DON GONYEA, HOST:
One week from today, the United States will celebrate its 250th birthday with a big blowout party. President Trump has had a heavy hand in shaping much of the event programming tied to the anniversary, but not everyone feels like celebrating in that way. NPR's Marissa J. Lang spent the day with crowds of people near the White House to engage in another great American tradition - protest. Hi, Marissa.
MARISSA J LANG, BYLINE: Hi, Don.
GONYEA: So what do the protesters out there today say this demonstration is about?
LANG: They're calling it All Of Us 250, and it's really meant to stand in direct contrast to the ways that we've seen the Trump administration honor America's 250. There was that UFC fight on the White House front lawn a couple weeks ago. Right now on the National Mall, there's blocks and blocks of this Great American State Fair. There have been military flyovers with B-2 bombers soaring over D.C. And what organizers of today's protest told me is that all of this emphasis on American might and power and nostalgia kind of misses the point that none of this actually gets at American identity in all of its diversity and complexity. Here's Linda Sarsour. She's a pretty well-known activist. She helped organize this event. She's a Palestinian American civil rights activist who was also a lead organizer of the 2017 Women's March on Washington and Black Lives Matter protests.
LINDA SARSOUR: We know that this current administration is engaging in erasure of history. It's deciding who belongs here and who doesn't belong here, and we are making a declaration of interdependence and saying that we all belong here. This country belongs to all of us, whether people like it or not.
LANG: Linda said she wanted people to come to this event and feel inspired not by what the U.S. has been, but what it can be. People here highlighted a number of ways they'd like to see the country improve - to be safer, more affordable, and take better care of the environment, to name a few.
GONYEA: So give us a sense of the vibe out there.
LANG: Well, it feels more like a bloc party than a protest on. Crowds are gathering at McPherson Square. That's a park just a few blocks away from the White House. And they came here from all over the country. Buses brought people in from cities up and down the East Coast and the Midwest. Some folks even flew in from as far away as Alaska. They had voter registration booths, games and music. As I was checking out the face-painting station, I found Shanice Jones (ph). She's a 13-year-old from Flint, Michigan, who was getting red, white and blue fireworks drawn on her forearm. I asked her why she felt like it was important for her to be here today.
SHANICE JONES: I do disagree with some of the stuff that is happening in the White House and stuff like that. But at the end of the day, I feel like we all need to, like, come together and be united.
LANG: Organizers told me that getting young people like Shanice activated was a big goal of the event today, which has been in the works since 2023. Here's Carmen Perez-Jordan, an organizer who was also involved in the Women's March.
CARMEN PEREZ-JORDAN: We have to be part of the next 250 years. We cannot be waiting for people to come and save us, right? And so whether it was going to be Donald Trump or another administration, we still would have been here.
LANG: It's part of a larger national effort today with progressive groups holding events in close to a hundred cities all across the country.
GONYEA: All right, that is NPR's Marissa J. Lang, Marissa, thank you for being out there today.
LANG: Thank you.
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