At noon on Tuesday, as Betsy DeVos was confirmed as the Secretary of Education, hundreds of high-school students in New York City walked out of their classes and gathered at Foley Square, in downtown Manhattan. Originally announced as a response to Trump’s ban on travel from seven Muslim-majority countries, the walkout happened to coincide with the Senate vote for DeVos.
Hebh Jamal, the seventeen-year-old Palestinian-American high-school senior who had planned the day of action, broke the news to the crowd she was leading from the Beacon School, a public school in Hell’s Kitchen. As it marched from the subway station, Jamal, who had been checking her cell phone constantly, halted the classmates behind her. “Mike check!” she called out, and announced the news about DeVos. Some began booing and shouting, and several gave a thumbs-down. “She wants to destroy education, but we’re here to say: education, not deportation!” Jamal yelled. Cheers erupted, and the students continued on their way.
Many of the homemade signs students brought to the rally expressed their opposition to DeVos: “Straight A student skipping (public) school, Betsy DeVos is a fool,” one said; another, “Grizzlies Against DeVos,” was a reference to DeVos’s statement that some public schools might need to keep guns around to ward off bear attacks. Standing at the edge of the crowd were two friends, Shabab Khan, seventeen, who was wearing a thin hoodie and shivering in the cold, and Syed Rahman, also seventeen. The two are both students at the Brooklyn Latin School, one of the city’s specialized public high schools. They’re worried about the ban—“I am Muslim myself, so I was obviously super against it,” Rahman said—but concerns about DeVos also weighed on their minds.
“We clearly know she’s not qualified for her job. I feel super strongly against her,” Rahman said. “She’s obviously there because she’s a billionaire and she donated, like, two hundred million dollars to the Republican Party.” (DeVos said in her Senate confirmation hearing that it was “possible” her family had given that much to the Party.)
Khan, clutching a sign decrying fascism that was handed to him by another attendee, chimed in. “The fact that DeVos was just confirmed, it kind of ruins what I thought about public schools in New York and the country,” he said. DeVos, he pointed out disdainfully, had sent her own children to private schools. “She has no credentials at all to be a leader, especially for public schools. It kind of shows how much Trump cares about the people.” He shook his head.
From a makeshift stage set up in the public plaza, Youssef Abdelzaher, a seventeen-year-old Muslim, reminded the crowd that the Stonewall rebellion was led by teen-agers, including the young Puerto Rican drag queen Sylvia Rivera. His voice going hoarse, he shouted a spirited “Viva la revolución!” before exiting the stage. Jamal, who was wearing a sage-green hijab, has already distinguished herself as a teen-age activist. Last November, shortly after Trump’s election, she helped coördinate a similar walkout; last week, she led another protest in response to the immigration ban, also at Foley Square, that drew hundreds of New Yorkers. “As students, we have control of our education, we have control of whether we go to class, we have the ability to disrupt and make a point,” Jamal said. “Students in the past have really proven that they’re the igniting force for change. I thought we could do the same.”
Eve Lalumia, fourteen, was holding a sign that said, “Stop pretending our racism is patriotism,” and wearing a Women’s March sweatshirt. “I love your Bernie pins!” her friend Emma Rehac, fifteen, said to her. Their parents had given them permission to skip class. “My mom marched for abortion rights, but she said this is so much bigger!” Rehac said. With them was Elizabeth Lambrakis, who had missed an exam to attend. She shrugged it off: “I’m going to grow up to tell my kids about, like, protesting when I was younger, rather than, like, a French test.”
Trump’s election has caused a flowering of homemade protest signs and slogans; at the walkout, many were earnest, while others showed a youthful sense of humor. They included: “Donald Trump is a mook” (slang for loser); “If you voted ‘Harambe’ this is your fault”; “Trump smokes reggie” (a reference to low-quality marijuana); and “Make racists afraid again (or, like, for the first time).” One student had simply written “No Muslim Ban” on his yellow skateboard, which he held aloft above the crowd.
Muslim students such as Atia Hussain shared their fears of the travel ban. For Nuala Naranjo, fifteen, it was the spectre of the border wall, which she described as “horrifying,” that compelled her to join the walkout. Yvette Hernandez, fifteen, spoke of her father, an immigrant whom she described as the bedrock of her family. She also has family members who are undocumented. “Basically, [Trump] just threatens our entire life here. And it’s just overwhelming, knowing that, at any moment, my family could be taken apart,” she said, her voice catching. “Even though I couldn’t vote, I’m trying to have a voice and speak out for what I believe.”
Hernandez was leaning against a police barricade with a group of friends, including fifteen-year-old Mason Bunker. His gaze was trained on a large sign in the air several yards away that bore the phrase “Silenence = Violence.” “I’ve seen some poorly misspelled signs,” Bunker commented to his classmate Eva Schenck. She worried about the image it would send about the young protesters. “They’ll just tell us to go back to school,” she replied darkly.
Bunker is transgender, and he’s concerned that, under the Trump Administration, more legislation like North Carolina’s HB2, commonly known as the “bathroom bill,” will be passed. “My rights are being attacked, my friends’ rights are being attacked,” Bunker said, a ball cap with the phrase “Queer Defense League” perched atop his head. Schenck piped in: “I want to be brave, but this terrifies the shit out of me.”
From Foley Square, they headed around the block, to the Jacob K. Javits federal office building, where they chanted, “Black lives matter!”; “Let them in!”; “White silence is violence!” The day was supposed to end there, but they began marching again, scores of teen-agers walking and, at times, running down Broadway, prompting onlookers to applaud and drivers to honk in support. No one knew where they were going—“This is impulsive!” one young woman said as she marched—but they didn’t seem to care. As they streamed down the street, their shouts echoed, “We vote next! We vote next!”