Nearly 300 people chanted and sang their way along Prince Avenue to the federal courthouse downtown Sunday afternoon in a protest march and rally against the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign.
Sponsored by two Athens faith-based organizations, the tone of the protest was not so much political as moral and religious, condemning the crackdown as contradicting the spiritual teachings of the Christian, Jewish and Muslim congregations that form the two groups, the Interfaith Clergy Partnership of Greater Athens and the Interfaith Sanctuary Coalition.
Marchers held hand-drawn signs, chanted slongs like “Hey, ho, hey, ho, ICE has got to go,” and sang familiar protest songs such as “We Shall Overcome” as they made their way up the sidewalk, some using canes, some couples with strollers. Often, passing drivers blew their car horns in support.
Organizers warned the marchers after they had gathered across Prince Avenue from the Clarke County School District headquarters that if they encountered counterprotesters, they should meet them with love, but no counterprotesters materialized.
As they quietly gathered at the courthouse, music minister Tom Eggleston played hymns of his own composition on a portable electric organ set up on the building’s portico.
The Rev. Daryl Bloodsaw, one of the faith leaders who spoke after the long line of protestors had arrived at the federal building, quoted from the Bible: “It has been said, ‘We are commanded to love them as we love ourselves.’”
Bloodsaw is pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church West, a church with a long history of civil rights activism. Ebenezer’s sanctuary is a block away from the development going up at the old Milledge Avenue Varsity site, where Black students picketed the segregated restaurant. The church was at the heart of protests during the 1960s and 1970s, when racial barriers finally came down at the University of Georgia and the Clarke County public schools.
He reminded the gathering of how the Christian Bible instructs the faithful to treat strangers—with welcome and kindness.
“I feel like our democracy is being melted,” Bloodsaw said. Rights guaranteed to all by the Constitution are being eroded, such as the right to due process of law, he said.
“We are called here by our moral values,” said another speaker, the Rev. Pippin Whitaker of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. “We are living in a time of spiritual peril,” she said.
Chaplain Shane Sims of Athens Al-Huda Islamic Center told the crowd that immigration is “central” to his faith. “The earliest Muslims were immigrants,” he said.
“We are all beloved children of God,” said Joel Siebentritt, representing the Athens Friends Meeting (Quakers).
“God just made God’s children. It isn’t God’s children and somebody else’s,” said the Rev. Nikki Mathis of St. Gregory the Great Episcopal Church. She encouraged the marchers to “Pray the name, talk the talk and walk the walk.” The abuse of immigrants didn’t just begin in January, but has been going on much longer, she reminded them.
“They are human beings worthy of safety, dignity and love, not outsiders to be feared, but neighbors to be embraced,” said the Rev. Tom Buchanan of Covenant Presbyterian Church.
“This is not justice. It is certainly not the will of God,” Buchanan said.
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