By Erin Cabrey

March organizers estimated that a crowd of more than 470,000 took to the streets with pink hats and handmade signs to protest issues ranging from reproductive rights to the repeal of Affordable Care Act to the supposed Muslim registry. The marchers came in waves, beginning around 11 a.m. at the Dag Hammarskjold Plaza and continuing to Trump Tower well into the night hours.

Though Fifth Avenue was sufficiently dominated by cat imagery, it certainly was not short of Rams. Tierney Resident Assistant Kathryn Porter, FCRH ’17, led a program for the event, and provided her residents with free MetroCards and materials to make signs for the march. They arrived in the morning to a Grand Central packed with people primed for the protest. Together the group braved the dense and often unmoving crowd with a homemade sign stating “Women’s Right are Human Rights”, a popular saying reiterated at the march which was first uttered by Hillary Clinton in 1995.

One of Porter’s residents, Robin Happel, FCRH ’16, marched against Trump’s attack on disability rights, an issue that hit close to home. “Repealing the ACA’s anti-discrimination laws would be disastrous for my mom, a close high school friend and other folks with congenital heart defects, not to mention other types of pre-existing conditions, like being a woman or a survivor of gender violence,” said Happel, who carried a handmade sign stating “‘Trump called disabled vets a ‘detriment’ to his ‘tax-paying’ business” during the march.

For marcher Helen Ziminsky, FCRH ’17, the Women’s March was a family affair. “I’m one of five sisters who each participated in a march, three of us in New York, one in San Francisco, and the other in Washington DC. We’re marching across the country in support of each other and all women,” said Ziminsky, using a feminist newspaper entitled Resist handed to her by a fellow marcher as an impromptu protest sign.

The Fordham College Democrats also sent a group of 20 down to the event later in the afternoon. “The reason we are marching is to show solidarity as a club for equality and civil rights for everyone. President Trump’s rhetoric and policy proposals have been frightening to many Americans, particularly women, people of color and the LGBTQ+ community. This march serves as a symbol of unity and a reminder that Americans will stand together to protect civil rights, even if the new President won’t,” said the club’s president, Thomas Palumbo.

As the marchers made their way from the United Nations Headquarters to Trump Tower, they were rarely silent. Fordham students participated in chants such as “my body, my choice” and “this is what democracy looks like.” The march ended at Trump Tower where protesters turned their efforts directly at Trump, chanting “hey hey, ho ho, Donald Trump has got to go!” and “racist, sexist, anti-gay, Donald Trump should go away.”

The protests, overall, were peaceful. While inauguration protests saw more than 200 arrests, neither the Women’s march on Washington nor its sister March in NYC yielded a single arrest, according to CNN. Although the New York protesters, who took over streets that were not originally blocked off for the march because of the crowd size, no altercations arose.

For Fordham College Democrats, the work of the Women’s March is not over.

“I have stressed to the club that yesterday’s march was simply a first step in fighting inequality and from here we have a lot of work to do to truly ensure civil rights and equality for everyone in the country,” Palumbo said.