Many of my students at the Jackson Street School in Northampton are immigrants; some are Muslims.
On the day after Election Day, many students were fearful, asking, “Will Trump kick us out?” and “Are they going to take my mother away?”
Just after President Trump announced the travel ban, I heard one student, who is a new citizen, saying that she could not return to her country to visit her grandmother, aunts, uncles and cousins because her family might not be allowed to return to the U.S. How can children learn when they are preoccupied with the survival of their families?
On Nov. 9, we educators had to check our own fear and reassure our students that even though there was a new president, they had the same teachers, principal and mayor who promised to keep them safe. Those were not empty promises. I am grateful to live and teach in a sanctuary city. We need to stand strong in the face of unconstitutional threats to deprive our city of federal funding.
My colleagues and I were at the emergency rally for immigrant rights organized by the Pioneer Valley Workers Center and a coalition of local organizations in Springfield on Jan. 27.
Since then, federal court rulings have temporarily blocked Trump’s ban on travel to the United States from seven Muslim-majority countries. Nevertheless, we will keep coming out to keep those promises to do whatever it takes to keep our students, their families, our neighbors safe.
Let’s remember a bit of history. In 1939, the U.S. refused entry to the SS St. Louis, a ship carrying 908 Jewish refugees from Germany. It was forced to cross the Atlantic back to Europe, where 254 of those refugees then died in the Holocaust.
On Jan. 27, Holocaust Remembrance Day, Trump repeated that history, slamming the door shut on all refugees for 120 days and all Syrian refugees indefinitely. An immigrant parent at school said to me, “America always used to be the country people escaped to, but now it’s becoming the country people might have to escape from.”
The very reason I spoke at the emergency rally for immigrant rights is a symptom of the crisis in the United States of America. The day before the demonstration, I was with three Muslim friends. They were heartened to hear about it, but they did not feel safe to come. What does this say about our country under Trump when our fellow citizens, whether they are Muslim, African-American or Latino, are so targeted and threatened that they feel that protesting is too dangerous, even though our rights to freedom of the press, of religion, speech, the right to peaceably assemble and to petition the government are guaranteed by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution?
This is like the strobe-light-flashing, blaring fire alarm in my school that empties the building in a minute. But this is not a drill.
We cannot rest until every American, not just those with white-skin privilege, can safely exercise their First-Amendment rights. This is our wake-up call to organize.
Each one of us needs to figure out how we will step it up, to figure out what more we will do. On Martin Luther King Day, I heard Tahirah Amatul-Wadud say, “If I have my neighbor’s back and she has mine, I don’t have to fear a man in Washington.”
Now is the time for us to get to know our neighbors and learn how to pull ourselves together. These organizations, even the ones that seem little, are the very organizations that will defend us and mobilize our resistance.
Start small, but start right now. This is the very nature of grassroots organizing. We need to dig in so deep that we can’t be weeded out.
Mary Cowhey, of Northampton, is a Title 1 math teacher at the Jackson Street School in Northampton, a founder of Families With Power and author of “Black Ants and Buddhists: Thinking Critically and Teaching Differently in the Primary Grades.”