About 200 people gathered on Stillwater Avenue near the Bangor Mall Thursday evening to rally against the Trump administration in honor of the late congressman and civil rights activist John Lewis.
The event was the latest in a series of nationwide protests broadly opposing President Donald Trump’s policies, with “Good Trouble Lives On” events planned in more than 1,500 locations across all 50 states, according to The Guardian.
More than 20 Maine communities participated in Thursday’s protests. The Bangor event was organized by Indivisible Bangor, a progressive advocacy group that formed after the 2016 election to oppose Trump’s agenda. Indivisible has thousands of chapters across the country.
The protest aimed to embody Lewis’s appeal for Americans to get into “good trouble, necessary trouble,” in pursuit of social justice, according to organizer Mary Ann Larson.
“People are waking up,” Larson said, noting she was especially concerned about the recently passed budget reconciliation bill and what it will mean for rural Maine hospitals and people who rely on food stamps funded by the federal government.
Thursday’s protest attendees were mostly older adults. Many brought American flags and pro-democracy signs with messages like “no kings in America” and “imagine being afraid of diversity more than dictatorship” — similar messaging to the larger “No Kings” rally last month, which saw more than 1,000 participants in Bangor.
The group seemed to get mostly positive responses from drivers passing by on the busy Bangor road, who often honked or waved out of their windows at the crowd lined up on the curb between Chick-fil-A and Washville.
One attendee, artist Bernice Cross, wore a handmade jacket with painted American flag imagery. She drove to the protest from Greenbush in a car she painted with abstract art and Black Lives Matter messaging in 2020 in response to the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.
Cross came out because “I love America,” she said, and in her view, Trump is destroying America and the values it was founded on.
For Cynthia Purmort and Mary Ann Labue of Cape Cod, who drove down to Bangor from their camp in Willimantic, a desire to defend the Constitution and individual freedoms were key in bringing them out to the protest.
“These are desperate times,” Purmort said.
Many rallygoers also mentioned defending immigrants as a key issue, with some chanting, “Hey hey! Ho ho! Stephen Miller’s got to go” in reference to Trump’s homeland security advisor.
Multiple protesters also expressed concerns about the measure approved by the Senate Thursday that would slash funding for public broadcasting and international aid.
Thursday’s rally was planned to coincide with the five-year anniversary of Lewis’s death.
He was a key figure in the Civil Rights Movement who spent decades advocating for racial justice and nonviolent resistance. He is especially known for leading over 600 voting rights protesters on an Alabama march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 that is widely credited with spurring the passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act.
Alabama state troopers attacked the nonviolent marchers on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge and fractured Lewis’s skull, but he survived and later was elected to represent an Atlanta district in the U.S. Congress in 1986, serving until he died of pancreatic cancer in 2020.