Activists Get Head Start on Opposing Trump

WASHINGTON — As Friday’s inauguration of President-elect Donald J. Trump draws nearer, activists already have started to mount fierce opposition to his presidency.

Civil rights leaders rallied several thousand activists, who braved the dreary rain and freezing temperatures Saturday and marched to the National Mall chanting, “No justice, no peace.”

“We march in the driving rain because we want the nation to understand that what has been fought for and gained, that you’re going to need more than one election to turn it around,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton, president of the National Action Network, the civil rights group that he founded in 1991.

The activists called for criminal justice and police reform and urged policymakers to safeguard the Affordable Care Act and funding for education, issues they say that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would support.

“I’m worried about whether or not Pell Grants and student loans will be there for me in the future,” said 17-year-old high school student Da’Quan Robertson, who is planning to begin Montgomery County College in Maryland in the fall. “There is just so much that seems scary about this new administration.”

Robertson and others may get a better sense this week of what policies the U.S. Department of Education will advocate for with the confirmation hearings of Betsy DeVos, Trump’s designee for secretary of education.

Gwen Carr is the mother of Eric Garner, the 41-year-old Staten Island man who was killed after police placed him in a chokehold. That incident galvanized young people from across the country and helped to spur a campus-based movement for social justice.