Parkland

by Dave Cullen

  Matt Deitsch, now the group’s chief strategist, referred to those stops as “the places where the hate comes from.” He meant the hate against them. But when I called it enemy territory, he cringed. Those stops were all about talking with antagonists—not fighting. Even hard-core Second Amendment warriors often agreed with them on background checks, and sometimes with their whole list of demands. But the myths had spread so quickly about those demands. Matt recounted an angry man berating him for trying to repeal the Second Amendment. “We have never advocated that,” Matt assured him. “Yes you did, it was on your website,” the man said. No, that was probably John Paul Stevens, Matt said. The retired Supreme Court justice had published a New York Times op-ed advising repeal three days after the march. “Oh no, that’s not good,” Matt had thought immediately. “People will associate that with us.” And they had. The gun debate was fueled by anger, with very little listening.

  And no one was really listening on social media. “We knew from the start that tweeting just wasn’t going to do it,” Jackie said. “When we try to have conversations with people online that disagree with us, it’s really unsuccessful. When we actually sit down, there’s something about human connection that’s just different.”

  They spent much of the spring working out the details, right up to departure. But by April, they had made the single biggest decision of the tour: where to begin. They knew the media; everything had to be fresh, first, early. It was all about anticipation. The national media would show up exactly one time—on day one—then disappear. They might get more coverage announcing the tour than actually doing it, if they kept it under wraps and unveiled it as a big surprise. They had one big chance, to choose one big symbol. They chose the Peace March.

  For ten years, Father Pfleger and Saint Sabina church had organized fed-up citizens to march through their South Side neighborhood weekly to reclaim it. Every Friday night of summer, they put the gangs and drug lords and anyone else with a gun on notice: Meet the resistance—we do not accept the madness. MFOL chose Chicago as a signal too. They chose to march through that neighborhood with the national press corps marching at their sides, to send a message to every Peace Warrior and BRAVE kid on the front lines, and every ally in their communities: We are with you.

  Choosing the Peace March dovetailed with another prime objective: helping local activists strengthen their own initiatives. This community had been working on this project for a decade. They built it from scratch, when people thought they were crazy. They persevered, and they were really having an impact, bigger every year. MFOL could bring tremendous exposure, which would likely translate into fund-raising dollars as well. Why create a one-off event, when they could have such a powerful impact for one of their partners? “The Peace March has been proven to save lives,” Matt said. “Why not support something actually saving lives?”

  They embargoed coverage until a big announcement on June 4. That would give the group a tight ten-day window to kickoff: long enough for media to schedule coverage, but short enough to forestall its ADHD.

  They settled on two buses on simultaneous tours: one across America, and the other across Florida, hitting every congressional district in their home state. But who would travel on each bus? It’s a question that ultimately answered itself. The national tour would be far more grueling, covering several hundred miles over many days. Some of the kids were eager to take that on; others wanted to stay close to home. Everybody on the bus would get plenty of opportunities to speak. They would use a panel format at the town halls, and rotate the speakers every night. Emma and David needed to be on the national bus, because kids really wanted to meet them, but they didn’t need to be onstage—and they generally weren’t.

  The group did its usual due diligence and anticipated all the ways their plan could go wrong. Then they got realistic. Sixty straight days was way too much. Showing up in each city beat-up mentally, physically, and emotionally would be worse than not showing up at all.

  They broke the national tour into three legs, around two weeks each, with short breaks in between. They would cover a city a day, and a new hotel every night. It became clear that there were not enough hours to sleep, so they hired a jumbo bus with a bunk section.

  It was very much like a rock band tour, and that was the model. They hired a tour manager and a staff of about half a dozen. Much of that was security, which their parents demanded. The bus would be unmarked. There was no way to go stealth in a vehicle that size, but they didn’t have to announce themselves with blaring logos. A separate van would follow with security, in case the bus was attacked. They hired a PR firm, and its leader would travel on the whole tour. All that staff also solved the chaperone dilemma. And the parents demanded one more thing: a mental health worker.

  Scheduling and organizing the events would be a massive undertaking. It would require them to establish a remote network in every city, and then to work with that network from afar. That seemed like way too much for one person, yet it would be most efficient if someone could pull it off. Jackie stepped up.

  Combined, the two buses would cover more than ten thousand miles, fifty cities, and twenty-eight states. Each event would light up local media coverage of the issue. The primary goal, however, was juicing 762 fledgling networks: connecting young local leaders, energizing them, guiding them, validating their achievements, and putting them onstage so they could be featured on the TV news.

  2

  June 14, the #RoadToChange tour kicked off in Chicago. The Peace March was heavily promoted online, with Jennifer Hudson and Chance the Rapper performing. But Emma González got top billing. One of the posters was dominated by a photo of her, with the others mentioned only by name, below hers.

  All the kids from both bus tours came. The press came too. Saint Sabina built a media riser, and filled it with reporters from several networks and national magazines. That was great, but two months of local media was the real prize. Local media has an inordinately large influence on voters, so that’s where legislators and candidates direct their attention. The Parkland kids wanted to inject guns back into the conversation at each stop, influence candidates to make it a campaign issue, energize local activists to keep the issue alive, and do the relentless spadework needed to register waves of young voters and entice them to vote for the first time.

  The June Peace March drew a crowd of thousands, its largest ever by far. No one had bothered to size them before, but Trevon Bosley estimated it was 50 percent bigger than the previous high. He had been working with BRAVE for years, and had attended most of the marches. “There’s always a lot of people, but this march . . .” He shook his head in disbelief. “And the vibe is different. Usually it’s a serious, calm vibe. This year it was a lot of energy. Happy energy. Being spread through the community, as well as through the group.”

  “This is my first one,” Alex King said. “It was lit. It was a whole lot of positive vibes. It was our time to show we can have all these people together and have a good time. It doesn’t have to end in violence or lead to that.”

  Everyone marveled at all the white people. The locals said they were thrilled to have them. They needed those white people, and if it took the Parkland kids to bring them, bless those kids.

  Emma did not speak at the rally, which caused a bit of consternation in the press. The whole group of Parkland kids came onstage together for a show of support, and that was it. They were highly visible throughout the parade, though, and spirits were soaring. Residents came down their front porch steps and spilled out of shops to join the march or to dance along with the music on the sidewalk. Daniel Duff, the freshman who discovered Cher on march day, lost his friends in the melee, but found new ones, several girls from Michigan giddy about marching with one of the Parkland kids. “I haven’t felt anything like this since DC,” Daniel said. Jennifer Hudson walked the two miles in floppy bedroom slippers with bows. Despite the unsensible footgear, she was all hugs and smiles at the finish line.

  The Pea
ce March was for the public; the private meeting the next morning was for the kids. It was the same nucleus that had been conferring since the March meeting at Emma’s house, but expanded on both sides. The whole MFOL team was there now—the Peace Warriors, BRAVE students, and more kids from Mansueto High. They had breakfast together, talked, and played games for four hours.

  There was a press avail afterward, with a stipulation: Parkland kids would speak only when paired with a local kid—and the interview had better focus on the locals, or they would walk away. That infuriated some of the reporters, but it was an astute tactic. The kids tended to be one step ahead of us. They couldn’t force us to write Chicago stories, but they could force us to hear a few. And they got how we operated. We tend to move in packs, and come in with our stories mentally prewritten. The only way to alter that is to give us a better story. And the Chicago kids had amazing stories.

  Trevon Bosley told one of them. His brother Terrell was shot and killed stepping out of church on Chicago’s Far South Side in 2006. “He was getting ready for band rehearsal,” Trevon said. “He was loading drums out of his friend’s car outside of church.” Terrell was eighteen, just starting college, making his way out of the neighborhood. Trevon was seven.

  “The killer of my brother is still free because, many people don’t know this, but only seventeen percent get convicted,” Trevon said. These kids knew their statistics, cited them constantly, and they checked out. “It’s the code in Chicago that if you talk, something might happen to you,” he said. “If everybody talks, they might come after everybody.” The police tended to drop the ball too, Trevon said. His family had gotten an anonymous tip and passed it to the detectives, but they never followed up. “But when it was an ATF agent that was shot here in Chicago, they got that case solved in like the same week.”

  Trevon joined BRAVE when he was ten or eleven, and he was still active as a junior at Southern Illinois University. BRAVE was doing amazing work, he said, but what a struggle for resources. Media attention was crucial to building a donor base, but that was a struggle too.

  “We did a press conference probably like three years ago, and there was no press at all,” he said. They had organized a big collection of advocacy groups to maximize impact at a critical moment, but the media passed. “A month of shootings had happened where it was probably fifty-plus shootings. The youth were tired of it, the kids were tired of it. We had some little kids; they spoke. No media came. We still had our press conference, because we still wanted everybody to understand, at least the people that did show up. That was tough. They say, ‘We care youth are dying, oh we care about it.’ But when we call you to show up for us, where are you?”

  He said that had begun to change since February. Media interest in their efforts had picked up—not enough, but a start. And that weekend was a huge infusion. If they came back.

  Was it a little insulting that it took the Parkland kids to bring in the press?

  “It was a little upsetting at first, but then you have to realize at least it’s here,” Trevon said. “You can’t just dwell on the past.”

  They talked about the future, what they hoped to see five years down the road. “I’d love to see a lot of the youth activists, whether it’s Peace Warriors, BRAVE, any of those different groups, I’d love to see some of us in office by that time,” Trevon said. “I’d love to see us holding down political spots. As well as I would love to see divisions start to disappear. Chicago’s a tale of two cities. Whether you’re downtown or you’re on the South Side, it’s going to be completely different. I’d love to see more equality throughout the city. I want to see gun violence just go down immensely. I want to see the education system change. I know that’s a lot to ask for.”

  “Don’t say it’s a lot to ask for,” Aalayah Eastmond said. “We deserve it.” Aalayah was a Parkland student, African American, and one of the recent additions to the team.

  “I want to see happiness in my community,” Alex King said. “I want to see the next generation, I want to see them being able to play outside. Being able to sit on the porch and nothing happen to them. Being able to go to their neighborhood park, being able to go to a friend’s house. Being able to go to church. Being able to go to school and be safe. I want to see that joy. I want to see the sense of people wanting to be alive, and not fearing for their lives.”

  The tour was all about connecting with young locals, who had typically gotten their activist feet wet organizing a sibling march or a school walkout. They had tasted success, proved their ability to peers and themselves, and flung themselves into the fight for the midterms. The Parkland kids had provided a model, validation, and hope.

  Diego Garcia was there, the Latino kid who had struggled for adult respect in his community. The Parkland kids’ approval had been key to earning it, but it came at a price. He had just organized a die-in at Chicago’s Trump International Hotel and Tower, and the Parkland kids helped spur attendance by retweeting it. But Twitter trolls descended and terrified him with some of their threats. The MFOL kids were used to that, but he wasn’t. Yet.

  A big element of the tour that was not announced to the media in advance was connecting with some of the promising activists by bringing them on board—literally. If it worked out, the group would look for candidates in other cities. “Once we hung out with them, they were like, ‘We want to come!’” Jackie said. “So we added a lot more people.” They left Saint Sabina with seven Chicago recruits, including Alex and D’Angelo from the Peace Warriors, Diego Garcia, and Trevon. They filled out release forms with family contact information at the barbeque. “It’s quite literally like the Freedom Riders, where people hop on and hop off,” Jackie said.

  3

  Town halls were the tour staple: the Parkland kids in conversation with young local activists, and sometimes a third contingent. Night two of the bus tour was only thirty miles from Saint Sabina, but culturally worlds away. The town hall was held at a Unitarian Universalist church in suburban Naperville, mostly white, and also Asian—not just affluent, genteel. The crowd was wildly enthusiastic. They leapt to their feet for the Parkland kids’ arrival. When it ended, much of the crowd rushed the stage: not just to chat up the Parkland kids and grab a selfie, but to talk to the local teens as well. They were ecstatic. To appear on that stage as peers, beside these national sensations, completely changed their sense of this mission. Changed the way they were seen by their parents, teachers, and school administrators—some of whom had chastised them as being immature for participating in the walkouts. Changed their image of themselves. Possibly forever.

  The event definitely fired up the young activists, but it was hard to imagine changing any minds that night. The free tickets had been snapped up in a few hours online, and the room seemed packed with true believers. But believers in what? Gun legislation, definitely, but how many members of that genteel suburban community were engaged in the deadly struggle underway on the South Side or West Side of Chicago, thirty miles away? Probably very few. But many were making that connection for the first time and thinking about “the gun problem” in a new light.

  The new freedom riders from Chicago provided some of the most poignant moments at the Naperville event, and provoked most of the standing ovations. These minority activists were bright and charismatic. They might have rivaled Emma and David in an alternate universe that cared about black kids.

  A telling thing happened at the end of the Naperville event. Jackie was moderating, and after the last question, she asked if any of the panelists had a final thought. One of the Chicago kids made a plea for donations for the Peace Warriors, “Even if it’s five dollars.” And then it was over, and the local host activists on the panel, mostly from Downers Grove North High School, rose to present a check to the Parkland kids. They had been working their butts off on fund-raisers to support the bus tour, selling wristbands and buttons, and holding a car wash that very afternoon, and had raised $1,118, a few dollars at a time. They had printed up one of t
hose huge cardboard blow-up checks to present together, and were all smiles. Cameron Kasky was one of the MFOL kids on the panel, and before the Downers Grove kids even reached him with the check, he said, “As our first gesture to work with Chicago students, we are pledging all of that money to ChicagoStrong.org.” ChicagoStrong is an umbrella organization created in the wake of Parkland to connect and support like-minded groups across the city, including Peace Warriors and BRAVE. Jackie was across the stage from Cameron, and seconds later she added, “We’re also going to double it.”

  Had they planned this? Staged it? Jackie and Cameron had no time to confer with the group—had they acted on their own? A few days later, Jackie said she had seen the check during the event, but the rest of the MFOL panel was taken aback. “We all came to the same conclusion, I think. We all looked at each other, and we were like, ‘No, we can’t take that! Are you kidding?’ We’ve had tons of great foundation [support] for March for Our Lives, and these kids literally were begging for money onstage.”

  What happened later, behind the scenes, embodied what the Parkland kids are trying to do. “I talked to the Naperville girl after she gave the check and she was like, ‘Wow, I didn’t even think about giving it to ChicagoStrong, but that is such a good idea!’” Jackie said. So she tried to steer the conversation toward “How are we going to continue the relationship between Naperville and the surrounding suburbs, and the Chicago students?” she said. “Because I don’t think that they realize they should create that connection and continue it after.”