Lexington’s No Kings protest draws over 6,000 people to site of the first battle of the American Revolution

I arrived in Lexington around 9:45 a.m. on Saturday, thinking I would beat much of the crowd that would gather to protest on the Battle Green about 15 minutes later. I thought wrong. 

When I drove up Massachusetts Avenue, the group that had already formed on the Green was reminiscent of the crowd that gathered there to mark the 250th anniversary of the Battle of Lexington in the spring. 

This time, a sea of about 6,000 demonstrators gathered on the Green for one of the nation-wide No Kings rallies — a demonstration where people gather to protest President Donald Trump’s policies and authoritarian actions. There have been several No Kings protests, including in Lexington, since Trump’s inauguration in January.

Residents of Lexington and surrounding communities, local committee leaders, college professors, authors, and even Senator Ed Markey spoke out against Trump’s agenda on the symbolic Battle Green Saturday. 

“It’s about time we took back the original idea of America, which is liberty and justice for all, not just those who can win the economic contest,” Rick Reibstein, a member of Sustainable Lexington, said to the Observer at the protest. 

The demonstration opened with music from the girl band, Cozmic Crush. They jammed out to classic rock hits such as “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” by Pat Benatar and “Zombie” by The Cranberries. Protestors sang along, waving homemade posters, some of which read, “clean up on aisle 47,” “make America lawful again,” and “tyranny is not an American value,” in the air.

Those signs matched protestors’ intentions for demonstrating. 

“I love America, I love democracy, I do not like fascists, and I want to stop the Trump regime,” Karen Bavuso, a Woburn resident, told the Observer. 

Bavuso, along with a few other people she was with, including two Navy veterans, dressed as frogs in solidarity with the person in a frog costume who federal agents pepper sprayed in Portland, OR, on Oct. 4 during a protest against ICE. A few other protestors on the Green wore inflatable animal costumes for the same reason.

Asked how she felt about Trump sending federal agents into American cities to ‘clean them up’, Deborah Sirotkin Butler, an Arlington-based attorney who attended the protest said, “I view it as a violation of the law, executive overreach, and illegal.” 

Trump has suggested he would deploy National Guard troops in Boston, like he has in Portland and Chicago, to quell what he calls “out of control” crime in blue cities and support his deportation initiatives. He also said he would consider moving the Fifa World Cup out of Massachusetts if he thinks it would be unsafe.

Speakers at Saturday’s demonstration included Sen. Markey; Regie Gibson, a Lexington resident and the state’s first ever poet laureate; and Bill McKibben, a Lexington native and author who has written extensively about global warming and democracy, among others. They took Cozmic Crush’s place on stage to share messages of determination, peace, and a love for democracy with the crowd, which sang with cheers and cow bells back at them. 

 “When they speak of our time, they will say this is when they set the world on the brink of burning,” Gibson said. “Let them say that we were the people of an infinite hope when it made no sense to hope at all.” 

“We simply cannot deny the darkness of this moment…too much is in the hands of too few,” Sen. Markey said. “In Lexington we do not bend to authoritarianism…Donald Trump is a walking talking constitutional crisis.”

The symbolism of holding a rally on the Battle Green was not lost on the protestors or speakers in attendance Saturday. Lexington’s Green is the location where the famous “shot heard around the world” took place 250 years ago in America’s fight for independence. Many attendees argued they are fighting for freedom from a tyrannic regime today just as they were then. 

The rally was powerful yet peaceful, unlike how some politicians have characterized No Kings rallies. House Speaker Mike Johnson and other top Republicans have called the “No Kings” protests that swept the country over the weekend “hate America” rallies. 

McKibben and other attendees argued No Kings protestors are those who truly love America because they are the ones defending democracy.

“Our new king has decided that half his constituents are worthless…what we actually have here today are people who care more for our foundation than they,” McKibben said. “We did not ask for this but we must rise to the occasion and this hallowed land is as good a place as any.” 

Drones caught aerial clips of the vast crowd on the Green as the demonstration ensued. That’s how LexAlarm, one of the organizers of the demonstration, estimated the size of the crowd. They got two photos — one from LexMedia’s drone footage and one published by NBC Boston — and used the Jacobs Method, which is journalists’ gold standard for estimating crowd size, to estimate how many people were there. LexAlarm leader Toby Sackton said the median number of people on the Green was 6,009. 

That is nearly three times as many as the 2,200 who turned out on June 14, he said. 

Cozmic Crush took to the stage again to lead the crowd in singing Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” to close out the demonstration.