Dozens of Gainesville residents stood up for what they believed in on Thursday: good trouble.
Protesters gathered along University Avenue next to Fred Cone Park to join the nationwide “Good Trouble” protest from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. Inspired by the late Congressman John Lewis, protest organizers said the display was a response to attacks on people’s “civil and human rights by the Trump administration.”
Lewis coined the term “Good Trouble” during the Civil Rights era; the nationwide protest comes five years after he passed away.
Large crowds gathered with handmade signs and flags along the street. People chatted with each other as the afternoon sun shone brightly, and cars drove by honking in support. The 50501 coalition of Gainesville handed out water bottles throughout the protest.
To Gainesville resident Mark Stowe, his father is the reason he protests regularly.
“I know he would've been here if he was still with us,” Stowe said. “My dad would be heartbroken to see this.”
He said his father was a World War II veteran, and he would have been disappointed to see how the current administration is running the country. Stowe held his father’s large American flag upside down as it caught the little breeze that cooled off the area.
“We've normalized things that would've been totally unthinkable,” Stowe said.
The “Good Trouble” protests follow a month after the nationwide “No Kings” protests, a movement that rejects what it perceives as authoritarianism, billionaire-first politics, and the militarization of American democracy, according to the event’s organizers.
Some protesters like Dawn Diaz-Ruiz, a hospital worker in Gainesville, came out because they themselves are veterans, and the country’s current state is “not what I signed up for.”
Diaz-Ruiz served in the Air Force, and she said what’s happening across the country is not what she signed up to protect.
She said the current administration is tearing down everything that veterans like her said they wanted to support and defend. The Gainesville local brought her son and granddaughter to protest as well, and they each sat along the road in chairs with handmade signs.
“Not everybody can be out here speaking up for whatever reason, physical reasons, mental abilities, different things,” she said, “so those of us who can, should.”
David Goboff, a Gainesville resident, said he protests because he doesn’t like what’s going on in America, and he’d like it to change. Protesting is a way to peacefully do it, he said.
He held up a handmade tank sign that he took to the “No Kings” protest last month.
People came out for their own reasons. People came because of what’s happening to immigrants across, the constitution, and in his case, public education, Goboff said.
“The more people who know, the more people who feel this way, the better chance we'll have of turning it over,” he said.
But the “good trouble” had some actual trouble as well. A sports team practicing at Fred Cone Park had to delay their practice because protesters had taken up all the spots in the parking lot. A parent said it was the Swampville Gators football team that had to delay their practice.
A volunteer at the protest said as soon as the coalition behind the protest found out about the parking situation, they immediately asked protesters to move their cars to the Alachua County Health Department.
The volunteer said the organizers were very sorry about causing the practice to be delayed.