The day of the Inauguration, all I saw from the mainstream media was a concentrated focus on the violence within the protests that day.

The protests I saw and photographed in the morning and towards the afternoon were vastly different. The DisruptJ20 group stated over and over that it was looking for nonviolent civil disobedience.

Later, I did witness people throwing rocks at the police, and did see reports that people had broken the windows of Bank of America. I won’t lie about that, or downplay it, but my job – as is the job of all newspeople – is to report everything. So, here is what I am reporting, simply because this is the majority of what I saw. Also, frankly, I am sure you’ve seen the image of the burning limo from TIME Lightbox more than once now. Yes. That did happen, and it was done by people calling themselves anarchists. I don’t know if they were affiliated with DisruptJ20.

Here, you will see protestors blocking off an entrance to an inaugural check point, at 10th Street & E Street, in front of the Hard Rock Cafe in Washington, District of Columbia. You will see a Trump supporter throwing himself against them, trying to get through. You will see police starting to ring protestors in, at a grassy space near L Street later in the day. But you will not see violence or threat from the protestors at the blockade point, or at the grassy space, because that is not what I witnessed, when I was photographing them.

(Note: I did want to photograph the conflict between protestors who were throwing rocks and the police, who were in riot gear, but I also needed to keep myself safe and functioning, since I was supposed to meet up with a reporter and a bus of Massachusetts women the following day for the Women’s March – which, of course, did not happen, as you will see from my post yesterday.)

Today, I

Posts tagged with disruptj20

Inauguration Day Protests: What You Didn’t See