The crowd spills onto C Street NE as neighbors listen to Coretta Scott King’s letter read aloud. (Photo by Rachel Sadon)

The crowd spills onto C Street NE as neighbors listen to Coretta Scott King’s letter read aloud. (Photo by Rachel Sadon)

As the Senate was voting nearly on party lines to confirm Jeff Sessions as the head of the Justice Department, about 100 people thronged around Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s house around the corner.

“Listen to Coretta, say no to Sessions,” they chanted. “Be like Liz. Resist! Persist!”

The crowd, largely made up of Capitol Hill residents, came out on a few hours notice to hear women read the letter that Coretta Scott King sent in 1986 to oppose Sessions’ nomination for a federal judgeship. McConnell invoked a rarely used rule to silence Senator Elizabeth Warren as she read it aloud the evening before.

“I’m from the south. I would have expected more from a Kentucky gentleman,” Jackie Blanchard, a Northeast resident who recently lost her job working in immigration reform, wrote on a note that she slipped into McConnell’s mail slot.

A group of Capitol Hill residents organized the last-minute rally, incensed at what had played out on the Senate floor the night before and hoping to prevent what was playing out at that very moment.

“The combination of the sexism of silencing one of the few female senators, and the fact that she was reading Coretta Scott King’s words, outraged me,” said Ruth Eisenberg, one of the organizers. “Really what we’re trying to do is call attention to Jeff Session’s lack of fitness to be attorney general.”

Though she’s participated in protests before, this was the first time she helped lead the charge. Eisenberg and several others read King’s letter aloud, along with comments from McConnell’s Kentucky constituents.

“The people are making our voices heard,” Eisenberg told DCist before the event. “We don’t have a vote, but we have voice.”

It was a common sentiment among the crowd, many of whom live in the neighborhood and brought their children out to exercise one of Washingtonians’ only means of fighting back against policies they overwhelmingly oppose.

“As D.C. residents, most of us are frustrated that we don’t have a vote. It is particularly hard in times like these. We’re not a constituent of anyone who has a vote that counts,” said Keira McNett, who came with her daughter. “This is the little we can do.”

It is one in a long line of recent protests that Washingtonians have poured out to, leaving the poster paper aisle bare at more than one CVS. Some are taking another approach to the constant state of dissent.

“There are too many atrocious policies coming out of the executive and legislative branches for a cardboard sign,” says Jobyl Boone, a copywriter for a progressive political organization, who lives on Capitol Hill. “That’s why I have a white board.”

She had wiped away yesterday’s message—”Deny DeVos!”—and replaced it with “My first amendment trumps your rule 19 #LetLizSpeak #NoSessionsAG.”

Still, at least one apparent neighbor wasn’t pleased with all of the recent demonstrations. A man broke up the end of the rally, screaming at the crowd to “get out of here. I’m sick of this.” After he knocked a camera out of a reporters’ hands, police on the scene quickly detained him. The reporter, with AJ+, declined to press charges.

As the crowd disseminated, several left their signs on McConnell’s doorstep. Some wrote on copies of King’s letter and pushed them inside in the hopes that the Senate majority leader might actually take notice. “The policies and cabinet appointments you are supporting make me worried deeply for the future,” Blanchard told him.

Filed Under: coretta scott king, jeff sessions, justice department, letter, mcconnell, Mitch McConnell, protest, rally, sessions, trump,