More than two months after the Black Lives Matter protests kicked off in D.C., the demonstrations continue. While the camera crews and extremely large crowds may be mostly gone, protestors say they still want their demands heard.

Those demands were on full display on Saturday, when the Palm Collective — a D.C.-based group of protestors — along with representatives from more than 60 local and national organizations joined together for a march from the National Mall to Freedom Plaza. It started with a few hundred people gathered at the National Museum of African American History and Culture around 3 p.m., but grew to a crowd of at least 1,000.

Though there were many groups in attendance — from Fuel the People, which handed out meals, to veterans’ organization Continue to Serve — all the organizers pointed to four core demands: to get police out of D.C. schools; end qualified immunity; establish a new D.C. public safety department; and make election days a paid holiday in the District.

“The momentum is still happening, the fire is still burning,” said Glenn Foster, organizer behind the Freedom Neighborhood, one of the local groups in attendance. “If the government is happy with the way you protest, you’re not protesting right.”

The Palm Collective, which started in early June by donating supplies to the protest front lines and hosting weekly Zoom calls with activists, raised more than $10,000 for Saturday’s event, called Demand D.C. The group previously helped organize the massive freedom march on Juneteenth.

Starting the afternoon with a series of speakers, the group then marched around the large barriers surrounding the White House, past Black Lives Matter Plaza, and ended at Freedom Plaza, where five players from the National Symphony Orchestra performed on a stage. Volunteers registered people to vote, sprayed people’s hands with sanitizer, and passed out water bottles.

“The organizations themselves are what we’re trying to focus on, because they’re small grassroots organizations — I call them mom and pop grassroots orgs — that don’t even have a 501(c)3. But they work full-time jobs. And they’re just tired of the same fucking story,” Palm Collective co-founder Bethelehem Yirga, an Ethiopian-American teacher from Prince George’s County, said in an interview.

One of Yirga’s former students, Kevin Cramer Jr., co-founded the group and led most of the day’s protesting. “When I say Demand, you say D.C.!” he chanted from a bullhorn, commanding a large group of mostly young adults of all races.

The march is underway pic.twitter.com/EVlJnWyIma

— Elliot C. Williams (@ecwilliams30) August 1, 2020

Ty Hobson-Powell, of local group Concerned Citizens, said he joined forces with the Palm Collective for the march because they had a similar mission to end police brutality. “We realized that we can’t sustain that change alone … there will be no one way to arrive at the revolution,” he told the crowd.

Others took to the stage to call for Mayor Muriel Bowser and the D.C. Council to divest funds from the Metropolitan Police Department and direct funds towards mental health resources for students.

“I’m out here because I’m pissed off, I’m still as mad as I was on day one, if not more mad,” Domi M., 26, who joined the demonstration as part of the D.C. Freedom Fighters, told DCist (she declined to give her last name for privacy reasons). “Look around us — this isn’t even a tenth of what was out here the first day, the first month. Everybody’s just gone on with their lives like it’s back to normal, and it’s not ever going to be back to normal. I won’t accept what is normal, because I want to have Black and Brown children in this world who don’t have to walk down the street and worry whether they’ll be arrested or killed … and then told that it’s their fault.”

The event wasn’t all about demands. Before marching, a DJ led the group in chants and dancing. At one point, go-go band UCB showed up and played for the crowd on a “Long Live Go-Go truck.”

Long Live Go-Go truck is here pic.twitter.com/BHIlW0sor1

— Elliot C. Williams (@ecwilliams30) August 1, 2020

The organizers said they were protesting over the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, of course — but they also wanted to call out local incidents of police brutality. At the end of the day, around 6:45 p.m., as dark clouds came over Freedom Plaza, Yirga took the microphone and listed the names of people who’ve been killed by MPD officers in recent years.

“We have our own names here to call out that have been murdered, that have been silenced,” she said, as the crowd members raised their fists. “We name those murdered right here in D.C., because it impacts our babies, our families, and our communities.”

Fighting back tears, she named more than a dozen people and said, “These are people’s children.”