This notebook comes from Grant Blankenship, a reporter for GPB News. He was at a rally called in response to Monday’s fatal wreck where a Chatham County teacher died. The wreck occurred early Monday morning as Linda Davis was driving to her job at Hesse Elementary on Whitefield Avenue and her car was struck by a man fleeing Department of Homeland Security personnel in a high-speed chase.
A day after the death of Savannah teacher Linda Davis during what the Department of Homeland Security called an ICE action gone wrong, a number of people rallied in the city’s iconic Forsyth Park to decry her death.
Forsyth Park was in fine form. The temperature was just on that warm side of cool that heralds spring. The light: golden. Perfect for the joggers and dog walkers lapping the park and for the parents watching as their kids burned off some late afternoon energy. Then organizer Genny Kennedy took up a red and white megaphone near the stage in view of the huge fountain in the park’s center.
“Abolish ICE!” Kennedy shouted to the crowd. It took about three repetitions before the chant caught traction, for the crowd and leader to have something like the same energy.
“What we’re doing here is popular. It’s actually popular to say abolish ICE,” Kennedy said before the rally. “It’s popular, too, to say that Trump has gone too far. And to say that people should live in dignity.”
That may be true, to a degree.
In the wake of the ICE activity in Minneapolis, even a number of Republican legislators from around the country have questioned the actions of the agency. But if Kennedy’s expectation was that people in the park would join the call to abolish ICE, would drop their leashes or put the parking brake on the stroller and pick up the chant, it didn’t appear to happen.
Meanwhile, Kennedy and others in the Savannah chapter of the Party for Socialism and Liberation looked at the events leading to the death of Linda Davis, a teacher at Chatham County’s Hesse K-8 School (a chase by ICE of a man whom they wanted to deport, his crashing his vehicle into Davis’) and blamed ICE for her death.
“I think that ICE has created an atmosphere of panic and terror and people have behaved according to that kind of environment,” Kennedy said. “And ICE escalated a situation unnecessarily and as they’ve done all over the country and it resulted in an awful unnecessary fatality.”
In their official response to Davis’ death, the Department of Homeland Security instead said anti-ICE rhetoric is to blame.
“This vehicular homicide is an absolute tragedy and deadly consequence of politicians and the media constantly demonizing ICE officers and encouraging those here illegally to resist arrest — a felony,” Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in an emailed statement.
Half a dozen Chatham County Police Officers watched the rally some yards away. It came off without a city permit. The officers said that wasn’t a problem. The half-dozen megaphones weren’t explicitly legal, but the officers weren’t going to make a fuss about that. What was a problem was the anti-ICE graffiti someone had sprayed on a building a few blocks up, but that was just because of the paint.
Meanwhile, kids were still on the playground near the rally. Some parents looked a little bewildered. Jay Thorne watched as his daughter played.
“I think it’s great,” Thorne said of the rally. “We’re seeing so many checks, balances, and things that are fundamental to America just erode or be ignored. And the only good thing that I can make out of all of the ice chaos and the pain and the hurt that has been caused is that it’s caused so many more people to get off the bench. And get into the conversation.”
Thorne explained he is an Army veteran with two tours of Afghanistan and one of Iraq. He said Afghanistan gave him a front row seat for the mechanics of how extremism degrades civil society.
“And for years, I’ve seen extremism slowly creep its way into our country,” he said. “If you want to live in a war-torn country, all you got to do is stick around here for a little while because I promise you it will happen.”
Rally organizer Genny Kennedy said she was counting on people like Thorne, people on the margins who maybe won’t pick up a protest sign today but who may tacitly agree with the aims of the rally chants.
“We’re building on the popularity of the sentiment of the people, ” Kennedy said.
And, Kennedy said, the people silent today shouldn’t be afraid to say out loud what Kennedy believes they know is right.