Andrew Venditti also contributed to coverage of this walkout.
On Friday, Nov. 8, Sunrise Movement UMass held a “Walkout Against Trump” that started in front of the Student Union and marched to Amherst Town Center to meet with students from the nearby Amherst High School and protest the environmental implications of the election.
The event came three days after the 2024 election, where Former President Donald Trump won over 300 electoral votes and became the first republican to win the popular vote since 2004.
“I’m sorry this is how the world is right now,” Brendan Post, a senior environmental science major and Sunrise Movement UMass’s campaigns coordinator told the crowd of over 75 gathered in front of the Student Union.
“This election, either way certain things weren’t going to change, but things got a lot worse, people, things got a lot worse,” Post continued. “We have six years to get our sh*t together, and our president in [a] few months doesn’t believe the climate is changing.”
Co-founded in 2017 by Varshini Prakash, a UMass graduate, the Sunrise Movement is a climate advocacy organization that supports the Green New Deal and other climate change initiatives. The organization did not endorse either candidate in the 2024 election, but did organize a nationwide door knocking campaign in support of Kamala Harris’ candidacy.
Throughout, signs and speakers referenced the 2030 deadline for cutting emissions in half, which the UN says will be necessary to keep global warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Daniel Shapiro, a sophomore geology and biology major and Sunrise UMass’ political lead, said the group was there because “the youth generation will fight for a future that we want to live in. That is the main goal of this – to just show people that we are here and we’re not going anywhere.”
“We voted, it didn’t work,” Post said. “Now we organize [and] we strike. We need to be strong for each other. We need to build strong communities to check in on each other and be there for each other.”
After a crowd had congregated, around 60 people marched to Amherst Town Center, chanting phrases like “the people united will never be defeated” most of the way.
According to Angel Silverio, a junior environmental and natural resource economics major and the organizing coordinator for Sunrise UMass, Sunrise held “an emergency national call. It was over Zoom and they just asked everyone to last minute literally within yesterday and the day before to put this together and it was a lot of work.”
Sunrise UMass reached out to Sunrise Amherst to see if they were interested in joint action.
Schools including University of Delaware, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, New York University, Oberlin College, Arizona State University Tempe Campus, Bard College and other schools participated in the nationwide walk-out.
Colin Humphries, a senior political science major and the president of the UMass Student Government Association (SGA), spoke during the open mic portion.
“I was elected to serve and protect you …,” Humphries said. “I promise that with every day left in my term, I will fight to protect you against what is to come because that is my job and I am not [going to] let no one come to this campus and tell us what is best for our students.”
Ruo Wu, a sophomore political science and economics major, expressed her frustrations with the Democratic Party.
“The Democratic Party will never save us,” Wu said to cheers from the crowd. “Every state that was supposed to vote blue, voted blue. I voted blue and all they had to do was win the swing state and they failed during this election cycle.”
“When they come crawling back to us for our votes and our support in four years’ time, it will be because they need us and not the other way around,” Wu finished.
Ryan Darbhanga, a sophomore economics major and the attorney general for SGA, also spoke to the crowd.
“I want to tell you that I will fight for every single student’s legal rights on this campus, no matter who you are [or] what political affiliation you are,” Darbhanga said. “This is the people’s war, this is our war … I myself have turned so far left and I’m proud of it … once your rights are taken away, there’s no going back.”
“I’m angry; I’m scared,” Julie Powers, an 18-year-old physics major said. “I have friends who are worried about their parents or their grandparents getting deported […] I am scared I won’t be able to get an abortion one day if I ever need to. I know that deep in my soul I feel something’s going to shift if we fight back – if we organize.”
Around 3:20 p.m., just over 20 high schoolers arrived in Amherst Town Center. The group of students left during their final class of the day and walked through downtown Amherst with no faculty member supervision.
Sylvan Cocco-Romano, a sophomore at Amherst-Pelham High School and one of the co-hub leads of Sunrise said that she felt angry and powerless after hearing the result of the election and that, “organizing this walkout would be a way of showing young people that we have power and we can stand up and we are here and we care about our environment. We’re willing to do what it takes. We’re willing to leave school and walk and protest.”
Cocco-Romano said that “the town will take [notice] and be inspired by this and our other efforts as an environmental club to impact, what’s the word to like, put more climate change legislation and stuff into our town at a local level.”
There is no current plan to collaborate with local legislators, according to Cocco-Romano.
Emmanuel Melbin-Diniz, a freshman at Amherst-Pelham High School, was told about the walkout by Cocco-Romano. He said that he felt “Trump isn’t really fit to be president.” Policies regarding gender-confirmation surgery and climate change were factors in Melbin-Diniz’s decision on who to support for this year’s election.
As a crowd of around 25 marched back to campus, they were met with honks supporting and opposing the rally from cars in Amherst. One man referred to the marchers as “Chavistas,” a term referring to supporters of Hugo Chávez, the former socialist leader of Venezuela.
The rally ended around 4:15 p.m., at the student union.
Daniel Frank can be reached at [email protected]. Kalina Kornacki can be reached at [email protected] or followed on X (formerly Twitter) @KalinaKornacki.
