More than 750 people turned out Saturday afternoon for a Hands Off Rally on the steps of City Hall in Athens to protest the policies and activities of President Donald Trump and his advisor Elon Musk.
Oconee County Democrats co-organized the event with Indivisible GA 10 and Athens-Clarke County Democrats, and Oconee County Democratic Party leadership was on-hand–and Oconee County residents were in the crowd–as the 90-minute-long rally played out.
Barbara and Rick Burt, co-leaders of Indivisible GA 10, opened the program and turned it over to Mokah Jasmine Johnson, Executive Director and Co-Founder of Athens Anti-Discrimination Movement, who served as master of ceremony.
Johnson told the crowd as she began that “We must fight, not with our fists, but with our voices.”
The crowd began assembling well before the 3 p.m. program start time, filled the sidewalk in front of City Hall, then the sidewalk across the street, and ultimately College Avenue itself.
Police cars blocked the entrance to College Avenue at East Hancock and at East Washington for public safety as the rally crowd grew and overwhelmed the attempts of rally marshals to keep people out of the street.
Participants carried hand-lettered and hand-written signs telling Trump and Musk to keep their hands off a long list of things, including educational funding, “Our Democracy,” voting, “Judicial Review,” the CDC, and “Our Constitution.”
The crowd was animated but orderly throughout, and it gave little heed to a protestor who attempted to disrupt the program through provocations electronically amplified and then by marching back and forth through the crowd carrying a banner reading “Jesus Is King.”
Comments Of Speakers
“I really hope that after this rally ends today you won’t go home just feeling inspired, you’ll go home and do something,” Johnson told the crowd.
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| Girtz At Hands Off Rally 4/5/2025 |
“We need you to show up if you want things to change,” she continued. “You need to show up not just today. You need to show up every day.”
Rev. Haley Lerner with the United Church of Christ and Campus Minister at the Table UGA, told the crowd that “Twisting sacred texts and symbols to prop up hate, homophobia, transphobia, racism, xenophobia, etcetera, goes against everything that we believe in.”
“Let me be clear,” she continued, “targeting vulnerable people is not holy. It is not righteous. And it is wrong.”
Athens-Clarke County Mayor Kelly Girtz told the crowd that others were gathered across the country at similar rallies, so “Just know, we are a mighty force together.”
“Right now, as all of you know,” he continued, “there is an attempt to chill the atmosphere. And so we need to burn bright to fight off this chill.”
Crowd Size
It is very difficult to know how many people attended the rally.
The crowd size increased as the rally progressed, with people on the sidewalks, on the sides of the steps to City Hall, across the street, and in the street.
Based on a photograph taken by event organizers from behind the speakers at the top of the stairs of a large section of the crowd, I counted the number of people in a one-inch block in the photograph (28), and multiplied it by the number of full blocks in the photograph (18).
I then used the same procedure for the partially filled blocks.
A second photograph by the organizers of another section of the crowd allowed me to do a second count.
A third section was unphotographed and thus uncounted.
Also unphotographed by the organizers were the crowds on the sides of the stairs, but I had taken pictures from each side myself as the speakers began, so I could count these participants from those pictures.
By putting all of these pieces together, I came up with the estimate of 750.
Based on video I had taken before the event began and long before the crowd had filled into College Avenue, I had come up with an estimate of about 400.
These counts suggest the final estimate of 750 is a conservative one.
Video
The video clips below were taken from different venues once the program began.
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