Voter turnout sagging in troubled voting rights hub of Selma
Fewer and fewer people are voting in Selma, Alabama. And to many, that is particularly heartbreaking. They lament that almost six decades after Black demonstrators on the city’s Edmond Pettus Bridge risked their lives for the right to cast ballots, voting in predominantly Black Selma and surrounding Dallas County has steadily declined. Turnout in 2020 was under 57%, among the worst in the state. “It should not be that way. We should have a large voter turnout in all elections,” said Michael Jackson, a Black district attorney elected with support from voters of all races. Thousands will gather on March 6 for this year’s re-enactment of the bridge crossing to honor the foot soldiers of that “Bloody Sunday” in 1965. Downtown will resemble a huge street festival during the event, known as the Selma Bridge Crossing Jubilee, with thousands of visitors, blaring music, and vendors selling food and T-shirts. Another Selma event, less celebratory and more activist, was held last year by Black Voters Matter. The aim was to boost Black power at the ballot box. But the issues in Selma — a onetime Confederate arsenal, located about 50 miles (80 kilometers) west of Montgomery in Alabama’s old plantation region — defy simple solutions. Some cite a hangover from decades of white supremacist voter suppression, others a 2013 Supreme Court ruling that gutted key provisions of federal voting law to allow current GOP efforts to tighten voting rules. Some Black voters, who tend to vote Democratic, simply don’t see the point in voting in a state where every statewide office is held by white Republicans who also control the Legislature. Then there is what some describe as infighting between local leaders, and low morale in a crime-ridden town with too many pothole-covered streets, too many abandoned homes, and too many vacant businesses. All are considered factors that helped lead to a 13% decline in population over the last decade in a town where more than one-third live in poverty. Despite visits from presidents, congressional leaders, and celebrity luminaries like Oprah Winfrey — and even the success of the 2014 historical film drama “Selma” by Ava DuVernay — Selma never seems to get any better. Resident Tyrone Clarke said he votes when work and travel allow, but not always. Many others don’t because of disqualifying felony convictions or disillusionment with the shrinking town of roughly 18,000 people, he said.ADVERTISEMENT “You have a whole lot of people who look at the conditions and don’t see what good it’s going to do for them,” Clarke said. “You know, ‘How is this guy or that guy being in office going to affect me in this little, rotten town here?’” But something else seems to be going on in Selma and Dallas County. Other poor, mostly Black areas have not seen the same drastic decline in turnout. Only one of Alabama’s majority Black counties, Macon, the home of historically Black Tuskegee University, had a lower voter turnout than Dallas in 2020. Selma is hardly the only place where big Black majorities don’t always translate to big voter turnout. The U.S. Census Bureau found that a racial gap persisted nationwide in voting in 2020, with about 71% of white voters casting ballots compared to 63% of eligible Black people. A majority of Dallas County’s voters are Black, and Black people made up the largest share of the county’s vote in 2020, about 68%, state statistics show. But white voters had a disproportionally larger share of the county electorate compared to Black voters, records showed. Jimmy L. Nunn, a former Selma city attorney who became Dallas County’s first Black probate judge in 2019, said the community is weighed down by its own history. “We have been programmed that our votes do not count, that we have no vote,” said Nunn, who works in the same county courthouse where white, Jim Crow officeholders refused to register Black voters, helping inspire the protests of 1965. “It is that mindset we have to change.” Selma entered voting rights legend because of what happened at the foot of the Edmond Pettus Bridge, which is named for a onetime Confederate general and reputed Ku Klux Klan leader, on March 7, 1965. After months of demonstrations and failed attempts to register Black people to vote in the white-controlled city, a long line of marchers led by John Lewis, then a young activist, crossed the span over the Alabama River headed toward the state capital of Montgomery to present demands to Gov. George C. Wallace, a segregationist. State troopers and sheriff’s posse members on horseback stopped them. A trooper bashed Lewis’ head during the ensuing melee and dozens more were hurt. Images of the violence reinforced the evil and depth of Southern white supremacy, helping build support for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In the following decades, Selma became a worldwide touchstone for voting rights, with then-President Barack Obama speaking at the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday in 2015. “If Selma taught us anything, it’s that our work is never done,” he said. “The American experiment in self-government gives work and purpose to each generation.” But in Selma, voting already was on the decline. After more than 66% of Dallas County’s voters went to the polls in 2008, when Obama become the nation’s first Black president, turnout fell in each presidential election afterward. Shamika Mendenhall, a mother of two young children with a third on the way, was among registered voters who did not cast a ballot in 2020. She often goes to the annual jubilee that marks the anniversary of Bloody Sunday and has relatives who participated in voting rights protests of the 1960s, and she’s still a little sheepish about missing the election. “To choose our president we ought to vote,” said Mendenhall, 25. A Black member of the county’s Democratic Party executive committee, Collins Pettaway III spends a lot of time pondering how to get young voters like Mendenhall more engaged. Older residents who remember Bloody Sunday and the subsequent Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march vote, he said,
Cory Booker ends presidential bid after polling, money struggles
Booker’s campaign struggled from the beginning.
Oprah Winfrey-backed ‘Rape of Recy Taylor’ recounts woman’s ordeal
When Oprah Winfrey saluted unheralded #MeToo crusaders at the Golden Globes last January, she chose a rape victim from 1940s Alabama to drive home her point. “Recy Taylor, a name I know, and I think you should know, too,” Winfrey said, sketching the outlines of the African-American woman’s assault by six white Alabama youths and her quest for justice. Taylor’s wrenching story and its connection to female civil rights activists, most notably Rosa Parks, are illuminated in filmmaker Nancy Buirski’s documentary “The Rape of Recy Taylor” (airing 9 p.m. EDT Monday on the Starz channel). Taylor, who died last December at age 97 shortly after the film’s theatrical release, is seen and heard briefly in it. Her words are powerful despite her frailty. “I can’t but tell the truth of what they done to me,” she said, condemning both her attackers and the authorities who weren’t “concerned about what happened to me.” The film mixes orthodox documentary elements — accounts from Taylor’s relatives and other contemporaries, the perspectives of historians — with haunting visual touches and music such as Fannie Lou Hamer’s “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” It blends into somber, unsettling poetry. There are clips from so-called “race films,” vintage movies made by African-American moviemakers, including one in which a distraught woman flees from unseen danger. In a scene from Oscar Micheaux’s “Within Our Gates” (1920), a white man attacks a black woman. The movie excerpts help “communicate very quickly that this didn’t just happen to Recy Taylor” and help broaden one woman’s ordeal to a “much larger canvas” about the peril black women faced, filmmaker Buirski said. In 1944, Taylor, then 24, married and a mother, was walking to her Abbeville, Alabama, home after an evening church service with two friends, an older woman and her 18-year-old son. Local whites out joyriding stopped them and, at gunpoint, demanded Taylor get in their car. They raped her repeatedly and, after forcing money into her hand, released her after she agreed to remain silent. She stumbled home “crying and upset,” recalls her brother, Robert Corbitt. “Those young boys felt like they can do it and get away with it. They really felt like they could. They know nothing was going to happen to them.” But Taylor fought back, recounting the assault to the local sheriff. Her courage put her family at risk — their home was firebombed — and eventually led to two faint-hearted, failed efforts to bring the case to trial in the Jim Crow South. The roots of such inaction run deep. Yale associate professor Crystal N. Feimster, who is part of the documentary, has written that it was a legal impossibility for a female slave to file rape charges against a white man in any Southern state before 1861. Northern black newspapers doggedly covered Taylor’s case as it unfolded, prompting African-American protests and action by the NAACP. The civil rights group dispatched Parks, then the secretary in its Montgomery, Alabama, office, to meet with Taylor — before Parks gained fame as the woman whose refusal to move to the back of a segregated bus sparked a powerful boycott. In a newspaper photo taken at the time, Taylor stares directly at the camera with an expression both stolid and determined. It’s a portrait of a young woman prepared to stand her ground. At one point, the Abbeville sheriff dismissed Taylor as “nothing but a whore” whom he’d arrested before, then admitted she had never been jailed and that she and her family were of good reputation. Filmmaker Buirski, who recounted the groundbreaking interracial marriage of Richard and Mildred Loving in a documentary and was a producer on the big-screen drama “Loving,” learned of Taylor from historian Danielle L. McGuire’s 2010 book, “At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance.” “One of the things that I felt so strongly about in this film (and the ‘Loving’ documentary) is you have people who have the moral courage to stand up, and they change history as a result,” Buirski said. “They don’t have to be activists. Anybody can change history.” There’s a question she’s fielded before, about why a white New Yorker felt compelled to make a film about Taylor, and she has a ready answer. “I do feel that whites and blacks should be telling stories about each other. I think that whites in particular have a responsibility to deal with this information because whites really are the reason for the suffering that a lot of blacks had,” she said. Was she the right person to make the documentary? “I’m the first person to say I don’t know what it’s like to be in a black woman’s skin,” one who would recount Taylor’s life and times differently and maybe better, Buirski said. But, she added, it’s up to African-American filmmakers to make “The Rape of Recy Taylor” the first “in a volley of stories” about her, not the last. Republished with permission from the Associated Press.
Oprah, 60 Minutes airs photos of lynchings from new Alabama memorial; here’s why
Montgomery, Ala. The original capital of the Confederacy, a city once mired in racism, will soon redefine its legacy when it opens the nation’s first memorial dedicated to lynching victims and a new museum dedicated to slavery in the spring. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Alabama’s capital city on April 26, 2018. A project of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), the memorial is devoted to 4,075 blacks EJI’s research shows were killed by lynching in the U.S. from 1877 to 1950. It will serve to acknowledge an era of racial terror in the United States when thousands of African Americans were lynched and publicly tortured, sometimes in the presence of thousands of people. On Sunday night’s episode of 60 Minutes, Oprah Winfrey visited the memorial before it’s opening to give viewers a glimpse into’s America’s painful history. As part of the report, the episode showed photos of actual lynchings — a decision CBS said Oprah and a team of producers intentionally made knowing they would disturb many viewers. “I don’t think the story exists without those photos,” Jeff Fager, the executive producer of the broadcast told CBS. According to CBS, “News executives have a tendency to self-censor too much, he says, out of concern that viewers will be turned off. For him, the decision to show the photos was about reporting important facts about a little-known but important chapter of history.” The decision to air the footage partners perfectly to the reason the memorial was created in the first place: the hope of creating a sober, meaningful site where people can gather and reflect on America’s history of racial inequality. “Our story is about a part of history, really almost 80 years of American history, that isn’t in the history books, 60 Minutes Overtime’s Ann Silvio said of the broadcast. “We don’t see these pictures. We don’t talk about it.”
Oprah visits grave of Alabama civil rights icon Recy Taylor
On Tuesday, Oprah Winfrey visited the grave of Recy Taylor, an African-American Alabama woman whose story Winfrey highlighted in her recent Golden Globes speech. Taylor was a 24 year old sharecropper in Abbeville, Ala. when she was kidnapped and raped by six men as she walked home from church. The case never went to trial, and two all-white, all-male juries refused to indict the men who confessed to assaulting her. The NAACP heard of the atrocious acts and assigned a young Rosa Parks to interview Taylor in Abbeville. Parks eventually helped move Taylor to Montgomery in an effort to avoid revenge from her attackers. Taylor died in December, just before her 98th birthday, and just three weeks after the release of “The Rape of Recy Taylor,” a documentary about the crime committed against her and systematic injustice. Winfrey posted the following caption on an Instagram post documenting the event: I don’t believe in coincidences, but if I did this would be a powerful one. On assignment for @60minutes I end up in the town of Abbeville where #RecyTaylor suffered injustice , endured and recently died. (GGspeech) To be able to visit her grave so soon after ‘speaking her name ‘sharing her story, a woman I never knew. Feels like🙏🏾☁️❤️ A post shared by Oprah (@oprah) on Jan 23, 2018 at 4:57pm PST “I don’t believe in coincidences, but if I did this would be a powerful one. On assignment for 60 Minutes I end up in the town of Abbeville where RecyTaylor suffered injustice, endured and recently died. To be able to visit her grave so soon after ‘speaking her name ‘sharing her story, a woman I never knew.”
Oprah Winfrey honors Alabama’s Recy Taylor in Golden Globe Awards speech
At the 2018 Golden Globe Awards Sunday night, Oprah Winfrey was honored with the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement. During her acceptance speech, Winfrey brought the Golden Globes crowd to its feet with a powerful speech where she called out sexual harassers around the world: “Their time is up.” In her speech, Winfrey told the story of Abbeville, Ala.-native Recy Taylor, a black civil rights activist who died late last month just days before her 98th birthday. Taylor was raped by a group of white men in Alabama in 1944. The horrific incident ultimately led her spearhead an anti-rape activism movement in the Jim Crow South. With the help of Rosa Parks — who was assigned the case by the NAACP — Taylor took on her attackers in court where two all-white, all-male grand juries decline to indict the men who admitted to authorities that they assaulted her. “Recy Taylor died 10 days ago. She lived too many years in a culture broken by brutally powerful men. Women were not believed,” Winfrey said, before adding to the abusive men, “their time is up.” Read the transcript of the segment of Winfrey’s speech mentioning Taylor: And there’s someone else, Recy Taylor, a name I know and I think you should know, too. In 1944, Recy Taylor was a young wife and mother walking home from a church service she’d attended in Abbeville, Alabama, when she was abducted by six armed white men, raped, and left blindfolded by the side of the road coming home from church. They threatened to kill her if she ever told anyone, but her story was reported to the NAACP where a young worker by the name of Rosa Parks became the lead investigator on her case and together they sought justice. But justice wasn’t an option in the era of Jim Crow. The men who tried to destroy her were never persecuted. Recy Taylor died ten days ago, just shy of her 98th birthday. She lived as we all have lived, too many years in a culture broken by brutally powerful men. For too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dare speak the truth to the power of those men. But their time is up. Their time is up. Their time is up. And I just hope — I just hope that Recy Taylor died knowing that her truth, like the truth of so many other women who were tormented in those years, and even now tormented, goes marching on. It was somewhere in Rosa Parks’ heart almost 11 years later, when she made the decision to stay seated on that bus in Montgomery, and it’s here with every woman who chooses to say, “Me too.” And every man — every man who chooses to listen. Winfrey’s moving speech have led many to call on her to run against President Donald Trump for President in 2020. “She launched a rocket tonight. I want her to run for president,” famed actress Meryl Streep told The Washington Post from the ballroom at the end of the awards show. “I don’t think she had any intention [of declaring]. But now she doesn’t have a choice.” NBC has since deleted a controversial tweet made during the award show. The official NBC handle tweeted Oprah will be “OUR future president” during the opening monologue.
First day goal? Make White House feel like home for Donald Trump
It’s supposed to feel just like home when Donald Trump steps inside the White House residence for the first time as president on Inauguration Day. His clothes will be hanging in the closet. The kitchen will be stocked with his favorite foods. Windows will have been washed, carpets vacuumed or replaced, and fresh linens and towels will be in all the bedrooms and baths. No packed or half-empty boxes will be lying around either, unlike a typical home move. Trump and his wife, Melania, can thank the nearly 100 butlers, maids, plumbers, electricians and other staffers who maintain the private living areas of the White House. The crew will have just the hours between Trump’s swearing-in and the end of the inaugural parade to remove all traces of President Barack Obama and his family and make the Trumps feel at home. “I’ve called it, for years, organized chaos,” says Gary Walters, a former White House chief usher who oversaw the move in-move out process for four presidents. The “chaos” breaks out moments after the outgoing president and the president-elect depart the White House for the oath-taking ceremony at the Capitol. However, the process itself starts after the November election when the White House chief usher reaches out to the incoming president’s team to begin coordinating the new First Family’s big move. Melania Trump toured the living quarters in November when she accompanied her husband to the White House for his postelection meeting with Obama. Trump, the businessman and reality TV star, now lives primarily at his three-story penthouse at Trump Tower on New York’s Fifth Avenue, and may continue to spend considerable time there because his wife and their 10-year-old son, Barron, plan to remain in New York until the school year ends. The Obamas started packing up their belongings weeks ago. Crates and boxes lined hallways and filled the East Room last week. Mrs. Obama isn’t doing a lot of packing herself, but she recently said in an interview with Oprah Winfrey that “I’m doing a lot of pointing” to indicate what needs to be boxed up. Obama told CBS’ “60 Minutes” that he’s taking books, clothes, mementos and furniture bought since he became president. He and the first lady didn’t bring many large items with them because they left their home in Chicago intact. They also won’t be going far when they leave the White House. After vacation in Palm Springs, California, the Obamas will settle into a rented mansion in Washington’s upscale Kalorama neighborhood. In a break with tradition, they plan to stay in the capital for a few years so their 15-year-old daughter, Sasha, can graduate from her private high school. One of their new neighbors will be Trump’s eldest daughter, Ivanka Trump, and her husband, Jared, who will become a senior adviser to his father-in-law. The couple plan to move into a mansion in the same neighborhood with their three young children. As the transition of power takes place at the Capitol on Friday, the White House residence staff oversees the transition from one family to another in a manner befitting an HGTV special. Moving trucks for each family are positioned nearby and are directed through tight security to the White House when they get the all-clear. Residence staff members are broken up into groups and given specific assignments. Some will pack the Obama family’s remaining items, and another group will carry them out to the truck. Other staffers will bring the Trumps’ things into the White House while still others unpack and put them in their designated places. All the while, “you’re changing sheets and you’re changing towels and the housekeepers are working feverishly,” said Anita McBride, who was chief of staff to first lady Laura Bush. But, adds Walters, “the end product is that when the new president and first lady come through the North Portico door after the parade that they walk into their home. Everything is in place.” For Trump, a real estate mogul whose brand is flashy luxury, the move may mean bringing some of his flamboyant style to the White House. Trump’s penthouse in Manhattan and his hotels are known for their marble columns, crystal chandeliers and gold. Earlier, before welcoming the president-elect for a pre-inaugural reception, the outgoing president, the chief usher and the residence staff traditionally meet for what often is an emotional goodbye. Over the years, the staff often becomes attached and protective of the president and his family, particularly those who serve two terms. In Obama’s case, many of those assigned to the residence are people of color and have been especially proud to serve America’s first black president and his family. Trump is expected to follow tradition and stay at Blair House, the government guest house across from the White House, before the inauguration. But how might he spend his first night at the White House? Trump is thinking about sleeping in the famed Lincoln Bedroom. He said so during a recent lunch with historian Douglas Brinkley and other guests at Trump’s South Florida club. A guest at the lunch recalled the conversation and Brinkley confirmed its accuracy. Republished with permission of The Associated Press.
Michelle Obama tells Oprah Winfrey that 2016 election ‘was painful’
First lady Michelle Obama tells Oprah Winfrey that this past election was “painful.” Mrs. Obama sat down with Winfrey at the White House for an hourlong special that was broadcast Monday on CBS. On the topic of the recent campaign she said: “This past election was challenging for me as a citizen to watch and experience. It was painful.” Still, Mrs. Obama says she and the president are supporting President-elect Donald Trump‘s transition because “it is important for the health of this nation that we support the commander-in-chief.” She says the same thing wasn’t done for her husband, but that “this is what’s best for the country.” As for her own political future, Mrs. Obama says she won’t run for public office. Republished with permission of The Associated Press.
Donald Trump says Michelle Obama’s ‘no hope’ comment about the past
President-elect Donald Trump said first lady Michelle Obama “must have been talking about the past” when she said there’s no sense of hope after his election. Trump, speaking Saturday at the final rally of his postelection “thank you” tour, then resisted escalating the spat further, suggesting “she made that statement not meaning it the way it came out.” But as Trump praised the Obamas for treating him so nicely when he visited the White House shortly after the election, many in the Mobile, Alabama, crowd booed the first family. Michelle Obama, in an interview with Oprah Winfrey set to air Monday on CBS, said she was now certain that her husband’s victory had inspired people because “now we’re feeling what not having hope feels like.” “What do you give your kids if you can’t give them hope?” she added. Trump’s comments about Michelle and President Barack Obama was one of the few conciliatory notes he sounded during a victory tour in which he showed few signs of turning the page from his blustery campaign to focus on uniting a divided nation a month before his inauguration. At each stop, the Republican gloatingly recapped his election night triumph, reignited some old political feuds while starting some new ones, and did little to quiet the hate-filled chants of “Lock her up!” directed at Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. At the tour’s finale at the same football stadium in Mobile that hosted the biggest rally of his campaign, Trump saluted his supporters as true “patriots” and made little attempt to reach out to the more than half of the electorate that didn’t vote for him. “We are really the people who love this country,” said Trump. He reminisced about his campaign announcement and his ride down Trump Tower’s golden escalator. His disputed a newspaper’s account of the size of the crowd at one of his rallies and bashed the press as dishonest. And he joked that he had booked a small ballroom for his election night party so, if he lost, he “could get out!” He paid homage to the August 2015 rally in the same stadium that he said jump-started his campaign. Though the crowd was not as large on Saturday, it was no less fervid, repeatedly chanting “Build the wall!” when Trump renewed his vow to build an impenetrable border at the Mexican border. Trump brought his nominee for attorney general, Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, up onstage to receive cheers from his hometown crowd. When Trump’s plane landed, he received a water cannon salute from a pair of fire trucks and was greeted by several Azalea Trail Maids, local women dressed in antebellum Southern Belle outfits. The raucous rallies, a hallmark of his campaign, are meant to salute supporters who lifted him to the presidency. But these appearances also have been his primary form of communication since the Nov. 8 election. Trump has eschewed the traditional news conference held by a president-elect within days of winning. He’s done few interviews, announced his Cabinet picks via news release and continues to rely on Twitter to broadcast his thoughts and make public pronouncements. That continued Saturday morning when Trump turned to social media to weigh in on China’s seizure of a U.S. Navy research drone from international waters, misspelling “unprecedented” when he wrote “China steals United States Navy research drone in international waters – rips it out of water and takes it to China in unpresidented act.” He later corrected the tweet. China said Saturday it intended to return the drone to the U.S. Within days of beating Clinton, Trump suggested to aides that he resume his campaign-style barnstorming. Though he agreed to hold off until he assembled part of his Cabinet, Trump has repeatedly spoken of his fondness for being on the road. Aides are considering more rallies after he takes office, to help press his agenda with the public – a possibility that Trump embraced from the stage Saturday. But Trump has also sounded some notes of unity on the tour. In Mobile, he acknowledged that “now the hard work begins” and ended with a plea for all Americans, including those who did not support him, to “never give up.” After the rally, Trump planned to return to Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach estate. Aides said the president-elect probably would spend Christmas week there and could stay until New Year’s. Earlier Saturday, he announced the nomination of South Carolina Rep. Mick Mulvaney to head the Office of Management and Budget, choosing a Tea Partyer and fiscal conservative with no experience assembling a government spending plan. Mulvaney, a founder of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, has taken a hard line on budget matters, routinely voting against increasing the government’s borrowing cap and pressing for major cuts to benefit programs as the path to balancing the budget. Republished with permission of The Associated Press.
Donald Trump’s inauguration set to test nation’s readiness to heal
One thing you can count on during inauguration season in Washington: People of all stripes will find a reason to show up — whether it’s to celebrate or commiserate. There are parties and protests to attend, stars to gawk at, receptions to be worked, deals to be done, drinks to be consumed. Less than two months out from Inauguration Day, there’s a different dynamic surrounding the planning for Donald Trump‘s swearing-in than the unbridled enthusiasm that swirled around the installation of the first black president in 2008. Crowd expectations are down. Fewer A-list celebrities are likely to descend. Hotels still have rooms to be rented. But congressional offices are maxing out on ticket requests for the Jan. 20 swearing-in. Trump’s inaugural committee is wooing big donors with candlelight dinners, exclusive luncheons and premier access to balls. Interest groups are lining up sideline events. And among those still mourning Hillary Clinton‘s loss, there is plenty of counter-programming afoot, including plans for a giant women’s march aimed at sending a defiant message to the incoming president. Before the election, District of Columbia planners set an early estimate of 800,000-900,000 people for this year’s inauguration and they haven’t revised that number yet, according to Christopher Geldart, director of D.C.’s Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management. But there’s scant expectation of replicating the 1.8 million people who descended on Washington for Barack Obama‘s first inaugural. Nor will Hollywood turn out as it did for Obama, whose two inaugurals attracted the likes of Beyonce, Bruce Springsteen, Usher, Jamie Foxx, Jay-Z, Oprah Winfrey and many more A-listers. “More than any election we’ve seen in a very long time, the Hollywood community was really behind Hillary, and a lot of people put their reputations on the line,” says longtime Hollywood publicist Howard Bragman. “Clearly those are people who are going to be taking their Xanax and Valium that day and staying in bed with the covers over them.” But Bragman said there still will be Republican-leaning celebrities who turn out for Trump — and a larger contingent of Hollywood types who show up for counter events like the women’s march planned for the day after Trump’s inauguration. While demand for hotel rooms and other venues is slower than at this point four and eight years ago, hoteliers remain “guardedly optimistic,” according to Elliott Ferguson, president of Destination DC, the city’s tourism bureau. Some hotels that set up four-day-minimum inaugural packages are rethinking that model, hoping to capture more business from those headed to Washington for the women’s march. Hotels are noticing “more rooms being picked up on Saturday than on Friday,” Ferguson says, suggesting strong interest in the march, whose organizers hope to draw 200,000 people to the city. Be advised: The president-elect’s own Trump International Hotel is sold out. Still available: For $2.5 million, the J.W. Marriott is offering a package that includes four presidential suites, 325 guest rooms, a craft bourbon barrel tasting reception, special inauguration menus, and a private viewing party on the terrace overlooking the parade route, among other amenities. There are always more affordable options through rental network Airbnb, which says local bookings for inauguration weekend spiked by 80 percent during the week after the election. Airbnb host Jade Moore, a video editor and Democrat, doubled her prices to $200 a night for inauguration weekend and says she’s booked both Trump supporters and women marchers for her Anacostia home. Before her inaugural guests arrive, she’ll be removing the toilet paper bearing Trump’s photo and the sign in her bathroom that invites people to “take a dump on Trump.” “I’m sure we’ll all get along,” says Moore, hopefully. “We don’t even have to bring up politics.” Not all hosts are that dispassionate. Another local Airbnb host, who asked that her name not be used to avoid getting in trouble for violating the company’s nondiscrimination policy, says she declined to accept a rental request that looked like it came from a Trump supporter and did accept a request that came from women planning to attend the march. Interest groups, too, are adapting in different ways. The Creative Coalition, a bipartisan advocacy group for the arts, has been holding inaugural balls for the past 20 years that typically attract top talent and celebrities. Coalition CEO Robin Bronk says interest in the ball remains strong and she expects it to feature top names once again. “It’s an event that hopefully will be part of the healing of the nation,” Bronk says. Plus, she adds, “I would venture to say a lot of business gets done at our ball.” The Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights organization that threw an “equality ball” eight years ago, this year is focused on making sure its members get involved in demonstrations, marches and other events on inauguration weekend and throughout the year, says spokeswoman Sarah McBride. The Latino Victory Project, which four years ago helped mount a huge Kennedy Center gala featuring Eva Longoria, George Lopez and other top Latino entertainers, this time is putting together events that put the Trump administration on notice that Latinos will fight “his hateful rhetoric and policies,” says project president Cristobal Alex. “I wouldn’t call it a party,” Alex said of this year’s yet-to-be-announced events. “What I would call it is a moment to learn” from the last election. Republished with permission of The Associated Press.
