March for Our Lives plans marches across the country on June 11

It’s time, once again, to take to the streets, various organizers with March for Our Lives announced on a country-wide call Wednesday evening in the wake of the mass shooting at a Texas elementary school where 19 children and two teachers were murdered.

Chapters across the country will host marches on Saturday, June 11, organizers from several states said. Marches in Florida will be in Parkland, Miami and Orlando.

The group also plans a mass march that same day in Washington, D.C., from noon to 2 p.m.

In South Florida, a march will go from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. in Parkland at Pine Trails Park, the site of several memorials and rallies after the 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. People can sign up online.

In Miami, a march will be from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., the organization’s site says. A location is still being determined.

Orlando will host a march from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Lake Eola.

The June 11 marches will come just weeks after the May 24 massacre of 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, where a gunman barricaded himself inside a classroom and a targeted mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y., 10 days earlier where 10 Black people were murdered and three others injured.

Hundreds listened to the call Wednesday night, some joining in from Buffalo, Pittsburgh, El Paso and other cities that have reeled in the aftermath of mass shootings.

With the U.S. House and Senate back in session the week of June 6, Zeenat Yahya, director of policy for March for Our Lives, said the “plan is to flood the offices” of lawmakers in D.C. that week leading up to the Saturday march.

The organization’s policy team will be arranging meetings in the Capitol and in D.C. to lobby for universal background checks. A bill requiring them, H.R. 8, passed the House but has languished in the Senate, which refuses to take it up.

“We’re going to force every single member of Congress to answer to the millions of us showing up in D.C.,” Yahya said.

Yahya said they are still ironing out final details for the D.C. trip. Young people across the country are invited to join the march, she said. The organization will have travel scholarships available.

Arianna Kelawala, a member of the national organizing team, called the epidemic of gun violence repeatedly seen across the country a “uniquely American tragedy.”

“I started doing this when work when I was 14 years old, and I only just recently celebrated my 18th birthday. And here we are, with thousands of folks on here, on this call, who came together to support this movement that is at its core about saving lives,” Kelawala said.

Olivia Julianna, an activist and organizer in Houston and native Texan, said after the Parkland shooting, when she was a freshman in high school, a state representative spoke at her school.

“That was the first time I saw an auditorium full of high schoolers, begging for a politician to care about their lives,” she said. “And to act on protecting our lives.”

She reflected on the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School where 20 children and six adults were killed at the school in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, 2012. Many who are now organizing with March for Our Lives were in elementary school at the time of that shooting.

“We’ve been saying the same things over and over and over again for the last 10 years,” Julianna said.

She stressed the importance of voting in federal, state and local elections to the listeners and urged them to do more than cast a vote.

“You also have to organize. Organizing is the backbone to a healthy democracy and a strong sense of community,” Julianna said.

Joining in the collective marches, Julianna said, is a way to send a message: “That we will not sit back and continue to let these kinds of tragedies happen.”

March for Our Lives was founded after the Parkland shooting. The group organized and led a mass march on the nation’s capital in March 2018. Hundreds of thousands of people showed up, and the organization’s website says it was the largest, single-day protest against gun violence in history.

The group advocates for gun-control legislation and has held voter registration events, created a policy agenda and sparked hundreds of chapters led by students to start around the country to advocate locally for change.