NYCLU News

I am finally exhaling a little bit. I’m sure many of you will know what I mean when I say that I was a nervous wreck about the election. But we’ve made it through a very dark and dangerous passage. You sticking with us these past four years means everything to me and to everyone here at the NYCLU. The Trump presidency is over—and that’s a very good thing.

Still, it’s too clear that he did real damage. He and his enablers attacked our elections and our right to vote. They chipped away ceaselessly at the rights and dignity of Black and Brown people, women, immigrants, Muslims and LGBTQ folks. The unbridled power of the police, and ICE’s inhumane treatment of people held in custody, has been shocking and a very justified cause for outrage and protest. Even on Trump’s way out, he instigated an attack – a failed coup attempt – on the U.S. Capitol to prevent the orderly transition of power, leading the ACLU to call for his impeachment...again.

Karen Jarrett, NYCLU’s brand new director of field organizing, learned the power of the people early on. She was a young single mother in the late nineties, working at a nonprofit in her native Newark, New Jersey, when she was fired for union organizing. The nonprofit, in fiscal disarray, stopped issuing paychecks. She could’ve slunked quietly away—but instead she and her colleagues organized a lunchtime picket outside the office and blanketed the area with leaflets saying that the nonprofit, a community mainstay, didn’t pay its staff.

“My ex-boss was so embarrassed, she called me asking me to come back,” says the warm Jarrett. “She begged, ‘Just make the protests stop!’ Right then, I understood the power of collective action and mobilization. We shifted power from her to us. For me, it was like a lightbulb turning on and it never shut off.”

As summer streets erupted with outrage over police brutality, we fought politicians who tried to use COVID to suppress dissent.

It was not just the summer of the pandemic—it was the summer of worldwide protest against police brutality. In New York, the NYCLU was there to make sure that activists were not silenced with COVID as an excuse.

In May, as public gatherings were banned to prevent COVID spread, Governor Andrew Cuomo signed new executive orders that allowed groups of up to 10 people to commemorate Memorial Day or religious events—all the while upholding orders banning protest and First Amendment-related activity. We filed suit against the inconsistency, and Cuomo quickly reversed the protest ban.

Just in time, it turned out. At the end of the month and into June, protests exploded in New York City and state, as well as worldwide, in the wake of police killings of Minnesota’s George Floyd and Kentucky’s Breonna Taylor, plus the racist murder of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia. The NYCLU’s protest monitoring program proved to be crucial as we trained more than 100 monitors to document police responses to demonstrations and be a resource to protestors if needed. Local governments and law enforcement officials around the state responded with even more police violence and arrests, packing jails—which threatened to further spread COVID. We demanded that leaders like NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio prioritize de-escalation as opposed to more police involvement.

In the past four years, not only has Joseph Logan, a 48-year-old Brooklyn graphic designer, become ever more horrified at the Trump administration’s attacks on civil rights—he’s also morphed from a casual to a competitive long-distance runner. So perhaps it was just a matter of time before those two things came together.

That’s what began to happen in late 2019. Logan was already planning to be one of five NYCLU runners participating in the 2020 TCS Marathon—better known as November’s annual iconic, 26.2-mile New York City marathon. Each NYCLU runner was tasked with raising at least $5,000. It was to be Logan’s first marathon.

“The last four years, I’ve felt an increased urgency to be politically active,” he says. “And the marathon was supposed to happen two days before the election, so I felt I could have more visibility that way.”