On Saturday, frustration with the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency once again spread out into the streets. Protesters from local organizations rallied in Murfreesboro as one of hundreds of “Hands Off!” protests planned nationwide took place in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
Hundreds of protesters left the Linebaugh Library parking garage and marched down Church Street, then lined Broad Street, one of downtown Murfreesboro’s main roads. They chanted for an hour before turning onto Vine Street to complete the loop around the block. American, Ukrainian, Pride and anti-fascist flags lined the sidewalk for nearly a block.
Marilyn Patterson, a demonstrator and self-avowed “hippie,” shared a sentiment that many held close during the rally: “I’m an old lady, and I’m mad as hell.”
Patterson also called out her alma mater, MTSU, for not doing more to stand up against the Trump administration. Patterson got her undergraduate and graduate degrees in English from MTSU and said she was disappointed in the lack of action from students. She said they needed to stand up against the Trump administration and organize more marches.
“A shame on my institution,” Patterson said. “They need to have marches; [students] need to stand up. We have dictators that [have taken] over our country. We were already great. We’re not going to make it better by doing what [Trump] is doing.”
The crowd looked different from those at other protests that have sprung up around Middle Tennessee since January, which were mostly youth-led. The majority of attendees were at least 60 years old.
Dan Harris, who is nearing retirement age, said he was there today because of the stock market but has been protesting against Trump since his first term in office.
“I would like to see it back where it was when Biden was president,” Harris said.
On April 2, called “Liberation Day” by Trump, the U.S. enacted sweeping tariffs on more than 60 countries. Trump introduced the tariffs because of a “lack of reciprocity in our bilateral trade relationships, disparate tariff rates and non-tariff barriers, and U.S. trading partners’ economic policies that suppress domestic wages and consumption,” according to the White House website.
Indivisible, a “volunteer-run, non-partisan, and progressive” organization that “advocates for First Amendment rights, rule of law, and the Constitution,” organized Saturday’s “Hands Off!” protest, according to a flyer for the rally.
Susan Myers-Shirk, a volunteer and rally organizer, said 120 people registered, but more than 250 people attended.
Some cars honked in support as they drove, while others who passed yelled slurs. One driver tried to “roll coal” — or deliberately cause black smoke to eject from a vehicle’s exhaust — onto protesters.
Diana Buchanan, a mother holding a small Ukrainian flag, attended because of “this awful thing that’s going on with the United States,” she said.
One attendee, 79-year-old Luther Ludwig, could remember presidents as far back as Dwight Eisenhower. There has never been anything like what Trump and Musk are doing in the history of the Union, Ludwig said.
The last time the federal government introduced tariffs as sweeping as Trump’s was the Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930. The act raised import duties to protect American farmers from cheap, international goods but ended up straining the global economic climate at the beginning of the Great Depression.
Ludwig offered some advice to young people upset with the state of things politics in America.
“Don’t sit idle,” Ludwig said. “Express yourself and pay attention to what is really happening, and don’t feel like you have to conform to what the crowd says.”
After the protest, despite dark clouds teasing rain, Myers-Shirk beamed with pleasure at how big the turnout was.
“I’m probably supposed to say something about success probably,” Myers-Shirk said. “But what I’m feeling right now is relief. I feel like it went really well and that people had a good chance to build community and express themselves. I think that’s really important.”
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