President Donald Trump was met with peaceful protesters in North Charleston, South Carolina on Friday as he gave a speech at a Boeing plant in his first visit to the state since winning its Republican presidential primary last year.
Members of Indivisible Charleston, a local resistance group, rallied at the North Charleston Coliseum near the plant, which produces the massive Dreamliner aircraft.
At least 100 people gathered to listen to speakers, wielding signs that read, "Truths not tweets," and "No one is free when others are oppressed."
100+ people here protesting Trump ahead of his Boeing visit pic.twitter.com/jcdE6QQxZ5
— Deanna Pan (@DDpan) February 17, 2017
— Deanna Pan (@DDpan) February 17, 2017
#ResistWithLove@UniteWomenSC @IndivisibleCHS @indivisible_sc pic.twitter.com/hJvR153i5n
— Bulldozer (@realLarryInSC) February 17, 2017
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One of the speakers read the 1986 letter by Coretta Scott King that opposed now-Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) famously attempted to read it on the floor of the Senate during Sessions' confirmation vote this month, only to be censured by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
Indivisible chapters have sprung up throughout the country in response to the Indivisible Guide, a field manual written by former congressional staffers that instructs local organizations on how to use the Tea Party's obstructionist tactics—honed during the Obama administration—to oppose the rightwing agenda in the White House and Congress, now under Republican control.
Trump's visit came just two days after Boeing's thousands of workers voted against unionization, a somewhat predictable outcome in a region that has historically cracked down on workplace organizing.
Jeffrey Hirsch, law professor who specializes in labor relations at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told WJLA, "The culture here, at least in recent memory, has not been pro-union."
"If they were successful it would be huge, I think," Hirsch says. "The numbers by themselves are not going to move the dial nationally in a substantive way, but the symbolism of it would be quite large."
