On January 8th – the day after the 37-year-old poet and mother of three, Renee Good, was fatally shot in Minneapolis by an ICE agent – hundreds of Rhode Islanders gathered at Providence’s City Hall to protest against ICE.
I live in Providence’s West End, where ICE has been witnessed abducting my neighbors on Westminster Street, Parade Street, and elsewhere. These kidnappings are traumatic for the families affected and for our community as a whole. As I watched the video of Jonathan Ross murdering Renee Nicole Good, I thought of my daily drives along those streets. If I block an ICE agent’s car as I bring my kids home from school, will I too be killed?
I set off for the City Hall protest feeling devastated, frightened, and outraged. I knew Providence was full of people who felt the same way. I wanted to be among those people.
Seeing what’s happening in Minneapolis made me more scared than I used to be about attending a protest. What if ICE decided to show up? Who would stop them from firing tear gas into a peaceful crowd?
In preparation, I packed goggles, a mask, band-aids, granola bars, saline solution (to flush eyes in case of tear gas), and the phone numbers of my husband and a lawyer friend. As I approached City Hall, I worried about the possibility of hostile counter-protesters.
Thankfully, if there were any counter-protestors there, I didn’t see them.
Here’s what I noticed instead: the mournful outrage in the crowd, and right alongside it, the warmth between the protestors. The reassurance of the yellow-vested volunteers protecting the crowd from traffic. The gentle ease of hundreds of peaceful protesters sharing space and giving way for the children among them. The smiles shared between friends finding each other in the crowd, and those smiles giving way to sad nods of understanding. And of course, a protest in the Creative Capital will always feature artistic and expressive signs, a handful of which appear in the photos below.
Times are dark, and we’re all we’ve got. Folding myself into that crowd of hundreds, I felt a little safer and a lot stronger.
All photos by Rebecca Atwood.
Rebecca Atwood is a photographer and filmmaker under the banner of her company Atomic Clock. Her photos have appeared in the Boston Globe, Romper, The Public’s Radio, and on ABC’s Nightline. She served as President of the West Broadway Neighborhood Association from 2022 to 2024. She lives in Providence with her family.
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