JERSEY CITY, N.J.—Labor and community organizations came together in Jersey City’s Berry Lane Park on Thursday, July 17th—one of more than 1,600 “Good Trouble Lives On” actions across the country.
Toni Ervin of the Justice for Drew Coalition emceed the event, which was interspersed with music from the Jersey City Resistance Choir. Ervin is the aunt of Andrew Washington, who was shot and killed by Jersey City police in August, 2023 while going through a mental health crisis.
“We have been fighting against the city and [Mayor] Fulop with the way they handled that, and we’re advocating so much for mental health,” she said. Community demands include releasing promised funds for state and city run programs using mental health professionals, rather than police, to respond to people in distress. An educator herself, Ervin also addressed the issue of gun violence in schools. “Children are afraid to go to school because they’re scared they’re going to get shot.”
Youth demanded safe schools
Right there on the spot, Ervin organized young people to create signs protesting cuts to education and demanding safe schools, which they held up as the audience sang “Lean On Me” with the choir.
Jersey City Ward F Councilmember Frank Gilmore also joined the community event. Like Ervin, he focused on issues faced by young people, including lack of recreation and jobs for youth, which are critical for protecting them from the mass incarceration system.
Council President Joyce Watterman was also present at the event, as well as Tina Nalls, Jake Ephros, and Eleana Little, candidates for Council At-Large, Ward D, and Ward E, respectively.
Introducing Pastor Doris Cherry of the Miracle Temple Pentecostal Church, Ervin pointed out that “our grassroots for the Civil Rights Movement did start in the church.”
“I know this song was sung that ‘We Shall Overcome,’ but…we should have already been in a different place,” the minister prayed. “We don’t want to go back, but we want to go forward.… Let us remember that this affects all of us, let us stand together in unity.”
Edward Perkins of the Anti-Violence Coalition of Hudson County protested Trump’s immigration policies. He also denounced U.S. funding for the slaughter of Palestinians, condemning “every bomb that kills our brothers and sisters and our children abroad.”
Turning to local matters, Perkins demanded more resources for Jersey City’s Black and brown communities. “There is a different level of services delivered to us…because of our race or the color of our skin or our class, and it shows true in Drew’s case.”
Perkins added that the city has a moral obligation to fulfill community needs directly through its own budget, and objected to policies of gentrification pricing out families with generational roots in Jersey City. “It’s dire across the country and even here in Jersey City, but we must not give up.”
Joe Tarrazi, an “essential worker and a proud union member with 32BJ,” agreed. “Every year, it gets harder and harder to stay in the city where I was born and raised.” Tarrazi works as a concierge in a luxury apartment building. He spoke about a labor-community coalition the union is building to hold landlords accountable by fighting junk fees.
“We organized, we rallied, and we made some good trouble. And we won!” Just a few days prior, the city passed an ordinance banning rent-setting algorithms, and Hoboken has done the same. But a state level ban is still needed.
“We keep the state clean, safe, and running smoothly, and New Jersey needs to make sure essential workers can afford to live in the state,” Tarrazi asserted.
Arlene Stein spoke on behalf of Knitty Gritty JC, a women-led community group that has been joining vigils outside the ICE detention center at Delaney Hall and conducting voter registration drives. For many, she pointed out, Trump was a rude awakening that democracy is something that “has to be defended, preserved, fought for.”
Finding inspiration from Lewis
Stein urged her listeners to find inspiration from Lewis’ hope for the future, despite growing up in the Jim Crow South. “He believed that this country could, and should live up to its promise. We need to learn from his example and from the example of the Civil Rights Movement.”
“We in this struggle have to use whatever tools are at our disposal,” including voting, she said, “but we also need to imagine that there are other ways in which we’re going to have to get involved,” recalling Lewis’ role organizing “Good Trouble”—sit-downs, boycotts, Freedom Rides, marches, and other nonviolent protests.
Nuzhat Chowdhury of the NJ Institute for Social Justice sent a statement read to the gathering pointing out the need to defend the vote with a NJ Voting Rights Act. “Our democracy has been under attack for over a decade now—with court cases and laws that weaken voting rights protections, that suppress the right to vote, and that dilute the power of Black and other communities of color so that the same kinds of people keep getting elected.”
Maya Pontón Aranoff, an activist from Resistencia en Acción, Union City Community Garden, and Ceasefire Now NJ, shared information about an ICE alert hotline, before blasting MAGA’s big ugly budget, which has turned ICE into a force larger than many countries’ militaries.
“They took billions of dollars from Medicaid and Medicare, from our children, from disabled people, from elders, from our families. They took money out of FEMA, out of environmental justice, out of programs designed to replace police with mental health services, and where did they put it? ICE, billionaires, military, weapons manufacturers, and corporations gouging your rent, making you sick, incarcerating your families, and making a buck off it.”
She named many of the corporations directly profiting off of suffering in the U.S. as well as in Gaza and the West Bank, Sudan, Ukraine, and elsewhere: private prison corporations GEO Group (now running Delaney Hall) and CoreCivic; weapons manufacturers L3HArris, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon who have operations in N.J., insurance companies like United Health; and fossil fuel companies like Chevron, which is opening up a fourth dirty power plant in Newark’s multi-racial working-class Ironbound community through its subsidiary, Hess. Behind all these corporations are the big banks.
“That should just motivate us to try and link hands under those flood waters and bring each other to shore. We have no choice!” One way to fight back, she said, is to support the Break the Bonds campaign, which calls on New Jersey to let its investments in Israel Bonds expire.
“Democracy and militarism are incompatible,” Michael Grele from NJ Peace Action added. “We’ve already seen attempts to normalize deportations and repression of Palestinian student activists, their allies, and others who speak out against [the Trump] regime, whether they are citizens or not.” He warned this type of repression—as well as trade sanctions and tariffs—”are often seen right before armed conflict.”
Grele emphasized the nuclear danger, with Trump’s government planning to spend 1.7 trillion dollars on upgrading its nuclear weapons. “Currently, there are nine states with nuclear weapons, and during 2025, eight of them have been at war.” He advocated for HR 317, the “Back from the Brink” resolution, “to eliminate our nuclear arsenal and to get the U.S. to renounce first-use of nukes.”
“You may say ‘fat chance with this President,’ and you’d be right,” he acknowledged. “It matters who is in office, but [historic victories] didn’t happen because of who was in office; they happened because of who was in the streets.”
A speaker representing New Jersey Friends of the People’s World spoke of the need for working class and all-people’s unity in the fight for equality and peace and for maintaining consistent democratic positions.
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