Darfur Rallies Receive Scant Attention
Tuesday, May 1st, 2007Here are some photos I took in Philadelphia on Sunday, April 29th at the Global Days for Darfur rally. It was sponsored by the Darfur Alert Coalition, the Jewish Community Relations Council of Philadelphia, and the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. Actually I wasn’t there to attend the rally but was in town on a Sunday School field trip with my son. We were waiting to go into the National Constitution Center on Independence Mall when we happened on the rally. 
PhillyNews.com reported that hundreds of people participated, although my guess would be that about 150 attended. In any case, rallies like this were held all over the United States and the world. News coverage, however, was light. One of my grad students at American University works for Amnesty International, and as he said,
The millions-strong immigrants rights rallies last year completely raised the bar and now it’s next to impossible for us to win any coverage of our demonstrations. There was a CNN camera man at the DC rally and a handful of other news outlets, but that was because we were able to get Mia Farrow to speak.