How a fight over religion tore apart the Women's March organization

A scene from the 2017 Women’s March in Washington, D.C. Creative Commons photo.

NEW YORK — The National Women’s March organization appointed 16 new board members to join veteran board member Carmen Perez in an effort to unite diverse communities of activists to create “transformative social change,” according to the movement’s mission.

Why the change? Prior to the Sept. 16 announcement, the movement had been under plenty of pressure to remove founding co-chairs Linda Sarsour, Tamika Mallory and Bob Bland.

The organization explained their latest announcement by saying that the trio’s term had simply ended, sharing that Sarsour, Mallory and Bland “will transition off of the Women’s March Board and onto other projects focused on advocacy within their respective organizations.”

That may not be the whole truth. Mallory and Sarsour have been under fire for supporting Louis Farrakhan, a minister respected in the black community and reviled in Jewish circles for his anti-Semitic remarks. The pair’s unyielding support of this divisive public figure is at the heart of anti-Semitism controversies and accusations the organization had been facing over the past year.

The shakeup comes as those who oppose President Donald Trump have galvanized around the prospect that he could be impeached even before Americans vote whether to re-elect him in November 2020. Nonetheless, the Women’s March finds itself at a crossroads following the shakeup of the past few weeks. Whether this group can remain relevant — and as a key player in the Trump resistance — remains to be seen. First, it has to deal with internal divisions that are very much based on religious differences.

Known for his attacks on the LGBTQ community, Jews and other groups in his speeches and online, Farrakhan even said in a now-deleted tweet: “I'm not an anti-Semite. I'm anti-Termite,” The Hill reported.

The march has not totally cut off its religious connections. Samia Assed, a Palestinian Muslim-American, remains part of the group’s leadership.

“The Women’s March has uplifted many voices by making space for my Palestinian and Muslim communities,” she said. “I will make sure to continue to uplift those voices and more by ensuring the urgent need to address racism, islamophobia, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, climate justice, reproductive justice and immigrant rights.”

Though the two former co-chairs had also publicly condemned anti-Semitism, homophobia and other forms of hate speech, they had repeatedly refused to renounce Farrakhan himself and in a statement published in late 2018 Sarsour revealed she had no intentions of doing so.

“We are being held to standards that no one would hold themselves to,” Sarsour wrote. “Tamika and I are women with our own agency. We speak for ourselves and ourselves alone. We are being stripped of our agency when every few months we are asked to condemn the Minister about words that we did not say, nonetheless the words of a man who did not consult us on his words.”

This statement seemed to quell the calls for the co-chairs to step down until Mallory attended the Nation of Islam’s 2018 annual Savior’s Day event in Chicago. There, The Washington Post reported, Farrakhan made incendiary comments about Jews, naming “powerful jews” he counted as his enemies.

This reignited the issue many Women’s March supporters had with Mallory and Sarsour supporting Farrakhan and led Women’s March Founder Teresa Shook to call the co-chairs to step down last year.

Political activist Linda Sarsour was one of three founders of the Women’s March to step down after having shown past support for Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Creative Commons photo.

“As Founder of the Women’s March, my original vision and intent was to show the capacity of human beings to stand in solidarity and love,” Shook wrote on her Facebook page. “Bob Bland, Tamika Mallory, Linda Sarsour and Carmen Perez of Women’s March, Inc. have steered the Movement away from its true course.”

She explained that the women have refused to separate themselves from people who use hateful rhetoric like Farrakhan.

After Shook spoke out, others followed, and this discord within the movement can be seen in the number of protesters that came out to the official march in Washington D.C. this year.

“I have always been deeply committed to the original mission and vision of the 2017 March, which ushered in a new generation of feminism, based on the principle of convening a movement that centers the most marginalized women's voices,” said board member Carmen Perez-Jordan, a civil rights advocate. “I am thrilled to serve on the incoming board alongside 16 other women who continue that spirit of intersectionality. Our new board brings together talented women from across the spectrum of the intersectional movement for women's empowerment.”

The Women’s March is a national protest that first took place on January 21, 2017, the day after Donald Trump was inaugurated president. The march also took place in 2018 and this past January. An estimated crowd of 100,000 came out to march on Washington in 2019, while 500,000 protesters showed up for the first one.

Though the Women’s March may continue to say that Mallory, Sarsour and Bland stepped down simply because they had served their terms on the board, these former co-chairs resignation appears to be a strategy to reunite and rebrand the Women’s March as a movement every woman can get behind.

But the former co-chairs’ resignation may not be enough to do this. Two days after the organization announced the list of new board members voted in by a nominating committee, one of the new members Zahra Billoo was voted off. National Review, a politically conservative magazine, reported that Billoo was voted out because of controversial comments she has made on Twitter. She claimed she was voted off because of an “islamophobic smear campaign.”

The group has vowed to counter the Trump administration and held a rally in October to #ReclaimtheCourt in Washington, DC to protest Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a Catholic, and what they call “his work to overturn Roe v. Wade” in the ongoing abortion debate.

Only time will tell whether the disunity within the Women’s March can be repaired and the women can rally together again to fight for a cause they all believe in: getting Trump out of the White House.

Elizabeth Winn is a student at The King’s College in New York City. She is currently interning at the New York Daily News and managing editor of EST Magazine, a student-run campus publication.