TIME

NEW FRIENDS, COMMON FOE

How the Women’s March brought progressives together
The Women’s March was organized by Tamika Mallory, Bob Bland, Carmen Perez and Linda Sarsour

THE IDEA STARTED WITH WOMEN ON Facebook. On the night of Donald Trump’s surprise victory in November, a grandmother in Hawaii named Teresa Shook went online and called for women to storm the capital on Inauguration weekend.

“At the same time, 5,000 miles away, I was doing the same thing,” explains Bob Bland, a female manufacturing entrepreneur in New York City. “Within an hour we’d found each other and merged our events, and we were off to the races.” By the next morning, thousands of people from across the U.S. had signed up to join the event that would become the Women’s March on Washington.

Bland quickly realized that in order to transform the march from an angry Facebook group into a progressive

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