Real estate greed, the glutted police budget, ceaseless gentrification, racist journalists, Eric Adams, Kathy Hochul, white people—we cycled through the injustices, against them, resuscitating despair into focused rage.

They told me they’d wanted to be around women. They hadn’t loved the speakers or the claim that Mayor Adams was one of “the men who get it,” but the gathering was, at the very least, a space of shared outrage. Some 14-year-old boys told me the most memorable speeches were the ones that situated the court’s decision within broader struggles and insisted that this wasn’t a single-day or single-issue action.