Solidarity and "SHAME" chants at Richmond's Labor Day rally

Labor Day 2025 was unseasonably mild in Richmond: the thermometer reached just 80°, according to the National Weather Service’s reading at the Richmond International Airport. The weather certainly didn’t match the mood in Monroe Park, where around 1,000 protesters spent the afternoon at 50501 Virginia’s “Workers Over Billionaires” rally heatedly naming and shaming the enemies of Virginia’s working class. Those included:

• Billionaires, generally;

• Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos specifically;

• Governor Glenn Youngkin, a private-equity centi-millionaire (but not a billionaire; how embarrassing);

• The masked kidnappers of Immigration and Customs Enforcement;

• Do-nothing Democratic lawmakers facilitating Israel’s genocide in Gaza;

• Virginia’s racist “right-to-work” law;

And so on. “This is a day for workers, this is a day for action,” said Tremayne Johnson, an organizer with the Service Employees International Union, which represents many Richmond city workers. It was also a moment for a broad coalition of left-of-center types—from silver-haired Facebook #resistlibs to keffiyeh-wearing, card-carrying socialists—to commiserate over the perilous state of the American labor movement and representative democracy itself.

Make no mistake: the situation is perilous. The consequences of the Trump administration’s unilateral and likely illegal destruction of the federal administrative state and cancelation of hundreds of thousands of federal workers’ union contracts are hitting Virginia particularly hard. But on Monday, there was joy in the crowd, too—and plenty of defiance.

“This is about the kind of country we want to live in,” said Mary Bauer, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia. “Virginia and frankly America have never lived up to the promises laid out in our constitution, but we sure as hell aren’t going to let them lay it back any further.”

The slate of speakers ran the gamut, and Bauer, dressed in a trim blazer and sporting the imprimatur of the country’s largest civil-liberties organization, was about the closest it came to an “establishment” figure. There were representatives from Richmond’s chapter of the Democratic Socialists for America and Virginia’s chapter of the Party for Socialist Liberation. An aspiring state delegate candidate from Chesterfield. An organizer with Richmond Defensa, a community protection organization. The editor of the Virginia Defender. I didn’t catch many names, unfortunately; the sound system was overmatched by the crowd. (Good thing I don’t have an editor at The Lookout, otherwise they would yell at me for this. Sloppy!)

The crowd was fired up, but the big-tent nature of the politics on offer made for some confusion. The labor chair of DSA Richmond, a guy named Sean, drew polite applause from the boomers around me in the crowd when he was first introduced; they seemed a bit unsure whether they should clap for somebody with “socialist” in his title. But DSA Sean won them over. “The ruling class is organized, and as long as we are not, we’re going to see another Trumpian president!” he thundered, to cheers.

After around two hours at Monroe Park, protesters headed out on the designated march route, which went westbound on West Broad Street then looped down Lombardy and back towards the plaza. Across from Virginia Commonwealth University’s Siegel Center on Richmond’s main drag, residents came to their balconies to watch the procession. One darted back inside when he saw the protest, emerging from his apartment holding a placard that said “GAZA CEASEFIRE NOW.” The march broke out into an ebullient chant of “Free, Free Palestine” that ricocheted off the buildings.