By Tracey Ann Duncan, HuffPost | Last week at Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey, protesters sang at police during a sit-in. It was just months after the Resistance Revival Chorus packed 500 people into Middle Church in Manhattan’s East Village for an ICE Out sing-in.
At that event back in February, 150 people who couldn’t get inside stayed on the sidewalk, singing along from printed lyric sheets. Neighbors filed out of their apartments to join them. Hundreds more watched the livestream from across the country.
Something loud is happening, and it’s not just happening in the New York metro area. Across the country, people are gathering in living rooms, churches, city parks and street corners to learn songs together — protest songs, spirituals, civil rights anthems and new compositions written in direct response to ICE raids and the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
In Minneapolis, a group called Singing Resistance held its first singing vigil in January, only expecting about 30 people. Three hundred showed up. They now have hundreds of chapters across the country. Other groups around the nation are forming — and growing rapidly — in response to the upheaval of the moment. In Portland, Oregon, a singing action group called A Notion, A Scream has grown from 40 to 90 singers in less than two years.
“We are not a choir,” says Liz Digitale Anderson, a community song leader in Minneapolis who co-founded Singing Resistance. “We are a mass participation movement trying to stand up to authoritarianism together.”
The story of Singing Resistance begins, like so many Minneapolis stories lately, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. When federal agents flooded the city in December 2025 under what the Department of Homeland Security called Operation Metro Surge, Digitale Anderson and a group of fellow community song leaders saw the writing on the wall. They’d already been talking to each other, planning actions for early 2026. Then an ICE officer killed Renee Good, and all bets were off.
. . . . . . . . . .
Read more about “Singing Resistance” here:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/singing-as-resistance-protest-growing-movement_n_6a300a80e4b07679090e26b3?origin=home-whats-happening-unit
