"Today We Did Some Good." The Diamondbacks Demonstration in DC

On Sunday in DC, I attended the 17th ballpark protest of the Arizona Diamondbacks during the 2011 baseball season. Like the other actions - in cities from Houston to San Francisco to Milwaukee - people chanted a loud and clear message to Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig: move the 2011 All-Star Game out of Arizona and make the state pay a price for enacting legislation that sacrifices immigrant families at the altar of election year politics. But this demonstration was also deeply different from the 16 others. It was a day of rain, risk-takers, racists, and rancor. And it couldn't have been more terrific.

First, the protest was publicly threatened by a pugnacious anti-immigrant organization called Help Save Maryland. This past week, I received a series of emails from people claiming to be connected to the group where they threatened to "swamp" the Move the Game demonstration and drive immigrant rights supporters from the park. They also taunted that my writing on the subject had led to them being "overwhelmed with phone calls and volunteers." For the record, we had 100 people march during the two-hour protest. They had seven. The group was so irrelevant that they went unmentioned - from ESPN to politico.com- in the flurry of subsequent media coverage.

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