By Bakari Height and Virginia Rodino
In mid-March 2025, the radical Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) convened a national meeting of trade unionists, with some community groups representing key issues such as immigrant and racial justice. More than 200 attendees spent two days hearing plenary speakers and breaking out into regional strategy groups to plan coordinated actions for May 1, 2025, but also to build networks and coalitions that would continue to organize through May 1, 2028. This is a date at which United Auto Workers International president Shawn Fain called for a general strike. At the Chicago meeting, Fain spoke to the assembly, as did several others, with nearly all speakers indicating that the Democrat party has not and will not be protecting us from attacks. CTU held weekly calls, produced outreach materials decrying the “billionaire takeover”, and launched a website (maydaystrong.org) for cities and towns across the country to list their May Day events.
All 50 states participated, and the organizing calls reached over 2000 attendees.
More than 1000 rallies and events were held across the country on May 1, 2025. In Chicago, the birthplace of May Day, there was a weeklong series of events and protests.
Although since 2006 May Day in the United States has been intertwined with the immigrant justice movement, in 2025 the attacks have been so ferocious on immigrant workers that there was a noticeable lack of immigrant workers on these demonstrations because of the high level of fear.
Because the attacks are so broad, the resistance has broadened and there have been very diverse coalitions that helped to organize these rallies. In many cities there was a much higher level of coordination and a linking of many issues recognizing that we are all in the Trump Administration’s sights.
In Baltimore, a city that was commemorating the ten year anniversary of the murder of Freddie Gray* by police, the one year anniversary of 6 Latin American construction workers killed during a bridge collapse, and the release of a report detailing how AFSCME member and sanitation worker Ronald Silver II died last August from 109 degree temperatures and no water or bathroom breaks, there was a visible knitting together of the issues at its May Day rally. Seven feeder marches – including ones for Palestine, education, families and children, immigrant justice, and labor – began at different parts of the city and converged at a plaza at the busiest intersection of the city.
LNS Transit Organizer Bakari Height joined the labor feeder march. “The feeder march really put into perspective on the power of coalitions. Whether it was the Labor march, the March on Palestine, the immigrant march, or the families march, Baltimore’s May Day rally showed how many people from different walks of life can rally together for a single cause through different causes. Many causes were hyperlocal to the city of Baltimore and Maryland, keeping a local follow-up on the top of many minds as this would not be the last of these marches.”
LNS Communications Director Virginia Rodino spoke at the rally saying, “We experience how much Baltimore suffers from climate catastrophe, from environmental injustice – the American Lung Association report that just came out saying Baltimore was the 36th worst city in the country for smog.
“Yet the workers and agencies that would protect us — the EPA workers, OSHA, NOAA, the environmental scientists, engineers and policy experts – have been suffering a tremendous reduction in force – being fired for trying to protect our health and lead us away from a climate catastrophe that the capitalist system is inevitably leading us into.
“The billionaires are profiting when they fire workers who provide these crucial services, increasing the pace at which our planet is being ravaged. We don’t have time and we can’t afford to have more of us suffer, to have workers die in the billionaires’ war on the planet in their drive for more and more profit.”
Here is a video of Rodino’s rally speech and news coverage of the rally where she is briefly interviewed.
Labor coalitions in Baltimore and neighboring counties continue to meet and plan next steps to resist MAGA tyranny and beyond. These coalitions are leading the organizing for June 14 rallies and strategic resistance through May Day 2028.
*On April 12, 2015, Baltimore police officers arrested Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old Black man, who sustained fatal injuries throughout the process of his arrest. Gray’s death sparked weeks of unrest in Baltimore; a federal investigative report, which found that the Baltimore Police Department engaged in a pattern of unconstitutional and racially discriminatory policing and led to a federal court consent decree; and ongoing advocacy for police accountability.