A look at the crowd gathered in front of the Winchester Unitarian Society on Main Street for the No Kings rally on Oct. 18, 2025. WINCHESTER NEWS STAFF PHOTO/FRANK SITEMAN
Winchester will hold its third No Kings rally this weekend and include a new addition to its program – a community walk toward town before the rally.
Organizers of Winchester’s third No Kings rally hope to draw in more than 1,000 people to the March 28 event. Other rallies were held in June and October 2025.
No Kings rallies have been organized across the country by activists to protest the Trump administration’s policies. Saturday’s rally will focus specifically on constitutional rights, democracy and the idea that “ no one is above the law,” said Eve Coffey, head of IndivisibleWIN.
“We’re coming up on the 250th anniversary of this country, and we’re seeing such backward movement,” Coffey said.
IndivisibleWIN, the Winchester chapter of the nationwide pro-democracy movement Indivisible, is organizing this rally. This weekend, it will add “The Neighbors Join In” and action tables.
The Neighbors Join In, organized by Bob Davidson, an assistant clergyman at the Parish of the Epiphany who is acting independently of the church, is a walk toward the center of town. Organizations will gather between 10:30 and 11 a.m. in three hubs: the First Congregational Church, Bellino Park and Riverside Sculpture Park.
The idea for the walk started after Davidson saw the success of “Winchester in Solidarity: Walking with Our Neighbors,” a walk in solidarity with immigrants, in early February. He wanted to echo those same feelings of community support that the walk had shown.
“Neighbors Join In is building on that solidarity walk,” Davidson said. “It’s really trying to focus on longer-term relationships between neighbors, creating that sense of support and momentum that we can take after the rally is over.”
At 11 a.m., those gathered in each area will walk toward the town center for the rally, which will begin at 11:30 a.m.
The rally will feature speeches from state Rep. Michael Day; Maria Teresa Nagel, director of Somerville’s Office of Immigration Affairs; the Rev. Seth Carrier-Ladd from the Winchester Unitarian Society; and more who have yet to be revealed.
Willie T & Doctor X, a Boston-based singer-songwriter duo, will perform an original No Kings song.
There will be “action tables” around the rally area, said Coffey. The tables will include postcard packets that can be purchased and sent to Georgia to encourage voter registration, along with a voter registration table run by the League of Women Voters.
Both of the past events have brought out residents from neighboring towns, including Medford, Stoneham and Woburn.
Medford resident Sue Edelman — a co-leader of Mystic Mashup, a local chapter of the national Indivisible movement that covers the Mystic Valley area, which includes Medford, Somerville, Malden and Everett — said most active members of the organization plan to attend the No Kings rally on Boston Common.
Mystic Mashup hasn’t hosted its own event because it wants to “add to the power of the larger events,” Edelman said. Leading up to the event, the organization has been creating flyers and cards with QR codes to its website to hand out at No Kings, preparing people to be marshals at the event and recruiting people to help with the medical tents.
Edelman expects Saturday’s event to include 3.5% of the population because “the last one was exponentially bigger than the first” and she thinks Saturday’s event will follow the same pattern.
Research from the Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights found in 2019 that nonviolent protests that have engaged 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.
Scott Drown, a Winchester resident who would be marching if he wasn’t out of the country on Saturday, said 3.5% of the population needs to be engaged in sustained efforts in order to “topple a regime.” Until the efforts are happening on a continuous level as opposed to massive get-togethers every three months, he doesn’t think the movement is going “to get anywhere,” he said.
About 5 million people attended the No Kings protest at about 2,100 locations across the country in June 2025, and 7 million showed up at 2,700 sites for No Kings rally in October 2025, Ezra Levin, co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible, said at Indivisible’s What’s The Plan meeting on March 19. Over 3,000 events are registered for Saturday’s protest.
The first No Kings rally in Winchester drew around 500 people, while the second had between 800 and 1,000 people. Coffey hopes this rally will bring in even more people.
Davidson hopes the rally gets more people to start participating in social movements and find their voice. He also knows there is more to be done.
“The work is not over – it’s just really begun,” Davidson said. “We need to focus on resilience on one another, continuing to keep this vision of a just world in front of us, and continuing to find solidarity with our neighbors.”
Crystal Yormick and Tavishi Chattopadhyay are journalism students at Boston University. This story is part of a partnership between Winchester News, Gotta Know Medford and the Boston University Department of Journalism.
