J uanita Benjamin was skimming her Facebook feed on Sunday morning when she spotted a friend’s post about a protest later that day at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. The event was titled A Stand for Refugees and Immigrants — a call to action in response to President Donald Trump’s sweeping executive order targeting Muslim travelers to the United States. As a black immigrant from Guyana, it caught her interest. “I came here legally,” Benjamin said, but she knows people who didn’t. “They’re working very hard because they want a better life. They’re not rapists. They’re not murderers.” After a year and a half of hearing dehumanizing rhetoric about “illegals” from Trump, Benjamin was dismayed by his first executive order, which promises to escalate deportations, build his long-promised border wall, and defund “sanctuary cities.” Now he was targeting people with visas and green cards, smearing whole families as potential terrorists based solely on their ethnicity and religion. She decided to go to the protest. Benjamin brought Dolores Williams, a friend and fellow teacher who recently retired. Under gray skies and a chilly drizzle, they arrived at the airport around the 4 p.m. start time to find a sea of people already there, with more pouring in on the MARTA, Atlanta’s public rail system. Protesters were young and old, of all races, waving signs and pumping their fists, cheering as drivers honked their horns in support. Many brought their kids. Over chants of “Say it loud! Say it clear! Refugees are welcome here!” Williams and Benjamin expressed solidarity with those targeted by the Muslim ban and indignation over Trump’s vicious portrayal of foreigners. “This nation was built on the backs of immigrants — those who came on their own accord and those of us who were brought here in chains,” said Williams. “And for someone to say, ‘I’m gonna build a wall’ like it’s Berlin, to stop immigrants from coming — it’s wrong. It’s wrong.” A Brooklyn-born black woman who adopted the South as her home years ago, Williams pointed out that it took Americans of all stripes to win the victories of the civil rights movement. “It’s a shame that 50 years later we’re still doing the same thing.” Atlanta’s airport is the busiest in the world, home to Delta Air Lines and a major point of entry to the southeast United States. On a hotel shuttle earlier that day, a Delta employee told me Trump’s directive had prompted mass confusion among the company’s foreign workforce, many of whom came from the seven countries singled out by the order and who regularly travel in and out of the U.S. Earlier that weekend, 11 Muslim immigrants had been detained at Hartsfield-Jackson, among them a child and a 76-year-old grandmother. Congressman John Lewis, whose district is home to the airport, showed up to push for their release, calling it “a dark hour for America.” Yet while Sunday’s demonstration was fueled by the emergency at hand, it was filled with a broader sense of urgency — and a unique sense of local history. Many protesters invoked Atlanta’s role in the civil rights movement, with Rep. Lewis serving as an iconic reminder of the power of protest. The same was true of other rallies across the South, in states that voted for Trump. In Birmingham, Alabama, on Saturday, protesters gathered at Kelly Ingram Park, where Bull Connor once unleashed police dogs and fire hoses on activists fighting Jim Crow. The next day, the Birmingham airport saw a protest of its own. While there were no dramatic scenes like those at New York’s JFK Airport or Dulles International in Washington, D.C. — where teams of heroic lawyers fought to release Muslim travelers trapped by the Trump administration — solidarity protests at smaller airports like Raleigh-Durham in North Carolina and Austin-Bergstrom in Texas drew impressive crowds. At the Birmingham Rally for Refugees and Immigrants, participants drove to the airport from Montgomery and elsewhere to make their voices heard.

Photo: Courtesy Ann Sydney Taylor

The rallies throughout the South have continued this week, a powerful rebuke to recent ahistorical arguments dismissing public protest as the leisurely purview of coastal elites. They are also an important visual reminder of the large swaths of immigrant communities throughout the region, which have grown exponentially in recent years, a phenomenon central to Trump’s scaremongering presidential campaign. It is no coincidence that in cities like Louisville, Kentucky, and Charlotte, North Carolina, whose foreign-born populations have risen sharply since 2000, thousands came out to protest Trump’s executive orders. Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer called it a “pivotal moment” for the country, speaking alongside immigrant and civil rights activists at an amphitheater named for Muhammad Ali. Many in the South have been personally impacted by Trump’s executive order. Among those most cruelly affected last week was a man named Fuad Sharef Suleman, who was traveling to Nashville, Tennessee, with his family, only to be blocked by authorities in Cairo. In addition to a significant Somali population, Nashville is home to the largest Kurdish community in the U.S., with many arriving as refugees from Iraq in the early 1990s. Suleman once worked as a translator in collaboration with USAID, a job that could put his life in danger in the escalating war against the Islamic State. In anguished statements to reporters on Saturday, Suleman said he and his wife had waited for two years to obtain a special immigrant visa to the U.S., quitting their jobs, selling their house, and taking their three children out of school. Suleman was distraught and bewildered by Trump’s order, saying he had believed the U.S. was a democracy. “It is just like Saddam Hussein’s decisions,” he said. Nashville residents joined the nationwide protests over the weekend, rallying in front of the offices of Republican Sens. Bob Corker and Lamar Alexander. The public pressure appeared to get results: Both lawmakers issued statements expressing concern about Trump’s order. While their words fell far short of real condemnation — Corker, who chairs the Senate Foreign Policy Committee, called the order “poorly implemented” — they were among the few national politicians to say anything at all. Protesters also called on Mayor Megan Barry, who spoke at the event, to make Nashville a “sanctuary city,” asking her to block deportations from city jails. The same demand was made of Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed. With mayoral elections coming up, a number of Atlanta residents made it clear at the airport rally that they will be watching what local politicians choose to do in this moment. One such protester was Shawna Pennywell, who came with her husband, Styron, their 18-month-old son, Conor, and their daughter Emerson, who was celebrating her birthday. On a large white posterboard leaning on her brother’s stroller, Emerson had written, “My birthday wish is to let Muslims come here and have a great life,” along with a drawing of a woman dressed in an abaya. “I can’t change the election,” her mother told me. But she can pressure local legislators to resist Trump’s agenda. The Pennywells are among the many black Atlantans who came out from the 5th Congressional District, which Donald Trump smeared as “horrible” in his Twitter tantrum toward Rep. Lewis. After the incident, which took place on Martin Luther King Day, the family went to the Barnes & Noble in Edgewood, “in the heart of our plagued, crime-infested city,” Shawna Pennywell joked. They bought “Preaching to the Chickens: The Story of Young John Lewis,” a children’s book by Jabari Asim, along with Lewis’s “March” trilogy — part memoir, part graphic novel about his years in the civil rights movement. “We have read them in the last week,” she said enthusiastically, admitting that she may not have gotten around to doing such a thing if it were not for Trump. Many Americans had the same impulse: Sales of Lewis’s memoir skyrocketed immediately following the controversy. For Styron Pennywell, this is the sole silver lining to Trump’s election. Trump’s actions and rhetoric are so bigoted and extreme, it is motivating people to get on the right side of history. “This is like Civil Rights 2.0,” he said. “We’ve had slavery, we’ve had Japanese internment camps. A ban on Muslims leads to a ban on — what’s next? So, we have to come together to support one another.” L ike the Women’s March that galvanized record numbers of protesters across the globe, the action in Atlanta was organized by women. Among them was Asma Elhuni, a hijab-wearing legislative intern at CAIR. Like Linda Sarsour, who was viciously targeted by racists following the D.C.-led demonstration she helped mobilize, Elhuni knows too well what it means to organize high-profile events — or just navigate life — as a visually identifiable Muslim. On the day before the protest, as news and social media swirled with reports of families being detained across the country, Elhuni caught a stranger taking pictures of her at a coffee shop in East Atlanta. She confronted the man, filming him on her phone as he came toward her with a smile, and sat uncomfortably close. He called her “uptight,” a “bitch,” and asked if she had a green card, yet she kept her cool, later posting the footage to Facebook. The video went viral. At the airport, strangers came up express their gratitude and admiration for Elhuni, some pausing to take selfies with her. “What people don’t realize is that this is actually the third time in two weeks that people have taken a picture of me,” she told me. “I happened to catch hate on camera, but this happens to women all the time.” In the rush to cover the astonishing spread of weekend protests across the country, many in the press described the actions as “spontaneous.” But they could not have happened without the local activist networks that have existed for years. In Atlanta, Elhuni was joined by Azadeh Shahshahani, a veteran human rights attorney and the legal and advocacy director of Project South. The group has spent decades fighting for racial justice in Atlanta and beyond, in some of the most challenging political climates. At a recent MLK Day event, Shahshahani urged people to expand the scope of their work, including through physical travel, as protesters at Standing Rock have done. “We have to go as far as we can,” she said. “For us to really survive, we can’t work in silos anymore.”

Demonstrators hold signs and chant at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport during a protest to denounce President Donald Trump’s executive order barring citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the U.S., Jan. 29, 2017, in Atlanta. Photo: Branden Camp/AP