06 Oct 2025 5 min read

Starting Speakers’ Corners while we can

In Santa Fe, I have helped start a Speakers’ Corner project. We held our first session this past Saturday. Reprinted below, from the Indivisible Santa Fe website, is my diary. But first, click the image below for footage showing a sampling of speakers from the day.

Speakers' Corner Diary, Number 1

We held the first Speakers’ Corner sponsored by Indivisible Santa Fe this past Saturday, October 4, 2025. A group of us set up our sign and stepstool-cum-soapbox in the Santa Fe Railyard Park, in between SITE Sante Fe and the corner of Paseo de Peralta, catty-corner from the Farmers’ Market Pavilion. Plenty of foot traffic, and the park made a lovely backdrop. We'll be back there, 10 - 11 a.m., this coming Saturday, October 11.

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The hour was both fun and intense. Fun because of the camaraderie among the Indivisible Santa Fe folks who turned out to support and participate. Fun because of the passersby who paused, who stayed, and who spoke. Intense because of the seriousness of this moment in the second Trump era. Intense because I know we need as many people as possible in as many places as possible speaking up in the face of rising fascism here in the United States. I fervently hope the Santa Fe Speakers’ Corner becomes a gathering point for those fighting for the survival of pluralistic constitutional democracy in the United States.

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A Speakers’ Corner isn’t expensive, it doesn’t require technical knowledge. It doesn’t take too long--we ran ours for just an hour. You can speak for a minute, for three minutes, or more (in Santa Fe we are asking folks to limit their turns to 5 minutes). Your remarks can be off-the-cuff or prepared. You can aim to be loud enough to attract more people to come over and join in or just speak in a conversational way. The variety of styles is part of what made Saturday’s session in Santa Fe interesting.

After our session on Saturday, I got home to news of escalating threats from Trump about sending troops into Chicago, over the objections of the city’s mayor and the Governor of Illinois. I watched footage of Chicagoans bravely walking up to armed, masked ICE agents, asking them about how they felt about their conduct and castigating them for behaving like Nazis. I watched footage of ICE agents assaulting protesting Chicagoans, agents throwing people to the ground, agents tear-gassing civilians. It brought home to me how important it was to stand up in my own city and speak out about the Trump regime’s lawless violence against Americans and others. On Saturday in Santa Fe, I had the privilege of exercising my free speech rights without being menaced by Trump’s goons. I may not always be so lucky.

Our inaugural speaker in Santa Fe, Dave B., talked about the relationship between the right to speak freely and its connection to some of deepest aspirations articulated in the Preamble of the U.S. Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Another Indivisible Santa Fe member, Joellen, spoke about liberty of choice and how it relates to our ability to live together in community despite some very stark disagreements among us.

A passerby spoke about how he tries to listen carefully and respectfully to those he cares about who support the Trump government. He said that listening to them - and trying to tell them why he disagrees - is necessary to getting past the political polarization he believes is making the country dysfunctional. A mother and daughter came by and talked about Hawaii and disagreements there about a private school system there, Kamehameha Schools, endowed by the Hawaiian princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop. The schools are controversial because, by the terms of the endowment, there is a policy of prioritizing the admission of students of Hawaiian ancestry. Hearing from this mother and daughter was an object lesson in the relation between free speech and learning; those of us from Santa Fe got a window into a civil rights dispute in another state. I was prompted to think carefully about whether I agreed with the visitors, who favor the schools' admission policy.

At one point, I asked the people gathered to share a memory that came to mind when I mentioned the right to speak freely. People’s contributions created a wonderful tapestry, illustrating different aspects of the American free speech tradition. College campus protests against the U.S. government, reporting on the body count of U.S. soldiers killed in Vietnam, journalist Bill Moyers talking about how exposure to other religions influenced his own beliefs, children speaking raucously at family gatherings where their noise and comments were tolerated by the adults. I put on my law professor hat and related these and other memories to the history and law of free speech as it has developed in the United States.

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I did not agree with everything I heard this past Saturday. As additional people speak in the coming weeks, I expect to hear more I do not agree with. That is fine. It is what participating in a Speakers’ Corner involves. More significantly though, I imagine I will again hear people talk about unexpected topics in unexpected ways. For me, that was a surprisingly striking and uplifting feature of the first Speakers' Corner sponsored by Indivisible Santa Fe. I had emphasized in my own remarks the importance of individuals exercising their right to speak in public places, not online, not in a publication, not on television. What I hadn’t noticed recently is what a pleasure it is to listen to people speaking, unpreviewed, unplanned, uncensored. I hadn’t selected a show, a podcast, a newsletter, or a publication. I just listened to people saying what was on their minds, taking what I heard as it came.