02-05-2025
Protesters gather in Columbia as part of coast-to-coast May Day demonstration
Angel Lee, right, and Karina Williams, center, both of Columbia, joined a May Day protest outside the post office in downtown Columbia, Thursday, May 1, 2025. (Photo by Jessica Holdman/SC Daily Gazette)
COLUMBIA — Some 120 South Carolinians who oppose the Trump administration lined the sidewalks of Columbia's downtown post office as part of a series of May Day demonstrations spanning the country.
The protests held on a day commemorating the fight for workers' rights and the national labor movement was organized by a group that calls itself the 50501 campaign, which stands for 50 protests, 50 states, one movement.
The movement, which originated online, has led to a wave of grassroots protests nationwide since President Donald Trump's inauguration. The group has had at least four coordinated demonstrations in the past four months, including a gathering that attracted hundreds to South Carolina Statehouse grounds on President's Day.
While signs, slogans and the issues protesters cared about Thursday went well beyond workers' rights, organizer Sam Gibbons, of Columbia, said the group did want to highlight workers' struggles.
At least one organizer from the Union of Southern Service Workers was in attendance and circulating flyers.
And among attendees' variety of chants was 'the U.S. mail is not for sale' in reference to suggestions by the Trump administration that the U.S. Postal Service should be privatized.
Gibbons, a 34-year-old educator, also criticized the administration's tariff policies and potential impacts to union workers and the middle class.
If we stop importing goods, longshoremen working at Charleston's port could lose work, he said. And if prices go up, retail workers may be affected.
The protest occurred the same day as Vice President J.D. Vance visited a Nucor steel mill in rural Berkeley County to tout the tariffs as bringing back manufacturing jobs.
Angel Lee, who also helped organize the Columbia event, said she's worried about possible changes to federal law that impacts those with disabilities. The 46-year-old is disabled and works with a non-profit that aids those with disabilities.
'As a disabled worker and an advocate, I know how hard we have to fight just to be seen,' she said. 'All we want is to be able to work with dignity and for fair pay.'
Lee will travel to Washington, D.C., Friday to protest with other members of the movement on the National Mall.
For Margot Robinette, of Columbia, it's the president's immigration policy and deportation efforts that are of the greatest concern.
The 26-year-old apothecary shop worker married into a family of immigrants. Her husband is a first-generation American whose parents immigrated to the United States from Honduras, and she said it's difficult to see those she loves living in fear that they could be deported.
Robinette has also worked alongside immigrants on a farm in California.
'Immigrants are essential workers,' she said. 'Workers' rights and immigrants' rights intertwined; you can't talk about one without the other.'
Miguel Torres, of Batesburg, also is the child of immigrants who came to the U.S. from the Guanajuato region of Mexico.
The 22-year-old retail worker attended the protest outside the post office as well as a gathering of legal professionals outside the federal courthouse in Columbia earlier in the day.
Lawyers, federal judges and the dean of the University of South Carolina law school held that separate event as part of National Law Day.
'Attacks on judges for unpopular rulings, political pressure on legal professionals and a growing distrust of the legal system threaten the very foundation of fairness and equal justice,' Columbia attorney Nekki Shutt said in kicking off the program.
U.S. District Court judges DeAndrea Gist Benjamin and Joseph Anderson then led the lawyers in a restatement of their legal oath, which Benjamin said directs legal professionals to serve 'without fear or favor, without allegiance to politicians or politics, to honest judgment, regardless of financial or social standing.'
Torres called the arrest of a county circuit court judge in Wisconsin for allegedly helping an undocumented immigrant avoid arrest scary.
'The rule of law in our country is just not being respected,' he said. 'Every single day on the news it seems like there's a new executive order.'
