The “Hands Off” Rally at Culver City Hall on Saturday, April 5, 2025 was large, loud and energized. One of more than 1200 events organized all over the country, it was a protest against the devastating cuts to federal staffing at crucial agencies by the Republican administration, and more. Signs carried by protestors decried everything from the loss of women’s rights to the illegal deportation of students.
It looked to be more than two thousand, and perhaps as many as 2500 people; the crowd expanded as far up Culver Boulevard as the Fire Station Number One, and as far down as the Post Office, spilling over to the far side of the street in front of the Kirk Douglas Theater and eventually populating the meridian as well.
Jamie Wallace, a local activist who had been the initial organizer, said that she was looking at the “Hands Off” website map for rally locations, and saw that there was “…nothing scheduled for the Westside… smaller cities had events so I thought, ok, let’s get the process started.”
Chants of “Hands Off!” and “This is what democracy looks like!” rang out at intervals for more than an hour.
Posted to begin at noon, people were still arriving well after 1:30 pm. So many people came that the rally took on a life of it’s own, with hundreds turned toward the street, chanting and waving signs, and hundreds turned into the courtyard where megaphone-led chants rang out briefly.
National reportage notes that up until Saturday, the Women’s March on Jan 21, 2017 was the biggest protest in the country’s history, and many of the ‘George Floyd’ protests came in at similar levels of participation. ‘Hands Off’ seems to have pushed past the previous records.
Judith Martin-Straw