By the time you read this, the participants in the 300 Men March will be almost all the way to the White House–and their feet will likely be aching. That’s because they’ve been walking since last evening, making their way to the nation’s capital by foot. Why? To protest against violence, and the apathy that often results from such violence. “People expect the murder rate to go away by sitting on the couch,” the group’s founder Munir Bahar told the Baltimore Sun. “If it’s business as usual, it’s murders as usual.”
The group enlists men to walk the streets of the city in a visible protests against community violence. “We hold ourselves accountable for the successes and failures in our community by looking within to provide permanent answers and lasting solutions,” reads a philosophical statement on the group’s website. The group has been active for a while now, but its work has gained more prominence after this spring’s city-wide protests. In response to the unrest and the subsequent uptick in violence, the group has come up with an Emergency Operating Plan to address street-level violence from a grassroots level, by training people to serve as anti-violence activists in their own communities. You can donate to helping make that plan a reality here.
Baltimore Sun reporter Kevin Rector is walking along with the group; you can check up on their progress via his Twitter feed.
