Breathing Together: On Joining a Resistance Choir

I walked into the back room of a bank after hours and sat down among strangers, mostly White and female, plus a handful of men. No one was under 40; most seemed over 60. When our leader, a silver-haired African American woman, stepped up to a music stand at precisely 6:30 pm, I expected her to ask us to introduce ourselves one by one. Instead, she made sweeping eye contact with everyone sitting before her, and said, “Okay, let’s breathe.”

Soon, I was harmonizing with people I’d never seen before, singing songs I’d never heard before. The feeling of belonging was instant. I had become a member of a resistance choir.

“Listen to one another,” the choir director admonished. This is how we got acquainted, listening to the timbre of each other’s voices, tuning ourselves to one another. I still didn’t know some of their names, but I would before long. In fact, I wasn’t entirely among strangers; my big sister had ventured into this with me. We have a long history of singing together.

I’ve never been a joiner. I’ve been restless and nomadic my whole life, never staying in one place long enough to take root. A few years ago, though, my husband and I settled in the suburbs east of Sacramento. An unwalkable California suburb was the last place on earth I had wanted to live, but circumstances had limited our options. Even worse, we wound up in a particular suburb that I had stereotypes about, carried over from my childhood in Sacramento: it would be White, conservative, and crawling with racists.

Right after we moved, COVID lockdown kicked in, and I had no chance to get to know my neighbors. Later, when interaction became possible, it was like that muscle had atrophied and I had lost the skills of sociability. I sleep-walked through the Biden presidency.

But then Trump got elected. Again. I felt my hunker-down instinct kicking in: if this was going to be like his first term, we would just have to weather it, and in four years it would be over. But, of course, it didn’t turn out that way. The first year felt like an avalanche, an earthquake, and a tsunami hitting all at once. I was outraged, and I wanted to resist somehow.

My only outlet was the big demonstrations in downtown Sacramento, a half-hour’s drive away. I made a sign and went to the Hands Off protest in April 2025. One side of my sign read: “Hands off our esteemed public workers!” (my protest against DOGE cuts); the flip side read: “Hands off law-abiding green card holders!” (a reflection of my angst for the green card holder in my life). About 5,000 protesters showed up in Sacramento for this first rally of opposition. I was exhilarated to see so many people thronging the state capitol, but the atmosphere was oddly relaxed, like an afternoon picnic. Groups of people sat in lawn chairs while others paraded back and forth, admiring each other’s home-made signs. I spent most of the afternoon sitting in the shade with my sister and my nieces and a few of their friends, a lime green tablecloth laden with food and drinks spread between us. Our setting was so cozy that a roving reporter for the Sacramento Bee sat down and joined us for a while, tossing out a few questions and scribbling in his notebook as he sipped from the cold can of soda we gave him.^[1]

At one point, I got up from our picnic to join the slowly moving parade. I held my sign overhead so both sides were visible as I took in the messages of others: “Let’s tell Trump and Musk ‘you’re fired’!”; “Trump is Putin’s puppet”; “Are we great yet?” When I reached the sun-drenched plaza in front of the capitol, I tucked my sign under my arm so I could take pictures against the dramatic backdrop of its Corinthian columns and towering, copper-topped dome. Somewhere in the midst of this crowd there was a stage where people were speechifying, but the sound system was crappy, and I couldn’t understand anything they were saying. I went back to my picnic.

In June 2025, I went to No Kings Day with a fresh sign. By this time, the DOGE purge was fading, but the immigrant purge was ramping up, so I decided to flaunt my immigrant heritage. I painted “Child of Immigrants” in blue on a yellow T-shirt, and on the back of it I pinned a Swedish flag that I had glued together from strips of felt. My sign asked whether my immigrant grandfather made me an invader. I was surprised to be greeted periodically by actual Swedes, who smiled broadly at my message. The other signs that I saw were pretty much the same as before, except that “Hands off!” was replaced by “No Kings!”

There were more people at this rally, packed like sardines on the capitol’s grounds, and this time some broke off to parade around the streets. There was a palpable sense that the movement was growing, but increasing the density of people per square foot in the same space didn’t feel very effective to me. We didn’t need to see more of each other within this space; we needed to be seen by others beyond this space. I wondered what was happening that day back in my own sleepy suburbs. I wanted the parade to go down my street.

I still felt like a relative stranger in my own neighborhood. I decided the most radical action I could take was to meet the challenge of simply getting to know my neighbors.^[2] It turns out I wasn’t alone. A couple of people on my block held a street party, and I discovered that my neighbors were far more diverse than my stereotype had allowed me to imagine. And, I liked them. I have a vocabulary now for this act of venturing beyond my home turf, a verb that sprouted from the seeds of pain sown in Minneapolis: neighboring.^[3]

When ICE agents started tearing apart communities in Minneapolis, I started to feel protective of my neighbors. I wanted to tell them I would shelter them if ICE came after them, but of course this was melodramatic. California was a Democratic bastion with a powerful governor who knew how to swat back attempts at federal interference. In the absence of ICE raids in my neighborhood, there seemed to be no outlet for my urge to act. All I could do was watch the horrifying videos from Minneapolis over and over and over.

Then, I saw a different kind of video: hundreds of people were gathered outside a hotel in Minneapolis where ICE agents were staying, and they were singing to them. The melody was haunting and beautiful, made all the more so because it was being sung in a round, a call-and-response:

Lay down your weapons
and sing your part!
We walk the same ground
but we’ve been torn apart…

This kind of protest, expressed through singing, seemed powerful. It gave me goosebumps. It felt transformative. And that’s when I knew: I needed to sing my resistance. This was something I could do. I had studied music throughout my childhood, I know how to sing, to read music, to harmonize. I started to find more videos of people singing as they rallied and marched, and I could see that the music focused people and brought them together. When people were singing, they weren’t milling around: they were projecting something onto everyone around them, sending out an infectious energy. I desperately wanted to join with others to sing my resistance, yet I had no idea how to find such people.

I had already been receiving notices about the major events Indivisible was helping to coordinate, like Hands Off and No Kings. I had registered for those at Mobilize.us, and once they had me in their system, my inbox became inundated with emails about all kinds of events and gatherings. I could see that local chapters of Indivisible were popping up all over the place. I kept hoping that something would show up out in my suburbs. And then I saw it: The Carmichael Resistance Choir.

A choir! This was my point of entry into the kind of resistance I was seeking. And Carmichael was the very suburb where my sister lived, just a few minutes from my own suburb. I registered for the next choir rehearsal, convinced my sister to register (that wasn’t difficult), and we showed up. I discovered that the choir had a loose affiliation with an Indivisible chapter near me that had only just come together about a month earlier. The choir director was part of the leadership team of that chapter. I gained a choir and a community all at once.

At that first rehearsal, I saw an array of percussion instruments at the front of the choir’s practice room. The choir director—I later learned her name is Christiana Quick-Cleveland—picked up a set of claves.

“Who has a good sense of rhythm?”

I gasped, and my hand shot up. Christiana raised her eyebrows incredulously as she slowly, as if with caution, handed me the claves. There was a gravitas to her demeanor, and yet I sensed a wry humor behind it. Both my sister and I were reverting to our experiences of organized music from our school days, and it made us punchy and giggly. I struggled to suppress my laughter; I wanted to prove to Christiana that I did take this seriously. Over time, I think I won her over simply by showing up. That, and the fact that I do have a good sense of rhythm. She began to hand me the claves at each rehearsal without asking.

Each time we met, Christiana brought copies of sheet music with new songs for us to learn, as well as call-and-response chants. Some of the songs harkened to the Civil Rights era, like “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me 'Round,” while “Keep On Moving Forward” was a song from the contemporary folk duo Emma’s Revolution. Others had African origins, like “Harambee,” which is Swahili for “all pull together” (the word appears on the Kenyan coat of arms). The lyrics to “Harambee” are in English, but “Sansa Kroma,” a folk song from Ghana, is in Twi. We learned to pronounce the words of that language.

As we learned these new songs, we sometimes sounded awful. But everyone seemed to have at least some sense of music, and Christiana exuded a level of energy that simply left no room for slacking. If our singing became lackluster, she leaned toward us and sang with us, her exaggerated facial expressions making us laugh even as they pulled our best voicings out of us. She chided us when we skewed flat (her solution was for us to smile even more broadly as we sang), and when she did praise our performance, we knew she meant it (she seemed so relieved that we actually could sound good). This was a retired African American woman coaxing and commanding a room full of White suburbanites, and nothing could have felt more natural. This group of individuals saw each other as “us.”

After my third rehearsal, Christiana launched us into action at the No Kings 3 protest in March 2026. It was the choir’s first public performance, the first deployment of the instrument she had built, as she put it. Because there were now so many chapters popping up all over the wider Sacramento area, protest actions became more dispersed, making our movement visible out in the suburbs, just as I had wanted. We no longer had to drive downtown and dilute ourselves in a large crowd. For No Kings 3, our Indivisible chapter chose a location that I knew well: an intersection near the neighborhood where my parents had lived for thirty-three years until my father died, the most consistent home I had known in my long spell of wandering. For me, it was surreal—I had never once walked the sidewalks of this busy intersection, only driven past it, but now I was standing on a grassy berm, singing and clacking claves in public.

Christiana had imagined a more coherent opening to the event. She thought we would gather on the broad lawn between the parking lot and the street. Here, chapter leadership would lay out the ground rules for the protest action, and then the choir would perform. We even had a sound system set up. But in a classic “herding cats” scenario, the protestors meandered to the street from all directions, most of them never even passing near us. Christiana laughed resignedly; we sang one of the songs we had rehearsed and then meandered down to the street ourselves.

Christiana was accustomed to the stage-and-audience format, and she had to adapt on the fly. She assembled us alongside a canopy set up on the berm above the sidewalk, where other musicians would perform throughout the morning—an accordionist, a jazz trumpeter, a drummer, a ukelele group. When the musician currently playing took a break, we performed a couple more of our rehearsed songs. But Christiana seemed dissatisfied. Our audience consisted of only the fellow musicians and nearby protesters waving their signs at the passing cars, whose honking all but drowned us out. “Could we sing and march?” I asked. Her eyebrows went up again, like in rehearsal, only this time with intrigue. We tried it, Christiana banging a Native American hand drum as she led us in a call-and-response: “We are the people, the mighty, mighty people!” When we reached the end of the block, Christiana was laughing excitedly. “People followed us,” she said. “It was amazing!”

Eventually, I had a chance to sit down and talk to Christiana about the choir. I asked her what had prompted her to start it in the first place, and I was surprised to learn that two key events that she named as catalysts for her action had affected me in a similar way: Trump’s demolition of the East Wing (along with all the women’s history it held); and the film One Battle After Another, with its depiction of well-organized action in defense of immigrants. She told herself, “Okay, I have skills, I have to do something with them, because now is the time.”

But Christiana more broadly rooted her motivation in the Black spirituals born out of slavery and the role such music played in the Civil Rights Movement: “It’s a no-brainer, really, to incorporate music in this somewhat epic struggle that we find ourselves in,” she told me. She made a distinction between protest and resistance, asserting that what she was building was not a protest choir, but a resistance choir. “I think of the sustaining virtue of the spirituals as being a form of resisting oppression to keep your soul when you’re being crushed,” she said. “The lifting quality of music is what sustains us through the hard pull. Because we’re being crushed, we’re being oppressed, we’re being silenced. They’re trying to disperse us, and music collects us back together.”^[4]

But moments from her own past feed into this present moment, as well. Christiana was born and raised in Washington, D.C. Her parents were part of what she describes as “the diaspora of Black folks who came to Washington, D.C. for the federal jobs and became the Black middle class in that segregated city.” She was about ten years old when the March on Washington happened, but she didn’t get to hear Martin Luther King, Jr. speak, because her family left for vacation in Cape Cod.

“My father was, you know, trying to make his way in the White world and didn’t want to be—well, my father did [want to be there for the March on Washington], but he just wanted to be safe and protect what we had. So, we left. And I always felt like we missed a moment.” That element of her biography, combined with everything that was happening as Trump pursued his agenda, made her say, “Okay, I’m still here, now I can do something. I can be active for my father who I know would have wanted to be a part of that protest.”

Her comments made me flash back to my own childhood: born in 1960, aware of the import of the protest movements that rocked that decade, but too young to be involved in them. I, too, felt that I had missed a moment. And now, like Christiana, I felt that my moment had come.

Back in rehearsal, Christiana began to spend time strategizing with us about where we could take our repertoire. She wanted the choir to do more than just show up at “honk-and-wave” events; she wanted us to partner with other local groups and to support a variety of actions. She suggested Communities Not Cages, a National Day of Action in late April called for by Detention Watch Network; we could organize a vigil at the federal building in downtown Sacramento, where ICE had been quietly depositing immigration detainees, trying to remain unnoticed following the backlash against the Trump administration’s draconian tactics in Minneapolis. Singing our resistance in front of the building would draw attention to this issue. The choir agreed.

We selected the strongest songs from our repertoire and polished them even further. Christiana prepared a poetry reading—Langston Hughes’s “Let America Be America Again”—and she invited a pastor from her Unitarian Universalist church to speak about the issue of ICE detention. The choir performed songs, and Christiana had everyone read in unison the names of the 17 people who had died in ICE detention across the U.S. since the start of the year, each name punctuated by the deeply rich sound of one choir member striking a hammered brass bowl. In addition to the 15 or so choir members who were able to make it, about 50 people turned out for the vigil, some with signs and one dressed as the Statue of Liberty. Christiana led them in several call-and-response choral rounds: “This is for our people who are locked inside / Together, we will dismantle ICE!” For Christiana, this was, and is, the main point, the end goal: getting everyone to sing together.

Visibly energized by the success of the event, Christiana was even more pleased when Sacramento ACT, an interfaith organization dedicated to social issues, invited the choir to sing at a vigil at the federal building the following month. She was happy for us to respond to such invitations, but she also wanted to be proactive. She was ready to try something even bigger. What she had in mind was an event she called the Weekend of Protest Song, a “prep rally” to bring our choir together with two other local activist choirs. Christiana was sure that we could learn from each other. But the event would not be just for the choirs: the idea was to bring in people from all over the region and get them singing together, teaching them songs they could take and deploy in their own activism. This would be a big step for our little resistance choir. We would really become the instrument that Christiana had envisioned from the start.

Before I found the choir, I had been feeling that something had changed on Earth, like the second Trump administration was generating a malaise that permeated everything, affecting even those of us trying to fight Trump’s outrages. This malaise was dividing us, and it seemed like nothing could break through it. The best we could do—the best I could do—was to mill around in a crowd of protestors, letting my clever sign speak my outrage. But making music with others has changed the alchemy for me. As Christiana put it, “When you’re singing together, you’re all singing the same thing. You know, it’s just like a trick: we’re all singing the same thing, and here’s this music, and yeah, we’re breathing together!” Singing my resistance has not only focused my energy on specific, achievable goals; it has created a space where I realize there is nothing to break through anymore, because once we are breathing together, we are already there.