‘I wanted to take action’: behind the ‘Wall of Moms’ protecting Portland’s protesters

It took the killing of George Floyd to get Jane Ullman to finally pay attention to what the police were up to in America. But it was the sinister sight of federal agents in camouflage snatching demonstrators off the streets of Portland that got her out to protest.

The chief financial officer for tech startups in Oregon’s biggest city joined hundreds of other mothers dressed in yellow in a “Wall of Moms”, turning out each evening to stand as a human barricade between protesters and agents dispatched by Donald Trump to aggressively break up Black Lives Matter demonstrations.

Ullman, a mother of two, said it was her first demonstration in support of racial justice.

“As an upper-middle-class white woman in the whitest city in America, I couldn’t stand by any longer,” she said. “I’ve been doing a lot of self-educating since George Floyd. Reading and learning. The feds’ part in it pushed me over the top. I wanted to take action. But it was the ‘Wall of Moms’ that brought me out.”

Ullman was not alone. What began as a small symbolic act of defiance on Saturday grew into the principal demonstration two nights later, as thousands packed the streets and squares outside the county jail and federal courthouse in downtown Portland for one of the largest protests to date.

At the heart of it were hundreds of women dressed in yellow and singing “Hands up, please don’t shoot me” – evidence that not only has Trump’s dispatch of federal agents failed to stop the protests, it has reinvigorated them.

A group of mothers form a human wall to shield protesters from federal officers in Portland. Photograph: Nathan Howard/Rex/Shutterstock

Video of unidentifiable federal officers, looking more like soldiers of an occupying army than police, beating and snatching protesters off the streets angered a 35-year-old mother of two, Bev Barnum, who