The crowds are everywhere. Even where you’d least expect them. Texas Monthly: Black Lives Matter Comes to Vidor—Yes, Vidor. “When word started to circulate that a Black Lives Matter rally was being planned in Vidor, many people on social media thought it was a trap—and expressed skepticism the event’s supposed planner, 23-year-old Maddy Malone, even existed. (She does.) To black folks with knowledge of the region, who had been told never to stop in Vidor, the idea seemed insane. ‘A civil rights rally in Vidor’ is the punchline to a joke, not a thing that could happen in this world. C’mon.” From my friend who grew up in Texas: Vidor is notoriously (literally) the KKK HQ of Texas. It’s so racist, we used to take a long-cut to avoid driving through on trips to visit family in Beaumont. A BLM rally there is really a sign of the revolution.

+ “We were becoming ever more atomised, and pushed further into our homes, and crowds were becoming more domesticated, enclosed, surveilled and expensive to be a part of. Our opportunities to gather freely, in both senses of the word, have greatly diminished since the 90s. And yet, throughout human history, there has always been something pleasingly resilient about the crowd: however many new ways are found to disperse it, it will always find a way to reconvene.” Dan Hancox in The Guardian: The power of crowds.

+ And the crowds are getting bigger. Slate: These Images Show Just How Massive the Floyd Protests Were on Saturday. And those crowds are gathering around the world.

+ The Atlantic: The Enormous Scale of This Movement.

+ There is metaphor somewhere in the images of huge, nationwide crowds demanding justice contrasted with a White House that is now almost completely surrounded by more than a mile of fencing. (It’s the one thing this administration is good at: Keeping toddlers in a cage.)