They Couldn’t Stop Us. So They Parked Two Trucks Instead.

On Saturday, May 24, members of Genesee Valley Indivisible gathered in York for our weekly Stand Up, Fight Back Saturday rally — a peaceful, legal assembly on the public sidewalk in front of York Town Hall and the Presbyterian Church. It was 50 degrees, pouring rain, and windy. We showed up anyway, because that’s what commitment to democracy looks like.

When we arrived, Walton Transporting had parked two large semis along the road, effectively blocking the sidewalk and making our assembly invisible to passing traffic. Parking on that road is permitted, so law enforcement could not intervene. Walton Transporting knew that. The trucks weren’t there by accident.

Forced off the sidewalk, our group crossed to the opposite side of the road — no sidewalk, just the wet grass of neighbors who graciously welcomed us — standing closer to live traffic than anyone should have to, in 50-degree wind and driving rain. No one was hurt, thanks entirely to our trained safety marshals. But we should not have been put in that position. A private business used a legal technicality to obstruct constitutionally protected assembly and force our members into an unsafe situation on a public road.

The First Amendment does not come with an asterisk that reads unless your neighbor finds a workaround. What Walton Transporting did was legal. It was also a deliberate attempt to silence neighbors exercising their rights.

We rallied anyway. We will keep rallying. But the residents of Livingston County deserve to know what happened on Route 36 last Saturday — and who made it happen.