Kids Fight Against Hate With Love When Their Park Was Defaced With Swastikas

via IG @Alexsoros

A local park of Brooklyn Heights New York was defaced with the words, “Go Trump” and swastikas on November 8th. The local park is named after Adam “MCA” Yauch, a member of the Beastie Boys who died of cancer in 2012 but played there as a kid.

.@beastieboys Adam Yauch Park in Brooklyn Heights was left defaced with ugly symbols of hate today. This cannot be the new normal! pic.twitter.com/xWjS7HLNyG

— Karen Wang (@kw492) November 18, 2016

Following the news of the defacement, Yauch’s bandmates Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz and Michael “Mike D” Diamond, both of Jewish heritage, called for an anti-hate rally in the park.

“This is homegrown terrorism,” said Horovitz at the rally. The crowd sang “We Shall Overcome,” and “This Land is Your Land.”

Horovitz was joined at the podium with rabbis and elected officials like Representative Nydia Velazquez and State Senator Daniel Squadron. Squadron said, “If hate is carried out in [Trump’s] name and he says nothing, it becomes his hate!”

The rally wasn’t just for adults, but included families with kids — kids who were directly affected by the hateful message on their park. During the rally, children wrote messages of love with chalk on the sidewalk and many others held signs for peace, love, and change.

A photo posted by Ms Kr 21c (@msk21c) on Nov 21, 2016 at 4:04am PST

Explaining what the swastikas meant was not easy for many parents. Chrystin Ondersma explained to Huffington Post how she had to explain to her 7-year-old son what happened:

“It’s difficult obviously because we haven’t even yet had a conversation really about what a swastika is. But we talked about how people after the election have been feeling that they could express hateful messages.”

Check out some of the messages of love that the children spread during the rally: