A Speakers' Corner for Santa Fe

Indivisible Santa Fe is pleased to announce a new project: A Speakers' Corner for Santa Fe.

Indivisible Santa Fe is beginning a new project: A Speakers' Corner for Santa Fe. A Speakers' Corner is a publicly-known area, usually located in a public park, where any person may speak without fear of governmental punishment or reprisal. Often, a Speakers' Corner is a focal point for political organizing and collective action.

Continuing our fight for constitutional democracy and civil rights through concrete, specific, visible, and regular actions, Indivisible Santa Fe will create its own Speakers’ Corner, to run weekly throughout Fall 2025. Indivisible Santa Fe will lead off each week with two to four members speaking and then will open the floor to others who want to say their piece. We will be experimenting with a few locations. The first session is this Saturday, October 4, at Santa Fe Railyard Park, in the northern part of the park, near the intersection of Paseo de Peralta and South Guadalupe, catty-corner from the Farmers' Market Pavilion. Start time 10 am; expected end time 11 am. Look for the folks in Indivisible Santa Fe No Kings shirts and a sign saying "Speakers' Corner"!

Additionally, Indivisible Santa Fe plans to propose to the City of Santa Fe the establishment of a dedicated municipal Speakers’ Corner in a downtown park. Indivisible Santa Fe will lobby for this designation, promote it, and possibly fundraise for a plaque to be contributed to the City.

Each week we will announce the time and place for that week's Speaker Corner. Bookmark A Speakers' Corner for Santa Fe to keep track of where to go to listen and to speak. We will be updating this page with photos, videos, and reports on our progress. Bookmark this page for weekly announcements of time and location.

A note on the history of Speakers‘ Corners - and why Santa Fe needs one now

In a pluralistic constitutional democracy, certain civil rights are essential to preventing tyranny. These rights protect individual persons and nongovernmental institutions such as businesses, religious congregations, and families from excessive encroachment by the state and preserve the opportunity for democratic participation by all persons regardless of their race, sex, gender, creed, language, or ethnicity. Rights to free expression, including freedom of speech, are among these essential ones. They have a particularly significant place in American constitutional democracy. 

The founders of the original states in America and the founders of the United States intentionally enshrined freedom of speech in the original states’ constitutions and then in the federal constitution because of how the British attempted to suppress and punish colonists’ speech criticising the British royal governors and the British King. The original state constitutions and the federal constitution broke with English legal tradition by enshrining a right to speech free from government infringement. New Mexico’s state constitution follows the American model. Thus, In the United States, we have the right to express our opinions with a minimum of government regulation as to content, time, manner, and place. Truth is a complete defense to libel.  Federal and state civil rights law empowers us to use speech to disagree with one another and with our governments, thereby discouraging violence as a way to fight for our views. 

To this day, the United Kingdom’s law of free speech remains more repressive than the United States’. But in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the British government was forced to pass legislation to permit fuller freedom of speech in at least one place, the portion of Hyde Park in London called “Speakers’ Corner.” Speakers’ Corner – Hyde Park became known for demonstrations and speech about expanding the right to vote and participate in public life in the United Kingdom. The women who fought for their right to vote in the United Kingdom insisted on their right to gather and speak in Hyde Park, where they spoke and demonstrated on behalf of women’s suffrage. Speakers at Hyde Park’s Speakers’ Corner have also included Karl Marx and Marcus Garvey. George Orwell lauded Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park as “one of the minor wonders of the world.”

Starting with British Commonwealth countries, Speakers’ Corners have spread throughout the world. Today in the United States of America we have reached the point of needing to establish our own. State and federal constitutional protections and our speech-protective federal First Amendment jurisprudence have not been sufficient to prevent Donald Trump and his appointees from threatening speakers using media platforms to criticize or lampoon Trump, his regime, or his allies. When Disney and CBS capitulate to threats from the regime, when big-name comedians like Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel are pressured to self-censor or be taken off the air, when government officials use social media to threaten people who disagree with them, we must demonstrate our unwavering commitment not just to the right of free speech but to exercising that right. Moreover, we must be seen to be exercising the right to speak freely and insisting that our local government demonstrate its commitment to supporting freedom of speech. This is how we develop and use local collective power to resist authoritarianism.