Emma González

The loudest speech at March for Our Lives was one that was mostly silence.

Emma González stepped up to the podium in Washington on March 24, a little more than a month after the tragic school shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 dead.

She recounted the deadly scene, read the names of the victims and then fell quiet.

The crowd shifted nervously for the first minute or two. Small pockets of applause and chants broke out to encourage González, thinking she had become overwhelmed by emotion.

But González remained silent with tears streaming down her face. Three minutes. Silence. Four, five, six. Silence. A little past the sixth minute, a timer on the podium beeped.

“Since the time I came out here, it has been six minutes and 20 seconds,” González said to the crowd. “The shooter has ceased shooting and will soon abandon his rifle, blend in with the students as they escape and walk free for an hour before arrest. Fight for your lives, before it's someone else’s job.”

And with that, González walked away from the podium to cheers from the crowd and plaudits from national pundits. But in the moment, she was feeling something entirely different than the crowd.

“There was mainly nothing going on in my mind as I stood there in silence,” she said in an email to Playbook. “I had held in my sadness for the whole day, and unleashed it all upon myself in that moment and felt absolutely numb.”

González and the other students-turned-activists never expected to be on stage in D.C., at the center of a political maelstrom. But after they were thrust into the national spotlight by tragedy, they became determined not to fade into the background like past survivors.

They’ve wielded social media as a cudgel against politicians they view as ineffective while appearing on national newscasts and on the cover of Time magazine. They’ve built a movement, too: Hundreds of thousands marched in D.C. that day, and organizers say 1.7 million joined sibling marches around the country.

“They said from the start they weren’t interested in making a statement, they were committed to building a movement,” Rep. Ted Deutch (D-Fla.), who represents Parkland, said in an interview. “They’re in it for the long haul, and they’ve identified a defining issue of their generation.”

González remains uncertain about her own short-term future, saying she’s not sure what the next year looks like for her. But she is certain she’s going to hold politicians’ feet to the fire until something has changed.

“If you think it’s harsh for us to say ‘Gun control or bust’ this midterm election, then take a stroll through our freshman building,” she said. “It’s open to any politician who wants to go see what many of us on that day saw.

“No one cleaned the blood off the walls. No one took the Valentine’s decorations down. If you say to this, ‘I don’t want to, because I would never be able to unsee that, unsmell that, unexperience that,’ that’s the point — neither can we.” — Zach Montellaro

Headshot by Larry French/Getty Images for SiriusXM. Story photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.