Bubbling Over with Energy, Sharing Her Viral Rise
ALEXANDRIA.VA–On Tuesday, March 3, 2018, Alexandria media sensation, gun safety activist, Naomi Wadler, walked across the stage and sat down with Ellen Degeneres.
Articulate and fully of energy, Wadler recounted how her rise to fame has happened since her mother, Julie Wadler, told her about a friend’s daughter who was killed in the Parkland, Florida school shooting, and how she wound up talking to Hollywood giant George Clooney and speaking in front of the world.
Wadler started to capture attention when she and fellow George Mason Elementary School student, Carter Anderson, staged an 18-minute walkout on March 14th to honor the 17 students killed in Parkland, Florida. They added one minute to recognize Courtlin Arrington, a 17-year old African American teenager killed in an Alabama school shooting three weeks after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School incident.
Then she got a call from the March for Our Lives organizers asking if she would speak for a few minutes at the podium in Washington, D.C. She did, and she went viral.
Naomi resonated with an international audience when she declared, “I represent the African-American women who are victims of gun violence, who are simply statistics instead of vibrant, beautiful girls full of potential. For far too long, these black girls and women have been just numbers. I am here to say never again for those girls too.”
Wadler appeared on The Ellen Degeneres Show Wednesday, April 4, 2018.
