Dissent and dynamism: History of protest runs deep
For the past two weeks,
George Floyd’s name and image have been inescapable in Houston — at a massive downtown protest march, at a mural in the Third Ward neighborhood where he grew up, at the public viewing of his body, and on the streets leading to the church where his private funeral was conducted.
These remembrances, memorials and protests, like others around the country, sprang up after Floyd died May 25 as a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck. The Houston events received heavy news coverage; TV stations went live from the June 2 protest march, and around a dozen Houston Chronicle reporters and photographers covered it.
It's interesting to imagine how these events would have been covered 60 years ago, and to consider the implications of the difference.
It’s often noted that Houston escaped the worst of the violent demonstrations and riots that convulsed the nation during the civil rights and Vietnam War eras. This frequently leads to the observation that Houston is “just not a protest city.”
But it’s not that simple, as Houston writer Leah Binkovitz explained in a 2017 article exploring the local history of protest and civil disobedience. Tens of thousands of Houstonians turned out for the local Women’s March in 2017, far surpassing organizers’ expectations, and as many as 50,000 took to Houston streets in 2006 as part of a national action for immigrant rights.
“There’s a general story that it’s a city of oil and gas, and it’s not a city of activism and marching, but if you dig at all, you a see much more rich and complicated story,” JD Pluecker, who has written about the city’s protest history from the 1965 black student boycott to the 1978 Moody Park Riots, told Binkovitz.
One important factor: For many years Houston’s major news organizations, heeding pleas from business and civic leaders, all but ignored civil rights protests. A good example, which I explored in an essay last year, involved efforts to desegregate lunch counters in the 1960s.
A group of Houston leaders persuaded proprietors to simultaneously open their lunch counters to African Americans; young black activists were to arrive at an arranged time. They asked editors of the city’s three daily newspapers, and news directors of TV stations, to restrain coverage.
This was based on concern that prominent stories would attract counter-protesters, which would lead to violence.
The news leaders obediently buried their stories, or simply didn’t produce any. Calm prevailed, but the costs of public ignorance of such a historical event are impossible to calculate.
How much did the suppression of this news set back the local civil rights movement?
This quiet, successful effort to desegregate Houston’s public spaces “did very little to improve the quality of life in Houston’s black communities,” Stephen L. Klineberg writes in his new book, “Prophetic City: Houston on the Cusp of a Changing America.” “It didn’t improve the segregated public schools. It did nothing to stop the refineries and industries from continuing to dump their toxic wastes in black communities.”
Of course, a dozen or so young people sitting at a lunch counter is hardly comparable to tens of thousands of shouting, signwielding protesters taking to the streets. Ignoring such an event would not have been possible even before the era of pervasive social media and the 24-hour news cycle. But would the 1960 version of the story have taken up three-quarters of the front page of the Chronicle the next morning, as the 2020 story did?
The different approaches to coverage are emblematic of broader changes in the city since the mid-20th century.
For decades, starting in the 1930s, Houston was led by an insular group of business leaders who handpicked elected officials based on their concept of enlightened self-interest — a firm conviction that what was good for business was good for Houston. This group’s informal name came from its meeting place in Suite 8F of the old Lamar Hotel downtown.
This singular focus on protecting the city’s reputation as a good place to do business filtered into its media organizations. And their lack of persistent attention to problems such as abusive police practices surely helped the practices continue. There’s little pressure to solve a problem few people know about.
Today the city’s elected leadership comes closer to reflecting its diverse population; news organizations compete to cover scandals that might “make Houston look bad,” such as the corruption underlying a botched drug raid last year that left two civilians dead and five police officers injured. It’s safe to say that no one from the Greater Houston Partnership called editors asking them to tone down coverage of the George Floyd protests.
How was this history reflected in what happened on downtown streets on June 2, or in subsequent, smaller protests? Organizers of the June 2 march strongly discouraged violence, and police generally were credited with practicing restraint and de-escalation tactics to prevent the confrontations and injuries that have been widespread elsewhere.
There were no reports of looting, although windows of downtown shops and restaurants were smashed on previous nights. Authorities reported no injuries, despite a few tense moments. But it wasn’t all sweetness and light: Police reported that more than 200 people were arrested, mostly for throwing objects at officers or failing to heed orders to clear streets; a week later, prosecutors announced they were dismissing 796 charges filed against 654 protesters at Floyd-related events.
Some of those arrested have complained that they were treated unfairly and that media failed to cover what happend to them. Attorneys representing them said police had used batons, pepper spray and rubber bullets, allegations a police spokesman disputed.
On balance, though, it seems that Houston’s protests continue to be relatively calm. Are we just lucky in having effective leaders or an uncommonly law-abiding population? Or is something else at work?
Angela Blanchard, an astute student of Houston who was the longtime CEO of one of its largest nonprofits, BakerRipley, kept coming back to two words when we discussed this question: “dynamism” and “fluidity.”
Houston, she said, has a relatively flat social structure; you don’t have to have a pedigree to get a City Council member or a prominent business executive to return your call. The city is big and spread out, and its neighborhoods are in constant flux, which makes entrenched pockets of despair less likely to develop and persist. My own sense, based on years of reporting in neglected Houston neighborhoods, is that these pockets exist, though perhaps their residents haven’t endured deprivation for as long as their counterparts in older cities like Detroit or Chicago.
Another possible factor is that many Houstonians moved here in recent decades without extended families, a circumstance that could lead to lower levels of civic engagement and activism.
Obviously, many thousands of Houstonians are angry and frustrated by the police killings of African Americans and by other racial, social and economic inequities. It would be naïve to suggest that Houston is immune from these problems. But when its residents gather publicly to express their outrage, they seem to do so in a way that reflects the city’s distinct history and culture. Whether this proves effective in bringing about change remains to be seen.