Protest: How America talks to itself
Marches, protests and demonstrations, on the street or now online, are how the United States talks to itself. And, to the benefit of the nation, we are doing a lot of talking these days.
Propelled and protected by the First Amendment freedoms of speech, assembly and petition, we have taken to the streets today and in the past to call the country to consider national challenges and solve national inequities, to press for change or to voice opposition to policies, plans and practices.
If 2020 is to be remembered for more than the COVID-19 pandemic, it will be as a year in which our fellow citizens — and, very often, those among us who see themselves as outside the majority in one way or another — demanded to be heard in matters of freedom and social justice and, even more, demanded more loudly than ever to see positive change as a result.
Consider for a moment the lasting impact of the critical moment of the 1963 march, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his historic “I Have a Dream” speech, with words that have resounded through the years.
King’s speech, some 10 minutes longer than the six minutes he was allotted, didn’t include its memorable title until gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, recalling earlier King speeches as she stood behind him at the podium on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, said to him, “Tell ‘em about the dream, Martin, tell ‘em about the dream!”
Setting aside his prepared remarks, King told an estimated 150,000 at the memorial and nearby Reflecting Pool that “… even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream … that … we will be able to speed up that day when all God’s children, Black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’”
The march 57 years ago was rooted in a similar event planned but not held more than two decades earlier. In 1941, A. Philip Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters labor union, called for a march on Washington, D.C., to protest exclusion of Black workers from defense industry jobs. In return for cancelling that event, Randolph gained an executive order issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt forming the Fair Employment Practices Commission to investigate racial discrimination in the national defense industry.
Ongoing national protests include groups opposing each other in public over COVID19-related issues — back-toschool plans, government orders to wear face coverings in public, the renewal of limits on store hours or openings, restrictions on worship services and social public gatherings, even the very nature and extent of the pandemic itself.
The breadth of current public outcries may be surprising, but the depth of emotion behind them shouldn’t be — protest is backed into the nation’s civic DNA: From pre-revolutionary times, when colonials took to cobblestone streets to protest taxes and British rule, to rallies and marches by pro- and antislavery advocates in the earlyto mid-1800s; from anti-draft demonstrations during the Civil War to a decade of anti-war rallies during the Vietnam War; from suffragette marches in the late 1800s and early 1900s to the ERA battles of the 1970s; from marches that led to a Prohibition amendment in 1920 to marches that led to its repeal in 1933; from white-robed Ku Klux Klan demonstrations across the nation peaking in the 1920s to the civil rights movement peaking in the 1960s; to the LGBTQ movement, from Stonewall in 1969 to recent demonstrations over marriage laws and employment equality.
There’s no guarantee under the First Amendment that when America talks to itself, Americans will listen. But our history is marked by those moments when as a nation we do hear, sometimes belatedly, what protesters, demonstrators and marchers are saying. And we are a fairer, more honest, more just country as a result.
As King said in his last public speech in 1968, nearly five years after the March on Washington: “Somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right.”