Protesting the “Right Way”

During the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1956 police harassed and arrested those who walked peacefully and with dignity in lieu of riding segregated buses. Employers fired boycott participants. Alabama banned the NAACP. Shots were fired, bombs were planted.

The boycotters were told they were not protesting the right way.

During the 1963 Birmingham Campaign peaceful protesters, including children, marched for civil rights in a city that had come to be known as “Bombingham” because of its violence against its black citizens. Bull Connor, the “Commissioner of Public Safety,” unleashed firehoses, German Shepherds and clubs on marchers. More bombs exploded. That September one of those bombs, planted by the KKK, killed four little girls in the 16th Street Baptist Church.

Those little girls, their parents and friends, were told they were not protesting the right way.

During Freedom Summer in 1964 black and white Mississippians worked together to register voters and to form a truly representative organization, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Three activists, a local black Mississippi native and two white northerners were murdered. Volunteers were harassed and beaten, locals who interacted with the volunteers were threatened, fired, and worse.

Freedom Summer volunteers were told they were not protesting the right way.

In 1965 citizens and allies in Selma, Alabama continued the quest for the vote but also for broader civil rights. They faced abuse, violence, and harassment. As they commenced the Selma to Montgomery March they were brutally beaten by local and state police. At a February protest an Alabama State Trooper murdered Jimmie Lee Jackson, a local activist. In March KKK members murdered Reverend James Reeb of Boston in one incident and Viola Liuzzo, a mother of five from Detroit, in another.

The dead and the beaten were told they were not protesting the right way.

In October 1966, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale formed the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in Oakland, California. The organization particularly focused on police brutality, and carried weapons while engaging in “Cop watch” activities. In April 1967. Ronald Reagan signed the Mulford Act, introduced by a Republican Assemblyman with the full backing of the National Rifle Association. The act repealed open carry and severely restricted firearms possession. On May 2 the Black Panthers brought guns to the California State Capitol in Sacramento. 

The Black Panthers were told that by carrying guns in the streets and in government buildings they were not protesting the right way.

By 1968 Martin Luther King Jr. had expanded his focus from civil rights to a whole range of issues of economic and social justice, which also included trenchant critiques of American foreign policy in Vietnam and beyond. In Memphis King marched with sanitation workers who were on strike against longstanding abuse.

King and the sanitation workers were told they were not protesting the right way. The declaration was punctuated with an assassin’s bullet on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel on April 4th.

“The language of the unheard”

Fast forward to 2016. Colin Kaepernick, quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, kneeled during the playing of the Star Spangled Banner, one verse of which is a paean to slavery. He knelt to protest police brutality, particularly widespread police killings of unarmed black men. Other players joined in, especially after President Donald Trump in 2017 asserted that any protesting players should be fired. They faced racist vitriol. Kaepernick, despite a far superior record to a large number of NFL quarterbacks, never played in the league after the 2016 season. Instead he expanded his activism and charitable activity.

Colin Kaepernick was told and told and told – including by the President of the United States -- that in peacefully kneeling to protest police violence against black Americans he was not protesting the right way.

The death in May 2020 of George Floyd, murdered by Minneapolis police for allegedly using a counterfeit $20 bill, was brutal but far from unique. There have followed a series of protests across the US, and in many parts of the world in solidarity, that have been a striking magnification of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Black Americans and their allies have been told again that they were protesting the wrong way when they did so peacefully. Sometimes they were admonished in the midst of protesting peacefully. They have been denounced as they marched in city after city, making voluble what Martin Luther King, Jr. called “the language of the unheard.” 

King’s legacy is even twisted to stigmatize the rallies 52 years after his assassination by a white supremacist. He was hated at his death by swathes of the groups who now make sugar-coated assertions about what he and the Civil Rights Movement stood for. 

“Rioting”?

We can even question much of the narrative about “rioting”. Some, though to be sure not all or perhaps even most perhaps, of the looting, property damage, and assaults appear to have been carried out by agents provocateur, from astroturfers, from organized alt-right elements, and more than a few times from police. Security and paramilitary forces have been an accelerant to violence, aggressively approaching and attacking peaceful protesters. 

A craven, indifferent, and racist president has used the Washington DC police and National Guard to unleash force and tear gas against peaceful protesters in the capital, on one occasion for a photo opportunity at a church he does not attend and waving a book he does not understand. Homeland Security units, have seized and detained non-violent protesters, taken away in anonymous vans by anonymous authorities to unknown destinations.

There is a history of rioting in the US that antedates recent times that antedates the 1992 Los Angeles unrest after the acquittals of the police officers who ruthlessly beat Rodney King, that antedates the Bronx burning in 1977, that antedates the Long Hot Summers of the 1960s. There is a history of race riots targeting African Americans, perpetuating the cause of white supremacy. 

I have never seen anyone on Twitter, Facebook, or Fox and Friends refer to “thugs” and call for aggressive, abusive, and armed action against largely white crowds that riot when their team wins a championship. Or when their team loses a championship. Or when their team wins a big regular season game. Or when their coach leaves. Or when their coach is fired for enabling sexual abuse. Or when Daylight Savings Time kicks in and their Halloween street party end an hour earlier than planned. Or when their Pumpkin Festival grew too large. These are all actual events, where police watched with bemusement or acted tentatively so as not to aggravate the situation.

 In recent days and weeks and months, cities and towns across the United States erupted in largely, overwhelmingly peaceful protests. Some turned violent or had violence turned toward them.

They were told they were not protesting the right way.

Derek Catsam is Professor of History and Kathlyn Cosper Dunagan Professor in the Humanities, University of Texas-Permian Basin.