Protests have defined American history since the nation’s founding in 1776. Is this moment any different?
Protests continue for nearly a week after the shooting in Minneapolis
Federal agents clashed with demonstrators in St. Paul and Minneapolis on Tuesday (January 13), nearly a week after the shooting death of Renee Good by federal agents, as demonstrations continued outside federal buildings and in communities.
The founders called this a “petition for relief.” Martin Luther King Jr. called it “civil disobedience,” and his protégé Sen. John Lewis described it as “good trouble.”
Whatever the terminology, historians largely agree. The United States was born out of protest 250 years ago and has since been driven by tumultuous social movements, from abolition to the civil rights movement.
“Protests are critical to the progress of this country,” said Gloria Brown Marshall, author of “A History of American Protests,” describing the demonstrations as “the human spirit rising up against insurmountable odds for something that seems unnecessary in the present.”
Today, Americans continue a deep tradition of public dissent, most recently with a series of nationwide demonstrations over the Jan. 7 shooting death of Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, by immigration agents and broader Trump administration policies.
Tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets in large cities and small towns across the country, holding signs that say “Abolish ICE Forever” and chanting phrases such as “Hey, ICE must be abolished.”
At the Golden Globes, some celebrities wore black and white pins reading “Be Good” and “ICE Out” on their tuxedos and designer dresses to raise awareness for the cause. Other Americans have also begun boycotting companies like UPS and Comcast that contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
President Donald Trump accuses protesters of ‘attacking ICE patriots’ and threatens to invoke insurrection law in Minnesota The move comes as some Republican lawmakers accuse Goode’s killing of using tactics Goode and other anti-ICE protesters have used in recent months, such as honking or blowing horns at ICE vehicles to warn others of enforcement.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called Good a “domestic terrorist.” On the morning Goode was killed, she drove her SUV to the scene of the ICE operation and stopped the vehicle in a manner that blocked traffic. DHS and ICE officials said Good tried to run over the officer after he was ordered to get out of his car. Video footage suggests she was trying to run away when she was shot.
Texas Republican Rep. Roger Williams argued that clashes like the one between ICE and Goode happen because of protests. He said people “need to stop demonstrating, stop yelling at law enforcement, stop challenging law enforcement.”
Similar sentiments have been expressed during times of heightened tension and demonstrations since the nation’s early days, despite the Constitution’s protection of the right of Americans to express their dissatisfaction with the government.
Here’s a short history of protests that have garnered national attention.
1773: The Boston Tea Party and the roots of the American Revolution
Protests across the 13 colonies paved the way for the American Revolution in the late 1700s. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson said to the British monarch that the colonists “in the humblest terms petitioned for relief.”
“Governments are established among men, and their just powers derive from the consent of the governed, and if any form of government should be destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it,” Jefferson wrote 250 years ago.
Stephen Solomon, author of “Revolutionary Dissent: How the Founding Generation Created Free Speech,” said most protests then, like today, were peaceful. But, Solomon said, as in most movements, there are “fringe” elements that condone violence and lawlessness.
The Boston Tea Party was one of the most memorable protests leading up to the Revolutionary War and is often hailed today as a heroic moment.
The Sons of Liberty, dressed in Native American costumes, boarded a British ship in Boston Harbor in the middle of the night and dropped hundreds of chests of imported tea overboard to protest what they saw as an unfair tax system.
Their actions were not legal under British law, and not all Founding Fathers supported the protests. George Washington supported the cause but opposed the destruction of tea. In a 1774 letter, he wrote that the actions in Boston “will be regarded as an American cause,” but that he “did not approve of their act of destroying Tea.”
Ten years later, when the Founding Fathers drafted the nation’s new government, they enshrined the public’s right to protest in the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights, giving the people the right to “peaceably assemble” and “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Brown Marshall, a constitutional law professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, argues that the two provisions were a “deliberate” way to ensure that protests remain a force for change in this country.
“It’s set up from the beginning to allow people to rebel against their government,” she says.
1794: Whiskey Rebellion
Six years after the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, a group of farmers and distillers in western Pennsylvania protested a federal whiskey tax they said was unfair to small producers.
First, they tarred and feathered the tax collectors and refused to pay them. Then, in July 1794, as tensions rose, peasants, armed with pitchforks and muskets, gathered in what historians have described as an “angry mob” and began a revolt.
Washington sent troops to Pennsylvania to quell the protests under the Militia Act of 1792, which allowed the president to organize state militias in times of crisis. This law is considered a predecessor to the Insurrection Act.
Today, Washington’s response to the Whiskey Rebellion is seen as the first test of federal authority in the then-burgeoning nation. Since then, the president has invoked the Insurrection Act, which authorizes the deployment of federal troops to quell civil unrest, 30 times, most recently during the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
1913: National Women’s Suffrage Parade
After decades of fighting for the right to vote, the women’s suffrage movement led a march down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington on March 3, 1913, the day before Woodrow Wilson’s first presidential inauguration. It was the first march on Washington by civil rights groups.
The march drew 5,000 women from all over the country, wearing elaborate costumes and banners. They organized 20 parade floats, nine bands, and four cavalry brigades among the marchers.
According to the National Archives, some marchers were assaulted and jeered by onlookers, and more than 100 women were hospitalized with injuries.
Although it would take another seven years before the 19th Amendment, which codified women’s right to vote, was ratified, historians credit the march with creating the momentum for the women’s suffrage movement.
1963: Birmingham Movement and Civil Rights Movement
Two centuries and countless protests later, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and dozens of others have been arrested and jailed for organizing protests against racial injustice in Birmingham, Alabama.
They were arrested on April 12, 1963, after the Commissioner of Public Safety filed a court injunction and found that Dr. King and his allies had not obtained the proper permits to protest. They had applied for a permit but were denied by city officials in the southern town, who deemed their plans a threat to public safety.
Protesters described the injunction as “naked tyranny disguised as maintaining law and order.”
While in prison, Dr. King wrote a letter to his fellow clergymen in which he supported their cause but called the protests “unwise and ill-timed.”
“You deplore the demonstrations occurring in Birmingham, but unfortunately your statement fails to express similar concern about the conditions that gave rise to the demonstrations,” Dr. King wrote in his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”
Dr. King wrote, “One day the South will learn that when the disinherited children of God sat at lunch counters, they were actually standing up for what was best for the American Dream.” “We are returning our nation to the great well of democracy that our Founding Fathers dug so deep.”
A year later, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law, prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. It is believed that Dr. King’s nonviolent protests increased public pressure and led to the enactment of the bill.
2017: Unite the Right Assembly
On August 11, 2017, hundreds of white supremacists, accompanied by armed groups, marched on the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest the removal of Confederate monuments.
They carried torches and chanted, “You will not replace us” and “Jews will not replace us.”
Protesters, including neo-Nazis and Klu Klux Klan members, continued to rally in the city’s downtown the next day, where they encountered counter-demonstrators and violence quickly erupted. Several people were injured, and a woman, Heather Heyer, 32, was killed when she was hit by a car that plowed into the crowd.
Several people, including the man who killed Heyer with his car, were subsequently charged and jailed for crimes and violence committed during the protests.
Then-President Donald Trump said the demonstrators included “some very bad people,” but also “some very fine people on both sides.” Joe Biden, who has since retired from politics, said in 2019 that the rally and Trump’s reaction inspired him to run for president.
The rally was widely seen as a turning point that brought the white supremacist movement into the public eye in a way it hadn’t in decades. It was the largest public gathering of white supremacists in the United States in generations, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
2020: George Floyd protests
The murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin on May 25, 2020 shocked a country already in turmoil due to the coronavirus pandemic. Video of Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes played on cellphone screens across the country.
Tens of thousands of people gathered to express their anger, holding placards with Floyd’s last words: “I can’t breathe.” Some demonstrations turned into shootings, looting, and vandalism. Dozens of states deployed the National Guard to quell the riots.
President Trump said in a statement at the time that he would ensure Floyd’s death was not “in vain,” but called some of the protests “an act of domestic terrorism.”
In the months and years since Floyd’s death and the violent protests that followed, states have passed more than 140 law enforcement oversight bills to limit police use of force and increase accountability, according to the Vera Institute of Justice.
Carissa Waddick, who covers America’s 50th anniversary for USA TODAY, can be reached at kwaddick@usatoday.com.
