How to Read a Protest by L.A. Kauffman

Author:L.A. Kauffman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520301528
Publisher: University of California Press

MASS MOBILIZING: THE TEN LARGEST PROTEST EVENTS IN US HISTORY

The 1963 March on Washington had, after all, established a certain character for the mass mobilization in America: huge—often impressively so—but fundamentally and emphatically unthreatening to those in power. Roosevelt had found the prospect of large Black crowds marching on the nation’s capital so dangerous and unnerving in 1941 that he acquiesced to organizers’ demands in order to keep it from happening: He feared a popular uprising on his doorstep. John F. Kennedy’s artfully accommodating approach twenty-two years later, coupled with A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin’s commitment to discipline and order, had removed any whiff of insurrection from the March on Washington, and that quality carried over into the many marches that followed in its footsteps. Paradoxically, what might seem on the surface (and to FDR) like one of the most militant tools in the organizer’s toolbox—the amassing of huge crowds to make political demands—became, as practiced in the United States, one of the mildest. To ensure the broadest possible participation, organizers would in almost every case negotiate with the authorities to secure a permit, a process that could often constrain the protest’s character and impact, much as when the Kennedy administration maneuvered the organizers of the March on Washington into accepting a far more anodyne staging of the event than they had initially intended. Sometimes the permitting process was so onerous it altered the character of a protest entirely, as for instance when the New York Police Department refused to allow protesters to hold a march on February 15, 2003, the day of the huge anti–Iraq War protests around the world. Demonstrators were only given permission to hold a stationary rally, and were surrounded with metal pens, which both seriously undermined the basic right to public assembly and created hazardous conditions for participants.43

There have certainly been numerous sizable protests in American history for which no one sought the authorities’ advance permission. From the 1999 blockade of the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle, where demonstrators disrupted a major trade summit as a protest against corporate attacks on human rights and the environment, to the nationwide Occupy protests of 2011 decrying economic inequality, to the Black Lives Matter marches against police brutality and impunity in 2014 and 2015, direct-action-oriented movements have typically shunned police permits, preferring to negotiate the terms of a protest as it’s under way. These events, though, have rarely attracted more than 25,000 or 50,000 participants; the greater risks involved in protesting without official permission have meant that even the largest direct actions in American history have involved substantially smaller numbers than the average permitted mass march. Every single demonstration in American history with more than 100,000 participants has been, to a greater or lesser degree, sanctioned and shaped by authorities, and nearly every one has played by the established rules. With only one exception, during the height of Vietnam antiwar protests in 1970, the huge crowds that converged in Washington for mass demonstrations never once left

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