What Protests of the Past Can Teach Us About Protests of Today

In the days since President Trump sent the National Guard and Marines to quell protests in Los Angeles, demonstrations against ICE raids have been held across the Bay Area and nationwide. This weekend’s “No Kings” protests, timed to the day of President Trump’s military parade, are expected to draw large crowds across the country. We take this moment to look back at times when protests have been successful instigators of change, and times when protests may have hurt a movement. What does it mean to have a successful protest? Who is the audience and how are they persuaded? And what should demonstrators know in this modern age of surveillance about the risks of hitting the streets and safeguards that can be taken.

This partial transcript was computer-generated. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Alexis Madrigal: Welcome to Forum. I’m Alexis Madrigal. The Bay Area has a rich, rich tradition of protest. Nobody takes to the streets as often or with as much gusto as the Bay Area. Civil rights, the Vietnam War, gay rights, the Iraq War, Oscar Grant, the Muslim travel ban, Black Lives Matter, Gaza — Bay Area activists are often early on the scene and loud.

The first few months of the Trump administration, though, have been unusually quiet here. That could be changing, catalyzed by the anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles and the Trump administration’s continuing attacks on the norms of democracy. The protests have begun, and more are planned. What might they accomplish?

Up first, we are joined by Omar Wasow, assistant professor of political science at UC Berkeley. Welcome.

Omar Wasow: Thank you so much for having me.

Alexis Madrigal: So, Omar, you study the history of protest movements, particularly of the civil rights era. Let’s just start with something that might seem kind of obvious, which is: What is the purpose of protests?

Omar Wasow: So I think every protest is a kind of complex mix of goals. There are some people who are there out of anger or grief. You know, for example, when George Floyd was murdered, people just had kind of rage and grief and wanted to express that. But there also are more strategic ends, like trying to persuade the larger public that there is some kind of injustice. And in the 1960s, that was sort of the core logic articulated by people like John Lewis or Martin Luther King — we’re trying to dramatize injustice.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah. And so — I mean, one of the things that’s complex about this, right, is that there are protests that are designed kind of to build solidarity within the group of people who are in the streets, and there are protests maybe that are more designed for external viewing. You know, there’s a lot of research on the way that the civil rights movement used television in particular to get their message out.

But most protests are trying to do both things at the same time — sometimes at cross purposes. Yeah?

Omar Wasow: Exactly. And so there’s almost a contest, in my mind, between expression and persuasion. And sometimes expressing rage is not going to be what’s persuasive. And conversely, sometimes what’s persuasive feels very kind of instrumental or inadequate to people’s sense of profound anger.

Alexis Madrigal: Mhmm. So watching these protests in Los Angeles, you know, from the distance that we are from them — we’re not on the ground — how are you seeing these kinds of dynamics come together?

Omar Wasow: I think what’s been really striking to me is how quickly we’ve sort of settled into certain kinds of scripts almost — where there’s a protest, a burning car, the media focuses heavily on, you know, fire. We have what appears in many ways to be an excessive police response, but also a very kind of chaotic protester response. And those dynamics have just played out repeatedly across American history, particularly in L.A.

And so I’m struck first, in some ways, by how familiar this is. I mean, you could look at 1965 or 1992, and there are some of these very same dynamics. And, of course, there are these new dynamics — the internet, cell phones — that change how we, as the people not there, observe, experience, and relate to them.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah. I mean, one of the things that seems really tricky — and we were talking about this with the team — is that we’re kind of judging the media performance of these protests, or however we want to phrase that, by local newspapers, by cable television shows that very few people actually watch, and by local television news, which also has a very specific and smaller audience.

And yet there’s this entire other layer that’s much more difficult for us to see, which is what’s being shared in these social networks about what’s happening at these protests.

Omar Wasow: Yeah. That’s right. And that’s both new, to a degree, but I think it’s also important to keep in mind that we had a fragmented media in the 1960s. There was a pro-segregation southern press, a kind of pro-liberation Black press, and a largely indifferent national press. And so depending on which media you were consuming, you could get a very different perspective on the civil rights movement: Was it violations of law and order, or was it a call for rights?

And so there’s that similar dynamic now, even refracted across this kind of kaleidoscopic media that we live in now. And I think what some research shows is that protests can be polarizing — in the sense that people can… if you went to Fox News on Saturday, you saw “riots are gripping L.A.” But in other media, it was about a military-style response by the state against a relatively small protest and relatively few blocks of downtown L.A.

And so just as there was in the past, there continues to be a kind of way in which people will get very different stories about what’s happening depending on the media ecosystem they’re in.

Alexis Madrigal: You know, do you think — given what you said about sort of the fragmentation of media even in the 1960s — do you think people have an accurate view of how violence and nonviolence played out during the civil rights movement?

I mean, I’m thinking of a classic right-wing political cartoon, showing devastation and cars burning and stuff — and Martin Luther King Jr. is presented there saying, I’m gonna have another peaceful protest tomorrow, right?

I mean, public opinion swung against Martin Luther King Jr. in the late 1960s, and yet, of course, now that’s not how those things are remembered, generally speaking?

Omar Wasow: Yeah. It’s a great question. And it’s, I think, not just a kind of right-wing critique of the civil rights movement, but it’s also a left-wing critique of the power of nonviolence — like, if you’re going to be tarred with the brush of violence no matter what you do, then why commit to nonviolence? Why sort of unilaterally disarm against some kind of repressive force?

And I looked at thousands of protest events in the 1960s civil rights era, some of which included protester violence, many of which were nonviolent — and looked at 270,000 newspaper headlines in eight different newspapers. And what I found was, in fact, that when events were nonviolent, you could predict with a high degree of accuracy that the next day’s newspaper headline would mention “civil rights.”

And if there was protester violence, that headline the next day was more likely to mention “riots.” All to say that what protesters did on the ground — the tactics that activists used — did in fact shape media coverage. And so, yes, there’s bias in the media. Yes, there’s bias against marginalized groups like African Americans. But the kinds of tactics people use can overcome those biases to shape the coverage.

And I find not only did it shape the coverage, but it influenced public opinion and voting.

Alexis Madrigal: What about the way the National Guard or other police groups — you know, now in kind of a new development, the Marines — how does that influence the way that people view protests?

Omar Wasow: So I think it’s very important to say we’re still very early in this. And I suspect we will have many more of these kinds of conflicts between activists on the ground opposing deportation or ICE and an increasingly militarized police, National Guard, you know, literally Marine or military response.

And so that’s a super combustible mix, and it could go, I think, in a lot of different directions. In the 1960s, when the state engaged in spectacles of violence — think Bull Connor siccing dogs on young people or shooting fire hoses at young people — that moved public opinion toward the protesters. And to be clear, the civil rights movement understood this and sought out places to protest where they thought there might be these police chiefs who engaged in exceedingly repressive tactics.

And so Trump and the administration, and their policies, run a genuine risk of being a kind of modern-day Bull Connor. And at the same time, if the police, National Guard, Marines are relatively restrained and it’s a summer of images of burning cars and vandalism, that is likely to — I mean, what we saw in the 1960s is that that produces… that moves the public in favor of more law and order, more repression.

And so it’s really, I think, an open question which way it will go right now. It depends in part on what kinds of tactics activists use, but also what kinds of tactics the state uses.

There was — the L.A. Press Council put out a report today that more than 35 journalists have been shot or experienced some kind of injury at the hands of the police. And that’s the kind of story that might produce more of a sense of excess state response — it’s too much police force — and might move the public in sympathy toward the activists. So we do see some initial polling that suggests that may be the direction things are going, but it’s still very early.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah. You know, one of the kind of ideas that I’ve seen bounce around in my time of following protests over the last 10 or 15 years in the Bay Area is the changes in the way that protests are organized — or, you know, the level of organization and discipline that’s displayed at different protests.

Where do you see these protests kind of fitting into the model of completely decentralized movements — like maybe we saw in anti-WTO protests — versus a very centralized approach, at times, during the civil rights movement?

Omar Wasow: Yeah. One of the gifts and curses of organizing in the modern era and the present is that cell phones, the internet radically lower the cost of coordinating people. Right? You can very easily get out: We’re meeting at this intersection, to thousands or even millions of people at essentially no cost.

And in the 1960s, people had to do all kinds of on-the-ground work to organize, and that meant that there often was a central organizing body. And that organizing body could help, you know, train people, impose some kind of discipline in terms of message discipline.

In the present, the ability to rapidly converge a bunch of people in protest means you can get a rapid response to, say, ICE raiding a Home Depot parking lot — but it also means there is nobody in charge. And it makes it much harder to impose something like message discipline.

We see nationwide that sometimes the state wants to negotiate with a social movement, and there’s no leader to negotiate with. Mhmm. So in the Black Lives Matter era, people talked about it not being leaderless, but being “leaderful.” But I think it’s really complicated because we do have this… it can also be chaotic.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah. We’re talking about protests, what’s happening locally, and what we can learn from history with Omar Wasow, assistant professor of political science at UC Berkeley. We’re going to be back with more guests right after the break.