What it Takes for Protests to Bring Change — Clues From History

Web story by Katrina Schwartz.

Massive protests over the police killing of George Floyd have spread across the nation and the world. The protests have been largely non-violent demonstrations for accountability and justice, with some calling for city leaders to defund the police. Mayors issued curfews and there have been numerous instances of police brutality against protesters.

For many people, it feels like the country has been here before. In the last decade, there have been countless protests over police killings of black people and even before that, activists have been calling attention to institutionalized racism, systemic oppression and inequality pervading American society. Yet nothing seems to change.

The current protests some people wondering whether demonstrating in the street actually changes anything. To help answer that question, we look to protest movements of the past and how they did, or didn’t, move public policy in ways the protesters wanted.

The Civil Rights Movement Offers Clues

“What we see in the early 1960s is a movement that uses non-violent tactics, often met with brutal state repression,” said Omar Wasow, a professor of politics at Princeton University. He’s spent the last 15 years doing statistical analysis of how different Civil Rights campaigns did or didn’t move public opinion.

Campaigns, like the March on Washington and the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, captured the media’s attention and generated headlines featuring the words ‘civil rights,’ Wasow said. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. intentionally used non-violent direct action to draw attention to the experiences of black people not predominantly covered in the media.

The result?

“Public opinion moves to thinking civil rights is the most important problem in America,” Wasow said.

His research shows that when people saw images of police attacking largely peaceful protesters, it triggered outrage and a shift in public opinion. Specifically white public opinion, because at the time almost 90% of the country was white.

Of course, sympathetic press might not be enough to move a bigoted mass public. Did nonviolent civil rights protests shift media coverage *and* public opinion? To test this I compared trends in protest activity, front page headlines that mention civil rights & public opinion. 12/ pic.twitter.com/fhZXb5MoQL

— Omar Wasow (@owasow) May 27, 2020

Less than a year after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have A Dream” speech in Washington D.C., the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964. And five months after 25,000 people marched from Selma to Montgomery to bring attention to the fact that black Americans were being denied the right to vote, the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965.

Wasow points to these political victories as evidence that non-violent civil disobedience is an effective tactic for policy change. He also acknowledges how exhausting and difficult it is for activists to continually put their lives and bodies on the line in the way many black activists have done throughout history.

“Seeds of that tactic also laid the groundwork for what came later,” Wasow said on KQED Forum. “The level of anger at that brutality by state actors, meant that there was a more militant wing of the Civil Rights Movement that emerged,” and they were more willing to use violence to defend themselves.

Then, like now, it was police violence against civilians that often started protests that would later become violent. In the summer of 1967, there were protests in more than a hundred cities in America. One of the most famous took place in Detroit after police raided a club. It sparked violent protests lasting five days. Forty-three people died.

Similarly, with significant protester-initiated violence (whether or not the police are violent), we see increases in protest activity associated with headlines that mention “riots” and more people answer that the “most important problem” in America is crime and riots. 14/ pic.twitter.com/Qi0GHG2EUw

— Omar Wasow (@owasow) May 27, 2020

As Matthew Green writes in his article, “Opportunity Lost: The 1968 Government Report on White Racism That America Chose to Ignore”:

The unrest stemmed from a deep-seated anger and hopelessness that had long simmered in many low-income, black and brown communities hobbled by systemic racism, where rates of poverty, police abuse, joblessness and crime were disproportionately high and opportunities for advancement few. Unlike in today’s demonstrations, those involved were almost unilaterally the black residents hardest hit.

“In the case of the [1960s] uprisings, and the case of the protests around the country today, the proximate cause is police violence,” said incoming Yale professor Elizabeth Hinton on Forum. “But really, these demonstrations are rooted in a call for greater socioeconomic inclusion and that is really what the mainstream Civil Rights Movement was championing at this time.”

Hinton says in 1968, America had a chance to do the right thing, but President Lyndon B. Johnson and other liberal lawmakers balked at what it would take. Following what has been dubbed “the long hot summer” of 1967, Johnson appointed the Kerner Commission, whose job it was to understand the root causes of uprisings.

The resulting report — titled “Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders” — was a New York Times bestseller and put the blame squarely on institutionalized racism, inequality and poverty.*

“They really drew the nation’s attention to the role of white racism in fostering discrimination and in compelling the kind of anger and despair that so many residents in low income urban communities of color expressed in these incidents of collective violence that characterized the 1960s,” Hinton said.

The Kerner Commission laid out recommendations to prevent uprisings in the future, including massive investment in fundamental resources in urban communities. It said the root causes of civil unrest lay in unemployment, unequal access to education and systematic socioeconomic exclusion.

But those recommendations were largely ignored, the “War on Poverty” was inadequately funded and many of the problems the Kerner Commission laid out only got worse. Public opinion also shifted after the nation watched on television as cities like Detroit burned and protesters clashed with police in the streets.

Listen to what this sister has to say.

I added captions to the video for anyone who needs it.

Credit: David Jones Media https://t.co/W1yuk2aUen pic.twitter.com/tQ9VpuDHyd

— Matthew A. Cherry (@MatthewACherry) June 5, 2020

“A violent protest today predicts a headline about riots, predicts public opinion saying crime and riots are the most important problem,” Wasow said.

Wasow’s research shows that shift may have had a decisive effect on the 1968 election, in which Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey were in a close race. Nixon, the law and order candidate, won and ushered in decades of policy that pumped money into policing, surveillance and incarceration.

“The biggest lesson we can learn is that we made this decision to manage the problem of failing schools, unemployment and dilapidated housing with police and with new surveillance technologies and locking people up and that has not worked,” Hinton said. “Now it’s time to try something new.”

*This article has been updated to reflect that the name of the Kerner Commission’s report is “Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders,” not “The Harvest of American Racism.” The “Harvest of American Racism” was the first draft the team of social scientists submitted to the commission, which was too radical for many lawmakers, and was actively suppressed until recently. We regret the error.