New Orleans         Protest and protesting is deeply embedded in America history, whether popular or not.  Professor Gloria Browne-Marshall, a constitutional law and Africana studies professor at John Jay College, part of the City University of New York, channeled her personal history and took on the mammoth task to write A Protest History of the United States.  The job was probably impossibly hard to begin with, but on Wade’s World she described how she broadened the definition of protest even more expansively, to write almost a history of America from indigenous struggles to our times.

For Browne-Marshall,

…street protests are crucial, even spiritual.  But there are also diverse ways to resist or object to governmental over-reach, civilian violence, unfair treatment, corporate harm, and abuse by the powerful.  Protests can be slave revolts, written petitions, and urban uprisings.  Rosa Parks quietly remaining seated or anti-war students holding a teach-in.  It can be sitting in segregated restaurants or refused to ride in segregated buses.  Taking a knew, putting fist in the air, or financially supporting or deserting certain groups can be protest.  Maintaining one’s cultural identity in the face of forced assimilation, artwork, or integrating elitists groups.  All can be forms of personal, profession, and performative acts of protest.

By her definition, protest is as American as apple pie.

This was different kind of history, and its rewards were many.  Here’s a sampling,

• She namechecks Eloise Cobell, a Native American banker from North Dakota, who served with me on the Tides board for years and her role in the fight, finally successful, to win unfulfilled treaty terms from the US.
• The Colored Citizens of Springfield, Massachusetts, showed up for their role in protecting fugitive slaves.
• She argues that that even “keeping family history alive is protest,” like her own as a member of a family Exodusters in Kansas after the Civil War.
• Who remembers that the term “rednecks” originally came from the miner’s strike at Matawan where the strikers all wore red handkerchiefs around their necks so they knew who was on their side and didn’t shoot each other rather than the Pinkertons mobilized by the mine owners.
• Many of us have been antiwar protestors, and given what’s happening in Iran, this could be mainstream again given the distaste the public has for Trump’s War, but who remembers the 1919 decision in Schenck v. United States, when the Supreme Court ruled that protest of the military draft was a violation of Espionage Act, passed in 1917. Schenck did ten years for passing out flyers at an induction center.
• Marcus Garvy, the black nationalist, launched one ship to Africa that sailed from the Port of New Orleans.
• Civil disobedience, Browne-Marshall argues, includes marching without a permit, an ACORN principle for the last more than 50 years.
• Lombard v. Louisiana was one of the key suits desegregating US restaurants.
• Alabama first and then Arkansas tried to get the membership lists of the NAACP. In the 1960 case, Bates v. Little Rock, Daisey Bates head of the Little Rock chapter and Birdie Williams, who led the North Little Rock group, refused to disclose the names, almost bankrupting the organization and facing contempt until the Supreme Court ruled in their favor.

Protest can be large or small.  We always train new organizers in the community or the workplace that there is always a history of struggle, and they need to listen for it when beginning to support people in forming a new organization.  History helps prove that point and rewards those willing to look and listen.