Black History Month Day 18: Protest Is Treated as a Crime
Black History Fact:
During the Civil Rights Movement, peaceful protesters were routinely arrested, beaten, surveilled, and labeled threats to public order.
Now, history textbooks prefer to stage this period like a polite church picnic — brave people walked, sang, and the nation slowly felt better about itself. Curtains close. Applause. Democracy takes a bow.
Reality looked less like a musical and more like a police report.
Men in suits explained that marches were “premature.” Officials warned that demonstrations created tension. Newspapers worried about disruption. Cameras recorded children pushed by water powerful enough to move livestock. The country discovered a remarkable principle: the demand to be treated as human was considered far more destabilizing than the act of denying humanity.
Power has always loved peace, provided peace means quiet.
The phrase “law and order” appears in American history the way humidity appears in July — predictably, heavily, and usually when something uncomfortable is about to happen. The law is invoked not merely as a set of rules, but as a moral personality, a wise elder whose main advice is: stop making us deal with this.
During the Civil Rights Movement, protest was regularly described as violence. Sitting at a lunch counter was provocation. Walking across a bridge was aggression. Asking to vote was disturbance. Meanwhile, actual violence — dogs, batons, jail cells, intimidation — was filed under the category of maintaining stability. The state raised its voice and called it order. Citizens raised their voices and it was called chaos.
Societies have a habit of grading noise rather than harm.
Black history shows a repeating pattern: accountability arrives first as inconvenience. Before it becomes legislation, it becomes irritation. Before it becomes celebrated, it becomes condemned. The people asking for rights are rarely praised in real time. They are praised safely — decades later — once no policy needs to change.
We admire yesterday’s protesters precisely because they can no longer disrupt today’s arrangements.
And so every generation seems shocked to discover protest again. Leaders insist this moment is different. Commentators explain that while past movements were noble, present ones have gone too far. Demonstrations are analyzed not for their grievances but for their traffic patterns. The moral question quietly relocates itself: from “What is happening to people?” to “Why are people making this inconvenient?”
The baton travels through time remarkably well.
When demonstrations are met with militarized responses, history is not malfunctioning. It is operating exactly as it has before. Surveillance follows dissent the way shadows follow sunlight. Labels appear: agitator, extremist, threat. The vocabulary changes costumes, but the play remains the same.
Every era believes it would have supported justice in the past. The difficulty is that justice never lives in the past. It insists on showing up in the present, wearing uncomfortable shoes and blocking traffic.
Black history teaches a stubborn lesson: protest is diagnostic. It does not create injustice any more than a fever creates infection. It reveals it. A society does not deploy force where nothing is wrong. It deploys force where something has been wrong for a very long time and someone has finally refused to whisper about it.
We often ask why protests look disruptive. History answers: because injustice is persistent.
Protest is not the problem.
Injustice is.
Julie Bolejack, MBA
P.S. I share these daily reflections not as history lessons alone, but as invitations — to notice, to question, and to act where conscience meets opportunity. The patterns we study are not confined to the past, and silence has never protected the vulnerable. If something here moves you, let it move your voice, your vote, your conversations, and your community.
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