When Nonviolent Protests Were Condemned
As people across the U.S. continue to demand an end to police brutality and racial injustice, some critics have (unfavorably) compared the demonstrations to the civil rights movement.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent marches were a protest, they insist, while today’s protesters are committing crimes.
This idea, however, reflects a whitewashed understanding of how the civil rights movement worked and was covered by the white press. The truth is actually a lot more complicated.
For example, when civil rights protesters began to stage nonviolent actions, the local press often villainized them and mischaracterized nonviolence as rioting, or left them out of coverage all together.
According to historian William G. Thomas III, white newspapers in Birmingham, Alabama, and Danville, Virginia, first refused to cover the 1963 marches and protests for school desegregation or to cover protesters’ demands. And when local Southern papers did write about them, they did not describe protesters as nonviolent resistors, but rather “discussed the protests as near racial riots and characterized the whites in Birmingham as stoically trying to prevent impending racial violence,” according to Thomas.
In addition to this, movement leaders like Dr. King grew to expect segregationist violence in response to their nonviolent protests.
They believed that the resulting visuals would show white America how segregationists brutalized Black people in the South. The reverend was a “master television producer,” Alexis Madrigal wrote in The Atlantic in 2018, leveraging nonviolence and the power of the press to broadcast images of violence nationwide.
The press showed little interest in nonviolent protests in Birmingham in 1963, until King and other leaders allowed activist youth to participate. Police used water cannons and attack dogs against kids dressed in their best church clothes. The violence recaptured the attention of the national press, and led to President Kennedy’s call for anti-discrimination and desegregation legislation, which would later be signed by President Johnson as the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
It’s clear that the civil rights movement was a complicated period in history that included violent and nonviolent elements – and Americans’ impression of it changed.
According to a 2019 Gallup analysis, Americans in the 1960s overwhelmingly thought that protests were harmful to the civil rights movement. In May 1961, 57% of Americans said that “tactics such as ‘sit-ins’ and demonstrations by the civil rights movement” had hurt the chances of Southern integration. In June 1963, 60% of respondents said “mass demonstrations hurt efforts to bring about racial equality.” That number jumped to 74% of respondents in May 1964.
Opinion shifted several years later, when 63% of respondents said they thought “Black Americans could win civil rights using nonviolent demonstrations.” That was in May 1969, one year after King’s assassination.
The misunderstanding of how the civil rights protests worked is still playing out today.
“The desire to create two buckets out of black protesters remains: the ‘good’ peaceful ones and the ‘bad’ radical ones,” wrote Madrigal in 2018. “Simply scan the news coverage of the Black Lives Matter actions in any city or at the national level. The tropes that were established by television reporters in Little Rock and Watts are alive and well.”
MLK To BLM: Inside America’s New Civil Rights Movement
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