A Protest History of the United States

by Gloria J. Browne-Marshall

Overview

Exploring 500 years of protest and resistance in US history—and what the unsung heroes of social movements past can teach us about navigating our chaotic world

In this timely new book in Beacon’s successful ReVisioning History series, professor Gloria Browne-Marshall delves into the history of protest movements and rebellion in the United States. Beginning with Indigenous peoples’ resistance to European colonization and continuing through to today’s climate change demonstrations, Browne-Marshall expands how to think about protest through sharing select historical moments and revealing the role of key players involved in those efforts.

Drawing upon legal documents, archival material, government documents and secondary sources, A Protest History of the United States gives voice to those who pushed back against the mistreatment of others, themselves, and in some instances planet Earth. Browne-Marshall highlights stories of individuals from all walks of life, backgrounds, and time periods who helped bring strong attention to their causes. Those examples of protest include those of Wahunsenacock, more commonly known to history as Chief Powhatan, who took on English invaders in pre-colonial America in 1607; legendary boxer Muhammad Ali's refusal to fight in Vietnam and appealed all the way to the US Supreme Court; and David Buckel, LGBTQ+ rights lawyer and environmental activist who protested against fossil fuels by committing self-immolation in 2018.

Regardless of whether these protests accomplished their end goals, Browne-Marshall reminds us that not only is dissent meaningful and impactful but is an essential tool for eliciting long lasting change.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807022689
Publisher:	Beacon Press
Publication date:	02/03/2026
Series:	Revisioning History
Pages:	360
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Gloria J. Browne-Marshall is a writer, an educator, a legal advocate, and a playwright. She is a professor of Constitutional Law and Africana Studies at John Jay College (CUNY), was a Resident Fellow at the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School, as well as a Visiting Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School. She won the 2024 American Bar Association Silver Gavel Award. Her books include She Took Justice: The Black Woman, Law, and Power, The Voting Rights War, and Race, Law, and American Society.

Read an Excerpt

Protest matters. Protests have led to changes in political will and winds. One person chooses to courageously defy, question, or demand change from the powerful in relative anonymity where masses of people, with song and soulful sharing, crowds of people are moved to stand shoulder to shoulder, chanting in unison, collectively presenting their grievances against injustices by law or tradition. Despite any possible consequences, they all want to make a difference. Protest, to me, is spiritual.

My first protest outside of my family was in third grade. I marched through the streets with classmates, carrying signs demanding that the adults vote to pass a tax levy to finance public school renovations. We laughed, sang a protest song I had written, and watched the sun set feeling ourselves champions of a cause we believed all adults would be foolish to ignore. The measure failed miserably. Some White parents had started their abandonment of the city’s public schools in the wake of racial desegregation. Learning in integrated classrooms, living in mixed neighborhoods, perhaps having a person of color in leadership who made decisions affecting their lives was anathema. They crept away into the suburbs to create secluded White havens, taking their children and a flawed notion of democracy with them. Now their children and grandchildren have come to the cities as “urban settlers”
estranged from or unaware of the history of colonial settlers, redlining,
busing, or environmental racism. I am writing this book because activists are soldiers for social justice, deserving of recognition for their service and sacrifice, perhaps even via a special day or designated cemetery. Far too many community organizers become elderly without a pension, pass away without enough money for a casket,
with lives shortened by constant self-deprivation, giving their time to the cause of others instead of to themselves or their families. Fannie
Lou Hamer was a Mississippi sharecropper, forced out of her home,
clothes thrown out on a dirt road because she had registered to vote.
As a voting activist, she was arrested then beaten after leading other
African Americans in Mississippi to the polls. Employers refused to hire her, and death threats were constant, as were money worries and stress. I am writing this book for her and others.

A Protest History of the United States is an interdisciplinary telling of the obstacles, protests, and protesters that braids together law,
memoir, events, and interviews into an account of centuries of history.
This book is for you, the reader, who may remember particular protesters and participated in activism yourself, in one form or another.
As you read this book, I urge you to think about generations of your family and the kinds of protest and resistance they engaged in without realizing it. Our achievements speak to their tenacity. This book is important to me because I, like each generation of my family, have been
Davids facing the Goliaths of slavery, racism, sexism, and classism, and have done so with tenacity, intelligence, faith, and a well-aimed rock.

Protest is an investment. My African American high school music teacher, Mrs. Baskins, tried to explain the debt we all owe to the next generation. I apologize on behalf of a raucous concert choir class that failed to embrace the songs of freedom, struggle, and resistance.
Only later did I realize those songs contained history, life skills, and protest. She, like me, had been integrated into the White school across town. Only as a working adult did I understand the racial and gender challenges she must have faced and how she used “Black Excellence”
as protest. My teachers gave me the gift of self-expression.
I am a playwright and writer. Music theater song dance, film, sculpture,
and drawing can all be protest. Art has long been a part of activism.
Protests can be on canvases or billboards; sung in deep-throated jazz or opera; danced in ballet, tap, or modern; ignited in theaters and in the streets. Do something! In art or academia, take a knee or walk the picket line, whether lawyer or librarian, be the first or refuse to be last but recognize a responsibility to keep progress moving. An investment of sweat and blood allowed me the time to write and you the time to read this book. It is humbling to realize so many made sacrifices without ever knowing our names.

Progress comes from public pressure creating equality under law,
because for most of this nation’s history the Rule of Law was a grand idea whereby every person was equal under law. However, historically,
the “role of law” is to control the labor class, people of color,
women, the poor, immigrants, the marginalized, and their allies until a critical mass of people rise up and convince stakeholders, influencers,
attorneys, and politicians to join their fray. For most, there is little connection between the freedoms they enjoy and the protests needed to make these rights a reality. For example, the eight-hour work week was not readily handed to workers; lives were lost to achieve it. The
US Constitution may provide the right on paper, but I was able enter the once segregated main library in Kansas City, Missouri, because of protests against discrimination. A source of pleasure for me during hot
Midwestern summers was taking the bus downtown and nurturing my curiosity and love of books at the library or walking to the local museums that would have turned me away a generation before.

Protest is primal. This book expands protest and resistance to include the precisely planned labor protests by the mill girls in the nineteenth century, the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom,
the 1975 Chinatown protests in New York City, and the Women’s
March of 2017. Protest includes the spontaneity of slave uprisings,
West Virginia coal mine gunfights, anti-war marches, and urban rebellions.
Protest can be the act of doing one small thing: refusing to move, standing up or staying seated, speaking up or remaining silent with one’s fist in the air, signing a petition or taking a knee, waging a sit-in or a boycott. Protest can mean resistance or surviving horrendous wrongs. This book is an extension of my research, writing, and speaking on protest, law, and violence in colonial America and the
United States from 1607 to present.

Indigenous peoples studied the colonial statutes and treaty laws,
as did some fugitives from slavery, newly arrived immigrant workers,
women seeking the vote, and those not formally educated learned to bend the power of law to their needs. The rule of law is an American ideal, that everyone is equal under law. For much of this nation’s history,
the role of law has been to oppress and restrict people of color,
women, the poor, and immigrants, as well as queer and disabled people and their allies.

Unfair laws are usually at the heart of protests, triggering demonstrations,
civil disobedience, strikes, rallies, and sometimes armed combat. Wealthy people have learned how to command the necessary laws and politicians to protect their positions and business interests.
But the unified power of the people is a force strong enough to battle tycoons, slaveholders, industrialists, magnates, billionaires, and the
One Percenters, and this book shows the laws and social conditions confronting the common person before they gather with others and channel rage, frustration, and desperation into strategy and action.
“Your silence will not protect you.” Audre Lorde’s words sing with a burning truth. Silent good people allow bad things to happen as they try to wait out the controversy—until it comes for them.
Women in human resources offices across the nation know that female employees earn less for the same job, but they remain silent. Police officers know that fellow cops spew racism and assault civilians, but they say nothing. Bank employees watch qualified lenders be denied loans or get hit with higher interest rates and poor terms, and they only complain privately. Realtors quietly watch prospective tenants and homebuyers get steered to marginalized communities. Courage is being afraid but acting anyway. Protests need not be mass meetings,
bull horns, and big painted signs. That is fine and necessary. However,
sometimes activism means one just needs to act.

I have stood in the cold, marched in the heat, and been drenched in the rain for issues concerning African American voting rights, women’s pro-choice rights, police-involved civilian deaths, book banning,
housing rights, and gun violence. I have marched sometimes and written letters to the editor other times, filed complaints, boycotted stores, spoken up, remained vigilant, donated funds, stopped donating funds, joined a group, quit a group, signed petitions, or simply avoided businesses that offer second-class service, and you can do so as well.
“Do not spend money in places where respect is not served” remains my motto. This can be a personal everyday act of protest. Use your power within your sphere of influence to start a ripple effect that brings social change.

The Ancestors gave their livelihoods, and some their very lives,
without ever knowing our names. Protesters, as warriors, are marching to a different drummer and are drawn to a light just beyond the horizon, some pushing forward despite personal fears and possible professional suicide. Courage is a superpower. Rest in power, ancestral protest leaders, rabble-rousers, conscience raisers, advocates of change, martyrs for equal rights, and conscientious objectors who built the freedoms about which this conflicted country boasts and blindly enjoys. For those who fought the good fight, finished the race, and kept the faith, thank you for your service.

Table of Contents

Author’s Note

INTRODUCTION
Our Conflicted Protest History

CHAPTER ONE
Indigenous Resistance for Land, Life, and Culture

CHAPTER TWO
What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?

CHAPTER THREE
Labor Rights and Union Strikes

CHAPTER FOUR
Anti-war Marches and Conscientious Objectors

CHAPTER FIVE
Rebellions Behind Our Golden Door

CHAPTER SIX
Her Body. Her Ballot.

CHAPTER SEVEN
Protesting Violent Policing

CHAPTER EIGHT
Contesting Climate Denial and Environmental Racism

Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

This is a must-read for those who seeks facts and the story regarding the history of protests in this place called America.”
—Our Time Press

“Browne-Marshall argues that a nation is made better when the people demand more of it, and her book offers both a history of and a guide for such protest.”
—Library Journal

“Attentive to historical records, memoir, environmentalism, and the arts, legal scholar Gloria Browne-Marshall provides fervent affirmation of the many different groups, causes, and methods that comprise the protest tradition from our nation’s founding to today’s pursuit of a more perfect union.”
—Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and of African and African American Studies, Harvard University

“To Gloria Browne-Marshall, protest is primal and a prism through which she has exhaustively examined its resonance in American history. Her broad and insightful discussion of protest, from its most violent expression to the mere thrusting of one’s fist in the air, shows how it has been persistently at the core of the nation’s existence. She thoughtfully demonstrates that protest is essential to the origins of the US, an unbroken thread from the Powhatan to George Floyd.”
—Herb Boyd, American Book Award recipient and author of Black Detroit: A People’s History of Self-Determination

“We don’t often read history seeking hope, but in Gloria Browne-Marshall’s A Protest History of the United States, we find it in every exquisitely written chapter. Browne-Marshall’s extraordinary book chronicles the marginalized American heroes who, through overt and covert acts of rebellion, protested systemic injustice, cruelty, and greed. Through careful research, attentive examination, and innovative vision, Browne-Marshall has uncovered a national legacy of resistance and resilience we can believe in.”
—Erika Krouse, author of Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation

“‘Workers are the backbone of every nation’ is the important conclusion learned from Browne-Marshall’s insightful chapter about labor unions and how protesting workers have fought back after being denied decent job conditions and their right to organize unions. Still, as A Protest History of the United States shows, many companies don’t get it: workers never give up!”
—Stefan Löfven, former prime minister of Sweden and former president of the Swedish Industrial and Metal Workers Union

From the Publisher