Today, on the day of No Kings demonstrations around the entire country, I’ve been reflecting on what protest actually means in America, and ultimately what it means for me.
There is a sanitized version of protest that exists in civics textbooks, but what about the real and messy practice of resistance in action? What does protest look like when it’s effective? What tools have truly shifted power? And where does protest fit into the broader American story?
The First Amendment—one of the most striking facets of the Constitution—protects the right to assemble and express political views. That idea is woven into the cultural fabric I grew up with, and it’s one I support. But our legal system doesn’t grant unlimited freedom. “Time, place, and manner” restrictions carve out narrow channels through within which we may exercise our free speech rights. Police and government officials decide the narrow constraints. Protest here is only tolerated within carefully drawn lines.
How Americans Perceive Protest
There’s no shared vision of what protest should look like, aside from the vague expectation that it remain peaceful. There are many who view it positively, seeing it as a tool to express resistance, mobilize communities, and demand the attention of power. It can be a place to vent frustration, find solidarity, or gather strength from being among others who want the same change.
But protest also carries with it negative associations. Blocking a freeway is often viewed more as an ineffective inconvenience than legitimate civic action. Like many political conversations in America, small talk often centers itself within the confines of our car-centric environment. When disruption collides with peoples’ daily lives, it’s easy to frame protest as chaos, violence, or simply “in the way”. Whenever change is demanded, there’s an in-group that benefits from the status quo, and those people predictably resent it. And for millions more living at the edge of exhaustion, even a freeway closure can feel like one burden too many. Support for protest often depends less on principle and more on whether someone agrees with the cause, or has the bandwidth to care at all.
Protest as Performance
There’s also the murkier territory of performance. Attending a protest might be purely self-indulgent, or a means to garner social capital. Attending a protest to them is like earning a badge of moral superiority. It can become a spectacle of participation rather than a strategy for change. Opportunists exploit this, too, using crowds as cover to steal, vandalize, and fight. The line between mobilization and spectacle is easily blurred.
Humans are biased, emotional, and inconsistent. The best among us try and shed such bias, understanding protest as a necessary lever within a democratic society to push people to think and act differently; a mechanism for self-correction and political evolution. But understanding that truth isn’t enough. A real grasp of protest requires confronting what it looks like and feels like in practice, and rooting that understanding in the context of the past.
Historic Examples of Protest
When protest has mattered in this country, it’s rarely been “polite”. Two of the clearest examples come from the labor movement and the civil rights movement.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, labor uprisings shook the foundations of industrial America. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 began as localized work stoppage in West Virginia and exploded across multiple states, grinding rail freight, the lifeblood of the economy, to a halt. It was one of the first truly national uprisings in U.S. history.
The strike was crushed by coordinated, state-sanctioned violence at the hands of federal troops and private militias, opening fire on workers, killing around 100 people. Despite the defeat, the strike exposed the boiling opposition between labor and capital, galvanized workers, and seeded the growth of organized labor in the decades to come.
The following decades were marked by escalating confrontations: the Homestead strike, the Pullman strike, and countless others. Strikers were routinely beaten, shot, or starved out, but workers organized and persevered to put pressure on the government and corporations. Out of these sustained struggles we now enjoy the eight-hour workday, weekends, workplace safety standards, and the right to unionize. Many things we take for granted were built on the backs of these protestors, who faced violent resistance.
Nearly a century later, the civil rights movement forever changed the fabric of American society. The Montgomery bus boycott lasted over a year, draining the city’s transit system and proving that Black communities could exert sustained economic pressure. Sit-ins across the South disrupted segregated businesses. Freedom riders deliberately defied racist laws, forcing national attention on local terror. In the Birmingham campaign, protestors, including children, faced fire hoses and attack dogs. In the Selma to Montgomery marches, protestors were beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge as the country watched.
A Letter That Changed How I Think
Over ten years ago, I read Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, and it was a pivotal point in my own enlightenment in civic resistance. Realizing that the same U.S. government that now elevates King as a national hero once locked him in a jail cell decades ago is a sobering reminder of how dissent is treated in its own time. But more than that, his words revealed a view of protest that was both deeply strategic and morally clear.
King described protest as purposeful disruption, not mere symbolism:
In any nonviolent campaign, there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices are alive, negotiation, self-purification, and direct action.
He explained how rights on paper collide with power in practice:
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.
He rejected the call to “wait your turn”:
For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ … This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’
And he exposed how protest is often criminalized and framed as illegitimate:
You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws… There are two types of laws: there are just laws and there are unjust laws.
King understood that protest isn’t meant to make anyone comfortable, and we should too. It exists to force a reckoning. His words are as relevant now as they were in 1963, because they lay bare a truth this country still struggles to confront. Meaningful change rarely happens within the boundaries power sets for us.
Protest in the Crosswalk
So again, I raise the simple question: what should protest look like?
There was a No Kings demonstration in Venice Beach today. Picture this: protestors waiting patiently at the crosswalk for the signal to turn green. People holding signs, standing on the sidewalk, taking selfies, shouting into the void of passing traffic. Blaring horns, deafening noise from cars and motorcycles. Protestors telling people to get out of the street, because that’s not “acceptable.”
There were signs like “Alexa, change the president”—which is almost self-parody, considering Alexa is an Amazon product, and its founder Jeff Bezos sat front row at Trump’s inauguration. Someone held up an “I miss Obama” sign, which just felt hollow. Obama isn’t coming back, and nostalgia won’t build a movement. His administration expanded drone warfare, deepened free-market orthodoxy, and maintained the same foreign-policy posture that defined the post-Reagan era. Even if he were on the ballot, what does that sentiment actually do to resist Trump? What does it build?
The whole thing felt messy, shallow, unorganized—a mishmash of privileged white opinions and disconnected frustrations. Framing that kind of protest against the civil rights movement makes it look almost absurd. It gave me the ick. Beyond disliking Trump, what exactly are Americans protesting? There are real reasons to be in the streets: ICE raids and mass deportations, tariffs and economic cruelty, the moral rot of Trump’s ties to Epstein, bailouts for foreign banks, government shutdowns, attacks on reproductive rights and healthcare, the relentless assault on the poorest and most marginalized. The stakes are enormous. But the protest I saw didn’t reflect that urgency.
Coloring Inside the Lines
The entire point of protest is to be uncomfortable, especially to those in power. But here, in car-dominated America, our protests are herded to the curb. We’re delegated to the sidewalks. It’s acceptable to block people on foot, but we draw the line at people in cars, as if the right to uninterrupted traffic outweighs the right to collective voice. The street, which once belonged to people, has been ceded entirely to machines, and so has our imagination of what public space can be.
It’s a strange kind of resistance—neatly contained, pre-approved, zoned like a land-use plan. We’ve learned to express rage in a way that never slows commerce, never disturbs the flow, never truly disrupts the world we’re supposed to be challenging. Maybe on top of that, we fear the repercussions of doing so. Our physical place in the protest mirrors our political place: tolerated, but never taken seriously.
The Real Target Isn’t Trump
I can’t help but ask: is that what protest is supposed to look like? Would the labor movement have won anything if they’d politely waited for the walk sign? Would the civil rights movement have dismantled segregation without sit-ins, boycotts, marches that blocked streets and bridges—direct action that forced a response?
Can Americans escape the comforts of modern technology, the consumerism, the allegiance to corporations, the willful ignorance of their own class struggle—the billionaires versus everyone else—and mobilize against the actual foundations that put Trump into power? Or are we simply organizing because, for a thousand different and often conflicting reasons, we collectively don’t like him? It feels like so much of the outrage has been aimed at the man, not the machinery that made him inevitable. Anger at an individual is easy. Dismantling the structure beneath him is the hard part.
Resistance in the Age of Surveillance
And in the age of mass surveillance, where biometric and geographic data are quietly harvested, where every intimate detail is for sale to the highest bidder, and where the doors to fascism have been left swinging open, can we ever resist the way we once did? Pondering these questions doesn’t bring clarity, it only raises more questions for me.
Persistence is the Point
For all the weight of these questions, I keep holding on to a truth that history reveals to us, albeit quietly: people have changed the world before. The labor movement didn’t win overnight; it took decades of strikes, losses, jailings, broken bones, state-sanctioned murder, and failures before the eight-hour day became law. The civil rights movement didn’t begin with the March on Washington; it began with countless local organizers, small church meetings, and the slow, grinding work of people who refused to give up. Every major victory in this country has been won through persistence.
Protest takes many forms. Not everyone can march, and not every march looks the same. Some movements are loud; others work quietly and patiently to erode the walls around them. But protest, in its many imperfect, unruly, and uncomfortable shapes, remains an essential part of democracy. It’s how ordinary people remind power that it isn’t inevitable.
Protesting Smarter, Not Louder
This isn’t a call to block streets for the sake of it. The most effective movements in history chose their targets strategically. The Montgomery bus boycott choked off revenue at the heart of the transit system. Sit-ins during the civil rights movement were about confronting segregation directly at its public and economic choke points.
Power lives in boardrooms, capitol buildings, corporate headquarters, financial districts, and logistics networks. Discomfort aimed upward forces the system to respond. Discomfort aimed sideways just lands on the people already struggling to get to work.
The built environment across the United States is not tailored for civic engagement. Cars, commerce, and private property are the rule of the land here. Public squares are few and far between, civic centers are fenced and surveilled, and corporate power is hidden behind thick landscaping, private security, and layers of legal insulation. The wealthiest and most powerful deliberately move in spaces the common folk can’t easily reach. It’s an architecture of control and protection of capital.
I feel uneasy coming to this realization; protest in its current, most popular form is largely ineffective at exerting pressure on the elites. But history may offer us some clues in how to do it more effectively. Economic disruption, like boycotts, labor strikes, and port blockades hit power where it actually hurts. And the ways to hurt power is generally, through our capitalist framework, through capital loss. Occupying symbolic and strategic spaces, from bridges to banks, exposes what’s usually hidden. Building networks of mutual aid and local solidarity can make movements harder to disperse. Protest doesn’t have to be a freeway standoff, it just has to aim its weight where it counts.
It’s important to acknowledge, though, that when collective action threatens corporate revenue, the state and its instruments of force show up fast—police, private security, injunctions, sometimes worse. That reality doesn’t make this kind of action impossible. It means it must be more organized, more deliberate, and rooted in strategy. There are countless tactics and tradeoffs to consider when we choose to pressure power without needlessly harming the people movements aim to protect. That’s a conversation for another essay.
Protest Isn’t Meant to Be Comfortable
I don’t know if protest works the way it used to. It’s hard not to ignore how many movements in recent memory have collided with power and left only faint dents. But the kind of protest that matters isn’t meant to be comfortable. It will be controversial precisely because that’s the point. Real resistance is meant to make power flinch.
But outrage alone doesn’t win anything. Disruption without direction is just noise. If protest is to have teeth, it has to be organized—rooted in unions, tenants’ groups, mutual aid networks, and durable coalitions that can turn a march into leverage. Pressure needs to be aimed upward: at boardrooms, supply chains, investor meetings, and the policy levers that keep the wealthy insulated. Collective power is what makes disruption dangerous to those who benefit from the status quo.
But we have to be willing to make people uncomfortable—and be uncomfortable ourselves—while standing together in a way that power can’t ignore or easily swat away. That’s how movements win. Through persistence and coordination.
If the sign is busted, we walk anyway. Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t afraid to block a bridge, and neither should we be afraid to act with purpose. Progress has never belonged to those who waited at the curb. It’s always been taken by those who stepped into the street together.