B A PARKER, HOST:
Heads-up - this episode contains some salty language.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
PARKER: Hey, everyone. You're listening to CODE SWITCH. I'm B.A. Parker.
GENE DEMBY, HOST:
And I'm Gene Demby.
PARKER: Gene, I don't know about you, but I've been feeling lately like this country is in a constant state of protest.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTER: What do we want? When do we want it?
DEMBY: Right? You had the No Kings protests, the protests against ICE all over the country, all the protests about Israel and Gaza, the protests about the war in Ukraine. I mean, before that, 2020 was like a conveyor belt of protests. It feels like we're in this constant churn of righteous indignation, protests, lather, rinse, repeat.
PARKER: But despite the energy going towards these protests, I think a lot of people have been wondering if they're actually achieving anything, including one of our listeners who reached out to us to share some of her concerns.
KATIE HAMEL: My name is Katie Hamel (ph), and I'm from Austin, Texas. My husband and I went to the No Kings protest here. And I had been talking to my son about the protest a couple days prior, seeing if he wanted to go, come down with - like, let's go out. Let's hold some signs. I was planning to blow bubbles and just be, like, a happy fairy sprite, which is kind of my jam. And he - his response was almost immediately, what's the purpose? I don't think protests really do anything. Like, they don't seem to make any difference.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DEMBY: Wait. But Parker, how old is Katie's son?
PARKER: He's 17. And Katie said he feels frustrated and defeated being a progressive teenager living in the conservative state of Texas. Like, the things he wants are likely just never going to happen.
HAMEL: And I was, you know, gutted, first and foremost, but also understandable. Understandable about where he's coming from.
PARKER: Katie says for her son, one worry can spiral into another.
HAMEL: We started talking about just his generalized anxiety about the state of the world. And that led us down a path of speaking about AI, and particularly the capacity of AI to create disinformation videos that can be used to foment political violence on a really massive scale that - you know, he's terrified. He's just so anxious.
PARKER: Oh, he's going through it.
HAMEL: Oh, yeah. He's in it. In it. All the teenage angst to the...
PARKER: Plus, like, the outward...
HAMEL: Yes.
PARKER: ...Like, the macro problems of the world.
HAMEL: That's it. It's heavy, heavy s*** over here right now.
DEMBY: Yeah, 'cause the state of the world is a lot for any of us to process right now. And for a teenager like Katie's son, I mean, I can see how he'd be feeling overwhelmed. And, like, you know, standing in the street blowing bubbles is not going to budge any of these big issues that he's really worried about.
PARKER: Yeah. And like we were saying, he's not the only one that's questioning whether protests actually make change. It's a question that's been on a lot of people's minds.
DEMBY: I mean, you've been trying to get answers to that question, Parker. So, like, what did you find? Do they work?
PARKER: That's what we're going to get into today.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
PARKER: I spoke with professor Gloria J. Browne-Marshall. She's a professor of constitutional law and Africana studies at John Jay College, and her book, "A Protest History Of The United States," explores how people in the U.S. have always organized. From Indigenous revolts to union strikes to the 2020 protests after the killing of George Floyd, rebellion and protest have shaped this country.
GLORIA J BROWNE-MARSHALL: We need to know how to do this, and do this, meaning protest. And people have said, oh, it's not effective anymore. Nobody does anything with protests. It doesn't really work. And so I wanted to have examples. And I couldn't put everybody's protests in there, but it's got a lot of protests from, you know, the Indigenous uprisings and all these different things that people have done, large and small, that I think is necessary for us to understand today to inform our protests today.
PARKER: Gloria told me that she wanted to write the book because she was seeing a disconnect between the rights we have now and the knowledge we have of the people who fought to achieve those rights.
BROWNE-MARSHALL: And they were almost dismissed from history. And I felt that they should be - or at least their efforts and their work should be known. And also, I wanted young people to understand that there are protests that have taken place that can inform the protests they're doing today.
PARKER: This is a perfect segue because I was talking to a listener who lives in Austin, Texas - a mom - and she's trying to persuade her teenage son that protests work 'cause he doesn't think that way. And what would you say to this mom to try to, like, cajole this kid back into action?
BROWNE-MARSHALL: Well, depending on the age, they've seen a lot. And they've seen a lot of protests, and yet they see a lot of backsliding. And so they have the right to be cynical. So I think she should really see him as someone who's deservedly cynical based on everything they've seen in their short time period on the planet, but also to realize that protest, even if it's street protest or some other protest, is empowering. And it allows them to lift that weight off of their shoulders and be a part of something that's social - that sense of empowerment that comes with being a part of something greater than yourself.
PARKER: What would you consider the most successful movements in U.S. history?
BROWNE-MARSHALL: Eight-hour workday. Yes, that's why people...
PARKER: Wait.
BROWNE-MARSHALL: You don't think that came from protests.
PARKER: Is eight-hour workday a good thing?
BROWNE-MARSHALL: An eight-hour workday is a good thing, because people used to work 16 to 20 hours. They used to work whatever amount of time the employer wanted them to work. And see, that's why I was saying basic things like that we take for granted, and we don't realize that the eight-hour workday was in law in the 1860s, but in practice, it didn't take place till the 1900s. People had to protest to make it a reality. You had people in the street. You had strikes. You had work shortages or slowdowns. You had work stoppages. And my book is about - there are many ways in which to protest. We don't think of Rosa Parks with a bullhorn in the street with a sign, but her protest was internationally known and effective all the same.
So for that mother talking to that young person, just think - protest doesn't have to be just out in the street. It could be a singular decision not to buy at a certain store. That's protest. You know, so I look at it - somebody wants to take a knee. That's a protest. That's an individual part, or it could be part of a group. And if we expand the idea of protest, it can involve more people and do more things. You don't have to go out into the street. That's not the way it has to be.
PARKER: Is that what you think people are getting wrong about protests?
BROWNE-MARSHALL: I think people are getting wrong about protests - one, they get a lot of things wrong. Not thinking there's a strategy to it. And you think that you do the TV version of protest - because people look at the last protest and they see the change. They think the last protest did it. They don't think of all the years of protests leading up to it because in the TV version, you have the problem, then you have the protest. You have the dark night of the soul where the protest doesn't work, then the next night it does, and now people are happy, and that's the end of the show. And so they don't show that the other side is saying, we're going to take our - this ground back you just took from us. The ground you took is mine.
PARKER: Think it'd be interesting to just, like, go through the strategy of a single protest but the non-TV version of it.
BROWNE-MARSHALL: OK. The coal workers' strike was based on the fact that the corporations, the train barons and the coal company barons - and they used the word barons back then because they were basically taking from the European models. They would come here and with the same mindset - many of them - of serfdom, that the worker is a serf. And at the time in Europe, the serf was connected to the land. That's why you get that word landlord because, yes, they were lord of the land. It became the version in the South of sharecropping, where the farmer would get, you know, a little part of what they produced, and the lion's share of it would go to the plantation owner. And so what we have now are people who are working in the coal mines. They find this massive amount of coal in the mountains of West Virginia. And so there's no eight-hour workday. They work them as long as they need to work them. They're going into these dangerous conditions, and people are dying. People are losing a limb. But the corporation owns the land. They own the homes. They own the schools. They own the church. The corporations own the stores.
And so the people who are working there are paid in what they called scripts. They're a piece of paper. It's not real money. It's a piece of paper with the company's name on it. Say it's $10. And then you go to the company store, and then the company store, which is owned by the corporation, then, you know, writes down how much you bought at the company store and takes it off of the script and writes it down how much you now owe from the rent, from the store, from clothes. The worker had nothing. So the workers want to join unions. They want to become united and have power to sit at the table and decide certain things. So they want to renegotiate their wages. And to do that individually, they would have - they call yellow-dog contracts. And in the contract, it said you could not, you know, negotiate your wage. You could not be part of a union. And if you did, you would be evicted from your home.
And so what they had to do - they had someone named Mother Jones, and Mother Jones was this little, like - she like a little grandmother, this little white-haired white woman who - with this fierce voice. And she would tell them, you know, get together. Everybody come together. So you had this strategy of how much money we should make. What should be the union? How can we bring in somebody from outside to help organize us? Then you have this union organizer in Mother Jones. So you have all these things coming together, but you also had people who were not going to allow that to happen. So folks were evicted, and once they were evicted, they would live in a tent. But then the corporation owned the land where the tents were, so they're evicted from the tents.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BROWNE-MARSHALL: So you had - you know, that's why you had a high price paid in order for them to continue to have union organizers. But because unions were in other parts of the country, outside people came in to help them organize their unions. So you had pressure on the outside. You had lobbying of federal government to recognize the unions and recognize the ability to have a union. You think about that, and you can apply that to what happened in the Civil Rights Movement because a lot of the Civil Rights Movement was based on the structure of what happened with labor organizing.
PARKER: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I wanted to ask you - so at the beginning of July, I saw these aerial views of Philadelphia. Their sanitation workers were on strike. And the streets were full of trash, and it was massive and, like, everywhere. What did you think about that?
BROWNE-MARSHALL: I used to live in Philadelphia, and I lived in Philadelphia during a trash strike.
PARKER: How'd it go?
BROWNE-MARSHALL: It was - rats were everywhere.
PARKER: Right.
BROWNE-MARSHALL: (Laughter) You know, they were jumping out of baskets. You know, on my way home, you had to dodge things. And yes, it was bad. And, you know, once again, what is it doing? Disrupting. It's making you stop your day-to-day going back and forth to whatever you're doing to say, pay attention to this issue over here. And so now you have this standoff. How long are people going to go without wages? Part of what I say in the - my book is, my father was part of a protest. And when he protested, you know, they were out so long, we lost our house. Yes, we lost our house. You know, he got another job in the end and worked his way up and, you know, he's passed on now. But, you know, we ended up getting - he ended up getting back on his feet and all of that. But yes, you can have devastating economic effects. I'm not trying to gloss this over at all.
PARKER: Yeah.
BROWNE-MARSHALL: People can get arrested. The police can be, you know, accused of assault, you know, in many instances. Those people who are out protesting will have economic effects.
PARKER: Yeah.
BROWNE-MARSHALL: That is part of it, too.
PARKER: Well, when you see - when you, like, see firsthand what the cost of protest looks like, what do you take from that when you see something like that happen with your dad?
BROWNE-MARSHALL: I think about the courage. These people put their lives and livelihoods on the line. They wanted something that was beyond just their individual needs. And so whether or not they're fighting for clean water or for better schools or for higher wages, they're going to be fighting for something that will not entail 100% of people because protests are usually just a fraction of the people involved, yet the whole group gets the benefit. Sometimes I ask the people, you want to be a freedom freeloader? 'Cause we have a lot of freedom freeloaders who don't want to do anything except reap the benefits of other people putting themselves on the line, but it's always been that way.
PARKER: Golly.
BROWNE-MARSHALL: You know, so that's why a lot of people go, you know, why isn't everybody there? It's never been everyone there, if that's proper English. It's always just been a fraction of people who have made the difference in - when it comes to protesting.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
PARKER: So what happens when you fight the good fight and it doesn't go your way?
BROWNE-MARSHALL: How could we lose?
PARKER: Yeah.
BROWNE-MARSHALL: This was something very important. This was necessary. Didn't they understand this was to help our education?
DEMBY: That's coming up. Stay with us.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
PARKER: Parker.
DEMBY: Gene.
PARKER: CODE SWITCH.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
PARKER: I've been talking to professor Gloria J. Browne-Marshall about her book, "A Protest History Of The United States." And she told me that one thing that stood out to her in her research was the importance of young people in protests.
BROWNE-MARSHALL: So many high school students have played major roles in protests. They haven't recently because so many people refuse to give young people, you know, their due, as far as effective protesters. They became effective during George Floyd because older people like myself who had, like, you know, respiratory issues or whatever couldn't protest as much as we would have. And so that gave the entree for young people to take their true role. But protests are usually by the young. They have the time to read the issues, but they also have the type of jobs that would allow them to protest. And the children's marches, for example, during the Civil Rights Movement - Martin Luther King had children, high school students, because if the parents marched and they lost their job, the whole family would lose their income. And so they would have high school students participating or college students participating in sit-ins and marches.
PARKER: That's why they protesting at night. They got to get out of school.
BROWNE-MARSHALL: I know.
PARKER: You got things to do. Do you - you write about it in the book, but I wanted you to say. Do you remember your first protest?
BROWNE-MARSHALL: I remember my first protest. I was in grade school, and this was during the time period in which a lot of white parents were taking their kids out of school and moving to the suburbs. I didn't understand any of this. All I knew was they wanted to pass what they called a levy, a tax levy. I wasn't even sure what a tax levy was. All I knew was that we needed the tax money to sustain the school. I didn't know as a child that, you know, people, working people dislike taxes - had no clue. But we went to the streets, and we had our little sign. You know, vote for the levy. And I had a little sign. (Singing) vote for the levy to save our schools. Vote for the levy. We're depending on you. And so yes - no, now you know...
PARKER: Aw.
BROWNE-MARSHALL: ...I didn't go into singing.
PARKER: Aw.
BROWNE-MARSHALL: And so I wrote the little song, and we were there. We were marching the street with our signs and everything like that. And the levy did not pass. We did not have the taxes to sustain the school system with all of the people who had, like, the higher incomes leaving, you know, the school district after Brown v. Board of Education. This wasn't right after Brown - thank you very much - for anybody trying to add stuff up. So...
(LAUGHTER)
PARKER: This was - it was 1950s (ph).
BROWNE-MARSHALL: Thank you. Thank you. This was not in the '50s at all.
PARKER: Right.
BROWNE-MARSHALL: Thank you very much for folks going on Google already. But the (laughter) - but what really got me about losing was just what you said, that feeling. How could we lose?
PARKER: Yeah.
BROWNE-MARSHALL: This was something very important. This was necessary. Didn't they understand this was to help our education? This was a good thing. So that was my first time going all in on a protest as a little kid, not understanding, not being mature enough to realize all the different levels of what was going on at the time. And that's why I said a lot of the young people were the ones who had the opportunity to study these things - the high school students, the college students - to study the issues and the different layers of the issues and not just go out emotionally and protest but think of the strategies based on what they were actually protesting against.
Some of the antiwar protests - very successful protests because those college students studied the Vietnam War. They understood what they were protesting against. They knew what the votes were. They knew how the money was being spent. They knew what the body counts were. So they would use that in their protest, you know, in trying to change the hearts and minds of people in positions of power and the presidency. I mean, Lyndon Johnson did not run for a second term because of the Vietnam War and the protests against the war. And the high school students - U.S. Supreme Court case, the Tinker's case, it's high school students protesting silently. They wore an armband to school as a protest to the Vietnam War.
So there are so many ways in which people have protested. But I think it's important for us to understand the issues that we're battling against and what it's going to take that would allow us to have substantive change so that when you have the two steps forward, when you have that one step back, the one step back is not so deep that it's devastating.
PARKER: Golly. I'm thinking about, when reading that in your book, when I was a kid and my first protest didn't go well, that would've devastated me and dissuaded me. But then I remembered my first protest as a teenager long before I was a journalist. Please note that it didn't go well. It didn't work in the way that I wanted it to. And as you were saying, that, like, oh, I wasn't dissuaded as a young person from protesting.
BROWNE-MARSHALL: I think it's very important to know that protesting does give a sense of power. We've been thwarted and our rights undermined for most of the time in this country. So to say I'm so disheartened by this past election that I can't do anything else is to negate all the history and all of our ancestral work that fought in the face of crooked elections, fought in the face of denial of the right to vote, lynchings based on the right to vote. Look at the nation's history.
PARKER: It feels like this country has been in this perpetual state of protest since maybe 2020, maybe earlier, 2017. Does what we're looking at right now seem to be working or have you seen it shift?
BROWNE-MARSHALL: I've seen a shift because I haven't seen the use of strategy the way it was used previously. And there's an impatience. This is the 21st century. People don't want to re-protest what was already protested and won, you know? So consider the Montgomery bus boycott was in 1955. We gained the civil rights legislation in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
PARKER: Right.
BROWNE-MARSHALL: And so many lives were lost. So many people were assaulted. So many protests happened during that time period of 1955 to 1965. But people want the TV version, and they want to see the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in...
PARKER: Some protests happened, and it was all done, and it was fixed.
BROWNE-MARSHALL: And it was all done. It was 1965.
PARKER: I saw that movie.
BROWNE-MARSHALL: Yeah. You saw the movie "Selma."
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "SELMA")
DAVID OYELOWO: (As Martin Luther King Jr.) We heard them say we don't deserve to be here.
(CHEERING)
OYELOWO: (As Martin Luther King Jr.) But today, we stand as Americans.
BROWNE-MARSHALL: You know, it's like, yeah, then - and you even get a theme song.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GLORY")
JOHN LEGEND: (Singing) One day, when the glory comes, it will be ours. It will be ours. Oh, one day.
BROWNE-MARSHALL: So I think that there's much more to it because we're in a nation that began with this kind of, you know, dual personality of stating, we want liberty while on stolen Indigenous land and kidnapped African people. So there's always been this conflict between what's been stated as liberty and freedom and what's actually been given. So perpetual protests, I would agree with that.
The Enemy Aliens Act was something that was passed by federal legislation in the 1700s. So we had just gotten to be a country when they started to limit the protest rights of immigrants. So that's why I'm telling you, once you look at the history of it and you realize this is something that's two steps forward, one step back, but it's two necessary steps - necessary - or else you're always going backwards. That's why it's so important to understand that protest is a necessary part of our work.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BROWNE-MARSHALL: I think what's missing as well is, it's not that the people before were naive. Yes, they wanted to just live their life. I think they believed in rest as well. Rest didn't just start in the 21st century, so they wanted to rest. But they decided to use their honest rage in ways that would be progressive for the community, for their families and for the future. And I think that's something I was - want people to understand, that folks before weren't just so giving of their time and money and energy that they didn't think about anything else. They wanted to be with their families. They wanted to enjoy their lives, too. But they also knew there was something bigger than themselves that they needed to be a part of. And that's why we have the rights and protections we have today because they protested. Those rights were on the paper, just like the eight-hour workday was on the paper in 1800s. But the protests made them a reality that we today can take for granted.
PARKER: Yeah.
BROWNE-MARSHALL: So I think we need to think about and look at the future. And are we going to be freedom freeloaders, or are we going to invest in a future in which there are people who gain rights and protections based on our work, the same way we gained them based on other people's work?
PARKER: On that note, thank you, professor.
BROWNE-MARSHALL: (Laughter) Thank you, Parker.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
PARKER: So Gloria J. Browne-Marshall talked about the history of protests, but I wanted to talk to someone as well who's on the ground at current protests and could talk to our listener Katie's concern about what's going on right now. So I called up the news and politics editor at Teen Vogue, Lex McMenamin. They've been covering protests for years. And they said, while protests are often messy and incomplete, they've definitely seen reasons for hope, reasons that aren't always easy to pick up from afar. Lex reflected on the 2020 uprisings that happened after George Floyd was killed and during the height of the COVID pandemic.
LEX MCMENAMIN: And so just like everyone else, like, I - my family was suffering. Like, I was in a really terrible position in 2020, and it wasn't, like, just being at home bored all the time. It was, like, there were real material conditions that were, you know, not only impacting me directly but my friends, my communities. Things were really difficult.
And so part of what was so fascinating to me about how the 2020 uprisings for George Floyd and the movement for Black Lives was covered was as these scary, violent, terrifying, need to call in the National Guard for safety purposes rhetoric that obviously Trump and no shortage of other politicians and public figures used, when in reality, they were often extremely joyous. There were opportunities to make public art. There were dance battles, more mutual aid, food handouts. I got so much free stuff, like, during those protests. Like, one of the best reusable masks I'd ever had in my life I got at a George Floyd protest in D.C.
PARKER: Lex also talked about some of the tangible results that have come out of those and other protests.
MCMENAMIN: I mean, I have, like, a list of some things that are actual wins that are going on in the last couple years that I can...
PARKER: Please, Lex, give it to me.
MCMENAMIN: (Laughter) Just in the last six months or whatever, the Tesla Takedown movement has, like, completely, completely targeted Elon's pockets, like, quite effectively. Like, you've seen it in how Tesla is, like, trending, for example. So that's one thing where it's like, that's not necessarily what I think protesters would necessarily highlight as, like, the movement. But it's a way in which people are trying to, like, connect with each other to target someone that has a role in this administration right now.
But more, like, traditionally, after Trump's executive order in January around hospitals providing gender-affirming care - which people have suggested is an attempt to lay the groundwork for adult-level, gender-affirming care bans - several hospitals across the country preemptively complied and announced they would stop providing gender-affirming care for trans youth. But protests that happened in various cities across the country actually got some of those hospitals to reverse their decisions on that and continue providing care, which truly is lifesaving health care. And so even if that's 10 kids - right? - that are, like, able to continue seeing their doctors, that's 10 kids who are going to make it to 25 maybe and, like, get to be people, like, after this, not just statistics.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MCMENAMIN: Once again, like, the idea is, like, the protest is the one-time thing that can bring you in. The rest of your life is, like, how you keep actually enacting the protest beyond just that one day. So, like, use it as an opportunity. Like, figure out a way to do something that maybe sounds fun to you. Maybe it's making art for the next protest. Like, there's only a thousand million ways that we can find little ways to fight back.
PARKER: Lex, thanks so much for being on the show.
MCMENAMIN: Thank you so much for having me.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
PARKER: And that's our show. You can follow us on Instagram - @nprcodeswitch. If email is more your thing, ours is codeswitch@npr.org. And subscribe to the podcast on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also subscribe to the CODE SWITCH newsletter by going to npr.org/codeswitchnewsletter.
DEMBY: And just a reminder that signing up for CODE SWITCH+ is a great way to support our show and to support public media, and you get to listen to every episode with no sponsors. So please go find out more at plus.npr.org/codeswitch.
This episode you're listening to was produced by Xavier Lopez. It was edited by Leah Donnella, and our engineer was Jimmy Keeley.
PARKER: And a big shoutout to the rest of the CODE SWITCH massive - Christina Cala, Jess Kung, Courtney Stein, Dalia Mortada and Veralyn Williams.
DEMBY: I'm Gene Demby.
PARKER: I'm B.A. Parker.
DEMBY: Be easy.
PARKER: Hydrate.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
Copyright © 2025 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
Accuracy and availability of NPR transcripts may vary. Transcript text may be revised to correct errors or match updates to audio. Audio on npr.org may be edited after its original broadcast or publication. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.