In a 1857 speech celebrating the 25th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in Britain’s Caribbean colonies, Frederick Douglass made one of his most famous statements: “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” The force of the point was not lost on the largely Black crowd that had gathered in upstate New York to hear Douglass’ speech—they had yet to win their struggle against slavery in the United States. In fact, Douglass was writing in the wake of significant setbacks for the abolitionist cause, including the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which denied people freed of slavery basic rights of trial by jury or habeas corpus while allowing them to be hunted across state lines. Douglass, however, was reminding his audience not to confuse “outward and hollow seemings of humility and repentance” with the real target of social change: By concerted, protracted struggle, in whatever forms were necessary.
Today’s protesters and advocates against police brutality and structural racism are the inheritors of this same moral force. As in Douglass’ day, activists are hoping to make major structural changes: to substantially reform or even totally abolish institutions like prisons and police. And as in Douglass’ day, they face an uphill battle against entrenched political and financial interests. For them to succeed, they need to heed Douglass’ warning: That for protests to succeed, they must be backed by movements with the ability to promise to withhold—labor, debt payments, rent payments, or consumer support—and to follow through if demands aren’t met. Protests by such movements consequently morph into real, tangible promises: demonstrations of an ability to escalate, backed by strategic leverage.
References to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his iconic 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech are ubiquitous in American politics, as are the images and moral legacy of the peaceful marches for justice associated with his approach to politics. We who protested in the summer of 2020 after the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade lived up to this aspect of the legacy, drawing vast multitudes of people to demand an end to injustices. By one estimate, 15 to 26 million people participated in the protests that raged that summer. And, just as in Selma in 1965, demonstrators were confronted with violence: indiscriminate use of pepper spray, tear gas, and life-altering rubber bullets to stand up against police brutality under the banner of slogans like “defund the police” and “Black lives matter.”
The protests weren’t for nothing: 20 cities cut police funds in some form in at least a temporary fashion; protestors in Seattle were able to win tens of millions toward a grassroots effort to let the public decide directly what and how to spend its money on public safety. But despite mobilizing an unprecedented number of Americans to the cause, and a brief interlude filled with the symbolism of task forces on racism and shoring up of diversity commitments from corporations, the political landscape that has developed in the years since is antithetical to the chants and signs of the 2020 protest movement. Local police were not defunded; besides the 20 holdouts, police budgets generally increased the very next year after the protests, and the recent pivot of President Donald Trump’s administration to a project of mass deportation has begun to draw local law enforcement into the “100 mile border zone” in which federal immigration enforcement agents are allowed to execute its full powers—a zone that encompasses fully two thirds of the American population. The Trump administration has also engaged in a full-scale assault on laws and executive orders that were key victories in the Civil Rights era struggle against segregation and discrimination.
What’s missing from the formula this time was a promise to withhold—a tactic that also proved successful, but perhaps less commonly heralded, in the civil rights movement::: For instance, the ”I Have A Dream” speech was made at a march for Jobs and Freedom—pairing a fight for fairness and inclusion with a fight over wealth and economic opportunity. Accordingly, the March for Jobs and Freedom was initiated by labor organizer and union founder A. Philip Randolph and organized by unionists in the Negro American Labor Council. In fact, the march itself was modeled off a plan Randolph and his co-workers had made back in 1941, the credible threat of which forced then President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to concede the important anti-discrimination executive order to desegregate the war industry to avoid Randolph’s promised strike (executive orders which Trump repealed in his very first days of his second term).
For the 1963 version of the march, the Negro American Labor Council brought together an important group of organizational allies pairing King (representing the Southern Christian Leadership Conference) with support from organizations including the NAACP, the Urban League, and the United Auto Workers. What was key to the success of that march was also what the ‘63 march shared in common with the planned march in 1941: The credible threat of disrupting business as usual that the organizations behind it represented. Such mobilizations might start with marches, but could advance elsewhere—for instance, King’s SCLC had itself been born out of the proven success of the Montgomery bus boycott, and the inclusion of the Negro American Labor Union alongside major unions like the UAW meant the possibility of major strike actions if the demands were not met, including the possibility of a “general strike” across all workers, like the UAW has called for today.
They were “demonstrations” in the fullest sense of the word—proof of how many people these organizations could mobilize, and how militantly they could be mobilized. They were promises about the kind of escalation the powers that could be expected if demands were not met, not just performances of dissatisfaction. The 2020 protests involved a lot of commitment by brave citizens, but largely did not have this kind of organizational base––the kind that could potentially impose the costs of a concerted strike or boycott. This helps to explain why the protests got the “the low-hanging fruit of symbolic transformation”, as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor wrote a year after the George Floyd protests, in response rather than loftier goals like, say, defunding the police.
Those of us disappointed about the outcomes of the 2020 matches are not alone. As Vincent Bevins chronicles in his 2024 book If We Burn, many protest movements across the world in recent years have faced similar drawbacks, for similar reasons: decentralized, social media-based approaches were effective in harnessing attention and organizing street demonstrations. But they couldn't steer the response of the system in the protests’ intended direction because there was no organizational support. All we got was black squares on Instagram. The very commitments that allowed the movements to garner attention and spectacle proved stumbling blocks once the cameras stopped rolling and only tanks and bullets remained.
None of this means that we’ve run out of time to course correct. There are encouraging signs even amid the worsening political landscape: While the protests may not have swayed policymakers, history suggests that the initial conservative backlash of the public was followed eventually by a progressive shift in voting behavior. This evidence suggests that, as with the civil rights movement, the long run may favor the movement—at least those people and organizations that survive long enough to reap the benefits of a more favorable audience. The organizations that survive may be able to direct political conversation and set the agenda for course correction in the aftermath of continued overreach from the present administration.
Above all, they can apply an approach to politics more like the one that succeeded in the civil rights movement or in Douglass’ vision of abolition—protests that withhold and promise, rather than merely perform. This may prove indispensable in the years to come.
Táíwò is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University and a fellow at the Climate and Community Institute. He is the author of the critically acclaimed books Elite Capture and Reconsidering Reparations.
This project was created in partnership with the Center for Policing Equity.