INTRODUCTION
From the beginning of American history, people have used free speech to advocate for increased equality. Often, they have been people lacking political power, like the 3,000 Black men and women who gathered in Philadelphia in 1817 to protest plans of the American Colonization Society to send them “back” to Africa, or reformers who gathered in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848 to demand that women receive equal rights, including the right to vote, or workers who fought for more than a century for the right to organize unions and strike for a living wage.
Conservatives seeking to retain power, even, or especially, when they were in the minority, have tended to fight change: Federalists who supported voting rights only for men of wealth, Democrats who supported slavery, and present-day Republicans who target people from historically marginalized groups with legislation that restricts ballot access. Defenders of slavery violently attacked abolitionists without fear of arrest or retribution. Judges threw suffragists into jail for picketing the White House and fed them through rubber hoses when they staged hunger strikes. Government used troops to crush strikes.
In announcing the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, Martin Luther King, Jr. explained that he intended to push the right to protest to the limit. “The only weapon that we have in our hands is the weapon of protest,” he said. “If we were incarcerated behind the iron curtains of a communistic country — we couldn’t do this. If we were trapped in the dungeon of a totalitarian regime — we couldn’t do this. But the great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for the right.”
Segregationists did everything they could to thwart civil rights protests. They launched a legal attack on the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Police used fire hoses and attack dogs to disrupt demonstrations. The Ku Klux Klan killed civil rights workers.
As a new age of protest has dawned, the fight for social change continues. Millions of women marched a day after Donald Trump took office in 2017. Later, high school kids across the country left their classrooms to protest gun violence. The Black Lives Matter movement sent demonstrators into the streets of hundreds of communities. Protests catalyzed by the murder of George Floyd while handcuffed by police in Minneapolis were the largest in American history.
This is the story of how the powerless have used free speech to pursue the promise of equal rights for all, and how it continues to fuel the fight for democracy.
Copyright © 2022 by Christopher M. Finan, foreword by Randall Kennedy. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
