The United States of Protest: Gloria Browne-Marshall on the Engine Room of American Democracy

“Democracy didn’t fall out of the sky. It was earned. It was created, and it was made manifest through protest.” — Gloria Browne-Marshall

Yesterday, Casey Michel described a United States of Oligarchy where the wealthy cosy up to dictators and destroy democracy. Today, Gloria Browne-Marshall describes a parallel America. In A Protest History of the United States, she explores 500 years of profound protest to what Michel coins the banality of the deal. If Casey Michel described the few who own the country, then Gloria Browne-Marshall chronicles the many who made it.

Her thesis is that a nation born of protest has been protesting with itself ever since. So Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence while owning the teenaged Sally Hemings. Democracy is protest’s child, not its parent. Rather than just falling out of the sky, she argues, American democracy was earned by protesters like her great hero, Daisy Bates, the Little Rock organizer whose mother was murdered by a white mob.

So where’s the protest now? “Too many people have outsourced their sense of outrage,” Gloria Browne-Marshall argues. Thus our Covid silos and the capitulating law firms. Her prescription for this malaise is, of course, to get out on the streets. She reminds us that the anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, with its quarter of a million protesters, is coming up at the end of the month. So it’s been done before. And will be done again. The United States of protest rather than of oligarchy. That’s who we are. Sometimes, at least.

Five Takeaways

•       A Nation in Protest with Itself. America was born of protest — the Declaration itself was a protest document — and has argued with itself ever since: the empire builder rolling over the rights of others on one side, liberty-and-justice-for-all on the other. Jefferson embodies the conflict: theorist of protest, author of the Declaration, slaveholder at Monticello with the teenaged Sally Hemings. And the artists matter as much as the marchers, Browne-Marshall argues, in a hand-off from Monday’s Curtis White conversation: the Depression photographs that moved a government, The Grapes of Wrath doing what no pamphlet could — art brings the humanity of the issue to the fore.

•       Democracy Didn’t Fall Out of the Sky. Asked about the d-word, Browne-Marshall answers that she expected it to be dissent. Democracy came by way of protest: the workers, the women, the marginalized earned rights nobody was volunteering to hand over. Vernon Dahmer was burned alive in his Mississippi home in 1966 — in a democracy — for trying to vote; Seneca Falls in 1848 became the Nineteenth Amendment only in 1920. The Voting Rights Act gave nobody the vote; it protected a right people were dying to use. And protest’s victories hide in plain sight: the end of mandatory retirement at 65, disabled children in mainstream classrooms — all of it protested into existence.

•       January 6 and the Meaning of Nonviolence. Is January 6 a protest? Yes, she allows — a protest with criminal consequences, like any protest that turns violent; rob a bank and call it a protest against poverty and the consequences still arrive. Nonviolence, meanwhile, is the most misunderstood word in the American vocabulary: a philosophy — Gandhi to Bayard Rustin to King — in which protesters will not strike back even when attacked. It is not a standard that applies only to Black protesters while the actual violence, historically, comes from those attacking them. January 6, with its gallows, its ransacked offices, and its hunted offici