“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 officials, was many things; nonviolent protest it was not.
• No Pension Fund: Daisy Bates. Browne-Marshall’s favorite figure in the book: the Little Rock organizer who learned at nine that the woman raising her was not her mother — her mother had been murdered by a white mob and thrown in the pond where Daisy swam as a child. She guided the Little Rock Nine into Central High under armed National Guard escort amid daily death threats; as NAACP secretary she chose jail over surrendering the membership list, a refusal that went to the Supreme Court; she faced sexism inside the movement itself, spoke before the United Nations — and died nearly penniless, fed by neighbors. Protest has no vacation plan and no pension fund. (Mother Jones was smuggled into the same answer. “You’re cheating.” “I know. I am.”)
• Outsourced Outrage. Why the relative quiet now? COVID scattered Americans into silos; the administration’s shock-and-awe blitz kept them off balance; masked, nameless ICE agents and capitulating law firms (Paul Weiss, by name) spread fear; and — echoing Claire Stapleton’s moral-compass warning from earlier this week — “too many people have outsourced their sense of outrage,” mistaking an email or an Instagram post for action. What’s needed: leaders willing to fight, strategy and alliances, visible plans, and a protest that is for something — democracy, diversity, health, literacy. The model remains the March on Washington, whose anniversary falls August 28: one hundred organizers, a quarter-million regular people, and a government reminded of its own Constitution.
About the Guest
Gloria J. Browne-Marshall is a professor of constitutional law at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, a civil rights attorney, and an award-winning playwright whose work has been staged and televised. Her books include She Took Justice, The Voting Rights War, and Race, Law, and American Society. She is the founder of Martyrs Day, observed July 5 in honor of slain protesters, and host of the forthcoming She Took Justice podcast. A Protest History of the United States (Beacon Press, ReVisioning History series), winner of the 2026 Independent Publisher Book Awards gold medal for history, is now out in paperback. She lives in New York City.
References:
• A Protest History of the United States by Gloria J. Browne-Marshall (Beacon Press) — 500 years of resistance, from Powhatan’s stand against the English in 1607 to the climate protests of today.
• Curtis White’s On Resistance — Monday’s Keen On conversation on cultural resistance, to which this episode is the historian’s reply.
• Claire Stapleton’s Don’t Be Evil — whose warning against outsourcing your moral compass finds its twin in Browne-Marshall’s “outsourced outrage.”
• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck — her example of art doing what no pamphlet can: bringing the humanity of an issue to the fore.
• Daisy Bates and the Little Rock Nine — Central High School in Little Rock still stands as what Browne-Marshall calls a living monument to protest.
• &nbs...
