Protest is the very foundation upon which the United States was built. In demanding the government answers to the people and not the other way around, it is vital to a functioning democracy and at the core of the First Amendment.
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In 2020, protests feel particularly ubiquitous; spurred on by the Black Lives Matter Movement, which has since become one of the biggest global civil rights actions in the history of the world. The protest movement as we know it today began with the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till — his killers declared not guilty the very same day Breonna Taylor’s would some 65 years later.
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“Nobody’s free until everybody’s free,” activist Fannie Lou Hamer famously said in a 1971 speech. It is a principle at the heart of Picturing Resistance: Moments and Movements of Social Change from the 1960s to Today (Ten Speed Press), a new book by Melanie Light and Ken Light.
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