Key players in the conflict over civil rights 171Protest Today After King’s and others’ nonviolent protests produced significant
successes, mass protest became the preferred tool of many social movements for
civil rights and other causes. Vietnam War protesters marched on Washington by the
hundreds of thousands in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The women’s rights, gay
rights, and environmental movements have staged many mass demonstrations in
Washington and other major cities. The largest single day of protest in the United States
was the Women’s March on January 21, 2017, which drew an estimated 4.2 million
people in 654 American cities and another 300,000 in 261 cities around the world to
protest the election of Donald Trump and call attention to issues concerning women’s
rights, health care, and immigration reform.^52
Social movements may also use direct action, rather than mass protests, to
advance their causes, as was the case with the protests against the Dakota Access
Pipeline in 2016–2017. When an oil pipeline was approved stretching from North
Dakota to southern Illinois, Native Americans from the nearby Standing Rock Indian
Reservation objected on the grounds that the pipeline’s route under the Missouri
River posed a threat to their sources of clean water and to their ancient burial grounds.
Thousands of protesters occupied the construction site for months in an effort to stop
the pipeline, but ultimately law-enforcement officers cleared the protesters with water
cannons, tear gas, and rubber bullets. In December 2016, President Obama issued
an executive order requiring an environmental impact statement for the part of the
pipeline that was to go under the river. However, President Trump overturned that
order, and the pipeline was completed in May 2017.^53
The tools of social movements have evolved in recent years to combine the power
of social media with mass protest. #BlackLivesMatter started in 2013 on social media
but has since expanded to organize mass protests against police killings in many
cities across the country. Black Lives Matter is a large, decentralized movement that
is not organized under a traditional hierarchy or national leadership. Black Lives
Matter activists have thus used a broad range of tactics to raise awareness and put
pressure on police departments to change their policies, including marches, “die-
ins” (protests in which participants block traffic by lying in the street), and social
media campaigns. Many police departments have responded to the organization’s
concerns about excessive police violence and a lack of accountability by adopting new
policies, such as requiring police officers to wear body cameras.^54 The cause received
a boost in 2017 when many NFL players kneeled during the playing of the national
anthem before games to call attention to racially biased policing and police violence.
President Trump pressured NFL owners to force the players to stand, saying thatAfter King’s and others’ nonviolent
protests produced significant
successes, mass protests became
the preferred tool of many social
movements, such as the Women’s
March on Washington (left) and Black
Lives Matter (right).Full_06_APT_64431_ch05_148-197.indd 171 16/11/18 1:29 PM