An Analysis of Student Involvement in Movements for Racial Justice from the 1960s to the Present

Published June 2025

Introduction

In 2009, a group of fifteen kindergarten students from Capitol Hill Day School in Washington, D.C., descended on downtown.¹ After learning about Marian Wright Edelman through a school-wide Black History Month study, the students were inspired to walk the path taken by thousands of demonstrators throughout history who have protested in front of the White House. The children chanted the messages on their handmade signs before singing “The Marian Song,” written by a teacher:

Marian Wright Edelman,
She thought things should be fair;
If they were not, she would make
Signs and picket there;
Born in the South, moved to D.C.,
True to yourself you should be;
She has three sons, works hard for you and me.²

Photo Source: Brigitte E. Dubois, Young Children as Activists: Celebrating BHM and Marian Wright Edelman’s Work 18, 24 Soc. Stud. & the Young Learner 18 (2011).

The kindergarteners’ demonstration outside the White House began with their teachers’ belief that students as young as five years old could recognize and understand the concepts of active citizenship, justice, and service to fellow community members.³ Throughout February, the students had spent their afternoons learning about Edelman’s life as a student, activist, and civil rights lawyer, including her tenure directing the Legal Defense Fund (LDF) office in Jackson, Mississippi. They learned the iconic song “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which became known as the “Black national anthem,” and discussed the importance of embracing all peers as equals, no matter what they look like.⁴ The students’ demonstration had a profound impact on all involved, with their teacher later writing, “As they waved their hand-painted signs in the direction of the White House, they seemed to be confidently acknowledging the power that lay inside.”⁵

The fact that Edelman’s life and work could inspire such rousing enthusiasm in this group of students will not surprise those who know her story. Born in 1939, she attended Spelman College in the late 1950s, where she quickly became a leading student activist.⁶ As the sit-in movement spread from Greensboro, North Carolina, to the rest of the South, Edelman and a group of college student activists wrote the civil rights manifesto “An Appeal for Human Rights” and organized sit-ins in Atlanta, Georgia.⁷ In March 1960, over 200 college students participated in the sit-ins, which were some of Georgia’s largest civil rights demonstrations.⁸ By the following fall, the number of student activists participating in the sit-ins had grown to the thousands, resulting in the closure of sixteen lunch counters in one day.⁹

Edelman, Lonnie King, Julian Bond, and the many other students who participated in civil rights demonstrations throughout the country in the 1950s and 1960s are exemplars of the importance of student activism and protests to push for social change.ⁱ Edelman went on to become the first Black woman admitted to the Mississippi bar.¹⁰ She directed LDF’s office in Jackson, Mississippi, advocated with the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D.C., and ultimately founded the Children’s Defense Fund in the same city in 1973.¹¹ She led the Children’s Defense Fund for almost five decades.¹² Edelman’s experience as a student activist “strengthened her resolve to continue the fight against Jim Crow”¹³ in her later endeavors.¹⁴

“An Appeal for Human Rights,” p. 1, Advertisement in the Atlanta Constitution, 1960. Constance W. Curry papers. Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University. 0818-010.tif. Found on the Civil Rights Movement Archive, crmvet.org

The right to protest, which Edelman and countless other student activists throughout history have exercised, is essential in defending and advancing the core principles of U.S. democracy.¹⁵ Protests fall squarely within the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution’s guarantees of freedom of expression and assembly.¹⁶ The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable or excessive police force while demonstrating, and the Fourteenth Amendment further enshrines equal protection under the law, making racially discriminatory police practices against protesters unconstitutional.¹⁷ Through protest and freedom of assembly, activists can use their bodies to call attention to racial injustices.¹⁸ Law enforcement’s role should be to safeguard constitutional freedoms—including the right to peaceful protest—by ensuring that individuals can express themselves without fear of arrest or excessive force.

This Brief proposes a framework illustrating how students’ involvement in protests and activism has effectively advanced racial justice and promoted social progress, using the examples of the 1964 Freedom Summer voter registration campaign in Mississippi and the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests following the police killing of George Floyd.ⁱⁱ In each movement, participants worked to: 1) raise awareness of racial injustices; 2) build Black political power; and 3) advance policy changes to remedy structural inequities against Black people. This Brief further details how opponents of racial justice often respond to progress with backlash through both violence and attempts to restrict lawful protest activities, and how such repression can limit subsequent protest activity for racial justice.

Student Protest Framework

The framework utilized in this Brief demonstrates the relationships between student protests, social change, and backlash against progress for racial justice causes.

Case Study Selection

The Freedom Summer campaign and BLM protests are appropriate case studies for this student protest analytic framework because both movements engaged student activists, promoted racial justice causes, and centered nonviolent strategies. Importantly, both were national: Freedom Summer drew support from college students throughout the country who traveled to Mississippi, and BLM protests, while not isolated to students, occurred nationwide in the summer of 2020.

This analysis therefore draws upon historic and recent movements as guides for building methodologies and strategies that current students can employ during protests.

Photo 1: Freedom Summer demonstrators in Greenville, Mississippi, call for federal intervention and protections after the disappearance of three civil rights workers. (Photo by Tracy Sugarman/Jackson State University via Getty Images)
Photo 2: Students rally outside of a St. Paul, Minnesota, high school during a walkout to protest the killing by police of Amir Locke in February 2022. Locke, twenty-two, was shot and killed by Minneapolis Police during a no-knock raid. (Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

Scope of the Brief

Intentional, organized protests do not exist in isolation—they are part of a movement strategy. It is difficult to disaggregate the achievements of specific protest activities from broader social movement strategies. Protest activities played a central role in the movement efforts of the Freedom Summer campaign and BLM protests. For the purposes of this Brief, protest is defined as strategic individual or collective action aimed at expressing values or views to influence decision-making.¹⁹ For Black and other racially marginalized communities, protests serve as a powerful alternative to electoral politics for demanding justice, confronting systemic racism, and amplifying voices historically excluded from democratic processes. Social movements are therefore collective, organized efforts to change laws, policies, or practices by those who do not hold the power needed to enact change through traditional institutional channels.²⁰ This Brief, which centers the role of student activism in the Freedom Summer and BLM movements, argues that the successes of these social movements reflect achievements not only of the specific protest activities but also of the broader movement-related organizing and advocacy efforts.²¹

While this Brief focuses on the involvement of students in both movements, the impacts presented in some cases stemmed from the efforts of wider coalitions of student, youth, and adult participants. Empirical evidence does not comprehensively separate the achievements of solely student activism versus activism that included other groups of people.

Social movements—and the protests that accompany them—have the power to change laws and social perceptions. The student protesters described in this Brief sought to create a more inclusive and just society. Because restrictive barriers to protests may limit people’s ability to engage in this important democratic practice, institutions and leaders must vigorously uphold the civil and human rights of all protesters, including students, by adhering to rule-of-law principles.

Glossary

Activism is broadly defined as “the use of direct action to create change.”²² Activism can take the form of striking, boycotting, protesting, signing petitions, and more. This Brief focuses on protests. However, protests are often situated within larger webs of activism, making up social movements.²³

Political power is the ability of groups to collectively influence the government to enact the substantive policies, laws, or other actions they desire.²⁴ The metrics of political power explored in this Brief are group representation in political bodies and access to and use of voting systems.

“Protest is a form of individual or collective action aimed at expressing ideas, views, or values of dissent, opposition, denunciation, or vindication. Examples include the expression of political, social, or cultural opinions, views, or perspectives; the vocalization of support or criticism regarding a group, party, or the government itself; the reaction to a policy or the denunciation of a public problem; the affirmation of identity or raising awareness about a group’s situation of discrimination and social exclusion.”²⁵

Social movements are organized, collective efforts to “change laws, policies, or practices by people who do not have the power to effect change” through traditional institutional channels.²⁶

Freedom Summer, 1964

“The questions that we think face the country are questions which . . . are much deeper than civil rights. They’re questions which go very much to the bottom of mankind, and of people. They’re questions which have repercussions in terms of our whole international affairs and relations. They're questions which go to the very root of our society. What kind of society will we be? What kind of a people will we be?"

– Robert P. Moses

A Freedom Summer Organizer, Speech on Freedom Summer at Stanford University, 1964²⁷

Photo: Freedom Summer student volunteers John Harris and Charles McLaurin at an Indianola, Mississippi, courthouse. (Photo by Tracy Sugarman/Jackson State University via Getty Images)

The Freedom Summer movement in 1964 was an effective mechanism for advancing racial justice and democratic participation. The students who volunteeredⁱⁱⁱ to participate in Freedom Summer explicitly aimed to publicize racial injustices in the South, build Black political power, and advance policy changes to secure Black people’s civil rights.²⁸ While Freedom Summer achieved these goals, activists faced backlash through both direct violence from individual actors and the criminalization of protest activities. Despite the continued need to resolve ongoing discrimination, the suppression of the Freedom Summer movement and other racial justice protests in 1964 ultimately limited the size and frequency of subsequent civil rights protests.

The Freedom Summer Campaign

On February 1, 1960, a group of Black students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College, a historically Black, land-grant research university in Greensboro, North Carolina, walked into a local Woolworth’s store and sat at a “whites-only” lunch counter.²⁹ This action quickly galvanized young people across the country, ushering in a new student movement that later led to Freedom Summer.³⁰ In the 1960s South, efforts to desegregate public accommodations and build Black political power—including securing voting rights—were carried out through sit-ins, picketing, and nonviolent protest marches.³¹ In 1961, members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and local Mississippi organizations came together to form the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO).³²

COFO’s main objective was to coordinate student-led activism throughout Mississippi. The state’s Jim Crow-era policies prevented Black people from registering to vote or casting a ballot. In 1964, only 5.3% of Black people in Mississippi were registered to vote due to widespread violence and intimidation targeting those who tried to exercise their right to vote.³³ Therefore, while COFO pursued numerous projects, student activism during Freedom Summer shifted its focus from integrating public spaces to building Black political power throughout the South through access to the ballot in local, state, and national elections.³⁴

Coordinated through COFO, hundreds of Northern college students with a variety of backgrounds and prior civil rights affiliations traveled to Mississippi for the Freedom Summer campaign.³⁵ Once in Mississippi, Freedom Summer students helped lead voter registration drives, operated Freedom Schools to educate local residents on civil rights and Black history, and brought national attention to the entrenched racial injustices of the Jim Crow South.³⁶ Freedom Summer students coordinated public protests and voting rights campaigns throughout Mississippi.³⁷ Black Freedom School participants conducted sit-ins at local libraries, restaurants, and department stores to test the protections of the recently passed Civil Rights Act of 1964.³⁸ After the out-of-state students left Mississippi, local Freedom Summer students and other community members continued to organize protests.³⁹

Building on earlier Civil Rights Movement campaigns that harnessed national media pressure to push for integration, Freedom Summer students used similar media and letter-writing tactics to demand enforcement of Black Southerners’ constitutional right to vote. Freelance photojournalist Ted Polumbaum documented the events of Freedom Summer, including protests against voter suppression.⁴⁰ In Greenwood and other cities throughout Mississippi, Polumbaum photographed the arrests of Freedom Summer students during public voter registration drives and voting rights demonstrations.⁴¹ The media and organizing strategies resulted in tangible gains for Black communities in the South.

LDF Involvement in Freedom Summer

LDF litigators, including Edelman and others in LDF’s Jackson office along with cooperating attorneys, represented over 250 Freedom Summer activists and pushed to increase the allocation of funds and lawyers to Mississippi.⁴²

A pamphlet distributed by LDF to Freedom Summer students about legal rights of persons arrested in Mississippi. Source: https://www.naacpldf.org/freedom-summer-ldf-legacy/

The Impact of Freedom Summer

Publicizing racial injustices

Freedom Summer sought to expose how discriminatory laws and violent intimidation denied Black Southerners their constitutional right to vote.⁴³ Bruce Hartford, an activist with CORE and SNCC in the 1960s, wrote that early in the planning of the Freedom Summer campaign, the organizers adopted a strategy that included placing 1,000 Northern, mostly white students in the South to “focus enough public attention to force Washington to act.”⁴⁴ As they hoped, the white students’ work prompted substantial media attention, which raised awareness nationwide of the denial of Black Southerners’ voting rights.⁴⁵ Freedom Summer students wrote letters to their homes in the North for publication in local newspapers and school or church bulletins, or through informal networks of family and friends.⁴⁶ National Black publications such as Jet, Ebony, and the Chicago Defender also covered the Freedom Summer movement.⁴⁷ Freedom Summer was one of the first instances of the Civil Rights Movement gaining around-the-clock media attention.⁴⁸

Building Black political power

By engaging in mass mobilization efforts, the architects of Freedom Summer attempted to increase the political power of Black communities to influence both the 1964 presidential election and state or local elections. The students therefore built voter registration and mobilization into their plans for the summer.⁴⁹

The movement built a base of engaged citizens through Freedom Schools, in which Freedom Summer students and community members taught Black Mississippians. The schools provided Black Southerners with the tools to be active participants in their political futures.⁵⁰ In addition to traditional subjects such as reading, writing, arithmetic, and history, the six-week summer program offered lessons not taught in public schools at the time, including units on Black history and constitutional rights.⁵¹ The explicit goal of the schools was to empower Black Southerners with the knowledge to confidently register, vote, or even run for office.⁵² During the summer of 1964, nearly forty Freedom Schools served upwards of 3,000 students.⁵³

Thanks in part to these efforts, by 1967, almost sixty percent of Mississippi’s Black voting-eligible population was registered to vote, and Black representation in elected offices had markedly increased.⁵⁴ Historian Charles Payne argued that while the subsequent legislative wins and electoral participation gains were significant achievements, the real impact of Freedom Summer was the “transformation in the local people themselves,” for whom “defiance of white supremacy had been institutionalized.”⁵⁵

Advancing policy changes

Freedom Summer, along with the legislative advancements passed in response to the efforts of civil rights activists, revolutionized Black Mississippians’ access to the ballot and ability to run for political office.⁵⁶ Freedom Summer students made a cornerstone of their campaign the racial discrimination Black communities in the South faced as they sought to vote. They put pressure on local, state, and federal officials to pass legislation to secure civil and voting rights for Black people under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.⁵⁷ Freedom Summer students’ tactics included drawing media attention to ongoing racial injustices in the South.⁵⁸ The students used this media attention both to recruit more Northern students and to make voting rights enforcement a priority for Congress and the White House.⁵⁹ The efforts of Freedom Summer students were a driving force behind the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, two of the most impactful civil rights laws since the Reconstruction Era.⁶⁰

THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1964 promoted equality for all people by prohibiting discrimination in public places on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. The law further declared that public schools and accommodations must integrate.⁶¹

Demonstrators at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. (Photo by Warren K. Leffler via Library of Congress)

THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT OF 1965 outlawed discriminatory voting practices and enforced the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. The law banned voting barriers such as literacy tests and poll taxes, which were adopted in many Southern states following the Civil War.⁶²

Selma foot soldiers singing while marching from Selma to Montgomery on March 25, 1965. (Photo by Stephen F. Somerstein/Getty Images)

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in public places, schools, and federally funded programs; strengthened the enforcement of voting rights; and established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission within the Department of Justice to enforce civil rights laws.⁶³ The act applied not only to government agencies and public schools but also to private institutions receiving federal funds, enhancing its sweeping impact.⁶⁴ The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed local literacy tests for voters and appointed federal examiners to certain jurisdictions with a history of discrimination, working to fully effectuate the goals of the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.⁶⁵ The Voting Rights Act paved the way for Black voters, and a quarter of a million new Black voters had registered by the end of 1965.⁶⁶ These gains translated into representation: in 1962, only 1,470 Black elected officials served in local governments in the South, but by 1980, that number had increased to 6,440.⁶⁷ By prohibiting racial discrimination in employment, voting, and a host of other domains, these pieces of legislation changed the landscape of American life.⁶⁸

The Freedom Summer campaign thus strengthened racial equity and democratic participation in the United States by publicizing racial injustices, increasing Black representation within local governments, and advancing policy changes. One scholar wrote in 1966 that such movements for Black political power and civil rights in the early 1960s “probably constitute the most important new moral-political force in America since . . . the New Deal.”⁶⁹

Civil Rights Movement Archive Materials

Workers active in CORE, NAACP, SNCC, and other organizations during the Civil Rights Movement later created the web-based Civil Rights Movement Archive, which includes the following materials.

Backlash to Freedom Summer

Violence in response to student protests

While Freedom Summer students organized meetings, held voter registration drives, and taught at Freedom Schools, they placed their bodies and lives on the line as they faced violence from state actors—local police—and others who opposed their movement. Police, state legislators, and other Mississippi officials responded to the Freedom Summer students with hostility and used violence, intimidation, and arrests to undermine their efforts. The National Archives estimates that during Freedom Summer, police arrested 1,062 activists, while white supremacists—often with the tacit support of local authorities—assaulted eighty students and bombed or burned thirty-seven churches and thirty Black homes and businesses⁷⁰ Both police and white supremacy groups such as the Ku Klux Klan carried out these assaults on Freedom Summer students.⁷¹ Fannie Lou Hamer, an activist and leader in the Freedom Summer movement, spoke at the 1964 Democratic National Convention about the violence she had experienced while registering Mississippians to vote—testifying that segregationist state actors had beaten and brutalized her and other activists.⁷² Her testimony was so powerful that President Lyndon Johnson called an impromptu press conference to divert attention from her speech.⁷³

Criminalization of the activities associated with protests

In addition to physical violence, Freedom Summer students faced suppression through the criminalization of protest activities. Several laws passed during this era targeted protest tactics such as picketing, leafleting, and public gathering.⁷⁴ This restricted the rights and practices of students and other racial justice protesters.

As Mississippi officials denounced the Freedom Summer campaign, state legislators passed and the governor signed laws prohibiting expressive activities such as picketing and leafleting.⁷⁵ To enforce these restrictions, elected officials nearly doubled the size of the state police and equipped local sheriffs and police forces with new weaponry.⁷⁶ A June 2, 1964, COFO document aggregated a selection of thirty-seven anti-civil rights bills in the Mississippi legislature that year, many of which targeted expressive activity.⁷⁷ For example, Senate Bill 1545 prohibited the distribution of leaflets calling for economic boycotts, while House Bill 546 prohibited “the unlawful picketing of state buildings, courthouses, public streets, and sidewalks.”⁷⁸ Further, House Bill 777 aimed to outlaw passive resistance in civil rights demonstrations, while at least two bills explicitly attempted to criminalize “Freedom Schools and Community Centers.”⁷⁹ House Bill 64 allowed police to restrict freedom of movement for individuals and groups and to establish curfews without formally declaring martial law.⁸⁰

The Suppression of Freedom Summer Activities

Despite the ongoing need to confront racial injustice, the violent suppression and over-policing of Freedom Summer protests contributed to a sharp decline in civil rights demonstrations from 1964 to 1966. While no comprehensive empirical evidence documents the precise number and impact of civil rights protests during the 1960s, digital libraries and primary source documentation show a dearth of civil rights protests in 1966 compared to 1964. The Civil Rights Movement Archive timeline includes at least seventeen protest movements throughout the South during 1964, including the Freedom Summer movement.⁸¹ However, the 1966 protests decreased to ten.⁸² While this decrease in protest activity could be a reaction to other factors, the Civil Rights Digital Library at the University of Georgia provides evidence that government opposition impacted Civil Rights activism.⁸³ According to the digital library, one movement for voting rights in Georgia “all but collapsed the following July [1964] when four civil rights activists were arrested and charged with sedition in the wake of large-scale direct action protests.”⁸⁴

The 1964 Freedom Summer movement and its corresponding protest activities ultimately advanced racial justice and democratic participation through publicizing racial injustices in the South, building Black political power, and securing policy changes such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965.⁸⁵ These advances upheld and strengthened the promise of the Reconstruction amendments. As police, legislators, and others who opposed civil rights attempted to curtail this progress, Freedom Summer students faced both direct violence and the targeted criminalization of their activities, which hindered subsequent racial justice protests. As discussed in the following section, the BLM protests over half a century later prompted institutional responses that mirrored the tactics of repression used during Freedom Summer.

Black Lives Matter, 2020

“I personally feel like: If not now, then when? It’s so important for our voices to be heard. There needs to be change. I felt like it was important to get out there and peacefully protest and have my voice be heard.”

– Alayna Jenkins, a Harvard University student reflecting on her experiences protesting in 2020 in St. Louis, Missouri⁸⁶

Photo: Black Lives Matter protesters in St. Paul, Minnesota, on October 10, 2020. (Photo by Tim Evans/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

The Black Lives Matter Movement

In the summer and fall of 2020, nearly sixty years after the Freedom Summer, the United States experienced one of the most potent mass mobilizations in its history.⁸⁷ In direct response to the police killings of Black individuals such as George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, tens of millions of people across the country attended racial justice demonstrations.⁸⁸

Similar to the Freedom Summer movement, the BLM protests in 2020—and the broader network of activism accompanying them—set out to publicize racial injustices, build Black political power, and advance policy changes.⁸⁹ And as with the earlier civil rights protests, institutional and individual actors also responded to the BLM protests with repression. BLM activists faced state-sanctioned violence along with surveillance, arrest, and prosecution for protest-related activities, which in turn limited subsequent protest activity.

Public demonstrations have been a pillar of BLM activities since the movement’s founding in 2013. The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, a group representing the organizers of the BLM protests that swept the nation in 2020, engages in research, public education, policy formation, and frontline organizing.⁹⁰ The movement gained widespread attention when public demonstrations surged nationwide in 2020 in response to police murdering Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota. One dataset recorded over 7,750 demonstrations linked to the BLM movement between May and August 2020 across more than 2,440 locations in all fifty states and Washington, D.C.⁹¹

In contrast to the Freedom Summer movement, which students founded and ran, students did not found the BLM movement, nor did they instigate every BLM protest.⁹² However, the wave of nonviolent activism surrounding BLM affected students throughout the country, with young people ultimately shaping the movement.⁹³ The first large-scale quantitative survey of adolescents’ exposure to BLM demonstrations found that youth engaged deeply with the protests.⁹⁴ In 2021, Yale University researchers conducted a survey of nearly 5,000 young people across the United States and found that a staggering seventy percent of respondents engaged with the BLM movement, including twelve percent who reported attending in-person protests.⁹⁵ One survey further reported that thirty-nine percent of Black respondents between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine participated in BLM protests.⁹⁶ For comparison, twenty-six million total individuals, or less than ten percent of the United States population on May 1, 2020, took part in BLM protests.⁹⁷ In interviews with researchers, students from a rural public university reported that they participated in BLM protests with the intent of “fostering Black student solidarity, education of white peers, and illuminating the physical and emotional costs of protesting racism in the twenty-first century.”⁹⁸

No comprehensive data exist on whether students or other groups more frequently took the lead in organizing BLM protests. However, journalists documented BLM protests on college and university campuses nationwide, including at Marquette University, the University of Florida, the University of Cincinnati, and the University of North Carolina.⁹⁹ Black student leaders also played a central role in the broader BLM social movement, including sending letters urging local government officials to denounce police brutality and collaborating with student governments to address racial inequity.¹⁰⁰ Therefore, although students did not universally lead the BLM movement or its attendant protests, they played a central role in the movement.

Ultimately, the BLM movement successfully publicized racial injustices, built Black political power, and advanced policy changes.

The Impact of The Black Lives Matter Movement

Publicizing racial injustices

The BLM protests of 2020 aimed to draw attention to racialized police violence against Black people.¹⁰¹ According to a Brookings Institution analysis, ninety-four percent of respondents who had participated in the summer 2020 protests reported racial justice and/or police brutality as one of their reasons for protesting.¹⁰²

Protesters used two primary platforms—national media coverage of BLM protests and grassroots social media posts—to call for an end to systemic racism and the discrimination faced by Black communities.¹⁰³ Online activists first used the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter in July 2013, following George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin.¹⁰⁴ Researchers at national organizations and universities soon began to track the rise in media coverage of BLM protests, demonstrating how news coverage played a role in the movement’s growth.¹⁰⁵ One 2021 research paper from the University of Minnesota analyzed 412 news articles about BLM, suggesting widespread media coverage at the height of the movement.¹⁰⁶ Social media also provided a platform for the BLM movement, with more than forty-four million #BlackLivesMatter tweets from nearly ten million users shared from July 2013 through March 2023.¹⁰⁷

Research has demonstrated that the police killing of Floyd and the ensuing protests caused an increased awareness of discrimination against Black people, decreased racial prejudice, and increased support for policies such as reparations for systemic racism against Black people.¹⁰⁸ In one study, fifty-three percent of poll respondents reported supporting the BLM movement as of June 10, 2020, up from forty-one percent a year earlier.¹⁰⁹ In addition, an analysis of Google search volume, Twitter mentions, Wikipedia page visits, and national news media sources found that BLM protests led to an increased use of antiracist vocabulary and interest in antiracist topics.¹¹⁰ Researchers found that on days with major protests, such as those following Floyd’s murder, Google searches for terms related to antiracism increased.¹¹¹ Notably, this increased attention was sustained, rather than short-lived: the antiracist discourse that proliferated in the wake of Floyd’s murder continued well through the end of that year, with searches for antiracist terminology remaining much higher in December 2020 compared to December 2019.¹¹² This shows that social movements, led by protests, have the power to shape discourse about racial justice issues.

Building Black political power

BLM activists have prioritized political mobilization and the building of Black political power to advance the movement’s aims. The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation recognizes the importance of voting as a mechanism for making necessary policy changes to protect Black lives and advance racial equality.¹¹³ The group’s website urges people to get involved in frontline organizing by “tak[ing] the protest to the polls!” and to work toward economic equality for Black people and community reinvestment by registering and voting.¹¹⁴ At some BLM protests, activists have put QR codes to register to vote on protest signs, signaling a commitment to mobilize voters who value the racial justice ideals of the BLM movement.¹¹⁵

Available data suggest that this commitment impacted political participation in the 2020 presidential election, the first election after the summer 2020 BLM protests. One study by a University of Pennsylvania researcher compared voting patterns between 2016 and 2020, using responses from six nationally representative surveys of more than 3,000 people. The researcher found that voter turnout increased in 2020 and that increases in voters’ perceptions of racial inequality significantly impacted which candidate they chose.¹¹⁶ The increased salience of race in 2020 almost doubled the likelihood of vote-switching to the candidate who supported policies more closely aligned with BLM.¹¹⁷

Advancing policy changes

The millions of people nationwide protesting for Black lives, and law enforcement’s often excessive use of force against such protests, triggered a swell of support for reform. This growing public awareness of and support for the goals of the BLM movement created an opening for tangible policy gains in police accountability and public safety.¹¹⁸

The Electoral Justice Project of the Movement for Black Lives drafted the BREATHE Act, a federal “omnibus bill born out of the George Floyd protests and rooted in the vision of sixty Black-led community organizations to reimagine public safety proactively and as a public health imperative for Black communities.”¹¹⁹ The Movement for Black Lives reported that in the year following the July 2020 unveiling of the BREATHE Act, communities such as Denver, Colorado, and Oakland, California, secured over $840 million in police budget cuts and $160 million in investments in community services, and voters in over a dozen cities overwhelmingly supported ballot initiatives to fundamentally change policing practices.¹²⁰ The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation also supported the People’s Response Act, inspired by the BREATHE Act’s vision of public safety.¹²¹ The People’s Response Act, sponsored by then-U.S. Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri, aimed to support local governments and community-based organizations in implementing community safety approaches that reduce law enforcement contact.¹²² In the 118th Congress, the bill was referred to the Subcommittee on Health but did not make it out of committee.¹²³ That same term, forty-five members of Congress co-sponsored the Ending Qualified Immunity Act, which would have limited liability shields for police officers in certain instances.¹²⁴

At the state and local level, LDF’s Justice in Public Safety Project compiled an index of policing legislation and found that state legislatures introduced over 3,000 policing-related bills in the year following the 2020 protests.¹²⁵ During this period, sixteen states passed laws to ban chokeholds, five states passed restrictions on no-knock warrants, and four states weakened qualified immunity.¹²⁶ To promote greater transparency and accountability for police officers, in 2021 Maryland legislators overrode the governor’s veto to repeal the state’s Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights, which protected officers from discipline and legal consequences for on-the-job actions.¹²⁷

Protests can further civil rights and racial justice at all levels of government. Despite nearly sixty years separating them, both the 1964 Freedom Summer and the 2020 BLM protests aimed to advance American society in significant and lasting ways. Both efforts achieved progress by shedding light on racial injustices, increasing Black political power, and advancing policy changes.

Backlash to the Black Lives Matter Movement

Violence in response to protests

While no comprehensive study exists to document violence enacted specifically on student activists who led or otherwise participated in BLM protests, there is ample evidence of the violence enacted against BLM protesters writ large. The LDF Thurgood Marshall Institute brief “Police and Protests: The Inequity of Police Responses to Racial Justice Demonstrations” shows that although ninety-three percent of racial justice protests in the summer of 2020 did not involve protesters using violence or destroying property, police responses to such protests included making mass arrests, driving police vehicles into crowds of protesters, and indiscriminately using projectiles and chemical weapons such as rubber bullets, tear gas, or pepper spray.¹²⁸ Dr. Sandhya Kajeepeta and Dr. Daniel K.N. Johnson, the study’s research leads, examined approximately 1,900 protests and demonstrations. They found that police in general were 3.1 times more likely to show up at racial justice protests compared to other protests, and riot police, state police, and/or the National Guard were 7.6 times as likely to be present at racial justice protests compared to other protests. Racial justice protesters experienced more violence because of the heightened police presence at demonstrations.¹²⁹ In addition to heavy physical police presence at protests, local police and federal law enforcement also monitored BLM organizers through digital surveillance, including tracking their social media activity.^iv

Existing evidence suggests that students likely face the same risks of violence when exercising their right to protest for racial justice. According to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, there were more than 440 reported aggressions against the press covering BLM protests—which includes high school and college student journalists—between May and June 2020.¹³⁰ A large-scale quantitative survey of adolescents’ exposure to BLM protests further found that seventeen percent of adolescents who attended such demonstrations witnessed police using force.¹³¹

Upholding the right to protest requires eliminating targeted violence toward those participating in demonstrations, especially from state actors such as police. Yet, direct violence is not the only mechanism through which protest suppression occurs—suppression also takes place through legislative action to criminalize protest activities.

POLICE AND PROTESTS:
The Inequity of Police Responses to Racial Justice Demonstrations

Throughout history, protest has been a crucial tool to advance social justice. And throughout history, people protesting against this racialized police violence have been met with more racialized police violence. This brief examines the striking disparities between police responses to racial justice demonstrations and other protests.

Read the Brief

Criminalization of the activities associated with protests

Evidence since the founding of the BLM movement shows that anti-protest bills often follow mass racial justice protests. Between 2014, when there were widespread BLM protests on college campuses following the police killing of Michael Brown, and 2018, at least nine states considered or enacted legislation disciplining students for protest behavior.¹³² After June 2020, state officials across the country put forth over 100 proposals that would restrict the right to free assembly. In the 2021 legislative session alone, lawmakers proposed eighty-one anti-protest bills in over thirty states.¹³³ According to an ACLED analysis, these bills passed in every Southern state except Louisiana. The new legislation included increasing the penalties for protesting and granting immunity to drivers who hit and injure protesters with their vehicles during demonstrations.¹³⁴ These state proposals represent a substantial increase from earlier years: an analysis of anti-protest bills in the United States by the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL) documented only seventeen anti-protest bills in 2018 and forty-one in 2019.¹³⁵

Importantly, anti-protest proposals that successfully passed into law did so in states where a higher proportion of BLM protests had taken place.¹³⁶ The ACLED analysis found that legislators more frequently introduced or enacted anti-protest bills in states with more BLM protests.¹³⁷ A PEN America analysis noted, “The bills often use vague terminology for concepts like ‘unlawful assembly,’ which would afford police wide discretion to determine what constitutes criminal activity—discretion that evidence shows is likely to be wielded in biased or arbitrary ways.”¹³⁸ The ICNL analysis further found that many anti-protest bills provide protections for people who cause harm to protesters, such as shielding drivers from civil liability if they injure or kill protesters who are blocking roads.¹³⁹

Such legislation circumscribing protest rights followed periods of heightened protest activity, such as the 2020 BLM demonstrations, and also passed more often in states where BLM protests took place. These anti-protest laws are therefore likely to disproportionately impact the rights and practices of racial justice protesters, including students.

The Suppression of Black Lives Matter Movement Activities

The United States experienced a reduction in racial justice protests following state-sanctioned repression aimed at BLM protesters. Data from the Crowd Counting Consortium show robust participation in antiracism protests in June 2020, when 1,845,317 people participated in antiracism protests.¹⁴⁰ By 2022, however, June protest participants in the United States had decreased to 984,472.¹⁴¹ This represents a decrease of 46.65% from June 2020 to June 2022. Similarly, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Global Protest Tracker, which tracks known protest events across the globe, estimated that one million people took part in protests for racial justice causes centered around police, including BLM, in the United States in 2020 alone.^v In comparison, only 24,200 participants joined protests on any topic from the summer of 2020 through early March 2025.¹⁴² Existing evidence therefore demonstrates a substantial decrease in protest participation since 2020.

BLM activists have used their power to publicize ongoing police violence and systemic racism, build Black political power, and advance policy reforms to combat discrimination. After BLM protesters faced state-sponsored and disproportionate violence as well as the criminalization of their activities, protest participation in the United States substantially decreased. This raises concerns about the ability of people today to fully realize their First Amendment right to freedom of speech and assembly.

PROTECTING PROTEST IS PROTECTING DEMOCRACY:
How LDF Challenges Police Violence Against Protesters

The right to protest is a cornerstone of democracy that has long been essential for Black people’s struggle for racial justice in the U.S. LDF represented Freedom Riders, Selma foot soldiers, 1,100 Black children in Birmingham who had been expelled for taking part in street demonstrations, participants of the sit-in movement, and a conscientious objector.

Current Challenges

Student protests for racial justice can effectively promote social change and strengthen democracy by raising public awareness of racial injustices, building political power, and advancing more inclusive and just legislation and policies. However, backlash through violence targeting protesters and the criminalization of protest-related activity stifles racial justice progress.

Freedom Summer and BLM are not the only instances of the United States’ historic pattern of restricting the ability of protesters to engage in their constitutionally protected right to expressive action. Students have been involved in, or at the heart of, nearly every social movement in the United States since the mid-twentieth century.¹⁴³ This remains true for the recent wave of pro-Palestinian protests on college and university campuses.

On October 7, 2023, members of Hamas launched an attack in Israel, killing more than 1,200 people and taking over 250 hostages.¹⁴⁴ In response, Israel launched an offensive ground and air campaign in Gaza, killing more than 46,600 Palestinian people by early 2025.¹⁴⁵

In the following weeks and months, peaceful protests and dissent proliferated throughout the country, including on college campuses. Between October 7, 2023, and June 7, 2024, the Crowd Counting Consortium recorded nearly 12,400 pro-Palestine protests in the United States.¹⁴⁶ Echoing similar ambitions to the racial justice case studies covered earlier in this Brief, the majority of campus protesters for Palestinian rights centered policy change by calling for divestment from Israeli companies and publicizing the rising death toll and mistreatment of Palestinian people in Gaza.¹⁴⁷

Many of these peaceful campus protests were met with disproportionate responses by armed law enforcement. In May and July 2024, LDF sent two letters urging the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Education to investigate law enforcement abuses and civil rights violations enacted against campus protesters for Palestinian rights.¹⁴⁸ The letters came after police officers—some of whom came to protests at the behest of university administrators—detained, arrested, or used excessive force against thousands of students and other protesters.¹⁴⁹ LDF estimated more than 1,600 arrests at thirty campuses in one month alone.¹⁵⁰ In 200 different documented instances, law enforcement intervened in campus protests for Palestinian rights even when protesters had not engaged in any violent or destructive behavior.¹⁵¹

In addition, a January 2025 presidential executive order appears to take aim at students who have participated in pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses by conflating advocacy on behalf of Palestinians with antisemitism.¹⁵² The order requires certain cabinet secretaries to submit reports to college administrators informing them of how to monitor and report “activities by alien students and staff” that could lead to “actions to remove such aliens,” including the cancellation of student visas.¹⁵³ This order, and the creation of a Department of Justice multi-agency taskforce for the same purposes, places pro-Palestinian protesters at risk because of their advocacy.¹⁵⁴

While not enough evidence yet exists to conduct a full analysis of the recent pro-Palestinian student protests using the framework articulated in this Brief, it is clear that many student protests have employed similar tactics to those used by the Freedom Summer and BLM protesters. Pro-Palestinian student activists have likewise also faced disproportionate and abusive backlash through violence targeting protesters and the criminalization of protest-related activity. LDF President and Director-Counsel Janai Nelson made the following statement on the similarities between pro-Palestinian protests and historic movements for racial justice: “It is impossible to watch the scenes playing out across the country and not be reminded of the profoundly impactful, nonviolent student activism that has positively shaped the course of our nation—and of history generally—for more than seventy years.”¹⁵⁵

Despite this pattern of backlash, student protests remain an essential part of advancing racial justice and democracy. From demonstrations during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s to the BLM protests in 2020 to the present day, student bodies and college campuses serve as incubators for social change.¹⁵⁶ Public demonstrations have been, and continue to be, integral to students’ advocacy efforts. In this moment, the right to protest must therefore be protected.

Paths Forward

“We . . . have joined our hearts, minds, and bodies in the cause of gaining those rights which are inherently ours as members of the human race and as citizens of these United States. . . . We do not intend to wait placidly for those rights which are already legally and morally ours to be meted out to us one at a time. . . . We want to state clearly and unequivocally that we cannot tolerate, in a nation professing democracy and among people professing democracy and among people professing Christianity, the discriminatory conditions under which the Negro is living today in Atlanta, Georgia.”

– “An Appeal for Human Rights,” 1960¹⁵⁷

Juneteenth march in Washington, D.C., on June 19, 2020. (Photo by Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)

Preserving the right to protest, including for students and youth, is essential to producing a more inclusive and just society. The Freedom Summer and BLM protests achieved tangible gains for social justice causes, such as the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the repeal of the Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights in Maryland. Rather than serving as an antagonist to democratic societies, protest signifies both the promotion and defense of democracy. The Organization of American States acknowledges that in situations where democratic rights or democratic institutional order are challenged, “protest should be understood to ‘[correspond] not only to the exercise of a right, but also to compliance with the obligation to defend democracy.’”¹⁵⁸

The Thurgood Marshall Institute advocates for essential protections of the right to protest, especially for student protesters, as a key component in the creation of a true multi-racial democracy. While certain restrictions on protests are permitted under the First Amendment (e.g., time, place, and manner restrictions that do not discriminate against certain viewpoints), officials can and should provide stronger protections that go beyond the requirements of the Constitution and enable peaceful protest. Officials should take the following actions to protect and uphold the right to protest: 

Legislators should repeal existing laws criminalizing protest activities, such as laws limiting picketing, leafleting, and public gathering.  

City officials should establish funds to remedy harm from the policing of protesters, distributed through community-led grantmaking processes and modeled after the settlement of Smith, et al. v. City of Philadelphia, et al. when and if harm occurs.¹⁵⁹

When law enforcement agencies are developing new protest management policies, they should involve community members, protest organizers, and activists in crafting the policies to the extent possible, including through collective agreements.

Protest policies should establish clear guidance for responding officers that provides greater protection than minimal legal requirements to prevent violations of the right to protest. These should include: 

Prohibiting the use of weapons with indiscriminate impact on protesters, observers, and bystanders, including tear gas, chemical irritants, and acoustic weapons;

Prohibiting crowd dispersal orders during peaceful protests as a preventative measure, for passive resistance to police, or in response to isolated acts by individuals within a crowd; and

Requiring exhaustion of nonviolent tactics before resorting to any use of force. 

Local government officials responding to protests should: 

Resolve disagreements regarding protest tactics through mediation and dispute-resolution processes; 

Consider restorative solutions for violations of rules in the course of protest activity; and

Maintain open lines of communication with protest organizers in order to facilitate demonstrations and to hear criticisms and concerns giving rise to protests so they can address underlying issues of inequity. 

Protests are a crucial part of the interconnected web of activism actions, such as striking, boycotting, and signing petitions, that drive social movements.¹⁶⁰ Previous research demonstrates that protests can shape public opinion, mobilize voters, and create policy change.¹⁶¹ Notably, public demonstrations for racial justice are overwhelmingly nonviolent: an estimated ninety-three percent of racial justice demonstrations in the summer of 2020 involved no violence, property destruction, or road blockades.¹⁶² Dismantling people’s rights to hold public demonstrations and express themselves would allow government and institutional actors to adopt policies without confronting public objections from those who are impacted by their actions and whom they, in many cases, are responsible for representing.¹⁶³ Only through acknowledging the sanctity of protest and protecting the rights of those who use their bodies and voices to call for change can the nation successfully build the future that youth are already imagining.

Endnotes

Brigitte E. Dubois, Young Children as Activists: Celebrating BHM and Marian Wright Edelman’s Work 18, 24 Soc. Stud. & the Young Learner 18 (2011), https://www.socialstudies.org/system/files/publications/articles/yl_240218.pdf.
Id at 21.
Id. at 19.
Id. at 20.
Id. at 18.
Britta Waldschmidt-Nelson, From Civil Rights to Children’s Rights: Marian Wright Edelman and the Children’s Defense Fund, 69 J. for the German Ass’n of Am. Stud. 245 (2024), https://amst.winter-verlag.de/data/article/12170/pdf/102403001.pdf.
Id. at 248. See also Howard Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History (Beacon Press, 2018); Marian W. Edelman, Lanterns: A Memoir of Mentors (Beacon Press, 1999).
Waldschmidt-Nelson, supra note 6 at 248.
Edward Hatfield, Atlanta Sit-ins, New Ga. Encyc., https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/atlanta-sit-ins/ (last modified July 15, 2020).
Miss. Bar, Evelyn Gandy Lecture Series, https://web.archive.org/web/20241114121509/https://www.msbar.org/expired-events/evelyn-gandy-lecture-series-save-the-date/.
NAACP Legal Def. Fund, Scholarship Recipients: Marian Wright Edelman, https://www.naacpldf.org/about-us/scholarship-recipients/marian-wright-edelman/ (last visited Mar. 3, 2025).
Children’s Def. Fund, About Us: Our History, https://www.childrensdefense.org/about-us/our-history-2/ (last visited Mar. 3, 2025).
Waldschmidt-Nelson, supra note 6 at 248.
NAACP Legal Def. Fund, supra note 11.
Martin J. King, Time, Place, and Manner: Controlling the Right to Protest, 76 FBI L. Enforcement Bull. 20 (2007). See also Edison Lanza, Protest and Human Rights: Standards on the rights involved in social protest and the obligations to guide the response of the State 1, Off. of the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (2019), https://www.oas.org/en/iachr/expression/publications/Protesta/ProtestHumanRights.pdf; Harrop A. Freeman, The Right of Protest and Civil Disobedience, 41 Ind. L.J. 228 (1966), https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/ilj/vol41/iss2/3; ACLU, Rights of Protesters, https://www.aclu.org/issues/free-speech/rights-protesters#:~:text=The%20right%20to%20join%20with,to%20thwart%20free%20public%20expression (last visited Mar. 3, 2025).
Id.; U.S. Const. amend. XIV, § 1; U.S. Const. amend. IV.
Id.; see also Sandhya Kajeepeta & Daniel K. N. Johnson, Police and Protests: The inequity of police responses to racial justice demonstrations 4, Thurgood Marshall Inst. (Nov. 2023), https://tminstituteldf.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Police-and-Protests_PDF-3.pdf.
Freeman, supra note 15.
Philippe Hanna et al., Conceptualizing social protest and the significance of protest actions to large projects, 3 Extractive Indus. & Soc’y 217 (2015), https://research.rug.nl/files/96369994/1_s2.0_S2214790X15001409_main.pdf; see also Lanza, supra note 15 at 5.
Erica Chenoweth et al., Who Protests, What Do They Protest, and Why?, Inst. of Labor Ec. by Deutsche Post Found. (IZA DP No. 15697, 2022), https://docs.iza.org/dp15697.pdf. See also Alison Mack, Alina Baciu, & Nirupa Goel, Supporting a Movement for Health and Health Equity: Lessons from Social Movements: Workshop Summary, ch. 2 (National Academies Press, 2014), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK268722/.
See Donatella D. Porta, Eventful Protest, Global Conflicts, Scandinavian J. Soc. Theory 27 (2009), https://lsa.umich.edu/content/dam/ces-assets/ces-docs/DonatellaFinal2.pdf.
Christina Müllenmeister, Jesper Larsen Maersk, & Lisette Farias, Exploring doing activism as a means for political action and social transformation in Germany, 30 J. Occupational Sci. 377 (2022), https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14427591.2022.2110146#d1e251.
Daniel Q. Gillion, The Political Power of Protest: Minority Activism and Shifts in Public Policy 9 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013).
Daryl J. Levinson, Looking for Power in Public Law, 130 Harv. L. Rev. 21 (2016), https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-130/looking-for-power-in-public-law/.
Lanza, supra note 15 at 5.
Mack et al., supra note 20.
Robert P. Moses, Speech on Freedom Summer at Stanford University, American RadioWorks (Apr. 24, 1964), https://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/blackspeech/bmoses.html.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Rsch. & Educ. Inst., Freedom Summer, https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/freedom-summer (last visited Mar. 3, 2025); History.com, Freedom Summer, https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/freedom-summer (last modified Apr. 16, 2021).
Kellie C. Sorey & Dennis Gregory, Protests in the Sixties, 28 Coll. Student Aff. J. 184, 192 (2010), https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/efl_fac_pubs/42/.
Id.
Id. at 188; Freeman, supra note 15 at 6.
Nicole Burrowes et al., Freedom Summer and Its Legacies in the Classroom, 52 S. Q. 155 (2014), https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/277/article/567257/pdf.
Arlisha Norwood, Freedom Summer, Nat’l Women’s Hist. Museum, https://www.womenshistory.org/resources/general/freedom-summer#:~:text=Freedom%20Summer%20of%201964%20was,around%20the%20clock%20media%20attention (last visited Mar. 3, 2025).
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Doug McAdam, Freedom Summer 71 (Oxford Univ. Press, 1988).
Id.
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Id.
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Gianna Baez, 60 Years of Freedom Summer: Legacies and Lessons from the Trailblazing Voting Rights Project, NAACP Legal Def. Fund (Aug. 6, 2024), https://www.naacpldf.org/freedom-summer-ldf-legacy/.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Rsch. & Educ. Inst., supra note 28.
Bruce Hartford, Mississippi Freedom Summer 1964 68 (Bay Area Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, 2011), https://www.crmvet.org/tim/msfs64.pdf.
Id. at 87.
Id. at 38, 86.
Id. at 86.
Norwood, supra note 33.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Rsch. & Educ. Inst., supra note 28.
Deborah Menkart & Jenice L. View, Exploring the History of Freedom Schools, C.R. Teaching, https://www.civilrightsteaching.org/resource/exploring-freedom-schools (last visited Mar. 3, 2025).
Baez, supra note 42.
Menkart & View, supra note 50; Andrew Goodman Found., Civics for Change: Freedom Summer 1964 (June 17, 2022), https://andrewgoodman.org/news-list/civics-for-change-freedom-summer-1964/.
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Joshua A. Douglas, A History of Third-Party Voter Registration Drives, Inst. for Responsive Gov’t (May 17, 2023), https://responsivegov.org/research/a-history-of-third-party-voter-registration-drives/.
Burrowes et al., supra note 32 at 163.
Baez, supra note 42.
Id.
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Id.
Library of Cong., The African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship, https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/african-american-odyssey/civil-rights-era.html (last visited Mar. 3, 2025).
R. 7152, 88th Cong. (1964).
Nat’l Archives, Voting Rights Act (1965), https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/voting-rights-act (last visited Mar. 3, 2025).
https://www.congress.gov/bill/88th-congress/house-bill/7152/text H.R. 7152, 88th Cong. (1964). See also Madison Minges, The Legacy of the Civil Rights Act, 60 Years Later, Am. Univ. Sch. Int’l Serv. News (June 28, 2024), https://www.american.edu/sis/news/20240628-the-legacy-of-the-civil-rights-act-60-years-later.cfm; U.S. Dep’t of Labor, Legal Highlight: The Civil Rights Act of 1964, Off. of the Ass’t Sec’y for Admin. & Mgmt., https://web.archive.org/web/ 20250206104612/https://www.dol.gov/agencies/oasam/civil-rights-center/statutes/civil-rights-act-of-1964 (last accessed Feb. 6, 2025).
H.R. 7152, 88th Cong. (1964); see also Minges, supra note 63.
Pub. L. 89-110, 89th Cong. (1965); see also Nat’l Archives, supra note 62.
Id.
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Baez, supra note 42.
Freeman, supra note 15.
Nat’l Archives, Freedom Summer, https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/vote/freedom-summer (last visited Mar. 3, 2025).
Id.; Wis. Historical Soc’y, What Was the 1964 Freedom Summer Project?, https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Article/CS3707 (last visited Mar. 3, 2025).
Norwood, supra note 33.
PBS Civil Rights Collection, Fannie Lou Hamer’s Testimony, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/freedomsummer-hamer-testimony/ (last visited Mar. 3, 2025).
As an example, House Bill 546 became Chapter 343 of the Laws of 1964, later codified as § 2318.5 of the Mississippi Code of 1942, annotated. See Cameron v. Johnson, 262 F. Supp. 873 (S.D. Miss. 1966); H.B. 777, Reg. Sess. (Miss. 2024); H.B. 62, Reg. Sess. (Miss. 2024).
Wis. Historical Soc’y, supra note 71.
Id.
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Supra note 54.
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Id.
Supra notes 65 and 66.
Juan Siliezar, Why they protest: Harvard students share why they took part in recent BLM protests and what this moment means to them, Harv. Gazette (July 9, 2020), https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/07/harvard-students-on-why-they-protest/.
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Kajeepeta & Johnson, supra note 17.
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Gabriel R. Sanchez, Americans continue to protest for racial justice 60 years after the March on Washington, Brookings Inst. (Aug. 25, 2023), https://www.brookings.edu/articles/americans-continue-to-protest-for-racial-justice-60-years-after-the-march-on-washington/.
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Crystal R. Chambers & Loni Crumb, And the Band Played On: Student Activism and the Black Lives Movement at a Rural Regional Public University, 37 J. Rsch. Rural Educ. 67 (2021), https://jrre.psu.edu/sites/default/files/2021-12/37-7-08.pdf.

Steve Chaplin, Black Lives Matter: Students, Campuses Are Central to the Movement, ACUI (June 11, 2020), https://acui.org/blog/2020/06/11/black-lives-matter-students-campuses-are-central-to-the-movement/.
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Diana C. Mutz, Effects of changes in perceived discrimination during BLM on the 2020 presidential election, 8 Sci. Adv. 2 (2022), https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/sciadv.abj9140; Julie Sloane, The Black Lives Matter Movement, but not COVID-19, Encouraged Voters Toward Biden in the 2020 Election, Univ. of Penn. Annenberg Sch. Comm. (Mar. 2, 2022), https://www.asc.upenn.edu/news-events/news/black-lives-matter-movement-not-covid-19-encouraged-voters-toward-biden-2020-election.
Mutz, supra note 116 at 4.
Crutchfield, supra note 89.
Movement for Black Lives, supra note 89.
Id.
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H.R. 4699, 118th Cong. (2023).
Id.
Jamillah B. Williams, Naomi Mezey, & Lisa O. Singh, #BlackLivesMatter: From Protest to Policy, 28 William & Mary J. Race, Gender, & Soc. Just., 103, 127 (2021), https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3439&context=facpub. See also, H.R. 7085, 116th Cong., 2d Sess. (2020); Justin Amash (@justinamash), Twitter (May 31, 2020, 9:30 PM), https://twitter.com/justin amash/status/1267267250475675651 [https://perma.cc/SHK6-MFR7].
NAACP Legal Def. Fund, After George Floyd: The Changing Landscape of Public Safety, https://www.naacpldf.org/george-floyd-anniversary (last visited Mar. 7, 2025).
Id.
Williams et al., supra note 124 at 128.
Kajeepeta & Johnson, supra note 17 at 3.
Id. at 5.
The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, https://pressfreedomtracker.us/ (last visited Mar. 7, 2025); see also Joe Severino, Student journalists covering protests face unprecedented violence from police, S. Poverty L. Ctr. (June 30, 2020), https://splc.org/2020/06/student-journalists-covering-protests-face-unprecedented-violence-from-police/.
Baskin-Sommers et al., supra note 94.
Charles H.F. Davis, Suppressing Campus Protests and Political Engagement in U.S. Higher Education: Insights from the Protest Policy Project 109, Univ. Mich. Nat’l Ctr. for Inst. Diversity (2019), https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/p/pod/dod-idx/suppressing-campus-protests-and-political-engagement-in-us.pdf?c=currents;idno=17387731.0001.109;format=pdf.
Roudabeh Kishi et al., A Year of Racial Justice Protests: Key Trends in Demonstrations Supporting the BLM Movement 10, ACLED (May 25, 2021), https://acleddata.com/acleddatanew/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/ACLED_Report_A-Year-of-Racial-Justice-Protests_May2021.pdf.
Id. at 11, fig.
Int’l Ctr. for Not-for-Profit L., Analysis of US Anti-Protest Bills, https://www.icnl.org/post/news/analysis-of-anti-protest-bills (last visited Mar. 7, 2025).
Kishi et al., supra note 133 at 10.
Id.
Nora Benavidez, James Tager, & Andy Gottlieb, Closing Ranks: State Legislators Deepen Assaults on the Right to Protest, PEN America, https://pen.org/closing-ranks-state-legislators-deepen-assaults-on-the-right-to-protest/ (last visited Mar. 7, 2025).
Int’l Ctr. for Not-for-Profit L., supra note 135.
Erica Chenoweth & Jeremy Pressman, Crowd Estimates May 2020, Crowd Counting Consortium, https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pZo5p9EKZJ87IvPVjIp50nQQPET_ucV8vKVfZ6NpOvg/edit?gid=1538635238#gid=1538635238 (last visited Mar. 7, 2025); Erica Chenoweth & Jeremy Pressman, Crowd Estimates June 2020, Crowd Counting Consortium, https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-HM-bFsnTd9omYOrB8JOMeQ0XzPvCaVaADKqXQ_RpXg/edit?gid=1538635238#gid=1538635238 (last visited Mar. 7, 2025).
Supra note 140.
Carnegie Endowment, Global Protest Tracker, https://carnegieendowment.org/features/global-protest-tracker?lang=en (last visited Mar. 7, 2025).
Vadim V. Ustyuzhanin, Patrick S. Sawyer, & Andrey V. Korotayev, Students and protests: A quantitative cross-national analysis, 64 Int’l J. Compar. Sociol. 375, 379 (2022), https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/00207152221136042. See also Nick Crossley, Social Networks and Student Activism: On the Politicising Effect of Campus Connections, 56 Sociol. Rev. 18 (2008), https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.2008.00775.x; Leonid Grinin et al., Students and Socio-Political Destabilization: A Quantitative Analysis, 87 Politeia: J. Pol. Theory, Pol. Phil., & Sociol. Pol. 35 (2017), https://www.sociostudies.org/upload/socionauki.ru/book/files/iim_10_en/006_Grinin,_Malyzhenkov.pdf; Herbert Moller, Youth as a Force in the Modern World, 10 Compar. Stud. in Soc’y & Hist. 237 (1968), https://www.jstor.org/stable/177801; Cristiana Olcese, Clare Saunders, & Nikos Tzavidis, In the streets with a degree: How political generations, educational attainment and student status affect engagement in protest politics, 29 Int’l Sociol. 525 (2014), https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0268580914551305, Sirianne Dahlum, Students in the streets: Education and nonviolent protest, 52 Compar. Pol. Stud. 277 (2018), https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0010414018758761.
Press Release, U.S. Dep’t of Homeland Sec., Statement from Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas Marking One Year Since the October 7th Attack (Oct. 7, 2024), https://www.dhs.gov/archive/news/2024/10/07/statement-secretary-alejandro-n-mayorkas-marking-one-year-october-7th-attack.
Emma Farge & Nidal Al-Mughrabi, Gaza death toll: how many Palestinians has Israel’s offensive killed?, Reuters (Jan. 15, 2025), https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-many-palestinians-has-israels-gaza-offensive-killed-2025-01-15/#:~:text=Gaza%20death%20toll%3A%20how%20many%20Palestinians%20has%20Israel’s%20offensive%20killed%3F,-By%20Emma%20Farge&text=Jan%2015%20(Reuters)%20%2D%20Palestinian,women%2C%20children%20or%20older%20people.
Erica Chenoweth, Protests in the United States on Palestine and Israel, 2023-2024, Soc. Movement Stud. 1 (Oct. 18, 2024), https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/protests-united-states-palestine-and-israel-2023-2024.
Santul Nerkar, College Protesters Make Divestment From Israel a Rallying Cry, N.Y. Times (Apr. 24, 2024), https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/24/business/college-protesters-divestment-israel.html; Jocelyn Gecker, Maryclaire Dale, & Michael Casey, As US colleges raise the stakes for protests, activists are weighing new strategies, AP News (Sept. 7, 2024), https://apnews.com/article/student-activist-college-protest-362d2adc0c771f2b3ad250fe7e6f4623.
Letter from NAACP Legal Def. Fund et al. to the Attorney Gen. of the U.S. and the U.S. Dep’t of Educ., RE: Renewed Request for Investigation of Law Enforcement and University Responses to Peaceful Campus Protests (July 11, 2024), https://www.naacpldf.org/wp-content/uploads/2024.07.10-Protest-Protection-Sign-On-Letter-Final-1.pdf.
Id. at 2.
Press Release, NAACP Legal Def. Fund, Recalling Civil Rights Era Abuses, LDF Roundly Condemns Rising Violations Against Peaceful Protesters and Calls for Immediate Federal Intervention (May 2, 2024), https://www.naacpldf.org/press-release/recalling-civil-rights-era-abuses-ldf-roundly-condemns-rising-violations-against-peaceful-protesters-and-calls-for-immediate-federal-intervention/.
Letter from NAACP Legal Def. Fund et al., supra note 148 at 2.
Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism, The White House (Jan. 29, 2025), https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/additional-measures-to-combat-anti-semitism/.
Id. The cancellation of student visas specifically came from the attending press release, and has already been put into effect with the arrest and detention of a Palestinian student activist at Columbia University, Mahmoud Khalil. Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Takes Forceful and Unprecedented Steps to Combat Anti-Semitism, The White House (Jan. 30, 2025), https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/01/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-takes-forceful-and-unprecedented-steps-to-combat-anti-semitism/; Eliza Shapiro, Immigration Authorities Arrest Pro-Palestinian Activist at Columbia, N.Y. Times, (Mar. 9, 2025), https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/09/nyregion/ice-arrests-palestinian-activist-columbia-protests.html.
Press Release, U.S. Dep’t of Just., Justice Department Announces Formation of Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism (Feb. 3, 2025), https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-formation-task-force-combat-anti-semitism.
NAACP Legal Def. Fund, supra note 151.
Doug McAdam, Recruitment to High-Risk Activism: The Case of Freedom Summer, 92 Am. J. Sociol. 64, 65 (1986), https://www.jstor.org/stable/2779717.
Committee on Appeal for Human Rights, An Appeal for Human Rights (Mar. 9, 1960), https://www.crmvet.org/docs/aa4hr.htm.
Lanza, supra note 15 at 5.
First Amended Compl., Smith v. City of Philadelphia, No. 2:20-cv-03431 (E.D. Penn. Sept. 16, 2020), https://www.naacpldf.org/wp-content/uploads/As-filed-Amended-Complaint.pdf.
Greg Satell and Srdja Popovic, How Protests Become Successful Social Movements, Harv. Bus. Rev. (Jan. 27, 2017), https://hbr.org/2017/01/how-protests-become-successful-social-movements.
Kajeepeta & Johnson, supra note 17 at 3–4.
Id. at 3.
State Historical Society of Iowa, Protest in America, https://web.archive.org/web/20240920080442/https://history.iowa.gov/history/education/educator-resources/primary-source-sets/protest-america (last visited Mar. 7, 2025).

An Analysis of Student Involvement in Movements for Racial Justice from the 1960s to the Present

Lauren O'Neil

Published June 2025

Introduction

Marian Wright Edelman, She thought things should be fair; If they were not, she would make Signs and picket there; Born in the South, moved to D.C., True to yourself you should be; She has three sons, works hard for you and me.2

Photo Source: Brigitte E. Dubois, Young Children as Activists: Celebrating BHM and Marian Wright Edelman’s Work 18, 24 Soc. Stud. & the Young Learner 18 (2011).

Student Protest Framework

The framework utilized in this Brief demonstrates the relationships between student protests, social change, and backlash against progress for racial justice causes.

Case Study Selection

Scope of the Brief

Glossary

Freedom Summer, 1964

– Robert P. Moses

The Freedom Summer Campaign

LDF Involvement in Freedom Summer

The Impact of Freedom Summer

Publicizing racial injustices

Building Black political power

Advancing policy changes

THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1964 promoted equality for all people by prohibiting discrimination in public places on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. The law further declared that public schools and accommodations must integrate.61

THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT OF 1965 outlawed discriminatory voting practices and enforced the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. The law banned voting barriers such as literacy tests and poll taxes, which were adopted in many Southern states following the Civil War.62

Civil Rights Movement Archive Materials

Backlash to Freedom Summer

Violence in response to student protests

Criminalization of the activities associated with protests

The Suppression of Freedom Summer Activities

Black Lives Matter, 2020

“I personally feel like: If not now, then when? It’s so important for our voices to be heard. There needs to be change. I felt like it was important to get out there and peacefully protest and have my voice be heard.”

– Alayna Jenkins, a Harvard University student reflecting on her experiences protesting in 2020 in St. Louis, Missouri86

The Black Lives Matter Movement

The Impact of The Black Lives Matter Movement

Publicizing racial injustices

Building Black political power

Advancing policy changes

Backlash to the Black Lives Matter Movement

Violence in response to protests

POLICE AND PROTESTS: The Inequity of Police Responses to Racial Justice Demonstrations

Criminalization of the activities associated with protests

The Suppression of Black Lives Matter Movement Activities

PROTECTING PROTEST IS PROTECTING DEMOCRACY: How LDF Challenges Police Violence Against Protesters

Current Challenges

Paths Forward

– “An Appeal for Human Rights,” 1960157

Marian Wright Edelman,
She thought things should be fair;
If they were not, she would make
Signs and picket there;
Born in the South, moved to D.C.,
True to yourself you should be;
She has three sons, works hard for you and me.²

THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1964 promoted equality for all people by prohibiting discrimination in public places on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. The law further declared that public schools and accommodations must integrate.⁶¹

THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT OF 1965 outlawed discriminatory voting practices and enforced the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. The law banned voting barriers such as literacy tests and poll taxes, which were adopted in many Southern states following the Civil War.⁶²

– Alayna Jenkins, a Harvard University student reflecting on her experiences protesting in 2020 in St. Louis, Missouri⁸⁶

POLICE AND PROTESTS:
The Inequity of Police Responses to Racial Justice Demonstrations

PROTECTING PROTEST IS PROTECTING DEMOCRACY:
How LDF Challenges Police Violence Against Protesters

– “An Appeal for Human Rights,” 1960¹⁵⁷