Before We Had the Right to Vote, We Had the Right to Protest | Wesley Lowery

Before we had the right to vote, we had the right to protest, says journalist Wesley Lowery. Protests have always been part of the U.S.’s political landscape, but over the last decade it feels as though there is an increase in dissatisfaction on the fronts of all causes – there is unrest, whether it’s a genuine increase or merely wider access to media and recording devices. Lowery's book is "They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement" ().
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Transcript - You know I think that what’s interesting is that at times of tumult in the United States of America, the 50s and 60s, now. You see candidacies often to the center, right. But sometimes of either part who come out on this kind of law and order platform, this idea that we need to regain control of what’s happening or things will become chaos, right. And so the time we’re in, think of the last few years we have seen riots in various cities. We’ve seen angry protests, people in the streets, people upset. That scares a lot of people. People who aren’t comfortable with that. People whose lives were plenty happy and who are comfortable. They don’t like the idea that the freeway is shut down. They don’t like the idea that people are angry or yelling at the police officers. And what they desire is someone who’s going to come and tell them I’m going to handle this. I’m going to get things back to the way they were. Now there’s a false promise there because the way they were, the way things were previously was not any better. We just perhaps weren’t paying attention to it. There’s always unrest. There are always people who are in pain. There are always protests happening.
But we’ve been in a moment where we’ve had an acute awareness of that pain that is different than the moments previously. And so it’s not surprising, you know, Donald Trump becomes one of the first candidates since Nixon to so successfully wield this law and order type of platform. And so while that comforts some people, people on the other end of the spectrum are horrified by that, right. What might that mean? If you are the young black man or woman who’s been in the street protesting what might that mean for you if you’re one of these activists, if you are, you know, what does he – he spoke about potential nationwide stop and frisk which horrifies a lot of people. He’s talked about the crackdowns on immigrants and that horrifies a lot of people. And so there’s this understanding that we have this spectrum of security and liberty and that will people’s liberty be taken in order to provide a greater level of security. Because very often in those moments of fear when we are scared of what is going to happen and what is happening in our world those end up being the moments very often where we make historically some of the worst decisions we’ve made as it relates to respecting the liberty of some of our fellow Americans. Read Full Transcript Here: .