Peaceable Assembly, Redress of Grievances

It gives me wry amusement to recall my youthful response to the civil rights demonstrations of the early 1960s. “Nobody ever changed anything by walking around waving signs,” I said. The aftermath of the March on Washington in 1963 proved me wrong. Some 250,000 people from all over the nation came to the National Mall on August 28 to protest racial discrimination. The next year Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Anti-war protests in the streets of the United States a few years later shifted public opinion toward ending American involvement in the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, an estimated 20 million people nationwide participated in Earth Day on April 22, 1970; this largest single-day demonstration in U.S. history led to passage of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. Protests over the weeks after police killed George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020 involved between 15 and 26 million across the nation, spurring some state and local police reforms such as banning chokeholds and no-knock warrants.

Crowd sizes are often contentious. Numbers matter as a measure of public support, a means to expand public awareness, and a factor in planning for public safety. Memorable disputes arose after the 1995 Million Man March and the 2017 Presidential Inauguration. Early attempts to be objective, by multiplying density (people per unit space) by the total space covered, didn’t account for variations in how tightly people cluster or for arrivals and departures over time. Drone photography, satellite images, and AI models allow more accurate headcounts if weather and visibility cooperate.

That said, nearly 7 million estimated participants nationwide made the No Kings protest this October one of the largest in American history. What changes as a result, if anything, is yet to be seen.

Image: No Kings protest in Dallas, Texas, June 14, 2025. Photograph by Brendan Rogers.