America proudly asserts that its citizens have the right to protest peacefully. That right comes from the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and the freedom to petition the government for redress of grievances.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Yet, when protesters assert those rights. The government may well use its formidable powers to vilify and even kill those who criticize those in power or their actions. While a British colony, variations of the Riot Act of 1715 were enforced, allowing authorities to disperse groups of twelve or more. If that group were of free Black people, the number could be as few as three, but I digress. The British version called for a statement to be read aloud, giving the group an hour to break up; at that point, authorities could forcibly break up the gathering or arrest the participants. It’s where the expression, “Reading the Riot Act,” comes from.
“Our sovereign Lord the King chargeth and commandeth all persons, being assembled, immediately to disperse themselves, and peaceably to depart to their habitations, or to their lawful business, upon the pains contained in the act made in the first year of King George, for preventing tumults and riotous assemblies. GOD SAVE THE KING.”
When America gained its independence from Britain, it was up to the individual states to create their own Riot Act laws, and in 1786, Massachusetts drew one up that would make J.D. Vance proud. The first portion of the law read like the British law except for saying GOD SAVE THE COMMONWEALTH, but the small print gave the Sheriff and others the absolute immunity Vance dreams of.
And if any such person or persons shall be killed or wounded, by reason of his or their resisting the persons endeavouring to disperse or seize them, the said Justice, Sheriff, Deputy-Sheriff, Constable and their Assistants, shall be indemnified and held guiltless.
It didn’t take long for Massachusetts to put that immunity to use during what was called Shay’s Rebellion. An armed uprising in western Massachusetts was led largely by Revolutionary War veterans facing crushing debt, aggressive tax collection, and mass foreclosures. Farmers shut down courts to stop property seizures and demanded economic relief. The movement was not fringe or criminal. It was a broad, organized protest by citizens who believed the state government had abandoned them.
Governor James Bowdoin, backed by wealthy Boston creditors, mobilized state militia and privately funded troops to suppress the uprising. At the Springfield Armory in January 1787, General William Shepard ordered cannon fire into the crowd, killing several rebels. To justify the killings, they exaggerated Daniel Shays’ role to create a villain. State officials “significantly and strategically exaggerated” Shays’s leadership role to shift blame away from their own economic policies. This was a deliberate political strategy: turn a decentralized protest movement into a “rebellion” led by a single dangerous figure. By inflating Shays into a demagogue, officials justified treating the movement as an insurrection rather than a mass economic protest.
The Governor claimed the protesters wanted to overthrow the state government. The rebels’ actual demands were for lower taxes, an end to debt imprisonment, issuance of paper money, and fairer courts. The “overthrow” narrative was political theater designed to justify lethal force.
George Washington led 13,000 militiamen in 1794 to crush a rebellion in western Pennsylvania. Farmers opposed a whiskey tax intended to pay off the Revolutionary War debt. It was the first and only time a sitting American president led troops in the field. No deaths this time, the rebels dispersed and hid from the large force amassed against them. The government portrayed the protest as a violent insurrection and exaggerated the scale and organization of the rebels.
In 1837, Elijah Lovejoy was killed defending his printing press during Abolitionist Protests. Protesters were holding anti-slavery meetings and conducting petition drives. Local and state officials in Illinois, Ohio, and Pennsylvania routinely claimed abolitionists were “inciting slave revolts,” “threatening public order,” and, of course, “endangering white women.” None of this was true. These were smear campaigns designed to justify shutting down meetings and allowing mobs to destroy abolitionist presses.
In 1877, railroad workers went on strike after the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O) cut wages for the third time in a year. The nation was still in the throes of the Panic of 1873, and unemployment was at 14%. Railroad workers in several cities joined the strike, and local police proved ineffective at stopping them.
Newly elected Rutherford B. Hayes ordered federal troops to those cities to crush the strike, removing many of those troops from the South, where they were protecting the freed enslaved people from the Klan and enforcing the voting rights of Black men. Hayes had already promised to remove those troops in the Compromise of 1877 that got him elected. He sent those troops before the Posse Comitatus Act was enacted in 1878, which might have made it a bit harder to use troops domestically.
When all was said and done, over 100 strikers had been killed by the combination of troops and local police. The government justified the deaths during the 1877 Great Railroad Strike by reframing a wage protest as a national security crisis. They claimed the strike was a violent insurrection, depicting the crowds as dangerous mobs. The government said the economy and public order were at risk and that federal troops were necessary to restore stability. These narratives made the killing of roughly 100 people appear not only lawful but necessary.
The pattern repeated itself during the 1894 Pullman Strike. Railway workers protesting wage cuts and rent hikes in company towns. President Grover Cleveland’s administration claimed the strike threatened the U.S. mail, endangered national security, and was led by “anarchists.” The mail claim was fabricated — mail cars were deliberately attached to trains to create a pretext for federal intervention. Troops were sent in, killing at least 30 workers.
Chicago Labor Newspaper, July 7, 1894., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Several veterans were killed in 1932 when begging the government to redeem certificates they’d been given that didn’t mature until 1945. General MacArthur and Majors Patton and Eisenhower destroyed the veterans’ camps, allegedly against President Hoover’s orders. The government claimed its own veterans from World War I were being led by communists.
Time after time, we saw the United States government vilify protesters, and if a few were killed along the way, it was an acceptable loss. There was the Civil Rights Movement, the 1968 Democratic National Convention Protest, the 1970 Kent State Shootings by the National Guard, and the shootings by local police at the Jackson State University campus. Most recently were the George Floyd protests and the ongoing Minneapolis protests since the murder of Renee Good. Anyone reading this has likely seen the video and knows Good didn’t “run over” the officer as President Trump told the world. Perhaps not on the same scale as Iran, Russia, China, and elsewhere, but America has always tried to crush protests and lied about the rationale afterward.
America has never lacked the language of liberty. What it has lacked, again and again, is the courage to extend that liberty to the people who most need to use it. From Shays’ farmers to railroad workers, abolitionists, veterans, students, and Indigenous water protectors, the pattern is painfully consistent: when ordinary people protest the decisions of the powerful, the state reaches first for the vocabulary of danger. It invents villains, inflates threats, and wraps its violence in the language of order. And when the smoke clears, officials insist the dead brought it on themselves.
The truth is simpler and far less flattering. Protesters are not the threat. They are the warning. They are the early signal that something in the political body has gone septic — debt, exploitation, disenfranchisement, corruption, indifference. A government confident in its legitimacy does not need to lie about its citizens to justify shooting them. A government committed to democracy does not need to call its critics “rioters” to silence them.
34th and Portland after ICE Murder of Renee Nicole Good — Chad Davis and link to chaddavis.photography/ Chad Davis. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.
If America wants to claim the First Amendment as more than a slogan, it must confront its own history honestly. It must be admitted that the danger has never been the people who gather in the streets, but the leaders who fear them. And it must decide, finally, whether it wants to be a nation that protects dissent — or a nation that punishes it and rewrites the story afterward.
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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