What Today’s Protesters Can Learn From Dr. King’s Strategy
Dr. King’s lesson remains urgent: violence against protestors should not be answered with violence.
"Our actions in Selma were not an accident. They were part of a deliberate, disciplined campaign to win the right to vote, using the power of nonviolence to expose injustice."
— John Lewis, remarks commemorating Bloody Sunday, 2015
The First Amendment to our Constitution guarantees the right to peacefully protest, yet that right is increasingly met with aggressive policing, surveillance, and attempts to delegitimize public dissent. From college campuses to statehouses to the streets of our cities, protesters are often treated not as engaged citizens but as threats to public order. In times like these, the strategy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. offers not just inspiration, but a blueprint. During the civil and voting rights campaigns of the 1960s, King understood that to provoke meaningful change, the method had to match the message. His practice of nonviolent direct action wasn’t passive—it was a powerful, intentional, and deeply disciplined way to confront injustice.
King knew that violence would come. He also knew that if his followers responded in kind, the movement would lose its moral footing and public support. “This has the potential to get ugly quickly,” King warned in many forums, but he was unwavering in his insistence that violence not be met with violence. He understood the importance of optics. If peaceful protesters were brutalized and remained peaceful, it would expose the cruelty of their oppressors and stir the conscience of the nation. But if protesters lashed out (admittedly as some have done to a limited extent in Los Angeles), the focus would shift from the injustice they were confronting to the conflict itself—undermining the cause and emboldening critics.
One of the most powerful examples of this strategy in action was the voting rights march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on March 7, 1965, later appropriately described as Bloody Sunday. King wasn’t there that day—an agonizing decision in itself—but he knew what was likely to happen. Sheriff Jim Clark and his deputies attacked the peaceful marchers with clubs, whips, tear gas, and horse-mounted deputies. John Lewis, then just 25 and co-leader of the 600 marching protesters, was so savagely beaten that he required over 40 stitches for a skull fracture inflicted by Clark’s men. Seventeen protesters were hospitalized and over 50 more required treatment for their injuries. But the marchers did not retaliate. They held to King’s teaching. That night, ABC interrupted a broadcast of the movie Judgement at Nuremberg, a dramatization of the Nazi war crime trials, with a special news bulletin showing footage of the violence in Selma that day. An estimated 48 million people saw it, with awareness in the following days to what was happening in the Deep South increasing dramatically across the nation.
The national outrage that followed did what years of behind-the-scenes political work had to that point largely failed to do: just five months after Bloody Sunday, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law. Selma succeeded not because it was peaceful in the face of peace, but because it was peaceful in the face of unthinkable brutality. That contrast—between dignity and savagery—forced the nation to look in the mirror.
Today’s demonstrators face different issues, but the stakes are just as high. When officials overreact to peaceful protest with heavy-handed tactics, the instinct to fight back is understandable—but it’s often counterproductive. Dr. King’s lesson remains urgent: violence against protestors should not be answered with violence. Doing so will only escalate the situation and weaken the purpose behind the protests. Nonviolent direct action is not about weakness—it is about resolve, discipline, purpose, and clarity. It demands more of us, but it also achieves more. Not responding opens ourselves up in a physically vulnerable way, having to fight the impulsive instinct to respond in kind. And that makes it a challenge. If today’s protesters heed that wisdom, they won’t just defend the First Amendment. They’ll redeem it.