The decentralized Black Lives Matter movement burst onto the national scene following the 2014 police shooting of an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Mo. Since then, activists have protested police brutality by stopping Black Friday sales, shutting down rail stations and becoming a fixture on the presidential campaign trail. They have disrupted Bernie Sanders, confronted Hillary Clinton and protested Donald Trump, leading to tense confrontations and violent reactions.
For these demonstrations, Black Lives Matter activists have received plenty of criticism from political candidates and their supporters and surrogates.
The majority of Americans haven't embraced the activists’ message or strategies, either; fewer than a third of Americans said Black Lives Matter focuses on real issues of racial discrimination while 55 percent said the movement distracts from those issues, according to a September PBS News Hour/Marist poll.
Another poll conducted that month by NBC News and Wall Street Journal found that 32 percent of Americans had mostly positive views of the movement; 29 percent had mostly negative views and 39 percent were neutral.
Such tepid acceptance of black activism isn't surprising. This country has a history of disapproving of civil rights protests and demonstrations. And perhaps nothing better demonstrates that dynamic than the movement of the 1960s.
Today, sit-ins, freedom rides and marches for voting rights are viewed with historical reverence. Schoolchildren across the country memorize Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Conservatives invoke the moral authority of the civil rights movement as a model for their own activism. Civil rights workers are viewed as national heroes.
But in their day, activists were met with widespread disapproval. A review of polling data from the 1960s paints a picture of an America in which the majority of people felt such protest actions would hurt, not help, African Americans’ fight for equality.
These surveys, compiled by Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell University, provide a snapshot of the nation’s mood throughout the decade. Collectively, they are "a corrective to the blurring of time," said Kathleen Weldon of the Roper Center.
“It’s a very clear picture — and not necessarily the picture we like to lay back on time that we see from today; it’s not necessarily the story we tell ourselves,” she said. “Time passes and people can start to intentionally or not rewrite history, particularly around something that seems as amorphous as public opinion — what everyone believed, what everyone thought.”
Recognizing the deep opposition toward the civil rights movement’s tactics in its day — “the things we think of normal today and not controversial” — may cause people to “think through what their opinions are about things today, and why they have those opinions,” said Charles Cobb, who was a field secretary for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s.