June 14: “No Kings”
This is an excerpt from Will Bunch’s column in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Click here to read the full column.
It might have been the largest one-day protest in American history when at least a million citizens and probably several million took to the streets on April 5 for a “Hands Off!” event that drew tens of thousands in cities like D.C. or Philadelphia and surprisingly robust gatherings in places you’ve probably never heard of, like Pittsboro, N.C., or Geneva, Ill.
Contrast those millions, singing songs and a-carrying signs, marching against the autocratic presidency of Donald Trump, with the most famous U.S. demonstrator of all-time: the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. King's 1950s and '60s campaigns of nonviolent civil disobedience—boycotts, sit-ins and unauthorized protest marches—played a critical role in taking down Jim Crow segregation in the American South.
Over the course of his epic yet all-too-short career, King was arrested or detained by cops some 29 times, sometimes spending fraught nights behind bars. That is also about 29 times more—except perhaps for incidents so unremarkable they didn’t make the news—than the number of arrests among the millions who’ve protested Trump at the mass rallies this year.
Organizers are expecting even larger crowds at a Saturday, June 14 event called No Kings, a protest meant to coincide with the abomination of Trump’s street-wrecking $45 million military parade that supposedly honors the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army but (surely a coincidence) falls on the president’s 79th birthday.
More than 1,000 rallies and events are teed up for June 14 … The idea is to show off the great mass of Americans who oppose Trump and his policies, but not to give him a confrontation that the White House might use to its advantage, and also not to appear that demonstrators have any quarrel with the rank-and-file soldiers who’ll be marching that day.
Rallies and marches in more than 1,000 cities and towns will get local media coverage from downsized smaller news outlets that can’t send a journalist to D.C. On the other hand, the reality of many news people is that they crave conflict, which might explain why a large day of peaceful protests on April 19 didn’t get as much hoopla as the one two weeks earlier.
[The] epic conflict between antiwar protesters and the cops — at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Washington, when I was 9—… was the ultimate example of a popular notion then that clashes which drew a brutal police response would “heighten the contradictions” of an unjust society. There’s something to this. America only passed a Voting Rights Act in 1965 after the clubbings of Selma’s “Bloody Sunday” were televised to a shocked nation.
The protests of 2025 have not been like this. A Business Insider journalist who attended some rallies in Michigan said “they were primarily people over the age of 65, white, and retired from jobs that depended on public funding as teachers, professors at local universities and social workers.” I’ve had the same experience attending Philly-area protests. The positive energy at these events is real, but can a vibe truly halt the march of authoritarianism?