March 28: The American Tradition of Saying No

Today, more than 3,000 protest events are planned across all 50 states under the banner "No Kings" — the third and largest installment of a growing national movement. Whatever one makes of the politics, the act itself is as American as the Constitution that protects it.

Today, in city squares and town commons and courthouse steps from Maine to Hawaii, Americans will gather in organized public protest under a banner drawn directly from the republic's founding argument: No Kings. The "No Kings 3" demonstrations, organized by a coalition including Indivisible and the AFL-CIO, represent the third and largest mobilization of a movement that drew an estimated 4 million participants at its June 2025 debut and roughly 7 million last October. Organizers have described it as opposition to immigration enforcement policies, the war in Iran, and what they call authoritarian overreach. More than 3,100 events are confirmed nationwide. Whatever one makes of the underlying political disputes, the scene playing out today belongs to one of the oldest and most consequential traditions in American civic life: the organized, nonviolent public protest.

From the Edmund Pettus Bridge to Every Courthouse Square

The American protest movement is as old as the republic itself — the Boston Tea Party of 1773 was, at its core, a mass act of organized public defiance. But the tradition of peaceful, disciplined, nonviolent mass demonstration as a tool for political change was forged and refined most powerfully in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. On March 7, 1965, a group of 600 marchers led by a 25-year-old activist named John Lewis crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, demanding the right to vote. State troopers met them with clubs, whips, and tear gas. The footage, aired that same evening on national television, interrupted a broadcast of "Judgment at Nuremberg" — a film about Nazi war crimes — and sent shockwaves across the country. Within days, hundreds of religious leaders, activists, and ordinary citizens flooded into Selma. Two weeks later, 25,000 people marched into Montgomery. That August, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law. The march had moved Congress. The protest had changed the country.

The decades since Selma have produced a continuous American tradition of mass public action. The March on Washington of August 28, 1963 — where a quarter of a million people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial and heard Dr. Martin Luther King deliver the "I Have a Dream" speech — remains perhaps the most iconic image of organized civic aspiration in American history. The anti-Vietnam War movement drew millions through the late 1960s and early 1970s. The 1969 Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam brought an estimated two million Americans into the streets in a single day. The 2003 protests against the invasion of Iraq saw an estimated ten to fifteen million people march globally on a single weekend — the largest coordinated protest in recorded history. In January 2017, the Women's March drew an estimated three to five million participants in the United States alone, the largest single-day demonstration in American history at the time. Each of these moments was contested, imperfect, and politically charged. Each was also, unmistakably, American.

A vast crowd of protesters filling a city street, seen from above, holding signs and banners, with the facade of a classical government building visible at the far end

The organized, nonviolent public protest is among the most enduring institutions in American civic life — a tradition that has shaped legislation, shifted presidencies, and, more than once, changed the course of history.

The First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees the right to peaceably assemble and to petition the government for redress of grievances — rights that were written into the republic's founding document precisely because the founders understood that democratic self-government requires a mechanism for the governed to push back against the powerful. "No Kings" is not an incidental phrase. It is a direct reference to the argument that separated the American experiment from the monarchies of Europe and animated the revolution that preceded it. The protesters gathering today in more than 3,000 locations across the country are exercising a right that is, in the fullest sense of the word, foundational. History will assess their cause. What history has already assessed — repeatedly, across more than two centuries — is the tradition they are standing in.