Protesting During a Pandemic: Narratives on Risk Taking and Motivation to Participating in the 2020 March on Washington

The study elucidates the interplay of COVID-19 and the wave of Black Lives Matter protests to assess motivation and risk taking for protest participation. We draw on protesters’ accounts to examine how police violence influenced the participants decision making to participate in the 2020 March on Washington during a pandemic that exacerbated the risks already in place from protesting the police. We found that protesters’ social position and commitment to the cause provided motivations, along with a zeal to do more especially among White protesters. For Black participants, the images in the media resonated with their own experiences of structural racism from police.

President's Address: On the Anniversary of the March on Washington

I am writing this on a significant anniversary in American history, and I would be remiss in not acknowledging it. Fifty-seven years ago, hundreds of thousands of people came together to march on Washington for jobs and freedom. Attendees heard from a number of civil rights activists including Myrlie Evers, Mahalia Jackson, John Lewis, A. Phillip Randolph, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; this is when the latter gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

Presidential inauguration tourism and hotel occupancy: Evidence from the Obama and Trump inaugurals

This article examines the impact of the inaugurations of Barack Obama and Donald Trump on hotel occupancy in the Washington DC metro area. Using daily hotel data from 2010 to 2020 and controlling for multiple other major events along with day, week, and year fixed effects, we find substantial effects of presidential inaugurations on hotel occupancy. Daily occupancy rates around the inaugurations are four to six times higher than the next largest event in our sample. We also find evidence that inaugurations are multiple-day tourist events, with hotel occupancy rates seeing positive leads and lags. We find little difference in overall hotel occupancy impacts between the Obama and the Trump inaugurations, although the pattern differs due to the differences when in the week they occurred. Unfortunately, our results cannot separate the effect of the Women’s March on Washington from the Trump inauguration.

Unifying yet dividing: voices of pussyhat maker–wearers who participated in the 2017 Women’s Marches

On January 21, 2017, several million protesters took part in the “Women’s March on Washington” and its more than 400 sister Marches held in cities throughout the U.S. and across the globe. One enduring image of these Marches was the (often pink) pussyhat. In this qualitative study we examine broader issues of inclusion and exclusion within craftivism and take a closer look at the way craftivism supported, and potentially detracted from, its intended purpose as a unifying symbol of the Marches. From a dataset of 511 surveys distributed and collected online, 71 “maker–wearers” were identified and investigated for this study. While our overarching question focused on the role of craftivism related to the inaugural March and the pussyhat, we seek to understand not only the voices of craftivists, but also the voices of marchers who reported negative and/or controversial associations with the pussyhat. Building on previous findings that the majority of marchers we surveyed perceive the pussyhat as an anti-Trump symbol that represented women’s power, strength, and solidarity, a small number of our respondents and emergent voices in mainstream media have indicated concerns about potential racism and trans person exclusion represented by the pussyhat. We conclude that even as the pussyhat is recognized as a unifying symbol, it is simultaneously representative of exclusionary, potentially divisive practices within both craftivism and feminism. As awareness of the pussyhat’s problematic symbolism is spreading, new conversations have spawned about intersectionality and the implementation of more inclusive practices.

“No Ways Tired”

We have witnessed a resurgence of mass demonstrations and other public forms of political protest in the Trump era, but are protests becoming less effective and delegitimated—counterproductive, even—precisely because of their frequency, as Richard Ford maintains in “Protest Fatigue”? Granted, more and more of us may be, in the immortal words of Fannie Lou Hamer, “sick and tired of being sick and tired” and, at marches against ever more virulent manifestations of sexism and racism, signs like “I Can’t Believe I Still Have to Protest This Shit” evince a certain weariness and frustration among the dissenting masses. But, in this chapter, I argue that more, not less, protesting—by more people, in more places, on more occasions—is what we need now, since it can have a galvanizing, reinvigorating effect and be no less legitimate than past protests such as demonstrations for women’s suffrage and the March on Washington. Especially in the digital age, mass protests, far from sapping our energy and yielding diminishing returns, have the potential to tap and replenish the ever-renewable resources of hope and solidarity.