Recently I became an inadvertent participant in a Ferguson “justice” rally. Several score of demonstrators marched up the trendy restaurant section of Washington, D.C.’s 14th Street on a Friday evening, with frolicking Millennials looking on from their bistro perches.
“Off the sidewalks and into the streets!” the marchers robustly chanted. I didn’t see any onlookers comply, but I followed along out of curiosity, nostalgically recalling protests from my boyhood against an unwanted highway. The marchers were surrounded at a discrete distance by a phalanx of police, who dutifully cleared traffic for the demonstration. From their facial expressions, the police, white and black, male and female, seemed bored to indifferent by the justice march. Doubtless in D.C. they’ve seen more dramatic displays of street action.
The march was mostly well behaved. Many looked like professional demonstrators, almost recognizable from Occupy Wall Street protests several years ago. They briefly blocked traffic at 14th and U, then moved on towards Adams Morgan, another lively nightlife neighborhood, where the bar hopping largely continued uninterrupted.
Numerous liberal Protestant seminaries, notably Union in New York, have boasted of their excited participation in Ferguson justice marches. Some of the loaded ideological assumptions behind the protests seem dubious. But the marches are lawful expressions of dissent. My historical knowledge is incomplete, but protest demonstrations are likely the fruit of Jewish/Christian beliefs about justice and individual conscience. The ancient and pagan worlds had mobs and riots, but I don’t think they had organized philosophical protests of dissent per se.
Of course, there’s sometimes a thin boundary between protest and riot. The initial street traction in Ferguson to the grand jury decision was a squalid riot from which that community will not recover for years. Now fashionable 14th Street in D.C., where I experienced the Ferguson justice marchers, suffered grievously from the 1968 riots after MLK’s assassination and did not fully recoup for 40 years.
Last night I stayed at the Chicago Hilton specifically because it famously was a hub of the notorious clashes between anti war protesters and Chicago police during the 1968 Democratic Convention. Nominee Hubert Humphrey could smell the tear gas while he showered upstairs. Outside hippies desecrated the flag, threw projectiles and called the police “pig whores.” The police weighed into the crowd with mace and truncheons, prompting critics to allege a “police riot.”
Anti war protesters thought the nationally televised optics would benefit their cause. But polls showed most Americans supported Chicago police and defiant Mayor Daley. Public option usually reacts negatively to public disorder, and rightly so. Christian faith sacralizes conscience and principled dissent. It does not sanction riotous disorder or anarchy. Lawful civil order is essential to justice and human dignity.
The benign Ferguson justice marchers I witnessed, escorted by carefully professional D.C. police, supinely observed by flocks of Friday evening revelers, embodied different social spheres performing in sync with civil order and harmony. Such orderliness should never be taken for granted and is a divine blessing absent from too many societies now and across history.
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