ABSTRACT
During the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1963) declared from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” In 1969, Students for a Democratic Society, a student activist movement in the United States, protested the Vietnam War by staging a demonstration in New York’s Central Park, and some of its members chanted, “Burn cards, not people,” and “Hell, no we won’t go” as they threw their draft cards into a bonfire. In 1988, more than a thousand protestors from ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and other groups and individuals sympathetic to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) issues stormed the Maryland offices of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), leading to a one-day shutdown. On January 9, 1993, in Pulaski, Tennessee, the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan, white separatists paraded and chanted, “What do we want? White Power! When do we want it? Now!” What do these events have in common? They are all part of social movement activity that is designed to bring about change in the United States.
