Protests have long been a powerful way to bring about change

The Reverend Martin Luther King Junior and his wife, Coretta Scott King, lead marchers to the Alabama state cAPitol March 25, 1965. Thousands of civil rights marchers joined in a five-day walk from Selma to Montgomery to demand voter rights for blacks. The effort helped bring about the Voting Rights Act. (AP)

For more than a month, the news has been filled with stories about protesters seeking racial justice and equality. Demonstrators, many carrying signs that say “Black Lives Matter,” have been marching in cities across the nation, including Washington.

Similar demonstrations are taking place in Europe, Asia, Africa and South America. Racial injustice binds many countries. In ours, its roots stretch back to pre-colonial times.

“Protest is patriotic and has been a part of our nation since the beginning,” Lonnie Bunch, who heads the Smithsonian Institution, told KidsPost.

Indeed, anger among 18th-century colonists about their treatment by Great Britain led to the American Revolution. Although founded on the idea that “all men are created equal,” the United States has struggled to achieve that reality, including ending the enslavement of black people, one of the key issues that led to the Civil War. A century later, the civil rights movement for African Americans led to new laws calling for equal rights in education, housing and voting.

Protests played a big role.

Rosa Parks’s refusal in 1955 to give up her bus seat to a white person in Montgomery, Alabama, sparked black people’s year-long refusal to ride the city’s buses. It was the nation’s first major demonstration against racial segregation. One of its leaders was a young pastor named Martin Luther King Junior. The boycott ended after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregated busing was illegal.

In 1960, four black college students quietly sat down at the “whites-only” lunch counter at Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina. They weren’t served, but they didn’t budge. The next day they returned with more students. Soon they numbered in the hundreds, and sit-in protests sprang up in a dozen states. A few months later, Woolworth’s led the way in opening its lunch counter to everyone.

The Smithsonian’s Bunch, who as a boy was refused service at a similar dining spot, has called these sit-ins “one of the most important moments in the 20th century.” A section of the Greensboro lunch counter is displayed at the Smithsonian.

In August 1963, thousands of people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. That’s where King give his powerful “I Have a Dream” speech. The march pressured the federal government to move forward on historic civil rights bills.

Not all protests were peaceful. At a 1965 voting rights march in Alabama, state troopers and others attacked marchers with clubs, tear gas and snarling dogs in what became known as “Bloody Sunday.” Two weeks later, federal troops protected the marchers on their 54-mile walk to the state capital. Their protest led to the landmark Voting Rights Act.

Today, new activists carry the torch for racial justice. Bunch said he is “hopeful, seeing millions of young people all over the world seizing the moment.” Earlier civil rights protesters “made the world better,” he said, “and I have no doubt that the new generation is doing the same.”