When Marching Replaced Building: The Diminishing Returns of Protest Without Policy

There was a time when Black people marched because they had somewhere specific to go. The March on Washington in August of 1963 was not a march for awareness. It was not a march to start a conversation. It was not a march to demonstrate allyship or perform solidarity or generate content for social media platforms that did not yet exist. It was a march with a legislative target — the passage of a civil rights bill that had been languishing in Congress — and within a year of that march, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law. Two years later, the marchers who crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, and were beaten with clubs and choked with tear gas on what became known as Bloody Sunday, produced the Voting Rights Act of 1965. These are the gold standard. This is what protest looks like when it is a tool rather than a destination — a lever connected to a mechanism, not a lever waved in the air.

I begin with these examples because they are the ones invoked every time someone questions the efficacy of modern protest. The implication is always the same: marching worked before, so marching works now. But this formulation requires you to ignore everything that made those marches effective and everything that has changed since. The March on Washington succeeded because it had a specific legislative demand, it was backed by an organized coalition with institutional power, it was timed to political leverage, and the participants understood that the march itself was not the victory — the legislation was. The march was the beginning of the work. The moment someone confused the march for the work itself, the movement had already begun to lose.

The Gold Standard and What Made It Work

Aldon Morris, in his landmark study of the civil rights movement, documented what most popular histories omit: the movement was not spontaneous. It was not a series of organic eruptions of moral feeling. It was organized, strategic, and institutional. The Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955–56, the event that brought Martin Luther King Jr. to national prominence, was an economic weapon — a coordinated withdrawal of Black purchasing power from a transit system that depended on Black riders for 75% of its revenue. It was not a demonstration. It was a siege. And it worked because the people who organized it understood the difference.

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference did not organize marches for their own sake. It organized marches that would provoke documented, visible responses from segregationist authorities — responses that would be broadcast on the evening news to a nation that had not yet confronted what its apartheid system looked like in practice. The Birmingham campaign of 1963, with Bull Connor’s fire hoses and police dogs, was designed to create a moral crisis so acute that legislative action became politically inevitable. This was strategy. This was the application of pressure to specific points of vulnerability in a power structure. And behind it was an institutional apparatus — the NAACP, the SCLC, the Congress of Racial Equality, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee — that could translate the moral energy of protest into the bureaucratic, legal, and legislative work that actually changes systems.

The NAACP was not founded to march. It was founded in 1909 to litigate — to file lawsuits, to challenge discriminatory laws in court, to build the legal infrastructure that would eventually produce Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. The National Urban League was not founded to protest. It was founded in 1910 to find employment for Black migrants moving north, to build economic capacity, to connect people to opportunity. These were institutions that understood that power is structural, not performative, and that the work of changing a society requires not just the capacity to fill a street but the capacity to fill a courtroom, a boardroom, a legislative chamber, and a school.

“The movement was not a series of spontaneous eruptions. It was an organized, strategic campaign backed by institutions capable of translating moral energy into legislative and economic power.”
— Aldon Morris, 1984

The Largest Protests in American History — and What They Produced

In the summer of 2020, following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, the United States experienced the largest protest movement in its history. The New York Times, drawing on crowd-count data from multiple researchers, estimated that between 15 and 26 million people participated in demonstrations across all fifty states and in cities around the world. This was not a minor event. By any measure of participation, it was the most significant mass mobilization the country had ever seen.

And what legislation resulted? The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, the most prominent legislative response, passed the House of Representatives and died in the Senate. Not once, but twice — in 2020 and again in 2021. Comprehensive police reform was enacted in zero states. Some cities passed local measures — Minneapolis voted to replace its police department, then reversed the decision. Some departments implemented modest use-of-force policy changes. But the fundamental legal architecture of policing in America — qualified immunity, militarized equipment transfers, the arbitration systems that reinstate fired officers — remained entirely intact. Twenty-six million people marched, and the system they marched against did not change.

Then there was the money. In the weeks following Floyd’s death, American corporations pledged approximately $50 billion to racial justice causes. Bloomberg News and other outlets tracked these pledges over the following years and found that actual disbursements fell catastrophically short. Many pledges were reclassified as loans or investments that would generate returns for the companies making them. Others were redirected to diversity training programs within the corporations themselves — spending on their own employees rebranded as racial justice spending. The total amount that reached Black communities or Black-led organizations in the form of direct grants was a fraction of what was announced.

The Psychology of Performative Action

There is a documented phenomenon in social psychology that explains part of what happened, and it is one that the organizers of the civil rights movement understood instinctively even before the research formalized it. Sociologists Alan Schussman and Sarah Soule, in their analysis of protest participation, identified what researchers have called the substitution effect: the act of participating in a protest creates a psychological sense of accomplishment that reduces the participant’s likelihood of engaging in subsequent, more demanding forms of political action. You marched. You posted. You felt the solidarity. And the feeling of having done something substituted for the reality of having changed nothing.

Social media has amplified this effect beyond anything Schussman and Soule could have anticipated. A hashtag feels like action. A black square on Instagram feels like solidarity. A retweet feels like resistance. And the algorithmic architecture of these platforms rewards emotional expression over strategic organization — the post that generates the most outrage gets the most visibility, regardless of whether it advances any tangible objective. The result is a movement that is extraordinarily good at generating attention and extraordinarily poor at converting that attention into power.

This is not a criticism of the people who marched. Their anger was righteous. Their grief was real. George Floyd was murdered on camera in broad daylight, and the impulse to take to the streets in response is not just understandable — it is human. The criticism is directed at the leadership, or more precisely at the absence of leadership, that allowed the largest mass mobilization in American history to dissipate without extracting a single structural concession from the systems it was protesting. That is not a failure of the marchers. It is a failure of strategy so complete that it demands examination.

The Movement That Understood Power

Here is a comparison that will make many people uncomfortable, and it should, because the lesson it contains is too important to sacrifice to ideological preference. In 2009, the Tea Party movement erupted in response to the Affordable Care Act and the bank bailouts. It began with protests — rallies, signs, speeches, the same visible demonstrations of public anger that characterize any mass mobilization. And then, within four years, it did something that the Black Lives Matter movement, despite being larger and better funded, has not done: it translated protest energy into structural power.

Tea Party supporters ran for school board seats. They ran for city council seats. They ran for state legislatures. They ran for Congress. By 2010, the movement had helped flip the House of Representatives in one of the largest midterm electoral swings in modern history, gaining 63 seats. By 2014, Tea Party-aligned candidates held positions at every level of government, from local zoning boards to the United States Senate. Whether you agree with their politics is irrelevant. What matters is that they understood something that the modern protest left has either forgotten or refuses to learn: power is exercised through institutions, not through demonstrations.

The contrast is instructive. After the 2020 protests, Black voter registration increased modestly. But the number of Black candidates running for local office — the school boards, the city councils, the county commissions, the district attorney races where policing policy is actually determined — did not increase proportionally to the scale of the mobilization. The energy went into marching, not into the patient, unglamorous, unfilmable work of running for office, sitting through budget hearings, negotiating police union contracts, and rewriting use-of-force policies line by line.

Bob Moses and the Freedom Schools

The civil rights movement produced at least one model of what the transition from protest to institution looks like, and his name was Bob Moses. Moses, a Harvard-educated mathematician who gave up a teaching career to work with SNCC in Mississippi, understood something that made him unusual among movement leaders: voter registration was not enough. The people being registered needed education, political literacy, and institutional support that would outlast any individual campaign. So he built the Mississippi Freedom Schools in 1964 — a network of alternative educational institutions that taught not just reading and writing but political analysis, community organizing, and economic self-determination.

The Freedom Schools were not a protest. They were an institution. They trained a generation of organizers who went on to build other institutions — community development corporations, legal aid societies, voter registration drives that persisted long after the television cameras left. Moses understood that the march gets attention, but the school produces capacity, and capacity is what changes a community permanently. He did not just register voters. He built the educational infrastructure that made those voters informed, engaged, and organizationally capable of defending their own interests.

This is the model. Not the march that ends when the crowd disperses, but the institution that is still operating on Monday morning. Not the demonstration that generates a news cycle, but the organization that generates a generation of leaders. The civil rights movement’s greatest achievements were not its marches. They were the institutions — the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Voter Education Project, the Southern Regional Council, the network of historically Black colleges and universities — that converted moral authority into permanent structural change.

“Organizing is a fancy word for relationship building. Real power comes from relationships that are sustained, not from crowds that disperse.”
— Bob Moses

What Building Looks Like Now

The question for Black America in 2026 is not whether to march. There will always be occasions that demand public demonstration — injustices so visible, so egregious, that silence itself becomes complicity. The question is what happens the day after the march. And the honest answer, based on the documented record of the last decade, is: almost nothing. The marchers go home. The hashtag trends for a week. The corporate pledges are announced and then quietly redirected. And the systems that produced the injustice continue to operate, undisturbed, because systems are not embarrassed by protests. They are changed by legislation, by litigation, by economic pressure sustained over years, and by the patient accumulation of institutional power in the hands of people who understand how that power works.

What would it mean for the energy of 26 million marchers to be directed toward institution-building? It would mean identifying the 500 most consequential local elected offices in America — the district attorneys who decide whether to prosecute police officers, the school board members who control curricula and budgets, the city council members who approve police contracts — and running organized, funded, strategic campaigns for every single one of them. It would mean building community development financial institutions that can lend to Black entrepreneurs without the documented discrimination that persists in mainstream banking. It would mean creating schools, not just protesting the failures of existing ones. It would mean the kind of work that does not photograph well, does not trend on social media, and does not produce the intoxicating feeling of solidarity that comes from standing in a crowd of thousands chanting the same words.

It would mean, in short, the harder work. The work that the Montgomery Bus Boycott represented — not a single day of walking but 381 consecutive days of organized, disciplined economic warfare that required carpools, fundraising, legal defense, and the maintenance of collective resolve through an entire Alabama winter and summer and winter again. That was not a march. It was a campaign. And the distinction between the two is the distinction between feeling powerful and being powerful.

The Departure Point

I write this not to dishonor the tradition of protest in Black America but to rescue it from the people who have turned it into a substitute for the thing it was always supposed to produce. The march is sacred when it leads somewhere. It is sacred when it is the first step in a campaign that will take years of grinding, invisible, unglamorous work to complete. It is sacred when the people who organize it have a plan for the day after, and the week after, and the decade after. When it does not lead somewhere — when it is its own destination, its own justification, its own reward — then it is not sacred. It is theater. And theater, however moving, however cathartic, however beautifully performed, does not change the material conditions of a single Black child’s life.

The March on Washington was a departure point. It departed toward the Civil Rights Act. Selma was a departure point. It departed toward the Voting Rights Act. These marches worked because the people who organized them understood that the march was the beginning of the work, not the work itself. The moment the march becomes the work itself — the moment the chanting, the signs, the solidarity, the shared emotion of the crowd becomes the thing you point to when someone asks what you have accomplished — the movement has already lost. It has traded power for performance, and no community in the history of the world has ever performed its way to freedom.

The question is not whether Black America has the capacity to march. That question was answered in the summer of 2020, answered in numbers that dwarf anything in American history. The question is whether Black America has the discipline to do what comes after the march — the organizing, the institution-building, the patient accumulation of structural power that does not fit on a placard and cannot be captured in a photograph. The civil rights generation answered that question with the NAACP, the Urban League, the Freedom Schools, the legal defense funds, the voter registration drives that persisted for decades. This generation has not yet answered it. And the clock — measured in school years lost, in economic mobility foregone, in another cohort of children growing up in communities where the power structure has not changed despite all the marching in the world — does not stop while we decide.