How Minneapolis protests fit into the history of civil disobedience

The recent unrest in Minnesota reminded me of the words of an anguished mother nearly a decade ago: “You could be next.” »

That’s Valerie Castile’s response in 2017 when a Minnesota jury found the police officer who killed her son Philando during a routine traffic stop not guilty.

In recent weeks, in the state where George Floyd and Mr. Castile died in deadly clashes with law enforcement, civil protests ended in tragedy when federal agents killed two American citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Their deaths echo a typically American story. In 1967, at the height of the civil rights movement, riots broke out in the predominantly Jewish and black communities of north Minneapolis. Police brutality was also a factor.

Name a city that has been the scene of recent protests: Portland, Oregon; Washington, DC; Chicago; Los Angeles. Too often, the freedoms of speech and assembly guaranteed by the First Amendment have been suppressed by law enforcement. Minneapolis raises a question: Do we choose to right the wrongs of society? Or repeat them?

Unfortunately, the answer remains the last. Five years ago, authorities called for “racial healing” to quell the unrest sparked by Mr. Floyd’s death, which occurred literally under the knee of law enforcement. The victims of the Minneapolis shooting were white, but race is a motive in deploying federal officers on American streets to arrest people with ethnic roots in countries the Trump administration denigrates.

Buzzwords alone do not constitute a balm, nor a functional policy. The political gains of the 1960s are ephemeral and fragile. Historian Ibram X. Kendi recently noted that President Andrew Johnson vetoed the first civil rights law in 1866, which Congress then overturned, granting citizenship to black Americans. This part of Mr. Johnson’s veto jumped out at me:

In all of our history, in all of our experience as a people living under federal and state law, no system such as that contemplated in the details of this bill has ever been proposed or adopted. They establish guarantees for the security of the colored race which go infinitely beyond any that the general government has ever provided for the white race.

It was 160 years ago. President Johnson viewed equality for Africans in America, which by proxy often proved to be a right for all, as excessive and providing an unfair advantage. During a January 2026 interview, President Donald Trump was asked about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which guaranteed equal access to education and employment for Black Americans. He said these protections resulted in white people being “treated very poorly.”

I can only describe the human cost of the civil rights movement as monumental, and it goes beyond the lives lost. The trauma of a generation that grew up with the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers and Malcolm X, among others, is still present. The struggle between civil rights advocates and their opponents is embedded in American life – from its people to its politics and, of course, its policing.

Today in Minneapolis, parents are afraid to send their children to school because of the presence of federal law enforcement agents on the streets, armed with military-grade equipment. Others kept their children at home during acts of protest. They did the same in 2021, before the trial of the police officer who killed George Floyd.

Civil disobedience has its own throughline in American history. Sometimes, to fix, you have to repeat what works.