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Ongoing protests against police brutality are causing journalists to question how we cover these events, from the language we use to the images we publish.
First off: Should we photograph protesters?
Some millennial and Gen Z journalists are pushing against the commonly held notion that it’s acceptable to run images of demonstrators because they’re participating in a public event. (We saw a glimpse of this perspective in action last November when student newspaper The Daily Northwestern apologized for posting photos of student protesters on Twitter. Many journalists in their 30s and older, myself included, didn’t get it.)
Part of the concern is that the photos could lead to harassment or other repercussions for taking part in a demonstration. This sounds a little far out to people like me who believe protesters are basically signing on for the possibility that they may be photographed, but that line of thought ignores that activists can face extreme and unwarranted consequences for protesting.
The history of activism in the United States is a history of conflict. People seeking change, especially when it comes to racial inequality, have always risked being spied on, harassed, assaulted or killed. Dozens of people died during the civil rights movement, including Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers, who Byron De La Beckwith killed in 1963. Beckwith wasn’t convicted of the crime until 1994.
The FBI has a long history of monitoring activists, including civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr., who was assassinated, Chicago Black Panther Fred Hampton, who police killed during a raid, and other progressives.
In “Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals and Reagan’s Rise to Power,” Seth Rosenfeld revealed how the agency worked against the free speech movement of the 1960s.
The FBI’s actions against activists, especially those thought to be connected to Communism, go back decades earlier, though. By 1942, J. Edgar Hoover, who headed the FBI for about 50 years, had started an off-the-books surveillance program aimed at suspected “subversives.” The effort, which even Hoover described as “clearly illegal,” involved agents making unauthorized home break-ins to plant microphones and take photos of documents.
In one episode from the 1950s, an FBI agent fell asleep in the crawl space under a home where he was supposed to be eavesdropping on targets of the House Un-American Activities Committee.
McCarthyism may feel distant from today, but surveillance of Americans for political reasons is alive, well, and aided by technology.
That’s evident in this piece by Wendi C. Thomas, the founder and editor of news nonprofit MLK50, who detailed her own experience as the subject of police surveillance.
Two years ago, Thomas learned that the Memphis Police Department had monitored her, three other journalists and Black Lives Matter activists.
In the 1960s, the police department started spying on a black student union, labor organizers, teachers and political activists. A lawsuit filed by the ACLU of Tennessee led to a consent decree requiring Memphis PD to stop its surveillance, but police resumed the practice in recent years, according to a second ACLU suit filed in 2017.
All of this brings me to a question I’ve had for years, one that has only grown more solid in the last few weeks.
Do we have the right to protest in the United States – not in theory, but in practice?
During the Floyd protests, dozens of videos have shown instances of police attacking demonstrators, often for no discernible reason. Through the videos, we’ve seen the tactics that law enforcement officials in communities across the country use to respond to these events. We’ve seen their equipment – riot gear, tear gas and rubber bullets, which go far beyond what the situation calls for.
In Louisville, Kentucky, police shot and killed David McAtee during a protest. An Ohio protester died after being exposed to tear gas and pepper spray at a Columbus event. At least three people who attended demonstrations, including a photojournalist, lost an eye to crowd-control weapons, like rubber bullets.
This violence is an extension of the violence that activists want to stop. It underscores the unwritten, unspoken conditions that must be met to protest in the United States without being harassed, assaulted or killed by police.
You have to fight the good fight in the “right” way. You have to be the right person with the right color skin, the right socioeconomic status and the correct list of demands – preferably the kind of demands that don’t require anyone, anywhere to change what they’re doing. Even if that thing they’re doing kills about 1,000 people each year.
In the same way that cellphone video and social media increased Americans’ awareness of police shootings, many people who have never been to a protest in their lives are seeing for the first time that civil freedoms are one thing on paper and another thing altogether in the streets of this country.
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Send me feedback, questions and tips: bryant@bigiftrue.org and 405-990-0988.
– Mollie Bryant
