America was born in protest. What’s changed 250 years later?

The founders called it “petitioning for redress.” Martin Luther King Jr. referred to it as “civil disobedience,” and his protégé, Rep. John Lewis, described it as “good trouble.”  

Whatever the term, historians largely agree: The United States was born out of protest 250 years ago and has been propelled forward by raucous social movements, from abolition to civil rights, ever since.  

“Protests have been pivotal to the progress of this country,” said Gloria Browne-Marshall, author of “A Protest History of the United States."

Today, Americans continue the deep-rooted tradition of public dissent, most recently through a string of nationwide demonstrations over the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, on Jan. 7 by an immigration agent and broader Trump administration policies.  

Tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets in big cities and small towns across the nation carrying signs that read “ICE out for good” and chanting phrases like “Hey, ho, I-C-E has got to go.”  

At the Golden Globe Awards, some celebrities wore black and white pins that read “Be Good” and “ICE Out” on their tuxedos and designer dresses to raise awareness for the movement. Other Americans have begun to boycott companies like UPS and Comcast that contract with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.  

President Donald Trump has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minnesota, accusing demonstrators of "attacking the Patriots of I.C.E." The move comes as some Republicans have blamed Good’s killing on tactics they say she and other anti-ICE protesters have used in recent months, including honking and blowing whistles at ICE vehicles to warn others of enforcement actions.  

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called Good a “domestic terrorist." The morning Good was killed, she had driven her SUV to the scene of an ICE action and had stopped her vehicle in a manner that obstructed traffic. DHS and ICE officials said Good, after being ordered to get out of her vehicle, tried to run over an agent; video footage suggests she was trying to pull away when she was shot.    

Texas Republican Rep. Roger Williams argued clashes like that between ICE and Good occur because of protests. People, he said, “need to quit demonstrating, quit yelling at law enforcement, challenging law enforcement.” 

Similar sentiments have been expressed during periods of heightened tension and demonstration since the early days of the country, even as the Constitution protects Americans’ right to air their grievances against the government.  

Here’s a short history of protests that have garnered the attention of the nation.    

1773: The Boston Tea Party and roots of the American Revolution 

Protests throughout the 13 colonies paved the road to the American Revolution in the late 1700s. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson told the British monarch that colonists had “petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms.” 

“Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it,” Jefferson wrote 250 years ago. 

Most protests back then were peaceful, just as they are now, said Stephen Solomon, author of “Revolutionary Dissent: How the Founding Generation Created the Freedom of Speech.” But, Solomon said, as occurs in most movements, there was a “fringe” element that took to violence and lawlessness.  

The Boston Tea Party is among the most memorable protests leading up to the Revolutionary War, and today is often heralded as a moment of heroism.  

Dressed as Native Americans, the Sons of Liberty boarded British ships in Boston Harbor in the dead of night and dropped hundreds of chests of imported tea into the water to protest a tax policy they considered unfair.  

Their actions weren’t legal under British law, and not all of the founding fathers supported the protest. Though George Washington supported the cause, he opposed the destruction of tea. In a 1774 letter, he wrote that the actions in Boston “will be considerd as the cause of America” but noted that he did not “approve their conduct in destroyg the Tea.”  

A decade later, as the founding fathers drafted the country’s new government, they enshrined the right of citizens to protest in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights, giving people the right to “peaceably” assemble and “petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”  

Browne-Marshall, who is also a professor of constitutional law at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, argues the two clauses were an “intentional” way to ensure protest would continue to be a force of change in the country.  

“It's set up from the very beginning so that the people would be able to push back against their own government,” she said. 

1794: The Whiskey Rebellion

Six years after the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, a group of farmers and distillers in Western Pennsylvania staged a protest against a whiskey tax enacted by the federal government, arguing that it was unfair to small producers.

First, they tarred and feathered tax collectors and refused to pay. Then, in July 1794 as tensions rose, the farmers gathered in what historians describe as an "angry mob" with pitchforks and muskets and pushed for rebellion.

Washington sent troops to Pennsylvania to quell the protest under the Militia Act of 1792, which allowed the president to organize state militias in times of crisis. The law is considered the predecessor to the Insurrection Act.

Today, Washington's response to the Whiskey Rebellion is viewed as the first test of federal authority in the then-burgeoning nation. Presidents since then have invoked the Insurrection Act – which allows them to deploy federal troops to suppress civil unrest – 30 times, most recently during the Los Angeles riots in 1992.

1913: The National Woman Suffrage Parade

After decades of fighting for the right to vote, the Women's Suffrage Movement led a march down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington on March 3, 1913, a day before Woodrow Wilson's first presidential inauguration. It was the first march on Washington by a civil rights group.

The 5,000 women in the march came from all around the country and wore elaborate costumes and banners. They organized 20 parade floats, nine bands and four mounted brigades among the marchers.

Some of the marchers were violently attacked and jeered at by onlookers, and more than 100 women were hospitalized for injuries, according to the National Archives.

Though it would take another seven years before the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, codifying women's right to vote, historians credit the march with creating momentum for the suffragist movement.

1963: Birmingham campaign and the Civil Rights Movement 

Two centuries and countless protest movements later, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and dozens of others were arrested and jailed for organizing protests against segregation in Birmingham, Alabama.  

They were arrested April 12, 1963, after a court injunction obtained by the commissioner of public safety found King and his allies had not obtained the appropriate permit for protesting. They had applied for the permit but were denied by city officials in the southern town that viewed their plans as a threat to public safety.  

Protesters described the injunction as “raw tyranny under the guise of maintaining law and order.”  

While imprisoned, Kingwrote a letter to fellow clergymen who said they supported his cause but called the protests “unwise and untimely.” 

“You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations,” King wrote in his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” 

“One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream,” King wrote. “Bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers.” 

A year later, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law, prohibiting discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin. King’s nonviolent protests were credited with ramping up public pressure that led to the legislation. 

2017: Unite the Right Rally  

On Aug. 11, 2017, hundreds of White nationalists and supremacists, accompanied by armed men, marched through the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest the removal of Confederate monuments.  

They carried torches and chanted “You will not replace us” and “Jews will not replace us.”  

The protesters, including neo-Nazis and Klu Klux Klan members, continued the rally a day later in the city's downtown, where they met counterprotesters and rioting soon broke out. Several people were injured, and one woman, Heather Heyer, 32, died when she was struck by a car driven into the crowd. 

Several people were later prosecuted and imprisoned for crimes and violence committed during the protest, including the man who killed Heyer with his car.  

President Donald Trump at the time said the protesters included “some very bad people,” but there "were very fine people, on both sides.” Joe Biden, then retired from politics, said in 2019 that the rally and Trump's response drove him to run for president.

The rally was widely viewed as a turning point that brought the White nationalist movement into public focus in a way it hadn’t in decades. It was the largest public gathering of White supremacists in the United States in generations, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

2020: George Floyd Protests 

The murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin on May 25, 2020, rocked a nation already in turmoil over the COVID-19 pandemic. Videos of Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes was replayed on phone screens across the country.  

Tens of thousands of people gathered to express their outrage, holding signs splayed with Floyd’s last words, “I can't breathe.” Some of the demonstrations descended into shootings, looting and vandalism. Dozens of states called in the National Guard to help quell the unrest.  

In a statement at the time, Trump said he would ensure Floyd did not die “in vain,” but he called some of the protests “acts of domestic terror." 

In the months and years after Floyd’s death and the tumultuous protests that followed, states passed more than 140 law enforcement oversight bills to limit police use of force and increase accountability, according to the Vera Institute of Justice.  

Karissa Waddick, who covers America's semiquincentennial for USA TODAY, can be reached at [email protected].