Introduction Overview

“Protests and mass demonstrations of dissent are a necessary part of a healthy democracy. I can’t wait to see what this generation comes up with.”

Zeynep Tufekci, professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University, New York Times, September 21,2024

Protests, civil disobedience, and dissent are not only a defining part of our shared history since the Colonial era, they also continue to the present day on campuses, at political conventions, and elsewhere. Indeed, the rights to freedom of speech and peaceable assembly are guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Some historic marches, sit-ins, and other actions such as the Selma to Montgomery March in 1965 are enshrined in our collective narrative, while others have faded from memory. While the cultural landscapes where these events occurred still exist, the events that took place may not be well-recognized and interpreted.

In its twentieth year, Landslide, The Cultural Landscape Foundation’s (TCLF) annual, thematic report and digital exhibition, breaks with tradition and looks not at threatened landscapes and landscape features, but at the actual protests at thirteen sites across the country that are at risk of fading from public memory, or worse, being forgotten. These events focused on Civil Rights, Native American rights, gay rights, Chicano rights, disability rights, urban renewal, anti-Vietnam War activism, sovereignty, self-determination, and fair representation. The stories associated with each of these sites are illuminating and inspiring and are the focus of Landslide 2024: Demonstration Grounds. When taken together these historic properties have the power of place to serve as portals for re-engaging with the stories of events that were pivotal in the nation’s history.

In past Landslide designations TCLF has placed an emphasis on three guiding principles and calls to action: “make visible, instill value, and engage.” The first of those three – make visible – is at the core of Landslide 2024: Demonstration Grounds and the report’s themes, which address the need for: interpretation on-site, including the identification of “witness trees” and similar landscape features; online interpretation; historic designation (e.g., National Register of Historic Places, National Historic Landmarks), or the expansion of the periods of significance of existing designations; and stewards’ mission and vision statements that also accommodate the protest events. At some places, the information is scant, while at others, including two National Park Service sites – Alcatraz Island and Independence Mall – the narratives are robust and are included in online and on-site interpretation, oral histories, and compelling and informative multi-media documentation.

The public protests that played out at the thirteen different sites across the country represented in Landslide 2024: Demonstration Grounds touch on events that shaped individuals and sparked movements. The protests are diverse: in site types, from a 22.5-acre island in San Francisco Bay to 3.7-mile-long march route through Los Angeles; in longevity, from one day to nineteen months; in the participants, from university students to mothers with baby strollers; and, as noted above, in subject matter. What follows is a brief overview of the Landslide 2024: Demonstration Grounds report and digital exhibition.

Events at two universities led to fundamental leadership changes. Student protests at Fisk in 1924-25 not only ousted the president, but it also paved the way slightly more than a generation later for the appointment of the university’s first African American president. And students at Gallaudet in 1988 protested the appointment of a hearing president with little knowledge of sign language. The “Deaf President Now” movement resulted in the appointment of a Gallaudet alumnus, I. King Jordan, as the president.

The day after VE Day in 1945, a handful of African Americans staged a “wade-in” at a whites-only beach north of the City of Miami. The move prompted the formal creation of an African American beach south of the city. Another “wade-in” in 1959 effectively forced the desegregation of all Miami’s beaches. Interpretive markers at two of these sites central to this story do not exist, while a third site is well interpreted.

A section of levee along the Mississippi River was the site of one of the nation’s largest uprisings of enslaved people. For two days beginning on January 8, 1811, as many as 500 people participated before it was suppressed, the leaders executed, and their bodies dismembered. More than 150 years later, it was the site of a student protest in reaction to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Advocates are currently engaged in efforts to make this history more visible.

The nineteen-month occupation beginning on November 20, 1969, of Alcatraz Island, the famed former prison in San Francisco Bay, was a defining moment in the struggle by Native Americans for dignity and self-determination. The occupation inspired others throughout the county, saw the rise of the Red Power movement, and marked the overturn of federal laws that deprived Native Americans of their lands and identity. Meanwhile, before the Stonewall riots of 1969 and annual pride parades, several dozen men and women in business attire staged an annual Reminder Day every July 4th for five years on Independence Mall in Philadelphia. They marched peacefully with signs decrying employment discrimination of gays and lesbians.

The 1960s was a decade marked by protests. Urban renewal had hollowed out cities and miles of new highways drew people to the suburbs. Seattle’s famed Pike Place Market neighborhood, with one of the country’s oldest farmers markets, faced ruination and in Boston protesters set up a tent city in opposition to the Boston Redevelopment Authority’s plans.

In the 1980s when a proposed parkway for the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum threatened the Olmsted designed Druid Hills neighborhood, residents, including Sally Harbaugh, galvanized opposition. Demonstrators established a tent city in Shadyside Park and images of protestors being arrested and dragged from the park generated significant local news coverage.

On the 50th anniversary of Robert Caro’s monumental biography about Robert Moses, The Power Broker, Landslide 2024 looks at two sites in New York City where Moses’ oversized ambitions and ego met their match: Washington Square Park, where his decades-long plan to run roads through the famed park in Greenwich Village was thwarted by a determined group including Jane Jacobs and former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt; the Battle of Central Park played out on the Upper West Side where irate mothers fought a parking lot proposal and saw the creation of one playground and the redesign of another.

Along with rallies and civil disobedience to promote Civil Rights, opposition to the Vietnam War generated mass protests across the county. In 1968 during the Democratic National Convention, anti-war protesters rallied at Chicago’s Grant Park where they were met with police violence that was televised into every living room in the country, yet today there are no interpretive markers present in the park. And on August 29, 1970, the National Chicano Moratorium March in Los Angeles protesting the disproportionately high casualty rate of Chicanos drafted for the war resulted in the death of Ruben Salazar, a Los Angeles Times journalist and columnist who focused his career on examining the state of Mexican Americans in the U.S. The park at which the march terminated, near where Salazar was killed, was renamed for him less than three weeks after his death; today it is undergoing a rehabilitation that will include interpretive markers, quotes by Salazar and others in the ground plane, and additional forms of site-specific commemoration and interpretation.

It is nothing short of remarkable that the First Amendment rights to freedom of speech, to peaceably assembly, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances, are foundational principles. These rights, as illustrated in Landslide 2024: Demonstration Grounds, have enabled marginalized and disenfranchised people and groups to make their voices heard. By amplifying those voices today, through narrative and site-specific interpretation and commemoration, disparate cultural landscapes will be recognized as witnesses to history, inviting future generations to be an active part of the continuum that is the American story.

Included in each site entry is a “Status” sidebar on the right hand side with “low, medium, high” rankings in the following categories: “Designation,” which looks at whether a site is listed in the National Register of Historic Places and similar recognitions; “Integrity of Protest Setting,” concerning the physical condition; “Interpretation On-site,” whether there are interpretive markers or signage; and “Interpretation Online,” which rates the inclusion of narratives about the protests on the website of the landscape’s owner/chief steward.