The
right to assemble is recognized as a human right and protected in the
First Amendment of the
US Constitution
The Constitution of the United States is the supreme law of the United States of America. It superseded the Articles of Confederation, the nation's first constitution, on March 4, 1789. Originally including seven articles, the Constitut ...
under the clause, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Widespread
mass protest
A political demonstration is an action by a mass group or collection of groups of people in favor of a political or other cause or people partaking in a protest against a cause of concern; it often consists of walking in a mass march format ...
became a distinct characteristic of American
civic engagement
Civic engagement or civic participation is any individual or group activity addressing issues of public concern. Civic engagement includes communities working together or individuals working alone in both political and non-political actions to ...
during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The rate of mass protests has risen exponentially since the mid-2010s thanks in part to the sudden and widespread availability of smartphones as well as the social media revolution, which has allowed for instant and widespread communication and planning. Each of the top ten attended protests in the United States has occurred since 1970 and three of the top five have occurred since the start of the
first Donald Trump administration in 2017.
Counting methodology
In 1995, the
National Park Service
The National Park Service (NPS) is an List of federal agencies in the United States, agency of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government, within the US Department of the Interior. The service manages all List ...
estimated that 400,000 people attended the
Million Man March in Washington, D.C., the official count for the event. The organizers said that more than a million people turned out, and they threatened to sue the Park Service unless it revised its estimate. Congress, in response, barred the agency from producing any more crowd estimates.
Since then, official crowd estimates for organized political protests, demonstrations, and marches have relied on an amalgam of police data, organizer estimates, the research of crowd scientists, and journalists.
List
This section lists one-day protest events in the United States with at least 100,000 participants.
Rows shaded in yellow indicates the protest happened in multiple cities simultaneously across the United States.
See also
*
List of protests in the United States
*
List of protests in the 21st century
Notes
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Protests and demonstrations in the United States by size
United States politics-related lists
United States-related lists of superlatives
20th century in the United States
21st century in the United States
Lists relating to attendances