When: July 28, 1917
Estimated attendance: 10,000
Reason for protest: Demonstrators marched in silence to protest violence against African-Americans following race riots in East St. Louis, Missouri.
Impact: The Silent Protest Parade, organized by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was "the first mass African-American demonstration of its kind and marked a watershed moment in the history of the civil rights movement," Chad Williams, an associate professor of African and Afro-American Studies at Brandeis University, wrote in an opinion piece for the Miami Herald in 2017.
The parade "constituted a radical claiming of the public sphere and a powerful affirmation of black humanity," Williams said. "It declared that a 'New Negro' had arrived and launched a black public protest tradition that would be seen in the parades of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s and the Black Lives Matter marches of today."