Peaceful Protest Vs Riot Analysis

One of the biggest case studies of a peaceful protest is a salt march for Indian independence from theBritish rule. During the end of the decade of the 1930s, the nation of India experienced disruption on thescale they had not seen in 75 years and it was witnessing a level of social movement participation thatorganizers who challenged undemocratic regimes usually only dream of achieving. Mahatma Gandhi andsome 80 followers from his ?ashram? set out on a Salt March peacefully protesting the British Monopoly onthe mineral used commonly by every Indian household.

The British retaliation on this march resulted inmore than 60,000 people arrested. The retaliation also left about 29,000 Indians proudly filling the jails atone time. The march had many prominent figures from the Indian National Congress, which includedpoliticians, not in favor of supporting peaceful protests. Besides “illegally” producing salt, the resistancegrew with thousands of villagers refusing to pay land and timber taxes. Many government officialsresigned from the government, with almost a third of local officials in one district of Gujarat declaringthat they would resign from their posts. Winston Churchill was furious with the British Parliament statingincompetence in properly defending the empire. After the end of the Second World War, the peacefulmovement eventually led to the British government leaving India for good. This is a good example ofwhen a peaceful protest worked to get a nation its independence.

A good example of a riot is the 1967 Detroit Riot, also known as the 1967 Detroit Rebellion or12?th? Street riot is known to be the bloodiest incident in the “Long hot summer of 1967”. The Riotcomposed mainly of confrontations between black residents and the Detroit Police Department. The riotwas incited in the morning of Sunday, July 23, 1967, in Detroit Michigan. The event that caused the riothad strong parallels to the play, Detroit ’67, and was the police raid of an unlicensed, after-hours bar thenknown as the blind pig, on the city’s Near West Side. It is one of the deadliest riots in American historyand lasted for five days. There were 43 people dead, 1,189 injured, and over 7, 200 arrests, and more than2,000 buildings destroyed as a result. The people of Detroit demonstrated their anger and frustration in theprotests but at the cost of 43 lives. The protest itself did not solve the problems faced by the African -Americans in the 1960s and 1970s, but it did have a domino effect around the country and with thepeaceful protests of Martin Luther King the Civil Rights Movement was passed into law.From both of the previous examples, one can easily say that peaceful protests are better than riots.But many would argue that riots are necessary to have governments take immediate action on the issue,however, the government’s retaliation on riots are far more violent than a peaceful protest. Peacefulprotests take a longer time and sometimes can have no results too. It is up to the people’s own discretionon how on what they would choose as a way for inciting the government to take action on something witha way of peaceful protest or riot.

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