George Floyd’s death rightfully ignited protests all across the country. Four recent polls revealed that 15 million to 26 million people in 550 places across the United States partook in #BLM protests.
According to scholars and crowd-counting experts and reported by The New York Times, “these figures would make the recent protests the largest movement in the country’s history.”
“Really, it’s hard to overstate the scale of this movement,” said Deva Woodly, an associate professor of politics at the New School.
The civil rights marches that took place in the 1960s were small in comparison to what’s happening now. “If we added up all those protests during that period, we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of people, but not millions,” Woodly said.
Neal Caren, associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who studies social movements in the United States, commented, “I’ve never seen self-reports of protest participation that high for a specific issue over such a short period.”
