Last year people took to the streets to stand up for Black lives. Now, Republicans have introduced more than 180 anti-protest bills to silence those taking action.
Noting the often punitive and discriminatory nature of GOP-sponsored state anti-protest laws, over 75 advocacy groups on Tuesday sent an open letter to top U.S. Justice Department officials asking them to condemn such measures and to support legal action against states that pass “legislation that censors and disrupts our First Amendment right to protest racial injustice.”
The letter—led by Color of Change, MediaJustice, and Free Press—points out that “state lawmakers have introduced more than 100 punitive anti-protest bills since the summer of 2020, and 81 this year alone,” more than twice as many such proposals as in any previous year.
