Protests for a kinder world.
Between January 20th, 2017 and January 31st, 2021, we learned about protests with over attendees—individuals demonstrating for inclusion, human rights and the environment. Below, maps show statistics broken down by state and interesting trends between states.
The cartograms below display states sized by their population and colored by their protest activity (total number of attendees, attendees per capita or “protest effort per resident,” and total protests). Switching from a geographic to a population-based representation of the country relates protest activity to the number of people living in each state, instead of relating protest activity to the amount of land in each state. Notably, small but densely populated states like Massachusetts take on greater visual importance in population-based cartograms, and large but sparsely populated states like Wyoming are de-emphasized. Here's a great article that further discusses differences between data visualizations using cartograms and maps.
The bar chart below shows the total number of protests by category and month. Clicking on a category in the legend will toggle that category's visibility on and off. National protests, such as March for Our Lives (March 2018) and Families Belong Together (June 2018), are clearly visible against a backdrop of constant protest activity. The chart also shows clearly the historic scale of the Black Lives Matter protests for racial justice and police accountability during the summer of 2020.
The table below shows the diversity of reasons that people came out to protest for or against within each broad category. Protest data can be searched using the text field in the upper right and sorted by header field.