The powerful should never tell relatively powerless people who are protesting for their very lives how they should be behaving.



That’s what was happening when a conservative pundit criticized Parkland students for organizing the March for Our Lives. It was, she said, “quite interesting that the children survivors haven’t even buried their friends, grieve, get over shock but have had the time to plan for a march, come up with a creative hashtag, get their story to all media outlets all in such a short amount time”.



But memorializing the dead through protest doesn’t mean denigrating them – it means honoring their lives by making a better future. Mourning through militant protest has a long and noble history in the United States.

It was young people protesting about the death of another Florida teenager who died from gun violence six years ago, Trayvon Martin, that led to the Black Lives Matter movement. Their love for that boy killed by George Zimmerman helped spark a movement honoring the value of black life.



Young people can’t change US gun law alone – but they could tip the balance | Gary Younge Read more

Similarly, Ferguson residents began mourning Mike Brown by protesting about the mass gun deaths due to racist policing. The protests might not have been considered appropriate etiquette by some, but their urgency was driven by the fact that his body was left to bleed out on the street for hours.

This is not unlike how Mamie Till chose “to let the people see what they did to my boy” in an open casket, making his funeral into a protest to protect other black people.

A few days after the Parkland shooting, a group of teens staged a “die-in” by lying down outside the White House. This was a painful new incarnation of a protest used by Act Up – the Aids Coalition to Unleash Power – which staged die-ins in the 1980s and 90s as many of the members themselves were dying. And in 1992, Act Up members heaved the ashes of their dead friends and lovers over the George HW Bush-occupied White House.



Policing the appropriateness of mourning is a way of saying “stay in your place”

To these gay men and their allies, mourning meant being militant about how the dead had been killed by homophobia and inaction – much as the teens staging a die-in outside the White House last week were protesting about the present federal government’s complicity via inaction on gun deaths.

Black people have been making life better for everyone by mourning through protest for centuries in this country. On 28 July 1917, some 10,000 people gathered in New York City to march down Fifth Avenue in a silent parade organized by the NAACP. The march was a protest against the East St Louis riots earlier that year, in which rampaging white mobs had killed dozens of black people and burned the homes of thousands more.



A century before that, during the German Coast Uprising of 1811, enslaved black people tried to mourn being raped, murdered, bought and sold by rebelling for their freedom.

Policing the appropriateness of mourning is a way of saying “stay in your place”. Having lost my father, mother, stepmother and sister in the span of a decade, I know a thing or two about mourning and the many forms it can take. But to understand that protest is a humane response for grieving people, you have to first believe they are humans capable of feeling. (The black teens who have been protesting against police shootings have not been considered as valid as the Parkland teens because their humanity isn’t typically seen as valid in media and politics.)

And if you’ve never had to fight for the lives of people you love – or felt that your own life is imminently in danger – then you may be inclined to do nothing and uphold the status quo. But when death has come through great injustice, mourning through a militancy aimed at stopping similarly unjust deaths is not just healthy, but righteous and ethical. Mourning through militancy is one of the more noble sides of America’s history.