The recent Black Lives Matter protests peaked on June 6, when half a million people turned out in nearly 550 places across the United States. That was a single day in more than a month of protests that still continue to today.
It
suggested that about 15 million to 26 million people in the United States have participated in demonstrations over the death of George Floyd and others in recent weeks.
These figures would make the recent protests the largest
movement in the country’s history, according to interviews with scholars and crowd-counting experts.
On June 6, at least 50,000 people turned out in Philadelphia, 20,000 in Chicago’s Union Park and up to 10,000 on
the Golden Gate Bridge, according to estimates by Edwin Chow, an associate professor at Texas State University, and researchers at the Crowd Counting Consortium.
One of the reasons there have been protests in so many places in the United States is the backing of organizations like Black Lives Matter. While the group isn’t necessarily directing each protest, it provides materials, guidance
and a framework for new activists. Those activists are taking to social media to quickly share protest details to a wide audience.
Black Lives Matter has been around since 2013, but there’s been a big shift in public opinion about the movement as well as broader support for recent protests. A deluge of public support from organizations like the N.F.L.
and NASCAR for Black Lives Matter may have also encouraged supporters who typically would sit on the sidelines to get involved.
More than 40 percent of counties in the
United States — at least 1,360 — have had a protest.
Unlike
with past Black Lives Matter protests, nearly 95 percent of counties that had a protest recently are majority white, and nearly three-quarters of the counties are more than 75 percent white.
Half of those who
said they protested said that this was their first time getting involved with a form of activism or demonstration.
