As crowds pour into streets across Kansas and nation, a nagging question: Is No Kings sustainable?

Kansans protest President Donald Trump at the June 14, 2025, "No Kings" rally at the Statehouse in Topeka. (Sherman Smith/Kansas Reflector)

Eliza Broadnax Bradshaw died in Jetmore, Kansas, on July 26, 1913.

She was 86.

Eliza spent at least the first 40 years of her life enslaved in Kentucky.

She spent the last portion in southwest Kansas, a widowed Exoduster, part of a migratory movement of Black people fleeing the violence they endured post-Reconstruction.

Eliza’s story is not well-known. But she’s the inspiration for a book with answers to a growing national debate.

• What comes after the massive No Kings protests?
• Sharing solidarity with like-minded people is one thing, but can throngs of sign-carrying marchers convince people who aren’t already at odds with the Trump administration?
• Is this truly an unprecedented moment in North American history?

The extraordinary life of Eliza Broadnax Bradshaw motivated her great, great granddaughter to write “A Protest History of the United States.”

The book is exactly what the title advertises, and more.

It expands common definitions of protest to argue that the nation has gone through predictable cycles, many similar to what is occurring now.

Author Gloria J. Browne-Marshall visited Kansas in March, part of travels promoting the 2025 book.

Browne-Marshall is a professor of constitutional law at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, a playwright and a civil rights attorney. She grew up in Kansas City, Missouri.

Author Gloria J. Browne-Marshall speaks at Rainy Day Books in Fairway on March 5. (Browne-Marshall photo)

The book is as compelling as it is comprehensive.

It covers protests of the Indigenous, slavery rebellions, labor rights and union strikes, anti-war and conscientious objectors, military service to prove loyalty to the nation, women’s suffrage, sexual freedom and reproduction, climate denial and environmental racism, criminal justice, and police reform.

She’s a lyrical writer. The text is filled with prose befitting poetry, or phrasing for a T-shirt.

“One side of this country’s personality extends a right to protest and the other gives the reason.”

“Rest in power ancestral protest leaders, rabble-rousers, conscience raisers, advocates of change, martyrs for equal rights, and conscientious objectors who built the freedoms about which this conflicted country boasts and blindly enjoys.”

Change, she said, doesn’t happen without disruption.

The two personalities of the nation have long clashed, Browne-Marshall argues.

“The United States is about empire building, commerce and capitalism,” she said.

On the other side, there’s the Statue of Liberty, and the idea that anyone can come here seeking freedom.

The empire builder personality is leading politics now, she said, noting President Donald Trump’s boasted claims for Greenland and Canada.

There are those who see themselves as empire and business builders, and those who see the nation as primarily a place for freedom and liberty.

The unifying factor of No Kings is the fact that Trump continues to see his administration as above reproach, beyond the moderating reach of Congress and the courts. Daily, Trump provides fodder for dissent.

There’s the escalating war with Iran and related gasoline prices, tariffs that have gutted American farmers, labeling drug runners as foreign terrorists and then ordering their assassination, and upending laws and policy that have long governed federal immigration enforcement.

He’s increasingly unpopular.

Yet, the multitude of areas where Trump draws criticism can be a liability, a way to fracture the movement, rather than focus it.

Historically, effective movements meet a list of criteria. They need strategy, tenacity, time, alliances, resources, and creativity, she said. Youth, especially college students, are almost always involved.

A potential pitfall that Browne-Marshall cites is that some younger activists today insists on a decentralized, collective voice, shunning formal leadership. That can be problematic when forming alliances and defining goals.

Browne-Marshall is hopeful about the role of labor unions.

“I hope union leaders recognize their power at this moment and lend their institutional knowledge to ‘No King’ leadership,” she said. “These national ‘No King’ rallies need to become protest events with demands and goals.”

Storytelling plays a large role in the book, outlining famous and little-known figures.

That includes Eliza, whose perseverance was an act of protest.

She once threw scalding water at her cruel slave masters, a calculated fit of rage that allowed her to escape being beaten with a rawhide whip. She pressed forward into farming the arid Kansas soil, widowed six months after leaving Kentucky with her husband and children.

She lived long enough to see a granddaughter graduate high school in Topeka, and then what was then called Kansas State Normal School, now Emporia State. A grandson became an attorney, helping lay the legal groundwork for Brown v. Board of Education.

Initially, Browne-Marshall thought she’d write about the legal arguments around protest.

The more she researched, she understood U.S. protest history is broader. She focused on empowering people, giving them tools by explaining the past.

Browne-Marshall invites readers to wrestle with the massive history of protest in the building of the nation: “Protest includes the spontaneity of slave uprisings, West Virginia coal mine gunfights, anti-war marches, and urban rebellions. Protest can be the act of doing one small thing; refusing to move, standing up or staying seated, speaking up or remaining silent with one’s fist in the air, signing a petition, waging a sit-in or a boycott. Protest can mean resistance or surviving horrendous wrongs.”

Mary Sanchez is a national syndicated columnist with Tribune Content Agency and a familiar face and voice in Kansas City media. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.