OHIO- As protests continue across our state and the nation, it’s important to understand why people protest and if history is doomed to keep repeating itself.

“A riot is the language of the unheard,” said civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Junior in 1967. “And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.​“

In that speech, he denounced riots and violence but foreshadowed what we are seeing across America today.

“There’s the speech that a riot is the voice of the unheard and the culmination of what it means to be unheard, dehumanized, marginalized, oppressed, and dominated for an entire class of people, an entire race of people throughout this country’s history, I think it’s profound,” says Associate Law Professor Ayesha Bell Hardaway. She is also the co-director of the Case Western Reserve University Social Justice Institute. 

“Protest is for people who need to get the attention of decision-makers, whether they are elected officials or just general folks who are in a position to affect change,” she says.

Seeing so much diversity in these protests, more than ever seen before gives Bell Hardaway hope. 

“At this point, you may be seeing folks from other groups and populations who are who, for the first time being confronted with the horrors of reality, and because of that, you know, we may see a different moment in time,” she tells Spectrum News 1 Ohio.

But she says for those concentrating only on property damage, they’re missing the point, missing the foundation of this anger and frustration that needs to be acknowledged for bridges to be built and healing to begin.

“I believe it’s necessary for that full conversation to recognize that there has been a great amount of damage and violence committed against black people in America since the inception of this country and that violence has extended beyond slavery to the creation of slave patrols, which manifested themselves into what we now know as law-enforcement agencies,” Bell Hardaway explains. “And those law enforcement agencies, for a significant portion of their history, were in charge of and responsible for dominating black bodies.”

Dominate the protestors as the president told the governors across the country. 

“And to the extent that we have a heavy-handed reaction from government officials law enforcement, sheriffs and the like, to what was a peaceful protest, there will be great concern and outrage over that heavy-handed approach,” she says. 

Bell Hardaway also says it’s not just critical to hold law enforcement accountable, but at all sectors in which African Americans are facing discrimination. “What policies, what mindsets, what initiatives are we going to put in place to make people recognize and understand that there are not two classes of people here in America.”​