We don’t have any polling specifically about Trump’s recent NFL comments, but a Quinnipiac University poll from 2016 found that only 38 percent of those surveyed approved of players choosing not to stand during the anthem. But while these NFL protests may be unpopular right now, particularly with white people, similar protests in the past — involving race, civil rights and varying definitions of patriotism — came to be viewed much more positively after the fact.
Marches for civil rights during the 1960s were generally seen negatively at the time. As the Washington Post noted last year, most Americans didn’t approve of the Freedom Riders, the March on Washington in 1963 or other similar protests. In fact, many Americans thought that these protests would hurt the advancement of civil rights. In addition, but many Americans held mixed-to-negative views of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. In a 1966 Gallup survey, 63 percent of Americans gave King a negative score on a scale from -5 to +5. Now, the civil rights marches are viewed as major successes, and just 4 percent of Americans rated King negatively on that same scale in a 2011 Gallup poll.
Many Americans also viewed gay rights marchers during the AIDS epidemic negatively. According to Business Insider, the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation in April 1993 drew more than 800,000 people fighting against discrimination and seeking more funding for AIDS research. But in a Newsweek survey conducted at the time, only 23 percent of Americans thought that the demonstration did more good than harm in the fight for gay rights. Today, gay rights organizations celebrate the march, same-sex marriage is legal and much of the platform demanded by protesters seems mainstream.
Nothing succeeds like success. And King was such a huge success that, after enough time passed, the very people who opposed the principles he stood for held him up as an unassailable moral standard for their own cause – and as long as nobody actually bothered to find out what King thought about these matters, it worked.
Can you see it in 2047? Senator Donald Beauregard Bannon of the InfoWars Party claims that if the sainted Colin Kaepernick were alive today, he would certainly be aghast at liberal Republican-appointed justices like Sam Alito, who say police may have some sort of obligation to provide medical assistance to the people they shoot.