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As protests over the war in Gaza erupt across college campuses and cities throughout the country, Houston has remained relatively quiet.
That, historically, has been par for the course in our city, where — despite having the fourth-largest population in the nation — protests tend to draw smaller crowds than in other parts of the country.
That’s not to say Houston isn’t a “protest city”, organizers say. Rather, here in Houston — where urban sprawl is part of the city’s physical DNA — protests look different. They have to.
“I would never want to say that we’re not a city of resistance. People have done it, and some of that’s overlooked,” says Daniel Cohen, chair of the grassroots political organization Indivisible Houston. “And in some ways, there’s the matter of perception: If we declare Houston a ‘non-protest city,’ we won’t have protests.”
Houston does have protests. Earlier this week, a few dozen immigrant rights advocates rallied at City Hall to ask city officials for help protecting Houstonians from Senate Bill 4, which would make it a state crime to enter Texas illegally from Mexico.
That same day, inside City Hall, a group of Houstonians implored city council to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. They came without picket signs, and spoke without linked elbows. But those actions are also a form of protest, says Ashton P. Woods, co-founder of Black Lives Matter: Houston.
“A protest should not just be on the streets, and then everybody goes home and forgets about what’s going on,” says Woods, who was at the helm of what has been widely acknowledged to be Houston’s largest-ever protest — the 60,000 person march downtown in the wake of George Floyd’s 2020 murder.
“People showing up to city council and commissioners court, saying, ‘This policy isn’t going to work, and we’ll see you next election.’ That’s protest.”
The chilling effect of a business mindset
That idea of how to sell the city for its own gain is ingrained in the fabric of what makes Houston Houston.
When brothers Augustus C. Allen and John Kirby Allen first founded Houston in the 1830s, they leaned heavily on marketing.
“There is no place in Texas more healthy, having an abundance of excellent spring water, and enjoying the sea breeze in all its freshness,” the Allens wrote in an 1836 ad promoting the new city they founded.
Never mind that the water in question was the city’s signature mucky bayous, then a magnet for mosquitoes carrying malaria and yellow fever — likely the ultimate cause of death for John Kirby Allen just two years later.
When it came time to desegregate lunch counters and other businesses during the civil rights movement more than a century later, civic leaders orchestrated a media blackout so the protests received little attention from prime-time cameras and front-page news coverage.
It was, the city leaders agreed, in the city’s best interest.
“When I think about that example, it took businesses to lead the way, and it hindered what the public needed, because big businesses made that decision,” says Melanie Pang, a clinical assistant professor at the University of Houston’s Graduate College of Social Work and expert on social justice, accessibility and policy.
“When policy is made behind closed doors, the moral victory can’t happen. The public doesn’t realize what rights they have,” she added.
While that kind of large-scale media blackout is a relic of the past, Houston continues to be guided by the perception of what’s good for business. And individual Houstonians feel this on a personal level as well.
Houston's history of prioritizing business may create a “chilling effect” on public demonstrations, as some residents fear jeopardizing their jobs for speaking out in an “at-will” state.
“Absolutely, Houston is a protest city,” Pang says. “It’s just that we are hindered by the larger decisions that capitalist structures make to be able to protest together.”
While Houston continues to be home to a swath of business leaders, it’s also a place where 40 percent of residents report they would be unable to access $400 in an emergency.
“Houston has always had to do things differently because the way business plays such a prominent role,” Pang continues. “When we think about also how tenuous financial security is in Houston — and there’s been this increased rhetoric of you could lose your job if you’re pro-Palestine on social media for example — there’s this chilling effect.”
Infrastructure as a barrier
The success of Houston’s economy has also defined the physical realities of the city, which has continued to expand outward in concentric circles, creating a sprawling mass. And that decentralization makes flooding the streets of Houston with protestors a unique challenge.
“We are arguably the most horribly planned city in the U.S.,” says Cohen. While protests in other cities include giant actions like physically shutting down neighborhoods through a swell of people, Houston’s decentralization hamstrings those kinds of actions locally.
“Imagine protestors in Houston saying, ‘We’ll shut down the street. We’ll shut down downtown,’” Cohen says. “OK, which one? The city’s too big. You can’t shut down the city for the most part.”
This sprawl works against organizers in other ways as well. If people on one side of Houston saw a protest occurring on the opposite side of the city, they’d be hard-pressed to make it there in time to participate.
That can hamper one of the key ways protests reach mass crowds in the digital age; if participants cannot make it to a rally to livestream it while it’s still happening, they lose an opportunity for organic, viral growth.
Add in the city’s extreme weather, its lack of shade and public transit and the hurdles stack to a point where the act of protest requires a string of sacrifices that many Houstonians are unable to make, Cohen and Pang both note.
“If I did the calculation, I’d need this person to have a vehicle to have social media to find out about the event, pay for parking, and how to navigate all that,” Pang says. “And I have to have them be able to stand or sit outside for an extended period of time — I think this is a person with no physical disability, a certain amount of wealth or income, and who are those people, they’re extremely busy trying to keep their jobs and being told that if they do anything that looks like activism, their job could be at risk.”
Large- and small-scale protests
This is not to say that Houston has never seen nor will never see giant crowds of protestors. More than 20,000 protestors swarmed downtown for the Houston iteration of the Women’s March in early 2017.
A year later, thousands more Houstonians showed up for the gun-control-focused March for Our Lives rally in 2018.
Then, in 2020, came the massive George Floyd protest, as an estimated 15 to 26 million Americans across the country protested police brutality, shattering protest records across the nation.
“There’s a lot that we protest for, that we fight for,” says Woods.
And just because you haven’t seen them, doesn’t mean they aren’t happening, he notes.
While much of the Texas spotlight has shined on the University of Texas at Austin, where dozens have been arrested for protesting the war in Gaza, Houston’s colleges have also seen acts of resistance.
At the University of Houston, where Pang works, about 10 to 20 students gathered at a time in the Student Center South stairs in what university officials have called “community-building” acts, during which students passed out literatures and displayed posters demanding the university divest funds from companies that have profited from the war.
The students “did not create anything permanent,” says university spokesman Kevin Quinn, and “left at the end of the day.”
Similarly, during an on-campus teach-in across town at Rice University, the university president Reginald DesRoches noted in a statement that “the student organizers of the teach-in also made several modifications to help maintain an environment that minimized disruption, departing the space each evening.”
While both events were smaller than those being highlighted in Austin, that doesn’t mean they didn’t take place.
“I think what it boils down to is, this,” says Woods. “If you feel like Houston is not a protest city, then you’re asleep at the wheel.”
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