I believe in protests. That’s not what Wednesday was.

The author is a Charlotte City Council member and participant in Charlotte protests:

After Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, I tweeted “Occupy the Senate.”

It was clear what was about to happen — the ramming through of a conservative replacement to the Supreme Court by an administration in its final months — and that my voice wasn’t being heard by my state’s elected representatives.

So I called for protest. I hoped Democratic senators would employ every parliamentary procedure possible to delay the process. I also imagined interruption, in the spirit of Greenpeace activists and Moral Mondays.

Protest, specifically by voices historically underrepresented in the political process, is a key tool in our democracy. There’s a long history of using protest to interrupt the business of government — and it’s a tool I learned to use in the past few years.

When Keith Lamont Scott was killed by a police officer in 2016, I joined the people protesting his death. The protest I supported was a way to get unheard voices and pain in front of my fellow Americans.

I ran for City Council in 2017 because I believe that if people organize well enough we can select the people we want to run our government and make rules we believe in. This is difficult to do. We win by applying constant pressure over time through the democratic process.

Since then, I’ve governed — but I’ve also continued to protest.

What happened Wednesday was not protest. It was not the lifting of historically underrepresented voices to make clear an injustice, to reject that injustice in the name of what our democracy can be.

It was a group trying to force a return to ideas that the majority of American voters left behind in November. A group whose white-supremacist viewpoint has been entrenched in America since its beginning. The way these rioters were treated by law enforcement bore little resemblance to how I was treated when I protested.

Seeing that led me to tweet this week: “Some personal context: I currently have a criminal charge pending for walking on the streets that I govern.”

The exceptional nature of America has always been about the possibility of who and what we can become. And though our founders had the audacious idea of federal, state and local governments that are of, by, and for the people, they also made a cowardly compromise on who counted — and did not count — as a person. That compromise has forced some Americans to try to prove themselves worthy of equal protection, through painful political processes that have passed down trauma through generations.

Watching an American coup being aided by real political power in 2021, I felt that trauma in real time. I felt the shared rage of people from Graham to Charlotte and all over this country who got criminal charges for walking in the street, as I did. I thought of that as I watched hundreds walk into the Capitol, some destroying property and carrying weapons, then walk out without confrontation or arrest.

But I also thought of Georgia and people who are working on democracy. I thought back to last fall’s elections in North Carolina. The results, largely, were not what I wanted, but turnout and voter engagement were incredible.

Democracy is hard-won. To win it, to keep winning, we must talk about it, at the dinner table, in schools, in random conversations. It is a political system that works only if there is a widespread understanding of its forms, principles and aims.

I have no doubt that the terror that flowed through the Capitol will try to find its way to our state. We will deal with it. I am confident we will not give in to insurrection. This year, we will organize around our municipal elections. We will continue to apply constant pressure for the rights of all people. I believe that we will win.

This story was originally published January 8, 2021 at 4:39 PM.