“You can tell a story about civil rights in which Martin Luther King made a good speech and then the government changed — and Martin Luther King did make good speeches, and government policies did change, but a lot of other stuff was happening at the same time,” said David S. Meyer, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine. “Promoting social change requires a complicated recipe, and to pull out and identify one ingredient and say ‘this is the one that matters’ is either bad social science or just deceptive.”

For the full story, please visit https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/16/us/politics/us-protests-history-george-floyd.html.