Updated Jan. 25, 2026, 9:32 a.m. ET
- Protests in metro Detroit were majority White, even in the majority Black city of Detroit in 2025.
- Surveys from national researchers also show that attendees elsewhere were mainly White and female.
- The reason why is nuanced and depends on who is asked, but many Detroiters said resources, concerns with the 2024 voter demographics and safety played a role.
Vendors sat with produce, soaps, homemade sweets and jewelry in booths along the sidewalk at an east-side Detroit farmer’s market.
At their backs, a crowd of individuals with graying hair gathered in the accompanying lot. Many held signs lambasting President Donald Trump.
It appeared to be a gathering of the “new Detroit,” said a neighborhood man who had been passing by.
It was a July 2025 “Good Trouble Lives On” rally invoking the memory of late civil rights leader U.S. Rep. John Lewis.
Set in the 80% Black neighborhood of East English Village, it served as a stark example of a theme: Anti-Trump protesters and rallygoers in metro Detroit tended to be White in 2025, even in the predominantly Black and liberal city of Detroit.
It’s a pattern found by national researchers. Across four major anti-Trump actions in 2025, the majority of protesters surveyed were White and female.
Why that is and what the future holds depends on who is asked.
Some would-be protesters in the Black community who spoke with the Free Press were already engaged in grassroots actions outside of mass mobilizations. Some were fearful that the presence of Black bodies would increase the likelihood of police action against protesters. Some said they already did their part by voting and marching in the past; it was time for White people to step up.
A few Detroiters were pro-Trump. Others did partake in the protests, and still others now wished to participate. Some, too, said they didn’t like Trump but did not feel aligned with those organizing or attending the protests.
Multiple vendors in East English Village expressed support for the gathering. That passing neighbor joined in. And Jacinda Cason, who organized the event and is Black, saw the White turnout as both positive and expected. She runs a racial traumatic healing effort called Encompass Lives Full Circle, works for the Black Voters Matter advocacy group, and said she promoted the rally through a website more likely to draw a White crowd.
“It’s always the people of color that does this work,” but White community members sit at tables, at family dinners, that Black community members don’t, Cason said. White attendees can carry the necessary messages to those tables.
The crowd was hopefully full of “co-liberators,” willing to be more active and vocal than mere allies, she said.
Who’s protesting?
The demographics of Detroit perhaps make the differing demographics of the protests more obvious than they would be elsewhere, said one metro Detroit organizer.
Black residents make up 78% of the city’s population, according to 2020 U.S. Census Bureau data. It went for Democratic candidate Kamala Harris in 2024, even as Trump won the state and picked up thousands more votes in the city than in prior campaigns.
Dana Fisher, director of American University’s Center for Environment, Community, & Equity and a professor focused on civic engagement and activism, has surveyed protesters at mass gatherings for years and across various administrations with her team.
They’ve found that during Trump’s time in office, attendees of permitted, large-scale protests have tended to be White, highly educated, older and female.
Those characteristics are unique to Trump’s time in office and were amplified the second time around, said Fisher, citing surveys at three D.C.-based protests and one Philadelphia-based protest in 2025.
When weighing why that is, she noted some people of color opted out of her anonymous surveys at protests in 2025 due to concerns someone might come after them.
Additionally, she said, permitted, large-scale, single-day, performative protests organized by professional groups, like Indivisible, tend to involve networks with progressives in privileged communities.
Younger people and people of color are coming out in different spaces, like smaller-scale protests on the ground in cities where the National Guard and additional immigration agents have been deployed, she said.
Alvin Tillery, director of Northwestern University’s Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy, who also leads a strategy firm for Democratic efforts, observed the protests nationally to be diverse overall, but also said they probably are slightly more White in attendance.
Resource limitations could contribute to that. Even on weekends, shift workers may be occupied, he said. There are the costs of childcare and transportation. Crowds appear to include more retirees than working-age individuals.
Then there are the personal feelings at play.
Watching the protests with wary eyes
Jalita Leitch, 41, of Detroit, is not a fan of the president or his policies, and protest is one way she has fought establishments in the past.
But ahead of one of the first larger protests of 2025, she saw discussions online in the Black community about not going. She understood the reasoning, including the voting records at play.
Black voters across the country continued to overwhelmingly vote Democratic in 2024, even as Trump saw some gains, according to the Pew Research Center. White voters have voted for Trump at a rate of roughly 55% the last three presidential elections.
There was a sense of “we did our part,” Leitch said.
To note, while protesters surveyed by Fisher’s team overwhelmingly voted for Harris in 2024, White women overall gave their vote to Trump in the last three elections by margins ranging from 2 percentage points to 8.
The community concerns also went beyond voting, Leitch said.
“They felt it wouldn’t be peaceful if they went out there,” Leitch said. That Black and Brown bodies would draw a stronger response from police.
Several Detroiters mentioned this, raising the images of clashes with police during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in contrast to many marches seen in 2025.
Only several years ago, the city settled a lawsuit in which protesters from the Black Lives Matter movement in Detroit alleged excessive use of force that ended in a collapsed lung and brain bleeding, among other injuries. The Detroit Police Department defended its actions during those protests and sought to stop the payout.
Black and Brown individuals also continue to be killed by police at disproportionate rates, according to reporting from the New York Times.
Leitch did end up going to that first protest with her union, but she opted out of others for the time being.
Gabriel “Kenyatta” Nichols, 63, of Detroit, also stayed back.
He’d heard the same worries about aggression against Black protesters. He heard calls from Black leaders to stay home.
It felt like it was the White community’s turn to “step up,” he said. To top it off, the anti-Trump protests in Detroit were seemingly organized more in White communities than in his own community.
“So even though I’m with them in spirit … (it) didn’t feel like that protest was for us,” Nichols said, later stating: “Black people have been fighting for justice, they’ve been fighting against racism and White supremacy … but many times we were out there marching and there wasn’t a White face around. … It felt good to me to see White people step and fight fascism.”
Fighting for a bad status quo
“If Kamala Harris was president, we would all be at brunch.”
That’s what Detroit Will Breathe leader Tristan Taylor saw on a sign in photos of early anti-Trump protests. It was symbolic of the issues he saw with the anti-Trump protests early on: that participants wanted to return to the status quo and that the Democratic Party was involved.
Taylor, who was a face of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in Detroit, isn’t interested in returning to the status quo.
He wants an overhaul in the country’s system of governance. He’s against imperialism. He’s anti-capitalist. He can’t support a status quo in which the judicial system disproportionally locks up Black and Brown people.
It was positive that thousands of people were mobilizing against Trump, but his group was still determining how they could show up within that, Taylor said in April 2025.
Detroit Will Breathe did not become a formal organizer of an anti-Trump mass protest until the October 2025 No Kings Day.
By then, it seemed like there was more opportunity for the group’s stances as a result of seemingly growing anger over Trump’s deployment of the National Guard and immigration agents, growing frustration over lack of action by the Democratic Party and the candidacy of Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani for New York mayor, Taylor said.
The administration’s actions in Chicago also showed that Black people can’t sit on the sidelines, he said. (There, concerns were raised about arrests of Black residents by immigration agents.)
Yet, ahead of No Kings Day 2.0 in October, Taylor wouldn’t promise to lead other such actions afterward.
He wanted to make sure there was space for his group’s perspectives and wanted to be sure his group wasn’t simply providing cover for liberals unwilling to push back against Democrats and be militant.
The many shapes of resistance
It shouldn’t be construed that Black community members opted out of the Trump resistance in 2025. Black residents in metro Detroit both attended and led actions with anti-Trump sentiments.
There was Cason and her Good Trouble rally. Other community groups with Black leadership and members have attended protests and held rallies. Union-led efforts in particular drew Black protesters. And though predominantly White, Hands Off, No Kings and regular, daily efforts in metro Detroit included Black participants with signs in hand even before groups like Detroit Will Breathe took an organizing role in the Oct. 18 No Kings Day.
Yet protest and rallying are just one form of resistance, said protest scholars and longtime activists.
Trump has moved people who have never demonstrated before to do so — grandmothers and older White people with canes and wheelchairs, said the longtime president of the NAACP Detroit branch, the Rev. Wendell Anthony, in April 2025.
Anthony was pleased and proud to see people protesting, he said.
But “protest is the last remedy,” he said. “You try to talk, you try to negotiate, you try to work out situations before you take to the streets.”
Anthony acknowledged that some in the community opted to let others protest after warning the world about Trump in advance.
“We aren’t tired, we’re just strategic,” he said.
At the time, he said he expected more boycotts of corporations like the one in 2025 against Target for its walking back on diversity, equity and inclusion. And indeed, would-be Black protesters, including Leitch, said they withheld their dollar from certain businesses in a boycott in 2025.
Historically, it has taken a bevy of tactics to make change, said DeJuan Bland, a lead organizer with the Black-led community group MOSES Action and a minister at Faith Redemption Center Church of God in Christ in Detroit.
“We’re at a moment where we need every tool in a toolbox, and so I think everybody can find a place in the resistance,” he said in April 2025.
He used the term “resistance,” for lack of a better term, however. To call it a “movement” suggested more of a shared strategy or a deeper relationship to shared work than there might be, Bland said at the time. Still, he was encouraged to see people activated.
MOSES Action engaged on issues regarding SNAP and Medicaid before 2025 and already had programming focused on juvenile justice scheduled for the day of the April 2025 Hands Off nationwide day of action, Bland said. MOSES stuck with their plan but promoted a Hands Off event.
MOSES Action also held events in Livonia to break down divides and took part in a bridge takeover focused on Medicaid. On a different day, MOSES held a town hall in a church, providing a largely Black crowd with information on how changes to Medicaid would affect them and what they could do.
In contrast, a primarily White gathering at a park in Milford that day featured fewer educational presentations and more anecdotal speeches with concerns.
Some 2025 anti-Trump protests served as a catch-all for all things naysayers saw wrong with the Trump administration. Yet some protests, still with anti-Trump sentiments, sought to focus, one at a time, on immigration, the deaths of Palestinians in the Israel-Hamas war, health care, transgender rights and more.
In the city of Detroit, those tailored gatherings were observed to be smaller but to have more Black and Brown participants and involve a younger crowd.
Looking ahead
Protests appeared slightly more diverse toward the end of 2025 and particularly in 2026, following an immigration agent’s fatal shooting of a woman in Minneapolis.
Mocha Brown, 31, of Detroit, joined Comité de Acción Comunitaria – Detroit (Detroit Community Action Committee) partway into 2025 primarily because of Palestine. Her group also has been vocal about making Detroit a sanctuary city amid immigration enforcement.
Diverse perspectives are needed, and Brown would like to see more people out, but messaging and expected outcomes are more important, she said.
“If it takes majority White crowds out there to get things done, if that’s what it takes, then that’s what it takes,” she said.
One Detroit Will Breathe organizer said a righter-leaning crowd than him at the October No Kings protest didn’t make him want to keep attending. But Taylor and Detroit Will Breathe were at the forefront of protests following the fatal shooting in Minneapolis in 2026 of Renee Nicole Good.
Taylor said there is a push to unify underway, and that unions, churches, city leaders and traditional civil rights leaders need to take up the cause.
Leitch hoped to take part in protests going forward because “every day it gets worse and worse” with the administration.
She thinks people will need to take part in actions like general strikes to move the needle, too.
“It’s important for all of us to unite and be out there in the forefront,” she said.
Bland was more willing to use the term “movement” in 2026 and said an “us versus them” mentality can’t be allowed, either in terms of method of action or in who is participating. All have a use.
Nichols said the scope of the anti-Trump protests needs to broaden to long-term concerns of the Black community, including racism and white supremacy.
Protests matter, but Cason said it will take the administration seeing their own protesting in the streets that will make a difference.
“Everybody has their lane, and we need to layer all of these to move the needle. … I’m going to stand 10 toes down when I say that the needle will not move unless it’s hundreds of thousands of White bodies in the streets.”
Data journalist Kristi Tanner contributed to this report.
