MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Many Americans joined marches to protest Trump administration policies this year. Some of the people who did that wonder why there aren't more demonstrations, but also whether street protests are making any difference. Montana Public Radio's Austin Amestoy reports from Missoula.
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AUSTIN AMESTOY, BYLINE: At the end of a bridge that runs through the heart of the college town of Missoula, Montana, a ritual unfolds every Friday just after noon. About a dozen demonstrators hoist signs with messages of nonviolence - veterans for peace, peace on Earth. Drivers honk in approval, and a passing cyclist rings a bell.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: OK. You, too.
AMESTOY: This weekly gathering started 24 years ago. Carel Schneider, who's 82, was there just after the 9/11 attacks. She's returned nearly every Friday since.
CAREL SCHNEIDER: Is it a protest? I don't know. Is it an action? Yes. Is it a statement? Yes. I mean, just - I don't want to give up.
AMESTOY: This protest is happening just down the block from the Jeannette Rankin Peace Center, founded in 1986. Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress, is from Missoula, and she voted against U.S. involvement in World Wars I and II. Schneider has worked for most of her life to carry on Rankin's anti-war principles. But after 24 years passing out paper peace cranes on the corner, she says she sometimes worries their pleas are falling on deaf ears.
SCHNEIDER: I struggle with hope, and I struggle with what's going to be.
AMESTOY: Schneider says it feels like no one's listening to each other, and the world is increasingly unkind. That makes it more difficult to stand on that corner, but she also says she's not going anywhere. Gloria Browne-Marshall, who teaches at John Jay College, just published a book called "A Protest History Of The United States." She says protest in America...
GLORIA BROWNE-MARSHALL: Is healthier than it has been in the last 15 or so years.
AMESTOY: Browne-Marshall says the Black Lives Matter movement five years ago spurred a renewed belief that protest can make change. But she says modern movements often lack a key element.
BROWNE-MARSHALL: My concern is what is missing in protests right now is the plan, the strategy.
AMESTOY: Browne-Marshall argues successful protest movements have been disruptive in some way - to the economy, to travel, to peace of mind. Missoula's Jeannette Rankin Peace Center gave its Peacemaker of the Year award to someone younger last year - 37-year-old Brendan Work, a local schoolteacher. He says he admires the older generation that still takes to the street every Friday.
BRENDAN WORK: And I want to be like them. But maybe in previous generations, the terms - peace, peacemaking, dialogue, listening - you know, these terms might have had closer to their original meanings.
AMESTOY: Work founded Montanans for Palestine two years ago. In addition to marching in the street, its members pressure city councils to pass ceasefire resolutions, have disrupted a Democratic senator's events, and push Democratic voters to choose no preference over candidates that don't call for peace.
WORK: I think there's great error among Democratic strategists or people on the center left that leverage is a dirty word.
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AMESTOY: Eighty-two-year-old Carel Schneider says she doesn't always understand the protest methods of younger generations. But on her street corner, she still manages to find hope every time she hands out one of her paper peace cranes to passersby.
SCHNEIDER: And that little bit of conversation - just a little, little bit of flicker of some kind of thought that they may have - is worth everything for standing out there.
AMESTOY: For NPR News, I'm Austin Amestoy in Missoula, Montana.
(SOUNDBITE OF CROSBY, STILLS, NASH & YOUNG SONG, "OHIO") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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