Sincere question here. Pro-Palestinian protestors recently shut down I-5 in Seattle
A few years ago BLM protestors occasionally shut down streets in several cities.
These street-blocking protests were widely condemned as illegal, dangerous to public safety, inappropriately inconveniencing for the general public, and so generally illegitimate.
But as the photo below shows, the tactic is not new, and the protest below is now part of American historical lore as legitimate.
What, other than time and the linkage of the Edmund Pettis Bridge protest with the hallowed 1950s Civil Rights Movement, distinguishes between the street-blocking protest seen in this image and the ones that happen today?
Was the protest in the photo actually illegitimate, despite how we see it now?
Are contemporary street-blocking protests legitimate, too, and the critics just the type of people who would have wrongly criticized the Civil Rights marchers?
Or is there some meaningful variable on which we can distinguish them? The content of the protest seems a weak line, not necessarily morally, but at lest legally because the First Amendment requires content-neutrality. And anyway, the BLM protests were clearly extensions of the Civil Rights movement, and wherever one stands on Israel-Palestine, the protests are opposing the killing of thousands of civilians, which isn't inherently a bad thing to oppose.
And yet I'm somehow bothered by the road-closing protest in Seattle, too. Perhaps because it seems too disconnected from any plausible political solution to what they're upset about?
So where should a liberty-oriented person come down on all this?