Protest Slogans: 30 of the Best in History, and What Made Them Work

The best protest slogan ever written was four words long and someone shouted it at a fascist. In October 1936, when Oswald Mosley tried to march his Blackshirts through the East End of London, the crowd that stopped them borrowed a line from the Spanish Civil War: they shall not pass. Mosley did not pass. The phrase outlived him by the better part of a century and it still turns up on placards today, usually held by someone who has no idea it was first shouted in Spanish.

This is the strange afterlife of the protest slogan. Most political writing is forgotten within a fortnight. A good slogan gets carried, chanted, printed on a shirt and dug up again forty years later by people fighting something else entirely.

If you are making a sign this weekend, you could do worse than steal from the people who did it best.

What makes a protest slogan work

Three things, and they are all boring.

It has to be short enough to read from across a road. This sounds obvious and yet every march produces a dozen placards carrying a full paragraph in small handwriting, held by someone who spent all night on it. The eye takes in about six words. Anything past that is a diary entry.

It has to work when chanted. Slogans that scan badly die on the first shout. Ban the bomb survived the Aldermaston marches partly because three stressed syllables are easy to bellow in step. This is also why the most enduring British political chant of the twentieth century was simply a woman’s name repeated three times, then the word out, repeated three times.

And it has to say one thing. The temptation is always to explain, to add the caveat, to acknowledge the complication. Resist it. A placard is not an argument, it is a flag.

The blunt ones

These are the slogans that state the position and stop.

1. No taxation without representation. American colonists, 1760s. Still the cleanest statement of a democratic principle anyone has managed.
2. Votes for women. Three words, no argument, no apology.
3. Deeds not words. The motto of the Women’s Social and Political Union, and a fairly direct comment on everyone who had promised them the vote and not delivered it.
4. Bread and roses. From the 1912 textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The workers wanted wages and they wanted dignity, and the phrase refused to treat those as separate demands.
5. I am a man. Memphis, 1968. Sanitation workers on strike after two of them were crushed to death in a faulty truck. Four words on a white board, and it is difficult to think of anything ever printed more powerfully.
6. Peace, land, bread. Petrograd, 1917. Three nouns, one revolution.
7. Silence equals death. ACT UP, 1987, on the American government’s refusal to address the AIDS crisis. The equals sign did a lot of work.
8. Nothing about us without us. Disability rights, later borrowed by more or less everyone who has ever been discussed rather than consulted.
9. They shall not pass. Cable Street, and before that Madrid.
10. Not in my name. The Iraq war marches of 2003, and a phrase since adopted by roughly every side of every argument.

The funny ones

Britain has a particular tradition here. The sincere placard is treated with mild suspicion, while the funny one gets photographed and shared.

11. Maggie, Maggie, Maggie. Out, out, out. Not funny exactly, but rhythmically perfect and endlessly adaptable. Every prime minister since has had their name run through it.
12. Coal not dole. The 1984 miners’ strike. Two syllables against two syllables, and the entire economic argument in four words.
13. Down with this sort of thing. Originally a joke from Father Ted, now a genuine fixture of British demonstrations, usually carried by someone who wants to register objection without committing to specifics.
14. I can’t believe I still have to protest this. The slogan of the returning marcher. Its power is entirely in the word still.
15. If you’re not angry you’re not paying attention. Slightly long, endlessly reused.
16. Sisters are doing it for themselves. Borrowed from the record, deployed with a raised eyebrow.

The ones that outlived the cause

Some slogans win, and then keep going.

17. The personal is political. A 1969 essay title that escaped and became a way of seeing the world.
18. Power to the people. Black Panthers, then everyone.
19. Make love not war. Now so thoroughly absorbed into the culture that it reads as decoration, which is what happens to a slogan when it wins.
20. Hell no, we won’t go. Draft resistance, Vietnam. Perfect meter.
21. The whole world is watching. Chicago, 1968, chanted at police in front of television cameras. Arguably the first slogan written with the broadcast in mind.
22. Liberty, equality, fraternity. A revolutionary slogan that ended up on the money.
23. Ain’t I a woman. Sojourner Truth, 1851, and a question nobody has satisfactorily answered since.
24. Workers of the world, unite. Whatever you think of the politics, it is a very good line.

The ones aimed at one target

A specific target sharpens a slogan considerably.

25. Ban the bomb. Aimed at a policy rather than a person, but it set the template.
26. Free Nelson Mandela. Two words and a name, sustained for twenty-seven years.
27. No pasaran. The original, and still the version people reach for when they want it to sound serious.
28. Say her name. An instruction rather than a demand, which is unusual and effective.
29. We shall overcome. Less a slogan than a promise, and the rare example of one that works quietly.
30. Remember Peterloo. Manchester, 1819, and a reminder that the right to gather in a field was itself something people were killed for.

Writing your own

The best homemade placards tend to break at least one rule above, usually deliberately. But if you want a method, it is roughly this.

Start with the one sentence you would say if you had ten seconds with the person responsible. Cut it in half. Cut it in half again. Read what is left out loud and see whether you could shout it twenty times without getting bored or running out of breath.

Then write it large enough to read from the other side of the street. More marches have been let down by a marker pen running out than by weak politics.

If you would rather not carry it, VeryBrexitProblems puts a fair few of these arguments on shirts instead, which have the advantage of still being legible after rain.

More from the protest and revolution archive: The history of British protest: from Peterloo to punk · Sign of the times! 14 protest signs that sum up the Sixties · 5 passionate protests that really did change the world