Tanks and Troops Before Talk: The South’s Long War on Protest

National Guard forces have long loomed over Southern crowds of protestors, and history shows that governors in Texas, Georgia, and Florida have repeatedly turned to troops and tear gas at the first sign of unrest. In February 1968, for example, South Carolina’s governor called in “tanks and all” to confront civil rights demonstrators at South Carolina State College. The image below, taken in the hours after the Orangeburg “massacre,” shows National Guardsmen with rifles and fixed bayonets surrounding the campus. On that night, state troopers fired on student picketers, killing three Black undergraduates and wounding dozens of others.  In effect, the governor’s decision to militarize the campus transformed a peaceful sit-in into a deadly confrontation.

That moment at Orangeburg echoed earlier episodes across the South. In 1957, Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus sent the Arkansas National Guard to block nine Black students from entering Little Rock Central High School. U.S. Army units ultimately intervened, federalizing the Guard and forcing the state’s compliance, but not before Faubus’s mobilization made national news. Six years later, Alabama Gov. George Wallace famously “stood in the schoolhouse door” to try to bar integration at the University of Alabama. President John F. Kennedy again federalized the state guard and ordered it to protect the Black students. In each of these cases, Southern governors wielded National Guard units as political muscle to resist civil rights reforms, sending a clear message that they viewed protest and racial integration as threats to be quelled by force.

The legacy of that era, a kind of “militarized politics” of protest, didn’t end with the 1960s. Over the decades, Southern leaders have relied on the Guard more frequently than their counterparts in other regions.  This has reflected enduring cultural and political attitudes in the region: Southern politics has long been dominated by one-party rule (first Democratic, now Republican) that prizes order and state sovereignty. Many citizens in Texas, Georgia, and Florida still harbor deep skepticism toward federal programs and large-scale protests, especially on racial or immigration issues. And their governors have few restraints on their emergency powers or the use of militia forces. The result is a confidence, and sometimes an eagerness, to station armed troops in state conflicts.

Take Texas. In recent years, Gov. Greg Abbott has overseen one of the nation’s most aggressive state mobilization strategies. Along the Mexican border, he launched “Operation Lone Star,” deploying thousands of Guard troops to string razor wire and place floating barriers against migrants.  (Last year, the Justice Department sued to block Texas’s unauthorized barriers in the Rio Grande, noting that Abbott had “strung up razor wire” and used “thousands of National Guard troops” for this purpose).  Now he’s trained that same militarism inward. In early June 2025, Abbott announced that he had “ordered more than 5,000 National Guard troops and 2,000 state police to be deployed around the state” in anticipation of domestic demonstrations. In other words, regardless of local authorities’ wishes, Texas was girded in advance. In the state capital, Austin, where Mayor Kirk Watson stressed that the city had not requested National Guard assistance, troops nonetheless arrived on the streets alongside riot police. All of this has been done in Abbott’s name, with the governor insisting that any violence toward law enforcement would be met with “a very swift reaction,” not a wink of federal restraint but the promise of state force to “make an example” of anyone who attacks officers.

Georgia’s response has followed a similar template. Republican Gov. Brian Kemp has repeatedly demonstrated that he welcomes troops at the first sign of disorder. Last month, he declared a state of emergency after a violent protest over Atlanta’s proposed “Cop City” police training facility, saying the order gave him authority to call up to 1,000 Guardsmen to “subdue riot and unlawful assembly” if needed. To Kemp, the message was simple: he would “always back the blue” no matter what.  In fact, he had already done so during 2020’s racial justice unrest, posting heavily armed Guard units at the Georgia state Capitol for weeks to deter any repeat of January 6, style threats.  And as June demonstrations approached, Kemp’s rhetoric grew harsher. He publicly warned Georgians that any person who hurts a police officer will face “quick and heavy accountability,” and his attorney general invoked Georgia’s domestic terrorism statute to declare that violent rioters could be charged with terrorism and jailed for decades.  In short, Kemp has adopted the language of zero tolerance and given it sharp teeth.

Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis has taken the same hard line. During the George Floyd protests of 2020, he put 700 additional Guardsmen on standby in Florida to back up the local police and enforce curfews.  DeSantis used the occasion to issue stern ultimatums, “Florida has zero tolerance for violence, rioting, and looting,” he announced and said Floyd’s killing could not “be used as a pretext for violence in our Florida communities.” He offered a rhetorical contrast to liberal cities by proclaiming that if anyone in Florida “riots or loots…you’re going to jail,” no Portland-style ticket-and-release for lawbreakers on his watch.  As the June 14 protests neared, DeSantis reiterated his readiness. On Fox News, he boasted that “our folks are ready at the state level,” meaning local police backed by state highway patrol, state agents, and yes, the Florida National Guard all “on standby” to respond to trouble.  His office explicitly said that the Guard would deploy if needed to protect property and keep order.

What these recent standoffs have in common is not coincidence but continuity. Southern governors today often view crowd control as a top priority, and they base that view on history. In many Southern states, governors have few checks on their authority to activate the Guard, and if local officials object, state power often wins. That dynamic helped to turn protests into armed standoffs in the 1950s and 60s, and it endures. Even as demographics change, the region’s political culture has remained more receptive to “weapons first, questions later.” Across the South, a traditional sympathy for using force is prevalent, characterized by strong support for law enforcement, lingering distrust of “outside agitators,” and a one-party state government that encourages executives to project strength. In short, a formula that the 1960s segregationists pioneered still pays political dividends for today’s governors.

By contrast, governors in many Northern and coastal states have generally emphasized restraint and local control. California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom, for instance, publicly sued the Trump administration to block federal troops, decrying their use as “an assault on democracy.”  Seventy-five other Democratic governors joined him in condemning any mission-creep into domestic law enforcement. However, in places like Texas, Georgia, and Florida, the response has been different: rather than pleading for “sanctuary,” these governors bristle at perceived disorder. They often race to announce deployments even before a single bottle is thrown. The Associated Press notes that in many GOP-led states, governors have not hesitated to say they will use troops; in fact, Abbott and DeSantis openly declared their plans for the Guard while describing protests as pre-scripted chaos to be stamped out.

All of which brings us back to June 2025. Across the South, officials are braced for a fierce showdown. In Georgia and Florida, police chiefs and sheriffs are taking briefings from the Guard and preparing backup plans. In Texas, company headquarters of border units are putting soldiers on alert. The pattern is unmistakable: where once the sight of tanks and rifles was meant to intimidate civil-rights marchers, today it is meant to intimidate anti-Trump and immigrant-rights protesters. Southern governors have learned from history that images of armed troops send a clear political signal to their constituents. That signal that “law and order” must be maintained at all costs is deeply rooted in the region’s past. As one Georgia official bluntly put it, peaceful protestors speak with words, but “rioters use violence,” and Southern governments have vowed that such violence will be met with overwhelming force.