[sillysaurus3]

Sure, I respect that. I guess I was just curious if their goal was to enact political change or just to express themselves.

It's not clear cut:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15103654

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/21/is-there-any-p...

She places its start at the moment of a famous failure: the Mayday Vietnam protest of 1971, when twenty-five thousand people blockaded bridges and intersections around Washington, D.C. A manual describing the demonstration’s tactics allowed Nixon’s Attorney General to summon the police, the military, and the National Guard preëmptively. More than seven thousand protesters were arrested. Mary McGrory, a journalist who was sympathetic to the cause, described it as “the worst planned, worst executed, most slovenly, strident and obnoxious peace action ever committed.”

Kauffman disagrees. The spectre of the protest rattled the Administration, she points out. What’s more, it marked the shift toward the tactics-driven approach that we still follow today. “The last major national protest against the Vietnam War, Mayday was also a crucial first experiment with a new kind of radicalism,” she writes. It was less about moral leadership than about the fact of obstruction. It embraced whatever—and whoever—forced the hand of power. “You do the organizing,” the Mayday manual read. “This means no ‘movement generals’ making tactical decisions you have to carry out.”

[stevenwoo]

The recent Vietnam War PBS documentary covers the Mayday protest as one of many different protests as public opinion turned against American involvement against the war. Whether the tide turned because the protests were leading or trailing public opinion is probably arguable. There were also signficant organized violent counter protesters in favor of the war/against the antiwar protesters. A bit of the info in the documentary is covered in The Fog of War but it's pretty interesting for the similarities to today. Also, there was a Vietnam vets against the war protest in DC immediately preceding the Mayday protest that the administration specifically did not oppose with police/national guard in order to not generate positive press/sympathy for the antiwar effort.