Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, part II

The Civil Rights Movement has inspired libraries of popular and scholarly books and articles. Its influence on the study of social movements and collective action processes is remarkable. Yet even something so thoroughly studied yields new insights to these processes. This dialogue is prompted by a recent article written by Doron Shultziner about the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955. In his piece (Mobilization, June 2013) he distinguishes between factors that explain a movement’s emergence from those that explain its momentum – in particular, the important role of humiliation and shame in sparking the boycott.

In light of Shultziner’s arguments, we asked scholars and activists to reflect more generally on the origins of social movements. What do we now know about the origins of the Civil Rights Movement? What are the implications of that for other social movements, given that so many theories developed with that movement in mind? In what ways has scholarly focus on this particular movement highlighted or obscured collective-action processes at different stages and in different places?

Adding to last month’s 8 great essays, we are posting 4 new insightful contributions. Many thanks to our cast of contributors:

David Cunningham, Brandeis University (essay)
Felicia McGhee-Hilt, University of Tennessee – Chattanooga (essay)
Francesca Polletta, University of California – Irvine (essay)
Burrel Vann, Jr., University of California – Irvine (essay)

As always, we invite you to join the dialogue by posting your reactions to these essays in the comments sections.

Editors in Chief,
Grace Yukich, David Ortiz, Rory McVeigh, and Dan Myers

Understanding the Participatory Emotions of a Social Movement

By Felicia McGhee-Hilt

Ella. Lee. Pettway. Most people are not familiar with that name but she was one of the 50,000 foot soldiers of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. She is also my maternal grandmother.

I deliberated for quite some time about whether I should do a study on the Montgomery Bus Boycott because so much has already been done on it. However, while at the Alabama Department of Archives in Montgomery, I decided to look through old newspaper articles about the boycott. I viewed many pictures, but there was one picture on the front of the newspaper The Montgomery Advertiser that caught my eye. The picture consisted of black domestics walking to work. As I continued to view the picture, I realized that one of the women looked extremely familiar. It was my grandmother. With purse in hand, she was walking along with the many other people that day. It was then that I realized that the Montgomery Bus Boycott was still a ripe research topic.

Local Rules: Institutional Bases for Challenging Segregation in the Civil Rights-Era South

By David Cunningham

Midway through his provocative article “The Social Psychological Origins of the Montgomery Bus Boycott,” Doron Shultziner presents bus map of the segregated seating pattern inside a typical city bus in 1950’s Montgomery. To me, this schematic was a revelation, encapsulating the promise of Shultziner’s award-winning paper.

When Does Anger Lead to Protest?

By Francesca Polletta

The insight that reoriented the study of social movements in the late 1970s was that people knew when they were oppressed. The relevant question was not, what led people to feel discontented enough to protest? (This was the question animating strain theories of collective action.) Instead, it was, when did people see themselves as able to act effectively on their discontent? Hence the causal importance attributed to external resources (by resource mobilization theorists) and to political opportunities, indigenous resources, and cognitive liberation (by political process theorists).

Doron Shultziner argues that the earlier question was the right one after all—and he does so in the context of the case that was supposed to have laid to rest accounts of mobilization based on discontent. Not only does discontent matter, he maintains; it may be all that matters. In short, none of the factors that have been used to account for protest generally, and the Montgomery bus boycott in particular, explain the decision of so many people to stay off Montgomery’s buses. No one from the outside injected resources, financial or otherwise. There were no political opportunities. To the contrary, after Brown v. Board, things got worse, not better, as a backlash against school integration swelled the ranks of the notorious White Citizens Council and amplified everyday white aggressions. There were black leadership structures in Montgomery, and they did play a role in the protest, but only after it had gotten underway. As for cognitive liberation, it is hard to imagine what would have led black citizens of Montgomery to feel that political change was newly within reach.

On Time, Agents, and Comparisons

By Burrel Vann Jr.

The Civil Rights Movement has been central to our understanding of social movements and critical for the development of social movement theory. We’ve amassed a rich history of the movement, with various scholars focusing on particular periods and places, instances of collective action, and both individual and structural precipitants and consequences of activism.

The focus on such an influential movement has been and will continue to be beneficial to our understanding of collective action processes insofar as researchers engage in intra- and inter-movement comparative work. Research that tracks one movement across time will highlight the long trajectories movements typically have (i.e., when movements begin and end); it can also tell us a great deal about changes in collective action processes at different stages, and how and when these are sparked. Additionally, work that compares findings from the Civil Rights Movement to the processes at work in other movements can demonstrate the generalizability of our theories.

Origins of the Civil Rights Movement

The Civil Rights Movement has inspired libraries of popular and scholarly books and articles. Its influence on the study of social movements and collective action processes is remarkable. Yet even something so thoroughly studied yields new insights to these processes. This dialogue is prompted by a recent article written by Doron Shultziner about the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955. In his piece (Mobilization, June 2013) he distinguishes between factors that explain a movement’s emergence from those that explain its momentum – in particular, the important role of humiliation and shame in sparking the boycott.

In light of Shultziner’s arguments, we asked scholars and activists to reflect more generally on the origins of social movements. What do we now know about the origins of the Civil Rights Movement? What are the implications of that for other social movements, given that so many theories developed with that movement in mind? In what ways has scholarly focus on this particular movement highlighted or obscured collective-action processes at different stages and in different places?

We are posting 8 great contributions now and several more later this month. Many thanks to our all-star cast of contributors:

Kenneth (Andy) Andrews, UNC Chapel Hill (essay)
Kim Ebert, North Carolina State University (essay)
Jo Freeman, feminist scholar and activist (essay)
Joseph Luders, Yeshiva University (essay)
Anthony (Tony) Oberschall, UNC Chapel Hill (essay)
Deana Rohlinger, Florida State University (essay)
Doron Shultziner, independent scholar (essay)
John Skrentny, UC San Diego (essay)

As always, we invite you to join the dialogue by posting your reactions to these essays in the comments sections.

Editors in Chief,
Grace Yukich, David Ortiz, Rory McVeigh, and Dan Myers

A Multi-Stage Approach to Social Movements

By Doron Shultziner

The Civil Rights Movement (henceforth, CRM) is the best known case of social movements in both theory and action. It was one of the earliest, most dramatic, politically important, and internationally influential cases of a social movement. As such, the CRM was (and still is) the paradigmatic case study that has informed and shaped the field of collective behavior and social movements theory. Central theoretical and conceptual contributions are based on studies of the CRM (e.g., Morris 1983; McAdam 1982).

These approaches and accounts of the CRM have various merits, and they highlighted important factors that are part of the vocabulary and thinking about social movements, such as resource mobilization, political opportunities, and framing. However, there are also many agreed limitations in the field of social movements (della Porta and Diani 2007: chapter 1; for insiders’ critiques see Morris 2000 and McAdam 2004). The field is ripe with various explanatory factors, and there are new cases of social movements that are not well explained by existing approaches.

On the Origins and Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement

By Kenneth (Andy) Andrews

Movement scholars have been attempting to make sense of the civil rights movement for many decades, and important studies were being carried out as the movement itself was still in its ascendency. With several decades of accumulated scholarship, studies of the black freedom struggle constitute defining contributions to our understanding of movement origins, participation, organizations and leadership, gender, collective identity and culture, repression, and movement consequences. Reflecting on this line of scholarship provides an excellent opportunity to gauge what we have learned and chart new directions.

I argue that movement scholars would benefit from paying closer attention to the recent work of historians. Over the past ten years, historians have developed a broad reinterpretation of the civil rights struggle that has revealed important but underappreciated dynamics. The “long civil rights movement” perspective sees the civil rights movement as one phase of a larger struggle for racial equality and civil and human rights (Hall 2005).

Grievance and Organization

By Jo Freeman

When I read the social movements literature in grad school in the late 1960s, I noticed that almost all of it looked for psychological causes. There was little attention to the role of organization. By then, I had been deeply involved in two major social movements – the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the Civil Rights Movement (in the North and South). I knew that in the South the official line was that all this trouble was caused by us damned outside agitators. If we’d just get out of town, race relations would return to their normal, comfortable, state. White Southerners completely discounted grievances as a reason for disorder.

I also knew that it was impossible for an organizer, no matter how dedicated, to compel people to endure major personal sacrifice for a cause where there was no history of bad experiences. I knew because I had tried. Indeed, SCLC, the organization for which I worked in the South, had tried to create another “Selma” a couple times in the fall of 1965 – first around the issue of school desegregation in Georgia, and then around the issue of the double-standard of justice after the killers of Viola Liuzzo and Jonathan Daniels were quickly acquitted by all-white, all-male juries. I found the white South’s dedication to denial to be downright funny at times; their determination to believe that everything was just fine between the races appeared to approach the level of a self-inflicted mental illness.

What Have We Learned from the Civil Rights Movement?

By Joseph Luders

I came to the study of social movements in part because of the dramatic and heroic nature of the civil rights struggle. And yet, the attraction to this movement, or really the analysis of any single movement, comes with risks. One such risk is devising general propositions from a single case. Only by placing a movement into a larger theoretical setting and by comparing diverse movements side-by-side can we produce robust generalizations. Yet the civil rights movement possesses certain features that make it ideal for hypothesis testing. In particular, the movement operated for many years in different localities, using different strategies, and often pursuing different goals. Despite the limitations of single case studies, investigations of the civil rights movement have thus produced multiple insights, many of which continue to dominate social movement theory today.

Without a doubt, Doug McAdam’s Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency (1982) defined social movement theory for a generation. Drawing from Tilly (1978) and others, McAdam cogently articulated the political process theory and fundamentally defined the essential vocabulary for investigation based on the three theoretical pillars: political opportunities, indigenous organizations (which became “mobilizing structures”), and cognitive liberation (which, in a more complicated fashion, was displaced by the related concept of framing processes).