Gender and the Civil Rights Movement

This study outlines how gender relations and gender differences come into play in the civil rights movement – the national movement to transform American race relations in the 1950s and 1960s. Social movement scholarship on the civil rights movement emphasizes dramatic mass mobilizations and charismatic leadership, both distinctively masculine enterprises. This emphasis overlooks the subtle and underappreciated dynamics of gender in shaping cultures of protest and resistance. Consideration of gender and gender roles in the private and public spheres provides a more nuanced understanding of protest strategies and the formulation of resistance in direct action. Gendered patterns related to movement participation, mobilization, leadership, strategies and ideologies also bring into focus how local issues shaped regional variations in civil rights initiatives. Finally, gender symbolism and culture deepen our understanding of non‐violent direct action as a moral, emancipatory performance, serving to blur the physical boundaries enacted by civil restraint.     

Turbulent Times: Bloody Sunday and the Civil Rights Movement

On 30 January 1972 in Derry Northern Ireland 13 men were shot dead by British soldiers. Bloody Sunday has come to be seen to be one of the key events in the recent history of the conflict in Northern Ireland. This article is an analysis of that event and its context through a range of theoretical ideas that seek to address the processes at work through the notion of movement or flow. Mobilizing a range of concepts from theorists such as Bakhtin, Deleuze and Guattari, Delanda, Serres and Virilio, the period is understood as one characterised by disruptive turbulence in the social field. As part of this reading use is made of a number of formulations from Complexity theory to address the open and dynamic nature of the forces involved. By considering the civil rights movement and the emergence of Free Derry as moments in an ongoing attempt to de‐code and de‐territorialize the founding terms of the Unionist statelet, the article argues that the potential for radical social change was drastically halted by Bloody Sunday.     

The American Civil Rights Movement Reconsidered: Teaching the Role of Women

Abstract

This article examines coverage in social studies curriculum and U.S. history textbooks, specifically, of women in the American Civil Rights Movement (CRM) and considers how social studies teachers can broaden the narrative they teach to include more gender-related issues and the work of women activists. The author found that despite a rich body of scholarship focused on women in the CRM, textbooks, which still serve as the central curriculum documents in most secondary social studies classrooms, provide a relatively cursory treatment of women’s roles in the movement. The context of women’s activism and the intersections of race and gender, particularly around sexual violence and sexism within the movement, are rarely examined. To address this problem, the author provides examples of critical issues confronted by African American women in the era of the CRM as well as examples of activists that teachers could incorporate into their CRM units. In addition, the author argues that an inclusive study of the American CRM provides an excellent opportunity for students to develop an understanding of the many ways in which women and girls—often in the face of great personal danger—acted with courage and skill in the fight for racial justice.     

Social Capital, Resource Mobilization and Origins of the Civil Rights Movement

Abstract  This article critiques the contradictory claims of Robert Putnam and Aldon Morris in relation to the American civil rights movement. Putnam identifies the South as the American region most lacking in social capital, and argues more generally that the 1960s marked a watershed beyond which social capital in the United States declined in all regions. Morris identifies the indigenous resources of southern African American communities as fundamental to the civil rights movement's emergence in the late 1950s and sees the social networks and cultural assets of the African American church in particular as central to the movement. The article disputes Putnam's negative judgment of the South by highlighting the role played by various types of social capital in the movement's launch. It also challenges Morris's over-emphasis on the ability of charismatic, black church leadership to deliver mass support and re-affirms the role played by female lay figures, such as beauticians.     

Linking Beliefs to Collective Action: Politicized Religious Beliefs and the Civil Rights Movement

Sociological Forum - Are religious ideological antecedents factors in the emergence of African American social protest? If so, how do these factors translate African American discontent into...     

The Rise of the New South Governmentality: Competing Southern Revitalization Projects and Police Responses to the Black Civil Rights Movement 1961–1965

This article examines the southern response to the civil rights movement and its relationship to the broader struggle for southern influence and control. Drawing from governmentality studies and the concept of “security”, I trace the correlation of two competing southern revitalization projects with distinct southern policing styles to consider the importance of normative political cultures, rather than the instrumental and immediate political outcomes of each local movement, on the southern response to the civil rights movement. Despite the development of new south police practices that curtained civil rights protest and produced a politically modern and racially tolerant idealized new south image, the old south project, in its failures, gained influence on the county, statewide, and regional levels. Although the conflicting revitalization projects differed in their objectives, the linkages between them set the stage for subsequent southern revitalization and development that started in the 1970s.     

Institutionalizing Counter‐Memories of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement: The National Civil Rights Museum and an Application of the Interest‐Convergence Principle

During the post–Reconstruction era in the United States, white southerners marked the cultural landscape with monuments and memorials honoring the Confederate cause and its heroes. These racialized symbols enjoyed an undisputed claim to public squares and parks throughout the South. It was not until the late twentieth century that commemorations to the black freedom struggle were publicly supported. This analysis examines the institutionalization of counter‐memories of the civil rights movement in Memphis, Tennessee at the Lorraine Motel, the site of the assassination of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The author draws on collective memory, cultural trauma, and social movements research as well as critical race theory to explain the creation of the National Civil Rights Museum. Using primary and secondary data sources the author examines how social memory agents, a changing political culture, and the passage of time mediated the cultural trauma of King's assassination and influenced the institutionalization of oppositional collective memories. Relying on Derrick Bell's interest‐convergence principle, the author concludes that the creation of this major memorial museum was a result of the convergence of white and black interests, specifically the economic and political interests of white elites and the cultural and political interests of black symbolic entrepreneurs.     

Nonviolence and Differentiation in the Equal Rights Movement

The larger movement for racial equality in the United States has experienced considerable structural and ideological differentiation in the past decade, largely as a consequence of disagreement over tactics to be employed. Two direct-action sub-movements, the southern sit-ins and the urban riots, best illustrate the divergence with the former committed to tactical nonviolence and the latter to violent means of effecting social change.
To regain the momentum lost through this differentiation, certain leaders must reorganize a major part of the black population around a tactical approach that acknowledges both the peculiar needs and temper of the potential protestors, and the nature and tolerance level of the system it seeks to change. Responding to these criteria, the approach may develop in the form of an extremely militant but basically nonviolent tactic of social disruption, combining all but the most violent techniques used to date by equal rights activists.     

It Takes a Tragedy to Arouse Them: Collective Memory and Collective Action during the Civil Rights Movement

This paper examines the impact that collective memories of key events related to the civil rights movement had on black political activism during the 1960s. It proposes a theory that examines the effects of collective memory on collective action by considering how events and collective memories are appropriated by political entrepreneurs for collective action. Examining four events through a rare opinion survey of blacks taken in 1966, the analysis specifies a framework that illustrates how events evolve into collective memories and how collective memories are appropriated for collective action as time passes from the original event. Qualitative materials from historical accounts, including autobiographies, biographies, and oral histories, are used to make inferences about the meaning of events to political actors. The analysis shows that one event among the four, the murder of Emmett Till, had a stronger residual effect on black activism than the other events. The findings suggest that scholarship on the movement may have underestimated the impact of Till's murder on the generation of black insurgency in the 1950s.     

Agenda Setting for the Civil Rights Issue

A comparison of front-page New York Times content and nationalpublic opinion from 1954 to 1976 showed strong agenda-settingeffects for the civil rights issue. For this issue, the optimaleffect span was the four- to six-week period immediately priorto field work. These findings contradict previous findings andassertions about a cumulative media effect over a longer periodof time.     

巴以冲突中的妇女和平运动

如何解决巴以冲突，已经成为关注的热点话题。普通妇女对于和平的渴望在巴以冲突地区越来越强烈地表现出来。她们的行动代表了一种新的政治理念。     

The Value–Oriented Civil Rights Movement and Passive Resistance: An Expression of Civility in the Pursuit of Social Justice

A core set of sociological values considered by most Americans as essential to the American way of life are discussed within the context of denial and opportunity for a large minority. These core values guarantee equal opportunity and justice for all Americans as expressed in, and supported by, the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights. Yet, historically, Black Americans experienced systematic injustices. A discussion of the Civil Rights Movement focuses on the organized, disciplined, nonviolent action employed as the means of calling attention to the incivility perpetrated upon Blacks while arousing the consciousness of the Nation. The author examines the nonviolent, passive–resistance movement as an expression of civility in pursuit of justice as accorded by the Constitution and in the expressed value system of the American society.
We hold these truths to be self–evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just power from the consent of the governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. (The Declaration of Independence in Congress, July 4, 1776)     

The Australian Disability Rights Movement Lives

The Australian Disability Rights Movement is surviving despite funding threats to advocacy programmes. The integral relationship of advocacy funding to the Australian Disability Rights Movement is outlined. A brief history of the Australian Disability Rights' Movement is given, and whether this is a new social movement, or not, is discussed. The role of Women With Disabilities Australia is outlined.     

巴以冲突中的妇女和平运动

如何解决巴以冲突,已经成为关注的热点话题.普通妇女对于和平的渴望在巴以冲突地区越来越强烈地表现出来.她们的行动代表了一种新的政治理念.     

THE BODY AND CITIZENSHIP IN SOCIAL MOVEMENT RESEARCH: Embodied Performances and the Deracialized Self in the Black Civil Rights Movement 1961–1965

In political and cultural theory, the body has been central to our understandings of political power, yet, the body remains absent in social movement research. This article examines the role of the body in social movements, focusing on how social movements shape bodily postures and techniques of affective self-mastery to represent idealized citizenship. Based on archival data and the concepts of performativity and performance, I use the cases of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's Citizenship Schools and Role-Playing Simulations and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's Community Centers to show how the deracialized body was materialization of liberal civic culture that sought to: (1) severe identification with the racial group in favor of identifying with an idealized national identity; and (2) change what counts as good citizenship to change who counts as good citizens. I analyze the movement's pedagogy focusing on the ritualized repetition of embodied movements that deracialized the black political body by embedding idealized citizenship into bodily postures, which increased the probability for a successful performance. Although the deracialized body was vital to the passage of the national legislation, it served to hide geographical and economic differences within the black population, producing the false correlation of national policy change with local change.     

Explaining the Emergence Process of the Civil Rights Protest in Northern Ireland (1945–1968): Insights from a Relational Social Movement Approach1

Abstract This article explains how the contingent of complex interactions among pre-existing structural settings, institutional constraints, processes of regional and international transformative events, and uniquely combined developments within and between different contenders in the aftermath of the Second World War shaped Northern Ireland socio and political relations and thus instigated the Civil Rights Movement mobilization process. By re-introducing the time-space context into our studies of collective action, through a relational reading, my intent first is to advance our understanding of those episodes and complex patterns of interaction that give rise to social movements, and second to move beyond the static movement-centric approach explanation and away from the a-historical nature of much of the social movement literature. My historical-sociological research, into the longitudinal case study of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement mobilization, involves secondary and new empirical primary sources, such as archival analysis, qualitative examination of Northern Ireland daily newspapers during the 1960s, and the collection of 35 semi-structured interviews with key players from the Civil Rights Movement.     

Strategies,Action Repertoires and DIY Activism in the Animal Rights Movement

Following Tilly, this paper argues that a social movement is what it does as much as why it does it. This approach is particularly important in the case of the animal rights movement, which is often demonized as extremist and violent. Critics of the movement claim that animal activists use letter bombs, arson attacks and threats to intimidate those they see as animal abusers and that violent direct action of this kind is typical of the movement as a whole. The present paper argues that the mainstream animal movement – in the USA, the UK and Australia – is overwhelmingly non-violent and that its core strategies and tactics have two broad aims, namely to gain publicity for the movement and to challenge conventional thinking about how we treat non-human animals. This is achieved primarily by the deployment of the key tactical mechanisms of persuasion, protest, non-cooperation and intervention. These tactics may be deployed collectively or as DIY (Do-It-Yourself) activism which many grassroots animal activists – ‘caring sleuths’ to use Shapiro's apt term – seem to prefer. The paper focuses on demonstrations and pamphleteering as examples of publicity strategies or liberal governance strategies as well as critical governance strategies or interference strategies such as the hunger strike, ethical vegetarianism and undercover surveillance.