PS 201 Introduction to US Politics
Joseph Boland Fall, 1998


Social Movements Lecture Notes

 

  1. The Problem: The major parties are dominated by entrenched elites and beholden to wealthy donors, making them unlikely vehicles for participatory democratic change. And the interest group system favors corporations-who can afford the high costs of lobbying and monitoring-along with professionalized nonprofits (most themselves highly dependent on corporate and foundation support). It also seems poorly suited to grassroots social reform efforts.
    1. What about social movements?. Throughout American history (see text p262), those who felt they were denied the rights and benefits of American society-who were politically disenfranchised, discriminated against, economically oppressed, or whose values and vision of American society were marginalized-turned to social protest and the organization of movements for political and social change.
    2. These movements stand both as an indictment of the failures of American democracy and its saving grace.
      1. As an indictment, they have drawn attention to the sometimes horrendous differences between American ideals and American realities, such as slavery (and later the legalized apartheid of segregation), the denial of political and civil equality to women, the impoverishment and degradation of many workers during industrialization, and the destruction of the environment.
      2. But they have also frequently brought democratic change to political institutions, at least partially righted social injustices, and improved the living conditions and opportunities of disadvantaged groups. In doing so, they have kept American ideals alive as a moral resource for others and have prevented the country from losing its conscience.
  2. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s
    1. Before looking at theories and models of social movements, let's examine the development of one movement that profoundly influenced American society.
    2. The system of apartheid in the South
      1. Economic-blacks largely confined to unskilled labor, low pay jobs and to tenant farming.
      2. Political-legal exclusion via literacy tests, poll taxes, and sundry other registration requirements.
      3. Social-personal and cultural deference, separate and unequal facilities, backed by terror (the KKK, lynchings).
    3. Blacks hemmed-in nationally:
      1. The Democratic party, traditionally the party of disadvantaged groups in America-immigrants in the 19th century, labor in the New Deal, does almost nothing for blacks under the New Deal because Roosevelt was dependent on the support of white Southern conservatives.
      2. Labor unions are predominantly racist, and besides this weak to nonexistent in the South.
      3. Constitutional law from the 1880s until the early 1950s defends segregation-most notably in the doctrine of "separate but equal" of Plessy v. Ferguson.
    4. Changes in the social situation and political power of African-Americans in the 1940s:
      1. One prominent black intellectual, Manning Marable, believes that "the watershed of African-American history occurred in the 1940s." Here's why:
        1. 500,000+ served in the military (segregated units, distinguished record);
        2. the number of black union members rose from 150,000 in 1935 to 1.25 million at war's end (American Communist Party organizing helpful);
        3. a black voting block formed (it was the margin of Roosevelt victory in 8 states in 1944);
        4. NAACP membership more than tripled 1934-44.
        5. NAACP Legal Defense Fund successes in repealing Jim Crow legislation prior to the landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling outlawing school segregation;
        6. blacks gain entry into state legislatures (two dozen by 1946); House (Adam Clayton Powell, 1946); federal appointments (Ralph Bunche--Anglo-American Caribbean Commission);
        7. improvements in black education: United Negro College Fund; etc;
        8. median income of non-white workers up from 41 percent of whites in 1939 to 60 percent in 1950. More black professionals and craftsmen (Marable 1991, 13-18).
      2. Ideological factors:
        1. The genocidal racism of the Nazi Third Reich made the contradiction between U.S. opposition to fascism and the existence of Jim Crow at home blatant. "Blacks and an increasing sector of liberal white America came out of the war with a fresh determination to uproot racist ideologies and institutions at home" (Marable 1991, 14).
        2. In the Cold War struggle with Soviet Communism, both sides claimed to embody the emancipatory values that would lead humanity into a better future. Domestic racism was an acute embarrassment for the U.S., because it suggested that American freedom and democracy did not apply to people of color, who were, after all, the vast majority in the "Third World" whose support both sides sought. "Newspapers throughout the world carried stories about discrimination against non-white visiting foreign dignitaries, as well as against American Blacks" (Dudziak 1993, 12).
      3. Global ideological considerations, the need for black votes, and probably genuine moral convictions all figured in Truman's civil rights efforts. In 1948 he desegregated the armed forces by executive order and introduced the first major civil rights legislation of the century (it was defeated in Congress).
      4. The 1954 Supreme Court ruling, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, prohibited segregation in schools. By overturning the "separate but equal" doctrine, the Supreme Court pitted federal authority against the South's system of racial segregation. The civil rights movement continually tested the willingness of the federal government to stand behind and to extend the Court's commitment to ending racial discrimination.
    5. New opportunity structure: These changes create new opportunities-what might be called more favorable objective conditions, but they also produce changes in attitudes and expectations, a subjective unwillingness to continue tolerating subordination and mistreatment: "there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression" (King in text, p259).
    6. Spontaneous protests occur, such as Rosa Parks refusal to move to the back of the bus. These now spark organized resistance and the articulation of collective demands.
    7. Initial demands are modest: not even full equality, but only "seating on a first-come, first-serve basis, with whites in the front and blacks in the back" (text p259).
    8. Social resources: The black community shows its strength and determination by maintaining a boycott that hurts not only the bus company but downtown businesses as well.
      1. Black churches: The churches play a vital role in cultivating solidarity and helping people cope with fear;
      2. Cross-class solidarity: class divisions among blacks are bridged; middle-class blacks lend their cars to poorer blacks;
      3. College youth (1960-1965): The student revolt of 1960, beginning with sit-in at white-only section of lunch counter in Greensboro, N. Carolina "'speeded up incalculably the rate of social change in the sphere of race relations; broke decisively the NAACP's hegemony in the civil rights arena . . .; and made nonviolent direct action the dominant strategy in the struggle for racial equality during the next decade'" (historians August Meier and Elliot Rudwick) (Marable 1991, 62). Rapid proliferation of direct actions during year.
        1. Founding of SNCC, April, 1960. Revival of CORE. Immediate CORE support for first sit-in. CORE resurrected the tactics of 1948 as "Freedom Rides." Supreme Court ruled in 12/60 in Boynton v. Virginia that racial segregation was illegal on all interstate buses and trains. "he desegregation battles of the early 1960s were conceived, planned, and carried-out by young people.". White youth "saw what blacks had always understood: the hypocrisy, the contradiction of America's democracy which was based on the continued subjugation of the Negro. . . . Thus, racial reform in the South was not an aberration of bourgeois democracy; it was its fulfillment" (Marable 1991, 64-65).
        2. SNCC led voter registration drive (along with NAACP, SCLC, et. al) beginning 1960, expanded 1961-62. "It is very difficult, in retrospect, to comprehend the sheer courage of these black teenagers and young adults."
        3. Effort of James Meredith to enroll at U. of Mississippi met with violent mob resistance plus governor Barnett "personally blocked Meredith from gaining admission" at one point. Battle forced Kennedy to choose which side to support.
    9. Rhetoric: Martin Luther King and others eloquently evoke American ideals and remind people of the Supreme Court decision against school segregation. Thus:
      1. The movement stakes a claim to stand for and defend values shared by the larger white-especially Northern white-culture.
      2. The Supreme Court ruling suggests that this is a propitious time to fight for change; moreover, the resolve of the federal government-if not also white society-to end discrimination must be tested.
    10. Tactics: King also brings to the movement the philosophy and tactic of nonviolent civil disobedience which at this time meshes almost perfectly with the appeal the movement makes to the nation's conscience.
      1. Peaceful resistance to unjust laws in this instance exposed the underlying brutality of segregation while implying a high degree of confidence in the moral rectitude of northern white society and the integrity of the federal government. The tactic avoids alienating northern whites while making it difficult for them not to see events as a test of their own commitment to democracy and equality.
      2. At the same time, nonviolent direct action proves successful at mobilizing Southern blacks and their external supporters.
    11. Southern white power structure: The white power structure, however, will not compromise, either fearing that concessions will encourage further demands or because compromise entails negotiations that would undermine the political exclusion of blacks as well as the ability of whites to treat them as inferiors.
      1. The alternative, repression, backfires, in part because television brings the spectacle to a national audience. Moreover, white intransigence radicalizes black activists:
        1. "The experience taught me a lesson ... even when asked for justice within segregation laws, the 'powers that be' were not willing to grant it. Justice and equality, I saw, would never come while segregation remained, because the basic purpose of segregation was to perpetuate injustice and inequality" (King in text, p261).
    12. National elite responses: Political elites must decide among three choices: repression, concessions, or co-optation. Different elites at different times do all three.
      1. Concessions: The national Democratic party is torn by conflict. Pragmatically, it wants to retain the support of both Southern whites and blacks throughout the nation (but particularly in the North, where they can vote and where their votes are important). Ideologically, it needs to preserve its image as the party of democracy, equality, and of government assistance to the poor and disadvantaged in times of need-in contemporary terms, its liberalism. But it also fears a white backlash. Thus its aid to the civil rights movement is almost always belated and cautious. However it does send troops into the South, and eventually passes the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
      2. Repression: The FBI and other intelligence agencies conduct what becomes a massive program of monitoring and disruption of the civil rights and other social movements of the fifties and sixties. Many of these are labeled COINTELPROs (counterintelligence programs).
      3. Co-optation: Particularly with the launching of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs, it becomes possible to bring many activists into federal anti-poverty agencies (text p270).
    13. Results of the civil rights movement: The movement ended the political exclusion of blacks (particularly in the South), broke the system of segregation and personal subordination, and ended practices of overt discrimination. What remains are economic injustices and the fight over affirmative action, education, and aid to cities.
  3. Analysis of social movements
    1. Social movements typically seek broad moral or ideological goals that affect the whole of society.
    2. Tactics have to weigh sometimes conflicting aims:
      1. Effectiveness in achieving immediate goals;
      2. Capacity to rally and mobilize core supporters;
      3. The need to avoid, if possible, inciting a backlash among peripheral supporters or undecided members of the larger society.
        1. King's eloquent "Letter from Birmingham Jail:" "The Negro's greatest stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the . . . Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice . . . who constantly says 'I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action'; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man's freedom" (quoted in Marable 1991, 71).
      4. See chart, text p263.
    3. Ingredients of social movements:
      1. Rising expectations - the theory of relative deprivation.
      2. Social resources, including"'free spaces' - organizations located between private families and large public organizations where people can learn self-respect, cooperation, group identity, and the leadership skills necessary for democratic participation" (text p266).
      3. An appealing moral cause
      4. Consciousness raising.
      5. Transformation leadership.
  4. Elite and popular democratic views of social movements
    1. Elite democrats make several criticisms of social movements:
      1. They make utopian and impractical demands without accepting any responsibility for the problems of actual governance-in other words, for the difficulties of attempting to meet the demands
      2. They overburden the political system, threatening to destabilize it.
      3. They are composed of poorly adjusted and socially isolated individuals, "losers", who make trouble for others. In more sophisticated language, social movements are pathological responses to temporary dislocations in the course of social and economic development. For example, 19th century agrarian populism could be regarded as a protest against the declining position of agriculture as the country industrialized.
    2. Popular democrats stress the importance of social movements to democracy. The independence struggle itself was a broad social movement among the colonists, and since then social movements have been responsible for the most momentous advances for freedom and political rights, including the end of slavery (the abolitionist movement) and equality for women (the 19th century suffragette movement and the 20th century feminist movement). Social movements prevent the political system from ossifying, and provide a way for people to communicate directly with the government and with society as a whole.

References

Dudziak, Mary Louise. 1992. Cold War Civil Rights: The Relationship Between Civil Rights and Foreign Affairs in the Truman Administration. Ph.D. dissertation. Yale University. Available through UMI Dissertation Services, Ann Arbor, MI.

Marable, Manning. 1991. Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945-1990. 2nd edition. Jackson, Mississippi and London: University Press of Mississippi.