Preparation Pathways and Movement Participation: Insurgent Schooling and Nonviolent Direct Action in the Nashville Civil Rights Movement*

2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larry W. Isaac ◽  
Jonathan S. Coley ◽  
Daniel B. Cornfield ◽  
Dennis C. Dickerson
Keyword(s):  
High Risk ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Multiple Paths ◽  
Nonviolent Direct Action ◽  
Movement Participation ◽  
Key Pathways ◽  
And Training

Employing a unique sample of participants in the early Nashville civil rights movement, we extend the micromobilization literature by conceptualizing “preparation pathways” (or schooling channels) through which activists acquire insurgent consciousness and capital so crucial for committed, effective, high-risk activism. We identify two key pathways in which activists were “schooled” in nonviolent praxis—experience in nonviolent direct action prior to the Nashville movement and training through intensive, highly organized, and disciplined workshops on nonviolence praxis. Evidence suggests that both pathways prove especially efficacious in accounting for intensity and persistence of movement direct-action participation. The implications of our findings extend to high-risk movement activism more generally and also illuminate an important chapter in the southern civil rights movement. Activists are not a homogeneous lot. Instead they move through multiple paths accumulating diverse cultural and relational endowments that they bring into movements. Once there, these endowments can shape the intensity and persistence of participation in struggle.

Pathways to Modes of Movement Participation: Micromobilization in the Nashville Civil Rights Movement

Social Forces ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 99 (1) ◽  
pp. 255-280
Author(s):  
Larry W Isaac ◽  
Jonathan S Coley ◽  
Daniel B Cornfield ◽  
Dennis C Dickerson
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Prior Experience ◽  
A Priori ◽  
The Core ◽  
Workshop Training ◽  
Nonviolent Direct Action ◽  
Movement Participation

Abstract We employ a unique sample of participants in the early 1960s Nashville civil rights movement to examine within-movement micromobilization processes. Rather than assuming movement micromobilization and participation is internally homogeneous, we extend the literature by identifying distinct types of pathways (entry and preparation) and distinct types (or modes) of movement participation. Pathways into the Nashville movement are largely structured a priori by race, by several distinct points of entry (politically pulled, directly recruited, or professionally pushed), and by prior experience or training in nonviolent direct action. Participation falls into a distinct division of movement labor characterized by several major modes of participation—core cadre, soldiers, and supporters. We demonstrate that pathways and modes of participation are systematically linked and that qualitatively distinct pathways contribute to understanding qualitative modes of movement participation. Specifically, all core cadre members were pulled into activism, soldiers were either pulled or recruited, and supporters were pulled, recruited, or pushed. Highly organized, disciplined, and intense workshop training proved to be integral in becoming a member of the core cadre but not for soldier or supporter roles. We conclude that social movement studies would do well to pay more attention to variability in structured pathways to, preparation for, and qualitative dimensions of movement participation. These dimensions are critical to further understanding the way movements and their participants move and add insights regarding an important chapter in the southern civil rights movement. The implications of our findings extend to modes of movement activism more generally.

We Can Add to the World Justice

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Azaransky
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Peace Movement ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Black Freedom Movement ◽  
Congress Of Racial Equality ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Nonviolent Direct Action ◽  
Freedom Movement

Bayard Rustin, James Farmer, and Pauli Murray developed a black Christian pacifism inspired by Gandhian nonviolence. Their activist projects in the 1940s, including sit-ins, freedom rides, and multicity marches, became mainstays of the later civil rights movement. While working with majority-white organizations like the Fellowship of Reconciliation and interracial organizations like the Congress of Racial Equality, Murray, Rustin, and Farmer nevertheless developed what Farmer called “the race logic of pacifism,” the idea that black Americans had a particular aptitude for nonviolent direct action because of their experiences of white racism. In the midst of a majority-white Christian peace movement, these three black activists devised a religious pacifism that was also distinctly black. Their early activism illuminates, furthermore, questions about the role of gender and sexuality in the black freedom movement.

Civil Rights and Battered Bodies

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Southern United States ◽  
Nonviolent Resistance ◽  
Racial Injustice ◽  
Nonviolent Direct Action ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter examines the publication of images depicting violence against people engaged in acts of nonviolent resistance, suggesting that these acts are deliberately choreographed dramatizations of racial injustice. It links the overarching goals of the civil rights movement to the enduring struggle for black humanity in America by focusing on the violence encountered during nonviolent actions and the aesthetics of their visual documentation through photography and documentary footage. The chapter highlights the strategy of nonviolent direct action that was taken up during the freedom rides, lunch-counter integrations, and marches of the 1960s as stark illustrations of the infringements upon black humanity and freedom of expression endured and indeed endorsed in the southern United States.

They’ll Never Separate Us Again

Blue Texas ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Max Krochmal
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
New Wave ◽  
And Training ◽  
Additional Space

This chapter describes the rise of the Democratic Coalition in Texas. Before it was extinguished, the coalition would reach deeper into the state’s black and brown neighborhoods than ever before, reactivating old networks of veteran activists and recruiting and training tens of thousands of new grassroots organizers. It would create additional space for PASO and labor to extend their joint organizing efforts and would help the Texas AFL-CIO become a civil rights organization in its own right. And it would support the arrival of the black civil rights movement on a statewide level, resulting in a new wave of direct action protests and culminating in the state’s largest demonstration to date.

Women’s Activism in the Modern Movement for Black Liberation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aisha A. Upton ◽  
Joyce M. Bell
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Feminism ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Black Power Movement ◽  
Women's Activism ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Women's Participation ◽  
Modern Movement

This chapter examines women’s activism in the modern movement for Black liberation. It examines women’s roles across three phases of mobilization. Starting with an exploration of women’s participation in the direct action phase of the U.S. civil rights movement (1954–1966), the chapter discusses the key roles that women played in the fight for legal equality for African Americans. Next it examines women’s central role in the Black Power movement of 1966–1974. The authors argue that Black women found new roles in new struggles during this period. The chapter ends with a look at the rise of radical Black feminism between 1974 and 1980, examining the codification of intersectional politics and discussing the continuation of issues of race, privilege, and diversity in contemporary feminism.

Championships and Civil Rights

2019 ◽  
pp. 101-146
Author(s):  
Derrick E. White
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Black College ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Predominately White Institutions ◽  
Structural Racism ◽  
Predominately White ◽  
Racial Change ◽  
White Institutions

This chapter explores how Black college football and FAMU reckoned with the civil rights movement. Gaither preferred interracial cooperation rather than direct action as a means for racial change. The civil rights movement, beginning with Brown v. Board of Education, and including the bus boycotts of the mid-1950s and the sit-ins of the early 1960s, undermined Gaither’s reputation with activists. Gaither’s opposition to immediate desegregation not only was an attempt to hold on to his powerful football program but also showed an understanding of how integration would perpetuate athletic dominance by predominately white institutions. Gaither’s experiences with structural racism in building Bragg Stadium provided an alternative perspective to the civil rights movement.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s white moderates and moderate Baptists: Moderateness as betrayal of the gospel

2019 ◽  
Vol 116 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-203
Author(s):  
Kate Hanch
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Women In Ministry ◽  
Sustained Change ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Martin Luther King

In his 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King Jr. criticizes “the white moderate,” identifying them as empathizing with the Civil Rights Movement, but not acting upon it. King’s “white moderate” compares to contemporary white Baptists who embody King’s definition. Putting “white moderate” in conversation with “moderate Baptists” demonstrates how moderate actions betray the Gospel. Exploring the identity of the clergy whom King addresses in his letter aids in drawing out a fuller definition of “moderate.” This article applies three aspects of King’s critique to contemporary Baptist concerns, such as women in ministry and inclusion of LGBTQIA persons in all areas of ministry: (1) an avoidance of tension through silence, what King calls “negative peace;” (2) a sympathetic view without sustained change in social structure or policy, identified by King as “lukewarm acceptance;” and (3) using generalized statements to avoid speaking of “hot-topic” issues, which King phrases as “sanctimonious trivialities.” White Baptists can fight against the trend of “moderateness” through being transformed by and participating in what King calls “direct action.” In doing so, Baptists may become, to use King’s term, “extremists for love.”

An Entire World in Motion

2021 ◽  
pp. 53-90
Author(s):  
Erin R. Pineda
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
South African ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Civil Disobedience ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
Nonviolent Direct Action ◽  
Entire World

This chapter develops an alternative framework for understanding the civil disobedience of civil rights activists: as a decolonizing praxis that linked their dissent to that of anticolonial activists and tied the context of Jim Crow to global white supremacy. If the constitutional, democratic state formed the normative horizon for liberal understandings of civil disobedience, activists’ horizon was defined by processes of imaginative transit—the process of thinking and traveling across boundaries and disparate contexts, through which activists in motion constructed civil disobedience as a means of transforming worldwide structures of racist imperialism, colonial rule, apartheid, and Jim Crow. Between 1920 and 1960, African American, Indian, South African, and Ghanaian activists proposed, debated, and wielded nonviolent direct action as a means of self-liberation from white supremacy’s structures of fear and violence, and way of disrupting and transforming the practices that held those structures in place.

Working together to survive and thrive: The struggle for Black lives past and present

Leadership ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 174271502097620
Author(s):  
Herbert G Ruffin
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Digital Technology ◽  
Black People ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Black Leadership ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Nonviolent Direct Action ◽  
Working Together ◽  
Revolutionary Period

This article examines Black leadership through the generations as a multifaceted struggle for Black lives led by ordinary Black people working together to end anti-Black violence and systemic racism for the affirmation of their humanity. At the center of this examination is the latest phase in a long struggle for Black lives, which has been branded as a Black Lives Matter movement. This new movement for social justice developed from past struggles and during the aftermath of the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin, 2014 Ferguson uprising, and 2020 George Floyd uprising. For the author, this new struggle is Black Americans most recent “walk of life” that stretches back to the movements for self-determination, anti-enslavement, and civil rights during the American Revolutionary period (1764–1789). Central to this new struggle is the blending of nonviolent direct action tactics with the use of digital technology and the inclusion of people who previously functioned on the margins of the civil rights agenda. This struggle is addressed, first through an exploration of where Black-led community organizations have been since Trayvon’s death, and second, by examining what is currently being done during the aftermath of the death of Breonna Taylor up to mid-September 2020.

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