CHANGES IN SUPPORT FOR U.S. BLACK MOVEMENTS, 1966–2016: FROM CIVIL RIGHTS TO BLACK LIVES MATTER

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 475-488
Author(s):  
Davyd Setter
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Logistic Regression ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Political Attitudes ◽  
Public Support ◽  
Political Context ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
Education Effect ◽  
Over Time

Black Lives Matter is often unfavorably compared to the civil rights movement based on assumptions that the earlier movement was more palatable to a white public. Available data, however, demonstrate the civil rights movement’s unpopularity with contemporaneous white audiences. In this article I ask if white public support for Black social movements has changed over time. If so, what explains these shifts in support? Using logistic regression, I compare white audience views of Black movements in 1966 and 2016. I find that white support for Black movements has increased, but this shift is not uniform. While 1966 support is correlated with education, income, and liberal attitudes, support in 2016 is driven by polarized political attitudes and increased support among youth and women. Surprisingly, the education effect disappears entirely in the 2016 analysis. The results demonstrate the fluidity of movement audiences, which are strongly impacted by changes in the broader political context.

Black Lives Matter and the Civil Rights Movement: A Comparative Analysis of Two Social Movements in the United States

2018 ◽  
Vol 49 (5) ◽  
pp. 448-480 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dewey M. Clayton
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
New York Times ◽  
The United States ◽  
Issue Framing ◽  
Black Lives Matter

Black Lives Matter (BLM) has arisen as a social movement in response to the numerous killings of unarmed African Americans. It has been criticized by some as too confrontational and divisive. The purpose of this study is to undertake a comparative analysis of the BLM Movement and the civil rights movement (1954-1965). As social movements, both have evolved out of the need to continue the Black liberation struggle for freedom. I have conducted a content analysis of the New York Times newspaper during a 2-year period for both social movements to examine the issue framing of each. I argue that the civil rights movement framed its issues in a more inclusive manner than BLM. BLM should take a lesson from the civil rights movement by boldly taking on an issue like police brutality of African Americans and expanding the boundaries of something that is politically unacceptable to being acceptable.

James Baldwin

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
American History ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
First Century ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
Twenty First Century

The book is devoted to the works of James Baldwin, one of the most compelling writers of the twentieth century. The authors examine his most important contributions – including novels, essays, short stories, poetry, and media appearances – in the wider context of American history. They demonstrate the lasting importance of his oeuvre, which was central to the Civil Rights Movement and continues to be relevant at the dawn of the twenty-first century and the Black Lives Matter era.

Medium

2020 ◽  
pp. 13-36
Author(s):  
Ray Brescia
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Mass Movement ◽  
Printing Press ◽  
Communications Technology ◽  
Post Office ◽  
Abolitionist Movement

This chapter discusses the medium—the mode of communication a group uses to communicate and organize. It reviews the advent of the printing press, the post office, the telegraph, the transcontinental railroad, the telephone, the radio, and the television, revealing that with the emergence of each of these innovations, a mass movement or movements rose up in their wake. Communications technology, in the form of the steam printing press, combined with the reach of the postal system, helped spur abolitionist efforts. Indeed, just as the abolitionist movement was gaining strength, this new technology helped fuel the advocacy of the movement and strengthen its power and reach. The chapter explores this connection between communications technology and social movements in U.S. history, from the events leading up to the American Revolution through the successes of the civil rights movement.

The Turning Point

2019 ◽  
pp. 301-352
Author(s):  
Steven K. Green
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Vatican Ii ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Public Support ◽  
The Public ◽  
Education Legislation ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Impact

This chapter examines the various events that undermined the public support for church–state separation in the 1960s. It considers the impact of Vatican II, of ecumenism, of the civil rights movement, and of federal social welfare and education legislation on Protestant attitudes. All of these events encouraged Protestants and Catholics to find common ground in working for the greater societal good. These events also suggested a model of church-state cooperation rather than one of separation. The chapter then segues to consider the various church–state cases before the Supreme Court between 1968 and 1975 in which the justices began to step back from applying a strict separationist approach to church–state controversies.

Foundational Invocations

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angélica Maria Bernal
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
Tea Party ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Normative Authority ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Us ◽  
Constitutional Thought

This chapter examines appeals to the authority of original founding events, founding ideals, and Founding Fathers in contemporary constitutional democracies. It argues that these “foundational invocations” reveal a window into the unique, albeit underexamined function that foundings play: as a vehicle of persuasion and legitimation. It organizes this examination around two of the most influential visions of founding in the US tradition: the originalist, situated in the discourses of conservative social movements such as the Tea Party and in conservative constitutional thought; and the promissory, situated in the discourses of social movements such as the civil rights movement. Though they might appear radically dissimilar, this chapter illustrates how these two influential conceptualizations of founding together reveal a shared political foundationalism that conflates the normative authority of a regime for its de facto one, thus circumscribing radical change by obscuring the past and placing founding invocations and their actors beyond question.

Between Protest and Politics

Meridians ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 427-452
Author(s):  
Robert J. Patterson
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Global Network ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
Short Term Change ◽  
Term Change ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Movement Organizations ◽  
Epistemological Framework

Abstract This article examines the official Black Lives Matter Movement (the Black Lives Matter Global Network) as a point of departure to argue that Black Lives Matter (BLM) in general expands our epistemological framework for thinking about black freedom movements, black freedom dreams, and black freedom strategies. By analyzing the movement’s explicit refusal to be likened to civil rights movement organizations as a concurrent attack against intraracial sexism, heterosexism, and transphobia, the article insists that BLM deprivileges heteronormativity to show that black freedom dreams must include gender and sexual liberation. By considering BLM’s rejection of capitalism as a broader critique of neoliberalism’s forceful role in maintaining black dispossession, the author posits that BLM desires to disrupt the state’s tendency to use the black middle class to enact, enforce, and reinforce an economic order that relies upon race and racism to codify and cement black inequality. Finally, the author posits that the movement’s tactics and goals provide a framework through which to enact short-term change, while pushing to dismantle the larger system of antiblack racism that is refracted through global capitalism.

Seizing the Stage: Social Performances from Mao Zedong to Martin Luther King Jr., and Black Lives Matter Today

2017 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey C. Alexander
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Social Performance ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Mao Zedong ◽  
Performance Theory ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
Martin Luther King ◽  
Performative Power

It is possible to look at radical social movements from the perspective of social performance theory; though, being wedded to nonsymbolic and realist methods, few contemporary social scientists would agree. Despite their immensely practical goals, the success of both Chinese Communists and American civil rights protesters depended on achieving performative power, all in the service of dramatically connecting with their audiences. The same can be said for the Black Lives Matter movement.

Social movements as schooling for careers: career consequences of the Nashville civil rights movement

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Jonathan S. Coley ◽  
Daniel B. Cornfield ◽  
Larry W. Isaac ◽  
Dennis C. Dickerson
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement

Exclusive Categories

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalie Masuoka
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Personal Identification ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Discrete Groups ◽  
Cultural Shift ◽  
Racial Categories ◽  
Small Set ◽  
Over Time

This chapter presents a historical analysis that traces changes in American norms concerning race over time. In particular, it highlights the cultural shift from perceiving race as a form of assigned classification to perceiving it as a product of personal identification. The chapter first establishes why Americans rely on racial categories and how race is practiced by classifying individuals in a small set of discrete groups. It then identifies events that occurred largely during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s that cultivated the new cultural norms that created opportunities to express race as a form of personal identity.

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