Civil Rights Movement

Mc Adam uses data to support his theory!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

· Comprehensive analysis of New York Times articles whose main theme focused on the civil rights movement.
· public opinion data among African Americans and Whites on their attitudes about the civil rights issue
· Path models, tend to be more persuasive indicators of causality


political opportunity structure - These are the general social and political constraints and advantages that a group faces when it decides to mobilize.
· Decline of the cotton economy in the South
· Rise of Black Churches, Black Colleges and the NAACP
· Migration of African Americans to the North improved the political opportunity structure for the civil rights movement.
· Northern industry was able to leverage the decline in the cotton economy by providing an incentive to attract African Americans to move north for better manufacturing jobs
· Without restrictive voting laws in northern states, African Americans became a sought after voting bloc.
· African American voters with leverage in local, state, and presidential campaigns (Mc Adam, 1992: 81-82).
· Examples include proactive stances by the Truman and Eisenhower administrations.

cognitive mobilization - stresses the shared sense of grievances among group members. This point also argues that group members have a sense of efficacy that collective action will be effective achieving the group’s goals

· . Without public opinion data available prior to World War II, Mc Adam is unable to examine whether there was a true shift in efficacy among African Americans as the civil rights movement progressed from its earlier
· Efficacy did decline in the period from the 1950s to the late 1960s (Mc

Movement organizations must also have a general unity on issues and tactics
mobilization began primarily through churches, black colleges, and the NAACP



Countermobilization

· This will have an additional effect in reducing the political efficacy of group. Members will notice their opponent’s increased mobilization and its impact on public policy.
· This increases the costs of collective action, therefore undermining the group’s ability to organize
· One can also see how declining levels of success can also undermine group unity, causing division among members in terms of the issues and tactics to advance their goals.

Movement Decline

· The civil rights movement began to decline in the 1960s as smaller groups emerged, pushing for new issues that were perceived as a bigger threat to the political status quo.
· New forms of protest such as the use of violence were advanced by some of the smaller groups.
This led to increased conflict internal to the civil rights movement
· Conservative countermobilization
· Mc Adam points to the use of racial rhetoric by the Republican Party beginning with the Goldwater campaign of 1964
· After Nixon’s election in 1968, conservatives were then able to control how civil rights issues were defined