Political context and protest: the civil rights movement in the United States (1933-68).

Abstract

The political opportunities variable, within the political process model, is visibly insufficient when it comes to explaining the emergence, strategies and results of the civil rights movement in the United States. This is so because it embraces a number of dimensions that are seen as necessary and sufficient to understand the relationship between different types of collective action and their specific political contexts. In clear contradiction with the political process model, the current article shows that the existence of influential allies and of a federal system did not ease the expression of the black protest; yet high decentralization and a rigid system of checks and balances did not impair the enforcement of the civil rights legislation in the mid sixties either. Brutal repression strategies did not demobilize the challengers, nor did it undermine their adherence to non-violent techniques –brutality was, as a matter of fact, actively provoked by the civil rights activists as a way of forcing federal intervention in the South. Finally, the analysis sets out to explore the framing process from a political and instrumental, rather than from a contracultural or contentious perspective.