Grassroots organising was central to this movement—and so was its cultural power. Stories and images both drew people into the movement, and they played a central role in changing the ‘climate of opinion’. Often, stories and images were combined in the form of dramatic events—stories that people could see.
The stories and images generated by the 1960 Greensboro and Nashville lunch counter sit-ins ignited and energised a national movement that placed race relations in the national spotlight.
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which led the Nashville sit-ins, went on to play a leading role in initiatives including the 1961 Freedom Rides and the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer voting rights campaign. A combination of community organising and cultural power was central to both initiatives.
According to historian Raymond Arsenault, the ‘saga’ of the Freedom Rides featured ‘characters and plot lines rivalling those of the most imaginative fiction’.
John Lewis recalls
The Freedom Ride served not only the purpose of desegregating or dramatizing the fact that segregation still existed in the area of public transportation, but also to arouse the black community in the South.
Video
Video excerpt from PBS series “Freedom Riders” focusing on the shift from lobbying government to nonviolent direct action tactics.
Freedom Summer—less well-known for its cultural impact—was important partly because of what it communicated. As PBS documentary highlights, it aimed to ‘force the media and the country to take notice of the shocking violence and massive injustice taking place in Mississippi’.
Freedom Summer exposed racist violence and led to the formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), which powerfully dramatised the exclusion of blacks from the Democratic Party in Mississippi at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.
Responding to these events, SNCC organised protests with drama in mind. Its goals were to:
engage in nonviolent direct action in order to dramatize the need for the unseating of the Mississippi delegation, to dramatize the need for the enactment of legislation based on the concept of one man, one vote, requiring one to give only age and residence as a qualification to register, and to dramatize the need for home rule in Washington, D. C.
Earlier, cultural power was evident in the action of civil rights activist Rosa Parks in refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger, and the symbolic signals sent by the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
The Boycott’s impact was powerfully conveyed through stories and images. The boycott meant that the movement could, for example, tell ‘the Montgomery story’, including in the form of a comic book, which conveyed a story that became a “blueprint” for civil rights organisers.
King writes that Montgomery was symbolically powerful: ‘Montgomery has been known… as the Cradle of the Confederacy. Here the first Confederate flag was made and unfurled…’ People in Montgomery had ‘followed a method of nonviolent struggle that became one of the glowing epics of the twentieth century. He added:
To sit at a lunch counter or occupy the front seat of a bus had no effect on our material standard of living, but in removing a caste stigma it revolutionized our psychology’.
Martin Luther King’s work involved a series of theatrical symbolic actions, (not all of which were solidly backed up by building an enduring community base through local organising), however, his work in Selma, Montgomery, Birmingham and at the Lincoln Memorial all fused cultural power with ‘people power.’
Movement strategy: ‘symbolic objectives’ and ‘dramatising the issues’
Reflecting on lessons learned by the civil rights movement following setbacks in 1961-2, King remarked, ‘We never since scattered our efforts, but have focused upon specific symbolic objectives’. Symbolic victories, he claimed, enabled the movement to ‘galvanize support and boost morale’.
One of the most significant instances of the movement’s use of symbolic action was displayed in the Selma-to-Montgomery marches of 1965 . Here, a combination of people power and cultural power was used ‘to attack the very heart of the political structure of the state of Alabama’. ‘We needed a sense of drama’, King wrote: ‘The goal of the demonstrations in Selma… was to dramatize the existence of injustice’ (emphasis added). These marches led to the passage of the 1965 U.S. Voting Rights Act.
See Cultural power in action: the case of the Selma-to-Montgomery marches.
Without the political use of images, narratives and social drama, this movement would have been unrecognisable, and it would have lacked much of its ‘real’ (if intangible) power to mobilise the movement, persuade the public, and thereby shift the ‘political climate’.
‘Creating a compelling… narrative, a social drama‘
Sociologist Jeffrey Alexander argues that the civil rights movement
engaged not only in instrumental but in symbolic action, creating a compelling, arresting, existentially and politically encompassing narrative, a social drama with which the audience… could identify and through which they could vicariously participate.
He observes that the movement
was able to translate what could have been viewed simply as a social, political, and racial conflict over the distribution of resources, centering on aggression and struggles over structural position, into a moral confrontation in which the excluded and denigrated minority won legitimate authority.
Further, he adds,
It is a fascinating and highly revealing fact of the academic literature on the movement that even those most interested in portraying civil rights leaders and masses as strategic, purposive, practical, and hard-headed continually employ the term ‘dramatic’ to identify the movement’s major events and activities.
