Cultural power matters for • creating defining moments • making what is at stake visible and impossible to ignore • capturing the public imagination, • persuading people • shifting the debate, and • firing the imagination of campaigners.
‘The movement of the ‘60s was really a people’s movement‘ recalls Diane Nash, a key figure in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
She also describes a moment in the 1961 Freedom Rides, when a key strategic decision was taken because of the signals or the ‘message‘ that social action conveys. The Freedom Ride had been met with violence, and Nash felt that activists had to make sure that the initiative did not stop:
‘[otherwise] the future of the movement was going to be just cut short. Because the impression would have been given that whenever a movement starts, all that has to be done is that you attack it with massive violence and the, the blacks would stop’.1
The Freedom Rides generated powerful images, which were central to their political impact. When members of the Ku Klux Klan attacked and burned a bus which participants were riding on, images of the burning bus were published in newspapers nationally.
A key organiser of the initial stages of the event, Jim Farmer, recalled:
I called my staff in New York and directed them to superimpose that photograph of the flame on the torch of the Statue of Liberty immediately, and to use that composite picture as the symbol of the Freedom Ride.
Movement historian Raymond Arsenault writes, ‘Nothing, it seems, had prepared Americans for the image of the burning bus… Even those who had little sympathy for the Freedom Riders could not avoid the disturbing power of the photographs and accounts of the assaults. [The image was] the newest icon of the civil rights struggle’.
Video:
clips from PBS series “Freedom Riders”.Freedom Riders: The Fresh Troops: includes a focus on the contribution of the Nashville movement
Freedom Riders: The Tactic: The shift to nonviolent direct action in the US civil rights movement.
Freedom Riders: The Movement: The people who participated and their stories of what happened.
For the complete set of video clips, see Freedom Riders.
For an overview of the history, see Nashville students and SNCC pick up Freedom Rides (SNCC Digital Gateway) and also “The Freedom Riders History” (Smithsonian Magazine).
People power’, cultural power, or both?
Did the US civil rights movement of the 1960s achieve its gains by exerting ‘people power’, cultural power, or both?
The following graphic sums up some key points in the debate between two thinkers on this issue, which are explored below.
The debate
(1) Sociologist Jeffrey Alexander:
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.
For example, he notes how the Selma campaign was planned with the ingredients of drama in mind: ‘the Selma organizers wanted to trigger Sheriff Clark’s temper and to put it publicly on display’ source, contrasting the segregationist sheriff with the nonviolent protesters.
From Alexander’s perspective, political action sends signals, and what was communicated by mobilisation is crucially important in social movements.
He quotes Martin Luther King:
Instead stead of submitting to surreptitious cruelty in thousands of dark jail cells and on countless shadowed street corners,” Martin Luther King wrote, the movement’s nonviolent tactics would force the southern “oppressor to commit his brutality openly-in the light of day-with the rest of the world looking on.
For Alexander, a key part of the movement’s power was the capacity of its imagery and narratives to persuade the broader public. Their capacity to persuade movement participants to become involved can be highlighted here as well.
(2) Historian of the US civil rights movement, Aldon Morris
Morris (2007) writes: ‘the civil rights movement, contrary to Alexander’s claims, generated instrumental power that was crucial in toppling’ the existing racist power structure (p. 619).
Overthrowing the existing system ‘required a black movement capable of generating real power.’ For Morris, ‘real power’ consists of ’leverage’, the use of nonviolent direct action and movement mobilization:
…by power I mean the movement had to create the leverage to realize its own will despite fierce resistance from the South’s powerful racist regime. It had to create the leverage to force the national government to pass federal legislation prohibiting Jim Crow… The strategy to achieve this end was nonviolent direct action, designed to cause a breakdown… in the functioning of the economic and political institutions in the South. But to achieve such power, thousands of people had to be mobilized to face violence, jail, beatings, and even death. For scholars of movements, it is crucial to analyze such mobilization, because it is extremely difficult to achieve and sustain. (p. 623)
Morris argues for ‘keep[ing] instrumental power at center stage (where it belongs)’ (p. 616).
However is it necessary to treat (1) the leverage brought about by movement mobilisation and (2) cultural power as two opposed and competing forms of power?
Cultural power also exerts leverage: it creates new conditions, or a new ‘political climate’ which make it possible to exercise other forms of leverage. In the case of the climate movement, the powerful images and narrative created by Greta Thunberg have changed the dynamics of climate politics.
Morris notes how ‘mobilization… is extremely difficult to achieve and sustain’. Yet the power of the stories and images generated by events such as the Freedom Rides, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and the Selma-to-Montgomery marches was central to sustaining a movement.
The same is true of Greta Thunberg’s story and image, and that of other school strikers around the world.
Some quotes from contemporary civil rights campaigners support Alexander’s emphasis on persuasion. The case that he makes is that stories and images are central to the process of actually succeeding in persuading key audiences.
- Diane Nash speaks of the purpose of a demonstration as ‘to focus the attention of the community on the issue and on the injustice’.
- Media coverage of the Freedom Ride in May 1961 noted how it ‘focuses world opinion upon… failures of democracy’
- In the annual Report of the SCLC in 1964, Martin Luther King stated: ‘Nonviolent direct action is the best way to ’raise the… injustices of our social order before the court of world opinion and require action’
- A 1964 SNCC report noted the importance of the ‘increasing influence in world opinion’ of ‘Afro-Asian countries’ and its strategic importance for the movement’s work
- In 1963, Vincent Harding and Staughton Lynd reflected on the recent movement in Albany, Georgia:
‘Of course, it was not to the local white community alone that the marches were directed. Martin Luther King told a mass meeting one night before a march that they had seen justice denied in a local court, and now they must raise their case before the court of world opinion. Like the freedom rides, the marches dramatized the situation, and brought international publicity’.
For Harding and Lynd, protest was important for what it communicated:
‘Going to jail served the… purpose of concentrating public attention on the situation’…
‘The word “protest” comes from the Latin root protestari, to declare publicly. The Albany Movement has expressed itself through ten forms of protest or public witness: freedom rides; marches; jail-ins; boycotts; picketing; prayer vigils; sit-ins; legal action; voter registration; and mass meetings’.
‘The marches in Albany… served the purpose of addressing an open letter to the white citizens of the town’.
Note: Morris emphasis ‘leverage’. ‘Leverage’ is a term used by Alexander as well: he writes of
- the leverage created by transforming public opinion
- the leveraging of ‘King’s prestige to exercise… dramatic power over the flow of events’;
- the way discourse can ‘provide leverage for… emancipation’; and
- the leverage exercised by social movements when they use of culture (e.g. narratives) in order to represent themselves in relation to their opponents, and to project an image of future goals.
Whether the focus is on the civil rights movement or the climate movement, it is not necessary to choose between the perspectives of Morris and Alexander: they speak to different dimensions of power— and both are real.
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There is more to Morris’ critique of Alexander:
See Cultural power as one form of ’real’ power – more on the debate between Morris and Alexander
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1 Historian of the Rides Raymond Arsenault comments:
Nash, Lewis, and several others argued that the civil rights community could not afford to let the Freedom Ride fail. The nonviolent movement had reached a critical juncture, they insisted, a moment of decision that in all likelihood would affect the pace of change for years to come. If the movement allowed segregationist thugs to destroy the Freedom Ride, white supremacist extremists would gain new life, violent attacks on civil rights activists would multiply, and attracting new recruits to the nonviolent cause would become much more difficult. The violence in Alabama had forced the movement to face a soul-testing challenge: Did those who professed to believe in nonviolent struggle have the courage and commitment to risk their lives for the cause of simple justice?… the die was cast: The Nashville Movement would do whatever was necessary to sustain the Freedom Ride.