David Cunningham Daniel Kryder Brandeis University
SES-1024026 Geoff Ward University of California Irvine
Social scientists have completed research the Civil Rights Movement but few studies have focused on those who organized against it. Consequently, we have only a limited understanding of why clandestine, public and legal enforcement methods were used in some places but not others; whether such enforcement patterns resulted from local economic, cultural, or political factors; or how such enforcement actions altered protest in various places, if at all. How did citizens both inside and outside of government in the American South combine in various ways to try to suppress local civil rights activity through various kinds of enforcement actions? What if any are the long term implications of this anti-civil rights activism?
This project will collect and analyze data to help answer these questions. The project's first research objective is to compile a comparative data base of the actions of civic actors, law enforcement personnel, and legal institutions opposing the Civil Rights Movement. Second, it will develop a general analysis - useful for scholars studying other times and places - that explains local patterns of anti-civil rights activism. The investigators focus on local courts, police agencies, and civic associations (including vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan), and how their operations blended together or remained separate in four cities in Mississippi, a cotton state regarded as the most brutally resistant to black freedom activists, and in four cities in North Carolina, thought to be one of the more progressive states in the region. The selected cities represent varying combinations of civil rights activity and enforcement activity in each state. Evidence of enforcement events will be compiled through fieldwork in local archives, including police arrest logs, local newspapers, and court records. Using statistical and narrative approaches, investigators will gauge whether certain town characteristics (e.g., African American employment in agriculture or industry) caused types of enforcement actions, both in terms of the characteristics of those acting in opposition to the civil rights movement (e.g., employers or the police) and the kinds of action taken (e.g., job pressure or arrests).
The project has several broader impacts. The investigators will train and employ a team of four advanced undergraduates drawn from underrepresented groups in Mississippi and North Carolina, along with two graduate students, to assist in this historical research. The investigators will partner with academics at UNC-Chapel Hill and the University of Mississippi to help plan and analyze the research. The investigators will make the event database accessible to teachers, researchers, and the public via dedicated webpages. Resulting scholarship will augment the deep literature on the Civil Rights Movement with closer attention to the role of anti-civil rights enforcement activity in the development of the movement and longer term race relations. Stud results will inform a wide range of scholars and practitioners with interests in social movements, racial equality, and human and civil rights.
This research studies the causes and effects of anti-civil rights actions in the American South, 1955-1975. The work is advancing knowledge in our intellectual communities, especially Sociology and Political Science, and promises to benefit science, technology, and society more broadly. Our work has several societal impacts. We have engaged diverse students as research assistants and participants in research activity, including students from underrepresented groups in our two study states, Mississippi and North Carolina, as well as diverse undergraduate and graduate students in our home institutions. This has involved training in research methods, such as how to scan historic newspapers for articles relevant for such a focused study, how to locate and transcribe municipal and county archives such as arrest records, or definitional and data collection issues related to anti-civil rights actions. We have developed fruitful collaborations with scholars in NC, MS, and elsewhere working on related topics and have learned a great deal from them about this history, its politics and lasting cultural and institutional significance. We are making our datasets – in particular, the Racial Violence Archive (RVA), the first comprehensive accounting of anti-civil rights actions in the mid twentieth century – readily available to teachers, researchers, and the general public, via a project website that will include interactive features allowing for the crowd sourcing of data related to anti-rights actions. Each of the investigators has developed new methods of teaching this vitally important historical material. Finally, we hope to disseminate our research to forums that will contribute to scholarship, public education, and current community organizing efforts related to civil rights-era racial conflict and remedial efforts. We have two main scholarly goals. First, we are assembling databases of anti-rights enforcement actions, as well as other data related to both local protest activity and repressive acts of violence, intimidation, and reprisal. Second, we are studying the socio-historical logic or organization of this historical violence, and issues of legacy and remedy today. The online RVA, hosted at UC-Irvine, documents patterns of racial terror that targeted black Americans before 1980. This data collection initially centered on events in the project states, documenting nearly 2,000 incidents of racial terror – murders, assaults, bombings, cross-burnings, etc. - in North Carolina and Mississippi between 1955-1975. Several studies are underway with these data. Meanwhile, the archive is expanding to include other southern states and earlier 20th century events, and will include records from other public databases (especially lynchings) to yield a total of over 4,000 incidents. Each record contains information about victims, the nature of their victimization, date and location, perpetrators, and resulting sanctions, if any, drawn from newspapers, academic works, organizational records, and official documents. In most cases these records are limited to date, location, and type of victimization, and while missing data will continue to exist, so will our data collection potential. The RVA is intended to support social science research and teaching as well as engage students, researchers, and policy advocates in constructive reflection on this violence and its social relevance today. Thus the RVA incorporates interactive components enabling users to both view and contribute event information, or add information to existing records, such as photographs, documents, or details. Currently in beta form, we anticipate that the RVA website will go live in 2015. In addition, we compiled a substantial amount of archival data to analyze anti-civil rights activism, including newspaper articles, city council minutes, school board minutes, and policing and court data from sample counties. This research suggests original ways of thinking about such actions. Several theoretical, methodological, and empirical insights are emerging, each addressing gaps or contributing new insight in various areas of scholarship. These include literatures on civil rights and other movements, historical violence and transitional justice, and the issue of contemporary homicide. Sociologists Political Scientists, and Criminologists have collaborated very little thus far to understand how anti-rights action, including racial violence, and how to address its social harms. In our experience, adding Informatics to this disciplinary mix has uniquely expanded research, education, and outreach dimensions of this sociological research. By building the collective knowledge base around the anti-rights action, its eruptions across time and space, sources of variation, types of harm, and so on - we hope this will serve students, scholars and the broader public at this time of renewed attention to problems of racial violence, historical and today, and ongoing pursuit for transitional justice.
