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 is benefiting society more broadly in several ways. Our work has several societal impacts. We have engaged a score of diverse students as research assistants, including students from underrepresented groups in our two study states, Mississippi and North Carolina, as well as graduate students in our home institutions. This has involved intensive training in research methods, such as how to scan historic newspapers for articles relevant for such a focused study, or how to locate and transcribe municipal and county archives such as arrest records. We have developed fruitful collaborations with scholars in NC and MS working on related topics and have learned a great deal from them about how to best understand local history, politics and culture. 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 actions and violence, as well as other statistics related to both local protest movement activity and local police organizations. And second, we are creating a general theory of why anti-civil rights actions took various forms in various places in North Carolina and Mississippi, and what those patterns tell us about resistance to rights movements worldwide. The online RVA, hosted by co-PI Geoff Ward at UC-Irvine, documents patterns of racial terror against black Americans. The RVA’s centerpiece is its historical database. Data collection initially centered on events addressed by this grant project, documenting nearly 2,000 incidents of racial terror – murders, assaults, bombings, cross-burnings, etc. - in North Carolina and Mississippi, 1955-1975. This archive now includes other southern states and earlier 20th century events, and other databases have been integrated (especially lynching records) to yield over 4,000 incidents. Each record contains information about victims, the nature of their victimization, date and location, perpetrators, and 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. 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 insights are emerging, and each addresses gaps in the scholarship on civil rights and other movements. For example, movement organizations and counter-movement organizations are hierarchical; a focus on local communities like towns and counties must also consider the state, regional and federal levels of protest and police organizations. Second, anti-rights groups can be rooted in formal police agencies (the sheriff or town police department) as well as in informal social organizations such as the KKK. This means that the people and offices trying to coordinate the actions of such differing groups are important. Third, there are several distinct aspects to the process of protesting and policing: the nature of the threat posed by challengers; the way police and others perceive these threats; the institutional power of enforcement groups (personnel, budgets and materiel); the way these groups coordinate their plans to oppose rights groups; the actual anti-rights actions; and the patterns of subsequent protest. Finally, the ways that Americans enforce racial inequality should be compared with examples from other countries at other times in history. Sociologists Political Scientists, and Criminologists have collaborated very little thus far to understand how enforcement affects protest. Knowing how enforcement networks vary, what causes this variation, and how variation in enforcement affects the pursuit of social and political justice - we hope this will serve scholars and the general public at this time of renewed attention in the way police work.
