Collaborative Research: Civil Rights Mobilization and Enforcement Networks

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

SES-1024396 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.