Every social movement can be thought of as either a reflection of or an intervention into a set of changing social circumstances. The Civil Rights Movement reflected the fact that the South was industrializing after World War II and so the South had to make room for a free labor market. The Civil Rights Movement also intervened to change the hearts and minds of whites in the South so that formal social segregation might be abolished. This question of whether a social movement is a reflection or an intervention is not simply the empirical one of deciding whether the movement or changed circumstances came first. Attitudes might start to change before the Civil Rights Movement made a change in attitude into a goal, and changes in legislation may indeed have been crucial in structuring a labor market already undergoing alteration. The question is a theoretical one in that it requires a re-conceptualization of the forces that might serve as either causes or effects. The idea of intervention has to be expanded to include the dynamics by which a movement defines its own purposes.
The history of the study of social movements has been to give social movements ever more agency. Movements become self-reflective rather than just reflections of their circumstances. Early Marxism had viewed social movements as, at best, easing the birth pangs of new social arrangements that were going to come about sooner or later. The social movement reflected the forces that were churning below. The working class would take power when the bourgeois could no longer sustain their ideology and their economy. But even within Marxism, those with a more fully developed imagination of the idea of revolution allow a degree of agency for those who make the revolution. Trotsky portrays the revolutionary moment as the time when the peasant looks into the eye of the Cossack and realizes that he will be allowed to pass. A great deal of suffering and history had gone on to make that moment possible, but the revolution was made at that moment by those who, in an instant, came to that realization.
Functionalist sociologists such as Neil Smelser go a step toward providing movements with agency. Smelser saw social movements taking on their characteristic dynamics as a result of the sets of circumstances they select as those they would alter. So a demand for bread expresses itself as a riot and a demand for a new social order expresses itself as a revolution. It is the movement rather than history that chooses its goals. That means that a movement has its own dynamics even if the parameters of those dynamics are set by the goals. Choose different goals and the dynamics will be different. But there is still no evading the external question of what aspect of the social structure is implicated once goals are chosen. That the Civil Rights Movement chose to engage in nonviolent demonstrations rather than guerilla warfare shows how its goals were implicit in its means.
Theda Skocpol elaborated the functionalist model. She saw a social movement as generated by the ideological elaboration of a previous role, whether that is the role of the revolutionary or the role of the pension recipient. Old roles are extended or applied to new circumstances. Ideology remains at the service of the ever altering circumstances, but the ideas change in the ways in which ideas change: through contraction and expansion and other intellectual processes.
The present article takes an additional step towards giving agency to social movements. The ideas of a movement are self-generating in that the ideas that are characteristic of social movements have a particular internal dynamic. Every social movement has at its core a paradox. The life course of a movement is an attempt to resolve that paradox. When that task is accomplished, the movement comes to an end, whether or not it has accomplished its other, perhaps more practical task, which is to alter the set of circumstances in which it arose. That is because the movement no longer challenges a population's sense of the order of things, no longer has an informing insight whose complexities seem to give validity to that insight.
Martin Luther King, Jr., who became the personification of the Civil Rights Movement, even if that stature was resented by some other civil rights advocates, presented a paradox whose resolution, once accomplished, meant that the Civil Rights Movement had served its purpose. King based his appeal to the nation as a whole on the idea that Black people were worthy of respect and therefore entitled to the same citizenship rights as white people. That was to go against the grain of a caste system which had seen Blacks as systematically inferior. They were lascivious, dirty, lazy, and immoral. Everyone could see that to be a fact since, for the most part, Blacks were uneducated sharecroppers or had only recently removed themselves from that condition.
King turned the tables by showing that his followers were the ones who were neat and orderly and took the high road in political and moral argument. They also relied on such respectable means of presenting their grievences as voter registration, peaceful demonstrations, and a philosophy of nonviolent civil disobedience, while their opponents relied on terrorism and cattle prods. King was able to contrast respectable Black teenagers with the likes of Bull Conner, the police chief in Birmingham, Alabama, and so the American population was awakened to the falseness of caste attributions. King's followers were the betters of their oppressors. That created the moral climate for the Voting Rights and Equal Accommodations Acts of the Sixties.
That reversal of imagery, the paradox that those who are lower are in fact morally better, did not address the economic problems of those Blacks who were of the poverty class. But it did allow middle class Blacks to become integrated into public and political matters and, gradually, into previously all-white institutions. The paradox loses its force over the course of the Seventies and the Eighties precisely because there was the lessening of a sense of disjuncture in seeing a Black man in a three piece suit going to a law office. That means the claim of affirmative action on the conscience of white people had ever less resonance, since the Black man is not out of place being in a white person's spot, and so no special notice or action need be taken to put him there or respect him for being there. Rather, he is just another of those people in suits who have an advantage over the rest of the population. To the extent that the goal of the Civil Rights Movement was to put the Black man in the three piece suit, it had succeeded. The paradox resolved, there is no further force behind the movement, and that was already becoming apparent at the time of King’s death, which happened when he was leading a strike of sanitation men in Memphis, and so was shifting his attention from the middle class Black to the working class Black. That does not mean that King might not have pulled off that transition from one movement to the next if he had lived, or that there was no need then or no need now for a movement to aid the poor. It only means that the paradox which had given life to one movement did not carry over to all of the issues that were of concern to that movement.
Every social movement carries with it not only a paradox, but three basic ways of resolving-- or simplifying-- that paradox. These strands lead to the disintegration of the movement because the movement follows these three different paths simultaneously and also because the three strands fragment the paradox and so rob the movement of its key idea. In other words, a social movement which gets rationalized dies. Its strands of thought are unraveled from one another and so there is no basic mystery left to unravel, the movement having spun off a set of ideologies that people may or may not come to believe.
These three strands are generated by an organizational problem: the role in the social movement of its elite. What can the leadership of the movement do to bring its followers into engagement with the world outside the movement? There are three possibilities. The leadership will be able to bridge the gap and assimilate its followers and their opponents. Or else, the leadership will not be able to do so and so simply remain a leadership that can point out the contours of a better or truer world to its followers or counsel them to accept and applaud their separation from that other world. Or else, the leadership will succeed to the extent that they are able to achieve success for some of their followers.
That certainly happened in the Civil Rights Movement. King always maintained his allegiance to the idea of non-violence because that was part and parcel of the paradox of the moral superiority of blacks over segregationists. His aim was integrationist, an idea he shared with W. E. De Bois, who had argued it some fifty years before. Other leaders looked for a more rational analysis—which is to say, where the ends of a movement seem more likely to be fulfilled, at least in their eyes. Black separatists thought there was no hope of assimilation, and so the need was to find a way to develop the Black community. That might not mean a land of their own, but it would mean congressional districts Black citizens could dominate and Black centers of commerce dominated by Black businesses. The goal was the equality of ethnic communities rather than assimilation into an overall integrated community. Political power and the use of the threat of violence to back that up were as American as apple pie. The trouble with that view, as enunciated by Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X, is that what they wanted was more difficult to accomplish than what King set out to accomplish. As Reverend Abernathy, the close associate of King put it, what had Malcolm X ever accomplished? King had changed the nation.
Other Black leaders at the time of the Civil Rights Movement, such as Whitney Young and the NAACP, took the third course. They championed the idea of using the white man's tools to find a way into the white man's house. The way to equality was through the boardroom and the law court. Success starts at the top and trickles down to those with the fewest resources. The worlds of white and black are not that different, and leadership eases the transition from a caste society to a casteless society by operating within the values shared by the two communities. A thousand leaders will bloom, some in politics, some in business, and some in the ministry, each of whom, in his or her way, will serve the needs of the black population as a whole or some segment of that population.
All three of these avenues have been traveled since the Civil Rights Movement sputtered to a close after the death of King. King’s route inspired generations of political rhetoric, even that of Barack Obama when he got on a roll. The separatism route still remains a rhetorical banner for hip hopers and others who say nothing will ever change even if it has. The legal route resulted in the Supreme Court upholding Affirmative Action in 2003. The key question, however, is not whether the civil rights movement had or had not been successful in reaching one or another of its goals along one or another of these routes, or whether the movement only frames changes that would be taking place anyway, but whether the central paradox of the movement, which makes the movement into an autonomous actor, has been resolved into separate and contradictory ideologies.