1 - COUNTERMOVEMENTS, THE STATE, AND THE INTENSITY OF RACIAL CONTENTION IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH

Summary

In direct and palpable ways, states shape movements. In the case of the civil rights movement, law enforcement officers harassed, arrested, and assaulted demonstrators. States prosecuted civil rights organizations; state sovereignty commissions and legislative investigative committees organized covert surveillance of activists and orchestrated various legalistic and economic reprisals against the proponents of racial equality. Most of these state activities are clear and directly related to movement behavior. Equally important yet far less studied are the many ways in which state and local authorities indirectly affect movements by modulating counter movement mobilization. During civil rights protests or desegregation events, public officials were obliged to respond to hostile white crowds and to the activities of countermovement organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens' Council. Though relatively ignored in the expansive literature on social movements, I argue that studies of the impact of states on social movements must address the manner in which states respond to countermovement mobilization. Simply put, states shape countermovements and countermovements affect the movement to which they are opposed. By opting to suppress, tolerate, or encourage countermovement mobilization, states can decisively affect the intensity of countermovement activity directed against the initial movement. In the case of the civil rights movement, I assert that a combination of state repression of Klan-type organizations and condemnation of lawlessness substantially reduced the intensity of private anti-rights violence.