4 - Local Struggles

Summary

While certain whites fiercely opposed civil rights gains, others demonstrated a cautious willingness to support concessions. Thus, as suggested in the previous chapter, an explanation of local movement outcomes must necessarily consider the interaction among these competing elements and movement targets. In this chapter, the disparate pieces, examined separately up to this point, are assembled in a series of case studies of local movement struggles to elucidate how targets tabulate their disruption and concession costs based on their own specific exposure to movement tactics and demands as well as the anticipated action (or inaction) of third parties. Case studies are used here because they can be sufficiently fine-grained to capture these interactions and trace out the imputed causal processes.

In order to tease out these causal mechanisms and explore their robustness, three principal considerations guided case selection. First, the cases depict targets and third parties exposed to disruption and concession costs of differing magnitudes. As such, it is possible to document if targets and others are responding to movement agitation based on their cost perceptions as predicted. Next, the cases incorporate a wide range of actors responding to civil rights contention. This diversity allows for the further exploration of the merits of the sectoral analysis presented in the last chapter. And although my emphasis thus far has been upon the reactions of economic actors to movement disruption costs, the analysis purports to explain the behavior of political actors as well.