Preparation Pathways and Movement Participation: Insurgent Schooling and Nonviolent Direct Action in the Nashville Civil Rights Movement*

Abstract

Employing a unique sample of participants in the early Nashville civil rights movement, we extend the micromobilization literature by conceptualizing “preparation pathways” (or schooling channels) through which activists acquire insurgent consciousness and capital so crucial for committed, effective, high-risk activism. We identify two key pathways in which activists were “schooled” in nonviolent praxis—experience in nonviolent direct action prior to the Nashville movement and training through intensive, highly organized, and disciplined workshops on nonviolence praxis. Evidence suggests that both pathways prove especially efficacious in accounting for intensity and persistence of movement direct-action participation. The implications of our findings extend to high-risk movement activism more generally and also illuminate an important chapter in the southern civil rights movement. Activists are not a homogeneous lot. Instead they move through multiple paths accumulating diverse cultural and relational endowments that they bring into movements. Once there, these endowments can shape the intensity and persistence of participation in struggle.

The Making of a Movement: An Intergenerational Mobilization Model of the Nonviolent Nashville Civil Rights Movement

“…It was, however, more than an exemplary citywide movement that achieved local results. By design, the Nashville movement was the chief vehicle for developing, diffusing, and training activists (e.g., Freedom Riders) in the nonviolence praxis adopted in 1957 by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) for deployment in the Southwide movement (Cornfield et al 2019;Halberstam 1998;Isaac 2019;Isaac et al 2012Isaac et al , 2016Isaac et al , 2020.…”

“…As a model of movement diffusion, a dialogical diffusion process treats the diffusion of a movement praxis as contested, problematic, and nonlinear, and not as a foregone conclusion (Chabot 2012;Isaac et al 2016Isaac et al , 2020. Indeed, during the civil rights movement of the 1958-62 era, nonviolence praxis faced two major challenges.…”

“…Du Bois in 1909, had championed civil rights and desegregation through litigation in the courts and was unsupportive of the SCLC's new tactical turn to a community-based praxis of nonviolent direct action following the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56, although some local NAACP chapters did engage in nonviolent direct action (Chabot 2012). Second, many Black young adults were skeptical of the requisite, tremendous self-restraint required for engaging in nonviolent direct action in the face of the profound indignities and violence hurled by hostile Whites at the nonviolent protesters (Cornfield et al 2019;Halberstam 1998;Isaac et al 2012Isaac et al , 2016Isaac et al , 2020.…”

“…Accounting for the challenges of intergenerational mobilization, and thus accounting for the involvement of students in a movement planned by more senior adults, is an important task because the students were the youngest generation of Nashville-based activists who went on to diffuse nonviolence praxis throughout the South. Students emerging out of the Nashville civil rights movement were among the founders and early leaders of SNCC in 1960; were responsible for continuing a Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)-launched Freedom Ride that had been halted in Alabama in 1961; and played a part in the Albany campaign of 1961-62, the Birmingham campaign of 1963, the March on Washington in 1963, the Freedom Summer campaign of 1964, the Selma campaign of 1965, the Chicago campaign in 1966, and the Memphis sanitation workers' strike of 1968 (Cornfield et al 2019;Finley et al 2016;Isaac 2019;Isaac et al 2012Isaac et al , 2016Isaac et al , 2020. Martin Luther King Jr. said the Nashville movement represented "the best organized and the most disciplined in the Southland" (qtd.…”

“…Our analysis draws on rich qualitative data on 63 members of the Nashville civil rights movement, including oral history interviews conducted by the senior co-authors with 36 members of the Nashville civil rights movement, oral history interviews held by the Nashville Public Library with 15 additional members of the Nashville civil rights movement, and historical data on 12 other participants culled from secondary sources (see Isaac et al 2016 and 2020 for full details on the oral history methodology). Later in the article, we describe the details of a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) strategy for analyzing our interviews with a subset of student participants.…”