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

Abstract

The 1960s-era, Nashville nonviolent civil rights movement—with its iconic lunch counter sit-ins—was not only an exemplary local movement that dismantled Jim Crow in downtown public accommodations. It was by design the chief vehicle for the intergenerational mentoring and training of activists that led to a dialogical diffusion of nonviolence praxis throughout the Southern civil rights movement of this period. In this article, we empirically derive from oral-history interviews with activists and archival sources a new “intergenerational model of movement mobilization” and assess its contextual and bridge-leading sustaining factors. After reviewing the literatures on dialogical diffusion and bridge building in social movements, we describe the model and its sustaining conditions—historical, demographic, and spatial conditions—and conclude by presenting a research agenda on the sustainability and generalizability of the Nashville model.

The New Labor Activism, a New Labor Sociology

“…The low immigration rates through the 1950s followed several decades of low rates of immigration to the U.S. Immigration rates would begin to rise during the 1990s. The nonviolent civil rights movement to dismantle Jim Crow in the South would mobilize toward the end of the 1950s after the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56 (Cornfield, 2006;Cornfield et al, 2021;Isaac & Christiansen, 2002); and the women's movement as a human rights movement for advancing women's full participation in society would mobilize during the 1960s, as signaled by the founding of the National Organization for Women in 1966 (Rupp & Taylor, 1987).…”

“…Inter-generational competition and collaboration occur during tactical turning points and “ruptures” in the course of social movements, including the U.S. labor movement (Cornfield, 2006, 2015, pp. 121–149; Cornfield et al, 2021). Milkman (2017) maintains that Millennials are indeed a new Mannheimian political generation distinct from earlier generations.…”

Mobilizing Resources in a Community of Practice: How Academic Change Agents Work Toward Equity in their Change Projects

“…Calling attention to educational practices within movement building, an emergent line of research has turned to social movement schools (SMSs): organizational sites designed to bring together, educate, train and mentor individuals to be effective and committed movement actors [6]. These intentional spaces empower their participants to enact change [4], impact participants' subsequent careers [7] and lead to the diffusion of a movement praxis across generations [5]. However, this literature has so far overlooked the resource mobilization processes through which participants build the capacity for change-making.…”

“…Resource mobilization theory proposes resource typologies and lays out the distinct mechanisms through which resources are accessed, produced, and distributed within movements [2]. Studies of social movement pedagogies provide a framework to uncover the role of learning in resource access [3], [4], and to identify the place of community leaders and external patrons in mobilization, visa-vis peer-to-peer learning [5]. Bringing these two social theories into engineering education has the potential to broaden our understanding of CoPs and how they accomplish change.…”

“…Change agents do not always know what resources are necessary to enact change; they acquire the necessary resources and skills over time. While existing research shows that SMSs blend different pedagogical styles to advance movement goals [3], [4], [5], how that complex pedagogical structure informs the participants' capacity for desired changes has been overlooked so far. Bringing together the literature on pedagogies and resource mobilization, we analyze how movement participants learn to mobilize resources to achieve desired changes in a setting dedicated to learning (i.e., in a CoP).…”