Anomia and Militancy Among Urban Negroes: A Study of Neighborhood and Individual Effects

Abstract

HISTORIANS AND SOCIAL scientists have usually concurred that one of the results of industrialization and urbanization is an increasing alienation of the individual from the community and society. Within the discipline of sociology a great deal of recent theory and research on alienation may be traced to Merton's meansends paradigm (Merton, 1963:161-194). Merton attributes one form of alienation, anomie, to a .. . breakdown in the cultural brought about by the incapacity of certain groups to reach the culturally prescribed goals by means of the available access routes. Although the Mertonian version of anomie is fundamentally a sociological rather than a psychological concept, suggesting strains within a social system, most researchers have focused upon anomic attitudes of individuals, implying that such attitudes mirror stresses and strains within the total society (Srole, 1956:709-716; Merton, 1964:213-242). Several studies of urban areas confirm that residents of lower-class neighborhoods manifest a high degree of anomia, reflecting in turn the perceived castelike hopelessness of slum life, particularly within lower-class Negro neighborhoods (Bullough, 1967:471-478; Killian and Grigg, 1962:661-665). Recent changes within the social structure, however, have presumably loosened the severity of the social controls which once forced the lower-class Negro to walk a straight and narrow path in areas of life which formerly were open territory only to whites. Within the past twenty years the emergence of these changes has been evident through a wide range of trends: Supreme Court decisions, the growth of civil rights and black power movements, the development of massive programs such as the War on Poverty and Model Cities. Increasingly it might be expected that many Negroes will manifest a more militant stance in seeking the goals which have been legitimated by the movements of the fifties and sixties. Among Negroes not strongly affected by the events of this period, however, the anomic attitudes which have been historically evident may still prevail. But among those who have been at least marginally touched by these trends, a recognition of this new goal-directed orientation toward civil rights should be manifest. A large proportion of the Negro population of the United States resides in poverty-stricken urban areas. If the neighborhood concept is to have utility in sociology, it is essential to gain a better understanding of the function of these local areas in the generation and maintenance of norms and attitudes. When the neighborhood is considered from the classical ecological perspective, its social context is usually viewed as a product of a competition for life-space, an interplay of forces principally within the economic realm. Beyond the recognition that the ecology of the city reflects a social class distribution, it has frequently been noted that inner-city neighborhoods undergo an invasion and succession of vari-