Criteria and Contingencies of Success in a Radical Political Movement1

Abstract

Using data collected in 1965 on white student civil rights workers in the South affiliated with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, this paper seeks to probe the factors that underlie the subjective sense of success and failure in an episode of political activism. Focusing on some fifty local projects scattered from Virginia to Alabama, we find that success was only partially a function of gains in voter registration, the summer's principal objective. It was related as well to the degree to which projects had been able to penetrate barriers into the black community to build black organizations, the degree of project cohesiveness, and the extent of personal fulfillment of the volunteers as individuals. One last correlate involved the amount of time spent protesting, and the paper explores this in particular detail, focusing on the sense in which the summer might be described as a romantic venture. Finally, the paper offers a comparison between the white student New Left and some of its older predecessors, stressing a distinction between “sympathetic” and “self‐interested” activism.