The Emergence of the Integrationist Ideology in the Civil Rights Movement

Abstract

In an attempt to integrate the importance of culture into the resource mobilization perspective, sociologists have introduced the notion of frames as a way to understand how movement leaders and movement participants identify grievances, devise strategies, and enumerate demands. In the civil rights movement, for example, sociologists have argued that the “rights” frame emerged because it resonated with some dominant values of our political culture. This analysis couples the rights frame with the more movement-specific ideology of integration and explains the origins of the integrationist ideology using a materialist and a political perspective. I argue that the emergence of integration was not primarily the result of a battle about which ideas were culturally more appealing but about: who controlled important sources of financing; which organization was able to court favor with political elites; and which organizations were actively repressed by those political elites. These conclusions challenge resource mobilization theorists to bring ideology into their analyses, not simply in terms of why people participate but more fundamentally in terms of how social movement organizations carve out their niches within a social movement industry.