Linking Beliefs to Collective Action: Politicized … Beliefs to Collective Action: Politicized Religious Beliefs and the Civil Rights Movement Author(s): Johnny E. Williams Reviewed

Linking Beliefs to Collective Action: Politicized Religious Beliefs and the Civil RightsMovementAuthor(s): Johnny E. WilliamsReviewed work(s):Source: Sociological Forum, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Jun., 2002), pp. 203-222Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3070324 .Accessed: 08/06/2012 20:09

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Sociological Forum, Vol. 17, No. 2, June 2002 (? 2002)

linking Beliefs to Collective Action: Politicized Religious Beliefs and the Civil Rights Movement1

Johnny E. Williams2

Are religious ideological antecedents factors in the emergence of African American social protest? If so, how do these factors translate African Ameri- can discontent into political action? Rather than proceed from standard rendi- tions of social movement analysis that argue structural opportunities motivate people to act, this paper contends that culture motivates many people to become and remain involved in collective action. The civil rights movement in Arkansas is examined to explain how religious ideas enable movements to emerge and endure in the face of tremendous opposition and uncertain prospects for movement success. Findings suggest that in the context of oppression ideas can help motivate, guide, and give meaning to protest. KEY WORDS: religion; social movements; politics; race; African Americans.

Once you change your philosophy you change your thought pattern, once you change your thought pattern you change your attitude. Once you change your attitude it changes your behavior pattern. Then you go on into some action.

Malcolm X (1964) "Ballot or the Bullet" speech

With these words, Malcolm X captures the complexity of an old contro- versy among scholars regarding the role of ideology and religion in collective action. Some scholars argue for the importance of religion for African American political mobilization (Billings, 1990; Cone, 1986; McAdam, 1982; Morris, 1984) while others insist religion operates as an instrument of political pacification and fatalism (Frazier, 1963; Marx, 1967; Mydral, 1944; Reed,

'An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the Midwest Sociological Society annual meeting, Chicago, April 1996.

2Department of Sociology, Trinity College, 300 Summit Street, Hartford, Connecticut 06106; e-mail: [email protected].

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0884-8971/02/0600-0203/0 ? 2002 Plenum Publishing Corporation

1986). This scholarly debate over the effect of religion on political mobilization overlooks the possibility that religion can simultaneously politicize and depoliticize people for action. That is, religious culture can encourage social movement development by instilling people with the possibility of, or in the case of African Americans, the hope for change and simultaneously constrain movement emergence by affirming the legitimacy of the status quo. Lincoln and Mamiya (1990) maintain that this multivalent character of African American church culture is a product of multiple and conflicting meanings within the church that create a plurality of beliefs that are both liberating and accommodating. In this context of dialectical tensions and interactions, people engage in an active process of social/cultural appropri- ation and interpretation that constructs their actions either to encourage or discourage movement mobilization.

Though sociologists have recently focused on the significance of culture for the emergence of social movements, its importance is still underval- ued (Polletta, 1999). In movement literature, culture is presented mainly as a mediating variable between structural opportunity and collective action (McAdam, 1982). Culture is assumed to have little or no independent influence on people's decisions to participate in social protest. In my analysis culture is defined as both content (shared meanings, beliefs, values, symbols, and norms) and the interpretive process that changes this content to construct various identities, behaviors, and perceptions of the world. Drawing on archival, secondary historical, and personal interview data on the Civil Rights Movement in Arkansas, this study moves beyond previous research on culture's effect on movement mobilization in two important ways. First, while most prior research defines culture in fixed terms (McAdam, 1982; McCarthy, 1973; McCarthy and Zald, 1977; Morris, 1984), my study's con- ception of culture provides a more fluid and complex understanding of how structure (content) and social processes interact to initiate movement mobilization. Second, while most research contends that movement participation is driven by narrow self-interests (Chong, 1991; Frolich et al., 1971; Olson, 1965) and access to resources (Oberschall, 1973; Tilly, 1978), my study examines how deeply felt commitments, aspirations, and hope that culture engenders directly and independently mobilize movement participation.

My analysis is presented in three sections. The first section briefly presents how movement literature discusses the relationship between culture and collective action and reveals a tendency in the literature to assign culture a mediating rather than substantive role in encouraging activism. In the second section I address this deficiency using historical sources and interview data to examine the role of church culture in mobilizing collective action in Arkansas. The final section explores how the church's dialectical cultural environment facilitates social action by making it possible for religious beliefs

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Politicized Religious Beliefs and the Civil Rights Movement

to be interpreted in divergent ways and for people to draw various behav- ioral directives from the same religious message. I also consider how the church's relational networks affect how members interpret religion.

CULTURE AND COLLECTIVE ACTION

Social movement scholars such as Ferree and Miller (1985) and Klan- dermans (1997), among others, have recently evaluated how culture operates as a force in the emergence and development of social movements.3 This literature contends that meaning systems embedded in interpersonal and organizational social networks are pivotal for both the mobilization of resources and the formation of ideational traditions that politicize movement participants. Ferree and Miller (1985), Gamson (1992), and Morris (1992) all argue effectively that social and cultural factors play an important role in the "translation of objective social relationships into subjectively experienced group interests" that are critical in the development of social movements. Specifically, they suggest that since people are embedded within both a cultural context that provides them with belief systems to help guide their actions and infuse them with meaning, and a structural context that shapes and limits their actions, scholars should focus more on the intersec- tion between the two contexts to understand the processes that make it possible for individuals and groups to act collectively (Morris, 1992:351).

Other scholars like Snow etal. (1986), Buechler (1990), McAdam (1994), and Staggenborg (1998) have begun to examine how culture transforms in- dividually held beliefs into collective beliefs. Klandermans (1997), for example, argues that individual beliefs are products of group or organizational socialization where people engage in a shared discourse in which beliefs are contested, refuted, reformulated, and defended. Since no two people experience socialization and discourse in exactly the same way, one can typically find beliefs within the same group/organization that vary from individual to individual (Klandermans, 1997:4). Klandermans contends that

collective beliefs are like the language shared by the members of a language community. Although no individual member of a language speaks exactly the same language, we would certainly be able to recognize single speakers as members of that community. (Klandermans, 1997:4-5)

Given the multiplicity of organizational discourses, individuals draw from a variety of meanings to help them maneuver through their social mi- lieu. However, these meanings are not randomly distributed but can be found

3Other theorists who examine the role of culture in the development of social movements include Rude (1980), Fantasia (1988), Morris and Mueller (1992), Buechler (1993), Johnston etal. (1994), McAdam (1994), Tarrow (1994), Johnston and Klandermans (1995), Gould (1995).

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in systems of collective beliefs such as religions and ideologies that function as "toolkits" (Swidler, 1986) from which individuals "rent" meaning to construct their version of a collective action frame (Klandermans, 1997:63). Once these cultural frames are internalized they can stimulate greater commitment and tenacity among movement participants faced with resistance and campaign reversals, and sustain a membership that derives greater satisfaction from movement participation (Lofland, 1995:215). For example, Pattillo-McCoy's analysis of civic life in an African American community in Chicago revealed that cultural practices within the African American church, such as holding hands during prayer, call-and-response interaction, singing, clapping, and swaying to music, invoke collective orientations (i.e., group identity and consciousness) among African Americans that serve as resources in political organizing and activism (Pattillo-McCoy, 1998). Re- search conducted by Taylor and Whittier (1992) on the feminist movement also found that social organizations or alternative institutions (e.g., book- stores, publishing houses, music festivals, and rape crisis centers) sustained an oppositional culture that comforted and inspired women to work continu- ously to demystify social arrangements and expose structural opportunities for collective action when the social environment was not conducive for protest.

Pattillo-McCoy's, Taylor's and Whittier's findings suggest that a broader formulation of culture as an interpretive resource for movement mobilization may provide a more comprehensive understanding of how civil rights protest was nurtured in oppressive segregated contexts (Pattillo-McCoy, 1998; Taylor and Whittier, 1992). Thus a closer analysis of cultural variables may reveal that churches contributed to the continuity of civil rights protest by supplying social support that raised critical awareness and predisposed people for social action (Nepstad, 1996).

Culture and Resource Mobilization

Recent interest in the relationship between ideas and social movements is part of a larger trend by movement scholars to critically analyze the "structural bias" of resource mobilization theory, a bias that privileges structural explanations over subjectivist and cultural interpretations (Taylor and Whittier, 1995). Theories aligned with the resource mobilization paradigm downplay the significance of culture, arguing instead that the availability of resources (McCarthy, 1973; McCarthy and Zald, 1977) is a more important determinant in the emergence and likely success of collective action (Buechler, 1993:221).

A variant of resource mobilization theory called the political process perspective acknowledges the importance of culture in the facilitation of

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social movements, but maintains culture is not sufficient in itself for initiat- ing collective action. This perspective contends that movements are less the products of culture than the beneficiaries of shifting political conditions that open up political and economic systems for change. Political process theorists argue that structural opportunities do not automatically translate into protest; rather political opportunities and organizations only offer insurgents a certain objective "structural potential" for collective action. Mediating between opportunity and action are the shared meanings people attach to their situation (McAdam, 1982:48).4

Culture's mediating role is evident in Morris's and McAdam's examina- tions of the Civil Rights Movement as they suggest that there was always a potential pool of participants available in the church-people who shared general ideational affinity with the movement but lacked the organizational base for expressing their discontent (McAdams, 1982; Morris, 1984). Morris's study of the Civil Rights Movement identifies the church's ideational repository, or what he terms the "culture content," as an important ingredient in the emergence of the movement, although his work focuses far more on the organizational functions that churches fulfilled during the movement (Morris, 1984). Morris found that preexisting organizations like the church and "movement halfway houses," such as the Highlander School and the Fellowship of Recon- ciliation, operated as free spaces/alternative institutions (Gamson, 1992:62) supplying African American movement participants with extant social relationships, meanings, beliefs, and cultural practices (e.g., language, stories, songs, ceremonies) that served to eradicate their sense of isolation and to define their struggle as just and right (Billings, 1990).5 That is, church culture connected African Americans to one another via cognitive frames, dense interactions, and emotional and affective exchanges that empowered people to resist societal oppression no matter what the personal sacrifice.

Polletta suggests that although scholars like Morris generally recognize that free spaces are not entirely immune from cultural codes that legiti- mate oppression or subordination, they have not gone beyond this acknowl- edgement to show how movements are advanced or impeded by broader meanings and patterned relations (Polletta, 1997:435). Morris, however, does specify that shifting political conditions may influence how "culture content" is interpreted. That is, he maintains that when political opportunities are limited, the church's interpretations of "culture content" serve to channel resistance into otherworldliness or pacifism and, when structural

4Melucci argues resource mobilization concepts such as "discretional resources" and "structure of opportunities" do not refer to "objective" realities but imply the capacity of people to define and construct their environment and themselves (Melucci, 1988:342).

5Gamson (1992) defines "free spaces" as dense communal social support networks where people construct meaning that may initiate and sustain collective action.

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opportunities are abundant, the interpretations help alter people's cultural perceptions and lead them to challenge dominant arrangements. Though Morris recognizes that social conditions influence how people interpret culture content in the church's free space, his reliance on structural conditions to explain interpretive variance leads him to focus far less on how culture independently mobilizes movement participation.6

In a more recent analysis of Chicago's African American politico- religious scene, Harris (1999a,b) broadens the resource mobilization perspective to include culture as resource for political participation. Specifi- cally, Harris maintains that at the fundamental level of organizing, social movements are expressions of cultural symbols and practices that provide meaning for social action. Therefore, he argues that "the religious culture of African Americans not only stimulates mobilization by serving as a guide for interpreting political goals but, just as important, it also provides sacredly or- dained legitimacy to political action" (Harris, 1999b:135). Moreover, Harris contends that church involvement cultivates organizational skills that engender political efficacy. This finding indirectly suggests, as I assert in this study, that relational networks within the church house cultural resources that are central in generating and sustaining African American movement mobilization.

In this analysis I argue that insurgent ideational strands are an enduring aspect of church culture that consistently inspire social action independent of structural conditions. Consider the example of the local and national women's club movement, which emerged from small auxiliary church so- cieties. Women activists in this movement did not allow the structurally constraining environment of late nineteenth and early twentieth century to impede their efforts to secure African American political and economic equality. Rather, in their church and club organizations women bonded in relationships that fostered the creation of strong social support and self- understandings that sustained their movement commitment in the face of tremendous opposition. Likewise, Payne (1995) suggests in his research on African American women's involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, that institutions like the church provided women with cultural assets (e.g., religiosity and social ties) that were crucial in mobilizing their protest.

This suggests that the literature has not given adequate attention to explaining how culture can independently mobilize and sustain movement participation. My research highlights the importance of churches as cultural places where meaning encourages movement mobilization.

6As Gamson and Modigliani (1989) and Lincoln and Mamiya (1990) argue beliefs are always found in a "dynamic tension" that is characterized by multiple conversations contesting, re- formulating, defending, and refuting beliefs within as well as between groups. Every argument has a counterargument and can thus create multiple ideational strands.

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METHOD

This paper examines the significance of church culture in the mobilization of civil rights protest in Arkansas from 1954-64. This state and period were chosen for study because (1) though much is known about the Little Rock Central High School integration action, considerably less is known about the overall development and maintenance of civil rights struggles in Arkansas; and (2) the 1954-64 decade in Arkansas, like elsewhere in the South, marked intensive civil rights struggles. Data for this study draw on analysis of secondary and historical accounts of the Civil Rights Movement, archival material, especially church and civil rights documents stored at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and the Arkansas History Commis- sion in Little Rock, and published works on the Civil Rights Movement and newspapers (e.g., Arkansas Democrat).

In addition, data are drawn from personal interviews I conducted with individuals who were involved as participants, supporters, leaders, organiz- ers, and fundraisers in Arkansas's Civil Rights Movement during the 1950s and 1960s. Through my archival analysis and with the help of clergy and scholars in Arkansas I compiled a list of activists to interview. I also used a modified snowball sampling technique to gather more potential respondents, particularly less well-known activists. Sixteen semistructured in-depth interviews were conducted in the summer of 1991. The average interview lasted 1 h while some lasted as long as 2.5 h. Since most African Amer- icans in Arkansas before and during the civil rights era were members of churches, virtually all the individuals who participated in the movement were religiously affiliated. Eleven were Baptist, two African Methodist Episco- pal, two Christian Methodist Episcopal, and one United Methodist; 10 were men, 6 were women. The socioeconomic backgrounds of respondents ranged from working to middle class; respondents' ages ranged from about 45 to 85 years old. Interviews were conducted in homes, churches, medical offices, and other workplaces.

The interview questions focused on understanding the motivation of these individuals to become and remain involved in the Civil Rights Move- ment. To uncover their motivation I asked a series of questions to help determine respondents' degree of activism prior to the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement such as their involvement in political activities before the Civil Rights Movement and their membership in any organizations that actively sought to change African American social conditions prior to the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement. I also asked a series of questions that tried to determine how respondents became involved in the Civil Rights Movement and their level of religiosity and embeddedness in the church before and during the civil rights era that included why they got

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involved in the civil rights movement; if they were a member of any movement organizations during the civil rights era, and if so, which ones; their role in the movement; church affiliation, their involvement in church activities; and how their religious faith inhibited or inspired their involvement in the Civil Rights Movement.

Open-ended questions gave respondents sufficient latitude to explain their activism. I tried to reduce error in memory of events that took place three or more decades ago using landmark events as memory anchors; rein- stating the context of the event or attribute being recalled; "bounding" the recall period by making explicit reference to periods and information provided in previous interviews; and asking respondents to date events after pro- viding them with contextualized information to assist their recall (Pearson et al., 1992:88). (Later, I systematically analyzed previously published works and archival data to verify the accuracy of respondents' memories about movement events and developments.) Using these techniques I was able to assist respondents in recalling their experiences and beliefs during the civil rights era.

OVERVIEW OF THE ARKANSAS MOVEMENT

Because my analysis does not proceed chronologically, a brief summary of major events in Arkansas prior to and during the decade I examined is in order. An important part of the desegregation movement Arkansas began in 1942 when the Arkansas Teachers Association (ATA)7 filed a suit against the Little Rock School District seeking the equalization of African Amer- ican and European American teachers' salaries. ATA member Sue Cowan Williams represented the ATA in the lawsuit in which the U.S. District Court ruled in favor of the school district, declaring that it had not discriminated against African American teachers in fixing salaries (Patterson, 1981:90). In the fall of 1943 the U.S. District Court's decision was appealed to the U.S. Eighth District Court of Appeals that reversed the lower courts ruling in 1945 and ordered equal pay scales for Little Rock school teachers.8 This ruling was significant because it provided African Americans with the foundation to go beyond teacher salary equalization to demand equal educational facilities and subsequently full integration.

7African American teachers formed the ATA in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, in 1898. It played a pivotal role preceding the civil rights movement in Arkansas in the struggle over teacher salary equalization in the 1940s and early 1950s.

8Despite the court's order to equalize teacher salaries and a directive by the Arkansas Legis- lature ordering local school districts to comply with the law, districts throughout the state did not deem it feasible to do so. They either could not or refused to raise the funds necessary to equalize teacher salaries. This situation led the ATA to file another suit in 1952 with James Wise as plaintiff for the case. There was no conclusive ruling in the James L. Wise v. The Gould Special District, No. 40 case.

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In 1948 the state's National Association for the Advancement of Col- ored People (NAACP) president and legal council, Harold Flowers of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, filed a federal court lawsuit on behalf of African American patrons, charging that the quality of DeWitt, Arkansas's African American high school facility, was far below that of the European American school and thus in violation of the "separate but equal" law. During this litigation the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville began integrating its graduate schools, state officials having concluded that their failure to ensure and maintain equal graduate facilities for African American students was in violation of the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson "separate but equal" law.

Meanwhile in Little Rock the struggle against segregation gathered more momentum in 1952 after an interracial school study found that though African American and European American Arkansans started school with the same abilities, the low quality of education at African American schools led to disparities within a few years (Arkansas Democrat, Feb. 3, 1952). This finding gave African Americans more urgency and determination in their quest to secure full integration. Moreover, when the U.S. Supreme Court declared "separate but equal" unconstitutional in its 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, ruling, it gave the NAACP and other African American Arkansans the political and legal legitimacy they needed to call for immediate and full integration. However, their calls for immediate integration were met by a host of gradual integration approaches such as token integration and pupil placement or school choice plans that continued to perpetuate school segregation by allowing parents to choose which school their child attended.

Though gradualism did not end African Americans' calls for full and immediate integration, NAACP state president Daisy Bates and local community leaders decided to move forward in 1957 with the Little Rock School District's effort to integrate Central High School with only nine African American students. This token attempt at integration marked the begin- ning of European American large-scale resistance and the mobilization of a sustained and organized statewide effort by African Americans in Arkansas to make integration a reality. After this event, state chapters of the NAACP, Urban League, and National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), in coordination with their national offices, became even more involved in the movement, an increased involvement that was countered by state laws9 in 1958 designed to deprive them of their right to represent and

9The 1958 Bennett law tried to outlaw the NAACP and other so called "subversive organizations" by (1) empowering the state attorney general to examine an organization's records and finance if she/he had reason to believe the organization was trying to evade state taxes; (2) defining barratry and making it unlawful to instigate lawsuits over school desegregation; and (3) making it unlawful to solicit or donate money to assist persons to start or maintain court actions over school desegregation.

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help African Americans seeking equal rights. To get around state efforts to outlaw national movement centers like the NAACP, local movement centers like the ATA, the Arkansas Christian Movement (ACM), the Little Rock Eastend Civic League, and a host of other state and local organizations took over many of their functions. These movement centers frequently used churches as meeting places to rejuvenate their struggle, plan actions, fundraise, and recruit participants. They functioned in this manner well into the 1960s and recruited participants from other existing community organizations like colleges and high schools to work for integration in every aspect of life.

CULTURE CONTENT AS FACILITATOR OF ACTION

The historical record suggests that church culture was an important mobilizing resource for the streetcar boycotts during the 1890s in Arkansas and elsewhere in the South. In their research of Georgia streetcar boycotts Meier and Rudwick (1976) found a Savannah Morning News report on an African American maid who refused to ride the streetcar to deliver two

heavy suitcases to the mayor's secretary in City Hall. When the maid ar- rived late soaked with perspiration, it was discovered that she had walked to town because her minister had admonished everyone to keep off the trol-

ley cars (Meier and Rudwick, 1976:272). Such ministerial exhortations also worked very effectively in Little Rock with "less than 5 percent of the usual 60 percent" of African American riders using the lines (Meier and Rudwick, 1976:272).

While participation in the streetcar boycotts was simply conformity to church norms for many African Americans (Chong, 1991), social acceptance alone is not a sufficient explanation for the participation of other boycotters. For these individuals, involvement may best be viewed as a product of insur-

gent church culture content that encouraged the social application of biblical

passages and church teaching. A part of this church culture content was a culture of hope that provided boycotters with a range of meanings which sustained their will to struggle in constraining environments and find solace and

empowerment in giving hope to succeeding generations that it was possible to abolish oppression. One respondent as well as many others I interviewed

explained that during the Civil Rights Movement this inherited culture of

hope predisposed him to believe

... that God has always been with people who are oppressed in ways in which they could not see or did not necessarily see during that time. But if the faith piece was there and you kept persevering then something good would come out of it in the end. Not that if you just lay back just leave it along. But you have to keep nibbling at the

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rock in order for that whole piece to come down. That's where I stand... I don't give up. I think that sometimes we [are] go[ing] to get shot down. But in fact you have to continue to put somebody out there to be the target in order to draw the enemy for you to get a good shot at him.

Though the odds for movement success were small, the shared spiritual and psychological satisfaction (i.e., feelings of efficacy, empowerment, and righteousness) gained from contributing to the long and continuous struggle for African American communal uplift sustained a "collective memory" (Polletta, 1999) of protest among respondents that often strengthened their resolve and encouraged future activism.

Several respondents like this one maintained that the church's "collective memory" or tradition of protest derived from

the Gospel of Luke, where Jesus c[a]me to his hometown and went to the synagogue on Sabbath day. He was given the book from Jeremiah and Isaiah to read. Jesus stood and read 'the spirit of the Lord is upon me, he has anointed me to preach the Gospel to the poor. He has sent me to heal the broken hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives and to recover the sight of the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised and to preach the word of the Lord'.... That diminution of Jesus that God is on the side of the oppressed.

In the Book of Exodus God told Moses, 'I hear the cries of my people by reason of their affliction, the cast down, and I come down to deliver.' Wherever God is revealed in the Bible, he is revealed as being on the side of the oppressed, the poor, the downtrodden, the outcast. 'I come to preach, to liberate them'...

Given this message another respondent explained that since

Christ himself fought for social issues.... [As indicated] throughout the Bible. He broke... social customs and did that which was right.... Rather than the church lay[ing] back and tak[ing] its hands off-... it is the one institution that is supposed to represent what is right.

In this way respondents in my study interpreted Gospel precepts as obligat- ing them to seek change and liberate the world.

Moreover, many respondents insisted that the courage of other activists, especially those in church-affiliated club movement chapters, and the tradition of struggle influenced their decision to participate in Arkansas's Civil Rights Movement. One respondent in particular credited his mother's activism in the NCNW and the church with helping him to construct and accept meanings and identities that encouraged him to become a civil rights activist during the early 1950s. He explained

I grew up resenting everything that was done illegally toward us as black folks and she (mother) never let me forget it. She didn't forget, she was one of Mary McLeod Bethune's vice-presidents [and] she was president of the state [chapter of the NCNW].... In fact she's responsible for me doing everything I did.... [S]he saw

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to it that I got the right training [to be an effective activist].... Momma went to all the Methodist Black women meetings and so did Miss Bethune.10

This respondent's insurgent identity was so strong that when some members of his church expressed their fears that his civil rights activities "were going too far... and putting them in bad with white folks, [he] told them [he] didn't give a damn."

Though the fears expressed by these members suggest that some African Americans were less inclined to translate their religious beliefs about injus- tice into political action, a point I will return to later, there was always a nucleus of early activists whose religious interpretations encouraged them to constantly probe the social system for weaknesses, which they exploited to create social change. These probes continued even when social conditions were not ripe for such actions. Tarrow calls these small insurgent groups "early risers" who culturally construct political opportunities that are then exploited by larger movement groups (Tarrow, 1994:189). My research indicates that these small groups come from institutions like churches that are infused with meanings, which lead some people to collective action.

Several years before the period examined in this paper, a cadre of early civil rights activists were encouraged by their interpretations of church culture content to organize local movement centers and political organizations. For example, the founder of the Democratic Voters Association of Arkansas asserted that he organized the Association in the 1940s because he believed that "the Bible is the answer to all human problems," therefore as a

Christian,... [y]our life is life is supposed to be an example to people, and you're sup- pose to be a leader by precept and example. [Hence I] joined the Young Democratic Voters Association and organized the black Democratic voters movement,... to ensure that black people were a part of everything in... government.

Consequently, one respondent, like several others I interviewed, maintained that church culture helped him maneuver through the social environment by linking Gospel passages with worldly action

... it's just thrown throughout the Bible where Christ did-I mean face the kinds of problems we [face] today. Trumped up charges in jail; [ministers] could always find something in the Bible. Civil disobedience, he could find that.... I can't think of specific biblical scriptures right now but there is just a world of material ministers [used] and can talk about to get [people] aroused.

Respondents suggested that their interpretations of church culture content led them to believe that they were obligated to participate in actions

l0Bethune was president of the national NCNW, founder of Bethune/Cookman College in Florida, and served as the highest ranking African American administrator in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration.

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to rid society of division and oppression. Noting the centrality of this perspective in the church's culture content one respondent explained that he had

to look at [him]self and say to [him]self; here I'm a Christian and how can I best serve God? Can I serve God just by going to church everyday or every Sunday or to various other board meetings I'm a part of? Is that it? And the answer came back to me, naw, that's not it. You know, it's like praying and getting up and doing something about the prayer. So you go to church. You got to do something about being a part of the church or carrying out the function or role... So you've got to implement your hopes, your desires, your dreams, your commitment to Jesus Christ.

Since almost everyone in the African American community attended church, the founder of the Democratic Voters Association maintained that he tapped into the community's familiarity with religious language to encourage mobilization. According to the Association founder's sister-in-law, his calls for movement participation often reasoned:

You're [on earth], at least you ought to have an education that leads into another life. [In] school... [you] learn how to read, [you learn a] skill, [you] learn [a] new life, and [learn how] to live with your fellow man and how to make money. You got to have money to live... You need houses-beautiful houses. God did not mean for you to live in no shack.... He put pretty stuff on earth for [us] to have.

My data demonstrate that the church's culture content played a crucial role in transforming individual discontent into collective interests and action. Churches in Arkansas provided African Americans with meanings that helped them to understand on one hand, the instrumentality of standing up and on the other, the moral propriety of doing so (Fireman and Gamson, 1979). Consequently, prevailing movement theory's focus on the church's organizational function during the Civil Rights Movement must be expanded to include an emphasis on not only culture but as my preliminary investigation below suggests, on understanding interpretive processes as well.

MULTIPLE INTERPRETATIONS

Since church culture is multivalent, it is common to find various groups and individuals within the church holding different interpretations about a single religious idea. Church people, for instance, vary greatly in their interpretations of the Gospel's call for the church to transform people's daily lives. The respondent below, like several others within the church, believed that the Gospel mandated that the church be responsible for

Teach[ing] people how to live for God in whatever respect in life that you have to deal with. It's to teach people how to live from day to day and whatever circumstances that come about. I feel that is the role of the church. But it is also the instigator

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of things that are good and things that are right. The things that are motivating for people in general to help prosper man.

Many others, however, maintained that the church had no role to play in temporal affairs. This is evident in an exchange between some church members and this respondent who, while discussing civil rights activities in the church, encountered members who

thought [the church] wasn't the place-they [would] say 'what's your problem? Say- ing all that in here.' We had a minister who used to tell us all the time,... 'Praise his name, tell God about it! AAAAmen! You want that done, you can march all you want to! Unless you tell God...! Amen, Amen'!!

The respondent continued

My interpretation was that God put me here... to help develop this earth. And I have read the Bible some. The Bible tells me 'out of one blood one nation came to dwell on all the face of the earth.' All nations of men are to dwell on the face of the earth. That was in me, I couldn't get it out of me. Sometimes I'll get up-I'll have members of my church-I'll say, 'Brother pastor' somebody would say, 'There he go.' We just kept on at it.

Though the respondent's church encouraged a conservative reading of religious texts he possessed an activist religious orientation. As I mentioned earlier, Harris's organizational involvement thesis suggests that it is possible for people in accommodative churches to develop political efficacious- ness through their participation in church activity (Harris, 1999b). While engaged in church activities, the previous respondent, like several others I interviewed, maintained he acquired a political consciousness that gave him the confidence to establish a secular movement organization to fight for civil rights.

[I got involved because of] the Christian religion. I maybe false on it, but that involved me.... You see I couldn't join church like they do now. I had to feel what we call the Holy Spirit, then we had to make a confession, and then we had to try to live by it. And in trying to live by it, seeing how certain folks: the privilege was treating the underprivilege.... Finally I decided, let's organize. Back there in 1948 we organized what was known [in Little Rock] as the Eastend Civic League. It's in operation now. [It's] no big thing but a lot of little things we tried to do to help out... several of us together. However, there might have been a few things I kind of took on myself. We have been involved in these things a long time. Organizing on civil rights.

Another respondent asserted that a link between organizational activity and activism existed because

Most of the people who were doing the work were people who were active in their church. That's what brought the politicians and social work into each person's immediate church.... The reason [there was a] close connection [was because the] church was the leading organization [and] because most of the people who were active in church went out and were the ones who... were active in politics and social issues.

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Through participation in church activity respondents suggested that

they were often exposed to ministers or key church members who were involved in activist networks and interpreted culture content in ways that encouraged social activism. For instance, this respondent maintained

... my church had a history of activism. Its activism is related to the composition of its membership.... The pastors were there for over fifty years: Dr. Gaines and the assistant pastor Reverend Crenchaw was the president of the [Little Rock chapter] of the NAACP... So, I don't know anything but a church that has dealt with its responsibilities... And so in regard to the church's history, all of our leadership has been leadership that took an active role.... What I saw was that from a religious standpoint it was strictly God's, as I understand, purpose for religion to prove that God creates everybody equal.

The respondent continued

Another thing is the minister that we had. All of our ministers [came] out of the Atlanta Ecumenical Interdenominational Theology. We had the disciples of Martin Luther King. [For this reason] [t]he Urban League was real strong in my church. The NAACP meeting have always been in church.... But Mt. Pleasant Baptist Church ha[d] members in the NAACP because of Reverend Crenchaw. He was called the father of the NAACP.

These comments suggest that ministers who were involved in secular and clerical networks that promoted activism were instrumental in fostering a movement consciousness and culture among church members.

Respondents consistently identified the politicoreligious urgings of minister Negail Raleigh of Wesley Chapel United Methodist Church of Little Rock and minister J. C. Crenchaw as factors in encouraging movement participation. One respondent explained that when people were exposed to Raleigh they

began to say if things are going to change we're going to have to be God's instrument, and that God has no hands but our hands, and no feet but our feet. We're going to have to do those things ourselves. And that was the kind of theology Negail Raleigh had.

The respondent continued "He was the first person who really challenged our church, in terms of linking its mission [to civil rights issues. In fact] those churches that had strong pastors [with] strong theological beliefs were able to persuade their people" [to get involved in the movement]. Thus churches containing individuals and social groups who were involved in secular movement organizations and interpreted "culture content" as encouraging people to see themselves as God's social activists were more likely to move some to view their role as Christians not as mere carriers of faith but as implementers of it in reality. Though some churchgoers held this disposition, many im- mersed themselves in religious cultural frames that legitimated social inac- tion by contending, "God is going to fix it." This respondent, like several

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others I interviewed, maintained that though many church people interpreted religious messages in pacifying terms, they did not block others from using the church as a movement vehicle

because the officers [in organizations like] the NAACP [were] members of... churches. If I am the president of the NAACP and I wanted to go to Mt. Pleasant. I [am a member] in good standing, I am a paying member, and have some political clout in the community. The pastor nine times out of ten is not going to deny me the right to bring that group into the church.

In my analysis, I also found preliminary evidence indicating that class status can influence whether or not church people are inclined to interpret church culture content as promoting political action. According to one respondent, fear of financial retribution was more effective in shaping the church culture content interpretations of middle-class professionals' spouses than working poor spouses because

When you have nothing you have more to gain. When think you have something you're cautious. The lawyer's wife thinks in terms of pleasing the customer/client. The waiter's wife [is] always thinking in the other way.

This suggests that considering class's effect on religious behavior may prove useful in analyzing how politico-religious meaning is constructed.

The preceding accounts suggest that a key factor in the link between organization and activism is the presence of individuals in the church's social network who are involved in secular movement organizations and interpret church "culture content" to promote mobilization. The presence of these individuals remind church people of religion's moral imperative to uplift the oppressed, and culturally cajole some to participate in and open their churches for civil rights organizing.

CONCLUSION

This analysis of religion's impact on African American political activism has implications for the study of social movement participation, religion, and African American political action. My study presents evidence sup- porting the theory that culture, particularly religious culture, has a direct and independent role in facilitating collective action. The analysis demon- strates that culture's role in movement mobilization is more complex and dynamic than is typically portrayed by resource mobilization theory. Rather than viewing culture as a mere framer of people's perceptions of political opportunity, I present a broader view that defines cultural processes as sources of meanings that people use to encourage social action. Some

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African American church members in Arkansas, for example, actively ap- propriated/interpreted church culture content in activist ways. These church cultural meanings helped African Americans define their social situation as unjust, and persuaded some to act during inhospitable periods. In this analysis I make an advance beyond resource mobilization theory's organizational focus by pointing to the centrality of the church's cultural resources in the emergence and maintenance of the civil rights protest. Specifically, my analysis sees organizations not simply as carriers of material resources but also of immaterial cultural resources that can independently engender movement efficacy. Also, in this analysis preliminary findings indicate that incorporat- ing analyses that explicate the causal role class play in the construction of politico-religious meanings may prove useful in explaining how movement participation is advanced or impeded. This indicates that the interpretation process is more complicated than described in my study, thus future research should not simply examine how the presence of activists in church networks influence interpretations but also how an individual's social class position affects this interpretation process as well.

In addition, my findings illuminate our understanding of religion's role in movement mobilization. Rather than contend that motivation to participate in political action is driven by narrow self-interest, I argue for the importance of religious culture and networks as independent factors in motivating movement participation. Specifically, I found that churches with ministers and key congregants involved in activist networks were more likely to interpret church content in activist ways as opposed to those congregations that lacked individuals who participated in social activism. This finding suggests that religion's rich storehouse of rituals, symbols, and networks of relationships can motivate some people to engage in collective action out of moral obligation and commitment to the group (Smith, 1996). My analysis shows that religion provides people with belief systems and relationships that shape their moral and political views about the kinds of social relationships that should exist in society. These beliefs inspire political action to make them concrete in reality.

Though my study of culture is preliminary, it suggests that examining the role of culture in movement may shed light on how collective action is generated and sustain in oppressive contexts. Kurzman's and Rasler's accounts of movement emergence in Iran in the context of heavy political repression, for example, provide preliminary empirical evidence for the via- bility of theoretical approaches that place culture at the center of movement analysis (Kurzman, 1996; Rasler, 1996). Thus placing culture at the center of movement analysis promises to further our understanding of how human agency mobilizes collective action.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank the many civil rights activists in Arkansas who agreed to participate in my study, and Stephen Valocchi, Noreen Channels, and Socio- logical Forum reviewers for their insightful and helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I also thank my patient and supportive wife, Elisabeth Neiterman, for helping me to clarify my ideas and reading the many drafts of this manuscript. All interpretations of the paper, however, are strictly the responsibility of the author.

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Documents

Linking Beliefs to Collective Action: Politicized … Beliefs to Collective Action: Politicized Religious Beliefs and the Civil Rights Movement Author(s): Johnny E. Williams Reviewed