The Development of the Civil Rights Movement: Relative Deprivation, Resources and Political Opportunities.

A Senior Honors Thesis

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for graduation with distinction in Sociology in the undergraduate colleges of The Ohio State University

By

Jon Agnone

The Ohio State University

July 2000

Project Adviser: J. Craig Jenkins, Department of Sociology

There are many theories that attempt to explain the origins of social movements, all with rather differing assumptions and approaches. The three major theories to reference in this case are relative deprivation (also referred to as grievances), resource mobilization, and political opportunity. In my study I explore how the civil rights movement can be explained in relation to relative deprivation, resource mobilization, and political opportunity theories over time.

It has often been stated that the civil rights movement is the ideal movement to study when looking to test social movement theory. This is, in part, attributable to the struggle for civil rights being arguably the most important social movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and "clearly one of the pivotal developments of the twentieth century" (Morris, 1999). With this in mind, the findings of this inquiry should easily be generalizable to other movements such as the women’s movement and the environmental movement.

My review of past literature delineates the major features of the theories I am testing, and some of the work done with each. These theories will be tested against the protest events of the civil rights movement from 1947 through 1997 to see which theory can best explain the ongoings of the movement. I feel that it is important to look at the civil rights movement beyond the legislative victories of the 1960s, since the struggle for equality is an ongoing battle. A research model on the following page gives a graphical representation of my explanatory model.

Relative Deprivation/Grievances. One perspective on the origins of social movements can be referred to as strain theory. There are a few different variations of strain theory (i.e., mass society theory, collective behavior theory, and relative deprivation), which have in common the idea that the "strain" indirectly leads to mobilization on the part of the individuals, who are then motivated to join movements. This is further explained by McAdam (1999) as he points out, "social movements are seen as a collective reaction to some form of disruptive system strain…which, when severe enough trigger… social insurgency."

These theories have in common the fact that they are based on the idea that social movements are the result of some systematic strain. This strain takes place on a macro-level when changes occur (e.g., urbanization, immigration, economic depression), which then ripples downward to a more micro-level (e.g., individual isolation, alienation, or psychological disturbance). However, strain does not have to be caused by alienation or psychological disturbance, but could simply be the collective perception of systemic injustice (e.g., income inequality despite comparative education and ability). Based on this dual-level mechanism, disregarding one level in favor of the other is unwise, since they are symbiotic in a way. Therefore once strain trickles down to where it confronts individuals, they seek to alleviate it. Thus, the mobilization of a social movement, which can be defined as movement protest events, since unruly or contentious activity is a central part of most movements (McAdam, 1999; Van Dyke, 2000).

The particular macro-level strain theory that I am interested in is relative deprivation/grievances. Relative deprivation occurs when one social group comes to see that they are disadvantaged relative to another group, and believes that the discrepancy is unjustified (Van Dyke, 2000).

The women’s movement of the 1960s is a good example of relative deprivation at work. There was a growth of women in college in the 1960s, but once these women graduated, they had trouble securing employment. With men as the reference group, women felt they were underprivileged, and indeed they were. The anachronistic idea that "they were useless parasites" left women no alternative but to fend for themselves and prove that they need not have their lives defined by men (Freeman, 1975). Thus, the women’s movement was feeding off of the outright that trickled down courtesy of the overtly macro-level patriarchal society that characterizes the United States. What is most important for a group is not only whether or not they are worse off than the reference group, which very well may be the case, but that they collectively perceive a disparity between "us and them."

A look at history indicates that the African-American population had more than enough grievances before the civil rights movement began. Aldon Morris suggests that, "the Jim Crow system went to great lengths to impress on Blacks that they were a subordinate population by forcing them to live in a separate inferior society" (Morris, 1999). He goes on to state that these poor accommodations and societal treatment lead to "serious psychological damage" in the Black population.

But, as Jenkins (1983) notes, strain theories are not infallible, that formulations like relative deprivation "pointed to sudden increases in individual grievances generated by the ‘structural strains’ of rapid social change." Although the details of differing hypotheses varied, "these traditional theories shared the assumptions that movement participation was relatively rare, discontents were transitory, movement and institutionalized actions were sharply distinct, and movement actors were arational if not outright irrational." Jenkins goes on to state that the movements of the 1960s by and large disproved these assumptions, which proved to be the catalyst for the emergence of new social movement theories. Specifically, movements such as the civil rights movement and the women’s movement "stimulated a shift in theoretical assumptions and analytic emphases that eventually became formalized in the resource mobilization theory of social movements."

What is rather intriguing is that, according to some researchers, almost all studies using relative deprivation fail to measure comparable levels over time (Abeles, 1976:123; McAdam, 1999). Later on McAdam explains, "Instead, the usual approach has been to measure the degree of relative deprivation in a specified population at a given point in time." Given this noticeable lacuna in the literature, my measures of relative deprivation/grievances should attempt to capture the fluctuation of strain over time.

Resource Mobilization. First posited by John McCarthy and Mayer Zald (1977), resource mobilization theory assumes that strain/grievances are constant, and that what changes, thus giving rise to movements, is the accessibility of resources to mobilize, not a realization of deprivation, for example. However, they state that oppressed people generally do not have the means and/or ability in which to mobilize on their own, that they need resources from other groups (i.e., elite sponsorship). Unfortunately for McCarthy and Zald, the civil rights movement and women’s movement are fairly good examples of mass movements that more than poke holes in their assertion.

There has been some debate as to what constitutes a resource, and that although resources are important, they do not necessarily have to come from elites or external sources (Van Dyke, 2000). Freeman (1979) has offered a rather useful means of identifying what resources are. There are tangible resources (i.e., money, facilities, and means of communication) and there are intangible resources (i.e., human assets such as organizing and legal skills, and supporters), which each movement has to some degree at their disposal.

Often internal resources are more important to a movement, whether tangible or intangible by definition. Internal resource mobilization in the case of the civil rights movement was very important. For example, one can, with great confidence, argue that black churches were the institutional center of the civil rights movement (McAdam, 1999; Van Dyke, 2000). The churches gave the movement an internal institution at their disposal in which to gather for meetings, to use as a communications headquarters, and as a general safe haven in which the white oppressors could not legally intervene. This was made possible, in part, due to the migration of large numbers of blacks to cities, which led to institution building, community organizing, and a dense social network through which protest could be organized (Morris, 1999). Generalizing this further, internal resources/organization is the key factor in getting a movement going (Van Dyke, 2000).

An example of resources coming in after the grassroots mobilization of a movement had begun can easily be found. The women’s movement, for one, managed to generate large numbers of intangible resources before substantial external resources were received (Costain, 1992). Another salient example of this phenomenon is the fact that the civil rights movement did not receive external resources until well after the protests had begun. However, even though outside resources did not play a part in the initial mobilization of the civil rights movement, internal resources were very prominent (Haines, 1988). Black churches and colleges were key southern-based institutions where a lot of organization and other important tasks were completed.

Jenkins and Eckert (1986) showed in their work on the civil rights movement that professional SMOs, and outside resources, were clearly "secondary actors," and "that the patronage was overwhelmingly reactive." They concluded that, "clearly, elite patronage did not initiate the civil rights movement." This is further substantiated by McAdam (1999) in that contributions of external wealth to the civil rights movement "were largely reactive, not initiatory" (see also Haines, 1988).

Political Opportunity. Another of the three main perspectives on the origins of social movements is political opportunity theory. This theory can be understood as the degree to which groups are likely to be able to gain access to power and to manipulate the political system, or the extent to which the political system is vulnerable to challenge (Van Dyke, 2000). Another variation was put forth by McAdam, McCarthy & Zald (1988), claiming that political opportunities refer to how receptive or vulnerable the polity is to the collective action by a given social movement. Sidney Tarrow’s notion of political opportunity structure is worth quoting here, which is, "consistent—but not necessarily formal, permanent, or national—signals to social or political actors which either encourage or discourage them to use their internal resources to form social movements (1996)."

There are four dimensions of political opportunity theory, according to McAdam. The first dimension deals with the relative openness or closure of the institutional political system. For example, a democracy is more open than an authoritarian government. This, if graphically depicted, would look curvilinear, with the most open and most closed political systems producing the lowest protest; hence it is mixed systems such as semi-democracies that are the least restrictive. Therefore, in the case of the civil rights movement it is the loosening up of Jim Crowism over time that set the stage for movement action.

The second dimension notes that the stability or instability of that broad set of elite alignments that typically undergird a polity are key in whether or not a movement can see a political opening. An very good example of this being the division between the northern and southern Democrats during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960. The northern Democrats saw the newly urbanized and northern dwelling blacks as a political mass that must be taken into account in order for them to take further political power away from the northern Republicans. At the same time, the southern Democrats, being staunchly anti-Black, wanted nothing to do with the policies of their northern brethren.

The presence or absence of elite allies is stated as being the third dimension of political opportunity theory. For example, the establishment of the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women in 1961 by President Kennedy showed women that they had an ally in the White House. This elite presence, especially if it is the President of the United States, lends legitimacy to a movement in the eyes of the nation and in the eyes of other authority figures.

The final political opportunity theory dimension is the state’s capacity and propensity to use repressive tactics. In regards to the civil rights movement, the mass arrests and ample jail space available in Albany, Georgia during the 1661-1963 campaign there really repressed and thwarted the aims of the movement. At the same time, repression can have negative consequences. This occurred in Birmingham, Alabama thanks in part to the city’s Police Commissioner Bull Connor, whose violent tactics were televised around the world. This violent repression lent much needed credence to the plight of African-Americans in their struggle for civil rights (McAdam, 1996; Van Dyke, 2000).

Political Opportunity theory proved to be rather cogent in the exploration of the Farm Worker movements. Jenkins and Perrow (1977) found this theory useful in comparing the unsuccessful attempts to organize workers by the National Farm Labor Union (NFLU) movement and the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) with the United Farm Workers (UFW) very successful attempt. The political environment changed drastically between the period of the three unions’ attempts to mobilize workers, allowing the UFW to gain much more positive ground than the NFLU or AWOC ever could. For example, "boycotts that secured success for the UFW also had been tried by the NFLU, but with quite different results." The subsequent success of the United Farm Workers was due to a change in the political environment (i.e., the liberal community was willing to provide support, and the political elite adopted a neutral stance toward farm workers), which AWOC operated under as well, but a poor organizational strategy led to the union’s lack of success. In essence, the "elite divisions provided the opening for reform measures then being pressed by a newly active coalition of established liberal and labor organizations. Though the reforms did not directly effect success, the process entailed by reform did result in a new political environment, one which made a successful challenge possible."

Another example of political opportunity theory is McAdam’s explanation of how the wheels of the civil right movement were set in motion (McAdam, 1999). The importance of the demise of King Cotton (i.e., the monolith that was the southern economy and way of life) proved to be the catalyst for change in the South. Once the devaluation of cotton began and blacks began migrating to the North to get industrial jobs, things started to change. Suddenly, blacks were not subjected to Jim Crowism when trying to vote. Through a weakening of social control, this suddenly re-enfranchised mass had to be accounted for in local, state and national politics and their electoral strength contributed to a restructuring of political alignments.

This study will contribute to our overall knowledge of what affects social movement protest events. To my knowledge, no one, with the exception of McAdam (1999), has tried to explain how relative deprivation, resource mobilization, and political opportunity theories interact with civil rights movement events across time. However, whereas McAdam dealt with the 1930-1970 time period, I am going to look at movement trends through 1997. This analysis, in effect, temporarily supercedes McAdam’s work in that it spans a larger time frame, and it uses multiple regression to test the time series data of the civil rights movement, something McAdam did not do. Hopefully, through this analysis, we will be able to better understand which theory can best explain the occurrence of these movement events and how the civil rights movement has evolved over time.

Movement Protest Events. The dependent variable in my analysis is the number of civil rights movement (also referred to as the African-American movement) protest events. Even though attempting to map out protest activity in specific cities would be a rather interesting pursuit, the aim of this analysis is to capture the protest events of the nationally focused civil rights movement. These events are derived from the New York Times Annual Index using a method of content coding, and examine the years 1947 through 1997 (see chart of the movement protest event count above). This method focuses on the contentious politics surrounding the African-American movement. The method of content coding employed here has previously been used with relative success, most notably by Jenkins and Perrow (1977), Jenkins and Eckert (1986), and McAdam (1999). As a matter of fact, the portion of the data from 1955 through 1970 is taken directly from Doug McAdam (McAdam, 1983 and 1999). The remainder of the data were gathered by a group effort consisting of Linda Powell, Craig Jenkins, Richard Lundman, Jessica Maguire, Lori King, and myself.

Since coding is a rather complex task, two independent coders were used to help ensure the accuracy of the analysis. In an effort to maximize reliability, the indices were double coded, once each by two independent coders. After this was completed a third party reviewer went over the results with the coders. This process showed that there were two particular problems that have to do with the accuracy of event coding (i.e., overcoding and undercoding) that were solved using the double coding method. In an overcode situation, for example, the first person could consider an event codable, which is later refuted by the second coder as not an event after all. This, in turn, can happen in undercoding as well, when the second coder spots a codable event that was previous missed.

Before brushing over a few of the important aspects of the coding rules, it is worth noting the exact source of the data. As stated above, the content coding focused on the news story abstracts provided under relevant headings of the New York Times Annual Index. The headings and subheadings that were scanned are as follows: 1947-1968, "Negroes, U.S." and "Education, U.S., Racial Issues;" 1968-1970, "Negroes: U.S." and "Education, U.S., Racial Integration;" 1971-1981, "Blacks, U.S." and "Education and Schools, U.S., Equal Education Opportunities;" 1982-1997, "Blacks, U.S." and "Education and Schools, U.S. (Jenkins, 1998)."

The data gathering process centered on the African-American movement and the subsequent protest events as tabulated from the abstracts of the New York Times Annual Index. The phrase, "African-American movement," means all actions whose primary goal is advancing the interests and rights of African-Americans. This means that political groups whose goals are broader (e.g., the American Civil Liberties Union, organized labor) or more complex and governmental actors were excluded. We do, however, include professionalized advocacy organizations (e.g., United Negro College Fund) and proto-movement groups (e.g., the Congressional Black Caucus) which stem from and advocate the goals of the African-American movement. In coding protest events, only movement-initiated protest events are coded. These are events in which movement actors launched. Ergo, feature stories and editorials are excluded. What is included are protest actions by individual movement supporters as well as collective actors (Jenkins, 1998).

The most critical factor in coding is to focus on actual protests and not stories or story summaries. A protest event requires: 1) an actor; and 2) an issue of concern. Thus, a single index summary may report multiple events and many summaries will contain no codable events. Codable movement events must be: 1) movement initiated; 2) have an identifiable beginning and end (typically within the boundaries of a 24-hour clock); and 3) advance the goals of the African-American movement and other groups known as the "civil rights movement," and/or the "black power movement." Only protests occurring within the United States are coded. Thus, protests from abroad by the Pan-African movement are excluded; however the anti-apartheid movement was included (Jenkins, 1998).

What is the validity of using the New York Times Annual Index?

Annual indexes are a way of getting at the given events for a year, without sifting through the exhaustive amount of printed issues that a newspaper has put out in a year. Of course, one cannot expect to get as good of a feeling for the events that going through the actual paper and reading each story would evoke. Reason being that story abstracts are at times vague, and often do not give enough information to be of any use. The positive side of using the index is that it allows a researcher to go through a given time period, with relative speed and success, and get a quantitative measure of what was going on with regards to the social milieux at a given point in time.

Realizing the advantages of using an annual index, many researchers have sought to incorporate specifically the New York Times Annual Index as a rather helpful tool (Jenkins and Perrow, 1977; Jenkins and Eckert, 1986; Costain, 1992; McAdam, 1999). The New York Times has been treated as a source for the entire country by researchers, which in itself may be debatable (Olzak, 1989). In doing this, researchers realize the, at times, limited nature of using such a method. Specifically, that some biases may exist in the coverage of events. Susan Olzak (1989), in her review of analyzing collective action with event counts states, "If the goals [of the research] involve testing generalizable theories with replicable evidence, then event analysis has several potential advantages." For one, hypotheses and models can be tested and compared "on their relative merits," and "event analysis allows empirical investigation of changes in forms of collective action."

Media Bias. At times noting the downsides of using the New York Times Annual Index is just not enough. John McCarthy et al. (1996) explored the case of media bias in the coverage of Washington, D.C. protests over the course of 1982 and 1991. Here they found that, "Demonstration size is, by far, the most important characteristic determining the likelihood of media coverage." Also, "evidence strongly supports our interpretation that issue-attention cycles affect the likelihood of coverage of demonstrations." The first two months after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986 is a good example of this phenomenon. The New York Times Annual Index had over five pages dedicated to this disaster and anything else remotely close to it (e.g., there was more coverage of nuclear plants in the United States, and every potential mechanical problem was magnified), whereas this time span would normally get about two pages of coverage. Unfortunately, there exists no good method that will allow us to control for the mass media attention cycle on given issues. Therefore, these attention cycles could very well prove to accentuate the peaks and valleys of the protest event count, which Oliver and Myers (1999) found, but we think the series provides a pretty good index of nationally-targeted civil rights action over time (see chart on page 10).

Given that there is going to be some bias, where do we go from here? McAdam (1999) assumes that any bias is stable across time. From this, it should be necessary to see if there is relative agreement between the biases of the New York Times and other papers. This assumption has been corroborated in an analysis of collective action events in the United States using the Washington Post and the New York Times (McCarthy et al., 1996). In essence, both of these papers were susceptible to the biases delineated by McCarthy et al. A comparison of coverage for the farm workers movement was done by Jenkins and Perrow (1977) using the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times, which suggested the same bias. They concluded that, "the New York Times is basically a more complete version of the same ‘news’."

I am going to look at how the grievances, resources, and political opportunities of the African-American movement affect the count of movement protest events. These independent variables are operationalized in the following paragraphs.

Grievances. The grievances of the African-American movement are operationalized as the level of the black/white median family income ratio (calculated by dividing the median family income of blacks by that of whites) and the percentage of black unemployment for the years 1947 through 1997. These aggregate measures seem to be the best way to tap into the collective perception of relative deprivation for the African-American community. The income ratio was taken from the 1948 through 1999 volumes of the Statistical Abstract of the United States. The black unemployment rate comes from Historical Statistics of the U.S.: Colonial times to 1970 for the year 1947, McAdam (1999) for the years 1948-1971, and from the Bureau of Labor Statistics website for the years 1972-1997.

Resources. Resources will be considered the total membership of the NAACP for a given year, which includes youth council membership, from 1947 through 1997. This data comes from the NAACP Annual Report for the years 1947-1982. Apparently the report was no longer issued after 1982, which left a major hole in the research of this project. However, the Encyclopedia of Associations, which is an accumulation of all the major recognized associations in the United States for a given year, was able to supply the needed information from 1982-1997.

Political Openness. The openness of the political arena to the concerns of the African-American movement is measured using the presidential margin of victory during the election year voting (percentage margin of popular vote garnered by the Democrat candidate minus that of the Republican candidate) and the percentage of non-southern democrats in congress. The southern states (i.e., the states not included in the percentage count) are the sixteen states considered southern by the Statistical Abstract of the United States 1990. These states are Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas. All of this information is taken from several different volumes of the Statistical Abstract of the United States for the years 1955-1999. The concept of using the percentage of non-southern democrats in congress comes from Jenkins (1987) and Santoro (1999).

The independent variables (grievances, resources, and political openness) were run against the dependent variable (civil rights movement protest events) using EViews 3.1 as the statistical package in a multiple regression analysis of the time-series data.

This analysis examines the affects of movement protest events from the scope of three different social movement perspectives. First, the grievance variables will be looking at the validity of relative deprivation theory. Second, resource mobilization theory will be applied to the events using the independent variables for resources. Lastly, the political openness variable will be testing the validity of the political opportunity theory as it relates to the explanation of social movements. In the end, this analysis will hope to yield an interpretation as to which theory holds the most water when discussing the ebb and flow of the African-American movement.

After running regression analysis on EViews 3.1, four working models were elicited. Two of the models have 3 variable equations, and two have 4 variable equations. For the following discussion, please note my regressions in Table 1 below.

Model 1 2 3 4

Intercept 187.84* 238.03* 298.64*** 235.87** (1.68) (2.06) (4.09) (2.46)

B/W Income -446.62* -582.48** -699.18*** -610.04**

(-2.11) (-3.27) (-4.78) (-3.07)

NAACP mem. .248* .317** .471*** .346**

(2.17) (2.99) (5.31) (3.08)

Pres. Margin 1.02* .388* .721* 1.08*

(1.87) (2.34) (1.72) (2.14)

Black Unemp. ____ ____ -5.12^ ____

(-3.08)

% Non-Southern ____ ____ ____ .125

Dems (.17)

R-squared .387 .464 .454 .332

(Adjusted)

D.W. 2.062 1.923 2.097 2.146

N 49 46 49 50

Note: T-values are in parentheses.

*.05 **.01 ***.001 (one-tailed test)

^.01 (two-tailed test)

Model 1 showed significance for all three variables at the .05 level. Here, one explanatory variable from each of the theory blocks was used. This model needed an AR(1) and AR(2) term inserted into the model to correct for autocorrelation at the first and second years. Model 2 is the same equation, except that the relationship between the variables and protest counts is stronger (i.e., black/white median family income and NAACP membership are now significant at the .01 level). What is interesting is that the only difference between the two equations is that Model 2 has an AR(5) corrective term inserted into it, which corrects for auto-correlation at the fifth year. Although the empirical findings are understandable, the theoretical implications are not as clear. One possible explanation for this is that presidential terms are four years, therefore the fifth year is either the second term for the existing president, or the beginning of a new president’s term. Out of this, it may be that only the first year of the new presidential tenure matters, or is most important in regards to legislative changes, in that this is when campaign promises are most apt to be followed through.

With Model 3, the black unemployment rate is inserted into the equation, with promising results. Similar to Model 1, this model needed both an AR(1) and AR(2) term to correct for autocorrelation. As compared to Model 1, the level of significance for the black/white median family income ratio and NAACP membership now reach the .001 level, with presidential margin of victory remains steady at the .05 level. What is interesting, however, is that the black unemployment rate showed significant in the negative direction. This suggests that the black unemployment rate might be a measure of movement resources, in that the lower the unemployment rate among blacks the greater their ability and means to organize protests. This finding is particularly interesting in light of black unemployment initially being operationalized as a grievance measure, which, as it turns out, is not the case at all. One possible explanation for the black/white median family income ratio being a better grievance measure than black unemployment is that income disparities affect the entire Black population, whereas only the most disadvantaged experience the blight of chronic unemployment. Moreover, this points toward the group relative deprivation/grievance thesis as opposed to the broader system strain ideas.

Model 4, in comparison to the first model, does show a higher level of significance for the black/white median family income ratio and the NAACP membership, which now are at the .01 level of significance. Model 4 needed an AR(1) term inserted into it to correct for autocorrelation at the first year. The new variable added to this equation is the percentage of non-southern democrats in congress, which even though it operates in the right direction, is not close to being significant. In relation to the presidential margin of victory, which is significant at the .05 level, this offers a rather interesting finding. This would suggest that, democratic alignments in congress are not as important to the political climate of social movement activity as is who sits in the White House. This may be due to presidential politics being more salient in the public eye as opposed to the more arcane congressional political scene.

As it turns out, each of the three main social movement theories prove to be valid in light of the regression analysis. This finding is particularly interesting when the grievance measure is considered. Grievances have been previously ignored by scholars, or have been considered omnipresent, and thus not empirically important or as driven by opportunity and resource processes (Jenkins and Perrow, 1977; McAdam, 1999). However, this is not the case. It seems that when dealing with the civil rights movement, and most likely other social movements as well, relative deprivation, resource mobilization, and political opportunity theories must all be used as explanations.

It may seem obvious, in a way, to claim that each of the main theories has its own merits when discussing social movements. But, what is not as obvious is stating that when controlled simultaneously, they all deserve the merit that was given to them individually. This is exactly what was done in my analysis, which proved very fruitful. To be more specific, resource mobilization theory needs to broaden as to accommodate the importance of grievances as well as political opportunities.

The limitations of my study would have to be the lack of certain ideal measures. For one, getting the enrollment figures for traditionally black colleges, southern preferably, would be an excellent and more precise resource measure. I tested the total college enrollment of black students over this time period, but it never showed statistical significance. Another excellent measure of resources would have been reliable and consistent black church data. The membership trends of traditionally black churches and separately the membership of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church were tested with neither being significant. The information was partially available, but not reported nearly consistent enough over time to be useful. Both of these measures would get at what McAdam describes as two of the most important internal resources mobilized by the black population in the early years of the civil rights movement (1999).

One concept that is worthy of future research is the difference between models 1 and 2 with regards to the insertion of the AR(5) term. It seems, at this point, to not be logically sound that there would be statistical auto-correlation problems five years out. But, this is essentially what the corrective term is suggesting.

What may also prove to be interesting, as far as future papers are concerned, would be to split the time-series data at about the late 60s or early 70s. This would allow an analysis to see whether or not the driving forces of the movement in its heyday are any different than those of the later years of the movement once it had achieved its legislative goals and began to fall off in magnitude.

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