Editorial Type:
Article Category: Research Article
| Online Publication Date: 10 Jul 2013
The Social-Psychological Origins of the Montgomery Bus Boycott: Social Interaction and Humiliation in the Emergence of Social Movements
The Social-Psychological Origins of the Montgomery Bus Boycott: Social Interaction and Humiliation in the Emergence of Social Movements
Page Range: 117 – 142
This study advances a new explanation of the Montgomery bus boycott, the constitutive event of the U.S. civil rights movement. It introduces new findings to demonstrate that Montgomery, Alabama, was unique in its segregation system, and that unrest among blacks emerged in the narrow time period between late 1953 and 1955. I trace the motivational origins of the boycott in worsening social interactions that caused a sense of abuse and humiliation in black passengers due to three main factors: changing ratios of black and white passengers on the public buses; labor-related issues that frustrated the bus drivers; and the impact of the 1954 Brown decision on the bus drivers. This study calls for a framework that conceptualizes and connects lived experiences and real contentious social interactions with the emergence of protest motivations and social movements. Accordingly, I stress the importance of distinguishing between causes that explain the emergence of movements and factors that explain the momentum and success of movements.
Abernathy, Ralph D. 1989a. And The Walls Came Tumbling Down: An Autobiography, 1st edition. New York: Harper and Row.
Abernathy, Ralph D. 1989b. "The Natural History of a Social Movement: The Montgomery Improvement Association." Pp. 99-172 in The Walking City: The Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955-1956, edited by David. J. Garrow. Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Pub.
Andrews, Kenneth T., and Michael Biggs. 2006. "The Dynamics of Protest Diffusion: Movement Organizations, Social Networks, and News Media in the 1960 Sit-ins." American Sociological Review 71(5): 752-77.
Bar-Tal, Daniel, and Dikla Antebi. 1992. "Siege Mentality in Israel." Ongoing Production on Social Representation 1(1): 49-67.
Biggs, Michael. 2006. "Who Joined the Sit-ins and Why: Southern Black Students in the Early 1960s." Mobilization 11(3): 241-56.
Burks, Mary Fair. 1993. "Trailblazers: Women in the Montgomery Bus Boycott." Pp. 71-83 in Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941-1965, edited by Vicki L. Crawford, Jacqueline Anne Rouse, and Barbara Woods. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Burns, Stewart. 1997. Daybreak of Freedom: The Montgomery Bus Boycott. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
Collins, Randall. 2012. "C-Escalation and D-Escalation: A Theory of the Time-Dynamics of Conflict." American Sociological Review 77(1): 1-20.
Fairclough, Adam. 2004. "Louisiana: The Civil Rights Struggle, 1940-1954." Pp. 144-169 in Before Brown: Civil Rights and White Backlash in the Modern South, edited by Glenn Feldman. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press.
French, Edgar N. 1989. "The Beginning of a New Age." Pp. 173-189 in The Walking City: The Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955-1956, edited by David J. Garrow. Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing.
Gamson, William A. 1992. "The Social Psychology of Collective Action." Pp. 53-76 in Frontiers in Social Movement Theory, edited by Aldon D. Morris and Carol M. Mueller. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press.
Gamson, William A. 1998. "Social Movements and Cultural Change." Pp. 57-77 in From Contention to Democracy, edited by Marco Giugni, Doug McAdam and Charles Tilly. Lanham, MD and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Garrow, David. 1985. "The Origins of the Montgomery Bus Boycott." Southern Changes, October-December, 21-7.
Garrow, David. 1989. The Walking City: The Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955-1956. Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing.
George, Alexander L., and Andrew Bennett. 2005. Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gilliam, Thomas J. 1989. "The Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-1956." Pp. 191-301 in The Walking City: The Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955-1956, edited by David J. Garrow. Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing.
Goffman, Erving. 1956a. "Embarrassment and Social Organization." American Journal of Sociology 62(3): 264-71.
Goffman, Erving. 1956b. "The Nature of Deference and Demeanor." American Anthropologist 58(3): 473-502.
Goodwin, Jeff, and James M. Jasper. 1999. "Caught in a Winding, Snarling Vine: The Structural Bias of Political Process Theory." Sociological Forum 14(1): 27-54.
Graetz, Robert S. 1991. Montgomery: A White Preacher's Memoir. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press.
Gray, Eliza. 2009. "A Forgotten Contribution." Newsweek, March 2, 2009.
Gray, Fred D. 2002. Bus Ride to Justice: The Life and Works of Fred D. Gray, Preacher, Attorney, Politician. Montgomery, AL: NewSouth Books.
Gurr, Ted Robert. 1970. Why Men Rebel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Harding, Vincent. 1983. There is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America, 1st Vintage Books edition. New York: Vintage Books.
Hendrickson, Paul. 1989. "The supporting Actors in the Historic Bus Boycott." The Washington Post, July 24, 1989.
Holden, Anna. n.d. Collection of personal interviews. Anna Holden Reports Folder. Perston and Bonita Valien Papers. New Orleans, LA: Amistad Research Center.
Jasper, James. 2006. "Motivation and Emotion." Pp. 157-167 in Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis, edited by Robert E. Goodin and Charles Tilly. New York: Oxford University Press.
Jasper, James. 2011. "Emotions and Social Movements: Twenty Years of Theory and Research." Annual Review of Sociology 37: 285-303.
Jenkins, Craig J., David Jacobs, and Jon Agnone. 2003. "Political Opportunities and African-American Protest, 1948-1997." American Journal of Sociology 109(2): 277-303.
Killian, Lewis M. 1984. "Organization, Rationality and Spontaneity in the Civil Rights Movement." American Sociological Review 49(6): 770-83.
King, Martin Luther. [1963] 2000. Why We Can't Wait. New York: New American Library.
King, Martin Luther. [1958] 1965. Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. New York: Harper.
Klandermans, Bert. 2003. "Collective Political Action." Pp. 670-709 in Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology, edited by David O. Sears, Leonie Huddy and Robert Jervis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Levinger-Limor, Ariela. 2001. Women's Political Council: Black Women's Academic Organization, Montgomery, Alabama, 1946-1955. Doctoral dissertation, Department of History, Tel Aviv University [in Hebrew].
Mansbridge, Jane. 2001 "The Making of Oppositional Consciousness." Pp. 1-15 in Oppositional Consciousness: The Subjective Roots of Social Protest, edited by Jane Mansbridge and Aldon Morris. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
McAdam, Doug. 1982. Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
McAdam, Doug. 2004. "Revisiting the U. S. Civil Rights Movement: Toward a More Synthetic Understanding of the Origins of Contention." Pp. 201-32 in Rethinking Social Movements: Structure, Meaning, and Emotion, edited by Jeff Goodwin and James Jasper. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.
McAdam, Doug. 2009. "The U. S. Civil Rights Movement: Power from Below and Above, 1945-70." Pp. 58-74 in Civil Resistance & Power Politics: The Experience of Non-violent Action from Gandhi to the Present, edited by Adam Roberts and Timothy Garton Ash. New York: Oxford University Press.
McAdam, Doug, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald. 1996. "Introduction: Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Framing Processes: Toward a Synthetic, Comparative Perspective on Social Movements." Pp. 1-22 in Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings, edited by Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
McAdam, Doug, and William H. Sewell, Jr. 2001. "It's About Time: Temporality in the Study of Social Movements and Revolutions." Pp. 89-125 in Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics, edited by Ronald Aminzade. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
McMillen, Neil R. 1971. The Citizens' Council: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction, 1954-64. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
McVeigh, Rory. 1999. "Structural Incentives for Conservative Mobilization: Power Devaluation and the Rise of the Ku Klux Klan, 1915-1925." Social Forces 77(4): 1461-96.
Morris, Aldon D. 1984. The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change. New York and London: Free Press; Collier Macmillan.
Morris, Aldon D. 1999. "Political Consciousness and Collective Action." Pp. 351-373 in Frontiers in Social Movement Theory, edited by Aldon D. Morris and Carol M. Mueller. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Morris, Aldon D. 2000. "Charting Futures for Sociology: Social Organization—Reflections on Social Movement Theory: Criticisms and Proposals." Contemporary Sociology 29(3): 445-54.
Morris, Aldon D., and Naomi Braine. 2001. "Social Movements and Oppositional Consciousness." Pp. 20-37 in Oppositional Consciousness: The Subjective Roots of Social Protest, edited by Jane Mansbridge and Aldon D. Morris. London: University of Chicago Press.
Opp, Karl-Dieter, and Christiane Gern. 1993. "Dissident Groups, Personal Networks, and Spontaneous Cooperation: The East-German Revolution of 1989." American Sociological Review 58(5): 659-80.
Parks, Rosa, and James Haskins. 1992. Rosa Parks: My Story, 1st edition. New York: Dial Books.
Polletta, Francesca. 1998. "‘It was Little a Fever…’ Narrative and Identity in Social Protest." Social Problems 45(2): 137-159.
Robinson, Jo Ann Gibson. 1987. The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press.
Rodriguez, Junius P. 2007. Encyclopedia of Slave Resistance and Rebellion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Scheff, Thomas J. 1988. "Shame and Conformity: The Deference-Emotion System." American Sociological Review 53(3): 395-406.
Scott, James C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press.
Seay, Solomon S. 1990. I was There by the Grace of God. Montgomery, AL: The S. S. Seay, Sr. Educational Foundation.
Sewell, William H. 1996. "Historical Events as Transformations of Structures: Inventing Revolution at the Bastille." Theory and Society 25(6): 841-81.
Shultziner, Doron. 2010. Struggling for Recognition: The Psychological Impetus for Democratic Progress. New York: Continuum Press.
Shultziner, Doron. [forthcoming]. "Transformative Events and Regime Change." In The Paradox of Repression, edited by Lester Kurtz and Lee Smithey.
Skrentny, John David. 1998. "The Effect of the Cold War on African-American Civil Rights: America and the World Audience, 1945-1968." Theory and Society 27(2): 237-85.
Snow, David A., and Robert D. Benford. 1992. "Master Cycles and Cycles of Protest." Pp. 133-155 in Frontiers in Social Movement Theory, edited by Aldon D. Morris and Carol M. Mueller. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press.
Snow, David A., Daniel M. Cress, Liam Downey, and Andrew W. Jones. 1998. "Disrupting the ‘Quotidian’: Reconceptualizing the Relationship Between Breakdown and the Emergence of Collective Action." Mobilization 3(1): 1-22.
Tarrow, Sidney G. 1994. Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action, and Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Thornton, J. Mills. 1989. "Challenge and Response in the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-1956." Pp. 323-379 in The Walking City: The Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955-1956, edited by David J. Garrow. Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Pub.
Thornton, J. Mills. 2002. Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press.
Williams, Juan. 2002. Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965. New York: Penguin Books.
Wood, Joanne V. 1989. "Theory and Research Concerning Social Comparisons of Personal Attributes." Psychological Bulletin 106(2): 231-48.
Zhao, Dingxin. 2001. The Power of Tiananmen: State-Society Relations and the 1989 Beijing Student Movement. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.