Preparation Pathways and Movement Participation: Insurgent Schooling and Nonviolent Direct Action in the Nashville Civil Rights Movement*
Employing a unique sample of participants in the early Nashville civil rights movement, we extend the micromobilization literature by conceptualizing “preparation pathways” (or schooling channels) through which activists acquire insurgent consciousness and capital so crucial for committed, effective, high-risk activism. We identify two key pathways in which activists were “schooled” in nonviolent praxis—experience in nonviolent direct action prior to the Nashville movement and training through intensive, highly organized, and disciplined workshops on nonviolence praxis. Evidence suggests that both pathways prove especially efficacious in accounting for intensity and persistence of movement direct-action participation. The implications of our findings extend to high-risk movement activism more generally and also illuminate an important chapter in the southern civil rights movement. Activists are not a homogeneous lot. Instead they move through multiple paths accumulating diverse cultural and relational endowments that they bring into movements. Once there, these endowments can shape the intensity and persistence of participation in struggle.
Contributor Notes
* Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the annual meetings of the Southern Sociological Society, April 3, 2014 and the Hawaii International Conference on the Social Sciences, May 28, 2014. We thank Larry Griffin for comments on an earlier draft, and we are grateful to the editor and anonymous reviewers for their exceptionally useful comments during the review process. We are deeply grateful to all interviewees, veterans of the southern civil rights movement, who gave so generously of their time and knowledge of “the movement.” Without them, so much would have been impossible including this project. We also thank the following people who played important roles in this project: Kathy Conkwright and Roosevelt Noble (videography); Cathy Kaiser (interview transcription); Stephanie Pruitt (Center for Nashville Studies, Vanderbilt University); and students in several Vanderbilt University seminars. The authors gratefully acknowledge funding from the Vanderbilt University Center for Nashville Studies, a Vanderbilt University “Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration Grant,” and the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Endowment.
† Larry Isaac is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University. Jonathan Coley recently completed his PhD in sociology at Vanderbilt University. Daniel Cornfield is Professor in the Department of Sociology at Vanderbilt University. Dennis Dickerson is James M. Lawson Professor of History at Vanderbilt University.