February 15, 2017
Do Protests Matter? Evidence From the 1960s Black Insurgency
Omar Wasow
Assistant Professor of Politics, Princeton University
Richard Scribner and Omar Wasow
Minutes of the 20th Meeting of the 75th Year
President Jock MacFarlane presided. Julia Coale led the invocation and Richard Fenn read the minutes of the preceding meeting.
John Kelsey introduced his guest, Denyse Leslie; Julia Coale introduced her guest, Jeff Tener, a nominee for membership. Eighty-nine members attended.
Richard Scribner introduced Omar Wasow, assistant professor of politics at Princeton University, who received his B.A. from Stanford University and a Ph.D. from Harvard followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton before joining the faculty. A student of race and politics and a well-known innovator and user of high-tech communications, he founded BlackPlanet.com and is a frequent commentator about race and politics on radio and television. Notably, he personally tutored Oprah Winfrey on how to use the Internet to get her message out.
At the start of his talk, Professor Wasow described a running interest among political scientists about how elites dominate politics while, much of the time, the mass of the electorate shows little or no interest. But, he said, there are periods of “punctuated pluralism” when subordinate groups can set or alter the political agenda and gain support from the elites. He decided to find out how they accomplished that and focused his research on the political consequences that ensued from civil rights insurgencies in the 1960s.
He pointed out that in the 1964 presidential election, Barry Goldwater lost in a landslide to Lyndon Johnson. Several landmark civil rights reforms were subsequently adopted with broad public support, yet only four years later, a portion of the Democratic electorate in several swing states (including New Jersey) that had voted against Goldwater and for Johnson, swung over in favor of Richard Nixon in the 1968 election. He wanted to find out what accounted for that switch.
He found that the violent race riots in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles between the 1964 and 1968 elections, which had received intense and continuing coverage on national television and in the print media, had produced anxieties among some Democratic voters who had favored the civil rights reforms earlier. Now they had become more concerned about the need for “law and order” and switched their votes in favor of conservative candidates.
In the face of this, he contrasted two classes of protest by which minority interests can attempt to focus public and political attention on their demands:
On the one hand, as Bayard Rustin -- an important adviser to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. -- argued, nonviolent protests can elicit empathy and support from elites on egalitarian grounds and thus attract them as allies for change.
On the other hand, Stokely Carmichael and others argued that, since too often the African-American community suffered only violent responses to its nonviolent protests, “a man must defend himself,” and violent protest is sometimes the only effective option. Professor Wasow described this as the “ethnocratic vs. egalitarian” debate.
To plumb shifts in race-related public opinion reacting to both nonviolent and violent protests, he plotted opinion polls over several decades to determine when issues of civil rights or social control were of heightened public concern and when they were less so in relation to worries about foreign affairs or the economy. He matched those trends with major political decisions and elections and even allowed for such random factors as the weather on election days and during protests.
He found that over those years protests and civil rights events clearly influenced congressional speech, legislative action and elections, but they only rose to the top of public concern after specific race-related events, such as major nonviolent protests or violent riots. Nonviolent protests, such as the March on Washington in 1963 and the march in Selma in 1965, elicited elite support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1966.
On the other hand, violent protests, such as those that occurred after the assassination of King in 1968, triggered a 2 percent shift of some Democrats who earlier had supported the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in favor of Richard Nixon and George Wallace, who had maintained an electoral lock on the states of the mid-South.
Mass movements, not just elites, influence politics and public policy, Professor Wasow concluded, but tactics obviously matter. Within a democratic political system, how a minority makes its case to the majority is a matter for careful calculation. Violence is counterproductive. It switches the electorate and the elites away from empathy and back toward worries about social control. Nonviolent Vietnam War protests were successful 50 percent of the time; violent protests only 25 percent. Empathy, not fear, wins allies.
Those who think violence is their best option often expect that media-spread images of violence inspire support. There is nothing like the sound of a breaking window or a good fire to win exposure. But he pointed out that the violent responses of the Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor to nonviolent civil rights protests in Birmingham, Ala., did more to win empathy and support for civil rights than any violent protests triggered by civil rights advocates themselves.
In response to several questions, Professor Wasow conceded that this probably only works in nonauthoritarian political systems. In the case of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, it was unlikely that nonviolent protests alone would have produced response. It was the threat to the country’s social and economic stability from violent protests that worried white elites in that country the most and ultimately led to change.
In closing, he commented that present-day electronic social networks certainly make organizing large-scale demonstrations a lot easier and added that if one wants to look for a silver lining the recent airport protests against the Trump administration’s executive order on immigration certainly motivated thousands of people to voluntarily go to John F. Kennedy Airport for the first time in memory. That was no mean accomplishment.
Respectfully submitted,
Ralph R. Widner
John Kelsey introduced his guest, Denyse Leslie; Julia Coale introduced her guest, Jeff Tener, a nominee for membership. Eighty-nine members attended.
Richard Scribner introduced Omar Wasow, assistant professor of politics at Princeton University, who received his B.A. from Stanford University and a Ph.D. from Harvard followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton before joining the faculty. A student of race and politics and a well-known innovator and user of high-tech communications, he founded BlackPlanet.com and is a frequent commentator about race and politics on radio and television. Notably, he personally tutored Oprah Winfrey on how to use the Internet to get her message out.
At the start of his talk, Professor Wasow described a running interest among political scientists about how elites dominate politics while, much of the time, the mass of the electorate shows little or no interest. But, he said, there are periods of “punctuated pluralism” when subordinate groups can set or alter the political agenda and gain support from the elites. He decided to find out how they accomplished that and focused his research on the political consequences that ensued from civil rights insurgencies in the 1960s.
He pointed out that in the 1964 presidential election, Barry Goldwater lost in a landslide to Lyndon Johnson. Several landmark civil rights reforms were subsequently adopted with broad public support, yet only four years later, a portion of the Democratic electorate in several swing states (including New Jersey) that had voted against Goldwater and for Johnson, swung over in favor of Richard Nixon in the 1968 election. He wanted to find out what accounted for that switch.
He found that the violent race riots in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles between the 1964 and 1968 elections, which had received intense and continuing coverage on national television and in the print media, had produced anxieties among some Democratic voters who had favored the civil rights reforms earlier. Now they had become more concerned about the need for “law and order” and switched their votes in favor of conservative candidates.
In the face of this, he contrasted two classes of protest by which minority interests can attempt to focus public and political attention on their demands:
On the one hand, as Bayard Rustin -- an important adviser to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. -- argued, nonviolent protests can elicit empathy and support from elites on egalitarian grounds and thus attract them as allies for change.
On the other hand, Stokely Carmichael and others argued that, since too often the African-American community suffered only violent responses to its nonviolent protests, “a man must defend himself,” and violent protest is sometimes the only effective option. Professor Wasow described this as the “ethnocratic vs. egalitarian” debate.
To plumb shifts in race-related public opinion reacting to both nonviolent and violent protests, he plotted opinion polls over several decades to determine when issues of civil rights or social control were of heightened public concern and when they were less so in relation to worries about foreign affairs or the economy. He matched those trends with major political decisions and elections and even allowed for such random factors as the weather on election days and during protests.
He found that over those years protests and civil rights events clearly influenced congressional speech, legislative action and elections, but they only rose to the top of public concern after specific race-related events, such as major nonviolent protests or violent riots. Nonviolent protests, such as the March on Washington in 1963 and the march in Selma in 1965, elicited elite support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1966.
On the other hand, violent protests, such as those that occurred after the assassination of King in 1968, triggered a 2 percent shift of some Democrats who earlier had supported the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in favor of Richard Nixon and George Wallace, who had maintained an electoral lock on the states of the mid-South.
Mass movements, not just elites, influence politics and public policy, Professor Wasow concluded, but tactics obviously matter. Within a democratic political system, how a minority makes its case to the majority is a matter for careful calculation. Violence is counterproductive. It switches the electorate and the elites away from empathy and back toward worries about social control. Nonviolent Vietnam War protests were successful 50 percent of the time; violent protests only 25 percent. Empathy, not fear, wins allies.
Those who think violence is their best option often expect that media-spread images of violence inspire support. There is nothing like the sound of a breaking window or a good fire to win exposure. But he pointed out that the violent responses of the Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor to nonviolent civil rights protests in Birmingham, Ala., did more to win empathy and support for civil rights than any violent protests triggered by civil rights advocates themselves.
In response to several questions, Professor Wasow conceded that this probably only works in nonauthoritarian political systems. In the case of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, it was unlikely that nonviolent protests alone would have produced response. It was the threat to the country’s social and economic stability from violent protests that worried white elites in that country the most and ultimately led to change.
In closing, he commented that present-day electronic social networks certainly make organizing large-scale demonstrations a lot easier and added that if one wants to look for a silver lining the recent airport protests against the Trump administration’s executive order on immigration certainly motivated thousands of people to voluntarily go to John F. Kennedy Airport for the first time in memory. That was no mean accomplishment.
Respectfully submitted,
Ralph R. Widner