“The Movement Never Came Here”: Civil Rights Organizational Presence and Southern Racial Inequality

Scholars typically assume that rights-based movements have generalizable impacts upon social inequalities; yet inequality reduction may be unequally distributed across space. By focusing on the American civil rights movement – a movement oriented toward achieving equal opportunity for people of color, especially Black Americans in the US South – this research evaluates whether reductions in racial inequality were contingent upon an active local movement presence or if all areas benefited equally. Census data from periods before and after the civil rights movement (1950 and 1980) are utilized to construct a measure of racial inequality change, focused upon high school graduation and management occupation employment rates. The presence of “the Big Four” civil rights organizations (the Congress of Racial Equality [CORE], the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People [NAACP], the Southern Christian Leadership Conference [SCLC], and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [SNCC]) in Southern counties helps to explain this change in racial inequality. Counties which had certain civil rights organizations were more likely to experience a greater reduction in racial inequality than counties that didn’t have such organizations. Education equity improved in counties that were less Black, more urban, had HBCUs, and CORE or SNCC organizational presence.