Networked City: Emergence of a Cohort of "Movement Supporters" in the Nashville Nonviolent Civil Rights Movement,1957-1963

• In Event: 40209 - The Drivers and Deterrents of Collective Action

Abstract

We develop a typology of the career-biographical pathways to becoming a “movement supporter.” Based in the emerging “varieties of activism” literature and our original typology of activist roles, movement supporters deploy their professional expertise (e.g. law, journalism, religion, music) to protect protestors from state repression; promote and legitimize the movement message and objectives in the community; and sustain movement morale especially as movement participants confront violent community resistance. We derive our typology from our ongoing research on the socio-spatial architecture and impact of the Nashville movement, Nashville as a space and base for the dialogical diffusion of the nonviolence movement praxis, and original in-person interviews with several movement supporters who participated in the nonviolent Nashville civil rights movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Authors

• Daniel B. Cornfield, Vanderbilt University

• Dennis C. Dickerson, Vanderbilt University

• Larry W. Isaac, Vanderbilt University