John H. McCray, Accommodationism, and the Framing of the Civil Rights Struggle in South Carolina, 1940–48

Abstract

John H. McCray was a political activist who served as editor of South Carolina's leading black newspaper in 1940–54. After years of dormancy, the civil rights movement sprang to life in the state in the 1940s. This study analyzed the available editions of the newspaper from 1940 to 1948 as well as the personal papers of McCray and his chief colleagues. The findings suggest the newspaper employed what William Gamson has identified as a “collective action frame” to spur black political engagement by framing the civil rights struggle to emphasize African-American agency and self-assertion during a time when strategies of accommodation and negotiation remained dominant in the deep South. Thus, McCray and his colleagues redefined the meaning of full citizenship for black Carolinians and linked it directly to political confrontation.

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Notes on contributors

Sid Bedingfield

SID BEDINGFIELD is a visiting professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of South Carolina. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Institute for Policy History conference in June 2010, and the author would like to thank Kenneth Campbell, Kathy Roberts Forde, and Patricia Sullivan far their guidance.