Interpreting Unrest: How Violence changes Public Opinions about Social Movements

ABSTRACT

Social movement scholars have long been interested in how violence impacts movements. A primary route to that impact is through public opinion. We examine changes in public opinion – in aggregate and within population subgroups – following dramatic sequences of movement-related violence. Using survey data collected in four US cities before and after the ‘long hot summer’ of urban unrest in 1967, we examine changes in public opinion about whether rioters reacted to legitimate grievances and whether the unrest would be effective in helping the plight of Black Americans. We find that violence expanded the opinion gap between the dominant white ‘public’ and Black ‘counterpublic.’ We also find unique opinion patterns among within-race subgroups based on gender and education (Black women and college-educated whites). In effect, violence realigned the structure of public opinion allies for the Civil Rights Movement.

KEYWORDS:

• Public opinion
• violence
• riots
• race
• civil rights movement

Author links

Matthew Baggetta

ORCiD ID: 0000-0003-1299-0673

Website: https://oneill.indiana.edu/faculty-research/directory/profiles/faculty/full-time/baggetta-matthew.html

Social Media Profiles: https://twitter.com/MatthewBaggetta | @MatthewBaggetta

Daniel J. Myers

ORCiD ID: 0000-0002-0393-0110

Website: https://sites.google.com/view/danieljmyers/

Social Media Profiles: https://twitter.com/myersdanielj | @myersdanielj

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Robin Gratz, A. Ferne Baldwin, Charles Lamb, and Peter Lysy for assistance accessing the Lemberg Center archives; N. Eugene Walls and Keely Jones Stater for input on earlier drafts; Deana Rohlinger for helpful comments; Michael Frisby, Hannah Bolte, and the Indiana University Statistical Consulting Center for technical advice; and Andrew Cloran, Noah Hammarlund, and Elizabeth Benson for assistance with preparing the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. As Spilerman’s (1970, Spilerman, 1976) studies definitively established, local conditions did not drive riot occurrence; it was a national wave. As a result, we do not posit an independent effect of local rioting – which was experienced as part of the larger national condition. Furthermore, the four cities in our study are not differentiable in terms of experiencing riots – all had multiple riots during the 1960s and all had riots during 1967. Therefore, we adopt a city fixed-effects analysis to focus our test on the pooled data patterns.

2. Another brief but severe spike followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968, but the summer of 1967 was unquestionably the most severe and sustained sequence of the era (Myers, 1997).

3. We examined the samples across cities and years finding no significant differences on race, age, gender, religion, homeownership, employment, occupation, and education.

4. The original surveys only differentiate between those currently working outside the home and those who are not. Thus, the ‘not employed’ category includes unemployed, retired, students, and homemakers. While varied, none of these involves regular interactions in employment settings where interpretive conversations might occur.

5. For additional detail regarding the sample, survey content, and methods, see the appendices.

6. Early polls suggest an omnibus shift toward believing violent protest was justified – with substantial gaps between races (CNN, 2020).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported in part by grants from the Faculty Research Program, University of Notre Dame; the Franics M. Kobayashi Research Travel Program, University of Notre Dame; and the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, University of Notre Dame.

Notes on contributors

Matthew Baggetta

Matthew Baggetta is Associate Professor of Public & Environmental Affairs at the Paul H. O’Neill School of Public & Environmental Affairs at Indiana University. He studies civil society organizations (CSOs), civic engagement, and social movements and recently developed a systematic social observation tool for collecting quantitative, observational data from CSO meetings, events, and activities. His work appears in the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, and Sociological Methods and Research. He holds a PhD in Sociology from Harvard University.

Daniel J. Myers is Professor of Sociology at American University in Washington, DC. Previously provost at American and Marquette University, his current work focuses on access and persistence in higher education contexts, the determinants of gender-related attitudes, and race and unrest in U.S. urban contexts.