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Racial Differences in Protest Participation*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Peter K. Eisinger
Peter K. Eisinger*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Abstract

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Understanding of the phenomenon of political protest has been inhibited by the view that protest is fundamentally extraordinary or unconventional in character and that those who use it do so because they lack the resources to employ more conventional means of political expression. This article challenges this unqualified view by examining survey data based on black and white samples from the city of Milwaukee which relate to racial attitudes toward protest, the social characteristics of protest participants, and to the uses and organization of protest in the two racial communities. The analysis reveals widespread support for protest in the black community in contrast to the general antipathy found among whites. Both black and white protesters are found to be socioeconomically better-off than nonprotesters in their respective racial communities, but a variety of indicators suggest that black protesters are more integrated and typical members of their community than white protesters are of theirs. Data on the uses and organization of protest show that it has become an institutionalized feature of the black pursuit of urban politics in Milwaukee in contrast to its generally ad hoc and less frequent role for whites.

We may conclude from all this that protest represents a widely accepted, integral part of black politics in the city, while for whites protest is indeed unconventional, a violation of dominant social norms. This conclusion is used as a basis for speculating on the relationship of protest participation to the possession of social resources and on the capacity of social resources to offset the costs incurred in the form of social disapproval for violating white norms against protest behavior.

Type
Articles
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 68 , Issue 2 , June 1974 , pp. 592 - 606
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1974

Footnotes

*

This research was made possible by a grant from the Government and Legal Processes Committee of the Social Science Research Council and by funds granted by the Office of Economic Opportunity to the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin. I wish to thank Floyd Stoner for his assistance in processing the data. I am also grateful to Paul Schumaker, Murray Edelman, Alan Rosenbaum, and Joel Grossman for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper. The conclusions are the sole responsibility of the author.

References

1 Skolnick, Jerome, The Politics of Protest (New York: Ballantine, 1969) p. 22 Google Scholar.

2 Lester Milbrath has written, for example, that protest demonstrations are “by definition, extraordinary rather than normal.” Political Participation (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1965), p. 27 Google Scholar. And Michael Lewis argues that one of the common defining threads which characterize various sorts of demonstrative political manifestations is their proclivity to go “beyond the constraints of the institutionalized political process.” “The Negro Protest in Urban America (1968),” in Protest, Reform and Revolt, ed. Gusfield, Joseph, (New York: John Wiley, 1970), p. 151 Google Scholar.

3 The black population of Milwaukee numbered 105,000 in 1970, or 14.7 per cent of the total. This proportion of blacks is not especially small for cities of this size. Milwaukee falls among the second ten largest cities in the country. The average percentage of blacks in these cities is 20.7. The percentages of blacks in Boston (16.3), San Francisco (13.4), and Indianapolis (18.0), all of which cities fall in the second ten largest group, compare most favorably with Milwaukee.

4 Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1968), pp. 158–159 Google Scholar.

5 Eisinger, Peter K., “The Conditions of Protest Behavior in American Cities,” The American Political Science Review, 67 (03 1973), 11–28 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 James Q. Wilson was one of the first to characterize protest as a bargaining process in these terms. “The Strategy of Protest: Problems of Negro Civic Action,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, 3 (09 1961), 291–303 Google Scholar.

7 See the discussion of this point in Turner, Ralph, “The Public Perception of Protest,” American Sociological Review, 34 (12 1969), 815–831, at p. 820CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

8 Eisinger, pp. 13–14; see also Nieburg, H. L., “The Threat of Violence and Social Change,” American Political Science Review, 56 (12 1962), 865–873, at p. 872CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 These data are cited in Etzioni, Amitai, Demonstration Democracy (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1970), p. 10 Google Scholar.

10 Brink, William and Harris, Louis, Black and White: A Study of Racial Attitudes Today (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), p. 222 Google Scholar.

11 Etzioni, p. 10.

12 Olsen, Marvin, “Perceived Legitimacy of Social Protest Actions,” Social Problems, 15 (Winter, 1968), p. 299 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Other sources of data showing similar attitudes toward protest may be found in Skolnick, p. 22–23; and Erskine, Hazel, “The Polls: Demonstrations and Race Riots,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 31 (Winter 1967–1968), 655–677 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Campbell, Angus, White Attitudes Toward Black People (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, 1971), p. 139 Google Scholar.

14 This finding seems consistent with the observations concerning widespread black support or at least sympathy for black rioters. Matthew Holden has written in this regard that:

in addition to people accustomed to violating the law or being in trouble with the police—whose participation in riots could be easily predicted—there was a substantial reservoir of more respectable black people who were at least sentimentally friendly to violence. They did not perceive how many black people—hard-working, tax-paying, and responsible—would permit themselves to ‘get caught up in the situation,’ let alone how many more would say ‘I wouldn't do it myself, but I can understand those who do.’

Politics of the Black “Nation” (New York: Chandler, 1973), p. 77 Google Scholar. Empirical evidence to this effect surfaced first in the Watts riot studies: David O. Sears and T. M. Tomlinson found in their study of attitudes after that riot that the major opinion cleavage in interpreting the disturbances was between the races, not between black rioters and black nonrioters. “Riot Ideology in Los Angeles: A Study of Negro Attitudes,” Social Science Quarterly, 49 (12 1968), p. 485–503 Google Scholar.

15 As I explain in greater detail later on, protesters are those who answered affirmatively when asked in the interview whether they had ever taken part in a sit-in, demonstration, mass march, Or other type of protest action. The category “protester” does not include those who merely engaged in union picketing on strike.

16 Twenty-two of the 35 white protesters disagreed with the statement; only three agreed.

17 On the social backgrounds of white student protesters see Westby, David and Braungart, Richard, “Class and Politics in the Family Backgrounds of Student Political Activists,” American Sociological Review, 31 (10 1966), 690–692 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Seymour Martin Lipset offers a thorough summary of the literature which arrives at these findings in “The Activists: A Profile,” in Confrontation, ed. Bell, Daniel and Kristol, Irving (New York: Basic Books, 1969), pp. 45–57 Google Scholar. On black student protest participation see Matthews, Donald R. and Prothro, James W., Negroes and the New Southern Politics (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966), p. 418 Google Scholar; and Orbell, John M., “Protest Participation Among Southern Negro College Students,” American Political Science Review, 61 (06, 1967) 446–456, at 450CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Clarke, James W. and Egan, Joseph, “Social and Political Dimensions of Protest Activity,” Journal of Politics, 34 (05 1972), 500–523 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Wilson uses the term “powerless.” Michael Lipsky speaks of the “relatively powerless.” Lipsky, , “Protest as a Political Resource,” American Political Science Review, 62 (12 1968), p. 1144 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Wilson, , “Strategy of Protest,” p. 292 Google Scholar.

21 Lipsky, p. 1144. Lipsky does not enumerate those resources but relies on Robert Dahl's list of resources in “The Analysis of Influence in Local Communities,” in Social Science and Community Action, ed. Adrian, Charles R. (East Lansing, Michigan: Institute for Community Development and Resources, 1960), p. 32 Google Scholar.

22 Wilson has written, for example, that “Protest actions involving such tactics as mass meetings, picketing, boycotts, and strikes rarely find enthusiastic participants among upper-income and higher status individuals.” “Strategy of Protest,” p. 206. Etzioni has argued that it is the “underclasses,” socioeconomically speaking, which “have a special affinity for protest.” Demonstration Democracy, p. 6. That blacks as a group, regardless of the objective social status of any given black individual, may comprise a racial “under-class” is a possibility I shall consider later.

23 Protest participation was initially treated both as a dichotomous dummy variable (protest/no protest) and as a continuous variable (frequency of protest participation, ranging from 0 to 10 or more). Fifty-six of the 87 protesters had taken part in more than one protest. The relationships between protest participation, treated as a dummy variable, and socioeconomic and demographic indicators are, for the moment, more important, since the object of the analysis is to distinguish those who take part in such activity from those who never do. The relationships are uniformly slightly stronger than when protest is treated as a continuous variable. Pearson's r coefficients are compared in the table below when the protest variable is treated differently.

24 Robert Alford and Harry Scoble offer a discussion of organizational membership as a political resource in “Sources of Local Political Involvement,” American Political Science Review, 62 (12 1968), 1192–1206 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Goodman and Kruskal's gamma is a nonparametric measure of association for ordinal grouped data. Occupational categories, based on the U.S. Census classification, are ordinally ranked. For a discussion of gamma, see Hays, William L., Statistics for Psychologists (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), p. 655 Google Scholar.

26 The standard deviation for black income is 87, for white income 166. For black education the standard deviation is 99, for white 183. This simply indicates that the dispersion around the mean for blacks is lower, signifying a greater probability that black protesters' means will fall closer to the sample mean.

27 Black protesters have lived in their neighborhoods an average of 5.4 years compared to 4.5 for black non-protesters. For whites the figures are 6.5 and 11.3 respectively.

28 Pearson r coefficients for the relationship between length of residence and age are .53 for blacks and .74 for whites.

29 A study of protest incidents in 43 American cities indicates that protest is a more effective tool for gaining access to public officials than it is for gaining substantive demands. Protesters met with their target to present their demands in 58 per cent of the 120 cases of protest, but they gained concessions in only 15 per cent of the protests. Eisinger, , “The Conditions of Protest Behavior in American Cities,” p. 17 Google Scholar.

30 It is appropriate to recall here that only 11 per cent of the white sample had ever taken part in protest, while 21 per cent of the black sample had done so.

31 Eisinger, pp. 16–17.

32 See for example Jennings, M. Kent and Zeigler, Harmon, “The Salience of American State Politics,” American Political Science Review, 64 (06, 1970), 523–535 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Eisinger, p. 17.

34 Gary Marx published data documenting black support for protest as early as 1967. Protest and Prejudice (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), pp. 15–17 Google Scholar.

35 Merton discusses political nonconformity and the “almost inevitable punishment” by the group which results. Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1957), p. 365 Google Scholar.

36 While this proposition remains here in hypothetical form, there is evidence that those with resources such as education and a prestigious occupation value those resources more than those without them. There is also some slight evidence that people without such resources (i.e., the working class) compared to those with such resources are more likely to feel dependent on others' opinions than on their own capabilities for economic advancement. Hyman, Herbert, “The Value Systems of Different Classes: A Social Psychological Contribution to the Analysis of Stratification,” in Class, Status and Power, ed. Bendix, Reinhard and Lipset, Seymour Martin, 1st ed. (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1953), pp. 430, 434, 437 Google Scholar. These findings do not suggest that social resources may compensate for the loss of social approval, but they indicate that protesters, because they are better-off, may be more independent of the opinions of others and more personally satisfied with the status resources they control than are those who are both nonprotesters and less well off.

37 Lipsky, pp. 1145–1146.