The Civil Rights Movement's Struggle for Fair Employment: A "Dramatic Events-Conventional Politics" Model

This study seeks to explain the adoption of civil rights legislation across periods of insurgency as well as relative quiescence. The historically grounded thesis I advance argues that within a context of public apathy, dramatic events generate the "first wave" of civil rights concessions. These early policy successes, however, set in motion a sequence of events that both diminish the role of dramatic events and heighten the role of conventional political processes in subsequent "second wave" legislation. Time-series analyses of equal employment legislation are consistent with this "dramatic events-conventional politics" approach. I find that black protests and segregationist violence prompted legislation up to the breakthrough 1964 act but that public opinion played the dominant role up to the passage of the landmark 1972 act.