Stories of Change: Narrative and Social Movements

2. Plotting Protest: Mobilizing Stories in the 1960 Student Sit-Ins

TWO Plotting Protest Mobilizing Stories in the 1960 Student Sit-Ins FRANCESCA POLLETTA On February 1, 1960, four black students from Greensboro Agricultural and Technical College purchased a few items in the downtown Woolworth and then sat down at its whites-only lunch counter. Told that they could not be served, they remained seated until the store closed. They resumed the sit-in the next day and the next, joined by other students from A&T and then from surrounding colleges. The Greensboro sit-in touched off a wave of similar demonstrations around the South. By the end of February, the sit-ins had spread to thirty cities in seven states; by the end of March, fifty-four cities in nine states. By mid-April, fifty thousand people had taken part in sit-ins (Carson 1981; Chafe 1980). Students described the demonstrations as unplanned, impulsive, “like a fever” and, over and over again, as “spontaneous.” Nearly forty years later, we know, as did the students themselves, that there was a good deal of strategic planning behind the “spontaneous” demonstrations (Morris 1984)—just as we know that Rosa Parks was a longtime NAACP activist before she refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus and precipitated the Montgomery bus boycott (Garrow 1988), and just as we know that Betty Friedan was a labor organizer concerned with issues of race and gender long before she wrote her account of awakening from the somnolent myth of feminine domesticity (Horowitz 1996). Why, then, these “myths of immaculate conception” (Taylor 1989)? Why do activists so often represent protest as sprung from the head of Zeus, ignoring or 31 sometimes downright denying the planning that preceded it? Why do they cast themselves not as strategic actors but as swept up by forces over which they have no control? And why do they do so even in communications with each other, where one would rather expect testimonies to the power of calculated and coordinated action? In an earlier examination of students’ contemporaneous accounts of the 1960 sit-ins as they were occurring, I found that students told stories of the sit-ins—remarkably similar stories—and that the sit-ins’ spontaneity figured in many of them (Polletta 1998a). Spontaneity meant not a lack of planning, however, but independence from adult control, moral urgency, and action by local initiative rather than bureaucratic maneuver. Students narrated the sit-ins to make sense of them. But since narratives simultaneously explain and evaluate, account for the past and project a future, students were also constituting an action-compelling collective identity as they narrated it. In addition, the failure of the sit-in stories to fully explain the sit-ins endowed them with mobilizing power. The word “spontaneity” means both voluntary and instinctual (involuntary)—contradictory meanings contained in the same word. In the sit-in narrative, “spontaneity” functioned as a kind of narrative ellipsis in which the movement’s “beginning ” occurred and the nonnarratable shift from observer to participant took place. Drawing on the narrative theory of De Man (1979) and Miller (1990), I argued that the sit-in story could not fix the motivation for participation (just as no story can fix origins, whether of humankind or of collective action), and so required its own retelling. And since the story was a true one, retelling it required reenacting the events it related. The sit-in story’s mobilizing power thus lay in its engaging inability to specify the beginning of mobilization. Analyzing movement narratives responded, I argued, to an important gap in theories of movement “framing”: their neglect of the discursive processes that occur before formal movement organizations with clear recruitment objectives have been established. In this chapter, I return to the 1960 student sit-ins and draw on additional narrative materials in order to respond to two additional weaknesses in framing theory. One is its neglect of emotions in protest. Recruitment depends on appealing to people’s good sense but also to their passions—if the two can even be separated (Barker, forthcoming). I argue that stories are better equipped than other discursive forms to elicit emotions and, just as important, to attach those emotions to particular courses of action and targets. In the sit-in narratives, black students’ “apathy” was reinterpreted as the repression of political aspirations, and thus trans32 POLLETTA formed into a motivation for action. Students were not apathetic; they were “tired of waiting” for the...