Mobilizing Public Opinion: Black Insurgency and Racial Attitudes in the Civil Rights Era (review)

Social movements are predicated on the belief that they can change public opinion. Yet the reigning orthodoxy in public opinion literature maintains that it is not movement activists but elites who shape public views on issues. In his engaging book on Americans' racial attitudes in the civil rights era, Taeku Lee shows why the orthodoxy is wrong. During periods of insurgency, movement "counterpublics" can effectively activate opinions among wide swathes of the public that are at variance with those of elites, Lee argues. From the 1950s on, Emmett Till and Fannie Lou Hamer were as influential in shaping Americans' racial attitudes about civil rights as were President John F. Kennedy and the Supreme Court.

Lee's analysis of survey data in 1954 and 1960 delivers a first blow to elite-centered theories of public opinion formation. Well before the heyday of the movement, respondents' views of federal policies supporting fair housing and employment and school desegregation were influenced more strongly by their identification with (nonelite) movement groups than by their (elite) partisan identifications (with the exception of southern whites, for whom, before 1964, the Democratic party could be seen as safely representing their interests). But Lee is unsatisfied with survey data, which, he says, tend to obscure the interactive and dynamic character of public opinion. He turns instead to a novel source of information on Americans' racial attitudes: Americans' letters to the president. Although letter writers generally skew upward demographically, their views on race during this period were broadly consistent with those measured in opinion polls. The difference, and what makes letters worth studying, is that letter writers' opinions are coherent and proactive rather than reactive to categories defined by the pollster.

Lee's analysis of 6,765 letters about racial issues sent to Presidents Harry Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson between 1948 and 1965 (a random sample of the estimated 176,550 letters received by the White House during that period) confirms his "movement-initiated, elite-interactive" model. Peaks in constituent mail occurred not in response to elite-initiated events like the 1964 presidential election or the 1965 Voting Rights Act but in response to confrontations between activists and segregationists in Montgomery (1955), Birmingham (1963), and Selma (1965). While African American writers were early and persistent correspondents, petitioning presidents from Truman on for governmental action on civil rights, northern white correspondents were galvanized in the early 1950s and then again in the 1960s by reports of police brutality against movement activists. Southern whites, for their part, responded to elite-initiated events before the surge in grassroots protest — castigating Truman for his 1948 speech in favor of civil rights and protesting the 1954 Brown decision — but increasingly responded to movement-initiated events.

The form and content of public opinion was also structured along racial lines. Where most letters from whites came from private citizens, almost half of the correspondence from African Americans in the 1940s and 1950s came from organizations — churches, women's groups, and colleges, as well as chapters of the NAACP and other advocacy groups. That the proportion of individual and mass mailings increased only in the 1960s suggests that the institutions making up a black counterpublic were responsible for activating black public opinion — a finding in tune with studies that have pointed to the centrality of indigenous nonpolitical institutions in insurgency.

What did the letter writers say? African Americans early on set the terms of debate, pressing forcefully in their letters for racial group interests, invoking the gap between cherished political ideals and racial realities, and appealing to universalistic rights. Northern whites echoed those frames and also invoked America's precarious standing in the court of world opinion. Southern white letter writers were defensive and reactive, responding to the movement rather than to federal policy and seeking to discredit activists as...