Kirjahaku

In June 1964, over 1,000 volunteers - most of them white, northern college students - arrived in Mississippi to campaign for black enfranchisement and teach at `freedom schools' as part of the Freedom Summer campaign organized by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. Within 10 days, three were murdered; by summer's end, another had died and hundreds more had endured bombings, beatings, and arrests. This is the first book to gauge the impact of Freedom Summer on the project volunteers and the period we now call the `turbulent 60s'.

In this sociological work, Doug McAdam presents a political-process model that explains the rise and decline of the black protest movement in the United States. Moving from theoretical concerns to empirical analysis, he focuses on the crucial role of three institutions that foster protest: black churches, black colleges and Southern chapters of the NAACP. He concludes that political opportunities, a heightened sense of political efficacy, and the development of these three institutions played a central role in shaping the civil rights movement. In his introduction, McAdam revisits the civil rights struggle in light of recent scholarship on social movement origins and collective action.