Theor Soc
DOI 10.1007/s11186-012-9178-4
Mobilizing ethnic competition
David Cunningham
# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012
Abstract Ethnic competition theory provides a powerful explanation for ethnic
conflict, by demonstrating how variation in ethnic mobilization relates to intergroup
struggles over scarce resources. However, the tendency to capture such relationships
at the aggregate level, through macro-level proxies of intergroup competition, offers
little insight into the processes through which ethnic grievances mobilize into contentious action. This article integrates insights from the social movements literature to
address how competitive contexts crystallize into broader conflicts. Drawing on data
from the civil rights-era Ku Klux Klan—perhaps the quintessential case of contentious ethnic organization in the United States—the analysis focuses on the ways in
which meso-level arrangements mediate the relationship between overarching competitive contexts and ethnic conflict. Results of a paired comparative analysis of KKK
mobilization in Greensboro and Charlotte demonstrate that social and spatial relations
within each city shaped the contours of perceived competition and subsequent ethnic
organization in ways that were not always predictable through observation of conventional proxies of competition.
Keywords Social movements . Intergroup conflict . Comparative-historical
methods . Threat . Civil rights . Ku Klux Klan
Ethnic competition theory provides a powerful explanation for intergroup conflict,
ranging from riots, to church burnings, to voting behavior, to hate group mobilization.
Rooting contention in struggles over resources, the theory postulates that ethnic
solidarities intensify when members of multiple groups occupy similar positions—
most often associated with overlapping labor market niches—and vie for scarce
rewards. The basis for conflict lies in the threat posed by competing groups, for
whom ethnic identities take on enhanced salience in competitive contexts.
D. Cunningham (*)
Department of Sociology, Brandeis University, MS 071, Waltham, MA 02454-9110, USA
e-mail: dcunning@brandeis.edu
Theor Soc
Ethnic competition explanations are by nature contextual, as they posit that
contention among individuals and groups is in fact shaped by environments that lend
themselves to perceived or actual contests over available resources. While related
models are thus concerned with how competitive settings shape perceptions and
attributions of threat and ultimately spur group conflict, conventional analyses have
tended to operate at the aggregate level, demonstrating how variation in ethnic
mobilization is related to overall levels of ethnic heterogeneity or labor market
overlap in nations, states, or municipalities (see, e.g., Brown and Boswell 1997;
Mousseau 2001; Myers 1997; Olzak 1989; Van Dyke and Soule 2002; Wilkes and
Okamoto 2002). Such relationships confirm the power of environments marked by
competition for scarce resources, but they are limited in their ability to interrogate the
ways in which broad contexts produce group conflict.
Further, while competitive dynamics are most striking when they result in sustained mobilization and protracted conflict (Olzak 1992), ethnic competition explanations offer little insight into the processes through which ethnic grievances translate
into mobilized contention, a longstanding concern of social movement theorists
(McAdam 1999; Tarrow 1998). As a result, competition models are unable to tease
out the direct versus indirect effects of competition—i.e., whether associated conflicts
are initiated by individuals who are themselves in direct competition for resources, or
alternately whether they emerge in a more diffuse manner in areas marked by a
generalized competitive climate. They also fail to explain how the presence of ethnic
conflict is shaped by the social and spatial organization of associations, which
mediate the coalescence of grievances within communities and thus serve as crucial
mobilization venues (Cunningham and Phillips 2007). In this sense, the emphasis on
meso-level associational settings in the mediated competition approach advanced
here does not represent a call to be still more precise in one’s choice of contextual
unit, but rather a theoretically-distinct effort to examine how social settings affect
perceptions of inter-group competition. Such perceptions likely have much to do with
the presence of out-group members, but also with how those alters relate socially,
spatially, and culturally to available resources and mobility structures.
This article thus places attention squarely on how competitive contexts, through
the influence they exert on individuals and groups, crystallize into broader conflicts. I
begin with a critical review of ethnic competition theory and show how our understanding of the dynamics of ethnic competition has been limited by a pronounced
inattention to the ways in which contention emerges within broad competitive
environments. Drawing on data from the civil rights-era Ku Klux Klan (perhaps the
quintessential case of contentious ethnic organization in the United States1)—I
engage with existing research that explains how social location shapes the likelihood
1
Indeed, in this particular case “ethnic competition” and “ethnic conflict” might reasonably be seen as
euphemisms for vehement racism. The KKK was (and continues to be) a white supremacist organization,
and its resistance to civil rights advances during the 1960s was undergirded by a clear sense that African
Americans’ racial status precluded legitimate co-existence and competition with whites in economic,
political, and social spheres. In the Jim Crow South, such views were widely shared within the white
population, though the Klan’s willingness to defend militantly its constituents against the “threat” posed by
civil rights reforms was distinctively extreme. In this sense, “competition” becomes a primary mechanism
for the activation of organized racism.
Theor Soc
of particular individuals mobilizing in the presence of ethnic contention. Then,
building on related insights focused on relational contexts for mobilization, I show
how differences in the associational makeup of two demographically-similar communities in the Carolina Piedmont—Greensboro and Charlotte—explain significant
variation in the KKK’s ability to organize in each city. Through a comparative
analysis that emphasizes economic, educational, and residential patterns within each
city, I demonstrate how meso-level associational structures mediate the presence of
competition and the subsequent emergence of KKK mobilization, explaining outcomes not always predictable through examination of conventional proxies of
competition.
Theories of ethnic competition
Ethnic competition theory builds on Barth’s (1969) emphasis on the sociallyconstructed boundaries through which ethnic groups ascribe difference.
Competition, stemming from overlap in the economic or political activities of
multiple ethnic groups,2 becomes a key mechanism through which particular boundaries are reinforced. This enhanced salience of ethnic divisions, in turn, can contribute
to the emergence of ethnic conflict (Hannan 1979; Olzak 1992). Both ethnic
boundary-formation and emergent conflicts are generally suppressed when groups
inhabit separate, spatially-distant, or complementary niches in labor markets and
political systems. But when competing groups occupy similar positions, thus exhibiting considerable niche overlap, ethnic solidarities intensify and contribute to increased competition-based conflict (Barth 1969; Soule and Van Dyke 1999).
Competition conventionally is conceptualized at the macro-level, through indices
of county/state/national conditions hypothesized to breed competition among ethnic
sub-groups. The presence of out-group members, for instance, or the scarcity of
economic or political resources within municipal units, commonly serve as macroproxies of inter-group competition (Brown and Boswell 1997; Schneider 2008; Soule
and Van Dyke 1999). Other research more precisely focuses on how threats emerge in
highly-competitive economic or political niches, defined by inter-ethnic overlap in
specific labor market sectors or increasing political representation by ethnic minorities (Cunningham and Phillips 2007; Medrano 1994; Olzak 1989, 1992; Van Dyke
and Soule 2002).
This contextual logic holds even for studies that employ narrower units of analysis.
For instance, Bergeson and Herman (1998, p. 39) argue strongly for defining units by
their degree of salience to relevant groups. Their investigation of the 1992 Los
Angeles riots thus employs census tract data, rather than more typical city-level
aggregations, to match previous research showing that “people tend to engage in riot
activity close to where they live.” Tolsma et al. (2008), reacting to inconsistencies in
the competition literature, note that outcomes are conditioned by “the unit of
2
Note that, while ethnic identities have been seen as primary determinants of group conflict (especially in
labor settings), the general competition logic outlined here can extend to other bases for collective identity:
gender, sexuality, nationality, and so on.
Theor Soc
measurement of the locale” and focus on the neighborhood level, where local political
decisions are forged and residents’ social networks are most dense. Still, these more
precise analyses maintain the usual logic of relating competition to the overall
composition of the unit in question, and do not address how the broad makeup of
particular locales is reflected in social life, through the organization of associations—
i.e., schools, businesses, religious centers, civic organizations, and so on. Similarly,
efforts to link individual locations within these settings to propensities to engage in
ethnic conflict (Aguirre et al. 1989; Coenders and Scheepers 2008; Scheepers et al.
2002; Tolsma et al. 2008) generally focus on rough proxies of competition—such as
whether persons hold a “low social status” or reside in an urban area (Schneider 2008,
p. 55)—rather than capture precisely the degree to which individuals overlap economically, politically, and socially with ethnic others.
Regardless of the unit of analysis employed, there is broad implicit agreement that
contextual conditions translate into ethnic conflict or exclusion through their impact
on individual grievances, i.e., people’s perceptions that they are threatened by
members of competing ethnic groups. While the relationship between contexts and
grievances is often assumed rather than demonstrated, it is clear that competitive
contexts do not translate into ethnic grievances in a straightforward and invariant
manner. Belanger and Pinard (1991) have found that active contention emerges in
settings conducive to inter-group competition, but only when associated conditions
are perceived as unfair. Such perceptions, they observe, do not uniformly follow from
the presence of competition for finite resources. Soule and Van Dyke (1999) likewise
note the possibility of mismatch between “objective” levels of competition and
individuals’ sense of perceived threats. Scheepers et al. (2002), employing a combination of demographic and individual survey data, show that socioeconomic conditions and residents’ perceptions interact to increase the likelihood of individuals’
support of ethnic exclusionism. Bobo and Hutchings (1996) focus on the processes
that underlie such interactions, by extending Blumer’s theory of group position to
highlight the historically, materially, and socially contingent manner in which
“threats” come to be perceived and encoded as inter-group prejudice.
Accounting for mechanisms that mediate relationships among structural contexts,
individual perceptions, and contentious outcomes seems especially important when
conflicts involve sustained mobilization. As these settings require more from aggrieved individuals than an expression of anti-ethnic attitudes or electoral support for
in-group candidates, they should more durably reflect competitive settings. The fact
that grievances are marshaled toward collective ends also points to processes welldocumented in the social movements literature, involving the mobilization of resources required for organizational coordination and the “frame alignment processes” that
channel grievances toward movement action (Edwards and McCarthy 2004;
McAdam 1999; Benford and Snow 2000; Okamoto 2003; Tarrow 1998).
While the majority of existing applications of ethnic competition theory focus on
exclusionary attitudes or discrete actions, Olzak et al. (1994), Cunningham and
Phillips (2007), and Van Dyke and Soule (2002) deal with these sorts of durable
movement organizations and protest campaigns. The latter two of these studies
explicitly seek to integrate competition and social movement approaches to ethnic
contention. For Van Dyke and Soule, the key insight is for social movement theorists,
who frequently discount or neglect entirely the mobilizing power of grievances.
Theor Soc
“Theories of social movement emergence,” they assert, “should include structural
social change and the threat it engenders as important mobilizing conditions”
(p. 513). Cunningham and Phillips seek to demonstrate the converse, applying
insights related to social movement diffusion to threat-based ethnic contention. In
particular, they show that the diffusion of “reactive mobilization,” strongest in
counties that are most closely tied in a social and economic sense, point to the fact
that threats are necessarily constructed and mobilized through existing social channels. In each case, however, these analyses adopt the established logic, focused on
how mobilization is patterned across large municipal units (SMSAs and states), and
thus are not concerned with the mobilization processes that follow from the imposition of competition-induced threats.
To interrogate these mediating processes, I examine a case of sustained ethnic
mobilization, associated with the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina between
1964 and 1966. Specifically, I examine why the KKK had uneven success mobilizing
workers across the North Carolina Piedmont, a region marked by a moderate, and
relatively homogeneous, degree of racial competition in the labor market. Through a
comparative focus on Greensboro, a Klan hotbed, and Charlotte, where the KKK was
largely rebuffed, I demonstrate how differences in the associational makeup of these
communities shaped the degree to which racial overlap in the labor force translated into
resonant anxieties over competition in the face of looming desegregation policies.
The rise of the civil rights-era United Klans of America
To assess how the dynamics of competition are shaped within communities, I draw on
data associated with the United Klans of America (UKA), the pre-eminent Ku Klux Klan
organization of the civil rights era. Formed in 1961, in the wake of the Brown school
desegregation decision and burgeoning civil rights challenges, the UKA quickly
became by far the largest of the 17 KKK organizations identified by the FBI during
the mid-1960s (Cunningham 2004). Led by its “Imperial Wizard” Robert Shelton, the
group was headquartered in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, but established hundreds of
affiliated chapters (referred to as “klaverns”) across the South. The group’s greatest
recruiting successes occurred in North Carolina. By 1965, the Tar Heel State boasted
more than 12,000 dues-paying members, a number that exceeded the UKA’s membership in the rest of the South combined (US House of Representatives 1967).
Similar to the Citizens’ Councils and the many self-styled segregationist organizations that emerged in particular states or local communities during this period, the
UKA sought to maintain the racist status quo in the South, embodied by Jim Crowstyle segregation. Couching their defense of white supremacy as a form of “Christian
patriotism” in the face of a growing challenge by communist-influenced civil rights
organizations and the federal government, Klan members adopted a highly militant
anti-civil rights stance (Chalmers 1981; Rich 1988). Most nights of the year, the UKA
would host a rally somewhere in North Carolina, featuring refreshments, souvenirs,
raffles, music, and prayer as a prelude to a two-hour slate of fiery segregationist
speeches by Klan leaders. The night would climax with the burning of a thirty-toseventy foot tall cross, which robed Klan members ceremoniously encircled while
“The Old Rugged Cross” played over the sound system (Cunningham 2008).
Theor Soc
By the end of 1965, tens of thousands of North Carolinians had attended these
rallies, with several thousand paying a ten dollar initiation fee—along with another
$15 for robes—to join one of the nearly 200 klaverns organizing throughout the state
(Williams 1964). Not surprisingly, this rapid upswing in Klan activity increasingly
drew the attention of the local media, which eagerly covered the Klan’s rallies, as well
as their periodic street walks (i.e., daytime marches by robed Klansmen and helmeted
members of the UKA “security guard”) and frequent attempts to intimidate black
residents or white liberals through cross burnings, beatings, and shotgun fire.
While these acts of violence tended to be perpetrated by a small militant core, the
broader membership engaged in a number of more above-board activities. Each
klavern held weekly meetings and encouraged attendance at rallies. Members paid
monthly dues and sponsored turkey shoots and fish fries on weekends. Many
klaverns organized parallel “Ladies Auxiliary Units” to support UKA social events
and pursue Klan-centered charitable works. The organization offered its own group
life insurance plan and also made forays into Klan versions of more formal ceremonies, including church services and weddings (Cunningham 2008). For most members, UKA membership required a significant outlay of both time and material
resources.
Related earlier research on United Klans established that the uneven patterning of
the UKA’s mobilization across North Carolina’s 100 counties can be explained by the
differing degree to which desegregation posed a threat to the white supremacist status
quo. In particular, Klan presence was higher in areas characterized by threats posed
by demographic, economic, or political forms of racial competition—i.e., counties
with large African American populations, relatively high proportions of non-whites
employed in the manufacturing sector (where workplace competition was most
pronounced), and increasing NAACP activity.
Cunningham and Phillips (2007) marshaled evidence that Klan presence could be
explained more fully by considering these structural features alongside basic social
features of the counties targeted by the UKA’s mobilization efforts. Specifically,
controlling for racial competition, the level of Klan activity in any given county
exhibited a significant contagion pattern, with nearby UKA klaverns increasing the
likelihood of Klan presence. This contagion effect was most powerful in counties
with dense connections to regional social and economic networks, suggesting that the
diffusion of UKA activity was rooted in social processes as well as the co-presence of
racial competition for economic and political resources.
The diffuse nature of threats was also evident in the fact that, while the UKA was
strongest in counties characterized by overall levels of racial competition, the Klan’s
recruits were not disproportionately drawn from workplace or industry settings where
white and black workers were likely to compete for jobs (Cunningham, forthcoming).
Instead, perceptions of racial threat tended to spread widely within aggrieved groups,
echoing Blumer (1958) and Bobo and Hutchings’s (1996) argument that ethnic
antagonism emerges broadly within competitive contexts (see also Bonacich 1972;
Olzak et al. 1996). Further, as social movement theory would predict, Klan mobilization tended to occur among aggrieved individuals who were biographically available, or free from personal constraints that raise the costs and risks associated with
participation (McAdam 1986, 2003; Schussman and Soule 2005; Wiltfang and
McAdam 1991).
Theor Soc
Thus, mobilization was more likely when enabled and sustained both by personal
networks and individuals’ perceptions that they were free to act on racial grievances.
Some individuals sympathetic to UKA ideology, for instance, might shy away from
the organization for fear of losing their jobs. But others—small business-owners in
particular—possessed the autonomy to act on grievances shaped by their own
experiences and connections (see, e.g., Brown n.d., p. 13; Young 1968, p. 155;
Lambreth 1964; O’Daniel 1965). The fact that ethnic grievances were defined and
diffused through these sorts of relational patterns suggests that, at the community
level, certain institutional arrangements were more conducive to ethnic mobilizations
than others. The analysis here extends this idea, developing a comparative analysis of
two specific communities to explore how associational (or meso-level) processes
mediate competitive contexts and ethnic mobilizations.
Analytic approach
The analysis that follows focuses on UKA mobilization in and around two North
Carolina cities between 1964 and 1966. Employing a paired-case comparative analysis, I draw on a range of archival and secondary data to explain the pronounced
difference in Klan outcomes across areas that otherwise look roughly equivalent in
terms of conventional macro-level proxies of competition. The dependent variable is
the level of UKA organization in the home county of each city (note that Charlotte is
located in Mecklenburg County, and Greensboro in Guilford County), as captured by
the Klan’s presence and public appeal. While the secretive nature of much of the
UKA’s actions makes it impossible to measure directly the degree of contention
created by its presence, the appeal of a militant defense of white supremacy in each
city can be proxied by the group’s support base, both in terms of membership and
public engagement through rallies and other Klan events.
As Table 1 illustrates, Charlotte was largely insulated from the UKA, as the Klan
never managed to maintain more than one moderately-sized klavern in the city or in
other communities in Mecklenburg County. Greensboro, in contrast, was known as a
Klan hotbed, with five klaverns located within its city borders and another three units
in surrounding Guilford County (US House of Representatives 1967). Greensboro’s
rate of 3.82 UKA units per 100,000 white residents was more than nine times greater
than Charlotte’s rate of 0.42. Several of Greensboro’s klaverns had memberships that
exceeded 50, and UKA rallies held in the county typically attracted crowds of several
hundred (FBI 1966). Charlotte’s lone klavern, in contrast, averaged only 30 members
Table 1 KKK organization in Greensboro and Charlotte
Guilford Co. (Greensboro)
Mecklenburg Co. (Charlotte)
UKA klaverns (1964–1966)
8
1
Klaverns/white resident (x 100,000)
3.82
0.42
Average estimated membership per klavern
> 50
30
Average estimated rally attendance
375
< 100
Theor Soc
even during its peak, and a number of rallies held nearby were lackluster. The crowd
at a November 1966 event held in a field just north of Charlotte’s city limits
numbered only one hundred, and three separate rallies the following year failed even
to match that turnout (Adams 1966; FBI 1966; Raleigh News and Observer, 6
November 1965).
Each of these factors points to a pronounced difference in UKA presence and
support across the two cities. To explain these varying Klan outcomes, I focus on
“meso-level” factors, by which I mean the associational settings within local communities that operate beneath the “macro”-structural compositional characteristics
captured by conventional ethnic competition analyses. Examples of such meso-level
settings include associations such as schools, workplaces, civic organizations, and
other formal or otherwise commonly-recognized gathering places within communities. As spaces that enabled or insulated residents from interracial contact and served
as venues for the accrual of resources and status, formal (e.g., schools) and informal
(e.g., neighborhoods) associations served as settings where perceptions of inequity,
privilege, and competition were forged.
Thus, the analysis that follows emphasizes the spatial locations and social activities and functions of these spaces, particularly those that bear upon the construction
or maintenance of perceived inequities across groups. While conventional macroproxies of competition provide a baseline sense of the likelihood that white residents
saw civil rights policy as threatening to the racial status quo, the degree to which
sweeping civil rights-related changes would alter the economic, political, and social
landscape was shaped in part by how these associational structures served to enable
and to constrain the perceived opportunities of both white and black residents. The
presence of meso-level settings where civil rights reforms would significantly equalize opportunities across racial groups, I hypothesize, intensified white residents’
perceptions of racial threat and facilitated the reactive mobilization of groups like
the UKA.
Meso-level dynamics: comparing Greensboro and Charlotte
Located fewer than 100 miles apart in the central Carolina Piedmont, Charlotte and
Greensboro were North Carolina’s two largest cities during the 1960s. Both were
approximately 70 % white. Median annual family incomes were similar, both around
$5,500. Unemployment levels were comparable as well—for working-age males,
2.1 % in Charlotte and 1.7 % in Greensboro, with rates for black male workers
equivalent across the cities, at 2.8 % (US Bureau of the Census 1960; 1972). Their
economies were emblematic of the Piedmont region circa the mid-twentieth century,
characterized by a growing textile manufacturing and service sector workforce. Both
cities possessed large and well-organized civil rights infrastructures. The NAACP, by
far the most widespread and influential civil rights organization in North Carolina at
the time, was strong in both places; at the outset of the 1960s, Greensboro boasted
1,665 NAACP members, while Charlotte—the site of the state’s NAACP headquarters—had more than 1,800. At that time, no other North Carolina county possessed a
membership exceeding 1,000 (Gavins 1991; Meier and Bracey 1987). Despite these
similarities, Greensboro was a UKA hotbed, the most-highly mobilized community in
Theor Soc
central North Carolina, while Charlotte and other communities in surrounding
Mecklenburg County remained largely insulated from Klan incursions.
To account for this stark difference in KKK mobilization, I focus on the associational
makeup of both cities, to provide a sense of how conventional macro-level proxies of ethnic
competition (such as the proportion of African-American residents, or the degree of racial
overlap in the labor market) were refracted through the social and spatial organization of
associations in each community. The key idea is that structural modes of competition foster
ethnic mobilization only when perceived as sources of viable racial threat. The degree to
which such perceptions of competition emerged varied, dictated in large part by the ways in
which racial interactions occurred within each community’s associational spaces.
Specifically, I emphasize how rates of interracial contact in city neighborhoods, prevailing racial arrangements within each city’s central workplaces, and the level of racial inequity
in both secondary and collegiate education created a sense of racial vulnerability among
white Greensboro residents that significantly exceeded that in Charlotte. In the civil rightsera South, this heightened sense of threat enhanced the resonance of the appeals of racist
groups like the KKK. Table 2 summarizes the measures emphasized in the discussion
that follows, showing how Greensboro and Charlotte compare in each case.
Both Charlotte and Greensboro were distinct from most North Carolina communities, with economies centered not on agriculture but instead on a mix of manufacturing and service work. In 1960, fewer than 3 % of workers in either city worked in
the agricultural sector, while more than half were employed in either the manufacturing or service workforce. Greensboro’s economy was more heavily tied to manufacturing, with 37.6 % of male workers employed in that sector, versus 22.8 % in
Charlotte. By 1967, that disparity had grown, with Greensboro workers nearly twice
as likely as those in Charlotte to be employed by manufacturing firms. The increased
predominance of manufacturing in Greensboro was counter-balanced by a higher
proportion of service workers in Charlotte. In that city 35.2 % of workers, versus
28.6 % in Greensboro, were employed in professional, technical, clerical, sales, or
other service fields. Among white collar workers, such inter-city differences were
even greater. Nearly 18 % of the Charlotte workforce was involved in white-collar
service work in 1967, versus only 12.8 % in Greensboro (Employment Security
Commission of North Carolina 1968; US Bureau of the Census 1963).
The different weighting of manufacturing and service work across the cities was
significant, given the distinct hiring practices associated with each sector. Both areas of
the workforce were highly segregated racially, though in different ways. Prior to 1960,
manufacturing plants were predominantly white spaces, with the overall proportion of
black workers hovering between 3 % and 4 %. While employers hired black workers in
increasing numbers over the ensuing decade, they remained confined almost entirely in
unskilled or semi-skilled positions that ensured their functional and physical separation
from higher-status white workers. By 1966, black manufacturing workers held only
0.6 % of North Carolina’s white collar positions, but comprised more than a third of the
industry’s lower-skilled operatives and laborers. While these positions were formally
divided by skill levels, in fact the majority of jobs were “semi-skilled,” requiring a level
of training possessed by large numbers of both black and white workers. Racial
segregation in manufacturing, then, was largely a product of higher-status jobs being
reserved for whites, a practice that became considerably more tenuous as the 1960s
wore on (Fulmer 1973; Rowan 1970).
Theor Soc
Table 2 Comparison of key structural & associational features in Greensboro & Charlotte
Guilford Co.
(Greensboro)
Mecklenburg Co.
(Charlotte)
Total population
246,520
272,111
Proportion nonwhite residents
20.9
24.6
Median family income
5,417
5,632
Nonwhite/white income
0.53
0.46
Overall unemployment rate (rate for black workers in parentheses)
1.7 (2.8)
2.1 (2.8)
Number of NAACP members (1959)
1,665
1,810
Median years of education (for men 25 and over)
9.8
11.4
Ratio of black/white years of education (1960)a
0.73
0.63
% of black residents over 25 with high school or greater
education (1960)a
32.0
20.9
% of black residents over 25 with 4 or more years of
college (1960)a
9.8
4.8
Number of black students at colleges (1964)b
3,818
1,048
Percent of enrolled black college students from local or
adjacent counties (1968)b
23.4
12.7
% employed in manufacturing (1960)
37.6
22.8
““(1967)d
51.7
26.7
% employed in service (1960)
28.6
35.2
% employed in white collar service (1967)d
12.8
17.8
for SMSA (1960)
66.9
75.6
for central city (1960)
84.0
87.1
Degree of segregation (index of dissimilarity)c:
All figures from U.S. Census (1960; 1972), except:
a
Bullard and Stith (1974)
b
NC Board of Education (1969)
c
Van Valey et al. (1977)
d
Employment Security Commission of NC (1968)
Service-sector work, in contrast, tended to be segmented into high- and low- skilled
positions that required significantly different levels of education and training. The vast
majority of positions in banking and insurance industries, for instance, were held by
white workers, with African Americans typically employed in low-skill service jobs.
Only 5 % of Charlotte’s clerical and sales workers were black, and African Americans
made up an even smaller percentage of managerial, professional, and technical workers.
Fewer than 2 % of the city’s clerical positions were held by black women, who were
overwhelmingly employed as domestic servants. A similarly high percentage of black
men worked as laborers, janitors, or in unskilled or semi-skilled service or craft positions
and were almost entirely absent from management, professional, and sales positions (US
Bureau of the Census 1963; Employment Security Commission of North Carolina
1968). The result was that black workers occupied the bottom end of a segmented
labor market, which effectively precluded racial competition for the majority of
positions. Unlike the manufacturing sector, where black and white workers were
Theor Soc
frequently employed in the same plants, possessing similar training and separated
primarily by informal practices that reserved most desirable jobs for whites, white
privilege in the service sector was both deep-seated and durable in the face of civil
rights legislation (Hanchett 1998; Leach 1976).
To the extent that segregation in manufacturing, to a greater degree than service work,
required the maintenance of informal racist practices that reserved high-status positions for
whites, workers in that sector felt a more acute sense of racial threat as civil rights
challenges mounted. Greensboro possessed a significantly larger manufacturing sector
than Charlotte’s service-centered economy, a fact that itself facilitated the UKA’s
Greensboro-area recruiting.3 But these economic distinctions were reinforced and
exacerbated by educational and residential patterns in each city.
Greensboro was home to an exceptionally large skilled black workforce, in part
because of the presence of two black colleges: North Carolina A&T and Bennett
College. One of the state’s two land grant colleges, A&T enrolled more than 3,000
students by the 1960s. Bennett College, a Methodist black women’s school, had since
the 1920s grown steadily, building a national reputation both for academic excellence
and as a strong force for advancement in the city’s black community (Brown 1961;
Chafe 1980). Importantly, both schools were located less than a mile from the city’s
center and main business district, which provided local business owners—especially
those in small establishments who were freer to stretch racial norms without attracting
broad attention (Chafe 1980)—with easy access to a large pool of young black
workers with considerable skills. This labor resource was especially appealing to at
least some black employers when the labor market tightened, and the fact that A&T
offered high-quality training in a range of technical fields ensured that a significant
stream of students possessed the skills required to fill machinist, draftsman, and other
positions for which candidates were chronically in short supply.4
3
Note that deindustrialization, as captured primarily by the outmigration of manufacturing jobs, would
shift this calculus in two contrasting ways. On one hand, fewer available manufacturing positions would
create more acute competition for a smaller number of those jobs. At the same time, such changes would
reduce differences in workforce composition across the two cities, as Greensboro’s traditional industrial
base shifted toward the sorts of service industries that were increasingly predominant in Charlotte. While
such processes are obviously salient, they emerged in North Carolina in the decades following the KKK’s
rise and fall (indeed, according to US Census data, the overall manufacturing sector grew by more than
22,000 jobs in Greensboro and Charlotte between 1960 and 1980). During this later period, increasing
ethnic diversity and related emergent patterns of occupational segregation within the overall workforce
would also complicate the ethnic boundary-construction processes that affected the sorts of conflict
examined here (see, e.g., Okamoto 2003).
4
Files documenting the American Friends Service Committee’s Greensboro-based program on “merit
employment” regularly highlight the significance of the skilled labor force produced by both A&T and
Bennett. One AFSC staffer noted that trained machinists were “as scarce in this area as hen’s teeth.” A&T
dropouts who had completed their drafting requirements were frequently channeled by the AFSC to
openings in the drafting room of Western Electric, one of the city’s largest employers. When the merit
employment program yielded businesses willing to consider African American candidates to fill openings
as chemists, draftsmen, engineers, or clerical workers, A&T and Bennett became the primary conduits to
link to appropriately trained workers (see, e.g., Memos from Behrman to File, 24 January 1955 and 17 May
1955, AFSC Archives, Box: Southeastern Regional Office 1947–1956, Folder: Merit Employment
Program, Visits to Businesses, Southeastern Regional Office 1955; “Meeting with counselors at A&T
College,” AFSC archives, Box: American Section 1958, Folder: Southern Program—High Point R.O.
1958, Projects—Miscellaneous, Community Relations File; and Memo from Herbin to Fairfax, 3
September 1958, AFSC Archives, Box: Southeastern Regional Office 1957–1959, Folder: Merit
Employment Program, Visits with Community Leaders & Orgs., Southeastern Regional Office 1957).
Theor Soc
The impact of this student base on Greensboro’s workforce was especially pronounced. Not only did the two colleges enroll a sizable number of black students—in
1964, their combined enrollments totaled 3,818—but Greensboro’s black student
population drew significantly from local communities. Nearly a quarter of all students
attending A&T and Bennett hailed from Guilford or adjacent counties, an unusually
high figure for black colleges during this period (North Carolina Board of Higher
Education 1969). This local impact diffused further, to the city’s younger AfricanAmerican students, as both campuses hosted a range of programs that exposed
Greensboro’s high school students to advanced academic work.
Such programs undoubtedly contributed to the fact that African Americans in
Greensboro were, in a relative sense, exceptionally well-educated. While only 14.7 of
North Carolina’s black adults had earned high school diplomas in 1960, a full 32 % of
Greensboro’s black population had high school diplomas (North Carolina Board of
Higher Education 1969; Powell 1970). Black adults in Greensboro had, on average,
more schooling than any other comparably-sized city in the South, an average of
8.8 years. The percentage of black residents who had attended at least some college
similarly dwarfed that of most other southern cities; nearly one in five had done so in
Greensboro, a rate nearly four times greater than in cities such as New Orleans,
Tampa, Fla., Columbus, Ga., and Greenville, SC (Bagwell 1972; Ladd 1966; US
Bureau of the Census 1972).
The quality of black education in Greensboro was exceptional as well. Two-thirds
of Guilford County’s African American students attended public schools accredited
by the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools, and more than half
of the accredited elementary schools in all of North Carolina could be found in
Greensboro. Nearly two-thirds of the city’s black teachers possessed advanced
degrees. Well prior to the 1960s, the guidance staff at Greensboro’s “Negro” high
school, Dudley High, organized programs to encourage students to train for jobs that
had traditionally been closed to African Americans. School administrators also
partnered with a “merit employment” program organized by the American Friends
Service Committee, to coordinate site visits to area businesses, provide training for
professional positions, and arrange panel presentations by A&T graduates who had
become racial “pioneers” in various fields (North Carolina State Advisory Committee
1962; Chafe 1980).
White Greensboro residents, in contrast, had relatively low levels of education.
More than a quarter of the city’s white adults had fewer than 8 years of schooling, and
barely half were high school graduates. The majority of white children in Greensboro
were enrolled in non-accredited schools, a proportion much higher than in the city’s
black community. Whites still enjoyed a significant educational advantage—local
black residents had an average of 73 % of the schooling achieved by whites, and
black residents were only 70 % as likely as whites to possess a four-year college
degree. But given the enormity of the barriers limiting black educational opportunities in the region, this racial gap was smaller in Greensboro than nearly anywhere else
in the South (US Bureau of the Census 1960; Bullard and Stith 1974; Ladd 1966).
The broad effect of this educational dynamic was to create a pool of black workers
who could compete with local whites for the majority of available skilled positions.
As discussed above, this sort of racial competition had long been suppressed artificially in the textile industry, by Jim Crow policies that reserved many skilled and
Theor Soc
semi-skilled jobs for whites. As the grip of formal segregation was loosened by civil
rights advances, the resulting climate of perceived competition was felt more acutely
in Greensboro than in the vast majority of southern communities.
The dynamic was quite different in Charlotte. While Greensboro’s economic
inequalities were attenuated by relatively high levels of black schooling alongside a
weak white educational profile, white Charlotteans were the best educated in the
state. The city’s black residents, on the other hand, not only possessed 37 % less
schooling than their white counterparts but also fared significantly worse than their
African-American peers in other Piedmont cities (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1963;
Ladd 1966). While in Greensboro nearly a third of black adults were high school
graduates, only 20 % had earned a diploma in Charlotte. The proportion with four or
more years of college was less than half of that in Greensboro. Further, Charlotte’s
black university, Johnson C. Smith, enrolled 1,048 students in 1964 (Greensboro’s
black college population was nearly four times larger), and only 133 of those students
hailed from Mecklenburg or adjacent counties (North Carolina Board of Higher
Education 1969). The consequence was that Smith attracted local black students at
a considerably lower rate than did Greensboro’s black institutions of higher learning.
And these educational inequities were exacerbated by the fact that Smith’s campus
was physically as well as socially distant from the downtown business districts.
Unlike A&T and Bennett in Greensboro, both of which bordered on the city’s central
business district, Smith’s Biddleville neighborhood was located on the periphery of
the city, separated from even the outskirts of downtown by a highway and large
cemetery (Hanchett 1998).5
In summary, given their comparatively low levels of education, Greensboro’s
white workers were, as a group, relatively ill-equipped to compete for positions in
an open market. This shrinking labor market advantage was exacerbated by the
county’s relatively highly-educated black population, most visible through the large
proportion of local students attending Greensboro’s black colleges. In Charlotte,
racial educational inequities were much more pronounced, with whites faring better
and African Americans faring worse than their counterparts in Greensboro. The
location of black colleges relative to each city’s downtown commercial district
mattered as well. In Greensboro, A&T and Bennett’s proximity to downtown businesses facilitated formal and informal interracial interactions, which created a looser
sense of racial separation than in Charlotte.
This spatial split was reinforced by Greensboro’s lesser degree of overall segregation. The “index of dissimilarity” for its Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area
(SMSA) was 66.9 in 1960, compared to 75.6 for Charlotte’s SMSA (for comparison,
the average value for 33 other southern SMSAs was 73.8) (Van Valey et al. 1977).
The result was that, while the overall black population in both cities was approximately 30 %, racial patterns in residential areas were quite distinct. In Charlotte,
African-American residents lived in neighborhoods spatially separated from white
5
Note that this account of colleges open to African Americans in Charlotte does not include Carver
College, which opened in 1949 as a community college intended to serve black residents in parallel with the
white Charlotte College. In 1961, Carver was renamed Mecklenburg College and relocated to a new
campus, a controversial move in that its de facto function was to reinforce segregated schooling in the postBrown era. Falling enrollments caused the school to close in 1965, and it therefore did not significantly alter
the black educational landscape in the period considered here (Leach 1976, pp. 81–90).
Theor Soc
residents to a degree greater than Greensboro and most other southern cities (Douglas
1995; Van Valey et al. 1977). More than 90 % of Charlotte’s nearly 60,000 AfricanAmericans lived northwest of the downtown central business district. Meanwhile, the
most affluent area of the city, comprising ten census tracts in the southeastern
quadrant, was home to more than 40,000 whites and not a single black family (US
Bureau of the Census 1972).
Throughout the 1960s, this pronounced residential segregation was exacerbated by
the city’s municipal planning projects. As a “Model City” eligible for the funding of
municipal infrastructural initiatives through LBJ’s Great Society programs, Charlotte
was able to propose and initiate a much more ambitious program of large-scale
projects than Greensboro or most other southern cities throughout the middle years
of the decade. Among the “resume of improvements” trumpeted by city officials
during this period was the federally-funded construction of I-85, which effectively
served as a racial barrier separating historical black and white neighborhoods on the
north side of the city. Other urban renewal projects resulted in the razing of Brooklyn
and Blue Heaven, two longstanding black communities, to make way for “redevelopment in uses more appropriate for its central location.” Little effort was made,
however, to build new housing for those displaced, which meant that raciallymotivated mortgage policies and realtor actions channeled those residents to the
city’s increasingly-segregated northwestern quadrant. Other efforts to provide public
housing options served the same purpose when they resulted in the relocation of black
families to low-income projects concentrated in black areas of the city. “We are
getting a compact Negro community in practically one area of town,” argued Fred
Alexander, Charlotte’s first black City Council member. “We’re building our future
Watts right now” (Douglas 1995; Lassiter 2006; Smith 2004).6
While residential patterns were not by any means progressive in Greensboro,
boundaries created by the spatial separation of white and black neighborhoods were
significantly more stringent in Charlotte. The presence of these clear racial boundaries reduced the anxieties that at times bubbled over in more porous Greensboro
neighborhoods, providing recruiting fodder for the Klan. When, for instance, Frank
Williams, a black minister at Greensboro’s Mt. Zion Baptist Church, moved into a
house purchased for him in 1967 by members of his congregation in a previously allwhite neighborhood, a group of Klansmen engaged in a sustained harassment campaign. While the public nature of this campaign—which included hurled bricks and
bottles, near-constant verbal abuse, blinding lights flashed in the house’s windows,
cross burnings, and a black dummy hung in effigy—was unusual, the overall
dynamic was anything but exceptional. Several months earlier, a black family that
had rented a house in a white neighborhood had been subjected to similar harassment,
including a message from a Klansman that he would “kill this nigger to teach a lesson
to others” (Chafe 1980; Guy 1967).
6
For more detail on Charlotte’s urban renewal efforts, and Alexander’s take on the process, see “Resume of
Improvements During Period 1959–1965” and “Brooklyn Area Blight Study,” UNCC archives, Manuscript
Collection 91, Box 40, Folder 12; Notes from NAACP Executive Committee meeting, 13 January 1966,
UNCC Kelly Alexander Papers, MSS 55, Box 2, Folder 8; “Can Charlotte Have a Race Riot?” flyer for
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Council on Human Relations public forum, 8 November 1966, UNCC archives,
Manuscript Collection 91, Box 39, Folder 5.
Theor Soc
These educational and residential dynamics correlated with, and in many cases
helped to produce, stark inequities across a range of broad racial progress indicators.
Bullard and Stith (1974) found that Charlotte, in the 1960s, had above-average levels
of racial inequity in overcrowded housing, low value owner-occupied housing,
median education, unemployment, low occupational status, median family income,
infant mortality, and family stability. Greensboro, on the other hand, exhibited the
lowest level of racial inequity on more than half of these indicators, and ranked above
Charlotte on nearly all of them.
Again, for our purposes, these indices demonstrate how this pronounced racial
inequity in Charlotte was expressed within the city’s associational makeup—i.e., its
neighborhoods, schools, health care facilities, and workforce—and minimized the
degree to which macro-level proxies of ethnic competition translated into perceptions
of racial threat within the city’s white population. While the desegregation of public
facilities created a seismic shift wherever it occurred, the contours of this change
differed based on the extent to which civil rights pressures would alter the overall
social landscape of a community. In Charlotte, its reverberations were contained by a
social structure that limited opportunities for non-hierarchical interracial contact in
neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces. In places like Greensboro, the effect was
further-reaching, and the attendant breakdown of controls that had tenuously insulated whites from direct competition with similarly-equipped black residents destabilized white identities previously predicated on racial purity and its attendant
privileges.
This tenuous hold on racial advantage was most strongly perceived by those
vulnerable to threats posed by racial competition. Nowhere in the Piedmont was
there a larger vulnerable white population than in Greensboro. As an organization
whose appeals were explicitly directed toward providing alternative vehicles for the
maintenance of white identity, the UKA, not surprisingly, resonated strongly in that
community. Its rallies were both more frequent and larger than in the more denselypopulated Charlotte area. The multiple UKA klaverns that dotted Greensboro and its
surrounding county, many of which maintained large memberships, demonstrated
that these rally appeals translated into deeper engagement with the group, a phenomenon that was noticeably lacking in Charlotte.
Discussion
Empirical studies informed by ethnic competition theory have uncovered compelling
relations between the structural contexts that produce inter-group competition and the
presence of ethnic conflict. The dynamics of such relationships are well-developed
theoretically; the typical assertion is that the presence of competition enhances the
salience of ethnic boundaries and enables mobilization along ethnic lines. How
competition translates into contention is less well-understood, however. While some
recent work has focused on micro-dynamics associated with individual perceptions of
competitive contexts, it remains unclear how the relations between macroenvironments and micro-mobilizations are mediated by meso-level associational
contexts. As individuals’ experiences of inter-group competition, shaped in large part
by the interactions that solidify ethnic identities, often coalesce within local
Theor Soc
institutional settings, it is important to understand how community structures compel
or inhibit individuals from mobilizing around ethnic identities. To begin to address
the ways in which ethnic competition is mobilized “on the ground,” the analysis here
focuses on how the socio-spatial makeup of communities mediate perceptions.
This study thus begins to interrogate the settings conducive to contention. In particular,
the mobilization of ethnic competition requires the activation of boundaries, which Tilly
(2003, p. 21) defines as shifts in social interactions “such that they increasingly a)
organize around a single us-them boundary, and b) differentiate between withinboundary and cross-boundary interactions.” The analysis here, which demonstrates
how particular associational arrangements enable the activation of certain militant
strains of an “us-them” boundary, builds on the idea that this boundary activation
mechanism is necessarily forged within identifiable social settings that reflect and refract
salient aspects of the overall composition of communities. Elucidating how those mesolevel settings operate lends insight into the dynamics of ethnic competition.
More generally, this analysis expands the link between traditional research on social
movements and other forms of contention—in this case, ethnic conflict—that fall under
the broader rubric of contentious politics. By focusing on the meso-level processes
through which inter-group competition is mobilized, the approach here incorporates
key social movement processes—i.e., factors associated with material and social resources generative of collective identity in aggrieved settings—into models of ethnic competition that have predominantly focused on the broad compositional dimensions thought
to produce ethnic grievances. Conversely, by emphasizing the role of mobilization
settings—in particular, how such contexts relate to the production of threat and grievance—this approach aligns with recent calls by social movement scholars to pay renewed
attention to grievance-formation processes (Van Dyke and Soule 2002; van
Stekelenburg and Klandermans 2009). The fact that the analysis here moves beyond
existing work on individual-level expressions of ethnic competition, which have
predominantly focused on attitudes or discrete political acts such as voting (Aguirre
et al. 1989; Belanger and Pinard 1991; Coenders and Scheepers 2008; Hwang et al.
1998; Scheepers et al. 2002; Schneider 2008; Tolsma et al. 2008), enables a clear
integration of social movement and ethnic competition approaches. By drawing on a
case of sustained mobilization, I emphasize the presence of durable forms of contention that require coordinated commitments to collective action rather than merely the
coalescence of individual grievances and propensities.
Of course, the specific question I explore here—how formal and informal associations shape the patterning of inter-group contact, and thereby the degree to which
competitive contexts translate into strongly-perceived threats—only addresses narrow
slices of the meso-level processes at work. In this sense, this article is intended to
illustrate and to highlight the importance of such processes, rather than as a holistic
explanation of how ethnic competition is mobilized on the ground. Among other
limitations, the bounded analysis here focuses predominately on factors that produce
economic competition, in contrast with studies by Blalock (1967), Olzak (1990), and
others that have demonstrated the importance of political forms.
Political factors were almost certainly significant in the Charlotte/Greensboro
comparison, as Charlotte’s mayor, Stanford Brookshire, was supported heavily by
the city’s business leaders and African-American voters and he engineered a progressive approach to race relations widely viewed as an exemplar of southern
Theor Soc
liberalism. Attorney General Robert Kennedy noted the “striking progress” made by
the city’s leadership, and recommended that Brookshire share his ideas and experiences broadly with other communities “confronted with the same initial difficulties”
as those that Charlotte overcame (Kennedy 1963; Leach 1976; Watters 1964). In
Greensboro, the political context looked quite different, with significantly higher
levels of civil rights contention (in particular around the 1960 sit-in movement, which
began in Greensboro, and an extended round of protests surrounding the integration
of public facilities in 1963) and city leaders who consistently favored a more laissez
faire approach to the desegregation of public accommodations. Unlike in Charlotte,
where the Mayor’s office and Chamber of Commerce were tightly coupled,
Greensboro’s business elites had little overlap with the city’s political leadership.
The resulting lack of coordination contributed to Greensboro’s inability to develop an
effective and peaceful response to mounting civil rights contention in the early 1960s
(Chafe 1980; cf. Luders 2006).
While a full examination of the role played by political forms of competition is
beyond the scope of this particular article, one take-away point involves the interrelationship of these cities’ economic and political spheres. In contrast with contemporary
and historiographic accounts that have placed significant weight on the role played by
the styles and strategies adopted by each city’s political leaders (Chafe 1980; Douglas
1995; Leach 1976; Smith 2004; Watters 1964; Wolff 1970), the analysis here suggests
that the “progressive” approach adopted by Brookshire in Charlotte was enabled at
least in part by institutional arrangements that ensured that civil rights policy would
have limited impact on racial inequities in the city, akin to the low “concession costs”
that Luders (2006) suggests facilitated business leaders’ accommodation to civil
rights demands. While the impetus for progressive policy was strongly rooted in a
visible cadre of civic leaders focused on Charlotte’s image, the demarcated scope of
racial changes associated with such policy approaches undergirded their progressive
orientation. In Greensboro, in contrast, political resistance to changes in the racial
status quo was exacerbated by the fact that racial integration, in the presence of
unusual levels of racial equity in education and training, would significantly shrink
white workers’ local labor market advantage. In effect, forging a liberal course with
civil rights issues was easier to do in Charlotte, because the implementation of civil
rights policies in that city posed relatively little threat to whites’ privileged positions.
Such political dynamics are strongly intermeshed with the modes of economic
competition that has informed the account above. While these dimensions provide
effective explanations for variations in KKK mobilization, factors exogenous to this
framework undoubtedly mattered as well. Beyond their direct impact on the human
capital imparted to black and white students, educational institutions exerted political
and cultural influence over discourses and actions associated with race relations and
civil rights reform. Similarly, newspapers and other local media differed in their
orientations, audience, and degree of influence. By 1963, civil rights protest in
Greensboro was considerably more aggressive and widespread than in Charlotte, in
large part due to Greensboro officials’ reluctance to facilitate or otherwise shepherd
the transition to desegregated public accommodations. This differing tenor of civil
rights mobilization, though conditioned by many of the associational dynamics
emphasized above, itself shaped white residents’ orientations to racial grievances,
and surely influenced the range of acceptable reactions and counter-mobilizations.
Theor Soc
Finally, the sway of local KKK organizers was not uniform across these communities. While Charlotte was not barren of committed UKA adherents (longtime
resident Joe Bryant had been a key organizer with several Klan outfits for more than
a decade, and later took over the UKA’s state leadership when North Carolina’s
“Grand Dragon” Bob Jones was sent to prison in 1969), Greensboro was home to
George Dorsett, a regionally-prominent UKA chaplain. A charismatic speaker and
organizer, Dorsett was a featured presence at nearly all UKA rallies around the state,
and he was closely tied to the UKA’s leadership. His influence was substantial, as
signaled by his ability to attract later several hundred adherents to the Confederate
Knights, a Klan splinter group that he formed after breaking away from United Klans
in 1967 (Drabble 2003; FBI 1969; interview with George Dorsett, 20 February 2005).
The presence of Dorsett and a cohort of committed organizers in Greensboro meant
that the UKA could effectively translate the opportunity created by community’s
tenuous racial status quo into successful recruitment campaigns.
While largely beyond the scope of this article, a complete analysis of contentious
outcomes in these cities should assess and adjudicate among the roles played by each
of these factors. Building from the foundational approach introduced here, such
studies can provide more nuanced insight into the dynamics of ethnic competition
and conflict. By looking at how resources and status might be conferred within
associations and thereby impact the grievance-formation process, analysts can bridge
between macro-level claims that competitive arrangements (as captured through
aggregate population compositions) spur the mobilization of group conflict, and
micro-accounts of the ways in which “threats” come to be perceived and encoded
as inter-group prejudice. The meso-level approach here seeks to account for the
historically, materially, and socially contingent manner in which threats are attributed
and acted upon, while taking seriously the power of social environments to enable
and constrain individuals’ beliefs and actions.
Following the rich extant literature on ethnic competition, such dynamics can
apply to a wide range of contentious outcomes, from discriminatory legislation, to
voting patterns in charged elections, and to the efflorescence of collective violence
driven both by durable organization and “spontaneous” emotion. Indeed, associational dynamics lie at the heart of threat-based mobilizations, including those of
contemporary movements like the Tea Party, whose conservative anti-interventionist
brand of populism has yielded its most political punch in relatively homogeneous
congressional districts (Williamson et al. 2011). McVeigh and Farrell (unpublished
paper) have found that, controlling for deprivation and compositional factors tied to
the movement’s core issues, the Tea Party has flourished in environments with high
levels of residential and educational segregation. Consistent with the approach here,
such analyses demonstrate how meso-level patterns of segregation produce an attitudinal homogeneity that enables the movement’s grievances to resonate among local
populations.
Indeed, as competition theorists have long posited, the perception of threats posed
by out-groups lies at the heart of these forms of contention. Focusing on the structural
and cultural significance of community associations provides one powerful way to
explain how such threats are constructed. By emphasizing the ways in which local
contexts mediate broad structural shifts and contentious outcomes, we can extend our
understanding of how ethnic competition is mobilized.
Theor Soc
Acknowledgments Earlier versions of this article were presented at the American Sociological Association’s 2011 Annual Meeting in Las Vegas, and at Sociology colloquia at East Carolina University and the
University of Connecticut. I thank participants in those sessions—in particular Bob Edwards, Melinda
Kane, Lee Maril, Claudio Benzecry, and Mary Bernstein—as well as Wendy Cadge and two Theory and
Society reviewers for their helpful comments.
References
Adams, J. (1966). About 100 Turn Out to Hear Klan Leader. Charlotte Observer (11 November).
Aguirre, B. E., Saenz, R., & Hwang, S. S. (1989). Discrimination and the Assimilation and Ethnic
Competition Perspectives. Social Science Quarterly, 70(3), 594–606.
Bagwell, W. (1972). School Desegregation in the Carolinas: Two Case Studies. Columbia: University of
South Carolina Press.
Barth, F. (1969). Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. Boston: Little, Brown.
Belanger, S., & Pinard, M. (1991). Ethnic movements and the competition model: some missing links.
American Sociological Review, 56, 446–457.
Benford, R. D., & Snow, D. A. (2000). Framing processes and social movements: an overview and
assessment. Annual Review of Sociology, 26(1), 611–640.
Bergeson, A., & Herman, M. (1998). Immigration, race, and riot: the 1992 Los Angeles uprising. American
Sociological Review, 63, 39–54.
Blalock, H. M. (1967). Toward a Theory of Minority-Group Relations. New York: Wiley.
Blumer, H. (1958). Race prejudice as a sense of group position. The Pacific Sociological Review, 1, 3–7.
Bobo, L., & Hutchings, V. L. (1996). Perceptions of racial group competition: extending Blumer’s theory of
Group Position to a Multiracial Social Context. American Sociological Review, 61, 951–972.
Bonacich, E. (1972). A theory of ethnic antagonism: the split labor market. American Sociological Review,
37, 547–559.
Brown, D. (n.d.). Interview with Scott Ellsworth, Duke University archives.
Brown, C., & Boswell, T. (1997). Ethnic conflict and political violence: a cross-national analysis. Journal
of Political and Military Sociology, 25(1), 111–130.
Brown, H. V. (1961). A History of the Education of Negroes in North Carolina. Raleigh: Irving Swain
Press.
Bullard, J. L., & Stith, R. J. (1974). Community conditions in Charlotte, 1970: a study of ten cities using
urban indicators with a supplement on racial disparity. Charlotte: The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Community Relations Committee.
Chafe, W. H. (1980). Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for
Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press.
Chalmers, D. M. (1981). Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan. New York: New
Viewpoints.
Coenders, M., & Scheepers, P. (2008). Changes in resistance to the social integration of foreigners in
Germany 1980–2000: individual and contextual determinants. Journal of Ethnic and Migration
Studies, 34(1), 1–26.
Cunningham, D. (2008). Truth, Reconciliation, and the Ku Klux Klan. Southern Cultures, 14(3), 68–87.
Cunningham, D. (2004). There’s Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Cunningham, D., & Phillips, B. T. (2007). Contexts for mobilization: spatial settings and Klan presence in
North Carolina, 1964–1966. The American Journal of Sociology, 113(3), 781–814.
Douglas, D. M. (1995). Reading, writing, and race: the desegregation of the Charlotte Schools. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Drabble, J. (2003). The FBI, COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE and the Decline of the Ku Klux Klan in
North Carolina. Paper presented at Duke University, John Hope Franklin Center Public Lecture
Series.
Edwards, B., & McCarthy, J. D. (2004). Resources and Social Movement Mobilization. In D. A.
Snow, S. A. Soule, & H. Kriesi (Eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements (pp. 116–
152). Malden: Blackwell.
Employment Security Commission of North Carolina. (1968). North Carolina Insured Employment and
Wage Payments 1967. Raleigh: Bureau of Employment Security Research.
Theor Soc
Federal Bureau of Investigation. (1966). Report from Charlotte Field Office to Director. Washington, DC:
FBI National Headquarters Reading Room.
Federal Bureau of Investigation. (1969). COINTELPRO-White Hate Groups Memo from Charlotte Field
Office to Director (30 January). Washington, DC: FBI National Headquarters Reading Room.
Fulmer, W. E. (1973). The Negro in the Furniture Industry. Philadelphia: Wharton School of Finance and
Commerce Independent Research Unit.
Gavins, R. (1991). The NAACP in North Carolina in the Age of Segregation. In A. L. Robinson & P. Sullivan
(Eds.), New Directions in Civil Rights Studies (pp. 105–125). Charlottesville: University Press of
Virginia.
Guy, E. C. (1967). State Highway Patrol Memo to Gov. Moore, 17 July. North Carolina State Archives,
Gov. Dan Moore Papers, General Correspondence 1967, Box 217, Folder: SHP and SBI Reports.
Hanchett, T. (1998). Sorting Out the New South City: Race, Class, and Urban Development in Charlotte.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Hannan, M. T. (1979). The Dynamics of Ethnic Boundaries in Modern States. In J. W. Meyer & M. T.
Hannan (Eds.), National Development and the World System: Educational, Economic, and Political
Change, 1950–1970 (pp. 253–275). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hwang, S. S., Fitzpatrick, K., & Helms, D. (1998). Class differences in rural attitudes: a divided Black
America? Sociological Perspectives, 41(2), 367–380.
Kennedy, R. F. (1963). Letter to Stanford R. Brookshire, 24 June. University of North Carolina-Charlotte
archives, Manuscript Collection 101, Box 1, Folder 5.
Ladd, E. C., Jr. (1966). Negro Political Leadership in the South. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Lambreth, T. (1964). State Highway Patrol Memo to Gov. Sanford, 17 February. North Carolina State
Archives, Gov. Terry Sanford Papers, General Correspondence 1964, Box 420, folder: KKK.
Lassiter, M. D. (2006). The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Leach, D. E. B. (1976). Progress Under Pressure: Changes in Charlotte Race Relations, 1955–1965. M.
Thesis, Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Luders, J. (2006). “The Economics of Movement Success: Business Responses to Civil Rights Mobilization.” The American Journal of Sociology, 111(4), 963–998.
McAdam, D. (1999). Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970 (2nd ed.).
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
McAdam, D. (1986). Recruitment to high-risk activism: the case of freedom summer. The American
Journal of Sociology, 92(1), 64–90.
McAdam, D. (2003). “Beyond Structural Analysis: Toward a More Dynamic Understanding of Social
Movements.” In M. Diani & D. McAdam (Eds.), Social Movements and Networks (pp. 281–298). New
York: Oxford University Press.
Medrano, J. D. (1994). The effects of ethnic segregation and ethnic competition on political mobilization in
the Basque Country, 1988. American Sociological Review, 59(6), 873–889.
Meier, A., & Bracey, J. (Eds.). (1987). Papers of the NAACP. Frederick: University Publications of America.
Mousseau, D. Y. (2001). Democratizing with Ethnic Divisions: a source of conflict? Journal of Peace
Research, 38(5), 547–567.
Myers, D. J. (1997). Racial rioting in the 1960s: an event history analysis of local conditions. American
Sociological Review, 62(1), 94–112.
North Carolina Board of Higher Education. (1969). Statistical Abstract of Higher Education in North
Carolina, 1968–69 (Research Report 4–69). Raleigh: North Carolina Board of Higher Education.
North Carolina State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. (1962). Equal
Protection of the Laws in North Carolina. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
O’Daniel, W. V. (1965). North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation Memo to Director, 11 November.
North Carolina State Archives, Gov. Dan Moore Papers, General Correspondence 1965, Box 57,
folder: SBI.
Okamoto, D. G. (2003). Toward a theory of Panethnicity: explaining Asian American collective action.
American Sociological Review, 68(6), 811–842.
Olzak, S. (1992). The Dynamics of Ethnic Competition and Conflict. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Olzak, S. (1990). The political context of competition: lynching and urban racial violence, 1882–1914.
Social Forces, 69(2), 395–421.
Olzak, S. (1989). Labor unrest, immigration, and ethnic conflict in Urban America, 1880–1914. The
American Journal of Sociology, 94(6), 1303–1333.
Olzak, S., Shanahan, S., & McEneaney, E. H. (1996). Poverty, segregation, and race riots: 1960–1993.
American Sociological Review, 61, 590–613.
Theor Soc
Olzak, S., Shanahan, S., & West, E. (1994). School desegregation, interracial exposure, and antibusing
activity in contemporary Urban America. The American Journal of Sociology, 100(1), 196–241.
Powell, W. S. (1970). Higher Education in North Carolina. Raleigh: State Department of Archives and
History.
Rich, E. (1988). Ku Klux Klan Ideology, 1954–1988. Ph.D. Dissertation, Boston University.
Rowan, R. L. (1970). The Negro in the Textile Industry. In H. R. Northrup & R. L. Rowan (Eds.), Negro
Employment in Southern Industry: A Study of Racial Politics in Five Industries (Volume IV – Studies of
Negro Employment). Philadelphia: Wharton School of Finance and Commerce Independent Research Unit.
Scheepers, P., Gijsberts, M., & Coenders, M. (2002). “Ethnic Exclusionism in European Countries: Public
Opposition to Civil Rights for Legal Migrants as a Response to Perceived Ethnic Threat.” European
Sociological Review, 18(1), 17–34.
Schneider, S. L. (2008). “Anti-Immigrant Attitudes in Europe: Outgroup Size and Perceived Ethnic
Threat.” European Sociological Review, 24(1), 53–67.
Schussman, A., & Soule, S. A. (2005). Process and protest: accounting for individual protest participation.
Social Forces, 84(2), 1083–1108.
Smith, S. S. (2004). Boom for Whom?: Education, Desegregation, and Development in Charlotte. Albany:
State University of New York Press.
Soule, S. A., & Van Dyke, N. (1999). Black Church Arson in the United States, 1989–1996. Ethnic and
Racial Studies, 22(4), 724–742.
Tarrow, S. (1998). Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics (2nd ed.). New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Tilly, C. (2003). The Politics of Collective Violence. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Tolsma, J., Lubbers, M., & Coenders, M. (2008). Ethnic competition and opposition to ethnic intermarriage
in the Netherlands: a multi-level approach. European Sociological Review, 24(2), 215–230.
U.S. Bureau of the Census. (1972). Census of Population and Housing: 1970 Census Tracts.; Final Report
PHC(1)-83 Greensboro– Winston-Salem–High Point, N.C. SMSA. Washington, DC: U.S. Government
Printing Office.
U.S. Bureau of the Census. (1963). U.S. Census of Population: 1960. Selected Area Reports. State
Economic Areas. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Final Report PC (3)-1A.
U.S. Bureau of the Census. (1960). U.S. Census of Population; Vol. I, Characteristics of the Population;
Part 35, North Carolina. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
U.S. House of Representatives, & Committee on Un-American Activities. (1967). The Present Day Ku Klux
Klan Movement. 90th Congress, First Session. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
Van Dyke, N., & Soule, S. A. (2002). Structural social change and the mobilizing effect of threat: explaining
levels of patriot and militia organizing in the United States. Social Problems, 49(4), 497–520.
van Stekelenburg, J., & Klandermans, B. (2009). Individuals in Movements: A Social Psychology of
Contention. In B. Klandermans & C. Roggeband (Eds.), Handbook of Social Movements Across
Disciplines (pp. 157–204). New York: Springer.
Van Valey, T. L., Roof, W. C., & Wilcox, J. E. (1977). “Trends in Residential Segregation, 1960–1970.”
American Journal of Sociology, 82(4), 826–844.
Watters, P. (1964). Charlotte. Atlanta: Southern Regional Council.
Wilkes, R., & Okamoto, D. G. (2002). Ethnic competition and mobilization by minorities at risk.
Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 8(3), 1–23.
Williams, O. (1964). Rebirth of Klan Counters Moderate Action in State. Raleigh News and Observer (23
August).
Williamson, V., Skocpol, T., & Coggin, J. (2011). The tea party and the remaking of Republican
Conservatism. Perspectives on Politics, 9(1), 25–43.
Wiltfang, G., & McAdam, D. (1991). Distinguishing cost and risk in sanctuary activism. Social Forces, 69
(4), 987–1010.
Wolff, M. (1970). Lunch at the Five and Ten: The Greensboro Sit-Ins, A Contemporary History. New York:
Stein and Day.
Young, P. B. 1968. Violence and the White Ghetto, A View from the Inside. LBJ Archives, Federal Records
—Eisenhower Commission (RG 283), Task Force I—Assassination, Box 1, Series 10.
David Cunningham is Associate Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at Brandeis University. His
current research focuses on the causes, consequences, and legacy of racial violence, with an emphasis on
the US South. His book Klansville, U.S.A.: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights-era Ku Klux Klan is
forthcoming in 2012 from Oxford University Press.