Exam 12: Politics and Power

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The framing process is an aspect of social movements and how they work to accomplish their goals. The framing process deals with how these movements create shared meanings and definitions that motivate and justify collective action of the group. The civil rights movement used Christian and American ideas of equality and fairness for growth and sustenance. The inequalities of Jim Crow were blatantly obvious when pointed out and justified the collective action of civil rights marchers. Since they avoided violence themselves, the actions of those opposing civil rights marchers, such as police with dogs attacking peaceful marchers in Alabama, presented a brutal contrast. This fostered the creation of common understandings of the civil rights cause with many people outside the American South and brought them around to support it. This also successfully challenged the previous conception of "separate but equal" that had previously maintained the divisions between whites and blacks in the South. Once enough people outside the South were convinced that the situation needed to be addressed, they pushed the federal government to act forcefully, and federal troops were dispatched to ensure that things changed. Thus, the movement was able to frame Jim Crow as fundamentally un-American and un-Christian and successfully ended those policies.