The Cross-National Diffusion of the American Civil Rights Movement: the Example of the Bristol Bus Boycott of 1963
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Miranda Revue pluridisciplinaire du monde anglophone / Multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal on the English- speaking world 10 | 2014 Images on the Move: Circulations and Transfers in film The Cross-National Diffusion of the American Civil Rights Movement: The Example of the Bristol Bus Boycott of 1963 Claire Mansour Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/6360 DOI: 10.4000/miranda.6360 ISSN: 2108-6559 Publisher Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès Electronic reference Claire Mansour, “The Cross-National Diffusion of the American Civil Rights Movement: The Example of the Bristol Bus Boycott of 1963”, Miranda [Online], 10 | 2014, Online since 23 February 2015, connection on 16 February 2021. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/6360 ; DOI: https:// doi.org/10.4000/miranda.6360 This text was automatically generated on 16 February 2021. Miranda is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. The Cross-National Diffusion of the American Civil Rights Movement: The Examp... 1 The Cross-National Diffusion of the American Civil Rights Movement: The Example of the Bristol Bus Boycott of 1963 Claire Mansour “When someone demonstrates that people are not powerless, they may begin to act again.” British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm. 1 When a group of people manages to induce institutional change to achieve their aims through the successful staging of a protest movement it generally convinces other groups of people to do the same. This process of social mimicry is linked to the concept of “diffusion” which is one of the basic tenets of sociology. In 1968, Elihu Katz broadly defined “diffusion” as: […] the acceptance of some specific item, over time, by adopting units — individuals, groups, communities — that are linked both to external channels of communication and to each other by means of both a structure of social relations and a system of values, or culture (Katz, 78). 2 Doug McAdam and Dieter Rucht then applied this definition to the analysis of social movements to explain the transfer of ideas and practices from one movement to another in a different country. Their theory of cross-national diffusion involves a group of adopters who will borrow one or several items from a group of transmitters through a combination of relational and non-relational channels provided that the adopters can identify with the transmitters (McAdam and Rucht, 56-74). Their model is based on a case study of the American and the German New Left which leads them to conclude that the tactics and ideology of the American New Left crossed the borders to Germany where they were adopted by the students. 3 Can the same be said about the Montgomery and Bristol bus boycotts? Even at first glance, the similarities between the two events are too striking to be a mere Miranda, 10 | 2014 The Cross-National Diffusion of the American Civil Rights Movement: The Examp... 2 coincidence. On 1 December 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white man, as required by the Alabama and Montgomery segregation laws. The bus driver subsequently called the police and she was arrested. The leader of the local NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People), Edgar Daniel Nixon, saw her trial as the perfect opportunity to challenge the constitutionality of the bus segregation laws. In the two days between Parks’s arrest and trial, the leaders of the black community formed the Montgomery Improvement Association, chose Martin Luther King as its president, and decided to launch a boycott of the city buses. This protest lasted for 381 days until it was called off on 20 December 1956 after the Supreme Court ruled that the bus segregation laws were unconstitutional forcing the city to pass a new ordinance allowing black citizens to sit anywhere they pleased. 4 As for Bristol, the initial spark for the boycott came in April 1963 when a young West Indian man called Guy Bailey was refused a job interview on the grounds of his skin colour despite the fact that he was well qualified for the post of bus conductor. But in the early 1960s there was no law in the UK forbidding racial discrimination, so the manager of the Bristol Omnibus Company, Ian Patey, was perfectly within his rights when he turned Bailey down. In fact, Paul Stephenson — who was both the spokesman of the West Indian Development Council and Bailey’s teacher — had decided that his pupil would act as a test case to denounce publicly the Bristol Omnibus Company’s colour bar against black bus crews. So when Bailey’s job interview was cancelled, as expected, Stephenson called for a boycott of the network in protest. Just like Rosa Parks, Guy Bailey’s impeccable profile made him the perfect test case for public exposure. The boycott lasted until 28 August when Ian Patey announced that the only criterion to recruit bus crews would be their suitability for the job. Thus, like the Montgomery protesters, the Bristolian activists achieved their aims. 5 The analogy between the two movements raises several questions. If one assumes that they are not isolated events and that they are both related, what, then, is the nature of the link between them? If it can be argued that the transfer of the Montgomery Bus Boycott to Britain is an instance of cross-national diffusion, which particular elements of the Afro-American protest were therefore adopted by their British counterparts? How can this phenomenon be explained? 6 To answer these questions, the first part of this article will show that the cultural similarities between the adopters and the transmitters are a necessary condition for diffusion because they enabled black Bristolians to identify with the Civil Rights activists in the US. Then the second part will argue that the Bristol Bus Boycott is not a mere copy of its Montgomery source and that the specificity of the British context endowed it with new characteristics. Finally, the third part will demonstrate that the relational tie between the two movements played a crucial part in the diffusion process since it accounts for the rational choice of taking the Montgomery Bus Boycott as a model despite the differences between the two contexts, in an effort to generate propaganda to force the bus company to lift the colour bar. Cultural similarities as a necessary condition for identification 7 The transfer of elements from one movement to another requires some kind of connection between them in the first place. Most sociologists have argued that cultural Miranda, 10 | 2014 The Cross-National Diffusion of the American Civil Rights Movement: The Examp... 3 similarities are instrumental in bringing about the diffusion process because they enable the adopters to identify with the transmitters. Once the adopters come to perceive themselves as similar to the transmitters, a bond develops between the two communities which will then mediate the transfer. Cultural similarities act as a non- relational channel of diffusion, meaning that they do not depend on interpersonal contact to exist. The West Indian community in Bristol and its African American counterpart in Montgomery can be seen as sharing several cultural similarities. They had both been through the distant and real experience of slavery1 and of course, they spoke the same language which also facilitated the transfer. Similar social category 8 The black citizens of both Montgomery and Bristol were generally confined to the lowest social categories because of white racism and discrimination. Black immigrants arriving in Bristol lived mainly in the deprived area of Saint Paul’s where they were exploited by slum landlords who took advantage of the housing shortage to charge exorbitant rents (Dresser, 1986, 7). Some historians believe that — since there were no laws against racial discrimination at the time - it was not unusual to see signs on the windows of some lodging houses saying “No Irish, no blacks, no dogs”. They were also frequently refused service in shops or pubs. The rate of black unemployment was over twice that of whites2 while those who worked were often relegated to menial jobs. Although relatively new and much less ingrained than in the Southern States, racism stood in the way of working-class consciousness. British trade unions resisted the employment of black workers and the poorest white Bristolians could always find comfort in the idea that they were still a cut above the “coloureds”. Whites on both sides of the Atlantic had similar prejudices, ranging from the notion that it was unclean to touch black people to the fear that they were lusting after white women (Fryer, 143). Both communities were also the victims of white violence, albeit to a lesser extent in England than in the Southern States, with gangs of Teddy Boys or racist white mobs preying on black individuals. By the late 1950s, acts of violence committed against blacks had become commonplace in cities where there were sizeable immigrant communities. “On weekend evenings in particular,” explains Peter Fryer, “gangs of ‘teddy boys’ cruised the streets looking for West Indians, Africans of Asians. […] The police took little notice of these attacks, whose frequency and violence steadily increased (378).” The race riots of Notting Hill and Nottingham in 1958 and Middlesbrough in 1961 are other large-scale examples of such practices. Communities with strong social ties 9 Both the African American community in Montgomery and the West Indian community in Bristol had strong social ties with similar networks linking people through social, cultural and religious activities although they took a more informal shape amongst the latter. The Afro-Caribbean Bristolians also had their own separate churches and even if their pastors were reluctant to get involved on a political level, they would still encourage their flocks to attend marches and take part in the boycott once it was launched.