Shifting Coalitions, Changing Claims: The Role of Clergy in the Black Movement, 1994-2010

Anna Milewski, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Chaeyoon Lim, University of Wisconsin
Pamela Oliver, University of Wisconsin

Scholarship has demonstrated the important role the Black church and Black clergy played as a source of leadership in the Civil Rights Movement. However, some have observed that Black clergy play a less central role in the Black movement today. In this study, we use a novel data set and social network analysis to examine changes in the role of religious leadership in the Black movement from 1994 to 2010 and assess how these changes have influenced the movement’s claims. We use data on Black protest events in the U.S. from 1994 to 2010 as reported in newswires and Black newspapers to construct a network of activists. First, we descriptively analyze the position and network characteristics of religious leaders and examine how these characteristics and positions changed over time including whether or not clergy were increasingly dissimilar from other network members or more peripheral in the network. This work builds knowledge on the changing landscape of leaders of the Black movement. Second, we use logistic regression to examine the relationship between changes in network member pair similarity, network member centrality, and claim-making. We expect events featuring network member pairs that are more dissimilar– meaning they appear together less frequently at events– and events involving peripheral network members will be more likely to make novel claims and combine claims in a novel way. We pay close attention to dissimilar or peripheral clergy specifically and what effect they have on claims made by events attended by clergy.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 8. US Political Movements