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      "It was like a fever...": narrative and identity in social protest. 

      Francesca Polletta. Social Problems.  May 1998 v45 n2 p137(23).

      Author's Abstract: 
      Although the 1960 student sit-ins were not nearly as uncoordinated as 
      contemporaneous and subsequent accounts suggested, their repeated 
      characterization in participants' accounts as "spontaneous" merits 
      explanation. Analysis of campus newspaper articles and letters to the 
      editor, speeches, and organizational and personal correspondence shows the 
      emergence of a coherent and compelling narrative of the sit-ins, in which 
      spontaneity denoted not a lack of prior coordination but independence from 
      adult leadership, urgency, local initiative, and action by moral 
      imperative rather than bureaucratic planning. Narratives of the sit-ins, 
      told by many tellers, in more and less public settings, and in which 
      spontaneity was a central theme, helped to constitute "student activist" 
      as a new collective identity and to make high risk activism attractive. It 
      was the storied character of representations of the sit-ins that compelled 
      participation. This case suggests the more general importance of narrative 
      - as distinct from collective action "frames" - in accounting for 
      mobilization that takes place before the consolidation of movement 
      organizations.


      Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1998 University of California Press 

      On February 1 1960, four Black students sat-in at a segregated lunch 
      counter in Greensboro, North Carolina and touched off a wave of similar 
      demonstrations around the South. Two months later, Harvard graduate 
      student Michael Walzer returned from a tour of Southern colleges to report 
      that "every student" he met had given the same account of the first day of 
      protest on his or her campus. "'It was like a fever. Everyone wanted to 
      go'" (Walzer 1960a: 111). 
      Metaphors of wildfire, fever, and contagion were common in early accounts 
      of the sit-ins. The New Republic reported in April 1960: "No outside 
      organization masterminded the recent uprisings. . . . In almost every 
      instance, they were planned and carried out by students, without outside 
      advice or even contact between schools except by way of press and radio 
      news" (Fuller 1960:13). The Nation in May: "Up to this point, the student 
      demonstrations have been spontaneous." Harper's (Wakefield 1960:404) in 
      June quoted an NAACP branch president: "How can I correlate anything when 
      I don't know where and when it's going to happen" (Lomax 1960:47). Paul 
      Wehr (1960), one of the first academic observers of the sit-ins, was 
      surprised by the "absence of any effective liaison" among sit-in groups on 
      eight campuses (quoted in Oberschall 1989:35). Martin Oppenheimer, in 
      another early study, dismissed prior organizational links as explanation 
      for the spread of the sit-ins, arguing that "the sit-ins caught on in the 
      manner of a grass fire, moving from the center outward" (1989:40; see also 
      Carson 1981; Matthews and Prothro 1966; Piven and Cloward 1977; Zinn 
      1964). A grass fire indeed: by the end of February, demonstrations had 
      spread to thirty cities in seven states; by the end of March to fifty-four 
      cities in nine states. By mid-April, fifty thousand people had taken part 
      in the sit-ins (Carson 1981; Chafe 1980). 
      Twenty years later Aldon Morris persuasively challenged the alleged 
      spontaneity of the student sit-ins. As part of a broader assault on 
      sociologists' neglect of the activist traditions and networks that precede 
      social protest, Morris revealed that the Greensboro sit-inners were 
      members of an NAACP Youth Council and had close ties with people who had 
      conducted sit-ins in Durham in the late 1950s. Their discussions of 
      nonviolence and direct action were pursued in an organizational context of 
      skilled strategists. After the sit-m began, a network of ministers, NAACP 
      officials, and other activists swung into action, contacting colleagues to 
      spread the news, training students in sit-in techniques, and persuading 
      adults to support the protests. The church was the linchpin of student 
      activism, Morris argued, supplying leaders and guidance, training and 
      inspiration. "To understand the sit-in movement, one must abandon the 
      assumption that it was a college phenomenon. . . . The sit-ins spread 
      across the South in a short period because [adult] activists, working 
      through local movement centers, planned, coordinated, and sustained them," 
      he concluded (1984:200, 202). 
      Subsequent chroniclers have taken Morris's lead in detailing the extensive 
      adult networks that preceded the sit-ins (Blumberg 1984; Chafe 1980; 
      Powledge 1991). Why then did Walzer's interviewees say they had been "like 
      a fever"? Why, in interviews with reporters, statements to Congress, 
      letters to friends, articles and editorials in campus newspapers and in 
      the Student Voice - organ of the brand new Student Nonviolent Coordinating 
      Committee - did sit-inners describe the protests as sudden, impulsive, and 
      unplanned? Certainly, there were good strategic reasons for conveying that 
      image to the American public. Spontaneity deflected charges of communist 
      influence, and were likelier to garner public support for a "homegrown" 
      protest. But students also referred to the spontaneity of the sit-ins in 
      less public statements, in articles and letters in campus newspapers, and 
      in communications with each other. One would imagine that the chief aim in 
      these communications would be to make sense of unfolding events and to 
      inspire and mobilize fellow students. Why then emphasize the absence of 
      planning, represent the sit-ins as driven not by concerted student action, 
      but by a zeitgeist over which students had no control? Would not the 
      latter undermine the sense of collective efficacy essential to successful 
      mobilization (Benford 1993a; Gamson 1992, 1995; Klandermans 1988, 1997; 
      McAdam 1982; Piven and Cloward 1979)? 
      My examination of students' descriptions of the sit-ins as they were 
      occurring suggests that "spontaneous" did not mean "unplanned." In the 
      stories that students told and retold about the sit-ins, spontaneity 
      denoted independence from adult leadership, urgency, local initiative, and 
      action by moral imperative rather than bureaucratic planning. Narratives 
      of the sit-ins, told by many tellers, in more and less public settings, 
      and in which spontaneity was a central theme, described student activists 
      and potential activists to themselves and, in the process, helped to 
      create the collective identity on behalf of which students took high-risk 
      action. Sit-in stories - and their narrative form was crucial - also 
      motivated action by their failure to specify the mechanics of 
      mobilization. Their ambiguity about agents and agency, not their clarity, 
      successfully engaged listeners. 
      The analysis that I present here draws on cognitive psychology and 
      literary theory as well as the sociology of social movements to respond 
      more broadly to two lacunae in theories of collective action "framing." 
      Framing has been defined as how "social movement organizations and their 
      agents . . . assign meaning to and interpret relevant events and 
      conditions in ways that are intended to mobilize potential adherents and 
      constituents, to garner bystander support, and to demobilize antagonists" 
      (Snow and Benford 1988:198; see also Benford 1993a, b; Gamson 1988; 
      McAdam, McCarthy and Zald 1996; Tarrow 1994). As such, it has been limited 
      to the persuasive efforts of already established movement organizations. 
      This neglects the discursive processes that precede the formation of 
      movement organizations or that take place outside their auspices. We still 
      know little about how the interpretive processes occurring in oppositional 
      subcultures and indigenous institutions, and occurring during initial 
      episodes of collective action (strikes, marches, occupations, etc.) yield 
      movement identities on behalf of which people are willing to sacrifice 
      their personal welfare (Klandermans 1988, 1992; Oberschall 1989; but see 
      Hirsch 1990; Steinberg 1996; Taylor and Whittier 1992). 
      I argue that narrative is prominent in such interpretive processes because 
      its temporally configurative capacity equips it to integrate past, 
      present, and future events and to align individual and collective 
      identities during periods of change. Narrative's reliance on emplotment 
      rather than explanation further engages potential activists precisely by 
      its ambiguity about the causes of collective action. These features 
      distinguish narratives from frames, which are said to contribute to 
      identity-formation through taxonomic atemporal and discursive processes of 
      analogy and difference. Frames' mobilizing capacity, moreover, is 
      allegedly dependent on clear, not ambiguous, specification of the agents, 
      intentions, and efficacy of protest. My purpose in this article is thus to 
      show how narrative identification supplies powerful incentives to 
      participate. 
      To make my case, I draw on accounts of the sit-ins that appeared in: 
      articles, editorials, and letters to the editor culled from eight campus 
      newspapers;(1) articles, letters, and personal narratives published in the 
      Student Voice, a monthly that began publication in May 1960, and 
      newsletters, speeches, personal correspondence, and memos circulated among 
      sit-in leaders and participants beginning in February 1960 that were 
      deposited in SNCC's extensive files (which contain more than 93,000 pages 
      of documents). Materials included communications to small audiences as 
      well as large ones, to friends and family as well as strangers, and to 
      fellow activists as well as funders, the media, and government. Together, 
      these data help to counter the instrumentalist and organizational biases 
      of recent social movement theorizing by elucidating the 
      social-psychological and discursive processes involved in recruitment that 
      takes place outside of formal organizations. 
      In the rest of the paper, I will more fully distinguish the concept of 
      "narrative" from that of "frame," make several propositions about the 
      mobilizing role of narratives in conditions of "loose structure" 
      (Oberschall 1989), and then turn to an analysis of students' accounts of 
      the sit-ins. 
      Frames, Plots, and Protest 
      Mancur Olson's (1965) identification of the "free rider" problem set the 
      challenge for sociologists of collective action. Under what circumstances 
      will people overcome their rational reluctance to participate? When and 
      why do their cost-benefit calculations tip in favor of participation in 
      spite of the fact that they will lose little from non-participation? 
      Concepts of "frames" and "framing" have proved useful in answering these 
      questions. Frames are "interpretive schemata that enable individuals to 
      locate, perceive, identify, and label occurrences within their life space 
      and the world at large" (Snow and Benford 1992:137; Snow et al. 1986:464; 
      see also Tarrow 1994; Zald 1996). Frames combine a diagnosis of the social 
      condition in need of remedy, a prognosis for how to do that, and a 
      rationale for action (Benford and Hunt 1992; Snow and Benford 1988). 
      Gamson (1992, 1995) identifies injustice, identity, and agency components 
      of frames. The injustice component refers to the cognition that a 
      situation is wrong and that it is political rather than merely personal, 
      or "situational" rather than "individual" (Klandermans 1988:179). The 
      agency component denotes a sense of collective efficacy, a belief that the 
      situation is not immutable and that "we" can change it. The identity 
      component refers to this "we," and to the "they" - human antagonists 
      rather than impersonal forces like hunger or poverty - against which 
      collective action must be mobilized."(2) Other theorists emphasize 
      discursive processes of "association and disassociation" (Hunt and Benford 
      1994), "typification" (Benford and Hunt 1992), "comparison" (Klandermans 
      1988, 1997:18), and "categorizing and labeling" (Klandermans 1992:83) in 
      developing the collective identities on behalf of which people 
      participate. 
      What makes for successful frames? At a minimum, say McAdam, McCarthy and 
      Zald, "people need to feel both aggrieved about some aspect of their lives 
      and optimistic that, acting collectively, they can redress the problem" 
      (1996:5). Snow and Benford argue that the diagnosis, prognosis, and 
      rationale for action provided by frames must be "richly developed and 
      interconnected" (1988:199), empirically credible, and congruent with 
      potential adherents' beliefs and broad cultural understandings (see also 
      Gamson 1988). Successful frames connect information and experiences in new 
      ways, or in ways never before "clearly articulated" (Snow and Benford 
      1992:138). They foster "a sense of severity, urgency, efficacy and 
      propriety" (Benford 1993a:209), supply a "clearly interpretable rationale 
      for participation, and discourage "fatalism" (Snow and Benford 1988:203). 
      They convince people "that they have the power to change their condition. 
      Such a conviction presupposes the presence of agents that impress people 
      as politically efficacious, by virtue of either their success in the past 
      or their potential efficacy" (Klandermans 1997:18). In each of these 
      accounts, then, frames motivate participation by persuasively 
      distinguishing insurgents ("us") from antagonists and irrelevant others 
      ("them"), and by clearly representing the possibility, necessity, and 
      efficacy of collective action by deliberate actors. 
      Recently, framing theorists have included narratives - stories, tales, 
      anecdotes, allegories - in their discussions of framing (Benford 1993a; 
      Fine 1995; Hunt and Benford 1994).(3) Narrative is treated as a discursive 
      form through which frames are "expressed and made concrete" (Fine 
      1995:134), and "exemplified" (Benford 1993a: 196). However, subsuming 
      "narrative," under the broader category of "frame" obscures distinctive 
      features of narrative. Indeed, an analysis of movement narratives, 
      understood as chronicles invested with moral meaning through emplotment 
      (White 1980), can fill some significant gaps in recent framing analyses. 
      First, narratives' configuration of events over time makes them important 
      to the construction and maintenance of individual and collective 
      identities. This temporal dimension of identity has been underemphasized 
      by theories of framing which, again, represent identities as developed 
      through discursive processes of analogy and difference.(4) Narrative 
      understandings of identity, by contrast, emphasize the structuring of 
      events into evolving wholes. Life events are "rendered intelligible" say 
      Gergen and Gergen, "by locating them in a sequence or 'unfolding process'" 
      (1997:162; see also Ricoeur 1984). Narratives not only make sense of the 
      past and present but, since the story's chronological end is also its end 
      in the sense of moral, purpose or telos, they project a future. This is 
      the basis for self-identity and action. We act not after the kind of 
      categorization that frames imply (in Polkinghorne's [1988] example, "I am 
      40 years old; I should buy life insurance"), but by locating events within 
      an unfolding life-story ("I felt out of breath last week, I really should 
      start thinking about life insurance"). 
      These features point to narratives' role in the development of collective 
      as well as individual identities. In telling the story of our becoming - 
      as an individual, a nation, a people - we establish who we are. Narratives 
      may be employed strategically to strengthen a collective identity but they 
      also may precede and make possible the development of a coherent 
      community, or nation, or collective actor (Carr 1997; Ginsburg 1989; Hart 
      1992; Sewell 1992; Somers 1992, 1994). They may be especially important 
      during periods of ongoing or potential social transformation. Narratives 
      retain continuity in change, preserve the self or collectivity through 
      change (as in cases of serious illness [Williams 1997], recovery [Denzin 
      1987], and politicization [Ginsburg 1989]). They connect through narrative 
      reversal the group under conditions of oppression and the group under 
      conditions of liberation. Stories thus explain what is going on in a way 
      that makes an evolving identity part of the explanation. 
      A second difference between narratives and frames centers more 
      specifically on how events are linked to outcomes in each one. What makes 
      a frame successful, say Gamson (1988, 1992), Snow and Benford (1988, 
      1992), and Klandermans (1997), is clear specification not only of the 
      injustice against which protest must be mounted but the agents and likely 
      efficacy of that protest. People must be shown that deliberate action will 
      have its intended effect. But individual intention is just one among the 
      principles that may link events in a story. The question in a story is 
      often just what the linkage is: are things happening because of chance or 
      divine intervention, conscious intention or subliminal drive? This is what 
      grips us, what keeps us listening or reading. A story whose end was 
      immediately apparent would be no story at all - would be the moral without 
      the story. Narratives which "underspecify" (Leitch 1986) risk 
      unintelligibility; those which overspecify risk the loss of narrativity, 
      of readers' or hearers' engagement with the text. Wolfgang Iser writes 
      that, "It is only through inevitable omissions that a story will gain its 
      dynamism" (1972:285; see also Bruner 1986). Narrative necessitates our 
      interpretive participation, requires that we struggle to fill the gaps and 
      resolve the ambiguities. We struggle because the story's end is 
      consequential - not only as the outcome but as the moral of the events 
      which precede it. 
      Literary critic J. Hillis Miller argues that even the story's conclusion 
      may not resolve the ambiguity - another reason for narrative's hold. Along 
      with plot and personification, all narratives are characterized by 
      repetition of a "complex word," Miller argues, a word with multiple, 
      indeed incongruous, meanings, as "right" may mean to have the right, to be 
      right, or to be straight (as in "right angle"). Each of those meanings may 
      or may not be simultaneously operative in the same story; this 
      indeterminacy is both what compels our attention and calls for more 
      stories. "[W]e always need more stories because in some way they do not 
      satisfy," Miller suggests (1990:72). I will expand on the argument later. 
      For now, my point is that the difficulty of logically explaining some 
      events (because they are unfamiliar or defy conventional rationales for 
      action)(5) may compel a narrative explanation, which in turn preserves the 
      ambiguity that calls for more stories. 
      To illustrate, let me turn to the "Hundredth Monkey Story" which, 
      according to Benford (1993a), demonstrates the importance of severity, 
      urgency, propriety, and efficacy components of frames. The book, which 
      became a powerfully persuasive tool for the American antinuclear movement, 
      opens with an allegory: 
      The Japanese monkey, Macaca fuscata, has been observed in the wild for a 
      period of over 30 years. In 1952, on the island of Koshima, scientists 
      were providing monkeys with sweet potatoes, but they found the dirt 
      unpleasant. An 18-month-old female named Imo found she could solve the 
      problem by washing the potatoes in a nearby stream. She taught this trick 
      to her mother. Her playmates also learned this new way and they taught 
      their mothers too. 
      This cultural innovation was gradually picked up by various monkeys before 
      the eyes of the scientists. Between 1952 and 1958, all the young monkeys 
      learned to wash the sandy sweet potatoes to make them more palatable. . . 
      . [sic] 
      Then something startling took place. In the autumn of 1958, a certain 
      number of Koshima monkeys were washing sweet potatoes - the exact number 
      is not known. Let us suppose that when the sun rose one morning there were 
      99 monkeys on Koshima Island who had learned to wash their sweet potatoes. 
      Let's further suppose that later that morning, the hundredth monkey 
      learned to wash potatoes. THEN IT HAPPENED! 
      By that evening almost everyone in the tribe was washing sweet potatoes 
      before eating them. The added energy of this hundredth monkey somehow 
      created an ideological breakthrough! 
      But notice. The most surprising thing observed by the scientists was that 
      the habit of washing sweet potatoes then spontaneously jumped over the sea 
      - Colonies of monkeys on other islands and the mainland troop of monkeys 
      at Takasakiyama began washing their sweet potatoes! 
      Thus, when a certain critical number achieves an awareness, this new 
      awareness may be communicated from mind to mind. . . . You may furnish the 
      added consciousness energy [sic] to create the shared awareness of the 
      urgent necessity to rapidly achieve a nuclear free world. (quoted in 
      Benford 1993a:196) 
      Benford argues that the story promotes efficacy by demonstrating "the 
      power of the new awareness and your role in the unfolding drama" (196). 
      Yet the story's demonstration of the power of conscious individual action 
      is not at all clear. "THEN IT HAPPENED," the story goes, but it is not 
      clear just what happened, nor why all the Koshima monkeys and monkeys in 
      distant tribes suddenly, "spontaneously," began washing potatoes. How did 
      monkeys that were not in contact with the original tribe learn the 
      practice? The story raises more questions than it answers, indeed, seems 
      to attribute the spread of the practice to some force beyond rational 
      control. Contrary, then, to Benford's contention that a successful frame 
      specifies agents and agency, it seems that this story was successful 
      precisely by its failure to supply a logical explanation for action. It 
      promises to explain the link between action and outcome but then simply 
      places us, the reader/listener, at the victorious end. Penetrating the 
      mystery of collective action requires more stories, and indeed, requires 
      not only stories, but that we ourselves act. 
      Of course, self- and collective narratives are social narratives, created 
      not solipsistically but from the wider narratives at hand (Somers [1994] 
      similarly distinguishes between "ontological" and "public" narratives). We 
      can as little imagine a nineteenth century thief narrating his life in 
      terms of a lack of self-esteem as we can imagine him lodging that defense 
      in a court of law. This points to a third critical difference between 
      narratives and frames. To be effective, say framing theorists, frames must 
      resonate with extant "ideology, values, belief systems" (Gamson 1988:220). 
      But since "every coin has two sides; every argument has its opposite 
      arguments" (Klandermans 1992:84), there is still plenty of room for 
      ideological maneuver. Framing theorists thus emphasize the multiplicity of 
      coexisting, often contradictory value positions that can be mobilized by 
      activists. By contrast, narrative's dependence on a limited stock of 
      culturally resonant plots - on a canon - emphasizes the constraints levied 
      by dominant cultural understandings. Narrative theorists differ on just 
      how many plots there are, and just how universal they are. But there is 
      agreement that stories not conforming to a cultural stock of plots 
      typically are either not stories or are unintelligible. Activists' very 
      understandings of "strategy," "interest," "identity," and "politics" may 
      be structured by the oppositions and hierarchies that come from familiar 
      stories. Thus, if part of the power of mobilizing narratives lies in their 
      polyvalence of meaning, oppositional meanings must always contend with 
      more conventional ones. In the case of the student sit-in narrative, I 
      will show how the anchoring theme of "spontaneity" both galvanized action 
      and weighted subsequent strategic options unequally. Spontaneous protest - 
      sitting-in - was represented as moral, urgent, and radical (contrary to 
      the amoral, gradualist, and moderate protest of adult activists). But it 
      was also characterized, by implication, as non-political and 
      non-strategic. 
      Mobilizing Identities in Fledgling Movements 
      Narratives' capacity to make sense of unfamiliar events, to engage as they 
      explain, and to sustain identity during periods of rapid change suggests 
      that they would be especially prominent in movement discourse that 
      develops before movement organizations have been consolidated or that 
      occurs outside their auspices. This phase of protest remains generally 
      understudied. Indeed, says Oberschall, analysts have tended to project the 
      aims of the formally organized phase of the movement backward to explain 
      its beginnings. So, for example, "they write about a civil rights movement 
      when there was yet only sporadic and disjointed challenge to segregation. 
      . . . Black leaders and participants in the 1960 sit-ins were not yet 
      conscious of forming a civil rights movement nor creating one according to 
      some well thought-out master plan" (1989:46). 
      Oberschall's "diffusion model" responds to this bias by describing 
      mechanisms of recruitment in "loose structures," collectivities where 
      there is no prior overarching organization, ideology, or dependable flow 
      of resources. In these circumstances, actors tend to overestimate the 
      likelihood of repression and underestimate the possibility for success. 
      But "[s]uppose that in a similar social milieu protest is initiated by 
      people much like oneself, with whom one shares a common identity, and that 
      the outcome and conflict circumstances become widely known" (41). When 
      widely diffused, for example via media coverage, such perceptions cause 
      people to revise their calculations of success and to participate. Applied 
      to the sit-in movement, this scenario has students learning about the 
      Greensboro protest through friendship networks, basketball leagues, and 
      media coverage, then planning their own campus meetings, and rallying 
      their fellow students to demonstrate. Against political process analyses, 
      Oberschall argues that church networks and movement organizations such as 
      the NAACP, SCLC, and CORE responded to the sit-ins and helped to sustain 
      them, but did not initiate them. 
      Oberschall's model is persuasive but it leaves underspecified several key 
      mechanisms. How is it that protesters elsewhere come to be seen as "much 
      like oneself," and worthy in their efforts? How does a common identity 
      come to be shared and to compel participation? Are perceptions that 
      retaliation and repression are less severe than originally thought enough 
      to explain activism that is still physically demanding and dangerous? 
      Friedman and McAdam (1992) provide answers to these questions by 
      emphasizing the normative dimension of participation. Highly regarded 
      roles within communities may come to be linked with activism in a way that 
      makes participation a requirement of the role. In the early part of the 
      civil rights movement, activism was linked with - normatively required of 
      - churchgoers; in 1960, student became linked to activist, became a 
      "prized social identity" that supplied the selective incentives to 
      participation. 
      Contemporaneous and retrospective accounts suggest that in 1960 activism 
      did become normative for Black college students. As Tallahassee sit-in 
      leader Charles Smith put it: "a spirit of competition has found its way 
      into the civil rights arena, and no college or university wants to be left 
      behind or be found wanting in this kind of courage or conviction" (Killian 
      1984:781). In his survey of sit-inners on eight college campuses shortly 
      after the wave of sit-ins began, Wehr (1960) found that "one common 
      response to the question 'Why did the movement start at your school?' was 
      'we wanted to jump into the movement before [another school]" (quoted in 
      Oberschall 1989:35). Laue noted similarly that: 
      [T]he response of Negro students to Greensboro was almost always phrased 
      in terms of "keeping up" with the other students. "When students came to 
      me to talk about their protest plans," recalls Tuskegee Dean Charles 
      Gomillion, "I asked them, 'Where are you going to sit-in here?' [in 
      predominantly rural Macon County, Alabama.] 'We have to go,' they said. 
      'What will other colleges think of us if we don't?'" (1989:82) 
      Friedman and McAdam's claim that student and activist identities had 
      become normatively fused is persuasive but their explanation for it is 
      unclear. "In the first stage, the emerging movement grows out of but 
      remains dependent upon preexisting institutions and organizations . . . 
      established groups redefine group membership to include commitment to the 
      movement as one of its obligations" (1992:162-163, emphasis mine). If they 
      mean that Southern college officials deliberately promoted an activist 
      identity, such an assertion is belied by the evidence.(6) According to 
      Orbell (1972), most student sit-inners experienced their college 
      administrations and faculties as unsupportive of the sit-ins (46% of 
      sit-inners enrolled at private colleges reported support from both 
      administration and faculty; 50% of state college demonstrators reported 
      that faculty was supportive of their efforts, but only 15% reported that 
      administrations were). By the end of the 1960 spring term, over a hundred 
      students had been expelled from Black colleges for their participation 
      (Laue 1989:77).(7) My own examination of campus newspapers showed that 
      many made no mention of sit-ins in which their own students were 
      participating; archivists attributed this lacuna to the conservatism of 
      campus administrations. 
      If Friedman and McAdam mean instead that the equation of student and 
      activist was effected by students themselves through informal framing 
      processes that were as much about making sense of current developments and 
      trends as they were about persuading people to mobilize, then we need a 
      better understanding of those processes. To account for the emergence of a 
      mobilizing identity on Black college campuses, and the development of such 
      identities more broadly, we need to examine not only the instrumental 
      framing efforts of indigenous and formal movement organizations but also: 
      (a) the larger social and cultural context in which an idiom of student 
      activism made sense (cf. Emirbayer and Goodwin 1994); and, (b) the 
      diffuse, noninstitutionalized discursive processes by which people's 
      efforts to make sense of initial protests turned into a rationale for 
      participation. 
      With respect to the first, Black college students in 1960 could not but be 
      affected by the association of student and activist that was occurring on 
      a world historical stage. "There was a feeling that it was the 'dawn of a 
      new era,'" SNCC founder and advisor Ella Baker recalled, "that something 
      new and great was happening and that only [students] could chart the 
      course of history" (see also Flacks 1971).(8) The sit-ins came at a time 
      when students were playing visible and dramatic roles in regime changes 
      around the world: they had toppled military regimes in Turkey and South 
      Korea, and had blocked President Eisenhower's visit to Japan (participants 
      at the 1960 National Student Association conference heard from student 
      movement representatives from all three countries).(9) It was not only 
      students, but Black students who were the change makers. "Sure we 
      identified with the Blacks in Africa," Nashville sit-in leader John Lewis 
      said later, "and we were thrilled by what was going on. Here were Black 
      people, talking of freedom and liberation and independence, thousands of 
      miles away. We could hardly miss the lesson for ourselves" (quoted in 
      Viorst 1979:116). African students studying at Black colleges participated 
      in the Nashville sit-ins, Lewis recalls. Representatives of the Republic 
      of Cameroon, Kenya, Nigeria, and other nations visited Black college 
      campuses in 1959 and 1960, and Black campus newspapers devoted 
      considerable coverage to events in Africa during this period. "Today, the 
      dark people on the other side of the earth are protesting and dying for 
      their freedom," a Howard University student noted in calling for student 
      activism in early 1960. "All over the world a new generation of leadership 
      is emerging," wrote a Fisk student. And another, "We realize that students 
      can play an important role in the development and redevelopment of 
      society."(10) 
      Students at Black colleges were thus exposed to students as change-makers 
      through their direct contacts with international student activists, 
      through national media accounts, and through their own campus press. At 
      the same time, campus newspapers in 1959 and early 1960 referred 
      frequently to the problems of student "apathy," and editorials chastised 
      students for their lack of political and intellectual engagement: "The 
      majority of our students are now apathetic toward student government;" 
      "General student apathy towards affairs pertaining to them - political, 
      social or otherwise - is a 'campus disease' badly in need of therapy;" 
      "Throughout American education there is a growing concern for what has 
      been labeled by some 'student apathy.'" The "beatniks" were discussed 
      critically in several editorials, and their repudiation of middle-class 
      conventionality was attributed to a pervasive normlessness. The cultural 
      media to which students were most directly exposed thus offered and 
      evaluated two modes of being a student, with the revolutionary aspirations 
      of the international students lauded and the deviance of the beats 
      condemned.(11) 
      The dynamic involved in the "fusion of prized role and activism" that 
      Friedman and McAdam (1992) describe seems to have been less an established 
      organization pitching a role than students perceiving it on a world 
      historical stage. But how did a collective identity of student activist 
      come to be associated with a particular set of expected behaviors? Even 
      after news spread of the Greensboro protest, one can imagine "student 
      activism" meaning rallying financial and moral support for the sit-inners, 
      or organizing campus discussions about race relations or about the 
      upcoming Presidential election. How and why did "student activist" come to 
      mean "putting one's body on the line," participating directly in 
      nonviolent desegregation efforts? 
      The equation of student and sit-inner on a wide scale was in part the 
      result of strategic framing efforts by representatives of the Student 
      Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the campus coordinating group 
      formed when SCLC activist Ella Baker convened 200 sit-in leaders to 
      discuss strategy in April 1960. In the following, I describe SNCC 
      representatives' efforts to legitimate and promote participation. But SNCC 
      was given only a modest role by campus groups who were insistent on 
      maintaining autonomy. And characteristic of a loose structure, SNCC's 
      voice was only one of many. In the weeks and months after the Greensboro 
      sit-ins, spokespeople for the fledgling movement were legion: sit-in 
      leaders and rank and file, participants and supporters, Northerners and 
      Southerners told stories of the sit-ins in letters to the editor of the 
      Student Voice and to SNCC, letters to the editors of Black campus 
      newspapers and letters among members of student groups such as the 
      National Student Association, the YMCA, and YWCA. These stories, along 
      with movement organizations' strategic framing efforts and a consciousness 
      of students' international political role, contributed to the development 
      of mobilizing identities. 
      Stories Versus Frames 
      Story-tellers had diverse aims: garnering adult support; urging federal 
      intervention; commenting on the larger significance and likely course of 
      the movement; and mobilizing participants. Did they, as framing theorists 
      would suggest, emphasize the injustice of their situation, cast their 
      identity in terms of their differences from clearly specified antagonists, 
      and assert their own capacity to bring about the changes they sought? My 
      examination of students' discussions suggests not. The injustices they 
      described were often vague: denial of "the humane aspects of the American 
      dream;" of "equality and dignity;" "dignity;" the injustice of "a 
      passively immoral society;" not only "the existing conditions, but . . . 
      the snail-like pace at which they are being ameliorated;" and the 
      "accumulated indignities suffered by Negro Americans since Reconstruction 
      days." Sit-inners pitted themselves against "apathy" - a condition that 
      seems more unfortunate than unjust.(12) 
      Contrary to framing theorists' contention that successful frames make 
      protest's agents and agency clear, in these accounts, students' control 
      over their own actions was ambiguous. The students acted, powerfully, 
      transgressively, with immediate, real consequence. And yet they were 
      simply the carriers of a force beyond them. The sit-ins came from nowhere 
      - "boom" - and were the culmination of "centuries of accumulated anger." 
      Narrators were as likely to deny conscious intent as to assert it (when 
      one group of students launched a demonstration, "[t]his was a surprise 
      (and shock) not only to the whole town but to themselves as well"), to 
      declare themselves followers rather than leaders ("Some great leaders are 
      present today," a student wrote in the Morris Brown College Wolverine. 
      "Let us follow them wherever they go"), to predict rather than claim their 
      own activism ("As soon as the movement broke, I knew I would get into 
      it"). "No one started it . . ." a sit-inner insisted - his claim denying 
      collective identity altogether.(13) Students attributed the sit-ins not to 
      conscious, collective intent, but to forces over which they had no 
      control. Rather than planning, they emphasized spontaneity. 
      Sit-In Narratives 
      The narrative form of students' representations of the sit-ins is 
      striking. They told stories, and similar stories, over and over again. A 
      piece published in the Shaw College campus newspaper in May 1960 opened: 
      It was night time Tuesday, Feb. 9. Radio and television commentators had 
      announced that 'it' was not expected to happen in Raleigh. Wednesday 
      morning, Feb. 10, 10:30 - BOOM! - 'it' hit with an unawareness that rocked 
      the capital city from its usual sedateness to a state oil glaring 
      frenzy.(14) 
      The same month, from a letter sent by the just-formed Student Nonviolent 
      Coordinating Committee to Congressmen: 
      The sit-ins began February 1st in Greensboro N.C. when four freshmen at 
      Negro North Carolina A and T sat down at a variety store lunch counter 
      after purchasing several items in other departments of the store. They 
      were refused service. Their action was a spontaneous rebellion against the 
      accumulated indignities suffered by Negro Americans since Reconstruction 
      days. "Why must we be continually under tension and indignity when we want 
      to eat, or find a lodging place, or use a rest room?" they asked. Their 
      action has led others to ask the same question - and to do something about 
      it. Since February, the sit-ins have spread to almost 100 cities in every 
      Southern state.(15) 
      One can imagine other ways of representing the sit-ins. Writers or 
      speakers might have first described the current state and scale of the 
      sit-ins in snapshot rather than chronological form (for example, "there 
      are students currently sitting-in in fifty cities"). They might have begun 
      by questioning or advocating the future course of the demonstrations ("we 
      must build on the sit-in movement to fight for more radical changes," 
      "after the sit-ins, what next?"), or by appealing directly to fellow 
      students' commitment ("your fellow students are putting their lives on the 
      line. Where are you?"). Instead, they recounted events in chronological 
      order from "the beginning," with the moral of the story conveyed by the 
      events themselves. Newspaper accounts are more likely to recount events in 
      narrative form than are speeches or personal letters, and I cite more of 
      the former than the latter. But newspaper stories typically do not display 
      the degree of suspense, moral as well as temporal directionality, and 
      ambiguity around causality that the sit-in narratives did. Interestingly, 
      the very first campus newspaper accounts of the Greensboro sit-in, which 
      appeared in the Agricultural and Technical College Register, used much 
      more conventionally journalistic and editorial formats. The difference 
      between these and subsequent accounts suggest that the narrative 
      representation of the sit-ins took some time to develop.(16) 
      Students' narratives of the sit-ins exhibited each of the elements that 
      Miller (1990) sees as characteristic of the form: plot ("an initial 
      situation, a sequence leading to a change or reversal of that situation, 
      and a revelation made possible by the reversal of the situation" [75]); 
      personification ("a protagonist, an antagonist, and a witness who learns" 
      [75]); and repetition of a complex word. With respect to plot, the sit-ins 
      reversed a situation of student apathy and a movement dominated by adult 
      gradualism; they created a new, student-led, action-oriented movement. The 
      revelations generated by the reversal were multiple. To the country, they 
      showed the level of Black discontent, to mainstream civil rights 
      organizations, they showed the inadequacy of a moderate agenda, to 
      students themselves, they showed the potency of students' collective 
      agency. "Saint Paul College students have been joltingly awakened to the 
      fact that we must do our part as thinking Negro Americans, and take a 
      definite stand in the fight for equal rights," a student writer ended his 
      account. "Because of [the sit-ins] Baltimore will never be the same," 
      another concluded. "When, in the future we look back on the 60's may it be 
      remembered as the years in which the American Youth forced the nation to 
      dedicate itself to turning the American Dream into a Reality."(17) 
      The successful plot makes the familiar unfamiliar or, as Roman Jakobson 
      puts it, "the ordinary strange" (quoted in Bruner 1991:13). We read 
      because we sense that the story we know will transpire differently on this 
      occasion. The sit-in narrative made the quotidian act of sitting down at a 
      lunch counter and ordering a cup of coffee - what should have been a 
      nonpolitical act - a dangerous and unpredictable epic. In conversations 
      with North Carolinian students, Michael Walzer observed that they "told 
      one story after another about . . . minor but to them terribly important 
      incidents in the buses, in stores, on the job. The stories usually ended 
      with some version of "I ran out of that store. I almost cried. . .'" 
      (Walzer 1960a). The sit-in narrative thus transformed a too-common story 
      of humiliation into one of triumph. In several accounts, the adventure was 
      funny as well as exciting. Editors of a college newspaper wrote, "Here 
      were two harmless young people sauntering through a store . . . stalking 
      them in true dragnetness were no less than half a dozen police officers, 
      while customers and managers hovered in corners as if the invasion from 
      Mars had come!" A Knoxville College writer composed an "Ode To A Lunch 
      Counter:" "Little lunch counter with your many stools/And your nervous 
      pacing manager fools/How do you feel amid this confusion and strife?/Do 
      you object to a change inevitable in life?"(18) 
      Students who did not participate in the demonstrations constructed 
      narratives in which the sit-ins were a subplot of their own larger story. 
      For example, a White high-school student wrote to sit-inners of his 
      experience in a race relations-themed summer camp: 
      And now it is September. For many of us we will return to homes and 
      schools which will irritate us even more after knowing and living what we 
      have learned and what we have lived. But we do seem to agree that we 
      cannot behave quite the way we did before we came to this camp. We have 
      talked so much about what the sit-in movement means to us. It would be 
      almost impossible to know how much it means to you. To us it is an 
      affirmation of so many things. Of the courage of our young people. Of the 
      miracle of spontaneity. Of the faith in people who will do something about 
      what they believe.(19) 
      Conversations about the sit-ins, about "the miracle of spontaneity" were 
      thus integrated into campers' own story of enlightenment. Swarthmore 
      College editors wrote in the same vein, "Because our minds are knit into a 
      web, the agitation of a few will tremble in all dimensions. Students 
      cannot control, they can only communicate, in a Tokyo snake dance 
      demonstration, a Nashville sit-in, or a chorus behind their printed 
      word."(20) 
      Personification was a second key feature of the sit-in narrative. The 
      witness role that Miller (1990) refers to was fulfilled by at least four 
      players: the sit-inners themselves who realized their own capacity for 
      transformative action; adult movement leaders; the national public; and 
      potential student activists who would recognize their potential selves in 
      the sit-in story. Dramatis personae expressed a set of appropriate 
      emotions. Sit-inners were "weary" of oppression and the slow pace of 
      change, "tired" of waiting for the "American dream to materialize." They 
      were "apprehensive" about the repercussions of their actions, plagued by 
      "butterflies." Yet, they were "all so very happy that we were (and are) 
      able to do this to help our city, state and nation," and "maintain[ed] 
      high enthusiasm." None of the stories represented the sit-inners as angry, 
      cynical, or calculating. SNCC's Jane Stembridge wrote to a sit-inner that 
      she had "read and re-read" his story "with the deepest pain, joy, 
      laughter, and chills. . . . You have written a story of Life," she 
      observed. "We can write fact after fact about the movement, and never 
      touch the real elements."(21) Narrative made "real" the movement in a way 
      that nonnarrative "facts" could not. 
      Miller's (1990) third narrative feature, repetition of a complex word, 
      occurs in the repeated reference to the spontaneity of the sit-ins. Again, 
      in these communications aimed at mobilizing fellow students as well as 
      understanding what had happened, why would students draw attention to - 
      indeed, celebrate - the unplanned character of the protest? There were 
      good strategic reasons for representing the sit-ins that way. Spontaneity 
      offered some defense against charges that the demonstrations were led by 
      "outside agitators" - read, communists. The students' image as eager, 
      impatient, and fearless also may have allayed potential financial 
      supporters' fears of communist inspiration, and gave older leaders a 
      valuable bargaining chip in their threat of disruption.(22) But an 
      exclusively instrumental account is belied by the fact that students 
      represented the sit-ins as spontaneous in communications with each other 
      as well as in more public settings. 
      It is unlikely that if asked, they would have denied the involvement of 
      specific adults and organizations in helping to plan the sit-ins. 
      Referring to the spontaneity of campus mobilization was not at odds with 
      the existence of planning networks. For example, one group of sit-inners 
      described their action as "the result of spontaneous combustion," then 
      went on to chronicle the planning that had preceded it. They emphasized, 
      however - and this seems to be the point of using the term "spontaneous 
      combustion" - that "there was no organizational tie-in of any kind, either 
      local or national." But they also acknowledged "in order to make the story 
      complete" that members of the sit-organizing group had previously received 
      a "Letter to Christian Students" from the National Student Christian 
      Federation urging them to seek ways to participate.(23) This insistence on 
      spontaneity in spite of evidence and acknowledgment of planning suggests 
      that the term meant something other than that the sit-ins were unplanned. 
      Closer examination of student sit-in narratives suggests three meanings. 
      First, the sit-ins' spontaneity signaled a decisive break, both with 
      students' prior apathy, and with adults' moderation. Howard University's 
      newspaper, The Hilltop ran a story titled "Students Picket in Spontaneous 
      Move" which opened: "A group of 130 Howard students did much recently to 
      destroy the myth of student 'apathy.'" Editors of a new campus journal 
      wrote: "No longer may students be called the 'Silent Generation.' 
      Dissatisfied with a passively immoral society, they are increasingly 
      involved in the world they want to change." "Our impatience with the token 
      efforts of responsible adult leaders, was manifest in the spontaneous 
      protest demonstrations which, after February 1, spread rapidly across the 
      entire South," SNCC's chair Marion Barry told Platform committees at the 
      Democratic and Republican national conventions.(24) The sit-ins were thus 
      represented as signaling the death of an old movement and the birth of a 
      new. Commending the formation of a new Black periodical, SNCC wrote to its 
      editors, "There is no longer a way to rationalize gradualism. It did die 
      on February 1, 1960, in Woolworth's of Greensboro. It will die again and 
      again when every individual rises to his responsibility. . . . We hope for 
      [the continuation of the Atlanta Inquirer] and its effectiveness as a 
      death blow to apathy, fear, and gradualism." A piece published in the 
      Student Voice referred to the student sit-ins as giving "birth" to a 
      "freedom child." "The Baltimore Sitdowner," read a flyer for that city's 
      movement, "was born on a bitter, cold night in March. "(25) 
      A second prominent theme in the sit-in narrative, one again evoked by the 
      term spontaneity, represented the demonstrations as motivated by a moral 
      imperative rather than a strategic plan, a directive to lay one's body on 
      the line that did not admit of negotiation. "Despite fears, the sit-ins 
      will continue for a long time," one story concluded. "Many more tears will 
      be shed, and perhaps many of my friends will be hurt. They feel that they 
      must go on." A piece in the Student Voice opened, "It is really strange - 
      to do things alone. Sometimes we have no alternative," then described 
      student Henry Thomas's frustrated efforts to mobilize students in St. 
      Augustine, Florida. "'I decided to make another try at it," Thomas was 
      quoted. "Still thinking of the opposition I would have, I decided to carry 
      out my plans regardless if there was no one but me - I did it alone.'" 
      "Hank Thomas road a train South" - now the editor's voice. "He had to do 
      this thing now. People on the train talked, said go slow, said don't try 
      too hard, said no to Henry . . . but the train did not stop till it got 
      home and Hank was on it." The story combined agency and zeitgeist: Hank 
      acted on his own and yet was just a passenger on a freedom train.(26) 
      Seven of the thirteen students interviewed by sociologist James Laue in 
      1962 attributed the start and spread of the sit-ins to the "tenor of the 
      times," or called them "inevitable." "Your relationship with the movement 
      is just like a love affair," said one. "You can't explain it. All you know 
      is it's something you have to do" (quoted in Laue 1989:62, 78). 
      Howard University's Lawrence Henry related the story of that campus's 
      sit-ins: "Who started it? No one started it. What united us was the 
      American principle of freedom and equality and the fact that we want to be 
      tree." Jane Stembridge told members of the National Student Association, 
      "The fact that the protest broke out overnight and spread with fantastic 
      speed said simply this: the Negro, despite the thoughts of too many 
      Whites, is NOT content. . . . And nobody could escape this." For students 
      at Penn State, the sit-ins were "symbolic of a new era in race relations 
      and of a new Negro - one who is unwilling to wait until the sweet 
      by-and-by." "We had been ready to do something like this for a long time;" 
      "We have been planning it all our lives;" "We're living in a jet age and 
      we're tired of moving at an ox-cart pace;" "Sure we've been influenced by 
      outsiders, outsiders like Thoreau and Gandhi. But our biggest influence 
      has been inside - all those years of second-class citizenship;" "We have 
      'taken it' since the day we were born;" "After 95 years of discussions, 
      delays, postponements, procrastination, denials, and second-class 
      citizenship, the Negro of today wants his full citizenship in his day" - 
      formulations like these peppered the sit-in narratives. Editors of Shaw 
      University's newspaper wrote, "[T]he students say - and it is reasonable 
      to believe them - that they are tired of waiting for the humane aspects of 
      the American dream to materialize."(27) 
      Students of Philander Smith College in Little Rock, Arkansas wrote, "The 
      spirit reached the boiling point at 11:00 a.m., March 10, 1960. It was on 
      this day that the students of Philander Smith College cast their lots into 
      the New Student Movement." On this rendering, protest was an expression of 
      centuries of frustration. SNCC's letter to Congressmen said of the 
      sit-inners: "Their action was a spontaneous rebellion against the 
      accumulated indignities suffered by Negro Americans since Reconstruction 
      days." Third, then, the sit-ins were represented as driven by an 
      imperative over which individuals had no control, as expression of a world 
      historical force. "This situation was inevitable," a speaker told Howard 
      University students. "Negroes are in the process of discovering a new 
      self-image; and they are no longer willing to accept the injustices done 
      to them." The "current wave of demonstrations is the spontaneous ground 
      swell of the profound determination of young Negroes to be first-class 
      citizens" wrote students at Vanderbilt University. From SNCC: "We know now 
      that we must inexorably win the battle against injustice."(28) 
      Descriptions of the student protest "burst[ing]," "breaking," "exploding," 
      "sweeping," "surging," "unleashed," "rip[ping] through the city like an 
      epidemic," of students "fired" by the "spark of the sit-ins," of "released 
      waves of damned-up energy," of a "chain reaction" were common and 
      suggested again an unstoppable moral impetus. Attacks on desegregated 
      accommodations were just one manifestation of a protest that could expand 
      in myriad ways. "It was not the coffee that caused an unbelievable wave of 
      demonstrations to arise spontaneously and, within weeks, to cover the 
      entire South. It was, as the Atlanta students wrote, 'an Appeal for Human 
      rights.'"(29) 
      If the twentieth century American "standard story" is one in which 
      significant actions occur as consequences of the deliberations and 
      impulses of independent, conscious, and self-motivated actors (Tilly 
      1998), then students' representations of the sit-ins as spontaneous 
      challenged that rationale for action, along with its connotations of adult 
      gradualism and amoral instrumentalism. Students narratively constructed 
      what was happening in order to make sense of it, but also to signal its 
      significance. In the process, they created a new collective identity of 
      student activist. "The sit-ins," SNCC Chair Charles McDew said in October 
      1960, "have inspired us to build a new image of ourselves in our own 
      minds" (McDew 1967). That identity supplied the selective incentives that 
      made "high risk activism" (McAdam 1986) attractive. 
      Narratives of the sit-ins also motivated by their very failure to convey a 
      single meaning. References to the sit-ins' spontaneity simultaneously 
      explained and failed to explain the sit-ins in a way that called for the 
      story's retelling - and reenactment. To clarify, I return to the third 
      feature of Miller's (1990) characterization of narrative. Again, the 
      complex word at the heart of all narratives is not only polyvalent but 
      finally indeterminate, Miller argues; its core meaning is unfixable. The 
      impossibility of a conclusive meaning calls for more stories that 
      recapitulate the dilemma, but differently. All stories both explain and 
      fail to explain, Miller goes on, but the dynamic is clearest in stories of 
      humankind's origins. The point at which man separates himself from beasts 
      is unknowable, since "whatever is chosen as the moment of origination 
      always presupposes some earlier moment when man first appeared" (72). The 
      question cannot be answered logically, and the alternative is a mythical 
      narrative whose illogical premises will nevertheless require that it be 
      retold. Thus Sophocles' Oedipus the King depicts a man who both has and 
      has not broken the incest taboo - that which separates humans from all 
      other species - and is punished (punishes himself) for that which he did 
      not know. The enigma is revealed but unresolved; hence the need for more 
      stories - for Shakespeare's Hamlet, for Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom. "What 
      cannot be expressed logically, one is tempted to say, we then tell stories 
      about," Miller concludes (74). 
      The question of origins is just as unanswerable in the case of social 
      movements, When does protest begin? In this case, did it begin when the 
      first students were arrested? Did it begin with the Montgomery bus 
      boycott? With Brown v. Board? Did it begin with the first slave rebellion? 
      With the first song sung, or African tradition preserved, or Christian 
      ritual reinterpreted in what James Scott (1990) calls an "infrapolitics of 
      dissent" stretching back to Africans' enslavement in this country? The 
      question of origins is historical but also personal. When does collective 
      action begin? When can I call myself an activist? The sit-in narrative 
      posed those questions and resolved them in a way that called for their 
      re-asking. The students acted, and yet it was a force that made students 
      act, an impetus that acted through the students. 
      The word "spontaneity" means both voluntary and instinctual (involuntary) 
      - contradictory meanings contained in the same (complex) word. In the 
      sit-in narratives, spontaneity functioned as a kind of narrative ellipsis 
      in which the movement's "beginning" occurred; "IT HAPPENED," and the 
      non-narratable shift from observer to participant took place. This 
      ellipsis or ambiguity strengthened the engagement of the listener/hearer 
      in one of two ways. Either, following Iser (1972) and Leitch (1986), its 
      underspecification of the mechanisms of participation forced 
      listeners/hearers to fill in the missing links, to become co-authors of 
      the story. Or, following Miller (1990), the story could not establish, 
      could not fix the motivation for participation and so required its 
      retelling. And since the story was a true one, retelling required 
      reenactment of the events already described. Either way, ambiguity was 
      crucial to narrativity, to readers' engagement and 
      identification with the story. 
      A concept of narrative thus captures the action-compelling character of 
      the discourse around the sit-ins better than does the concept of frames by 
      virtue of narrative's combination of familiarity and undecidability, 
      convention and novelty, and truth (representing reality) and fiction 
      (constituting reality). It was not the sit-in narratives' clarity about 
      the antagonists, protagonists, stakes, and mechanics of struggle that made 
      them so compelling but rather their containment of ambiguity, risk, and 
      mystery within a familiar discursive form. 
      Institutionalizing Spontaneity 
      How compelling were the sit-in narratives? In addition to the number of 
      students who joined the sit-ins (70,000 by September 1961 [Oberschall 
      1989]), the challenges created for SNCC as a fledgling organization by the 
      sit-in narratives suggests their potency. Spontaneity, emblematic of 
      students' independence and their unique contribution to the movement, 
      became organizational commitments which both animated and constrained 
      strategic action. Students called for coordination but were resistant to 
      direction, wanted the movement to speak to the nation but were wary of 
      leaders, wanted to expand the scope of protest but distrusted adult 
      advice. Southern Regional Council official Margaret Long advised SNCC 
      workers on their fundraising activities: "I wonder if it is really true, 
      as this brochure says, that you 'seek to be a coordinating agency.' I see 
      a great deal of uprising and brave and impeccable and successful marches 
      on the Bastille, but I don't see any coordinated movement by you or 
      anybody else. And I don't know that there should be."(30) SNCC leaders 
      apparently took Long's advice, for in funding appeals, newsletters, and 
      speeches, they represented the group as extension of the spontaneity of 
      the sit-ins, and of the values of moral imperative, local autonomy, and 
      radicalism that spontaneity connoted. A narrative of the sit-ins warranted 
      SNCC as a kind of "anti-organization," as observers would later call it, 
      an organization that sought not so much to guide the struggle as to go 
      where people were "moving;" that was less interested in executing a 
      well-planned agenda than in enacting in its own operation the society it 
      envisaged, and that privileged direct and moral action over political 
      maneuvering.(31) 
      The strength of the sit-in narrative, and its equation of student protest 
      with moral - as opposed to political - action, is also suggested by the 
      internal conflict SNCC faced the following year in moving from direct 
      action (sit-ins and freedom rides) to voter registration. Proponents of 
      voter registration within SNCC were careful to emphasize that "the only 
      group that could do a complete voter registration program southwide was a 
      student group,"(32) thus asserting SNCC's distinctive identity as a 
      student organization. But they still met with fierce resistance (Carson 
      1981; Zinn 1964). Detractors were wary of the federal administration's 
      support for a voter registration campaign and worried about cooptation. 
      They also saw electoral politics as "immoral," and as antithetical to the 
      moral protest that had animated SNCC's activism thus far (Stoper 1989). 
      An organizational split was averted only through the intervention of 
      advisor Ella Baker, who persuaded the group to form direct action and 
      voter registration wings, an arrangement abandoned as some direct action 
      proponents left the organization and others shifted to voter registration. 
      SNCC workers were also discovering, as one put it later, that "voter 
      registration was direct action" (Charles Jones quoted in Stoper 1989:197). 
      Accompanying Black people to southern courthouses to register provoked the 
      same violence and disruption as had the sit-ins and served equally well to 
      dramatize to the nation the denial of African-Americans' constitutional 
      rights. Marches and demonstrations to protest the harassment of civil 
      rights workers drew new members to local movement organizations; "Freedom 
      Days" where people went to the courthouse en masse built solidarity; and 
      public facilities-testing through direct action did both (Carson 1981; 
      Payne 1995). 
      Yet SNCC workers never fully integrated direct action with political 
      organizing, a failure evident in field reports that allude to conflicts 
      between residents' desires to test public accommodations and SNCC 
      directives to focus on electoral mobilization.(33) Organizers' commitment 
      to "letting the people decide" the direction and methods of struggle sat 
      uncomfortably with their persistent suspicion of direct action as not 
      properly political. In 1963, for example, SNCC workers framed the choice 
      between voter registration and direct action as whether "the emphasis 
      should be political or religious, spontaneous or rigidly political."(34) 
      The formulation is revealing. "Spontaneous" had come to refer to action 
      not oriented to electoral politics, action motivated by religious 
      commitment rather than strategic calculation, and action orchestrated by 
      local groups rather than national committee. Its meaning went far beyond 
      an absence of planning, but remained locked within a set of dualities: 
      spontaneous versus political; political versus moral; moral versus 
      instrumental. Since even proponents of direct action accepted these 
      dualities, they were ill-equipped to challenge direct action's relegation 
      to the sphere of the personally satisfying but politically ineffectual. 
      The problem thus lay in the power of the canonical narrative to shape 
      strategic options. In this movement, like in others, the conventional 
      storyline that has people acting out their moral commitments in emotional 
      and impulsive protest overwhelmed one in which people acted emotionally, 
      morally, and in politically instrumental ways.(35) 
      Conclusion 
      I have argued that although the sit-ins and the groups they galvanized 
      were not without prior organizational affiliation, their narrative 
      construction as spontaneous was central to an emerging collective 
      identity. The Black students who launched the sit-ins, then kneel-ins, 
      wade-ins, and pray-ins, and who founded SNCC, departed from the existing 
      civil rights organizations not so much in long-term goals (integration), 
      nor even in strategy (nonviolent resistance) as in militancy and 
      organizational form. The sit-ins were represented as a break with the 
      gradualism of prior Black protest forms (spontaneity denoted urgency), a 
      break with the incomplete engagement of adult leaders (spontaneity denoted 
      a moral imperative to act) and a break with the hierarchy and bureaucracy 
      of existing organizations (spontaneity denoted local initiative). 
      Narratives of the sit-ins helped make normative a physically demanding and 
      dangerous form of activism. 
      To be sure, representing the surge of student protest as spontaneous 
      defused charges of outside planning by left-wing groups. And tying SNCC to 
      the sit-ins legitimated it as organizational expression of the sit-ins. 
      However, my account suggests that this kind of instrumentalist view is 
      limited. Representations of the sit-ins as spontaneous coincided with 
      rather than followed the establishment of a student protest organization. 
      My account thus builds on Oberschall's (1989) theory of the diffusion of 
      protest by showing how high rates of participation can occur by means 
      other than the formal recruitment strategies of already established 
      movement organizations. But contrary to Oberschall's argument that it is 
      simply information about the reduced costs of participation that leads 
      people to join fledgling movements, I have argued that narratives of the 
      sit-ins, told in formal and informal settings, made participation 
      normative. Rather than simply persuasive devices deployed by strategic 
      collective actors, narratives help to constitute new strategic actors. 
      After a formal movement organization was consolidated, the sit-in 
      narratives shaped contests over legitimate strategies within it. 
      Further examination of the role of narrative in mobilization promises 
      several analytical payoffs. First, it will help us to better understand 
      the dynamics of mobilization before the consolidation of a formally 
      organized movement. As Klandermans (1988, 1992) observes, we still know 
      little about how collective identities emerge from "subcultural networks 
      and indigenous structures" and emerge during episodes of collective 
      action. Further investigation of the discursive processes that unfold in 
      such settings should detail the causal schemes that underpin popular 
      vocabularies of motive. Is the dominant logic one of individual intention 
      and collective efficacy, as framing theorists maintain? Or are events 
      represented as unfolding by narrative necessity, as I have suggested? Is a 
      critical discursive ellipsis, a point in the story where the 
      non-narratable movement beginning takes place, a characteristic feature of 
      movement-founding stories? 
      Activists do more than tell stories, of course. They storm barricades, 
      negotiate with authorities, evaluate past tactics, march. They use 
      referential, persuasive, and expressive modes of discourse as well as 
      narrative ones (Polkinghorne 1988). Under what other circumstances, then, 
      are they likely to turn to narrative? This is a second important line of 
      research. After formal organizations have been established, activists 
      probably continue to tell stories in order to sustain and strengthen 
      members' commitment since, as Stephen Cornell puts it, in telling stories, 
      "we not only make sense of ourselves; through stories we create ourselves: 
      we become subjects" (1996:3). Movements in which the goal is 
      self-transformation as much as political reform may see personal 
      story-telling as activism. Narratives undoubtedly figure more in movement 
      decision making than classical rational models would have us believe 
      (March and Olson 1976; Meyer and Rowan 1977). Activists may legitimate and 
      evaluate drastic transformations in agenda or strategy by telling stories 
      that configure past decisions in a broader narrative of enlightenment. 
      Veteran activists may stake their authority on a superior knowledge of the 
      movement's history. However, stories are not only legitimating but 
      evaluative, they are lenses through which opportunities and obstacles, 
      costs and benefits, and success and failure are assessed (King 1986). Jo 
      Freeman argues that "past experiences" constrain the resources available 
      to movement groups for action (1979:177). But experience is filtered 
      through discursive frames, among them stories. This suggests more 
      attention to the role of narrative in movement decision making. 
      Narratives' dependence on a stock of plots, on a canon, suggests a point 
      of conceptual entry into the relationship between the hegemonic and 
      subversive features of (movement) culture. Rather than counterpoising 
      oppositional stories to hegemonic ones, we should ask whether there are 
      features of narrative - not shared by other discursive forms - that make 
      it prone to reproducing hegemonic understandings even when used by 
      oppositional movements. Drawing on Ewick and Silbey's (1995) study of 
      legal narratives, we can identify several such features. Since narratives 
      rely for their intelligibility on their conformity to familiar plots, 
      modern Western movement stories may tend to attribute insurgency to 
      individual, independent actors rather than to the relationships that 
      social movement scholars know are so important in generating and 
      sustaining participation. It may be easier to tell a story of short-term 
      triumph than one of long-term endurance.(36) Since narratives do not lay 
      out the grounds for their credibility, relying on emotional identification 
      and familiar plots rather than on testing or adjudication of truth claims, 
      they are better able than other discursive forms to rule out challenge. 
      This may be a good way to stifle internal dissent, but if leaders seek to 
      prefigure a fully democratic society within the movement itself, then this 
      feature of narrative surely proves a hindrance. Finally, narratives often 
      work by "effac[ing] the connections between the particular and the 
      general" (Ewick and Silbey 1995:218). A compelling story seems to speak to 
      a shared experience but without demonstrating its representativeness. The 
      danger for movements is that my particular story is too easily seen as 
      that of "women" or "gays," in a way that erases difference within the 
      group. 
      Stories, like other cultural forms, both reproduce the existing and 
      provide tools for changing it. The key, of course, is to understand how 
      and when they do each. And that requires grasping not only the formal 
      features of narrative that distinguish it from other discursive forms, but 
      the social conditions in which stories are more and less familiar, easily 
      communicated, and authoritative. 
      Research was supported by a grant from the Columbia University Humanities 
      and Social Sciences Council. Thanks to Marc Steinberg, Gregory Polletta, 
      two anonymous reviewers, the editorial staff of Social Problems, members 
      of the City University of New York Graduate Center Sociology Colloquium, 
      and of the Great Barrington Theory Group for their comments on previous 
      drafts. Thanks also to Linda Catalano and Joyce Robbins for research 
      assistance, and to the many archivists who helped to locate and search 
      campus newspapers, especially Ms. Kathy Jenkins of Howard University's 
      Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Ms. Tanya Moye of Atlanta University's 
      Robert W. Woodruff Library. and Ms. Ledell B. Smith of Southern 
      University. Direct correspondence to Francesca Polletta, Department of 
      Sociology, Columbia University, 510 Fayerweather Hall, New York, New York 
      10027; e-mail: fap8@columbia.edu 
      1. In twelve other campus periodicals examined by me or by college 
      archivists, there was no mention of the student demonstrations in 1960 or 
      1961, this despite the fact that students from those institutions had been 
      involved in sit-ins. One former student at Lincoln University remembers 
      the administration prohibiting coverage of the sit-ins in the campus 
      newspaper (interview with Elizabeth Wilson by Linda Catalano, September 
      29, 1997). 
      2. Gamson suggests that although the identity of the "they" in an 
      adversarial ("us and they") frame may be elusive ("In the pursuit of 
      cultural change, the target is often diffused throughout the whole civil 
      society and the they being pursued is structurally elusive" [1992:85]), 
      the "we" must be clearly specified ("In sum, frames with a clear we and 
      all elusive they are quite capable of being fully collective and 
      adversarial" [85]). 
      3. Interest in narrative in sociology, anthropology, political science, 
      history, psychology, and law is burgeoning. For an extensive bibliography 
      of work on narrative in the social sciences see Hinchman and Hinchman 
      (1997). For sophisticated treatments in sociology see the essays collected 
      in a special issue of Social Science History, Vol. 16, no. 3 (1992), as 
      well as Somers (1994); and Polkinghorne (1988). There is also renewed 
      interest in narrative as a mode of presentation as well as object of 
      investigation. See the Hinchman and Hinchman (1997) bibliography, 
      Polkinghorne (1988), and for an interesting critique, Tilly (1998). 
      4. Drawing on Goffman's (1959) dramaturgical perspective, Hunt and Benford 
      (1994; see also Benford and Hunt 1992) argue that frames configure 
      identities in dramatic form. Listeners/readers are encouraged to see 
      themselves in the role of hero, to see movement antagonists as villains. 
      This would seem to suggest the narrative configuration that I'm 
      describing. However, as Polkinghorne points out, "To play a social role is 
      not the same as configuring one's life into a plot that is one's personal 
      identity." Distinguishing a narrative perspective from a Goffmanian 
      dramaturgical one, Polkinghorne argues that roles rather "take on meaning 
      from the perspective of the single adventure that is one person, as 
      defined by the life plot" (1988:153). 
      5. Psychologist A. E. Michotte (1963) found that when presented with small 
      colored rectangles moving on a screen, viewers constructed elaborate 
      narrative plots: "It is as if A's approach frightened B and B ran away."It 
      is as if A, in touching B induced an electric current which set B 
      going."The arrival of A by the side of B acts as a sort of signal to B. . 
      . . "It is as if A touched off a mechanism inside B and thus set it going" 
      (quoted in Sarbin 1986:13). Observers often laughed at the rectangles' 
      movements. The experiment suggests our proclivity to turn to narrative to 
      make phenomena intelligible. 
      6. Johnston, Larana and Gusfield (1994) thus paraphrase and criticize 
      Friedman and McAdam: "there are leaders, committees, or cabals that plot 
      the best collective identity for a movement, much like marketing 
      executives strategize the best way to present a product. It is a "top 
      down" approach to collective identity that seems to be more useful . . . 
      when SMOs are established and likely to be thinking in these strategic 
      terms. At earlier stages, however . . . it makes sense that a more "bottom 
      up" approach is, if not the entire answer, then at least deserving of a 
      place in the theoretical equation" (1994:18). 
      7. SNCC reported that near 200 students had been expelled during that 
      period ("from you know who . . ." NA, ND [July 1960], SNCC microfilm reel 
      1 #291). Michael Walzer (1960b) wrote that the sit-ins had galvanized a 
      surge of church-based adult movement organizations. But "the students, for 
      the most part, do not attend the weekly meetings in the churches. 
      Embarrassing moments often follow suggestions that students present rise 
      and be applauded. They turn out to have stayed on campus for a meeting of 
      their own." 
      8. Ella Baker interview in Stoper 1989. 
      9. "Theopolis Fair, John Baker, Jerry Byrd, Henrietta Eppse Represent 
      Fisk," Fisk Forum, September 30, 1960. 
      10. Joan Burt to the editor, Hilltop, May 31, 1960; Fisk Forum, October 
      28, 1960; "Retreat Best in History of School, Declares Dean Green," Fisk 
      Forum, September 30, 1960. On African students and representatives at 
      Southern colleges, see transcript of John Lewis interview, 
      Moorland-Spingarn Research Center; "Cameroun's (sic) Foreign Minister 
      Visits Xavier U. Campus," Xavier Herald October 1960. SNCC invited the 
      brother of Tom Mboya to be keynote speaker at its first conference, 
      addressing the "relationship of the African freedom movement to our own 
      fight' (Marion S. Barry, Chairman, to Dear Friend, October 10, 1960, SNCC 
      microfilm reel 4 #920). 
      11. "Campus Politics," Xavier Herald, January 1960; "Student Sloth," 
      Xavier Herald, October 1960; Fisk Forum, September 30, 1960: "Like - Being 
      Way Out," Aurora (Knoxville College), March 1960. The fact that some of 
      these characterizations appeared when the sit-ins were well under way, and 
      at the same time as some were referring to 1960 as "the year of tile 
      student" [Fisk Forum, September 30, 1960] suggests that accusations of 
      student apathy continued a powerful challenge. 
      12. "Sitdown Protest in Pictorial Retrospect," Shaw Journal, May 1960; 
      "Justifiable Recalcitrance," Shaw Journal, March-April 1960: "The New 
      Freedom," SNCC microfilm reel 4 #108; "An Appeal for Dignity," Student 
      Voice, November 1960, reprinted in Carson, 1990: 23; "Call for Unity in 
      Struggle for Freedom," Hilltop, March 7, 1960. 
      13. "A Report on the Student Direct Action Movement at Penn State as of 
      March 31, 1960," SNCC microfilm reel 44 #22: "The Price for Freedom," 
      Wolverine Observer, October-November 1960: Jane to Dave, August 14, 1960, 
      SNCC microfilm reel 4 #810: "Call for Unity in Struggle for Freedom," 
      Hilltop. March 7, 1960. 
      14. "Drama of the Sitdown." Shaw Journal, March-April 1960. 
      15. "Newsletter to Congressmen." August 1960, SNCC microfilm reel 1 
      #291-2. 
      16. The latter used an explicitly persuasive mode - "you as students can 
      believe me when I tell you this will benefit every one of us who sit at 
      the Woolworth counter" - and emphasized not transformation but continuity: 
      "The waitress ignored us and kept serving the White customers. However, 
      this is no great surprise to me because I have been exposed co segregation 
      at lunch counters for 15 years and the situation is predominately 
      unchanged" (Register February 5, 1960). 
      17. Saint Paul's College (Virginia) Student Journal, May 1960; "The 
      Sitdowns Came in 1960, But They Remain for 1961" by George Collins, SNCC 
      microfilm reel 44 #98; Joan Burt to Dear Editor, Hilltop, May 31, 1960. 
      18. "Column from Cambridge Correspondent." SNCC microfilm reel 62 #130 
      (ellipses in original); "Ode to Lunch Counter" by Robert Booker, Aurora, 
      June 1960. 
      19. Sidney Simon to Dear Friend, September 8, 1960, SNCC microfilm reel 4 
      #1230. 
      20. Albatross (Swarthmore College). 
      21. Marion S. Barry to Congressman Byron L. Johnson, August 22, 1960, SNCC 
      microfilm reel 1 #285; "Sitdown Protest in Pictorial Retrospect," Shaw 
      Journal, May 1960; Edward King to Dear Friend, September 12, 1960, SNCC 
      microfilm reel 4 #920; NT, Henry Thomas report, ND (July 1960), SNCC 
      microfilm reel 5 #170; Fuller, 1960:16; "Civic Interest Group Progress 
      Report," October 13, 1960, SNCC microfilm reel 4 #1279; Jane Stembridge to 
      Henry James Thomas, July 20, 1960, SNCC microfilm reel 5 #174. 
      22. NAACP head Roy Wilkins announced a nationwide economic boycott as the 
      sit-ins spread, explaining, "We have always used persuasion through 
      various means of political and economic pressure, but now we're going to 
      use it much more intensively than in the past because the membership has 
      become restless over the slow pace of the civil rights proceedings" 
      (Bennett 1960). Lewis Killian argues that the need to deflect red-baiting 
      charges led the organizations assisting the sit-inners in Tallahassee, 
      Florida to deny their own involvement (1984:782). 
      23. "A Report on the Student Direct Action Movement at Penn State as of 
      March 31, 1960," SNCC microfilm reel 44 #22. 
      24. Hilltop, March 7, 1960; "The New Freedom," SNCC microfilm reel 4 #108; 
      "Statement submitted by SNCC to the Platform Committee of the National 
      Democratic Convention," July 7, 1960, SNCC microfilm reel 1 #243-248. 
      25. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to Mr. Bill Strong, July 
      31, 1960, SNCC microfilm reel 1 #207; Bob Moses, "A Freedom Child," ND 
      (July 1960), SNCC microfilm reel 4 #939; "Inside the Sitdowner," ND, SNCC 
      microfilm reel 44 #100. 
      26. Stephen Henderson "A White Student Sits-In," Social Progress, February 
      1961; Jane Stembridge to Henry Thomas, July 20,1960, SNCC microfilm reel 5 
      #174; SNCC newsletter entry, 1960, SNCC microfilm reel 5 #190. 
      27. "Call for Unity in Struggle for Freedom," Hilltop, March 7, 1960; 
      Speech to NSA by Jane Stembridge, SNCC microfilm reel 44 #1280-1283; "A 
      Report on the Student Direct Action Movement at Penn State as of March 31, 
      1960," SNCC microfilm reel 44 #22; Fuller 1960:13; Walzer 1960a; Dykeman 
      and Stokely 1960:10, "Justifiable Recalcitrance," Shaw Journal, 
      March-April 1960; Letter to the editor, Aurora, April 1960; "Sitdown 
      Protest in Pictorial Retrospect," Shaw Journal, May 1960. 
      28. "Up Against the Obstacles." NA, ND, SNCC microfilm reel 4 #980: 
      "Newsletter to Congressmen," August 1960, SNCC microfilm reel 1 #291-2; 
      "Author Says Sit-Ins Were Inevitable," Hilltop, April 29, 1960; "This is 
      Important," ND, SNCC microfilm reel 44 #113; Edward B. King to Dear 
      Friend, September 20, 1960, SNCC microfilm reel 4 #920. 
      29. Jane Stembridge to Lillian Lipsen, August 18, 1960, SNCC microfilm 
      reel 4 #207; Sample Fund-Raising Letter for Student Nonviolent 
      Coordinating Committee, SNCC microfilm reel 3 #785; Bennett 1960:35; "An 
      Appeal for Dignity," Student Voice, November 1960, reprinted in Carson 
      1990:23; "Across the Editor's Desk," Student Voice, November 1960, 
      reprinted in Carson 1990:22; Student Voice, special supplementary issue. 
      November 1960, reprinted in Carson 1990:20; "Drama of the Sitdown," Shaw 
      Journal. March-April 1960: "Students Continue Woolworth Picket.' Hilltop, 
      April 8, 1960; "Dear Congressmen, from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating 
      Committee," August 12, 1960, SNCC microfilm reel 12. 
      30. Letter to Julian Bond from Margaret Long; Heirich to Jane Stembridge, 
      SNCC microfilm reel 4 #122. 
      31. Student Voice, April and May 1961, reprinted in Carson 1990:2. 
      32. SNCC Minutes, July 14-16 1961, SNCC microfilm reel 3 #792-5. 
      33. See, for example, Meridian Report, November 23, 1964, SNCC microfilm 
      reel 66 #1259-1230; Field Report: Perry County, Alabama, Jan. 16-25, 1965, 
      SNCC microfilm reel 37 #123; Overall Report, Southwest Georgia, February 
      1965, SNCC microfilm reel 37 #839b-843. 
      34. Summary of Selma Workshop, December 13-16, 1963, SNCC microfilm reel 9 
      #382-389. Among White new leftists, the skepticism was even greater. In 
      1961, Tom Hayden of Students for a Democratic Society praised SNCC's "new 
      emphasis on the vote" as "signal[ing] the decline of the short-sighted 
      view that 'discrimination' can be isolated from related social problems." 
      "The moral clarity of the movement has not always been accompanied by 
      precise political vision," he went on, "and sometimes not even by a real 
      political consciousness." Another SDS leader concluded in 1962 that, "The 
      focus of action on Negro campuses in the non-violent protest movement has 
      been largely 'non-political.'" (To SDS, From Hayden Re: Race and Politics 
      Conference, ND [1961], SNCC microfilm reel 9 #1142; "For Dixie with Love 
      and Squalor," by Robb Burlage, ND [1962], SNCC microfilm reel 9.) 
      35. Rosenthal and Schwartz (1989) note that a tendency to associate 
      spontaneity with expressive, even irrational action is common in 
      sociological accounts of collective action. 
      36. Kim Voss argues that Poland's Solidarity movement was sustained in 
      periods of defeat by activists' invocation of the "Catholic belief in the 
      successive stations of the 'via dolorosa' to explain failures, the 
      implication being that while early uprisings resulted in Crucifixion, 
      eventually insurgency would bring Resurrection and Life" (1996:8). Derrick 
      Bell (1992) has described similarly sustaining narratives among African 
      Americans. 
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