Our findings in this study pose a question that is at the heart of the debate about the state of black political life at the turn of the twenty-first century – can black political equality be accomplished without economic equality? We assess the state of political equality for African Americans since the civil rights movement by exploring how two competing forces – black political empowerment and social and economic distress – influence civic participation in black communities. Exploring fluctuations in black activism over the course of the first two and a half decades after the 1960s civil rights revolution, our study demonstrates that black civic life has exhibited a tug-of-war between the empowering effects of black office-holding on the one hand and the stagnating effects of social and economic distress on the other. The primacy of distress in the tug-of-war between empowerment and economic factors is an unanticipated outcome from the civil rights movement's focus on the guarantee of formal political rights in the transition from protest to the promise of blacks' equal access in mainstream political life.

The movement and the landmark legal reforms that emerged in response to mass action altered the American political landscape by opening opportunities for blacks to have their voices heard equally as civic actors in mainstream political life.