The American civil rights movement influenced globally the struggles of ethnic and religious minorities, of women, of people with disabilities, and later of people with unconventional sexual identities. These can all be viewed as identity politics, concerning rights held by people because of who they fundamentally are, not because of their position in a class structure. So the movement was important in shifting the political left away from class politics toward identity politics, and this shift was especially marked in the United States since it was the only major country in which racial oppression occurred at home rather than in colonies.

Social movements theory

Most sociologists have analyzed the civil rights movement as the paradigm case for other recent social movements. They have tried to generate concepts applicable to them all, including environmental, gay, sexual preference, and disability movements. The main concepts of this social movements theory are “resource mobilization” (McCarthy & Zald, 1977), “political opportunity structures” (Meyer, 2004), “framing theory” (Benford & Snow, 2000), and finally “political process” theory – a catch-all model embodying all the others. Political process involves three main components of social movement formation: the buildup of insurgent consciousness, organizational strength, and political opportunity structures. These concepts are obviously abstract and universal, applicable to all movements everywhere – at least their practitioners see them in this way. Nonetheless, this school of sociology has a certain narrowness. It tends to focus on progressive protesters, neglecting those favoring the status quo or reactionaries seeking to restore conditions as they were in the past. They also tend to see opportunity structures as only political, neglecting the economic, military, or ideological opportunities I will discuss here. Resource mobilization theorists identify the main resources as money, political influence, access to mass media, and committed militants – revealing a concern with movements in advanced democratic countries. For subsistence peasants, monetary and media resources might be less relevant, while weapons do not figure as a resource. These sociologists prefer to study rather nice pacific groups, not fascists or ethnic cleansers or peasant revolutionaries. Thus some of their accounts of the civil rights movement focus on its nonviolence, especially neglecting the violence of their segregationist opponents. This is business as usual in modern sociology, which systematically neglects the role of organized violence in society.