External Forces That Influence A Community's Receptivity To Change

Outside forces that alter economic conditions and social and political structure influence a community’s receptivity to external ideas and change. This receptivity in turn may welcome external agents that can direct the transformation of that community. This essay compares how outside forces such as the Great Depression created environments that were conducive to change and how that change came about. It will also compare external agents like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) to see how they used altered conditions to carry out an agenda and to examine how successful they were in transforming their target community. (I use community loosely to refer to a group of individuals
with common interests and backgrounds. These groupings could take the form of an actual community, a social movement of homogeneous nature or a labor union.) External agents can be characterized as having a limited agenda such as a national supermarket or movie theatre chain or a Catholic orphanage locating placements in Catholic homes.
Other agendas are broader such as advancing democratic freedoms through the increased voter registration of African-Americans or creating a dynamic union through the transformation of ethnically divided laborers into a unified working class. Transformation can also take place on a national level through the interaction between community and national leaders. Receptivity to change can be based on the desire for change as witnessed by I’ve Got the Light of Freedom or it can take the form of adaptation to changed circumstances as in Making the New Deal. Receptivity to change can also be based on a reaction to perceptions of change overwhelming traditional social and moral structures as in Suburban Warriors. Reactionary change can also occur when receptivity is lacking as in The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction and take the form of a backlash against the external and internal instigators of
change.
SNCC brought its agenda of equal rights and voter registration to the Delta region of Mississippi at a propitious time and through the work of its members established community ties that resulted in transforming the lives of the African-American community there. Other organizations such as the NAACP had tried to undertake similar work but the community had not yet reached a point where it was receptive to change.
This region was receptive to new ideas because external forces had begun altering acceptable behavior by white society and expectations of black society as early as the 1930s and 1940s. These external forces included the Great Depression, World War II, federal government intervention, northern public opinion and Eastern investment capital. Additionally, the mechanization of the cotton industry also worked hand in hand with these other factors to change Mississippi society. 1 The Great Depression had created an economic need among shopkeepers for customers of any color that led to enhanced status for African-Americans.2 The ability to spend money, while not an equalizer, altered white perceptions and increased receptivity to broader access by African-Americans to previously segregated sectors of society. Government intervention through the New Deal, created in response to the Depression, decreased the number of lynching as a result of providing an economic buffer to poor whites who had been the principle instruments used by white society to terrorize black society. As violence decreased, African-American found themselves less fearful of violent response to their demands and consequently more open to new ideas and organizations.3
Receptivity to change was also fueled by the return of Black World War II veterans in the 1940s. These veterans questioned the irony of their roles in fighting for democracy when democratic freedoms were denied to them at home. Military service proved to be a schooling ground for future activists like Robert Burns, who found in the army an opportunity to “stop and think.” Another veteran, Aaron Henry, came back to Mississippi determined to make changes. He was the first black man to vote in Coahoma County thanks in part to the Progressive Voters League. In fact, war veterans were instrumental in increasing black voter registration throughout this period.
The Progressive Voters League was formed in response to the 1944 Supreme Court ruling that overturned the all-white primary and was one way the federal government expressed its dissatisfaction with overt racism and racial violence.4 Northern public opinion was another factor in quelling the number of lynching. It was important to the upper-class segment of Southern white society to maintain a political calm in order to attract capital investment from Eastern banks to establish new industries as alternatives to cotton production. The importance of cotton production to the Mississippi economy had declined while the industry’s automation made it less reliant on black labor consequently eliminating the economic reasons behind the intimidation of the black community diminished.5
As a result of these structural changes to Mississippi society, the local community increasingly became receptive to external agents of change.
SNCC, through activists such as Bob Moses and Medgar Evans, used existing grass roots organizations to make connections with opinion leaders within the community. Through interaction between the organization and these individuals and institutions, SNCC organized a number of activities aimed at creating a collective consciousness among the black community but also to increase voter registration. One way the organization was able to stimulate voter registration was to engage in a food drive when the White Citizens Council withheld food consignments from the black community. By serving to blunt the effect of white reprisal, SNCC created trust among community
members.6
Additionally, SNCC was able to some degree to manipulate the national media in order to expose southern violence against civil rights activists and mold national opinion.7 Federal intervention was also welcomed in the form of protection when it could be gotten. In effect, an outside organization was able to respond to a changing context of a local community and use sympathetic outside forces and a receptive local population to effect change.
Lisabeth Cohen also outlines the economic and cultural changes caused by the Great Depression and the influence of mass culture and consumption that allowed the differing ethnic communities of Chicago to become receptive to outside influences. The focus of Cohen’s book is the impact of mass consumption and culture on ethnic identity of the first American born generation of immigrant workers in the 1920s but the last part also studies the role of the CIO in the process of creating a new and complementary identity for these workers.
The impact of mass culture depended “on the context in which it developed and the manner it was experienced, in other words how mass culture was produced, distributed and consumed.”8 As the context altered because of new immigration laws, economic upheaval resulting from the Great Depression and generational shifts, mass culture came to coexist with ethnic culture and to form a platform from which ethnic groups could find common ground. Mass culture by 1930 through the emergence of larger “commercial units” in the form of national chains “limited the range of experien