Was the Civil Rights Movement Successful Tracking andUnde.docx

Was the Civil Rights Movement Successful? Tracking and
Understanding Black Views
1
Wayne A. Santoro
2
Was the modern civil rights movement successful? I depart from
traditional approaches that judge suc-
cess in terms of political inclusion and policy response and
instead ask “ordinary” blacks what they
thought. Using 1968 survey data, I find that while a slight
majority (58%) believed that the movement
successfully reduced racial discrimination, a sizable share
(42%) saw failure. It seems most accurate
to conclude that both perspectives resonated with large
segments of the black population. I next exam-
ine who thought the movement a success and uncover that
blacks of higher economic standing had the
most faith in the movement’s achievements. This result supports
critics who thought that the poor were
left behind by the movement’s gains. Finally, while there was
overall stability from 1968 to 2000 in

opinion, the mid-1980s represented the nadir in thinking the
movement successful. This development
appears to have been a reaction to the racially hostile Reagan
administration and the worsening eco-
nomic position of blacks in the 1980s. Views on the civil rights
movement, thus, are a living memory
that can be altered by contemporary deleterious developments. I
conclude by arguing that conceptual-
izations of success should be grounded in how movements
impact the everyday lives of their
constituency.
3
KEY WORDS: African American; civil rights; discrimination;
inequality; public opinion; social
movements.
INTRODUCTION
The popular narrative of the modern civil rights movement is
that it was unam-
biguously successful, especially in the South (Brooks 1974;
Hamilton 1986; Havard
1972; M. King 1967; R. King 1992). Backed by the Supreme
Court, policy success
was most clearly manifest by passage of the 1964 Civil Rights
Act and the 1965 Vot-
ing Rights Act. The 1964 law made illegal racial discrimination
in employment, pro-
vided mechanisms to enforce school desegregation in the South,
and outlawed

segregation in public accommodations. The 1965 law was the
first serious federal
attempt to enfranchise Southern blacks since Reconstruction.
There are many signs
that the movement abetted racial progress by early 1970s, the
most appropriate
1
The author wishes to thank Andy Andrews, Mar�ıa B. V�elez,
Sharon Nepstad, the Social Movement
Group at the University of New Mexico, as well as Arlene
Santoro.
2
Department of Sociology, University of New Mexico, MSC05
3080, 1 University of New Mexico,
Albuquerque, New Mexico 87131-0001; e-mail:
[email protected]
3
This article is part of a special issue entitled, “Commemorating
the Fiftieth Anniversary of the 1960s
Civil Rights Laws.” Other authors include Bonastia (2015), Lee
(2015), Massey (2015), McAdam
(2015), Pettit and Sykes (2015), Valdez (2015), and Whitlinger
(2015).
Sociological Forum, Vol. 30, No. S1, June 2015
DOI: 10.1111/socf.12181
© 2015 Eastern Sociological Society
627

benchmark given the decline in black insurgency by then.
4
Politically, black voter
registration in the South rose from 25% in 1956 to 66% in 1970
(Garrow 1978).
There were 103 black elected officials in 1964, but 1,469 by
1970, and Button (1989)
found that the greatest impact of the movement was in securing
black political inde-
pendence from whites. Economically, between 1959 and 1969
black poverty rates
decreased from 48% to 30% and black family income increased
by 53% (Tienda
and Jensen 1988). The black middle class doubled in size from
1960 to 1970 (Landry
1987), partly in direct response to pressures stemming from the
civil rights move-
ment (Collins 1983). Culturally, Alice Walker (1967) wrote that
the movement
engendered feelings of self-worth among blacks, and surveys
document that white
public opinion became more racially tolerant (Schuman et al.
1997). For instance,
three-quarters of whites supported the principle of integrated
schools in 1970 com-
pared to half in 1956. And perhaps most important, white
violence to control blacks
diminished in the South. At a gathering of Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Com-
mittee (SNCC) activists in 1978, Vincent Harding declared that
if anyone present
doubted what the movement had accomplished he or she “had
forgotten what life
was like in a Jim Crow America where lynchings went
unpunished and terror was

everywhere” (Chafe 1986:127; see also Piven and Cloward
1979).
But there has always been another narrative of the civil rights
movement stress-
ing disappointment in its accomplishments (Allen 1970; Carson
1986; Fairclough
1990). It is the view that the movement did little to improve the
day-to-day lives of
blacks in poverty-stricken Northern cities or Southern rural
areas. The system may
have opened up, but to only a token few who already enjoyed a
degree of privilege.
Sentiments like these were articulated in the speeches of
Malcolm X (1973) and
Stokely Carmichael (Stewart 1997) and in the writings of
Bayard Rustin (1965) and
Martin Luther King Jr. (1967). One can recite a variety of social
science indicators
to buttress this decidedly more pessimistic perspective.
Economically, the 2:1 ratio
of unemployment for blacks compared to whites remained stable
from 1954 to the
1970s and large racial gaps in income, poverty, and wealth
persist (DeNavas-Walt,
Proctor, and Smith 2013; Hirschman 1988). Residentially,
blacks were hypersegre-
gated from whites in Northern and Southern cities in 1950 and
remained hyperseg-
regated in 1970 (Massey 2015; Massey and Denton 1993:Table
2.3). Culturally,
white expressions of racism have changed, but white antipathy
toward blacks has
not (Bonilla-Silva 2003). Politically, blacks in 1970 comprised
only 0.3% of all
elected positions and even the ability to vote has been

undermined by felony disen-
franchisement laws (Uggen and Manza 2002) and Shelby v.
Holder (2013) that gut-
ted crucial aspects of the Voting Rights Act.
The goal of this article is to weigh in on the debate concerning
the success of
the civil rights movement. I take a novel approach. Rather than
recite the opinions
of historians or movement leaders, report social science
indicators, or look to the
passage of civil rights laws, I instead use surveys of self-
identified blacks, which
asked them if racial discrimination had declined since the civil
rights movement. I
label the movement as a “success” if blacks thought that the
movement had reduced
4
Admittedly, in some domains social change may have taken
longer to register. But the more the indica-
tor of progress (or setback) is removed in time from the
movement (circa 1955–1968), the more difficult
and speculative it is to establish the movement’s causal impact.
628 Santoro
meaningfully racial discrimination and “failure” if the
movement had not. No
doubt individual views on the movement’s achievements are
more complex than this
dichotomy allows. But the movement ultimately sought to break
down racial barri-
ers and eliminate racial disparities. Thus, whether respondents

believed that the
movement had reduced discrimination is a particularly salient
way to gauge whether
individuals perceived that the movement had made meaningful
progress in securing
its most basic goal. The analysis begins with a focus on a large
1968 survey which
offered respondents a unique temporal vantage point to reflect
both on the move-
ment, which had peaked just three years earlier, as well as on
the major policy con-
cessions that already had been secured. I report how common it
was for blacks in
the late-1960s to feel optimistic regarding the movement’s
success and investigate
who felt this way. I then proceed to track opinion on movement
success from 1968
to 2000 and devote attention to explaining sharp temporal shifts
in this assessment.
This work makes three contributions. First, while astute
observers have always
known that many blacks were disappointed with the movement’s
accomplishments,
among whites today this is not the case. Bonilla-Silva (2003)
argues convincingly
that white understanding of race is fundamentally shaped by
their belief that the
civil rights movement successfully eliminated racial barriers.
This ideology allows
whites to interpret remaining black disadvantage as a product of
the faults in black
individuals, their culture, or even their preferences, rather than
structurally based
systems of inequality. This means that to most whites even
questioning whether the

movement was successful is decidedly counterhegemonic. I
mean to be an irritant to
advocates of this “color-blind” form of racism. No doubt,
raising questions about
the movement’s success is discomforting to white liberal faith
in racial progress as
well.
Second, I hope to enhance the understanding of a less-well-
documented aspect
of the civil rights movement. Movement scholars
disproportionately focus on emer-
gence and mobilization. As a result, we know more about the
Montgomery bus
boycott and the sit-in movement in 1960 than we do about the
dynamics taking
place during the movement’s decline. Understanding the extent,
determinants, and
temporal pattern of feelings regarding success or failure will
help tell an important
part of the story of the movement’s final chapter.
Third, this research challenges common conceptualizations of
movement suc-
cess, including approaches I have used in the past. The
dominant perspective gauges
success by whether movements secure political inclusion and
policy outputs (Gam-
son 1975). For the civil rights movement this includes work on
passage of civil
rights laws, black political representation, the distribution of
city services to black
neighborhoods, and welfare/civil rights expenditures (Andrews
1997, 2001; Burstein
1985; Button 1978, 1989; Garrow 1978; Isaac and Kelly 1981;
Lawson 1976; Meyer

and Minkoff 2004; Piven and Cloward 1979; Santoro 2002,
2008). Yet this
approach misses how constituents judge the movement’s
success. Gaining elected
representation or policy concessions, for instance, does not
necessarily measure suc-
cess because such victories may not ameliorate the grievances
that constituents’
experience. The approach used in this research is grounded in
black assessment of
whether the movement’s core grievance—racial
discrimination—was meaningfully
reduced and hence captures this often-neglected element. I do
not advocate
Civil Rights Movement Successful? 629
abandoning conventional approaches to movement success;
rather, it is time to
broaden the metric used to judge it.
MEASURING MOVEMENT SUCCESS
Searching the Inter-university Consortium for Political and
Social Research
(ICPSR) archives, I identified five surveys of black views on
the movement’s success
in reducing discrimination: the Racial Attitudes in Fifteen
American Cities’ survey
(Campbell and Schuman 1968), the Detroit Area Study (Farley
and Schuman 1976),
the National Survey of Black Americans (Jackson and Gurin
1979–1980), the
National Black Election Study (Jackson, Gurin, and Hatchett

1984), and the New
York Times Race Poll (New York Times 2000). The wording of
the key question
was fairly stable; the 1980 question is typical: “I’d like you to
think about the way
things are today for blacks compared to how they were 20 years
ago just before the
civil rights movement. Do you think there is more racial
discrimination now, less,
or have things remained pretty much the same?” The referent
time period varied
slightly across surveys. In 1968 and 1976, respondents were
asked if racial discrimi-
nation had changed “over the last 10 or 15 years.” Accordingly,
the comparison
was to 1953–1958 for the 1968 survey and to 1961–1966 for the
1976 survey. In the
1984 survey the referent period was “over the last 20 years or
so” and in 2000 it was
“since the 1960s.” All five questions therefore asked blacks to
compare discrimina-
tion at the present time to a period right before or during the
heyday of the civil
rights movement.
5
This is important because I believe that these questions
therefore
reflect whether respondents thought that the actions of the civil
rights movement
had reduced meaningfully racial discrimination.
Responses are coded into those who saw a lot of progress
(success) and those
who saw not much real change (failure) in discrimination. Only

the 1980 survey
offered the option of discrimination increasing and those
responses are coded into
the failure category. All surveys used probability sampling
designs and contain large
samples of blacks, with the average sample size being 1,424
blacks. The target popu-
lation was national for the 1980, 1984, and 2000 surveys and
was limited to the
Detroit area in 1976. The 1968 survey sampled 15 large cities
that were mainly
Northern. Indeed, only 2 of the 15 cities are officially located in
the South (Balti-
more and Washington, D.C.), but even these cities are arguably
more Northern
than Southern. This regional bias of this late-1960s survey is
relevant because move-
ment leaders like King (1967) and Rustin (1965) thought that
Northern blacks were
especially disappointed with the movement’s gains (see also
Marx 1967). This means
that findings may underestimate favorable assessments of the
movement’s impact,
an issue I return to later. When tracking opinions over time, the
data are open to
the critique that differences may be an artifact of each survey’s
different sampling
design, sample size, question wording, and the like. This is a
typical concern with
5
Thus, I exclude surveys that asked if racial discrimination had
changed using a referent well after the
movement. For instance, three surveys in the 1980s asked if
discrimination had changed in the “last 4
or 5 years.” Surveys that use a shorter time comparison find, as

one would expect, considerably higher
shares of blacks believing that discrimination had not changed
for the better (see Sigelman and Welch
1991).
630 Santoro
tracking opinion trends, although the large samples of blacks
offset at least one
common problem with examining black attitudes (Schuman et
al. 1997). While
these methodological concerns cannot be dismissed, the relative
consistency in
responses across surveys (Fig. 4 later in this article) suggests
that each survey’s idio-
syncrasies do not play a major role in the findings.
BLACK ASSESSMENT OF MOVEMENT SUCCESS IN 1968
I begin with results for 1968. The face-to-face survey sampled
2,809 blacks,
but because of missing data on assessment of movement
success, the sample is
reduced to 2,699.
6
No other probability survey of blacks during this era can
boast of such a large sample. The average age was 37, making
the typical
respondent 24 years old at the beginning of the Montgomery bus
boycott. A
few words are in order about the historical context of this time.
The late 1960s

witnessed much black protest despite its decline compared to
previous years. In
fact, 32% of all black protest from 1955 to 1968 took place
between 1966 and
1968 (McAdam 1982). Rioting reached its apogee between 1967
and 1969 and
the period had its share of militant rhetoric (Jenkins and Eckert
1986). How-
ever, processes of institutionalization also were occurring, and
in fact twice as
many black protestors in 1968 thought that conventional tactics
like negotia-
tions rather than violence were the best way to continue to press
for change
(Santoro and Fitzpatrick 2015). In terms of the political
environment, political
opportunities were closing despite the fact that Congress had
enacted all major
civil rights laws of the era except for open housing. The white
electoral back-
lash was apparent by the 1966 elections, Northern opposition to
the movement
was visible, outside funding for civil rights organizations was
drying up for all
but the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NA-
ACP), media attention became unsympathetic, and the public’s
attention had
switched from civil rights issues to Vietnam (McAdam 1982,
2015). Along with
the political, economic, and cultural indicators discussed
earlier, it was within
this backdrop that blacks judged whether the movement had
succeeded in
reducing racial discrimination.

The first two bars in Fig. 1 display how many blacks believed
there had or had
not been real improvement in reducing discrimination compared
to 10 to 15 years
ago, meaning at the time of the Montgomery bus boycott. Fifty-
eight percent
reported that there had been a lot of progress in getting rid of
racial discrimination;
42% believed that there had not been much real progress. Thus,
most blacks
6
The survey was administered prior to the murder of Martin
Luther King Jr. Blacks were questioned by
black interviewers, and the response rate was 74%. Cities
sampled were Baltimore, Boston, Chicago,
Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Gary, Milwaukee, Newark, New
York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, San
Francisco, St. Louis, and Washington, DC. Compared to all
other cities in 1970 with populations over
200,000, the selected cities were more populous, higher in
percentage black, had greater levels of prior
black insurgency, more blacks in local elected office, and were
less likely to have been in the South
(Santoro and Fitzpatrick 2015). Success/failure is gauged with
the question “Some people say that over
the last 10 or 15 years, there has been a lot of progress in
getting rid of racial discrimination. Others say
that there hasn’t been much real change for Negroes over that
time. Which do you agree with most?”
thought the movement successful. It is likely that this

assessment would be higher if
the sample included more Southern blacks, although I believe
that such an inclusion
would only marginally enhance favorable appraisal.
7
That a majority of blacks held
such a favorable assessment might seem surprising given how
many scholars have
emphasized disappointment in the late-1960s, whether among
civil rights activists
or the general black population (Carson 1981; Conant, Levy,
and Lewis 1969; Har-
ding 1975; M. King 1967; McAdam 1982; Meier and Rudwick
1973; Robnett 2002).
These data offer a more optimistic appraisal. I do not wish to
present a naive view
of the movement’s ability to eradicate racism and racial
disparities, but it is impor-
tant to note that most people in the best position to judge its
success saw real
progress.
Yet the percentage of blacks that held this optimistic view was
far from a
decisive majority. Indeed, a sizable portion thought the
movement unsuccessful
as 42% would translate into 9.4 million blacks in the late 1960s
believing that
there had been no meaningful change in discrimination since the
mid-1950s. This
large share cautions against a Pollyannaish view of the
movement’s success. Fig-
ure 1 explores another way to document discontentment by
showing the percent-

age of blacks that thought that racial discrimination in housing
had improved in
their city. Racial segregation in housing is particularly
detrimental because
majority black neighborhoods tend to have fewer education and
employment
opportunities, concentrated poverty, less access to city services,
and heightened
exposure to crime and health risks (Massey and Denton 1993;
Williams and Col-
lins 2001). Housing is also relevant because by the time of the
1968 survey Con-
gress had not passed antidiscrimination mandates in this area
and in fact the
Senate defeated legislation that would have done so in 1966
(Bonastia 2015; Mas-
sey 2015). Not surprising, most blacks (62%) saw no progress in
housing dis-
crimination. The final bars in Fig. 1 combine respondents who
thought that
housing discrimination and/or discrimination more generally
had not shown real
7
The Great Migration resulted in most Northern blacks having
Southern heritage. Indeed, 58% of
respondents in the 1968 sample were born and had spent most of
their childhood in the South. If
Southern blacks were particularly optimistic regarding the
movement’s achievements, it seems reason-
able to think that this would be evident among these Southern-
born/raised respondents. Yet I find that
among Southern-born/raised blacks only 60% saw the movement
as successful, a percentage only
slightly higher than results for the entire sample. If it is fair to
use these results as instructive to this

issue, two factors may explain why Southern blacks were not
considerably more optimistic than North-
ern blacks. First, by the late 1960s the movement had produced
limited racial change in rural areas of
the Deep South, suggesting that Southern black optimism may
have been geographically limited. Sec-
ond, while I believe that respondent assessment of success is
tied to their own experiences, Northern
blacks no doubt were aware of the movement’s impact in the
South especially given that most had fam-
ily members in the South. This suggests that some Northern
respondents offered a favorable assessment
in part because they took into consideration the greater change
that the movement produced in South-
ern cities. More broadly, arguments that the civil rights
movement was Southern and hence scholars
need to exclusively focus on its Southern manifestations
obscure the fact that the movement’s regional
concentration was historically contingent. For instance, while
89% of movement-initiated events were
in the South during the early stages of the movement (1955–
1960), by the movement’s later stages
(1966–1970) only 34% of events were in the South (McAdam
1982). Moreover, if we trace the origins
of the movement prior to the mid-1950s, as some historians
insist we must (Korstad and Lichtenstein
1988; Sitkoff 1971), at times black protest was mainly Northern
(Meier and Rudwick 1976). In sum, I
am unconvinced that the litmus test for assessment of movement
success resides exclusively in the
Southern black population or that the 1968 data significantly
underestimate national levels of black
optimism.
632 Santoro

change. Using this alternative approach, nearly three-quarters of
blacks saw per-
sistent discrimination in 1968. This alternative metric obviously
offers a more
pessimistic view.
In sum, results present a mixture of optimism and pessimism
that defies an easy
either–or judgment. It seems most accurate to conclude that
both viewpoints reso-
nated with large shares of the black population. If it is correct
to say that the move-
ment achieved mixed results, then it should not be surprising
that black assessment
of movement success was mixed as well. These findings serve
as a reminder that the
black population is not monolithic and that the uncritical
assumption that the
movement was successful is deeply problematic.
UNDERSTANDING BLACK ASSESSMENT OF MOVEMENT
SUCCESS IN
1968
Figure 2 explores who believed the movement to be successful
in 1968. I use
bar charts to show bivariate relationships so as to present
results in an easy-to-inter-
pret manner. All relationships are statistically significant,
unless otherwise noted,
58.2%

41.8%
37.8%
62.2%
28.5%
71.5%
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
lot of progress no real change progress no progress progress no
progress
getting rid of discrimination in
last 10–15 years
housing discrimination
decreasing
index of progress in housing
and overall discrimination
Fig. 1. Black assessment of the success of the civil rights
movement in 1968.
Notes: Data come from the Racial Attitudes in Fifteen American

Cities survey (Campbell and
Schuman 1968). Data for overall black assessment of change in
discrimination has an n of 2,699.
Because of missing data the sample is reduced to 2,636 for
housing discrimination and 2,554 for
the index of housing and overall discrimination.
and were assessed using t-tests or analyses of variance
(ANOVAs).
8
The bars in
Fig. 2 represent the percentage of blacks that saw a reduction in
discrimination
since the mid-1950s. I begin with class. One criticism of the
movement is that it was
biased toward the middle class: led by the middle class,
pursuing middle-class goals,
and using tactics that resonated with the middle class. Most
formal leaders of pro-
test organizations were middle class (Robnett 1997). Goals like
residential integra-
tion and admissions into universities had a middle-class tilt
(Gregor 1970). The
middle class also at times advocated for less confrontational
tactics (Button 1989;
Santoro and Fitzpatrick 2015). For instance, middle-class blacks
in Birmingham
opposed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)
targeting their city
for a protest campaign in 1963 because they preferred less
confrontational tactics to

advocate for racial change (Fairclough 1987). Echoing this
concern, the public rela-
tions director for the Deacons for Defense and Justice argued
that “the civil rights
movement was originally a protest addressed to the power
structure by the bour-
geoisie, it was never addressed to the power structure by the
people in the streets,
blacks in the ghetto, the ones who are trapped, the ones who
really have a problem”
(Strain 2006:31). The role of the middle class, however, cannot
be so easily dispar-
48.1%
58.2%
64.5%
48.4%
58.9% 57.4%
65.9%
42.9%
59.3%
62.8%
0%
20%
40%
60%

80%
100%
$0-$1,999 $2,000-
$11,999
$12,000-
$20,000+
unemployed employed no yes lower class middle class upper
class
noitisopssalcdeifitnedi-flessutatstnemyolpmeemocnidlohesuoh
professional/managerial
occupation
Fig. 2. Percentage of blacks who view the civil rights movement
as successful by indicators of
economic standing in 1968.
Notes: All relationships shown between viewing the movement
as successful and economic stand-
ing are statistically significant using t-tests or ANOVAs. Data
come from the Racial Attitudes in
Fifteen American Cities survey (Campbell and Schuman 1968).
All variables have an n of 2,699,
but due to missing data, self-identified class position has an n
of 2,633.
8
I also ran a logistic regression predicting viewing the movement
as successful. The model included all
variables in Figs. 2 and 3 plus controls for being a rioter,
education, skin color, and Southern location.
The model utilized robust standard errors that adjusted for

clustering due to the nonindependence of
observations within the 15 cities. With two exceptions
(unemployment and professional/managerial
occupation), all statistically significant bivariate relationships
remained significant in this analysis.
Among controls, seeing the movement as successful was greater
for Southerners and less for rioters.
Education and skin color had no effect.
634 Santoro
aged. While many leaders were middle class, the blood many
shed and the sacrifices
they made cannot be dismissed as driven merely by self-
interested class motives.
Demonstrators often were middle class (Bloom 1987; Marx
1967; Von Eschen,
Kirk, and Pinard 1969), meaning that the poor did not equally
share in the costs
and risks of activism. Whatever one concludes about the role of
class in the move-
ment, it is fair to question whether the middle class was its
primary beneficiary
(Allen 1970).
Figure 2 depicts the relationship between perceptions of success
and four indi-
cators of economic standing: income, employment status,
professional/managerial
occupation, and self-identified class. Income is coded so that
those making less than
$2,000 (7% of the sample) are in the lowest category and the
highest category
includes the top 10% of incomes. Among the top earners, 64%

thought the move-
ment successful whereas only 48% in the lowest income felt this
way. This pattern
holds true for the remaining class measures. Fifty-nine percent
of employed blacks
thought the movement a success versus 48% of those
unemployed. Blacks self-iden-
tified as upper class were 20 percentage points more likely to
feel the movement a
success than self-identified lower-class blacks. Among those in
professional or man-
agerial occupations, 66% saw success compared to 57% not in
such occupations. In
short, the middle class and the poor did not share equal faith in
what the movement
had accomplished by the late 1960s.
These findings correspond to critics, including some of the
movement’s archi-
tects, who believed that the poor were left behind by the
movement’s gains. “What
is the value of winning access to public accommodations,”
Bayard Rustin wrote in
1965, “for those who lack the money to use them?” (Rustin
1965:25). Gregor (1970)
43.7%
59.6%
52.4%
60.7%
52.1%

59.3% 60.0%
56.9%
52.0%
59.3%
66.3%
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
yes no no white
friends
white friend protestor non-
protestor
male female 16-29 30-49 50+
protestor status sexexperienced job and
police discrimination
isolation from whites age
as successful by select respon-

dent characteristics in 1968.
Notes: Relationships shown between viewing the movement as
successful and select respondent
characteristics, except sex, are statistically significant using t-
tests or ANOVAs. Data come from
the Racial Attitudes in Fifteen American Cities survey
(Campbell and Schuman 1968). All variables
have an n of 2,699.
argued that antidiscrimination mandates in employment mainly
benefited mid-
dle-class blacks in civil service employment rather than the
mass of black workers
whose employment prospects were limited to unskilled jobs
vulnerable to techno-
logical displacement. In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. expressed
his disappointment
that the black middle class was largely “untouched and
unmoved by the agonies
and struggles of their underprivileged brothers” (M. King
1967:131). I am not the
first to highlight the class bias concerning perceptions of the
movement’s success,
but this study is the first to my knowledge to empirically
document it.
Figure 3 extends this line of inquiry to factors beyond economic
standing.
Most blacks (56%) who had experienced job and police
mistreatment saw the
movement as unsuccessful. Job discrimination meant being
refused a job or promo-

tion mainly because of race. Police mistreatment meant police
officers had treated
respondents with insulting language, frisked them without good
reason, and/or
physically roughed them up. Experiencing either form of
discrimination also is
linked to seeing the movement as unsuccessful (not shown). No
doubt, it is hard for
an individual to believe that the movement had reduced
discrimination if they per-
sonally experienced it. Figure 3 also shows that blacks with no
white friends outside
their neighborhood were less likely to see the movement as
successful as those with
white friends. (This relationship remains controlling for class;
see footnote 8.) Given
that racial integration was a core goal of the movement
(McAdam 1982) and that
racial separatism was not popular among blacks (Aberbach and
Walker 1970), it
makes sense that those who did not experience social
integration would see the
movement as less successful. Another interpretation is that
interracial contact may
promote racial tolerance and understanding and hence make
blacks more likely to
see white society in a sympathetic light (Sigelman and Welch
1993).
People who had joined a nonviolent protest event like a sit-in or
mass march
were more disappointed in the movement’s accomplishments
than nonprotestors.
Protestors were most dedicated to the cause and it is
particularly poignant that they
were most dissatisfied with the movement’s gains. Likely, these

individuals had
developed idealistic expectations of the possibilities of reform
and were disap-
pointed in the smaller-scale change that took place.
9
Across other movements, it
appears common for activists to be disappointed with their
movement’s achieve-
ments (della Porta 1995; Smelser 1962). Tarrow (1998:165), for
instance, asserted
that “individuals who have thrown themselves into public life
with enthusiasm
return to private life with a degree of disgust proportional to the
effort they have
expended.” This finding also accords with case studies of SNCC
and the Congress
of Racial Equality (CORE), which noted that by the mid-to-late
1960s many acti-
vists had grown quite discouraged. Robnett (2002) argued that
SNCC activists
became disillusioned after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights
Act, because they
realized that the law would not improve the day-to-day lives of
most blacks. Ditt-
mer (1986) and Carson (1986) noted how discouraged SNCC
and CORE activists
became after the white liberal establishment largely ignored the
demands of the
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the 1964 Democratic
presidential
9
A related interpretation is that activists’ experiences made them
more perceptive of racial injustice

(Davenport and Trivedi 2013) and hence, less likely to see a
meaningful reduction in it.
636 Santoro
convention. Results are in line with these studies and suggest
that feeling
disappointed was not limited to the small cadre of activists in
the most visible
protest campaigns.
Did men and women differ in their perceptions of movement
success? This is
possible, because gender affected other movement processes. In
the rural South and
in some Southern cities most participants were women, but men
outparticipated
women in the sit-in movement (Jackson 1971; Lawson 1991;
Matthews and Prothro
1966; Payne 1998). Gender shaped tactical preferences, such
that men were more
likely than women to advocate for violence (Santoro and Broidy
2014), in part
because some men saw nonviolence as a threat to their
masculinity (Wendt 2007).
Particularly relevant to the issue at hand, at times men
marginalized the contribu-
tions and concerns of female activists (Evans 1979), and women
generally were
excluded from formal leadership positions, although they still
acted as leaders
(Robnett 1997). Despite the ways that the movement was
gendered, sex was unre-
lated to feelings of success. Mean levels of belief in the

movement’s accomplish-
ments do not statistically differ between men and women. Even
though women were
not always treated as equals, one explanation for this finding is
that many women
nonetheless found the movement empowering (McAdam 1988;
Robnett 1997).
Finally, age was positively related to viewing the movement as
successful.
Among those under 30, 52% saw the movement as successful
while 66% of those 50
and older felt this way. Although not written with the late 1960s
in mind, Payne’s
(1998:136) remark is informative: “Black youth seem to think
the movement accom-
plished little or nothing, that racism is unchanged from what it
used to be. In part,
this thinking may reflect how little contemporary youngsters
understand just what
racism used to be.” Sigelman and Welch (1991) instead thought
that young blacks
had more idealistic notions of racial equality and accordingly
were more sensitive to
perceiving discrimination.
Altogether, findings so far underscore that perceptions of
movement success
are not uniform within the black population. Some of this
variation is due to differ-
ences in the degree of disadvantage blacks encounter, with
those most socially iso-
lated, economically marginalized, and ill-treated being most
discouraged. In this
regard, disappointment is a “common-sense response to an
objective reality” (Ru-

stin 1965:27). Other sources of variation in opinion, however,
have to do with gen-
erational differences and the extent of involvement in protest
activities.
Disadvantage, thus, is but one dimension that structures black
views on racial pro-
gress (Sigelman and Welch 1991).
TRACKING BLACK ASSESSMENT OF MOVEMENT
SUCCESS OVER
TIME
I turn now to assessing long-term change in opinions concerning
movement
success. On the one hand, it is possible that over time greater
number of blacks saw
the movement as successful. Button’s (1989) research is
instructive. He found that it
took some time to translate the right to vote into securing black
political representa-
tion and sometime thereafter before such “institutional
activists” (Santoro and
McGuire 1997) were able to improve services to black
neighborhoods. Similarly,
antidiscrimination mandates may better help the generation not
yet in the labor
force, as current workers likely are unable to improve their
human capital. Like-
wise, white racial tolerance may occur with generational
replacement, suggesting a

delay before racial tolerance would be noticeable. On the other
hand, one might
speculate that fewer shares of blacks over time saw the
movement as successful. In
Mississippi, whites quickly created new techniques after 1965
to diminish the power
of the black vote (Parker 1990). The euphoria over the election
of black mayors
may turn to disappointment as such politicians often had limited
resources to aid
black communities, especially in the private sector (Tate 1993).
And, of course, the
enactment of rights does not mean the realization of those
rights. Martin Luther
King Jr. (1967), for instance, came to realize that he was
mistaken in thinking that
Brown v. Board of Education was a historic victory because it
minimally reduced
school segregation.
Figure 4 displays the percentage of blacks from 1968 to 2000
who saw a reduc-
tion in discrimination since the civil rights movement.
Contradictory to my specula-
tion, from the first to the last survey there was remarkable
stability in assessment of
movement success. The percentage that saw a meaningful
reduction in discrimina-
tion, roughly six out of ten, changed by only 1.3 percentage
points across the
32-year time span. Using the 2000 survey, another way to
document this genera-
tional stability is to compare blacks who were adults (18 years
old or older) during
58.2%

61.7%
64.7%
53.2%
59.5%
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
1968 1976 1980 1984 2000
as successful, 1968–2000.
Notes: See text for data sources. The unweighted sample sizes
excluding respondents with missing
data on assessment of discrimination change are 2,699 (1968),
392 (1976), 1,907 (1980), 833
(1984), and 909 (2000).
638 Santoro
the modern movement (by 1968) to the generation that reached
adulthood after-

ward. Near identical percentages across these generations saw
the movement as suc-
cessful: 58% for the older generation and 60% for the younger
generation. These
findings suggest that views on the civil rights movement are a
collective memory
transmitted across generations (Nasstrom 2008). I can only
speculate as to the
mechanisms that produce this stability, but family socialization
likely plays an
important role.
While there was overall stability, a closer look at Fig. 4 reveals
that from 1968
to 1980 there was a noticeable increase in viewing the
movement as successful. The
percentage rose from 58% in 1968 to 65% in 1980. That nearly
three-quarters of
blacks in 1980 saw the impact of the movement so favorably
implies that blacks by
then had definitively passed judgment and declared the
movement a success. Yet
this decade-long increase in an optimistic direction was
interrupted by a precipitous
decline in 1984. Based on the national survey in 1984, there was
a 12 percentage
point decline in seeing the movement as successful compared to
the national survey
just four years earlier. The sharp downward turn in the
assessment of movement
success suggests that black opinion was influenced by the
social, economic, and
political milieu of the 1980s. After all, the movement had not
changed as it was by
then nearly two decades past. I turn to a closer examination of
the 1984 survey to

better understand this development.
UNDERSTANDING BLACK ASSESSMENT OF MOVEMENT
SUCCESS IN
1984
I highlight two issues that may help account for the downward
turn in opti-
mism in 1984, one economic and one political, that data allow
me to investigate.
Economically, the 1982 recession lowered black family income
by 14% and the
racial gap in family income widened (Tienda and Jensen 1988).
Jargowsky (1997)
documented a 70% growth in blacks residing in high-poverty
neighborhoods
between 1970 and 1990, with most of the increase in the 1980s.
Black male
unemployment in the early 1980s approached levels last seen
during the Great
Depression (Hirschman 1988). Yet during this period,
increasing shares of blacks
entered the middle class (Landry 1987) and Wilson (1987)
believed that this eco-
nomic bifurcation of the population led to greater class
polarization. These devel-
opments may have made poor blacks especially pessimistic
about the movement’s
success, perhaps because they would have seen only the middle
class as having
benefited from the movement. Politically, blacks particularly
disliked President
Ronald Reagan and the 1984 data were collected just after his
landslide reelec-
tion. Few blacks voted for him in 1980 and 1984 and by 1984,

72% of blacks
thought that he was racially prejudiced (Tate 1993). By 1988,
78% of blacks
thought that Reagan had tried to keep blacks down rather than
offer help (Sigel-
man and Welch 1991). He ushered in an era of conservative
racial rhetoric,
opposed civil rights measures, and his budgets reduced spending
on social
programs that disproportionately benefited blacks (Dawson and
Bobo 2004).
Moreover, his administration and the congresses of the era
enacted criminal
justice policies that led to the mass incarceration of black men.
I turn to an
examination of how economic standing and views toward
Reagan and the politi-
cal system are linked to beliefs about the success of the
movement.
10
The data are from a national telephone survey conducted during
the 1984 elec-
tion. The question of interest was asked in the postelection
wave, with 872 people
being interviewed, but because of missing data on assessment of
progress the sample
is reduced to 833. The data are weighted to correct for unequal
probabilities of
household selection.

11
The passage of time meant that fewer respondents were
adults during the modern civil rights movement: 30% were at
least 18 years old by
the start of the Montgomery boycott while 54% were that age by
1968. Unlike the
1968 data, however, age in 1984 played no role in perceptions
of movement success
(not shown). Figure 5 shows the relationship between movement
success and
48.5%
54.5%
50.9%
48.4%
53.6% 52.7% 55.1% 51.8%
56.3%
53.3%
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%

$0-$9,999 $10,000-
$40,000
$40,001+ unemployed employed no yes poor working class
middle class
household income employment status professional/managerial
occupation
self identified class position
as successful by indicators of
economic standing in 1984.
Notes: None of the relationships shown between viewing the
movement as successful and eco-
nomic standing are statistically significant using t-tests or
ANOVAs. Data come from the National
Black Election Study (Jackson et al. 1984). The unweighted
sample sizes are 758 (income), 830
(employment status), 833 (professional/managerial occupation),
and 807 (self-identified class
position).
10
Other factors beyond which I can measure may have contributed
to the decline in seeing the civil rights
movement as successful. In particular, the growth of mass
incarceration of black men in the 1980s led
to considerable black disillusionment with the legal system
(Bobo and Thompson 2006). Some of this
effect may be picked up by my measures of political trust and
government responsiveness discussed
shortly.
11

The first wave of the survey was conducted prior to the
presidential election and had a sample of 1,150
blacks. The response rate was 57%. Of those individuals, 872
were reinterviewed after the election.
Compared to 1980 census estimates, the sample did not greatly
differ, but some discrepancies were
apparent. For instance, respondents tended to be more educated,
higher in income, disproportionately
female, and non-Southern. The data collectors recommended
controlling for characteristics associated
with nonresponse to “mute what bias may be present” (Jackson
et al. 1984:4). The text presents bivari-
ate relationships, but I also ran a weighted logistic regression
predicting views on movement success
with all variables shown in Figs. 5 and 6 plus controls for sex,
education, age, Southern location, and
urbanicity. All bivariate relationships that were either
significant or nonsignificant remained this way
in the multivariate model (not shown). All control variables
were nonsignificant.
640 Santoro
income, employment status, professional/managerial
occupation, and self-identified
class.
12
No measure of economic standing was related to thinking the
movement
successful. For instance, 48% of people with the lowest income
and 51% of people
with the highest income thought the movement a success, a

small and nonsignificant
difference. I had speculated that even greater shares of those
most economically
marginalized would have come in 1984 to see the movement as
unsuccessful, but I
was wrong. Remarkably similar shares of those with low
economic standing
thought the movement successful in both 1968 and 1984. For
instance, 48% of
blacks in the lowest income category in 1968 and 1984 thought
the movement a suc-
cess and identical shares of unemployed blacks in 1968 and
1984 viewed the move-
ment as successful. Rather, what changed was that greater
shares of those with
higher economic standing became pessimistic about progress.
For example, 66% of
respondents with a professional or managerial occupation
thought the movement a
success in 1968, but only 55% did so in 1984; among the top
earners, belief in suc-
cess dropped 13 percentage points from 1968 to 1984. Thus,
what explains the lack
of a class effect in 1984 was that the poor remained equally
skeptical, but there was
a pessimistic shift among those more economically privileged.
While there were
instances of class polarization in the black community in the
1980s, these findings
show an instance of class convergence. Perhaps this class
convergence was due
to the population being politically and economically threatened,
which can
66.7%

58.3%
47.2%
72.3%
51.0%
57.0%
47.5%
54.7%
49.1% 49.5%
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
approve disapprove
not strongly
disapprove
strongly
trust not trust responsive not responsive like neutral dislike
responsiveness of
political system

political trustview of President Reagan view of Democratic
Party
as successful by political views
in 1984.
Notes: Relationships shown between viewing the movement as
successful and political views,
except opinion regarding the Democratic Party, are statistically
significant using t-tests or ANO-
VAs. Data come from the National Black Election Study
(Jackson et al. 1984). Because of miss-
ing data, the unweighted sample sizes are 779 for view of
Reagan, 804 for political trust, 788 for
responsiveness of the political system, and 803 for view of the
Democratic Party.
12
Success/failure is determined using the question: “Some people
say that over the last 20 years or so,
there has been a lot of progress in getting rid of racial
discrimination. Others say there hasn’t been
much real change for most blacks over that time. Which do you
agree with most?”
stimulate racial solidarity. For instance, Katherine Tate (1993)
claimed that the
then record-high turnout of black voters in the 1984 presidential
election was a
collective effort to defeat Reagan. It is also possible that the
economic vulnerability

of the black middle class in the 1980s (Collins 1983) served to
undermine their faith
in racial progress.
Figure 6 investigates political views. The first three bars show
the relationship
between opinions toward Reagan for the 16% who approved of
him, the 17% who
disapproved of him but not strongly, and the 58% who strongly
disapproved of
him. Opinions toward Reagan clearly mattered: whereas 67% of
those who
approved of Reagan saw the movement as successful, only 47%
thought this way
among those who strongly disapproved of him. The next two
relationships examine
political trust and responsiveness. Political trust captures how
much a person
thought they could trust the government in Washington.
13
As might be expected,
only 24% of blacks trusted the government during the Reagan
administration.
Blacks who had little faith in the government were 21
percentage points less likely
to see the movement as successful compared to those who
trusted the government.
Political responsiveness refers to the respondent’s belief that
the government cares
about people like themselves and is responsive to their
concerns.
14
It also has the

same relationship with belief in success: most people who saw
the political system as
responsive saw the movement as successful while most who
believed the political
system unresponsive believed the movement unsuccessful.
Finally, Fig. 6 shows the
link between opinions concerning the Democratic Party and
movement success.
While blacks in the 1980s were firmly tied to the Democratic
Party, it is possible
that they grew frustrated with their lack of influence within the
party (Tate 1993).
For instance, blacks may have become discouraged when the
Democratic Party did
not nominate Jesse Jackson as their presidential candidate in
1984. Feelings toward
the Democratic Party, however, are unrelated to views on
movement success. This
finding suggests that what was dampening black belief in the
movement’s success
was specifically tied to the actions of the government controlled
by white racial
conservatives.
In sum, I explain the decrease in the share of blacks thinking
the movement
successful in the mid-1980s in two ways. First, the economic
crisis of the 1980s
caused many from the middle class who previously saw the
movement as a success
to come to see the movement as a failure. Second, the hostility
of the Reagan
administration drove some to rethink the gains of the movement.
What seemed like
a success in the late 1960s, no longer seemed so meaningful.

These observations
indicate that in some historical moments, especially where
racial gains are under-
mined and government leaders are openly hostile, memories of
the civil rights
13
Political trust is an index that codes people who (a) believed
that you can trust the government in
Washington to do what is right and (b) that government is run
for the benefit of all the people. Lack-
ing political trust means that the respondent did not think that
you can trust the government and/or
that the government is run by a few big interests looking out for
themselves.
14
Political responsiveness is coded where the respondent agreed
with any two or more of the following
three statements: people like themselves have a say about what
the government does, public officials
care about what people like themselves think, and white
government officials and politicians do not
always get things their own way.
642 Santoro
movement are “selective reconstructions informed by present-
day circumstances”
(Nasstrom 2008:334).
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
Did the modern civil rights movement succeed? This

straightforward question
has a complex answer. Indeed, it stirs a debate that can never be
unambiguously
resolved. One reason for this is that the goals of the movement
changed from elimi-
nating de jure segregation and statutory discrimination to
eradicating economic dis-
parities.
15
Success is easier seen with the former than the latter (Chafe
1986; Marx
1967). Another reason is that the movement varied in its timing
across locales and
consequently change was not geographically and temporally
uniform (Button
1989). The movement also differentially affected blacks because
the population is
heterogeneous. For instance, gains in elected black
representation in the 1970s were
mainly experienced by men given that women comprised only
11% of all elected
black officials in 1970 and even fewer (7%) in 1972 (Bositis
2000).
Rather than resolving this debate, this study has shed a unique
light on it. I did
this by using a largely unanalyzed series of survey questions
asking blacks if dis-
crimination had been reduced since the time of the civil rights
movement. I label
those who saw less discrimination as indicating that they saw
movement success; I
see evidence of failure for those who perceived no alleviation in
discrimination. Like

all measures of success, my approach has drawbacks. One
limitation is that the
dichotomous measure likely simplifies respondents’ views. Yet
in doing so, it forces
people to take a stance and thus has the advantage of clarifying
whether a person’s
assessment was mainly optimistic or pessimistic. Another
concern is that my
approach captures perceptions of gains, which may over- or
underestimate “true”
changes in discrimination. At first glance, this might seem to
stand in contrast to
more objective measures of success like the passage of
legislation. But while the
enactment of laws such as the 1965 Voting Rights Act is a
matter of the historical
record, labeling it as an indication of success also is subjective
because it is debat-
able whether it granted blacks meaningful leverage in the
political system—the rea-
son why protestors pursued the vote in the first place. Thus, all
measures of success
rely on subjective judgments. Last, my approach leaves
unexplored if some people
are in a better position than others to judge success. Are
activists, for instance, more
qualified to gauge success than nonactivists? This issue is
difficult to resolve. None-
theless, I am confident that black opinions offer the most
insight into assessing the
movement’s impact. In part, this is because whites see racial
progress through a dis-
torted ideological lens while black opinions are more closely
tied to actual experi-
ences, as demonstrated by uncovering the link between
perceptions and actual

discrimination experiences, prior activism, and the like.
15
Some historians disagree that goals shifted in this manner by
noting that economic issues were always
a concern. Lawson (1991:463) writes, “The backbone of the
Montgomery boycott, the domestics and
the seamstresses who daily rode the buses to work, viewed
economic woes and political disfranchise-
ment as deeply intertwined.” Recall also that the 1963 march in
Washington, DC, was called by orga-
nizers the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.”
Analyses focused on two issues. First, I investigated how
common was it for
blacks in the late 1960s to see the movement as successful and,
related, who held this
belief. I find that most blacks (58%) believed that the movement
had meaningfully
reduced racial discrimination. This is an important finding as it
is at odds with
much scholarship—often without the aid of survey data—that
depicts the late 1960s
as an era of overwhelming black discontentment with racial
progress. But many
blacks did not hold this optimistic view. Moreover, when I
expanded the metric of
success to include perceptions of change in discrimination in
other areas (housing) I
find that a decisive majority reported little racial progress. In
light of these conflict-
ing results, I think it most accurate to conclude that both

perspectives resonated
with sizable shares of the black population. Just as historians
and former activists
have mixed views on the success of the civil rights movement,
so too did the broader
black population. In terms of variation within the black
population, those of lower
socioeconomic standing were least likely to feel that the
movement was successful.
Piven and Cloward (1979) suggested that the class bias in the
movement’s impact
was inevitable. When sufficiently pressured whites were willing
to grant blacks
access to the political system, for instance, but they never were
willing to address
inequality in economic standing. These class findings highlight
how difficult it can
be to understand race without understanding the
intersectionality of race and class
(Valdez 2015). Other measures of disadvantage, such as being
brutalized by social
control agents of the state, also diminished beliefs in the
movement’s success. These
results reinforce the idea that the gains made by the civil rights
movement were not
uniformly experienced. Perhaps scholars should not be asking
“Was the civil rights
movement successful?” but rather, “Who was it successful for?”
Second, I tracked views on the movement’s success over time.
From 1968 to
2000, black opinion changed little. Views on the movement’s
success appear to be a
collective memory transmitted across generations such that
whether a person wit-
nessed the movement firsthand or was born years afterward did

not much matter.
Yet within this time frame, opinion did fluctuate with the mid-
1980s representing
the ebb in feeling the movement successful. I argued that the
deleterious economic
and political conditions of this period eroded support for
believing the movement a
success. Middle-class blacks became more skeptical, as did
those most cognizant of
the racial hostility of the Reagan administration. In this
instance, views on the civil
rights movement are a living memory that can be altered by
contemporary develop-
ments (Pelak 2015; Whitlinger 2015). In sum, there is short-
term change but long-
term stability in assessment of the movement’s achievements.
This inquiry leads me to believe that prior conceptualizations of
movement
success have missed its central dimension. Focusing on issues
like the passage of
civil rights statutes, the election of blacks to political office, or
trends in voter regis-
tration misses entirely assessments of change in the lives of
blacks. Indicators of
progress only matter in how they are experienced. Legislative
victories may be
“peripheral. . .to the fundamental conditions of life of the Negro
people” (Rustin
1965:25). Achieving middle-class status may only serve to
heighten racist interac-
tions with whites (Feagin 1991). Employment in high-paying
professions may only
make racial barriers more apparent (Collins 1989). The most
important way to
judge movement success is to document changes in the everyday

lives of blacks (see
644 Santoro
M. King 1967:13). The black community provides the only
authoritative voice to
do this. This means that the story of the success or failure of the
civil rights move-
ment will be found in autobiographies, oral histories, memoires,
and surveys of
blacks. This record is voluminous (Eynon 1996; Rogers 1988).
These are the data
best positioned to document what SCLC activist Ralph
Abernathy (1989:xii) called
the “concrete particulars of experience.” Here is where a thick
understanding of the
movement’s impact will be found. I hope my work nudges
scholarship in that
direction.
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SO42CH10-Parker ARI 15 June 2016 22:31
Race and Politics in the Age

of Obama
Christopher Sebastian Parker
Department of Political Science, University of Washington,
Seattle, Washington 98195;
email: [email protected]
Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2016. 42:217–30
First published online as a Review in Advance on
May 25, 2016
The Annual Review of Sociology is online at
soc.annualreviews.org
This article’s doi:
10.1146/annurev-soc-081715-074246
Copyright c© 2016 by Annual Reviews.
All rights reserved
Keywords
existential threat, Obama effect, race, racism, social change,
Obama
Abstract
Race has rarely mattered more in US politics than it does now.
The election
of President Obama has laid bare the racial divisions that
continue to frac-
ture the United States. In this review, I explore the emerging
scholarship
that assesses Obama’s impact on social and political life in the
United States.
I first examine the symbolic meaning of Obama’s election to
black and white

citizens. Second, I analyze how racism has influenced whites’
political be-
havior and policy preferences. Next, I examine how President
Obama has
influenced public policy. Then, I suggest that the toxic political
climate sur-
rounding Obama is just another installment of a saga in which
rapid social
change is met with anxiety and anger by some whites who
perceive their
way of life as being under threat. Finally, I illustrate how the
“Obama ef-
fect” combines with the perceived “Latino threat” to affect
whites’ political
behavior.
217
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ANNUAL
REVIEWS Further
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INTRODUCTION
“The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the
color line” [Du Bois 1903 (2003),
p. xli]. It is no mystery how W.E.B. Du Bois arrived at this
conclusion. When he wrote The Souls
of Black Folk, Jim Crow, a legal system of racial segregation
that would continue for approximately
60 years, was barely 20 years old. Of course, conditions for
blacks beyond the South were not much
better (e.g., Chen 2009, Hosang 2010, Sugrue 1996). With the
possible exception of the ways in
which Muslims were racialized in the wake of 9/11 (e.g., Stubbs
2003/2004), the traditional racial
divisions in the United States reappeared on the US political
radar in the aftermath of Hurricane

Katrina. Since its reemergence, race has remained a force with
which to reckon in the United
States, mainly as a source of inequality. Indeed, well into the
twenty-first century, race continues
to account for sundry disparities in several domains, including
education, income, wealth, housing,
health outcomes, and incarceration (e.g., Dawson 2011, chapter
1).
Many hoped that the election of the first black president of the
United States would signal the
end to what may rightfully be called the continuing significance
of race. Indeed, as I write, we
should be into our seventh year of postracialism in the United
States, but we are clearly not (Tesler
2016). The emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement in
response to the murders of blacks
by whites underscores the continuing significance of race in the
age of Obama. The racial strife on
college campuses, including Ivy League institutions, is also
indicative of the continuing significance
of race in America. Although the significance of race continues,
we lack a clear understanding of
how, if at all, the presence of Obama as a political figure affects
how race operates in the context
of social and political life in the United States.
In this review, I explore the ways in which the emergence of
Barack Obama on the political
scene has affected how race shapes, and is shaped by, politics in
the United States. The scholarship
on Obama is voluminous relative to the short time during which
he has been on the American
political landscape. For the sake of brevity, I will confine this
essay to four substantive areas, all of
which include Obama’s connection to race, racism, and politics.

I begin with an exploration of how Obama’s rise as nominee and
time as president affected
the conversation on race relations and racial progress. Next, I
examine how the nomination and
eventual election of the 44th president affected US politics, in
particular the two major political
parties and the dynamics in Congress. Further, I dive into the
ways in which his campaigns have
affected political behavior, and then I shift gears to assess how
President Obama influenced the
direction of public policy. In the final section, I examine what
ultimately drives the reaction to a
black president: Is it, as many have surmised, all about race? Or
are there alternative explanations
for how Americans received President Obama?
THE MEANING OF OBAMA
In many quarters, the nomination and election of Obama was
taken as a sign that the United States
was, perhaps, finally moving beyond race—that the significance
of race was, at last, in decline. This
belief can assume a number of guises. For instance, moving
beyond race (e.g., becoming postracial)
includes the perception that race relations have improved and an
interracial comity has emerged.
In reality, however, the perception of race relations is typically
a one-way street: the perception
of blacks by whites (e.g., Bobo & Kluegel 1997). For reasons
discussed below, the emergence of
Obama on the political scene also held the potential to affect the
ways in which blacks perceived
a decrease in discrimination and, therefore, an increase in the
number of opportunities available
to them. Collectively, these outcomes have come to be known as

the Obama effect.
218 Parker
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For blacks, the so-called Obama effect is manifold, beginning
with the belief that the election
of a black man must signal improving conditions for blacks as a
whole. After centuries of enduring
race-based domination, blacks had been systematically stripped
of any hopes that they would
witness racial equality in their lifetime, much less soon

(Dawson 2011, chapter 1). The election
of Obama to the most powerful office in the world, however,
was seen as proof that the American
Dream was within the grasp of blacks. Indeed, Obama’s initial
victory in 2008 made blacks feel
better about their life chances even though their objective
economic conditions declined more
dramatically than those of whites during that year (Stout & Le
2012). Moving beyond the symbolic
nature of the Obama effect among blacks, others have analyzed
how Obama’s victory might inform
the ways that blacks perceive concrete opportunities. As Hunt &
Wilson (2009) make plain, blacks
tend to see the emergence of Obama as a sign that they will
more easily advance in their chosen
professions and will have more political opportunities at the
national level.
There is another way in which Obama’s candidacy and
subsequent victory shaped black percep-
tions, beyond race relations, racial progress, and life chances.
Some contend that the Obama effect
extends to the ways in which blacks see themselves by serving
as a reminder of what is possible.
This is important because, as the seminal research by Steele &
Aronson (1995) indicates, blacks
tend to internalize the negative stereotypes often attributed to
them, and those stereotypes often
impede their ability to achieve. In the present case, the
achievements of Obama as a role model for
blacks might mitigate, if not completely undermine, the
internalization of negative stereotypes.
As promising as this sounds, the jury remains out on this.
Whereas one group of scholars have
confirmed the proposition that the Obama effect extends to the
weakening of existing stereotypes

(by reducing the role race plays in test performance; see Marx
et al. 2009), another study, using
an experimental design, has called into question the existence of
such an effect, because invoking
Obama failed to increase test-based performance (Aronson et al.
2009).
Of course, the real impetus for exploring the existence of the
Obama effect is the way in which
the candidacy and election of the first black president stood to
affect the racial attitudes of whites
(Welch & Sigelman 2011). Beyond the fact that whites who
tended to feel comfortable with black
candidates were more likely to vote for Senator Obama than
those who were not (Block 2011),
the rough consensus is that his success has undermined
stereotypes of blacks as lazy, unintelligent,
violent, and unpatriotic (e.g., Bobo & Kluegel 1997); in short, a
salient and positive example of
blackness has been shown to improve racial attitudes toward
blacks (Bodenhausen et al. 1995,
Dasgupta & Greenwald 2001).
There is evidence to support such claims. Let us begin with
explicit racial attitudes, which
include prejudices and possibilities for racial progress. Drawing
on a longitudinal design analyzing
the effects of media exposure to Obama’s presidential
campaign, Goldman & Mutz (2014) show
that prejudice, operationalized by the degree to which whites
agree with negative stereotypes of
blacks, decreased among whites in proportion to their exposure
to the Obama campaign. Whites
also became more optimistic about the state of race relations
compared to those who were exposed
to the campaign in smaller doses.1 Although these results are

important, they are too limited to
draw general conclusions.
These results, however, are not indicative of a consensus. For
example, Bernstein et al. (2010)
find that racial prejudice among whites remained unchanged
after the election of Obama compared
1 Digging deeper into the data, they also found that the Obama
campaign had the largest impact on conservatives. If this seems
shocking, consider the following: Conservatives harbor far more
negative stereotypes about blacks than progressives. As such,
the counter-stereotypical example Obama represents undermines
preexisting negative stereotypes more among conservatives
than among progressives.
www.annualreviews.org • Race and Politics in the Age of
Obama 219
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to when he was a candidate. More damning, however, is the
study conducted by Lybarger &
Monteith (2010), which shows that priming the president as a
positive exemplar actually increases
racial antipathy measured as symbolic racism. It seems that
“ordinary” blacks are failing to live
up to the standard set by Obama, with the implication being that
if most blacks worked as hard
as Obama has, they too would be successful. For whites who
subscribe to this belief, racism is a
thing of the past.
Similar patterns emerge when it comes to implicit prejudice, a
form of race-based antipathy
associated with beliefs that lay beyond conscious awareness
(Greenwald et al. 1998). The key
theoretical distinction between implicit and explicit bias is that,
whereas the latter is subject to
social desirability effects, the former, due to its automaticity, is
not. As a result, implicit attitudes
are believed to be more authentic than explicit ones. One set of
studies suggests that exposure to
Obama does nothing to change implicit racism. For example, in
perhaps the most far-reaching
field study to date, Schmidt & Nosek (2010) discover that levels
of implicit racism failed to change
in any appreciable way between September 2006 and May 2009.
This quasi-experimental study

contradicted results from Plant et al. (2009) that showed a
decrease in implicit racism among
college students upon exposure to Obama.
In like fashion, drawing on a longitudinal design and using a
convenience sample, Bernstein and
colleagues (2010) found evidence that implicit prejudice toward
blacks declined after the election.
Similar results were obtained using an experimental design.
Reasoning that exposure to Obama
was already high at the time of the study, Columb & Plant
(2010) employed a creative design to
tease out the Obama effect. After exposing two experimental
groups to negative images of blacks,
the investigators further exposed one of the groups to images of
the president. Subjects in the
control group were only primed with neutral images, i.e.,
neither negative nor positive depictions
of blacks. All subjects were then administered the Implicit
Association Test (IAT). The group
in receipt of the Obama prime scored markedly lower on the
IAT than did subjects in the other
conditions.
Perceptions of racism among whites during Obama’s presidency
are also conditioned by factors
not directly tied to race or racism, per se. For instance, political
orientations color perceptions of
race relations and racism. Goldman & Mutz (2014) find that
conservatives believed the Obama
effect had a more positive effect on race relations than did
progressives. This may strike some
as counterintuitive, but as Goldman & Mutz explain, it is simply
the case that the views on race
relations held by conservatives enjoyed more room for
improvement than did those of progressives.

Of course, a more cynical perspective also explains such
results: Conservatives always believed
that claims of bad relations between the races were overblown.
Obama’s election simply proved
their case: If a black man could be elected president, how bad
could race relations be? Indeed,
Valentino & Brader (2011) arrive at a similar conclusion when
they assess the impact of Obama’s
election on whites’ perceptions of continuing discrimination.
They find that conservatives are
more likely to see Obama’s ascendance as proof that antiblack
discrimination is a thing of the past.
From affirming positive black identity, to its impact on racism,
by and large, the Obama effect
appears to be real. For blacks, it has the potential to liberate
them from seeing themselves in the
same unflattering light in which many whites see them. Among
whites, the meaning of Obama
is a bit more complicated. When it comes to explicit prejudice,
the results are mixed: There is
evidence that prejudice declines with exposure to Obama as
well as signs that as a positive exam-
ple, the president perpetuated racism. These differences may be
attributed to differences in the
way in which racism is indexed across studies—i.e., stereotypes
versus symbolic racism. Whereas
stereotypes are rooted in shared in-group beliefs about the
perceived behavior of out-groups (All-
port 1954), symbolic racism is a mixture of negative affect
toward blacks and the belief that they
violate cherished American values (Sears & Henry 2003). What
cannot be gainsaid, however, are
220 Parker

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the results as they relate to implicit racism. Studies featuring
more rigorous designs indicate that
the emergence of Obama coincides with the mitigation of
implicit racism, an important finding
because implicit attitudes may be considered more authentic
than their explicit counterparts.
POLITICS
The impact of the first black chief executive of the United

States on American politics is not totally
clear. Of course, there were likely to be at least some in the
electorate that supported the president
because of his race, just as there were people who voted against
him for the same reason: His race
cost Obama 10% among whites but gained him 2% among
blacks (Kinder & Dale-Riddle 2012).2
Further, as Redlawsk and colleagues (2010) find, one-third of
all whites, regardless of partisanship,
were “troubled” by the fact that Obama would be the first black
president. Still, are there other
factors beyond race and racism that informed political choice?
Finally, how, if at all, does Obama’s
presence inform parties, partisanship, and policy?
Primary Season
We begin with race, racism, and political choice during the
2008 primaries. This is an important
distinction to make because the primary electorate looks
different from the general electorate in
at least one important way: It tends to be more ideologically
extreme (e.g., Brady et al. 2007).
Indeed, at least among the Democrat primary electorate,
ideology almost always plays a more
significant role than race in determining the eventual nominee.
But since Obama has been on the
ticket, race has always outperformed ideology, especially in the
ways in which it has influenced
choice between him and Clinton (Tesler & Sears 2010).
Support for Obama during the primary season, however, was
also driven by other considerations
not directly related to race. For instance, Parker et al. (2009)
discovered that class and patriotism

played important roles among whites. On the eve of the general
election, upper-class whites
who considered themselves patriotic threw their support behind
Obama, whereas their lower-
class counterparts roundly rejected the Democrat nominee.
Interpreted through an attitudinal-
functional lens (according to which attitudes serve specific
functions), it is likely that upper-class
whites view patriotism as a value-expressive attitude, one that
brings normative criteria, e.g., the
values on which America was founded, to the evaluation of
social groups and public policies (Katz
1960). Lower-class whites, on the other hand, are likely to
interpret patriotism through an ego-
defensive lens in which patriotism is operationalized as a means
of preserving the social status of
whites (Sidanius & Pratto 1999). Support for Obama among
whites during the primary season
cannot be confined to racial and class-based explanations:
Religious messages were also important.
Indeed, as McKenzie (2011) shows, Reverend Jeremiah
Wright’s comments on race dampened
support for the eventual president in the primaries.
The General Elections
In the general elections, race should be even more salient than
in the primaries. With Republicans
becoming ever more hostile on racial issues since the Goldwater
campaign in 1964 (e.g., Carmines
2 In 2008, Obama won about 53% of the popular vote—the first
Democrat since Jimmy Carter to win the outright majority.
However, he lost among white voters. National exit polls
indicate that he won 43% of the white vote. This share is higher
than the percentages obtained by all but two democratic

candidates since 1964, when Lyndon Johnson won the majority
of
the white vote: Carter, who won 48%, and Clinton, who won
44% (both of them are southern Democrats). In 2012, Obama
did not do so well among whites. He gained 39% of the white
vote (a decrease of 4%). What really carried Obama to victory
is a high share of African American and Latino votes: Among
African Americans he got 93%, and among Latinos he got 71%.
www.annualreviews.org • Race and Politics in the Age of
Obama 221
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& Stimson 1989), the parties have become more polarized along
racial lines, among other things
(e.g, Noel 2013, Valentino & Sears 2005). With a black man as
the standard-bearer for Democrats,
and older white men representing the GOP in 2008 and 2012,
how could race not play an important
role in the most recent presidential elections?
This is precisely what we find. Enthusiasm ran high in the black
electorate—at all-time high
in 2008. For instance, turnout among blacks hit 67%, up from
59% in 1964, the prior record.
In the end, the junior senator from Illinois received 95% of the
black vote. Indeed, compared
to the 2004 election cycle, in 2008 blacks were 15% more likely
to vote than whites (Kinder &
Dale-Riddle 2012). What are some of the factors that motivated
blacks to vote for Obama? For
starters, group-based factors such as racial solidarity and the
black Church successfully mobilized
the black community, as did outreach from Democratic Party
officials (Kinder & Dale-Riddle
2012, Philpot et al. 2009).
What motivated whites to vote for (or against) Obama? Racism,
of course, is one factor. Perhaps
the most common way in which scholars in political science
capture (explicit) racism is through
the use of racial resentment or symbolic racism (e.g., Henry &
Sears 2002, Kinder & Sanders
1996). In this guise, racism has shifted from an old-fashioned
model in which antipathy toward
blacks was framed in terms of innate inferiority to a model in
which blacks are perceived as
violating core American values, such as the work ethic. When

paired with antipathy for blacks,
this formulation of racism has proven able to inform the
attitudes and behavior of whites across
various policy and behavioral domains (e.g., Kinder & Sanders
1996).3 It seems that resentment
toward blacks in general affected whites’ willingness to support
the Democrats in 2008 and 2012
(Hutchings 2009, Kinder & Dale-Riddle 2012, Tesler 2016),
something that suggests that no
matter his accomplishments, Obama failed to outrun his race.
Negative feelings toward blacks,
in other words, were transferred first to the candidate and
subsequently to the president. This
resulted in the tendency for whites to vote for the Republican
candidate in 2008 (McCain) and
2012 (Romney) (Pasek et al. 2014, Tesler & Sears 2010).
Racial resentment is not the only race-based antipathy Obama
failed to outrun. In some cases,
scholars have shown that stereotypes about blacks affected
whether or not whites would vote for
the soon-to-be president (Hutchings 2009, Piston 2010). Other
scholars have drawn on another
concept, social dominance orientation, to assess the ways in
which racism informs political choice.
It seems as though whites who believe that blacks are
subordinate to whites cast their vote for
the black candidate. Knowles and colleagues (2009) interpret
this counterintuitive finding by
suggesting that at least some of those who were highly
inegalitarian voted for Obama because his
candidacy perpetuates the myth that racism is over. Other
research shows that it does not take
racism per se to affect presidential political choice. Using a
question format designed to mitigate
the effects of social desirability bias, Schaffner (2011), for

instance, shows that the mere salience
of race was enough to move people to vote for or against
Obama.
By now, it should be clear that to avoid the ways in which
social desirability taints responses to
various questions, perhaps the best tool is implicit assessment.
However, whereas the relationship
between explicit racism and political choice is fairly consistent,
the same cannot be said of implicit
racism. For instance, Greenwald and associates (2009)
demonstrated that whites who scored high
(i.e., who appeared more racist) on the IAT were less like to
vote for Obama. This work is
important insofar as the findings remain robust even after
accounting for explicit racism, e.g.,
racial resentment and symbolic racism.
3 This perspective is not without its critics. See, for example,
Schuman (2000), and Wilson & Davis (2011).
222 Parker
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Still, this is not always the case. Other scholars have shown that
when explicit racism is included
in the model, the effects of implicit racism disappear (Kalmoe
& Piston 2013, Pasek et al. 2014).
Perhaps differences in the ways in which implicit attitudes are
operationalized account for such
different outcomes. For instance, the study conducted by
Greenwald and colleagues draws on the
familiar IAT, a method that depends upon the measurement
response latency (Greenwald et al.
1998). Even so, the study led by Pasek et al. (2014) as well as
the paper by Piston & Kalmoe rely
upon the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP), an approach
ultimately rooted in affect (Payne
et al. 2005).4 Because one way of extracting implicit attitudes
appears more related to cognition
(the IAT) and the other draws upon affect (the AMP), we should
not be alarmed when differences
between the two studies emerge: One relies more upon thinking,
the other indexes feeling.
One way to get beyond this impasse on the effect of implicit
racial attitudes on support for
Obama is to continue avoiding explicit racial animus and

attitude reports that may be tainted by
social desirability effects, while downplaying both the IAT and
AMP. This can be accomplished
through the use of Google searches. As Stephens-Davidowitz
(2014) suggests, Google searches are
ideal as proxies for the assessment of sensitive preferences
because they are generally conducted
alone and online. Using Google searches for the “N-word” as a
rough proxy for prejudice during
the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, Stephens-Davidowitz
estimates that Obama’s race
cost him 9.1% in 2008 and 9.5% in 2012 among whites who
would have otherwise voted for a
white Democrat.
Public Policy
If race and racism affected support for Obama, does his election
necessarily affect support for race-
based public policies? Preliminary results suggest that his
presence in the White House has done
precisely that. To begin, 20% of whites believe that Obama’s
policies will benefit blacks (Redlawsk
et al. 2010). Further, using a longitudinal design, Kaiser and
colleagues (2009) conclude that
support for policies engineered to address increasing racial
inequality declined after the election
of Obama. They conclude that it is likely that with Obama’s
election, these respondents felt that
the time for policies aimed at achieving social justice had
passed. Of course, this is not entirely
unrelated to the belief that Obama’s policies would benefit
blacks at the expense of whites.
Using a different approach, one that has the advantage of
sampling the general population (as

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