research 3 types of boycotts in the united states

Q&A: Here’s when boycotts have worked — and when they haven’t

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Actress Alyssa Milano was one of thousands who called for a one-day boycott on Thursday of FedEx, Apple TV and Amazon for not severing their ties with the National Rifle Assn. In a tweet, she included a photo of herself in front of the White House, with the words “Never Again” written on her hands in red ink.

The call for action came after Delta and United airlines, parent companies for Avis and Budget, Enterprise, National and Alamo car rentals, financial institutions and more have dropped deals with the gun rights lobbying organization since the Feb. 14 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., where 17 people were killed.

In an effort to undermine the NRA’s clout and to pressure lawmakers to pass gun control legislation, organizations and individuals have been calling for a variety of boycotts. Among them is David Hogg, a 17-year-old senior at the school, who in a Feb. 24 tweet said that people should boycott Florida for spring break until gun reform happens. If lawmakers won’t listen to students, Hogg wrote, “maybe [they’ll] listen to the billion dollar tourism industry in FL.”

Boycotts are nothing new. Here’s a quick look at how they’ve played out in the U.S. and abroad.

Are boycotts successful?

The answer depends partly in how you define success.

“Very few boycotts have led to changes,” said Maurice Schweitzer, a professor of operations and information management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. “Most boycotts lack a sustained effort” and people lose interest or stop paying attention, he said.

“In practice, most boycotts achieve the more modest goal of attracting media attention,” Schweitzer wrote in an email. “There are, however, hundreds of calls for boycotts each year, and most accomplish very little.”

Some targets of boycotts in recent years include BP for its role in the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, and Chick-fil-A, after Chief Operating Officer Dan T. Cathy’s comments against same-sex marriage in 2012.

Is it possible to measure a boycott’s impact?

No, not always, simply because multiple factors can influence events. Consider the case of former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who took a knee during the national anthem to protest racism and police brutality, launching similar protests across the National Football League. In the aftermath of his protest, Kaepernick was not signed by any team.

Kaepernick supporters urged fans to stop watching NFL games, and a Change.org petition calling for a boycott gained more than 200,000 supporters.

“Knowing that NFL owners only respond to ratings, which in turn brings money from advertisers and network partners, I felt the only way to get the owners' attention was to create a petition asking for a full boycott until Colin Kaepernick got signed,” Vic Oyedeji, founder of Unstripped Voice, a platform that promotes racial, social and economic equity, wrote in an email.

The boycott will end if Kaepernick is signed by an NFL team, Oyedeji wrote.

Viewership for the NFL’s 2017 season dropped by 9.7% compared to the previous season, according to Sports Illustrated. However, the NFL’s ratings had also dropped by 8% for the 2016 season — a year before the NFL boycott started. There is no conclusive evidence that the boycott contributed to the ratings decline when other factors — a plunge in the quality of games, growing concern of the game’s violence — are at play.

“Boycotts are rarely the precipitating factor for change. Rather, they bring attention to an issue and signal the magnitude and intensity with which a group feels a particular way,” Schweitzer said. “In most cases, a small minority of people call for a boycott that the wider community fails to support by taking substantive action.”

Have boycotts helped change public opinion?

Yes, and perhaps one of the best examples comes from the civil rights era, when a boycott rose out of tensions over public buses in Montgomery, Ala.

One day in 1955, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was dragged off a bus by police officers for sitting in the whites-only section. Nine months later, Rosa Parks refused to leave her seat on a Montgomery bus.

Blacks began boycotting the public buses, and soon the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the Rev. Ralph Abernathy and other civil rights leaders joined their cause. Despite King and Abernathy’s houses being firebombed, they did not stop. “My intimidations are a small price to pay if victory can be won," King said .

A federal court eventually ruled that bus segregation was unconstitutional and violated the equal protection provisions of the 14th Amendment. The boycott, along with Parks’ arrest, cast a harsh spotlight on the inequities African Americans suffered in the Jim Crow South.

Are there other examples of boycotts influencing public opinion?

In 1965, Cesar Chavez and the National Farm Workers Assn. urged the public to boycott grapes to compel growers to provide better pay and working conditions. The boycott targeted nonunion grape businesses.

The National Farm Workers Assn. joined the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee to form United Farm Workers and increase attention on their boycott. Millions showed solidarity by not purchasing grapes until the UFW signed its first union contracts.

Another major boycott, which won support from across the globe as well as the U.S., targeted South Africa and its system of racial segregation known as apartheid. Individuals as well as companies and governments boycotted the country. Tourists refused to travel there, companies would not do business there, artists would not perform there. South Africa was excluded from the Olympics for decades.

In 1986, Congress voted to override a veto by President Reagan to enact the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act. The act banned South African imports, airlines and foreign aid from the U.S. International companies began leaving South Africa in droves, causing significant losses in revenue and jobs there.

Leader P.W. Botha resigned in 1989, and his successor, F.W. de Klerk, lifted a ban on the African National Congress and freed Nelson Mandela and all political prisoners in 1990.

In 1993, the U.S. sanctions against South Africa were lifted after De Klerk announced a completely representative democratic process for their presidential election. The following year, Mandela was elected as South Africa’s first black leader and apartheid was dismantled.

The Montgomery bus and South Africa boycotts “are the exceptions, rather than the rule, of boycotts that ended with the desired policy change,” Schweitzer said.

Do boycotts inflict economic harm?

Sometimes, yes. The liberal polling firm Center for American Progress wrote a 2010 report called "Stop the Conference" that estimated that Arizona lost $45 million in convention business because of a boycott called after passage of SB 1070, a tough law targeting illegal immigration.

Most recently, boycotts targeted North Carolina after the passage of the Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act, commonly known as House Bill 2, which blocked localities from passing protections for the LGBTQ community and instructed transgender people to use the bathroom of the sex they were assigned at birth.

In response to the passage of HB2, several organizations and agencies boycotted North Carolina. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors wrote a letter to then-North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory to say county employees were barred from visiting the state for county business.

“We echo the overwhelming criticism expressed by local governments in your state and throughout the nation that have passed resolutions calling for the repeal of HB2,” the letter read. The board joined 28 other counties, seven states and the District of Columbia, and 29 cities in barring employees from traveling to North Carolina.

Professional and collegiate sports leagues like the National Collegiate Athletic Assn., Atlantic Coast Conference and the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Assn. all pulled significant events from the state. The NBA announced on July 21, 2016, that the league would move its 2017 All-Star Weekend from Charlotte to New Orleans. The loss of revenue to North Carolina was estimated at $100 million.

Entertainment company Lionsgate canceled filming of its Hulu series “Crushed” in Charlotte. 21st Century Fox, A&E Networks and Turner Broadcasting said they would not consider North Carolina for future production if HB2 were not repealed.

In all, the state lost more than $3.76 billion, according to an Associated Press analysis.

Once HB2 was repealed and replaced, those corporations and organizations agreed to do business with North Carolina again.

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Michael Livingston was a Metpro trainee from 2017-18 at the Los Angeles Times. He previously worked as a crime reporter at the Herald in Rock Hill, S.C. and the Danville Register & Bee in Virginia. While at the Register & Bee, he won multiple Virginia Press Assn. awards for crime and breaking news reporting. He graduated from Virginia Union University in Richmond.

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• TeachableMoment

The Boycott, Then and Now

Two student readings (with discussion questions) examine the historical development of the boycott as a tactic used by both progressives and conservatives, and recent boycotts targeting Glenn Beck and Florida's Stand Your Ground law.

by Mark Engler  

To The Teacher:

The boycott is one of the most powerful, time-tested tactics that social movements have at their disposal. History offers many examples of people joining together to exercise their power as consumers in support of movements for social justice, civil rights, and workers' rights. By calling for people to not spend their money on a target good or service, boycotts can aid these movements by drawing on a wider base of supporters who would otherwise be unable to participate.

This lesson examines the historical development of the boycott as a tactic - with examples of its use by both progressives and conservatives - and looks at some recent boycotts that are related to hot-button political issues.

The first student reading considers the history of the boycott in the United States, reviewing some famous examples of how it has been used. The second reading examines some recent boycotts, with focus on the online advocacy group ColorOfChange.org. This group launched a campaign pressuring advertisers that supported controversial right-wing commentator Glenn Beck. They also launched a boycott targeting a group that championed Florida's "Stand Your Ground" gun law, which drew attention in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting. The reading explores how these campaigns developed and considers responses from conservative critics - including calls for a counter-boycott.

Questions for student discussion follow each reading.   

Student Reading 1: 

The boycott: an american tradition.

The boycott is one of the most powerful, time-tested tactics that activists have at their disposal. History offers many examples of people joining together to exercise their power as consumers in support of movements for social justice, civil rights, and workers' rights. By calling for people to not spend their money on a target good or service, boycotts can compel a targeted company to change its behavior so it can win back customers and ward off economic damage.

Two of the most famous American boycotts are the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the United Farm Workers' (UFW) grape boycott. Both of these successful boycotts emerged in the context of the social and political upheavals of the 1950s and 60s.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott is the first boycott most Americans learn about in school. The boycott is considered one of the most important episodes in the southern struggle for civil rights, and is best remembered for some of its central participants: Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and Ralph Abernathy.

Like many Southern cities, Montgomery, Alabama, rigidly enforced "Jim Crow" laws for racial segregation. On buses, this meant that black riders were required to sit in the back while white riders got seats in the front. Black riders were expected to surrender their seats to white riders when a bus was full.

The boycott began on December 1, 1955 when Rosa Parks, a trained activist, refused to surrender her seat to a white rider and was arrested. For more than a year, the black community of Montgomery overwhelmingly avoided using the city's buses, organizing carpools or walking long distances instead. Protesters faced a harsh, often violent backlash. Nevertheless, their persistence started paying off in June 1956, when a federal district court ruled that Alabama's segregation of buses was unconstitutional. In November, the United States Supreme Court upheld the district court's ruling and a Montgomery ordinance finally desegregated buses in the city.

Not only was the Montgomery Bus Boycott successful in ending segregation on a local level, news images of the action galvanized public support for the civil rights cause nationally. As   The Nation   magazine explains:

For 381 days, despite brutal harassment, and no protection from the state or federal government, the boycott endured. When it finally ended on December 27, 1956, not only was it a complete victory for the black community, but the civil rights movement had a new leader in King and a momentum that over the next ten years would destroy nearly every vestige of Jim Crow that had plagued the South and the nation since the Civil War.  ( http://www.thenation.com/learning-pack/montgomery-bus-boycott )

Another important boycott was organized by the United Farm Workers (UFW). Through much of the first half of the 20th century, labor union organizers had attempted unsuccessfully to bring California's farm workers into a union. These workers were largely immigrants from Latin America and Asia who labored under harsh conditions with little pay. Organizers finally began to make headway in the 1950s under the leadership of Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez, who in 1962 co-founded the organization that later became the UFW.

To build support for their on-the-ground organizing efforts, the UFW called on people throughout the country to stop eating grapes. Documentarian Rick Tejada-Flores writes on the PBS website:

By 1967 farmworkers were enlisting consumers in their battle. When the Giumarra Corporation tried to disguise their shipments by using other grape growers' labels, the farmworkers began a national boycott of all table grapes. Striking farmworkers spread out across the country, forging alliances with students, churches, and consumers and other union members to try to stop the sale of grapes... At its height, more than 14 million Americans helped by not buying grapes. The pressure was irresistible, and the [California] growers signed historic contracts with UFWOC in 1969. ( http://www.pbs.org/itvs/fightfields/cesarchavez1.html )

The boycott was effective because it allowed people across the country who were sympathetic to the UFW organizing effort but unable to participate directly to lend meaningful support to the cause.

While boycotts are often associated with politically liberal causes, they are sometimes used for conservative ends. In 1997, the Southern Baptist Convention launched a boycott of the Walt Disney Company in response to the company's decision to extend health care and other benefits to the partners of gay employees. As the Associated Press reported in June 2005, when the boycott officially ended:

Southern Baptists ended an eight-year boycott of the Walt Disney Co. (DIS) for violating "moral righteousness and traditional family values" in a vote on the final day of the faith's annual convention Wednesday... The Disney resolution, passed at the SBC's 1997 convention in Dallas, called for Southern Baptists to refrain from patronizing Disney theme parks and Disney products, mainly because of the entertainment company's decision to give benefits to companions of gay employees. ( http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,160382,00.html )

Unlike the grape boycott and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Disney boycott was ultimately unsuccessful in forcing any substantive changes in behavior from the campaign's target.

For Discussion:

1.  Do students have any questions about the reading? How might they be answered?

2.  What is a boycott? What does it aim to do?

3.  What was the goal of the Montgomery Bus Boycott? What impacts did it ultimately have?

4.  While the Montgomery Bus Boycott primarily drew on local participation, the UFW grape boycott depended on the participation of people from across the country. How do you think this affected the character of the action?

5.  Why do you think the Montgomery Bus Boycott and UFW grape boycott were successful while the SBC's boycott of Disney failed?

Student Reading 2: 

Colorofchange.org and the boycott today   .

The boycott remains a tactic that is regularly deployed in political life, including in the past year. A progressive online advocacy group called  ColorofChange.org  has gained notable success with two campaigns: one to encourage sponsors to leave conservative pundit Glenn Beck's television program and another to put pressure on companies supporting a right-wing legislative group called ALEC. Liberals see these two campaigns as effective political interventions. But conservatives say that the campaigns unfairly sought to limit the free expression of ideas.

On July 28, 2009, the controversial conservative commentator and Fox News Channel host Glenn Beck appeared on the daily talk show "Fox and Friends" to discuss recent news. When the conversation turned to President Obama's response to a racially charged incident that was in the headlines, Beck called the president himself a racist, charging that President Obama held "a deep seated hatred for white people or the white culture."

Beck's inflammatory remark provoked an immediate backlash. ColorOfChange.org launched a petition calling on Beck's advertisers to terminate their sponsorship of the program. The petition received nearly 300,000 signatures and advertisers began leaving in droves. In total, nearly 400 advertisers ended their support of Beck's program. To strengthen their case to advertisers, ColorOfChange activists also documented other extreme comments that Beck had made.

Ultimately, Fox News chose not to renew its contract with Beck, whose program on that network ended in June 2011. Fox News executives denied that ColorOfChange had anything to do with their decision not to extend Beck's contract, stating, "The advertisers referenced have all moved their spots from Beck to other day parts on the network, so there has been no revenue lost." But Eric Boehlert of the progressive media watchdog group Media Matters offered a contrary view in an April 7, 2011 article:

The television industry is built around supply and demand. Glenn Beck has supply in the form of roughly 20 minutes of advertising time sold each episode. And it wants to build demand. Usually, healthy ratings drive that demand since advertisers want to reach the masses. But if suddenly hundreds of advertisers raise their hand and announce they'd be happy to spend money with Fox News, but not on Glenn Beck, then the show's demand plummets, but the supply - the 20 minutes of advertising inventory - remains the same. Bottom line? The ad rates go down.... As Brad Adgate, director of research for the ad-buying giant Horizon Media, noted in an email to me yesterday: "Ad rates are predicated on supply and demand, not ratings. If the show has low demand and an oversupply of advertiser inventory, the show will not get premium ad pricing no matter how many viewers." ( http://mediamatters.org/blog/201104070011 )

In a typical boycott, a group of consumers withhold their patronage of a particular good or service until the company heeds its demands. In the case of ColorOfChange.org's campaign against Glenn Beck, it was the implied threat of a consumer boycott that led companies that advertised on Beck's program to withdraw their sponsorship.

A similar dynamic appeared in early 2012 when ColorOfChange.org set its sights on the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a conservative thinktank known for championing right-wing causes. One such cause is the Florida "Stand Your Ground" gun law, which drew attention in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting. ( Under the law, an individual has no "duty to retreat" before resorting to the use of deadly force for self-defense. See our  TeachableMoment lesson .)

ColorOfChange.org decided to act on public outrage about ALEC's support of Stand Your Ground and of "voter ID laws," which critics say disproportionately prevent poor people and people of color from voting. ColorOfChange.org decided to focus public pressure on the various companies that pay $25,000-per-year dues to ALEC. ColorOfChange.org launched a petition drive, urging people to write to these organizations expressing their concern. A sample letter written by ColorOfChange.org stated:

I presume your company does not want to support voter suppression, nor have your products or services associated with discrimination and large-scale voter disenfranchisement. I urge you to immediately stop funding ALEC and issue a public statement making it clear that your company does not support discriminatory voter ID laws and voter suppression.

In response to the campaign, a string of companies, including Wendy's, McDonald's, Coke, Pepsi, and Kraft, all announced that they were leaving ALEC. In response, ALEC retreated from some of its most controversial positions, stating that it was "eliminating [its] Public Safety and Elections task force that dealt with non-economic issues" such as Stand Your Ground and Voter ID.

Liberal critics of ALEC regarded the announcement as a victory. However, many conservatives were unhappy that corporations had backed away from their financial commitment to the group's legislative advocacy. In a column for the Concord Monitor entitled, " Why Are Liberals So Scared of ALEC, " State Representative Jordan Ulery argued that the boycott represented an unfair suppression of ideas. "[T]he fringe left is apparently opposed to open thinking and discussion of legislation," he wrote.

Ulery's complaint notwithstanding, others called for conservatives to adopt the boycott tactic for their own purposes: namely, punishing companies that decided to leave ALEC. At  National Review Online , commentator Michelle Malkin wrote:

Let's stipulate: Activists on the left are free to exercise their rights of speech and assembly to boycott businesses whose politics they oppose. Conversely, activists on the right are free to exercise the power of their pocketbooks and refrain from supporting businesses that shun their values... It's time for conservatives to stand their ground and stop showing these corporate cowards their money.

1. Do students have any questions about the reading? How might they be answered?

2. Why did ColorOfChange.org choose to target Glenn Beck? Why did it later target the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)?

3. With its two campaigns, ColorOfChange.org did not actually boycott any specific corporation, it merely created the implied threat of a boycott. How did the group do this?

4. Conservative legislator Jordan Ulery believes that the ColorOfChange.org boycotts represented an unfair suppression of ideas. Do you agree or disagree? Why?

5. In contrast, Michelle Malkin argues that conservatives should launch a boycott of their own. What do you think would be the result of two competing boycotts?

6. ColorOfChange.org used the internet as a primary vehicle for spreading the word about its petitions and getting people to sign on. How do you think the existence of the Internet has affected the boycott tactic? In what ways might the tactic evolve further in the future?

This lesson was written by Mark Engler for TeachableMoment.Org, with research assistance by Eric Augenbraun.

We welcome your comments. Please email them to: [email protected] .

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Presentation U.S. History Primary Source Timeline

The civil rights movement.

In the middle of the 20th century, a nationwide movement for equal rights for African Americans and for an end to racial segregation and exclusion arose across the United States. This movement took many forms, and its participants used a wide range of means to make their demands felt, including sit-ins, boycotts, protest marches, freedom rides, and lobbying government officials for legislative action. They faced opposition on many fronts and fell victim to bombings and beatings, arrest and assassination. By the end of the 1960s, the civil rights movement had brought about dramatic changes in the law and in public practice, and had secured legal protection of rights and freedoms for African Americans that would shape American life for decades to come.

A few key moments include:

• Brown v. Board of Education The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense and Educational Fund, led by Thurgood Marshall, spent decades fighting against racial segregation in education. This long campaign culminated when the U.S. Supreme Court heard Brown v. Board of Education, which gathered together five separate cases related to school segregation with Marshall leading the arguments before the Court. On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” legally ending racial segregation in public schools and overruling the “separate but equal” principle set forth in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1889.
• Rosa Parks arrested On December 1, 1955, civil rights activist Rosa Parks was arrested when she refused to surrender her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus to a white passenger. The arrest led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a pivotal event in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, and was a defining moment in Parks' long career as an activist. The Montgomery Bus Boycott also saw the rise to prominence of a young Montgomery minister, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Little Rock school integration crisis After the Brown v. Board, Supreme Court decision, state and local officials in a number of states resisted school integration. In September of 1957, nine African American students attempted to attend Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. The governor ordered the state’s National Guard to surround the high school, and the Black students were harassed and kept from entering the building. President Dwight Eisenhower nationalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent U.S. troops to protect the students and enforce the desegregation order of the federal courts.
• Birmingham campaign In the spring of 1963, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., launched a large-scale campaign of sit-ins and marches in Birmingham, Alabama, to protest the city’s brutal segregation policies. Many of the protestors and leaders were jailed, and while behind bars, Dr. King wrote a long public letter that explained his philosophy of non-violent protest. This document, which became known as “The Letter from Birmingham Jail,” went on to be widely republished and regarded as a classic defense of the principles of civil disobedience.
• The March on Washington On August 28, 1963, hundreds of thousands of people arrived in Washington, D.C., for the largest non-violent civil rights demonstration that the nation had ever seen: The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The march was organized in a few months, coordinated by veteran strategist Bayard Rustin, and was meant to demonstrate an urgent need for substantive change. The demands in the event program began with “Comprehensive and effective civil rights legislation from the present Congress” and included the end of discrimination in education, housing, employment, and more. Leaders and organizers met with members of Congress and with President John F. Kennedy, while the march ended at the Lincoln Memorial with music and speeches, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
• The Selma civil rights marches On March 7, 1965, a civil rights march in Selma, Alabama, led by 25-year-old activist leader John Lewis, was attacked by state troopers and sheriff’s deputies as the marchers attempted to cross the city’s Edmund Pettus Bridge. Coverage of the marchers being beaten, tear-gassed, and trampled by police horses prompted outrage across the nation, and activists, religious leaders, and everyday citizens flooded into Selma to lend their support. On March 9, a second group of marchers, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., approached the bridge, prayed there, and returned to church. On March 21, thousands of marchers crossed the bridge, this time protected by federalized National Guard troops, and headed to Montgomery.
• The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 The two most significant pieces of civil rights legislation since Reconstruction were passed within two years of each other. Between the two, these Acts outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. They banned discrimination in public accommodations, public education, and employment, and prohibited race-based restrictions on voting. Such sweeping legislation had been a longtime goal of the civil rights movement, and it brought many of the laws and practices of the Jim Crow Era to an end.
• Holding a poster against racial bias in Mississippi are four of the most active leaders in the NAACP movement
• Poster for an appearance by Rosa Parks
• Freeman A. Hrabowski oral history
• Vivian Malone entering Forster Auditorium to register for class at the University of Alabama
• Final plans for the march on Washington for jobs and freedom, August 28, 1963
• The Civil Rights Act of 1964

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Consumer Boycotts

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Despite the increasing occurrence of consumer boycotts, little has been written about this form of social and economic protest. This timely volume fills the knowledge gap by examining boycotts both historically and currently. Drawing on both published and unpublished material as well as personal interviews with boycott groups and their targets, Monroe Friedman discusses different types of boycotts-from their historical focus on labor and economic concerns to the more recent inclusion of issues such as minority rights, animal welfare, and environmental protection. He also documents the shift in strategic emphasis from the marketplace (cutting consumer sales) to the media (securing news coverage to air criticism of a targeted firm). In turn, these changes in boycott substance and style offer insights into larger upheavals in the social and economic fabric of 20th century America.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1 | 20  pages, consumer boycott basics, chapter 2 | 12  pages, factors affecting boycott success, chapter 3 | 30  pages, labor boycotts, chapter 4 | 26  pages, consumer economic boycotts, chapter 5 | 42  pages, minority group initiatives: african american boycotts, chapter 6 | 28  pages, boycott initiatives of other minority groups, chapter 7 | 22  pages, boycotts by religious groups, chapter 8 | 20  pages, ecological boycotts, chapter 9 | 12  pages, consumer “buycotts”, chapter 10 | 14  pages, boycott issues and tactics in historical perspective.

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Black economic boycotts of the civil rights era still offer lessons on how to achieve a just society

Associate Professor of History, UMass Amherst

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Kevin A. Young does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

UMass Amherst provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation US.

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Signed into law 60 years ago, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination in the U.S. based on “race, color, sex, religion, or national origin.”

Yet, as a historian who studies social movements and political change, I think the law’s most important lesson for today’s movements is not its content but rather how it was achieved.

As firsthand accounts from the era make clear, the movement won because it directly hurt the interests of white business owners. The 1955 Montgomery bus boycott , the 1963 boycott of Birmingham businesses and many lesser-known local boycotts inflicted major costs on local business owners and forced them to support integration.

The conventional narrative

A view common among scholars, activists and the general public holds that the Civil Rights Movement succeeded because violent attacks against peaceful Black protesters mobilized white public opinion in the movement’s favor.

One of the most famous incidents occurred in Birmingham, Alabama, in May 1963, when the city’s public safety commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor , turned fire hoses and dogs on Black demonstrators.

The conventional wisdom is that Connor’s actions outraged Northern whites, and in response, the Kennedy administration sent federal troops to Birmingham and a civil rights bill to Congress.

But this view misunderstands the source of the movement’s power.

For one thing, it overstates public sympathy for the Civil Rights Movement. Three months after the attacks against Black protesters in Birmingham, for instance, almost two-thirds of the public opposed the famous March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom of August 1963.

Moreover, the Kennedy administration predicted that civil rights legislation would hurt the Democrats electorally . “The President never had any illusions about the political advantages of equal rights,” wrote Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger in his memoir “ A Thousand Days .” “But he saw no alternative” given the movement’s actions.

So what were those actions?

Black organizers aimed to inflict maximal disruption on the white power structure, particularly economic elites. As Martin Luther King Jr. later recounted , “The political power structure listens to the economic power structure.”

By disrupting white businesses, often in a highly organized way, Black activists won social change.

A ‘devastatingly effective’ weapon

Economic boycotts in Southern cities such as Birmingham and Nashville, Tennessee , played crucial roles during the civil rights era.

A 20-month boycott by Black shoppers of downtown businesses in Greenwood, Mississippi , brought legal changes to the city’s hiring practices in 1964.

The most famous boycott occurred in 1955–56 in Montgomery, Alabama, where the nearly 13-month protest against segregated public transportation caused the city’s bus service to lose an estimated US$3,000 a day in fares.

Black people made up about 75% of public transportation riders. Instead of using city buses, they walked, formed car pools and used Black-owned taxi services. The boycott ended on Dec. 20, 1956, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Browder v. Gayle that segregation on buses was unconstitutional.

By 1960, civil rights organizers were widely embracing this “economic weapon to fight segregation,” reported the national magazine Business Week.

Three years later, Time magazine wrote that boycotts had proved “devastatingly effective” in pushing white business owners and government officials to desegregate.

In Birmingham, for example, real estate tycoon Sidney Smyer led the elite push for integration. Smyer was a staunch racist , but he capitulated amid the boycott and related disruption.

“I’m still a segregationist,” he said in May 1963, but “I’m not a damn fool.”

During five weeks of boycotts, sit-ins and marches, Birmingham businesses had lost millions in sales .

Smyer and his fellow executives decided to cut their losses by integrating. They then dragged along the politicians, judges, school administrators and law enforcement officials.

That had been civil rights strategists’ plan from the start.

According to civil rights organizer Abraham Woods , they hoped that business owners hurt by the boycott in Birmingham would “ pressure the city ” to integrate.

Andrew Young, an adviser to King, later said that “Bull Connor made the impact greater, but the dynamics would have taken effect without Bull Connor and the dogs. … When the demonstrations were so massive and the economic withdrawal program was so tight, literally, the town was paralyzed.”

Changing the law after Birmingham

The Birmingham victory inspired other Black people to rise up. Kennedy’s Department of Justice reported another 2,062 Black protests in 40 states by the end of 1963.

It also led Kennedy – 28 months into his presidency – to propose a civil rights bill , in June 1963.

Even as he tried to dissuade Black leaders from marching on Washington, Kennedy admitted that the disruptive boycotts and protests “had made the executive branch act faster and were now forcing Congress to entertain legislation,” as Schlesinger reported in his book “A Thousand Days.”

Kennedy also feared the radicalization of Black consciousness after Birmingham. If the federal government didn’t deliver moderate reform, the “colored masses” might embrace “the mindless radicalism of the Negro militants,” as Schlesinger described the president’s logic.

Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 meant the civil rights bill fell to his successor, Lyndon Johnson. After a heated battle in Congress, Johnson signed the bill into law on July 2, 1964.

By causing massive and sustained disruption to ruling-class interests, particularly businesses, Black organizers who were formally excluded from political power were able to force legal change.

The lesson is that major legislative reform requires mass disruption outside the electoral and legislative spheres. Without that disruption, it will be very difficult to win any law that negatively affects entrenched power-holders.

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In her book, “Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict,” Harvard Professor Erica Chenoweth explains why civil resistance campaigns attract more absolute numbers of people.

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Nonviolent resistance proves potent weapon

Michelle Nicholasen

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Erica Chenoweth discovers it is more successful in effecting change than violent campaigns

Recent research suggests that nonviolent civil resistance is far more successful in creating broad-based change than violent campaigns are, a somewhat surprising finding with a story behind it.

When Erica Chenoweth  started her predoctoral fellowship at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs in 2006, she believed in the strategic logic of armed resistance. She had studied terrorism, civil war, and major revolutions — Russian, French, Algerian, and American — and suspected that only violent force had achieved major social and political change. But then a workshop led her to consider proving that violent resistance was more successful than the nonviolent kind. Since the question had never been addressed systematically, she and colleague Maria J. Stephan began a research project.

For the next two years, Chenoweth and Stephan collected data on all violent and nonviolent campaigns from 1900 to 2006 that resulted in the overthrow of a government or in territorial liberation. They created a data set of 323 mass actions. Chenoweth analyzed nearly 160 variables related to success criteria, participant categories, state capacity, and more. The results turned her earlier paradigm on its head — in the aggregate, nonviolent civil resistance was far more effective in producing change.

The Weatherhead Center for International Affairs (WCFIA) sat down with Chenoweth, a new faculty associate who returned to the Harvard Kennedy School this year as professor of public policy, and asked her to explain her findings and share her goals for future research. Chenoweth is also the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Erica Chenoweth

WCFIA:  In your co-authored book, “ Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict ,” you explain clearly why civil resistance campaigns attract more absolute numbers of people — in part it’s because there’s a much lower barrier to participation compared with picking up a weapon. Based on the cases you have studied, what are the key elements necessary for a successful nonviolent campaign?

CHENOWETH:  I think it really boils down to four different things. The first is a large and diverse participation that’s sustained.

The second thing is that [the movement] needs to elicit loyalty shifts among security forces in particular, but also other elites. Security forces are important because they ultimately are the agents of repression, and their actions largely decide how violent the confrontation with — and reaction to — the nonviolent campaign is going to be in the end. But there are other security elites, economic and business elites, state media. There are lots of different pillars that support the status quo, and if they can be disrupted or coerced into noncooperation, then that’s a decisive factor.

The third thing is that the campaigns need to be able to have more than just protests; there needs to be a lot of variation in the methods they use.

The fourth thing is that when campaigns are repressed — which is basically inevitable for those calling for major changes — they don’t either descend into chaos or opt for using violence themselves. If campaigns allow their repression to throw the movement into total disarray or they use it as a pretext to militarize their campaign, then they’re essentially co-signing what the regime wants — for the resisters to play on its own playing field. And they’re probably going to get totally crushed.

In 2006, Erica Chenoweth believed in the strategic logic of armed resistance. Then she was challenged to prove it.

Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer

WCFIA:   Is there any way to resist or protest without making yourself more vulnerable?

CHENOWETH: People have done things like bang pots and pans or go on electricity strikes or something otherwise disruptive that imposes costs on the regime even while people aren’t outside. Staying inside for an extended period equates to a general strike. Even limited strikes are very effective. There were limited and general strikes in Tunisia and Egypt during their uprisings and they were critical.

WCFIA: A general strike seems like a personally costly way to protest, especially if you just stop working or stop buying things. Why are they effective?

CHENOWETH: This is why preparation is so essential. Where campaigns have used strikes or economic noncooperation successfully, they’ve often spent months preparing by stockpiling food, coming up with strike funds, or finding ways to engage in community mutual aid while the strike is underway. One good example of that comes from South Africa. The anti-apartheid movement organized a total boycott of white businesses, which meant that black community members were still going to work and getting a paycheck from white businesses but were not buying their products. Several months of that and the white business elites were in total crisis. They demanded that the apartheid government do something to alleviate the economic strain. With the rise of the reformist Frederik Willem de Klerk within the ruling party, South African leader P.W. Botha resigned. De Klerk was installed as president in 1989, leading to negotiations with the African National Congress [ANC] and then to free elections, where the ANC won overwhelmingly. The reason I bring the case up is because organizers in the black townships had to prepare for the long term by making sure that there were plenty of food and necessities internally to get people by, and that there were provisions for things like Christmas gifts and holidays.

WCFIA: How important is the overall number of participants in a nonviolent campaign?

CHENOWETH: One of the things that isn’t in our book, but that I analyzed later and presented in a TEDx Boulder talk in 2013 , is that a surprisingly small proportion of the population guarantees a successful campaign: just 3.5 percent. That sounds like a really small number, but in absolute terms it’s really an impressive number of people. In the U.S., it would be around 11.5 million people today. Could you imagine if 11.5 million people — that’s about three times the size of the 2017 Women’s March — were doing something like mass noncooperation in a sustained way for nine to 18 months? Things would be totally different in this country.

“Countries in which there were nonviolent campaigns were about 10 times likelier to transition to democracies within a five-year period compared to countries in which there were violent campaigns — whether the campaigns succeeded or failed.” Erica Chenoweth

WCFIA:   Is there anything about our current time that dictates the need for a change in tactics?

CHENOWETH: Mobilizing without a long-term strategy or plan seems to be happening a lot right now, and that’s not what’s worked in the past. However, there’s nothing about the age we’re in that undermines the basic principles of success. I don’t think that the factors that influence success or failure are fundamentally different. Part of the reason I say that is because they’re basically the same things we observed when Gandhi was organizing in India as we do today. There are just some characteristics of our age that complicate things a bit.

WCFIA: You make the surprising claim that even when they fail, civil resistance campaigns often lead to longer-term reforms than violent campaigns do. How does that work?

CHENOWETH: The finding is that civil resistance campaigns often lead to longer-term reforms and changes that bring about democratization compared with violent campaigns. Countries in which there were nonviolent campaigns were about 10 times likelier to transition to democracies within a five-year period compared to countries in which there were violent campaigns — whether the campaigns succeeded or failed. This is because even though they “failed” in the short term, the nonviolent campaigns tended to empower moderates or reformers within the ruling elites who gradually began to initiate changes and liberalize the polity.

One of the best examples of this is the Kefaya movement in the early 2000s in Egypt. Although it failed in the short term, the experiences of different activists during that movement surely informed the ability to effectively organize during the 2011 uprisings in Egypt. Another example is the 2007 Saffron Revolution in Myanmar, which was brutally suppressed at the time but which ultimately led to voluntary democratic reforms by the government by 2012. Of course, this doesn’t mean that nonviolent campaigns always lead to democracies — or even that democracy is a cure-all for political strife. As we know, in Myanmar, relative democratization in the country’s institutions has been accompanied by extreme violence against the Rohingya community there. But it’s important to note that such cases are the exceptions rather than the norm. And democratization processes tend to be much bumpier when they occur after large-scale armed conflict instead of civil resistance campaigns, as was the case in Myanmar.

WCFIA:  What are your current projects?

CHENOWETH: I’m still collecting data on nonviolent campaigns around the world. And I’m also collecting data on the nonviolent actions that are happening every day in the United States through a project called the Crowd Counting Consortium , with Jeremy Pressman of the University of Connecticut. It began in 2017, when Jeremy and I were collecting data during the Women’s March. Someone tweeted a link to our spreadsheet, and then we got tons of emails overnight from people writing in to say, “Oh, your number in Portland is too low; our protest hasn’t made the newspapers yet, but we had this many people.” There were the most incredible appeals. There was a nursing home in Encinitas, Calif., where 50 octogenarians organized an indoor women’s march with their granddaughters. Their local news had shot a video of them and they asked to be counted, and we put them in the sheet. People are very active and it’s not part of the broader public discourse about where we are as a country. I think it’s important to tell that story.

This originally appeared on the Weatherhead Center website . Part two of the series is now online.

The artwork, “Love and Revolution,”  revolutionary graffiti at Saleh Selim Street on the island of Zamalek, Cairo, was photographed by Hossam el-Hamalawy on Oct. 23, 2011.

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Boycotts: From the American Revolution to BDS

• First Online: 30 December 2018

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• David Feldman 3  

Part of the book series: Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism ((PCSAR))

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This chapter surveys the history of boycott movements from the late eighteenth century to better understand the global campaign for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) directed against Israel. The chapter argues that boycott movements have often been both instrumental and expressive in character and have had an ambiguous relationship to the rule of law. The debate on whether or not BDS is antisemitic has drawn attention away from these other, more significant, ambiguities and tensions within the movement.

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The Emergence of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement

Islamophobia and Antisemitism in the Balkans

Anti-plurality and Genocide: Hannah Arendt’s Understanding of Holocaust Perpetrators and Contemporary Holocaust Research

The origins of the movement have been traced to the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, held in Durban, South Africa in 2001, where the NGO forum called for the ‘complete and total isolation of Israel as an apartheid state’. Kenneth Marcus, The Definition of Antisemitism (Oxford, 2015), 204.

http://www.waronwant.org/bds ; https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/blog/2016/12/10/university-of-manchester-must-follow-students-and-endorse-bds

Omar Barghouti, BDS: Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions. The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights (Chicago, 2011), 63.

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/BDS-is-the-modern-form-of-anti-Semitism-449415

http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.577920

Joel S. Fishman, ‘The BDS message of anti-Zionism, anti-Semitism, and incitement to discrimination’, Israel Affairs , vol. 18, no. 3, (July 2012), 412–25; Gary Nelson and Gabriel Noah Brahm, The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel (Chicago, 2015); Maia Carter Hallward, Transnational Activism and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (New York, 2013).

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jun/24/artists-bp-protest-tate

In this regard BDS is different from the boycott of Israel pursued by Arab states. Gil Feiler, From Boycott to Economic Cooperation: The Political Economy of the Arab Boycott of Israel (London, 1988).

But not only in North America. See M. O’Dowd, ‘Politics, Patriotism and Women in Ireland, Britain and Colonial America, 1700–80’, Journal of Women’s History , vol. 22, no. 4, (2010), 15–38; On the United States, see T.H. Breen, <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Marketplace of Revolution. How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (2004).

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, ‘Political Protest and the World of Goods’, in: The Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution , eds. Edward Gray and Jane Kamensky, (Oxford, 2013), 75.

Breen, The Marketplace , ch. 7.

Breen, The Marketplace, xvii.

Breen, The Marketplace , 254–67; Lawrence B. Glickman, Buying Power. A History of Consumer Activism in America (Chicago, 2009), 46–8.

Clare Midgely, Women Against Slavery. The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 (London, 1992), 35–37.

Midgley, Women against Slavery , 60–2, 103–4.

Peter Gurney, ‘Exclusive Dealing in the Chartist Movement’, Labour History Review, vol. 74, no. 1, (April 2009), 90–110.

R.C. Comerford, ‘The land war and the politics of distress’. in: In A New History of Ireland. VI Ireland Under the Union II , ed. WE Vaughan, (Oxford, 1996), 28–45.

T.W. Moody, Davitt and the Irish Revolution 1848–82 (Oxford, 1982), 418–9.

The Times, 18 October 1880, 6.

Donnacha Seán Lucey, Land, Popular Politics and Agrarian Violence in Ireland: The Case of County Kerry, 1872–1886 (Dublin, 2011).

R.V. Comerford, ‘The impediments to freehold ownership of land and the character of the Irish Land War’, in: Uncertain Futures: Essays about the Irish Past for Roy Foster , ed. Senia Paseta, (Oxford, 2016), 60.

Donald Jordan, Land and Popular Politics in Ireland. County Mayo from the Plantation to the Land War (Cambridge, 1994), 221, 226–7.

R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (London, 1988), 405–13.

Moody, Davitt, 377–81, 458.

John McKivigan, Forgotten Firebrand. James Redpath and the Making of Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, 2008), 159.

Glickman, Buying Power , 122–4.

Leo Wolman, The Boycott in American Trade Union (Baltimore, 1916), 24–5.

Harry Laidler, Boycotts and the Labor Struggle (New York, 1913), 58–94.

Glickman, Buying Power, 128–31.

Paula Hyman, ‘Immigrant women and consumer protest: The New York City kosher meat boycott of 1902’, American Jewish History , vol. 70, no. 1, (September 1980), 91–105.

Tehila Sasson, ‘Milking the Third World? Humanitarianism, Capitalism and Moral Economy of the Nestlé Boycott’, American Historical Review, vol. 121, no. 4, (October 2016), 1196–1224; Matthew Hilton, Prosperity for All: Consumer Activism in an Era of Glaobalization (Ithaca, 2009), ch. 5; Frank Trentmann, Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers from the Fifteenth Century to the Present (London, 2016), 562–80.

Sasson, ‘Milking’, 1217.

This dimension to the practice of boycott was present from the earliest occasions, when we find collective action to restrict the markets of an individual or group of individuals as a way of effecting political or social change. Wollman, The Boycott, 12.

Maneklal H. Vakil, Boycott of British goods and foreign cloth , (Bombay, 1930), 14.

Laidler, Boycotts, 75.

Torsten Lorenz, ‘Introduction’ 11, in: Cooperatives in Ethnic Conflicts. Eastern Europe in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century, ed. Lorenz, (Berlin, 2006).

Miloslav Szabo, ‘Because Words are not Deeds.’ Antisemitic Practice and Nationality Politics in Upper Hungary around 1900, Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History, Journal of Fondazione CDEC , no. 3, (July 2012), url: www.quest.cdecjournal.it/focus.php?id=299 , 176.

Szabo, ‘Because Words’, 179.

Klaus Richter, ‘Antisemitism, “Economic Emancipation” and the Lithuanian Co-operative movement Before World War 1’, Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History, Journal of Fondazione CDEC , no. 3, (July 2012), url: www.quest.cdecjournal.it/focus.php?id=300 , 187.

M. Gottleib, ‘The anti-Nazi boycott movement in the United States: an ideological and sociological appreciation’, Jewish Social Studies , vol. 35, no. 3–4, (July–October 1973), 198–227.

James Sanders, South Africa and the International Media, 1972–79 (London, 1999), 56.

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/singling-out-israel-singling-out-the-jews/18904#.WuGteG4vxR0 ; Alan Dershowitz, The Case Against BDS: Why Singling Out Israel is Anti-Semitic and Anti-Peace (New York, 2018).

Barghouti, BDS.

Tara Zahra, ‘Zionism, emigration and East European Colonialism’, in: Colonialism and the Jews , eds. Lisa Moses Leff and Maud Mandel, (Bloomington, 2017), 166–92.

Maxim Rodinson, Israel and the Arabs (Harmondsworth, 1968) was important in establishing this formulation.

Derek J Penslar, ‘Zionism, Colonialism and Postcolonialism’, Journal of Israeli History, vol. 20, no. 2–3, (2001), 84–98.

Anthony Julius, Trials of the Diaspora . A History of Anti-Semitism in England (Oxford, 2010), 476–83.

Marcus, The Definition, 207, 213.

Marcus, The Definition, 207–9; David Feldman and Brendan McGeever, ‘Labour and antisemitism: what went wrong and what is to be done?’ https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/labour-party-antisemitism-jeremy-corbyn-jewish-left-wing-holocaust-a8306936.html

Marcus, The Definition, 207.

Marcus, The Definition, 181–5, 209.

Stephen Miller, Margaret Harris, and Colin Shindler, The Attitudes of British Jews Towards Israel (London, 2015); European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, Discrimination and Hate Crime Against Jews in EU Member States: Perceptions and Experiences (Luxembourg, 2013), 27.

Discrimination and Hate , figure 1, p. 16.

Marcus appears to concede this point: The Definition , 210.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/sep/09/gove-against-boycotting-israeli-goods-gaza-conflict ; Julius, Trials of the Diaspora, 477–82.

http://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_topic/the-academic-boycott-movement/

Bashir Bashir, ‘Reconciling historical injustices: deliberative democracy and the politics of reconcilation’, Res Publica, vol. 18, no. 2, (2012), 127–43.

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Feldman, D. (2019). Boycotts: From the American Revolution to BDS. In: Feldman, D. (eds) Boycotts Past and Present. Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94872-0_1

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15 corporate boycotts from 2019

Boycotts hold an honored place in history.

The Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott—a 13-month campaign that started in 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a segregated bus—fueled the nation's civil rights movement. In the 1960s, a five-year boycott of California grapes organized by Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers led to better pay and improved working conditions and union contracts for thousands of agricultural laborers. A global boycott of South Africa , with international sanctions on trade, embargos, and travel bans, spanned decades in the 20th centuryand played an indispensable role in ending the nation's apartheid system of harsh racial segregation.

The word "boycott" has its origins in an Englishman named Captain Charles Boycott , who lived in Ireland in the late 1800s and worked collecting rents for a landlord. One year during a particularly poor harvest, local tenants asked him to lower their rents, and he refused. In response, the tenants organized and ostracized him. Almost no one would speak to him, work for him, or even acknowledge him, and he eventually left. The tactic caught on and soon tenant farmers were using boycotts successfully to improve their circumstances.

Modern-day boycotts use essentially the same strategy of shunning, although these days a campaign calling for consumers to stop buying products or frequent a business can spread online across social media at unprecedented speed. A public relations misstep by a company or an unfortunate turn of phrase by a top official can prompt an avalanche of calls for a boycott within minutes.

Assessing the impact of a boycott is tricky. It may take a toll on a company's sales or stock price, but experts say the most effective result is the difficult-to-measure impact on a company's reputation . Companies like Coors Brewing Co., the target of a boycott for its anti-union policies, and Exxon, boycotted after one of its tankers ran aground in 1989 and caused a huge oil spill, were long colored by public condemnation .

Stacker has compiled a list of the 15 most significant and effective boycotts of 2019, looking at their origins, how they spread, and what impact they made.

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Chick-fil-A

Chick-fil-A announced in November 2019 that it would stop donating money to two religious organizations that opposed same-sex marriage and give to groups working in areas of education, homelessness, and hunger. The fast-food giant had been the target of a boycott since 2012 by LGBT-rights advocates. Some saw its change of heart as capitulation , and others saw it as a business strategy. During the boycott, the company grew to become the nation’s third-largest fast-food company, and it was repeatedly named the favorite fast-food restaurant by a leading index of 23,000 consumers.

Toyota, General Motors, Fiat Chrysler

Deciding to set its own greenhouse gas emission standards, California in November announced a boycott of automakers Toyota, General Motors, and Fiat Chrysler, who all opposed the plan. The automakers had opted to stand with the administration of President Donald Trump , which has proposed to weaken federal auto emission standards. Gov. Gavin Newsom said the state will no longer buy vehicles from the three companies. Filmmaker Michael Moore on Twitter has asked his followers, who number over 6 million, to join the boycott.

Agricultural industries in Brazil

Officials in New York City and Los Angeles in November 2019 proposed a boycott of businesses linked to the devastating fires in Brazil’s Amazon rainforests. They are calling for divestment from agricultural industries that promote deforestation and climate change. Beef is one of Brazil’s biggest exports, and environmentalists say demand for meat has moved cattle ranchers to clear the Amazon for grazing, increasing the risk of fire and cutting down trees essential to cleaning greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. The proposals have not become official city policies.

Pokémon Sword and Shield

Hard-core fans called for a boycott of the Pokémon Sword and Pokemon Shield games, complaining the new versions did not allow the transfer of many of the original characters. The game’s developer apologized but said there were technical restrictions and that Pokémon was moving in a new direction. In November, Nintendo said the games sold over 6 million units worldwide on the weekend they were launched and sold more than 2 million units in the first two days in the United States—Pokémon’s highest-grossing game launch.

Calls for a fresh boycott of Uber arose recently after the ride-sharing company's chief executive referred to Saudi Arabia's killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi as " a serious mistake " in a television interview. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi later apologized on Twitter. In France, meanwhile, calls have arisen to boycott Uber by users who say the company deleted riders' comments about sexual assault by drivers on its Instagram account. Uber in 2017 was the subject of a nationwide U.S. boycott stemming from its decision to stop surge pricing at Kennedy International Airport while local cabs were striking in protest of President Trump's immigration ban. Critics said the company was profiting from the protest, and Uber later said hundreds of thousands of consumers stopped using its platform within days.

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Backcountry.com

Backcountry.com , a giant vendor of outdoor goods, has been hit with a consumer boycott over its legal campaign to stop other businesses from using “backcountry” as a registered trademark with cease-and-desist letters and lawsuits. The company’s chief executive published an online apology, saying it had made a mistake and was reexamining its approach. But many of the more than 22,000 people on Facebook’s Boycott BackcountryDOTcom page want the company to go further by dropping all of its remaining legal actions and making amends to businesses and groups harmed by its strategy.

Macmillan Publishers

Libraries across America have announced boycotts of Macmillan Publishers over its policy, effective as of November 2019, of placing a two-month embargo on library e-book sales . The policy limits libraries to buying one perpetual access e-book during the first eight weeks of publication. The company said it was a move to protect book sales, but libraries argue it limits access for readers who depend upon libraries for information.

More than 1,000 musicians in 2019 signed an open letter to boycott Amazon-sponsored festivals and events in response to the online giant’s business with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and its Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. The “ No Music for ICE! ” letter calls on Amazon to terminate all existing contracts with the military, law enforcement, and government agencies that commit human-rights abuses; stop providing cloud computing used by the government in deportations; and end projects such as its facial-recognition technology that promotes racial profiling and discrimination. The letter was triggered by the announcement of Amazon’s first music festival set for December in Las Vegas.

The University of California, Los Angeles has been the target of a three-year boycott launched by labor unions and this year, honoring the boycott, the Democratic National Committee moved a December 2019 debate that was scheduled to be held at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees called for the speakers boycott on behalf of patient-care workers locked in a labor dispute with the university. The union says the school is outsourcing jobs to lower-paid non-union workers.

Some Fitbit users have made recent calls for a boycott of the devices after it was announced on Nov. 1, 2019, that the maker of the wearable activity trackers would be purchased by Google. Google said it would not sell users' data, but on social media Fitbit users have expressed doubts. Calls have been made for federal regulators to examine the proposed tech purchase very closely.

Workers’ rights advocates have been waging a boycott of Wendy’s over its refusal to join the Fair Food Program , an initiative that benefits farm laborers, largely in Florida. The program calls on giant buyers to pay slightly more for tomatoes and in exchange, growers pay agricultural workers at least minimum wage and adhere to certain working condition standards. This year the Wendy’s lease at the University of Michigan campus was not renewed, and local Ann Arbor officials voiced the city’s support for the three-year boycott, as have actresses Amy Schumer and Alyssa Milano .

In June 2019, consumers made calls to boycott Wayfair , the online furniture and home goods company, angered over its sale of mattresses and bunk beds to an organization that runs a detention camp in Texas for unaccompanied migrant children.The boycott was prompted by hundreds of Wayfair employees who walked off their jobs at the company’s headquarters in Boston. The company in response made a donation to the American Red Cross but calls for the boycott continue on social media.

A giant national teachers’ union threatened to boycott Walmart over its gun sales following the mass shooting in August 2019 in an El Paso, Texas Walmart that killed 22 people. Walmart a few weeks later said it would stop selling some kinds of ammunition and asked customers not to carry guns inside its stores. The company’s announcement spurred calls on social media to #BoycottWalmart by both gun opponents and enthusiasts.

Equinox, SoulCycle

A boycott of Equinox and SoulCycle started in the summer of 2019 after Stephen Ross, who owns a majority stake in Related Companies, the parent of Equinox Fitness, hosted a fundraiser for President Donald Trump. Supporters of LGBT rights said they were particularly incensed because Equinox had marketed heavily to an LGBT clientele . The fitness companies issued a statement saying they had nothing to do with the fundraiser, but independent business data showed purchases and attendance at SoulCycle dropped.

In June 2019, President Donald Trump put out a call for a boycott of AT&T so it would make "big changes" at CNN, part of Turner Broadcasting System, a division of AT&T's WarnerMedia. In a tweet, the president wrote that CNN was "All negative & so much Fake News." AT&T's stock price rose some 20% in the months that followed.

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Exploring why consumers engage in boycotts: Toward a unified model

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Abolitionism to Jim Crow

• Du Bois to Brown
• Montgomery bus boycott to the Voting Rights Act
• From Black power to the assassination of Martin Luther King
• Into the 21st century
• Black Lives Matter and Shelby County v. Holder

When did the American civil rights movement start?

• What did Martin Luther King, Jr., do?
• What is Martin Luther King, Jr., known for?
• Who did Martin Luther King, Jr., influence and in what ways?
• What was Martin Luther King’s family life like?

American civil rights movement

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• Table Of Contents

The American civil rights movement started in the mid-1950s. A major catalyst in the push for civil rights was in December 1955, when NAACP activist Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a public bus to a white man.

Who were some key figures of the American civil rights movement?

Martin Luther King, Jr. , was an important leader of the civil rights movement. Rosa Parks , who refused to give up her seat on a public bus to a white customer, was also important. John Lewis , a civil rights leader and politician, helped plan the March on Washington .

What did the American civil rights movement accomplish?

The American civil rights movement broke the entrenched system of racial segregation in the South and achieved crucial equal-rights legislation.

What were some major events during the American civil rights movement?

The Montgomery bus boycott , sparked by activist Rosa Parks , was an important catalyst for the civil rights movement. Other important protests and demonstrations included the Greensboro sit-in and the Freedom Rides .

What are some examples of civil rights?

Examples of civil rights include the right to vote, the right to a fair trial, the right to government services, the right to a public education, and the right to use public facilities.

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American civil rights movement , mass protest movement against racial segregation and discrimination in the southern United States that came to national prominence during the mid-1950s. This movement had its roots in the centuries-long efforts of enslaved Africans and their descendants to resist racial oppression and abolish the institution of slavery . Although enslaved people were emancipated as a result of the American Civil War and were then granted basic civil rights through the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution , struggles to secure federal protection of these rights continued during the next century. Through nonviolent protest, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s broke the pattern of public facilities’ being segregated by “race” in the South and achieved the most important breakthrough in equal-rights legislation for African Americans since the Reconstruction period (1865–77). Although the passage in 1964 and 1965 of major civil rights legislation was victorious for the movement, by then militant Black activists had begun to see their struggle as a freedom or liberation movement not just seeking civil rights reforms but instead confronting the enduring economic, political, and cultural consequences of past racial oppression.

(Read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Britannica essay on “Monuments of Hope.”)

American history has been marked by persistent and determined efforts to expand the scope and inclusiveness of civil rights. Although equal rights for all were affirmed in the founding documents of the United States, many of the new country’s inhabitants were denied essential rights. Enslaved Africans and indentured servants did not have the inalienable right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” that British colonists asserted to justify their Declaration of Independence . Nor were they included among the “People of the United States” who established the Constitution in order to “promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Instead, the Constitution protected slavery by allowing the importation of enslaved persons until 1808 and providing for the return of enslaved people who had escaped to other states.

As the United States expanded its boundaries, Native American peoples resisted conquest and absorption. Individual states, which determined most of the rights of American citizens , generally limited voting rights to white property-owning males, and other rights—such as the right to own land or serve on juries—were often denied on the basis of racial or gender distinctions. A small proportion of Black Americans lived outside the slave system, but those so-called “free Blacks” endured racial discrimination and enforced segregation . Although some enslaved persons violently rebelled against their enslavement ( see slave rebellions ), African Americans and other subordinated groups mainly used nonviolent means—protests, legal challenges, pleas and petitions addressed to government officials, as well as sustained and massive civil rights movements—to achieve gradual improvements in their status.

During the first half of the 19th century, movements to extend voting rights to non-property-owning white male labourers resulted in the elimination of most property qualifications for voting, but this expansion of suffrage was accompanied by brutal suppression of American Indians and increasing restrictions on free Blacks. Owners of enslaved people in the South reacted to the 1831 Nat Turner slave revolt in Virginia by passing laws to discourage antislavery activism and prevent the teaching of enslaved people to read and write. Despite this repression, a growing number of Black Americans freed themselves from slavery by escaping or negotiating agreements to purchase their freedom through wage labour. By the 1830s, free Black communities in the Northern states had become sufficiently large and organized to hold regular national conventions, where Black leaders gathered to discuss alternative strategies of racial advancement. In 1833 a small minority of whites joined with Black antislavery activists to form the American Anti-Slavery Society under the leadership of William Lloyd Garrison .

Frederick Douglass became the most famous of the formerly enslaved persons who joined the abolition movement . His autobiography—one of many slave narratives —and his stirring orations heightened public awareness of the horrors of slavery. Although Black leaders became increasingly militant in their attacks against slavery and other forms of racial oppression, their efforts to secure equal rights received a major setback in 1857, when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected African American citizenship claims. The Dred Scott decision stated that the country’s founders had viewed Blacks as so inferior that they had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” This ruling—by declaring unconstitutional the Missouri Compromise (1820), through which Congress had limited the expansion of slavery into western territories—ironically strengthened the antislavery movement, because it angered many whites who did not hold enslaved people. The inability of the country’s political leaders to resolve that dispute fueled the successful presidential campaign of Abraham Lincoln , the candidate of the antislavery Republican Party . Lincoln’s victory in turn prompted the Southern slave states to secede and form the Confederate States of America in 1860–61.

Although Lincoln did not initially seek to abolish slavery, his determination to punish the rebellious states and his increasing reliance on Black soldiers in the Union army prompted him to issue the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) to deprive the Confederacy of its enslaved property . After the American Civil War ended, Republican leaders cemented the Union victory by gaining the ratification of constitutional amendments to abolish slavery ( Thirteenth Amendment ) and to protect the legal equality of formerly enslaved persons ( Fourteenth Amendment ) and the voting rights of male ex-slaves ( Fifteenth Amendment ). Despite those constitutional guarantees of rights, almost a century of civil rights agitation and litigation would be required to bring about consistent federal enforcement of those rights in the former Confederate states. Moreover, after federal military forces were removed from the South at the end of Reconstruction , white leaders in the region enacted new laws to strengthen the “ Jim Crow ” system of racial segregation and discrimination. In its Plessy v. Ferguson decision (1896), the Supreme Court ruled that “ separate but equal ” facilities for African Americans did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment , ignoring evidence that the facilities for Blacks were inferior to those intended for whites.

The Southern system of white supremacy was accompanied by the expansion of European and American imperial control over nonwhite people in Africa and Asia as well as in island countries of the Pacific and Caribbean regions. Like African Americans, most nonwhite people throughout the world were colonized or economically exploited and denied basic rights, such as the right to vote . With few exceptions, women of all races everywhere were also denied suffrage rights ( see woman suffrage ).

Montgomery Bus Boycott

December 5, 1955 to December 20, 1956

Sparked by the arrest of Rosa  Parks  on 1 December 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott was a 13-month mass protest that ended with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that segregation on public buses is unconstitutional. The  Montgomery Improvement Association  (MIA) coordinated the boycott, and its president, Martin Luther King, Jr., became a prominent civil rights leader as international attention focused on Montgomery. The bus boycott demonstrated the potential for nonviolent mass protest to successfully challenge racial segregation and served as an example for other southern campaigns that followed. In  Stride Toward Freedom , King’s 1958 memoir of the boycott, he declared the real meaning of the Montgomery bus boycott to be the power of a growing self-respect to animate the struggle for civil rights.

The roots of the bus boycott began years before the arrest of Rosa Parks. The  Women’s Political Council  (WPC), a group of black professionals founded in 1946, had already turned their attention to Jim Crow practices on the Montgomery city buses. In a meeting with Mayor W. A. Gayle in March 1954, the council's members outlined the changes they sought for Montgomery’s bus system: no one standing over empty seats; a decree that black individuals not be made to pay at the front of the bus and enter from the rear; and a policy that would require buses to stop at every corner in black residential areas, as they did in white communities. When the meeting failed to produce any meaningful change, WPC president Jo Ann  Robinson  reiterated the council’s requests in a 21 May letter to Mayor Gayle, telling him, “There has been talk from twenty-five or more local organizations of planning a city-wide boycott of buses” (“A Letter from the Women’s Political Council”).

A year after the WPC’s meeting with Mayor Gayle, a 15-year-old named Claudette Colvin was arrested for challenging segregation on a Montgomery bus. Seven months later, 18-year-old Mary Louise Smith was arrested for refusing to yield her seat to a white passenger. Neither arrest, however, mobilized Montgomery’s black community like that of Rosa Parks later that year.

King recalled in his memoir that “Mrs. Parks was ideal for the role assigned to her by history,” and because “her character was impeccable and her dedication deep-rooted” she was “one of the most respected people in the Negro community” (King, 44). Robinson and the WPC responded to Parks’ arrest by calling for a one-day protest of the city’s buses on 5 December 1955. Robinson prepared a series of leaflets at Alabama State College and organized groups to distribute them throughout the black community. Meanwhile, after securing bail for Parks with Clifford and Virginia  Durr , E. D.  Nixon , past leader of the Montgomery chapter of the  National Association for the Advancement of Colored People  (NAACP), began to call local black leaders, including Ralph  Abernathy  and King, to organize a planning meeting. On 2 December, black ministers and leaders met at  Dexter Avenue Baptist Church  and agreed to publicize the 5 December boycott. The planned protest received unexpected publicity in the weekend newspapers and in radio and television reports.

On 5 December, 90 percent of Montgomery’s black citizens stayed off the buses. That afternoon, the city’s ministers and leaders met to discuss the possibility of extending the boycott into a long-term campaign. During this meeting the MIA was formed, and King was elected president. Parks recalled: “The advantage of having Dr. King as president was that he was so new to Montgomery and to civil rights work that he hadn’t been there long enough to make any strong friends or enemies” (Parks, 136).

That evening, at a mass meeting at  Holt Street Baptist Church , the MIA voted to continue the boycott. King spoke to several thousand people at the meeting: “I want it to be known that we’re going to work with grim and bold determination to gain justice on the buses in this city. And we are not wrong.… If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong” ( Papers  3:73 ). After unsuccessful talks with city commissioners and bus company officials, on 8 December the MIA issued a formal list of demands: courteous treatment by bus operators; first-come, first-served seating for all, with blacks seating from the rear and whites from the front; and black bus operators on predominately black routes.

The demands were not met, and Montgomery’s black residents stayed off the buses through 1956, despite efforts by city officials and white citizens to defeat the boycott. After the city began to penalize black taxi drivers for aiding the boycotters, the MIA organized a carpool. Following the advice of T. J.  Jemison , who had organized a carpool during a 1953 bus boycott in Baton Rouge, the MIA developed an intricate carpool system of about 300 cars. Robert  Hughes  and others from the Alabama Council for Human Relations organized meetings between the MIA and city officials, but no agreements were reached.

In early 1956, the homes of King and E. D. Nixon were bombed. King was able to calm the crowd that gathered at his home by declaring: “Be calm as I and my family are. We are not hurt and remember that if anything happens to me, there will be others to take my place” ( Papers  3:115 ). City officials obtained injunctions against the boycott in February 1956, and indicted over 80 boycott leaders under a 1921 law prohibiting conspiracies that interfered with lawful business. King was tried and convicted on the charge and ordered to pay $500 or serve 386 days in jail in the case  State of Alabama v. M. L. King, Jr.  Despite this resistance, the boycott continued.

Although most of the publicity about the protest was centered on the actions of black ministers, women played crucial roles in the success of the boycott. Women such as Robinson, Johnnie  Carr , and Irene  West  sustained the MIA committees and volunteer networks. Mary Fair Burks of the WPC also attributed the success of the boycott to “the nameless cooks and maids who walked endless miles for a year to bring about the breach in the walls of segregation” (Burks, “Trailblazers,” 82). In his memoir, King quotes an elderly woman who proclaimed that she had joined the boycott not for her own benefit but for the good of her children and grandchildren (King, 78).

National coverage of the boycott and King’s trial resulted in support from people outside Montgomery. In early 1956 veteran pacifists Bayard  Rustin  and Glenn E.  Smiley  visited Montgomery and offered King advice on the application of Gandhian techniques and  nonviolence  to American race relations. Rustin, Ella  Baker , and Stanley  Levison  founded  In Friendship  to raise funds in the North for southern civil rights efforts, including the bus boycott. King absorbed ideas from these proponents of nonviolent direct action and crafted his own syntheses of Gandhian principles of nonviolence. He said: “Christ showed us the way, and Gandhi in India showed it could work” (Rowland, “2,500 Here Hail”). Other followers of Gandhian ideas such as Richard  Gregg , William Stuart  Nelson , and Homer  Jack  wrote the MIA offering support.

On 5 June 1956, the federal district court ruled in  Browder v. Gayle  that bus segregation was unconstitutional, and in November 1956 the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed  Browder v. Gayle  and struck down laws requiring segregated seating on public buses. The court’s decision came the same day that King and the MIA were in circuit court challenging an injunction against the MIA carpools. Resolved not to end the boycott until the order to desegregate the buses actually arrived in Montgomery, the MIA operated without the carpool system for a month. The Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s ruling, and on 20 December 1956 King called for the end of the boycott; the community agreed. The next morning, he boarded an integrated bus with Ralph Abernathy, E. D. Nixon, and Glenn Smiley. King said of the bus boycott: “We came to see that, in the long run, it is more honorable to walk in dignity than ride in humiliation. So … we decided to substitute tired feet for tired souls, and walk the streets of Montgomery” ( Papers  3:486 ). King’s role in the bus boycott garnered international attention, and the MIA’s tactics of combining mass nonviolent protest with Christian ethics became the model for challenging segregation in the South.

Joe Azbell, “Blast Rocks Residence of Bus Boycott Leader,” 31 January 1956, in  Papers  3:114–115 .

Baker to King, 24 February 1956, in  Papers  3:139 .

Burks, “Trailblazers: Women in the Montgomery Bus Boycott,” in  Women in the Civil Rights Movement , ed. Crawford et al., 1990.

“Don’t Ride the Bus,” 2 December 1955, in  Papers  3:67 .

U. J. Fields, Minutes of Montgomery Improvement Association Founding Meeting, 5 December 1955, in  Papers  3:68–70 .

Gregg to King, 2 April 1956, in  Papers  3:211–212 .

Indictment,  State of Alabama v. M. L. King, Jr., et al. , 21 February 1956, in  Papers  3:132–133 .

Introduction, in  Papers  3:3–7 ;  17–21 ;  29 .

Jack to King, 16 March 1956, in  Papers  3:178–179 .

Judgment and Sentence of the Court,  State of Alabama v. M. L. King, Jr. , 22 March 1956, in  Papers  3:197 .

King, Statement on Ending the Bus Boycott, 20 December 1956, in  Papers  3:485–487 .

King,  Stride Toward Freedom , 1958.

King, Testimony in  State of Alabama v. M. L. King, Jr. , 22 March 1956, in  Papers  3:183–196 .

King to the National City Lines, Inc., 8 December 1955, in  Papers  3:80–81 .

“A Letter from the Women’s Political Council to the Mayor of Montgomery, Alabama,” in  Eyes on the Prize , ed. Carson et al., 1991.

MIA Mass Meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church, 5 December 1955, in  Papers  3:71–79 .

Nelson to King, 21 March 1956, in  Papers  3:182–183 .

Parks and Haskins,  Rosa Parks , 1992.

Robinson,  Montgomery Bus Boycott , 1987.

Stanley Rowland, Jr., “2,500 Here Hail Boycott Leader,”  New York Times , 26 March 1956.

Rustin to King, 23 December 1956, in  Papers  3:491–494 .

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• > Journals
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• > Coping with boycotts: An analysis and framework

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Coping with boycotts: an analysis and framework.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2015

In recent years, consumer boycotts are increasingly being used by various activist groups to punish targeted countries. This paper develops an analytic framework to help managers formulate strategies to cope with country-of-origin-related consumer boycotts. Based on the two dimensions of brand–country association and boycott intensity, we propose four possible strategies. We discuss spillover effects wherein certain firms become unintended victims of boycotts due to misperceptions about their nationality. Also discussed are economic opportunities that boycotts present to potential new entrants.

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• Volume 17, Issue 3
• Saleh Al Shebil (a1) , Abdul A Rasheed (a2) and Hussam Al-Shammari (a3)
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.5172/jmo.2011.17.3.383

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Boycotts, Movements and Marches

Events that initiated social change during the civil rights movement.

The 1950s and '60s were the height of the civil rights movement and the continued struggle for social and racial justice for African Americans in the United States. The Civil War abolished slavery, but it did not end discrimination. African Americans, along with help from many white colleagues, mobilized and began an unprecedented journey for equality. Here are the major boycotts, movements and marches instrumental in bringing social change during the civil rights movement.

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1. 1955 — Montgomery Bus Boycott

This boycott was born after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Ala., to a white male passenger. The next day, Dec. 1, 1955, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. proposed a citywide boycott against racial segregation on the public transportation system. African Americans stopped using the system and would walk or get rides instead. The boycott continued for 381 days and was very effective. In June 1956, a federal court ruled that the laws in place to keep buses segregated were unconstitutional, and the U.S. Supreme Court eventually agreed. The Montgomery bus boycott was one of the first major movements that initiated social change during the civil rights movement.

2. 1961 — Albany Movement

This movement protested the segregation policies in Albany, Ga. Many groups took part in the Albany movement, including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), local activists and King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). King’s goal was to offer counsel rather than become a participant, but he was jailed during a demonstration and was given a sentence of 45 days or a fine. He chose jail to push for change but was released three days later. Some concessions were made to the coalition, but the movement eventually disbanded after nearly a year of protests without accomplishing its goals.

3. 1963 — Birmingham Campaign

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The goal of the Birmingham campaign was to end discriminatory economic policies in the Alabama city against African American residents. They faced deep financial disparities and violent reprisal when addressing racial issues. The campaign included a boycott of certain businesses that hired only white people or maintained segregated restrooms. Protesters used nonviolent tactics such as marches and sit-ins with the goal of getting arrested so that the city jail would become crowded. Police used dogs and high-pressure water hoses against protesters. This campaign came to a successful end when many signs of segregation at Birmingham businesses came down and public places became accessible to people of all races.

4. 1963 — March on Washington

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This was the largest political rally for human rights ever in the United States. An estimated 200,000 to 300,000 participants converged on the Mall in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 28, 1963, to protest for jobs and freedom for African Americans. King delivered his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The March on Washington is credited with helping pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 .

5. 1965 — Bloody Sunday

This march went down in history as Bloody Sunday for the violent beatings state troopers inflicted on protesters as they attempted to march peacefully from Selma, Ala., to the state capital, Montgomery. The march was aimed at fighting the lack of voting rights for African Americans. Approximately 600 protesters were to travel from Selma on U.S. Highway 80 to the state capital on March 7, 1965, led by John Lewis, then chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Rev. Hosea Williams of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Police violence against protesters brought the march to a shocking end. Footage of the brutality broadcast across the nation sparked public outrage and boosted support for the civil rights movement.

6. 1965 — Chicago Freedom Movement

The Chicago Open Housing Movement, also called the Chicago Freedom Movement, was formed to protest segregated housing, educational deficiencies, and employment and health disparities based on racism. The movement included multiple rallies, marches and boycotts to address the variety of issues facing black Chicago residents. By Jan. 7, 1966, King announced plans to get involved in the Chicago Freedom Movement, and on Aug. 5, 1966, King led a march near Marquette Park in a white neighborhood. The marchers were met with rocks, bottles and firecrackers. Approximately 30 people were injured, including King, who was hit in the head with a brick. After negotiations with Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, an agreement was announced on Aug. 26, 1966, to build public housing in predominately white areas and to make mortgages available regardless of race or neighborhood. The Chicago Freedom Movement continued through 1967 and was credited with inspiring the Fair Housing Act, passed by Congress in 1969.

7. 1967 — Vietnam War Opposition

Many groups and individuals vehemently opposed the Vietnam War in the massive peace movement of the 1960s and '70s. King compared the antiwar movement to the civil rights movement and denounced U.S. involvement in a series of speeches, rallies and demonstrations. His first public speech against the war, called “Beyond Vietnam,” was delivered in April 1967 in front of 3,000 people at Riverside Church in New York. He called for a stop to all bombing in North and South Vietnam, as well as a declaration of a unilateral truce and a move toward peace talks. His stance cost him many allies, including President Lyndon Johnson, but King maintained his antiwar position until his assassination exactly one year to the day after he delivered his “Beyond Vietnam” speech.

8. 1968 — Poor People’s Campaign

The goal of the Poor People’s Campaign was to gain more economic and human rights for poor Americans from all backgrounds. A multicultural movement, the campaign included Asian Americans, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Native Americans and whites along with African Americans. A march on Washington was planned for April 22, 1968, but when King was assassinated on April 4, the movement was shaken and the march postponed. By May 12, approximately 50,000 demonstrators had converged on the Mall in Washington and erected a tent city, called Resurrection City, in what became a live-in. The campaign's major march occurred at the Solidarity Day Rally for Jobs, Peace and Freedom on June 19. The occupation lasted six weeks and ended when bulldozers arrived and mowed down Resurrection City on June 24. The bill of rights the campaign strived to establish never became law, but the federal government enacted several programs to end hunger.

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COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK

Research Associate

• Division of Scholarship & Rsch
• Columbia University Medical Center
• Opening on: Sep 14 2024
• Job Type: Officer of Administration
• Bargaining Unit:
• Regular/Temporary: Regular
• End Date if Temporary:
• Hours Per Week: 35
• Standard Work Schedule:
• Salary Range: $62,400-$62,400

Position Summary

The School of Nursing is seeking a detail-oriented Research Associate to provide support for federally funded projects focusing on HIV prevention and management. This position will be hybrid including both in-person and virtual work.

Responsibilities

The selected candidate will be expected to work on research focused on digital health and HIV/ AIDS. 

Under the supervision of the Principal Investigator, the Associate will be responsible for a broad range of research and administrative activities. Other duties will include:

• Providing daily support for research projects, including recruiting subjects, enrolling study participants, and scheduling other research-related meetings.
• Assisting in the staffing of research study visits, including overseeing logistics, communicating with participants, and preparing materials for both staff and participant use.
• Conducting observations and collecting survey data on enrolled study participants.
• Experience working with confidential data and maintaining confidentiality, privacy, and integrity in professional interactions.
• Handling data entry and database management.
• Assisting with research and manuscript preparation for publication and dissemination of results, including conducting literature searches, article summaries, and basic coding and analysis.
• Contributing to the development of study-related documents and/or materials.
• Performing other related duties as assigned.

This is a grant funded position and continued employment is contingent upon grant funding. 

Minimum Qualifications

• Requires a bachelor’s degree or equivalent in education and experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Excellent communication, organizational, and database management skills.
• Excellent quantitative and qualitative data analytic skills.
• Computer fluency in Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access and statistical software. (SPSS/SAS/Stata/R).
• Ability to organize and perform multiple tasks and meet deadlines with minimal supervision.
• Available nights and weekends.
• Interest in developing health information technology, public health LGBT health, HIV prevention or management, and/or health informatics.
• Experience working on research involving the LGBT community, people living with HIV, or other vulnerable and diverse populations.
• Experience conducting observational or survey data collection.

Equal Opportunity Employer / Disability / Veteran

Columbia University is committed to the hiring of qualified local residents.

Commitment to Diversity 

Columbia university is dedicated to increasing diversity in its workforce, its student body, and its educational programs. achieving continued academic excellence and creating a vibrant university community require nothing less. in fulfilling its mission to advance diversity at the university, columbia seeks to hire, retain, and promote exceptionally talented individuals from diverse backgrounds.  , share this job.

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