ON JULY 3, 1981, the New York Times published its first story about a rare and fatal condition that had appeared among homosexuals in the city. Already, the mysterious disease had claimed the lives of forty-one people, young men whose immune systems had been ravaged. Within a few years, hundreds more began overcrowding hospital wings in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, victims of what was then being called the “Gay Cancer.” Their bodies were slowly decaying from infections and skin lesions, and they were afflicted by what had been dubbed the three Ds of the disease: “Dementia, diarrhea, and disgrace.”1
The AIDS crisis had arrived. By 1987, AIDS was spreading exponentially, with more than fifty thousand cases reported in 113 countries. But the disease’s early casualties were concentrated in the gay communities of metropolitan New York and California. For a generation of gay men, the diagnosis was fatal. As renowned HIV specialist Dr. John Bartlett remarked, “It was an awful way to live. They got emaciated. They died a lingering death. If you asked me, ‘How would you least want to die?’ I’d say, ‘The way an AIDS patient died.’”2
Despite the fact that AIDS was quickly becoming a sweeping epidemic that affected both men and women, regardless of sexual orientation, it was clouded in stigma. For seven years after the emergence of the disease, President Ronald Reagan went out of his way to avoid acknowledging AIDS. His first policy address on the subject came in 1987, near the end of his second term, prior to which he scarcely uttered the word publicly. Behind his silence was a cruel bias. The Reagan administration maintained close ties with the emergent “religious right,” in particular the Moral Majority. The leader of that group, the Reverend Jerry Falwell, had stated flatly, “AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals, it is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.”3
In the broader public, fear was prevalent. A December 1986 poll in the Los Angeles Times showed that 50 percent of respondents supported a quarantine of AIDS patients, and 15 percent were in favor of tattooing AIDS victims. People diagnosed with the disease were routinely fired from their jobs and evicted from their residences. Children with AIDS were refused access to schools, and when one such child—Ryan White—protested, his family’s home was vandalized and the tires of his parents’ car were slashed. At least one bishop advised parishioners attending church with people who might have the disease to stop drinking from the communion cup.4
Such public scorn and official indifference had serious consequences. Some hospitals refused to take AIDS patients or expand services to meet the growing need. Budgets for AIDS research at organizations such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) were seriously underfunded, a trend that started early. “Here is a telling comparison,” writes sociologist Deborah Gould: “in 1976, the Centers for Disease Control spent nine million dollars within months of the initial outbreak of what became Legionnaires’ Disease, an outbreak that killed thirty-four people; in contrast, during the entire first year of the AIDS epidemic, when more than two hundred people died, the CDC spent just one million dollars on AIDS.” Making things worse, the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) refused to streamline its approval procedures to bring new drugs to market in time to help patients who were dying. When pharmaceutical companies finally did make these drugs available, they were incredibly costly and inaccessible. Patients struggled to get treatment covered by their insurance companies and to collect disability benefits. Many were left impoverished and alone.5
If there was a single watershed moment when this began to change, it might well have been March 24, 1987. On that day, 250 protesters gathered on Wall Street to demand that government and corporations act to address AIDS—and that the $10,000 annual price of AZT, the only drug then available to treat HIV, be lowered. Activists lay down to block traffic on Wall Street and Broadway, some with cardboard tombstones, and seventeen were arrested.6
The protesters were from a group that had been founded just days before: the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP. They were loud. They were abrasive. Their emblem was a pink triangle—the symbol that homosexuals had been compelled to wear in Nazi concentration camps. And their motto was “silence equals death.” After continued protest, the pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome cut the price of AZT, and a new template for AIDS advocacy was established.
So much of mainstream politics involves an appeal to togetherness. Politicians perennially pledge to create common ground and help the country’s citizens overcome their disagreements. And yet, social movements often take an approach that is almost exactly opposite: instead of bridging differences between groups, they widen them. ACT UP is an important case in point. Unlike other AIDS campaigners, these activists were willing to make enemies and to polarize the issue of how the disease was being addressed. ACT UP members denounced opponents as “Nazis” and “murderers”; they openly confronted religious leaders, politicians, and doctors whom they saw as worsening the crisis; and they cared little if people called them “faggots” and “sinners” in response. Undertaking a notably confrontational strategy, the group stirred strong feelings and often courted backlash.
This strategy did not always make them popular. But it did allow them to stay in the public eye, to expose the injustice of official neglect and disregard, and finally to win broad support for their cause.
Practitioners of nonviolent conflict have regularly shown themselves willing to be intentionally divisive, making use of a complex yet critical phenomenon known as “polarization.” In doing this, they grapple with an undeniable tension: broad-based support is vital if campaigns of civil resistance are to prevail. And yet many of the tactics of nonviolent disruption tend to be unpopular. People prefer calm speech and reasoned dialogue to the ruckus of confrontational protest. In many cases, creating a galvanizing crisis around an issue involves inconveniencing members of the general public, potentially alienating the very people that advocates want to win over. Moreover, when a vocal minority speaks out, it can inspire its most ardent enemies to begin organizing in response.
Notwithstanding these dangers, the experience of social movements—from the civil rights movement in the 1960s, to ACT UP in the 1980s and 1990s, to the immigrant rights movement in the new millennium—shows that polarization can also be a powerful friend. By taking an issue that is hidden from common view and putting it at the center of public debate, disruptive protest forces observers to decide which side they are on. This has three effects: First, it builds the base of a movement by creating an opportunity for large numbers of latent sympathizers to become dedicated activists. Second, even as it turns passive supporters into active ones, it engages members of the public who were previously uninformed, creating greater awareness even among those who do not care for activists’ confrontational approach. And third, it agitates the most extreme elements of the opposition, fueling a short-term backlash but isolating reactionaries from the public in the long run.
Polarization did not guarantee that ACT UP would win its fight, but it did make the battle lines clear. And in a climate where silence and indifference had become fatal, this was a decisive advance.
ACT UP was certainly not the first organization formed in response to the growing challenge of AIDS. In San Francisco, West Hollywood, and New York City, the communities of those most affected by the disease had mobilized to fill the vacuum left by an indifferent public health system. Groups such as Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) provided education, peer support, legal aid, and care for those suffering from AIDS. Some of the people who ran or donated to these organizations—such as GMHC president Paul Popham, an ex–special forces officer and successful Wall Street banker—brought privileged connections and access to money, because they themselves were closeted members of the sociopolitical elite. But their standing made them reluctant to risk exposure by publicly challenging governmental and corporate institutions.7
Larry Kramer, an openly gay author and Academy Award–nominated screenwriter, had been one of the founders of GMHC in 1982. But, over time, he grew frustrated with the increasingly institutionalized and professionalized nature of the organization. “Everything had to have a job description and approval by this, and approval by that,” Kramer later recalled. “It became the Red Cross.”
This ethos meant avoiding politics: “They wouldn’t go after anybody,” Kramer explained. “They wouldn’t criticize anybody. They wouldn’t picket, they wouldn’t protest—any of those things.”8
On March 10, 1987, Kramer found himself delivering a speech on short notice at New York’s Lesbian and Gay Community Center after scheduled speaker Nora Ephron fell ill. The talk drew a large crowd, and Kramer gave what one observer called “one of the most moving and impassioned speeches of the AIDS era.” Kramer castigated the NIH, the FDA, and even GMHC. He told those assembled that if they didn’t stand up and fight, many of them would be dead in just a few years. At the end, he called for the creation of an organization devoted solely to political action. The room filled with cries of assent, and two days later ACT UP was born.9
Over the next decade, the group staged some of the most creative and militant nonviolent protests in US history. It organized hundreds of dedicated volunteers through chaotic general assemblies and decentralized affinity groups. As The New Yorker later reported, “Dozens of chapters were formed, from San Francisco to Bombay. Each was filled with desperate, aggressive, and often exceptional young men who, in the end, made Gay Men’s Health Crisis look like a sleepy chapter of the Rotary Club.”10
In the following years, members of ACT UP returned to Wall Street and—in an unprecedented coup—successfully shut down trading on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. They chained themselves inside pharmaceutical corporations and blockaded offices at the FDA, plastering posters with bloody handprints to the outside of the agency’s headquarters. They stopped traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge and interrupted mass at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. Using fake IDs to enter CBS headquarters, they jumped onscreen during Dan Rather’s nightly news broadcast, reeling off a string of chants before the network cut to a long, unplanned commercial break.11
ACT UP draped a giant yellow condom over the Washington home of Senator Jesse Helms, one of the movement’s most ardent and homophobic adversaries. And during a 1992 memorial in Washington, the group’s members held a procession to scatter the ashes of friends and lovers who had died of AIDS onto the White House lawn. Public health administrators ACT UP members disliked were sometimes hung in effigy at protests.12
Unsurprisingly, not everyone was enamored of these actions. ACT UP’s brazenly confrontational demeanor, a Rolling Stone reporter wrote in 1990, “caused many to write off the group as radical lunatics.” The New York Times described the group’s tactics as “a mixture of the shrill and the shrewd,” remarking that “to the businesses, bishops, and bureaucrats that they accuse of slowing the fight against AIDS, they often seem rude, rash, and paranoid, and virtually impossible to please.”13
Meanwhile, the Washington Post wrote, “Kramer, a very public face of an increasingly public disease, was in everyone’s face,” and elsewhere he was described as the “angriest man in America.” Even within the gay community, critics argued that ACT UP’s strident demonstrations only gave ammunition to the rising religious right, which used fear about homosexuality to swell its ranks.14
Asked in 2005 if he thought ACT UP’s tactics had been alienating, Kramer responded with characteristic indignation: “Who gives a shit? I’m so sick of that. You do not get more with honey than you do with vinegar. You just do not.”15
As is characteristic of polarizing movements, ACT UP had a different effect on different groups of people. Most directly, it took a community at the center of the crisis—AIDS patients, their lovers, and friends—and transformed them from passive victims into a potent political force. A growing number of disciplined activists found their voice within the working groups that emerged from ACT UP’s decentralized structure. In short, the organization’s high-profile actions and vibrant meetings generated a strong base of active public supporters.
Michael Petrelis, a New Jersey native and ACT UP stalwart who had been openly gay since high school, contended that this had a ripple effect in the wider gay community: “Because we’re in the streets being the radicals, everyone else can take another step and still seem moderate,” he argued. Members of the public at large were moved toward activities such as supporting AIDS charities and promoting sex education, even if they were not inclined to approve of activists’ more abrasive tactics.16
ACT UP was only one factor that shifted the spectrum of opinion around AIDS. But over the decade when the group was most active, public attitudes underwent a profound transformation. Where stigma had previously prevailed, increased awareness about the disease led to much greater compassion for its victims. Joining the fight against AIDS became a popular celebrity cause, and ordinary people flocked to AIDS Walk benefits. Patients who were HIV-positive were included in government protections against discrimination. And, as author Randy Shaw writes, “Federal spending on AIDS rose from $234 million in 1986 to nearly $2 billion in 1992, a nearly tenfold increase in only six years.” Eventually, such funding gained broad bipartisan support.17
On the negative side, there is no doubt that ACT UP produced backlash. Religious conservatives used the group’s attacks on religious leaders to convey the sense that Christian America was under assault by advocates of a “homosexual lifestyle.” But by holding their opponents publicly accountable for their bigoted views of AIDS patients, ACT UP ultimately succeeded in isolating them from the mainstream. In the early 2000s, even Jesse Helms repented, saying he regretted his previous stance opposing funding for AIDS research and treatment.18
To what extent any single organization can claim credit for prompting the seismic shifts in public opinion around AIDS is questionable. But it is certain that ACT UP made a vital contribution. The high levels of disruption and sacrifice embodied in the group’s demonstrations prompted a stream of headlines that kept people talking about the disease. “It’s hard to overestimate the impact of these protests,” the Washington Post’s Jose Antonio Vargas wrote in 2005. “Silence = Death” became the central rallying cry of the forces that established AIDS as a true public crisis. Companies targeted by die-ins made previously unaffordable drugs more accessible, and hospitals acquiesced to demands to treat patients with more respect and care.19
Members of ACT UP’s Treatment Action Group proved themselves to be knowledgeable experts about the on-the-ground success of various drug therapies and treatment regimens. Soon they were invited guests at major conferences, establishing a key role for patients themselves in helping to set the direction of public policy. Gran Fury, the renowned design and art collective within the organization, created a new iconography for the fight against AIDS. Its “Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do” posters became a landmark in public awareness about the disease. Meanwhile, its stickers with ACT UP’s slogan and pink triangle, wrote one reporter in 1990, became “ubiquitous reminders on cash machines, newsstands, tollbooth buckets, and pay phones” throughout New York City.20
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the NIH’s program on infectious disease and a past target of activists’ ire, acknowledged, “ACT UP put medical treatment in the hands of the patients. And that is the way it ought to be.”21
ACT UP prompted major changes in the federal government’s procedures for testing and distributing new drugs, allowing AIDS patients to receive life-saving medications far more quickly than they would have otherwise. “They helped revolutionize the American practice of medicine,” The New Yorker’s Michael Specter wrote in 2002. “The average approval time for some critical drugs fell from a decade to a year, and the character of placebo-controlled trials was altered for good. . . . Soon changes in the way AIDS drugs were approved were adopted for other diseases, ranging from breast cancer to Alzheimer’s.”22
A New York Times headline from January 3, 1990, perhaps put it best: “Rude, Rash, Effective,” it read, “ACT UP Shifts AIDS Policy.”23
Members of ACT UP prided themselves on being aggressive and outspoken. But the controversy surrounding the group, and the range of responses its protests provoked, is not unique. Indeed, it is only a somewhat magnified example of the reactions that all campaigns of nonviolent protest tend to generate.
In 2012, the Los Angeles Times reported, “Polls have shown that the public generally supports Occupy’s message but not its disruptive tactics.” The next year, Salon published a story with the headline, “Study: Everyone hates environmentalists and feminists.” It reported, “People tend to hold negative views of political and social activists,” preferring “nonabrasive and mainstream methods” over activities “such as staging protest rallies.”24
The Salon article drew a moral from the negative perception of protesters: “The message to advocates is clear,” the story concluded: “Avoid rhetoric or actions that reinforce the stereotype of the angry activist.” This message echoed the well-intentioned counsel that campaigners hear constantly: that they should be more moderate and friendly, and that embracing a less antagonistic route toward pursuing change will produce better results.
Certainly, activists can work to be creative in their actions and present themselves in ways that break with typical protest clichés. But the idea that they should avoid negative reaction by being less “angry” is folly. The major social movements of the past two centuries have consistently proven wrong the advice that activists do better to appear civil and minimize confrontation. The most well-known quote from famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass eloquently addresses this very topic: “If there is no struggle, there is no progress,” Douglass stated in 1857. “Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.”25
True, disruptive actions are polarizing. But this is not an unintended consequence. It is central to how they work. The dynamics of divisiveness are not easy to master, and they do not always play out in completely predictable fashion. Nevertheless, across many movements, some instructive patterns have appeared.
In recent years, the phenomenon of polarization has rarely received in-depth reflection within the field of civil resistance. However, its importance was recognized early on. In his 1973 work, The Politics of Nonviolent Action, Gene Sharp wrote, “With the launching of nonviolent action, basic, often latent, conflicts between . . . groups are brought to the surface and activated.” The start of public demonstrations, he wrote, “will almost always sharpen the conflict, cause the conflicting groups to become more sharply delineated, and stimulate previously uncommitted people to take sides.”26
Try as they might, activists have little hope of avoiding such an effect: “This polarization,” Sharp observed, “seems to be a quality of all forms of open conflict.”27
On the positive side, Sharp noted, “As tension increases, morale rises and large numbers of formerly passive people become determined to take part in the coming struggle.” Unfortunately, there are less desirable consequences as well. The “previous period of indifference,” Sharp noted, is replaced by one where there is “active antagonism.” Reactionaries who are opposed to the movement’s cause will rise to defend the status quo, mobilizing a backlash. In instances when the backlash is powerful, it can look like activists are worse off for having picked a fight—especially if vocal opposition is accompanied by repression from the state.28
One might ask: If the discord generated by confrontational protests spurs both supporters and detractors, what is actually gained?
For polarization to pay off, the positive must outweigh the negative. And here the reaction of the general public—those not already aligned with either side—is critical. Acts of sacrifice and political jiu-jitsu can help to foster an empathetic reaction: they convince the undecided to side with communities in resistance rather than forces of repression. When the process works, members of the public are alienated by the extremism of reactionary opponents, and they acknowledge that something needs to be done to address the movement’s grievances. They become passive sympathizers.
Interestingly, a significant portion of these people will still be turned off by the movement’s tactics—they will plead for peace and reasoned negotiation rather than continued disruption. But even when they do not like a movement’s methods, these new sympathizers will agree with the justice of its cause. In the civil rights movement, these people may have disliked the fact that impatient students started sitting in at segregated lunch counters in Southern cities rather than going through official channels. Yet they were loath to identify with the racist mob members who poured milkshakes over the activists’ heads or put out lit cigarettes on the backs of the students’ jackets. Even as the moderate observers wished for an end to conflict, they acknowledged the injustice of Jim Crow and insisted that officials provide a remedy.
“The first public reaction to the nonviolent challenge may well be negative,” Sharp notes. Yet, over time, “successful nonviolent campaigns produce a strengthened solidarity among the nonviolent militants, a growth of wider support for correction of the grievance, and a fragmentation and disintegration of support for the opponent.” As a campaign progresses, the ranks of its active supporters swell and passive goodwill toward the activists’ position becomes dominant. Meanwhile, the opposition shrinks down to an ever-smaller core of enraged and embittered extremists, and the public increasingly recognizes their views as isolated and obsolete.29
Working independently from Gene Sharp and others in the field of civil resistance, Frances Fox Piven identified polarization as a critical common factor in dozens of social movements in US history. Indeed, she presents polarization as a core function of these mobilizations. As they “force people to ask themselves how they stand on the issues of contention,” she argues, movements create stark divides among voters, compelling politicians to offer concessions as a means of restoring order in the electoral landscape.30
Piven writes in her book Challenging Authority, “Protest movements threaten to cleave the majority coalitions that politicians assiduously try to hold together. It is in order to avoid the ensuing defections, or to win back the defectors, that politicians initiate new public policies.” For this reason, Piven contends, “conflict is the very heartbeat of social movements.” Even if protests are seen as distasteful, protesters can win.31
Time and again, patterns of polarization appear in democratic movements in the United States and abroad. Looking back from the safe remove of history, it can be easy to imagine that landmark social and political causes of the past—whether they involved ending slavery, securing the franchise for women, or establishing standards of workplace safety—were popular and widely celebrated. But the truth is that, in their time, these issues generated tremendous controversy. In promoting them, activists had to make the difficult decision to invite division and acrimony before they achieved their most impressive results.
The civil rights movement is a key instance in which agitation was widely depreciated. Although it is now universally admired and honored, the fight against Jim Crow was not always regarded with such reverence. In fact, the movement was incredibly polarizing.
Today, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” is viewed as an eloquent explanation of the aims and methods of the struggle against segregation. It stands as one of the most significant and closely studied essays written by one of America’s national heroes. It is less commonly remembered, however, that King did not write the letter as a response to racist opponents. Instead, he was addressing would-be supporters who criticized the movement’s approach as too pushy and impetuous.
On April 12, 1961, in the second week of Project C, King, along with his close friend Ralph Abernathy and forty-six other demonstrators, was arrested for kneeling down in prayer in front of Birmingham’s City Hall, a clear violation of the recently instated injunction against public demonstrations in the city. The day after the arrest, eight clergymen, prominent white liberals from Alabama, published an open letter in the Birmingham News voicing their opposition to the direct action tactics being used by King, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the local Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights.32
Uncomfortable with the heedless confrontation of the civil rights campaign, the ministers wrote, “We recognize the natural impatience of people who feel that their hopes are slow in being realized. But we are convinced that these demonstrations are unwise and untimely.33
“When rights are consistently denied,” the ministers further argued, “a cause should be pressed in the courts and negotiations among local leaders, and not in the streets.”
Jail was one of the things King feared most. Having been placed in solitary confinement, he was unnerved by the isolation of imprisonment. Yet when he was permitted news from the outside and he saw the ministers’ open letter, he focused his attention. He promptly began writing a reply on whatever scraps of paper he could find.
The clergymen had chided protesters for joining sit-ins and marches rather than pursuing negotiation. In response, King charged that the ministers preferred order to justice. “You are exactly right in your call for negotiation,” King wrote. “Indeed, this is the purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront an issue.”34
Previously, city fathers had balked at implementing a plan for negotiated progress, King explained. Accordingly, civil rights protesters had little choice but to take up direct action “whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and national community.”35
Soon, a righteous impatience was emerging from beneath the formal politeness of King’s letter. “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate . . . who constantly advised the Negro to wait until ‘a more convenient season,’” King wrote. “Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”36
King’s rebuke to his liberal critics on this occasion was especially forceful. But it was only one of the many times in his career he had been called upon to defend the civil rights movement from people who thought that its tactics were too loud and aggressive. In May 1961, a Gallup poll asked Americans, “Do you think that ‘sit-ins’ at lunch counters, ‘freedom busses,’ and other demonstrations by Negroes will hurt or help the Negro’s chances of being integrated in the South?” The respondents were overwhelmingly negative: 57 percent believed that the nonviolent actions were counterproductive, with just 27 percent expressing confidence in the tactics’ effectiveness.37
A year earlier, speaking on the popular Sunday morning political talk show Meet the Press, King faced a barrage of questions related to the student sit-ins in Nashville. The program’s producer, Lawrence Spivak, a smartly coiffed Harvard graduate, kicked off the discussion on a combative point. Noting that former president Harry Truman, generally held to be “an old friend of the Negro,” had recently denounced the students’ tactics, Spivak asked bluntly, “Isn’t this an indication that the sit-in strikes are doing the race, the Negro race, more harm than good?”38
King responded with unflappable calm. “No, I don’t think so, Mr. Spivak,” he said. “Now, I do not think this movement is setting us back or making enemies; it’s causing numerous people all over the nation, and in the South in particular, to reevaluate the stereotypes that they have developed concerning Negroes, so that it has an educational value, and I think in the long run it will transform the whole of American society.”
As part of the civil rights movement’s struggle with polarization, activists had to face the fact that hard-core opponents were galvanized by their protests. In the South, civil rights demonstrations were a major boon for organizations such as the White Citizens’ Councils and the Ku Klux Klan. In The Rise of Massive Resistance, historian Numan Bartley writes that, with the launch of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955, “white Alabamians flocked to join the resistance,” and “Montgomery quickly became a bastion of Council influence.” A month after the start of the boycott, Montgomery mayor W. A. Gayle joined the Council, proclaiming, “I think every right-thinking white person in Montgomery, Alabama, and the South should do the same. We must make certain that Negroes are not allowed to force their demands on us.” The next month, the group’s membership doubled.39
Tellingly, the Council’s surge in Montgomery tapered off after the Bus Boycott ended in late 1956. Yet racist resistance continued to spike in other locations where the civil rights movement focused its energies, such as neighboring Mississippi.40
Developments in electoral politics added to these troubling trends. As challenges to segregation intensified, race became an ever more crucial electoral issue for Southern politicians. Civil rights activism buoyed the fortunes of staunchly anti-integrationist politicians in the mold of Mississippi governor Ross Barnett and South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond. Politicians who had not previously been vocal on the issue of segregation found it in their best interest to adopt openly discriminatory platforms. Alabama governor and future presidential candidate George Wallace had initially been a fairly progressive Southern Democrat in the style of Louisiana populist Huey Long. But after being defeated in the 1958 gubernatorial primary by an overtly racist candidate riding the wave of anti–civil rights backlash, Wallace vowed, “I will never be out-niggered again.” Four years later, he ran for governor once more, this time on a strictly segregationist platform, and he won with a stunning 96 percent of the vote. It was then that Wallace famously declared, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!”41
Finally, backlash entailed more than political setbacks: it also meant extremist violence. One historian called the two years after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act a “period of terrorism,” during which more than two thousand black churches were burned.42
If King preferred outright rejection to lukewarm acceptance, the defenders of the old order were offering it as clearly as they knew how.
The tactics of the civil rights advocates were often unpopular, and they fueled backlash from the defenders of segregation. But this movement also provides an example of the positive effects of polarization. In the end, these positive effects allowed civil rights activists to triumph.
From the Montgomery Bus Boycott, to the student lunch-counter sit-ins, to the Freedom Rides, to Birmingham, and beyond, high-profile movement campaigns led to a marked increase in levels of participation in resistance efforts, attracting people who were previously supportive but had been reluctant to join in. When the Bus Boycott in Montgomery began, Donie Jones, a forty-seven-year-old mother of six who cooked and cleaned for white families across town at Maxwell Air Force Base, marveled at the overwhelming turnout at mass meetings. “When we had the first meeting, the church was so full, there were so many people,” she explained. “It was like a revival starting.”43
Writing about the launch of the lunch-counter sit-ins in 1960, sociologist Aldon Morris similarly notes, “The sit-ins pumped new life into the civil rights movement.” The daring actions “pulled many people, often entire communities, directly into the movement, making civil rights a towering issue throughout the nation. Consequently, the sit-ins produced more experienced activists and provided the movement with more funds, because blacks as well as sympathetic whites sent money to the movement following the dramatic sit-ins.”44
Beyond activating the African American community, resistance in the South was formative for white college activists nationwide. Kirkpatrick Sale, author of a history of Students for a Democratic Society, writes that after sit-ins started, “civil rights activity touched almost every campus in the country: support groups formed, fund raising committees were established, local sit-ins and pickets took place, campus civil rights clubs began, students from around the country traveled to the South.”45
While polarization turned passive supporters into increasingly active ones, the movement’s campaigns also affected people in the middle of the political spectrum who had not previously taken a stand. Historian Michael Kazin’s contention that Bull Connor’s attacks on protesters “convinced a plurality of whites, for the first time, to support the cause of black freedom” is supported by visible movement in the polls. Starting in the wake of the Birmingham campaign in 1963, the percentage of the public that identified civil rights as “the most urgent issue facing the nation” sharply increased.46
As public opinion moved in favor of the movement, the opposition grew isolated and fractured. Actions of the Klan and the White Citizens’ Councils became a liability for segregation’s more mainstream defenders, who found it increasingly difficult to defend racist practices in national debates. Previously, Southern legislators in Washington had made their case based on a genteel defense of states’ rights. Polarization around racial injustices made this position untenable. The unabashed extremism on display at the local level, in addition to shifts in the center toward civil rights advocates, left them little ground on which to stand.
Just as the pillars of support would fall years later in Serbia against the Milosevic regime and in the United States around gay marriage, major social institutions began abandoning the racist order in the 1960s once majority support for civil rights was established.
Keen to preserve the public image of their states and ward off national boycotts, moderate business leaders in the Deep South openly turned against embattled segregationists. “On February 3, 1965, the Mississippi Economic Council (the statewide Chamber of Commerce) came out in favor of ‘order and respect for the law,’ fair administration of voting laws, support for public education, and compliance with the newly enacted Civil Rights Act of 1964,” writes political scientist Joseph Luders. “This shift toward moderation pitted rearguard defenders of the old order, aligned with the Citizens’ Council and Delta plantation interests, against urban industrialists, bankers, and others espousing relatively greater willingness to countenance change.”47
Politicians started experiencing defections within their own ranks. In January 1965 the Democratic Party’s whip in the Senate, Louisiana’s Russell Long, shocked segregationists in his state by announcing his support for federal voting rights legislation. The previous year, the senator had been one of the most impassioned voices inveighing against the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
As Long explained his shift, “I’ve been able to recognize that things move, they change, and to adjust myself to a changing world, and I think that all southerners will have to do that.”48
Eventually, public opinion would swing so thoroughly that even some of the most stubborn segregationists of the civil rights era were moved to acknowledge their past errors. As his health failed in the 1990s, George Wallace himself sought repentance. He arranged meetings with figures such as John Lewis and Ralph Abernathy, and he even attended a twentieth anniversary march from Selma to Montgomery.
According to the former governor’s obituary in the New York Times, “Sometimes he even managed to use the magic words ‘I’m sorry.’”49
Few alive in the twenty-first century defend the apartheid system that existed in the US South prior to the 1960s. But plenty will still take a hard line on immigration. And, indeed, the current struggle around immigrant rights provides a vivid illustration of how past patterns of polarization still hold today.
Immigration reform advocates argue that the millions of undocumented immigrants living in the country should be recognized for their contributions to America’s communities and afforded a pathway to citizenship. Yet this proposition has stirred intense controversy. Detractors say that “illegals” are no better than common criminals, that they should be deported, and that the border should be sealed, even if it requires militarized means to do so.
By pursuing high-profile protest in recent years, immigrant rights activists have only deepened divisions between these groups—leading a variety of commentators to declare their movement a failure. Yet those who understand the power of polarization will see things very differently: the politicization of the Latino community, brought about in no small part through mass social movement mobilizations, is becoming one of the most significant developments in US politics since the turn of the millennium.
The trigger event for mass action around immigrant rights, starting in 2006, is sometimes invoked with a single word: Sensenbrenner.
In late 2005, Republican representative James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin proposed a reactionary piece of immigration legislation that would have instated harsh penalties for unauthorized presence in the United States, erected a seven-hundred-mile fence along the border between the United States and Mexico, and criminalized those assisting undocumented immigrants in obtaining food, housing, or medical services. The Sensenbrenner Bill passed through the House in December, and the prospect that it might subsequently clear the Senate in early 2006 set off unparalleled alarm in the Latino community, giving rise to several national days of action.50
By April 10, protests spread through more than 140 cities in 39 states. With as many as two million total participants, the news program Democracy Now! dubbed it the “Largest Wave of Demonstrations in U.S. History.” This was matched by another flood of marchers on May 1, when as many as one million people poured through downtown Los Angeles with the message “No human being is illegal.” The spring’s mobilizations produced huge crowds in cities such as Chicago, Dallas, Phoenix, New York, and Washington, DC. But perhaps even more remarkably, dozens of smaller cities and towns such as Fresno, California, and Garden City, Kansas, saw the largest demonstrations ever recorded in their localities. Protesters carried American flags and signs that read “We Are America.”51
These actions drew significant attention in the mainstream press: “Over and over again,” the New York Times reported, “construction workers, cooks, gardeners, sales associates, and students who said they had never demonstrated before said they were rallying to send a message to the nation’s lawmakers.” Yet this attention was dwarfed by coverage in the Spanish-language media, which treated the movement as a top story for months. Students across Texas, Nevada, and California added to the drama by marching out of class to protest Sensenbrenner, with school districts in Los Angeles County witnessing a thirty-six-thousand-person-strong walkout.52
“It got the word out that we’re not going to be quiet,” a sixteen-year-old Salvadoran immigrant named Christian Dorn told the Washington Post, likening the protests to the civil rights revolts of the 1960s. “We shouldn’t be treated like criminals.”53
Author Randy Shaw called the demonstrations “a social earthquake rumbling across the American landscape.”54
There was a problem, however: the transactional impact of the quake was not immediately evident—and some doubted whether the movement had made any gains at all. Although the Senate version of the Sensenbrenner Bill did not pass, neither did any positive immigration reform that would have legalized the status of undocumented immigrants or created a pathway to citizenship. The next several years showed little sign that gridlock on the issue in Washington could be broken. By 2011, Fortune magazine used the immigrant rights mobilizations as an example of how movements “can peter out without achieving meaningful change.”55
Just as civil rights activists had invigorated the White Citizens’ Councils, one of the effects of the 2006 protests was to activate hard-line anti-immigrant sentiment. The Minuteman Project, founded in 2005 by a few hundred people who vowed to maintain “citizen patrols” along the Mexican border, spawned more than three hundred like-minded local organizations by 2010, drawing in tens of thousands of volunteers.56
In 2005, reporter David Holthouse visited a camp of Minuteman volunteers in Cochise County, Arizona, and recorded the conversation. “It should be legal to kill illegals,” said one sixty-nine-year-old retiree and army veteran. “Just shoot ’em on sight. That’s my immigration policy recommendation. You break into my country, you die.”
Another volunteer added, “The thing to do would be to drop the bodies just a few hundred feet into the U.S. and just leave them there, with lights on them at night. That sends the message ‘No Trespassing,’ in any language.”57
Such fringe groups enjoyed the support of mainstream conservative pundits such as Lou Dobbs of Fox News, who warned that hordes of unwashed immigrants would bring plagues of tuberculosis, malaria, and even leprosy.58
Perhaps even more distressing, conservative state legislatures in Utah, Arizona, Georgia, Alabama, Indiana, and South Carolina pushed forward regressive legislation targeting undocumented immigrants. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) charged that these measures, modeled after Arizona’s notorious “Show Me Your Papers” bill, invited “rampant racial profiling against Latinos, Asian-Americans, and others presumed to be ‘foreign’ based on how they look or sound.”59
In the wake of this wave of conservative backlash, some immigrant rights groups experienced a perception of failure. By 2010, with comprehensive reform legislation stymied in Washington and regressive state-level laws moving forward, they looked back at the legacy of the 2006 protests feeling demoralized.
At the time, it seemed that anti-immigrant forces were growing more powerful and aggressive. And in some parts of the country, they were. In heavily white, rural areas of the South and Southwest, immigrant rights advocates were losing—just as civil rights forces faced setbacks in places where the White Citizens’ Councils expanded. But this is only half the picture.
Polarization also had a positive side, and this would increasingly translate into tangible gains for the movement. In short order, a galvanized immigrant community created an ongoing crisis for conservatives at the polls. Even as they rallied in the spring 2006 demonstrations, immigrant rights activists had vowed electoral action. “Today we march,” they chanted. “Tomorrow we vote!” And by that fall, the movement contributed to one of the more swift and consequential electoral shifts in recent memory.60
Prior to 2006, a variety of anti-immigrant actions—for example, high-profile raids on factories that led to scores of deportations—had produced generalized fear and anger in Latino communities. The difference with Sensenbrenner was that the mass mobilization channeled community discontent in a clearly political direction. Throughout the summer and fall of 2006, We Are America, a national alliance of more than a dozen labor, faith, and civil rights groups that formed out of the demonstrations, ramped up an effort to register new voters and oust anti-immigrant candidates in that year’s midterm elections. In the end, the effort contributed to a disastrous defeat for the Republicans in 2006, as the party lost control of both the House and the Senate.61
Massive turnout among Latinos far exceeded typical patterns for midterm elections. As conservative Miami Herald columnist Andres Oppenheimer explained, “Hispanics said ‘adiós’ to President Bush’s Republican Party in Tuesday’s midterm elections, voting in much greater numbers than expected for Democratic candidates in an apparent rejection of the ruling party’s efforts to blame much of the nation’s problems on undocumented migrants.62
“Many experts had predicted that Hispanics would not turn out in big numbers on Tuesday,” Oppenheimer added; instead, these experts expected “that it would take until the 2008 elections for the largely Hispanic ‘today we march, tomorrow we vote’ protests of earlier this year to translate into the naturalization and registration of large numbers of foreign-born Latino voters.”
The experts were wrong, and the exit numbers in the midterms showed the kind of swing that can make veteran poll-watchers do a double take: 73 percent of Hispanics voted for Democrats, up from 55 percent in the 2004 presidential election.63
Savvy Republicans, who saw the potential of serious long-term harm to their party, scrambled to do damage control. In the summer of 2006, top presidential advisor Karl Rove showed up at the national convention of La Raza, the country’s largest Latino civil rights organization, and attempted to distance the White House from the anti-immigrant wing of his party. Rove would later warn conservatives, “An anti-Hispanic attitude is suicidal.”64
No doubt, the protests of 2006 were only one element affecting voting patterns. However, the record in this case provides an impressive testimonial to the power of mass protest: huge numbers of people took to the streets; their actions captured national attention and dominated the Spanish-language media for months; the protesters vowed to turn out votes against anti-immigrant Republicans; and they ended up delivering to a far greater extent than top electoral analysts had predicted.
The shift has had lasting consequences. In 2008 the trend established in the previous election held, and any gains George W. Bush had made in wooing Latinos to the Republican Party in 2000 and 2004 were long gone. In 2012 Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney managed to attract just 27 percent support from Latino voters—the lowest of any presidential candidate since Bob Dole in 1996—while record turnout in immigrant communities provided a significant boost for President Obama’s reelection. Republican senator Lindsay Graham called the Republicans’ loss in 2012 a “wake up call” for the party.65
As the Latino voting bloc grows each year, conservatives find themselves in an impossible bind. Looking toward the 2016 presidential race, Vox correspondent Dara Lind pointed to the “massive prisoner’s dilemma the GOP faces on immigration.” If right-wing candidates appeal to the anti-immigrant extreme in an attempt to win primary contests, they enter into general elections facing down an energized bloc of the immigrant rights movement’s active public supporters—and their anti-immigrant statements increasingly fly in the face of mainstream opinion as well. It is a losing recipe for conservatives and a winning one for pro-immigrant advocates.66
Put another way: polarization is paying dividends.
In the summer of 2012, Javier Hernandez and Veronica Gomez had run out of patience with the White House. They decided to go after President Obama by focusing on an operation that they knew would be sensitive: his campaign for reelection.
On June 5, the two walked into the Denver office of Obama for America carrying bags laden with bottled water and Gatorade. They announced that they would stay for the duration of a hunger strike. Until Obama agreed to take executive action to allow young immigrants to remain in the country, they would subsist only on H2O and electrolytes.
Hernandez, of Denver, and Gomez, living in California, came from similar backgrounds. When they were still toddlers, both of their families had entered the United States from Mexico on visas now long expired. Despite having grown up in the United States, Hernandez and Gomez were undocumented. Because of this, their act of civil disobedience entailed risking something much graver than arrest: they faced possible deportation from the only country they had ever truly known. “We are Americans,” Gomez told one reporter, “even without paperwork.”67
Hernandez and Gomez were part of a group of determined immigrant youth known as the DREAMers. They advocated a piece of legislation, the DREAM Act, designed to provide legal status for young people who had been brought to the country as children, who had spent their formative years living in the United States, and who were seeking to attend college or serve in the armed forces. The moral case for allowing them to formalize their status as Americans was clear. Although the DREAM Act would not create comprehensive immigration reform covering the estimated 11.2 million immigrants living in the United States, the measure would serve as an important first step. It had major instrumental significance for millions of people. And beyond that, it would also provide a critical symbolic victory for the movement.68
In the summer of 2012, with the pressure of election season building, DREAMers selected Obama for America offices as prime targets for activism. Even as Hernandez and Gomez carried out their six-day hunger strike in Denver, the movement deployed sit-ins in more than a dozen cities, with actions spread from Oakland, California, to Dearborn, Michigan, to Cincinnati, Ohio. The National Immigrant Youth Alliance, a prominent DREAMer organization, reported that Obama for America offices in Georgia and North Carolina preemptively closed down “once they caught wind of the protests.”69
As the New York Times commented, Obama suddenly faced the real prospect of “alienating the Latino voters who may be pivotal to his re-election bid.”70
Starting in 2010, the DREAM Act students had emerged as a disciplined, energized core of activists, carrying forward the energy of earlier mass protests into targeted and vocal confrontations. In one prominent action, four students marched fifteen hundred miles from Miami, Florida, to Washington, DC, attracting press coverage all along the way. Throughout 2011, demonstrations flared: ten undocumented students in Charlotte, North Carolina, were arrested as part of a three-hundred-strong group blocking a major downtown intersection. A group of six young immigrants in Atlanta, Georgia, held up traffic that June, when, donning caps and gowns, they sat on a busy street with a banner reading “Our Dreams Can’t Wait.” In Washington, student activists convinced Illinois congressmen Luis Gutiérrez to join them in getting arrested during a July rally for the DREAM Act outside the White House.71
In one of the most powerful aspects of these protests, the DREAMers drew from the gay rights movement: they made a public display of young activists “coming out” as undocumented—putting themselves at risk by making their status known and asserting their identity as Americans. Jonathan Perez, a twenty-three-year-old student at Pasadena City College who traveled from Colombia with his family at age three, told the Huffington Post, “We need to live without fear because the fear paralyzes us. If we stay quiet, we stay in the shadows.”72
Legislatively, the DREAM Act, which singled out a very sympathetic subset of undocumented immigrants, seemed like the most likely reform measure to make it through the obstacle course that confronted any immigration legislation in Congress. Near the end of 2010, the act passed through the House of Representatives and gained majority support in the Senate—but was not able to secure the sixty votes needed to overcome a filibuster. It took another year and a half of pressure before the White House was moved to circumvent Congress.
Threats to Obama’s reelection prospects proved decisive in making that happen. Previously, the president had insisted that he did not have the legal power to unilaterally grant the DREAMers’ demands, despite the fact that the movement had produced more than ninety immigration law professors who argued the contrary. But just ten days after the hunger strike in Denver began, and with pro-immigrant allies in Washington needling the president with increasingly aggressive questions about the issue, Obama announced that his administration would implement a de facto version of the DREAM Act by executive order.73
On June 15, 2012, President Obama directed federal immigration authorities to follow a set of guidelines that would allow young residents who met the DREAM Act’s criteria to receive renewable work permits. The action allowed as many as 1.2 million young undocumented immigrants to live and work freely in the United States, and it was later expanded to include millions more. For young activists who had submitted their families to great anxiety and uncertainty, risking their futures in the country they knew as home, the announcement represented a great vindication: “We were all watching and listening and screaming out in joy,” said one DREAMer.74
Polarization was doing its work. After the mass mobilizations of 2006, active supporters of both pro- and anti-immigrant positions had increased. But strong evidence emerged that immigrant rights forces were the ones prevailing in terms of winning over ever-larger blocs of passive sympathizers. Prior to the protests, an August 2005 CBS News poll found that just 32 percent of Americans thought that immigrants who are in the country illegally should “be allowed to apply for work permits which would allow them to stay and work in the United States.” In April 2006, with wide-scale demonstrations under way, a similar CBS poll showed 49 percent in favor—a major shift.75
Other polls have shown a significant rise in public support for humane immigration reform in the years since, and, for the first time, advocates have been able to demonstrate majority backing for creating a path to citizenship.
Between 2007 and 2009, even amid the growth of extremist border-patrol groups such as the Minutemen, the proportion of people who believed that undocumented immigrants “should be allowed to stay in the U.S. and eventually apply for citizenship” rose from 38 percent to 44 percent of Americans polled. It rose further in the years after. Since 2014, this number has consistently exceeded 50 percent—reaching a record 57 percent in May 2015.76
In this context, important changes have taken place. Border vigilante groups such as the Minutemen have dwindled, with the Southern Law Poverty Center’s Mark Potok telling the Christian Science Monitor in April 2014, “The movement is one-tenth the size that it used to be.” Lawsuits by pro-immigrant organizations have succeeded in striking down the discriminatory provisions of reactionary state laws. By the time Alabama settled the remaining legal challenges to its anti-immigrant measure in October 2014, policy experts argued that the move was “part of a broader shift around the country away from harsh anti-immigrant laws on the state and local level.” Instead, one news report explained, “more and more states are passing what [advocates] called ‘pro-immigrant, inclusive’ legislation, such as laws granting driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants or in-state tuition for DREAMers.”77
In late November 2014, President Obama announced an even farther-reaching executive action, using his power to enact a major overhaul of the immigration system. His initiative created a mechanism for some five million additional immigrants, including those who are parents of US citizens, to live and work in the country legally. The Washington Post characterized it as a major coup for advocates, commenting that “the sweeping magnitude of Mr. Obama’s order is unprecedented.”78
It remains to be seen whether Americans will ever see James Sensenbrenner reverse himself in the manner of Jesse Helms or George Wallace, using the magic words “I’m sorry” to make amends with the DREAM Act students. But it is possible that the polarized extremism of the Minutemen may soon look just as archaic and bigoted as the White Citizens’ Councils that thrived, for a brief moment, thanks to the “unwise and untimely” clashes generated by the civil rights movement.
Whatever the evidence of polarization’s power, it is a process that makes people uncomfortable. Mainstream organizations, particularly those trying to maintain relationships with elected officials, consistently try to avoid it, preferring to look moderate and reasonable. For this reason, groups that are willing to risk divisiveness can expect to receive flack for their boldness.
ACT UP, born of a crisis in which the consequence of silence was death, used vinegar rather than honey to change the course of the fight against AIDS. The civil rights movement ended Jim Crow by refusing to wait for “a more convenient season” to protest. And the DREAM Act students forced the hand of an administration that was fearful of losing the support of a polarized electorate. With the passage of time, successful movements are often celebrated as heroic and noble. But, while they are still active, their tactics are never beloved by all. Accepting that reality is part of using conflict and disruption as tools for change.
Yet there is a danger here. For polarization to work to the advantage of a social movement, advocates cannot delude themselves into thinking that public reaction does not matter or that “anything goes” is a viable strategy. Activists can take the risk of being called rude and rash as a result of pursuing confrontation. But if a movement is to remain effective, it must be another thing as well: disciplined.