Transnational Roots of the Civil Rights Movement

How did African Americans gain the ability to apply Gandhian nonviolence during the civil rights movement? Responses generally focus on Martin Luther King’s “pilgrimage to nonviolence” or favorable social contexts and processes. This book, in contrast, highlights the role of collective learning in the Gandhian repertoire’s transnational diffusion. Collective learning shaped the invention of the Gandhian repertoire in South Africa and India as well as its transnational diffusion to the United States. In the 1920s, African Americans and their allies responded to Gandhi’s ideas and practices by reproducing stereotypes. Meaningful collective learning started with translation of the Gandhian repertoire in the 1930s and small-scale experimentation in the early 1940s. After surviving the doldrums of the McCarthy era, full implementation of the Gandhian repertoire finally occurred during the civil rights movement between 1955 and 1965. This book goes beyond existing scholarship by contributing deeper and finer insights on how transnational diffusion between social movements actually works. It highlights the contemporary relevance of Gandhian nonviolence and its successful journey across borders.

Sean Chabot’s book describes and analyzes the decades of collective struggle that produced the Gandhian approach to nonviolent resistance in the American civil rights movements, and the decades of collective learning that enabled African Americans to apply this approach. For an understanding of how innovative protest methods travel between social movements as different and distant as the Indian independence movement and American civil rights movement, scholars and activists could not do better than to read this book., More theoretically sophisticated than existing historical accounts of the adoption of Gandhian non-violence by black civil rights leaders and far richer historically than most sociological accounts of the diffusion of movement tactics, Chabot has written the best book to date on the “transnational roots of the Civil Rights Movement.” A welcome addition to both social movement studies and the historiography of the “long” civil rights movement.

Sean Chabot is associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Eastern Washington University.