Mobilizing ethnic competition

David Cunningham

# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012

Abstract Ethnic competition theory provides a powerful explanation for ethnicconflict, by demonstrating how variation in ethnic mobilization relates to intergroupstruggles over scarce resources. However, the tendency to capture such relationshipsat the aggregate level, through macro-level proxies of intergroup competition, offerslittle insight into the processes through which ethnic grievances mobilize into con-tentious action. This article integrates insights from the social movements literature toaddress how competitive contexts crystallize into broader conflicts. Drawing on datafrom the civil rights-era Ku Klux Klan—perhaps the quintessential case of conten-tious ethnic organization in the United States—the analysis focuses on the ways inwhich meso-level arrangements mediate the relationship between overarching com-petitive contexts and ethnic conflict. Results of a paired comparative analysis of KKKmobilization in Greensboro and Charlotte demonstrate that social and spatial relationswithin each city shaped the contours of perceived competition and subsequent ethnicorganization in ways that were not always predictable through observation of con-ventional proxies of competition.

Keywords Social movements . Intergroup conflict . Comparative-historicalmethods . Threat . Civil rights . Ku Klux Klan

Ethnic competition theory provides a powerful explanation for intergroup conflict,ranging from riots, to church burnings, to voting behavior, to hate group mobilization.Rooting contention in struggles over resources, the theory postulates that ethnicsolidarities intensify when members of multiple groups occupy similar positions—most often associated with overlapping labor market niches—and vie for scarcerewards. The basis for conflict lies in the threat posed by competing groups, forwhom ethnic identities take on enhanced salience in competitive contexts.

Theor SocDOI 10.1007/s11186-012-9178-4

D. Cunningham (*)Department of Sociology, Brandeis University, MS 071, Waltham, MA 02454-9110, USAe-mail: dcunning@brandeis.edu

Ethnic competition explanations are by nature contextual, as they posit thatcontention among individuals and groups is in fact shaped by environments that lendthemselves to perceived or actual contests over available resources. While relatedmodels are thus concerned with how competitive settings shape perceptions andattributions of threat and ultimately spur group conflict, conventional analyses havetended to operate at the aggregate level, demonstrating how variation in ethnicmobilization is related to overall levels of ethnic heterogeneity or labor marketoverlap in nations, states, or municipalities (see, e.g., Brown and Boswell 1997;Mousseau 2001; Myers 1997; Olzak 1989; Van Dyke and Soule 2002; Wilkes andOkamoto 2002). Such relationships confirm the power of environments marked bycompetition for scarce resources, but they are limited in their ability to interrogate theways in which broad contexts produce group conflict.

Further, while competitive dynamics are most striking when they result in sus-tained mobilization and protracted conflict (Olzak 1992), ethnic competition explan-ations offer little insight into the processes through which ethnic grievances translateinto mobilized contention, a longstanding concern of social movement theorists(McAdam 1999; Tarrow 1998). As a result, competition models are unable to teaseout the direct versus indirect effects of competition—i.e., whether associated conflictsare initiated by individuals who are themselves in direct competition for resources, oralternately whether they emerge in a more diffuse manner in areas marked by ageneralized competitive climate. They also fail to explain how the presence of ethnicconflict is shaped by the social and spatial organization of associations, whichmediate the coalescence of grievances within communities and thus serve as crucialmobilization venues (Cunningham and Phillips 2007). In this sense, the emphasis onmeso-level associational settings in the mediated competition approach advancedhere does not represent a call to be still more precise in one’s choice of contextualunit, but rather a theoretically-distinct effort to examine how social settings affectperceptions of inter-group competition. Such perceptions likely have much to do withthe presence of out-group members, but also with how those alters relate socially,spatially, and culturally to available resources and mobility structures.

This article thus places attention squarely on how competitive contexts, throughthe influence they exert on individuals and groups, crystallize into broader conflicts. Ibegin with a critical review of ethnic competition theory and show how our under-standing of the dynamics of ethnic competition has been limited by a pronouncedinattention to the ways in which contention emerges within broad competitiveenvironments. Drawing on data from the civil rights-era Ku Klux Klan (perhaps thequintessential case of contentious ethnic organization in the United States1)—Iengage with existing research that explains how social location shapes the likelihood

1 Indeed, in this particular case “ethnic competition” and “ethnic conflict” might reasonably be seen aseuphemisms for vehement racism. The KKK was (and continues to be) a white supremacist organization,and its resistance to civil rights advances during the 1960s was undergirded by a clear sense that AfricanAmericans’ racial status precluded legitimate co-existence and competition with whites in economic,political, and social spheres. In the Jim Crow South, such views were widely shared within the whitepopulation, though the Klan’s willingness to defend militantly its constituents against the “threat” posed bycivil rights reforms was distinctively extreme. In this sense, “competition” becomes a primary mechanismfor the activation of organized racism.

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of particular individuals mobilizing in the presence of ethnic contention. Then,building on related insights focused on relational contexts for mobilization, I showhow differences in the associational makeup of two demographically-similar com-munities in the Carolina Piedmont—Greensboro and Charlotte—explain significantvariation in the KKK’s ability to organize in each city. Through a comparativeanalysis that emphasizes economic, educational, and residential patterns within eachcity, I demonstrate how meso-level associational structures mediate the presence ofcompetition and the subsequent emergence of KKK mobilization, explaining out-comes not always predictable through examination of conventional proxies ofcompetition.

Theories of ethnic competition

Ethnic competition theory builds on Barth’s (1969) emphasis on the socially-constructed boundaries through which ethnic groups ascribe difference.Competition, stemming from overlap in the economic or political activities ofmultiple ethnic groups,2 becomes a key mechanism through which particular bound-aries are reinforced. This enhanced salience of ethnic divisions, in turn, can contributeto the emergence of ethnic conflict (Hannan 1979; Olzak 1992). Both ethnicboundary-formation and emergent conflicts are generally suppressed when groupsinhabit separate, spatially-distant, or complementary niches in labor markets andpolitical systems. But when competing groups occupy similar positions, thus exhibit-ing considerable niche overlap, ethnic solidarities intensify and contribute to in-creased competition-based conflict (Barth 1969; Soule and Van Dyke 1999).

Competition conventionally is conceptualized at the macro-level, through indicesof county/state/national conditions hypothesized to breed competition among ethnicsub-groups. The presence of out-group members, for instance, or the scarcity ofeconomic or political resources within municipal units, commonly serve as macro-proxies of inter-group competition (Brown and Boswell 1997; Schneider 2008; Souleand Van Dyke 1999). Other research more precisely focuses on how threats emerge inhighly-competitive economic or political niches, defined by inter-ethnic overlap inspecific labor market sectors or increasing political representation by ethnic minor-ities (Cunningham and Phillips 2007; Medrano 1994; Olzak 1989, 1992; Van Dykeand Soule 2002).

This contextual logic holds even for studies that employ narrower units of analysis.For instance, Bergeson and Herman (1998, p. 39) argue strongly for defining units bytheir degree of salience to relevant groups. Their investigation of the 1992 LosAngeles riots thus employs census tract data, rather than more typical city-levelaggregations, to match previous research showing that “people tend to engage in riotactivity close to where they live.” Tolsma et al. (2008), reacting to inconsistencies inthe competition literature, note that outcomes are conditioned by “the unit of

2 Note that, while ethnic identities have been seen as primary determinants of group conflict (especially inlabor settings), the general competition logic outlined here can extend to other bases for collective identity:gender, sexuality, nationality, and so on.

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measurement of the locale” and focus on the neighborhood level, where local politicaldecisions are forged and residents’ social networks are most dense. Still, these moreprecise analyses maintain the usual logic of relating competition to the overallcomposition of the unit in question, and do not address how the broad makeup ofparticular locales is reflected in social life, through the organization of associations—i.e., schools, businesses, religious centers, civic organizations, and so on. Similarly,efforts to link individual locations within these settings to propensities to engage inethnic conflict (Aguirre et al. 1989; Coenders and Scheepers 2008; Scheepers et al.2002; Tolsma et al. 2008) generally focus on rough proxies of competition—such aswhether persons hold a “low social status” or reside in an urban area (Schneider 2008,p. 55)—rather than capture precisely the degree to which individuals overlap eco-nomically, politically, and socially with ethnic others.

Regardless of the unit of analysis employed, there is broad implicit agreement thatcontextual conditions translate into ethnic conflict or exclusion through their impacton individual grievances, i.e., people’s perceptions that they are threatened bymembers of competing ethnic groups. While the relationship between contexts andgrievances is often assumed rather than demonstrated, it is clear that competitivecontexts do not translate into ethnic grievances in a straightforward and invariantmanner. Belanger and Pinard (1991) have found that active contention emerges insettings conducive to inter-group competition, but only when associated conditionsare perceived as unfair. Such perceptions, they observe, do not uniformly follow fromthe presence of competition for finite resources. Soule and Van Dyke (1999) likewisenote the possibility of mismatch between “objective” levels of competition andindividuals’ sense of perceived threats. Scheepers et al. (2002), employing a combi-nation of demographic and individual survey data, show that socioeconomic con-ditions and residents’ perceptions interact to increase the likelihood of individuals’support of ethnic exclusionism. Bobo and Hutchings (1996) focus on the processesthat underlie such interactions, by extending Blumer’s theory of group position tohighlight the historically, materially, and socially contingent manner in which“threats” come to be perceived and encoded as inter-group prejudice.

Accounting for mechanisms that mediate relationships among structural contexts,individual perceptions, and contentious outcomes seems especially important whenconflicts involve sustained mobilization. As these settings require more from ag-grieved individuals than an expression of anti-ethnic attitudes or electoral support forin-group candidates, they should more durably reflect competitive settings. The factthat grievances are marshaled toward collective ends also points to processes well-documented in the social movements literature, involving the mobilization of resour-ces required for organizational coordination and the “frame alignment processes” thatchannel grievances toward movement action (Edwards and McCarthy 2004;McAdam 1999; Benford and Snow 2000; Okamoto 2003; Tarrow 1998).

While the majority of existing applications of ethnic competition theory focus onexclusionary attitudes or discrete actions, Olzak et al. (1994), Cunningham andPhillips (2007), and Van Dyke and Soule (2002) deal with these sorts of durablemovement organizations and protest campaigns. The latter two of these studiesexplicitly seek to integrate competition and social movement approaches to ethniccontention. For Van Dyke and Soule, the key insight is for social movement theorists,who frequently discount or neglect entirely the mobilizing power of grievances.

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“Theories of social movement emergence,” they assert, “should include structuralsocial change and the threat it engenders as important mobilizing conditions”(p. 513). Cunningham and Phillips seek to demonstrate the converse, applyinginsights related to social movement diffusion to threat-based ethnic contention. Inparticular, they show that the diffusion of “reactive mobilization,” strongest incounties that are most closely tied in a social and economic sense, point to the factthat threats are necessarily constructed and mobilized through existing social chan-nels. In each case, however, these analyses adopt the established logic, focused onhow mobilization is patterned across large municipal units (SMSAs and states), andthus are not concerned with the mobilization processes that follow from the imposi-tion of competition-induced threats.

To interrogate these mediating processes, I examine a case of sustained ethnicmobilization, associated with the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina between1964 and 1966. Specifically, I examine why the KKK had uneven success mobilizingworkers across the North Carolina Piedmont, a region marked by a moderate, andrelatively homogeneous, degree of racial competition in the labor market. Through acomparative focus on Greensboro, a Klan hotbed, and Charlotte, where the KKK waslargely rebuffed, I demonstrate how differences in the associational makeup of thesecommunities shaped the degree to which racial overlap in the labor force translated intoresonant anxieties over competition in the face of looming desegregation policies.

The rise of the civil rights-era United Klans of America

To assess how the dynamics of competition are shaped within communities, I draw ondata associated with the United Klans of America (UKA), the pre-eminent Ku Klux Klanorganization of the civil rights era. Formed in 1961, in the wake of the Brown schooldesegregation decision and burgeoning civil rights challenges, the UKA quicklybecame by far the largest of the 17 KKK organizations identified by the FBI duringthe mid-1960s (Cunningham 2004). Led by its “Imperial Wizard” Robert Shelton, thegroup was headquartered in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, but established hundreds ofaffiliated chapters (referred to as “klaverns”) across the South. The group’s greatestrecruiting successes occurred in North Carolina. By 1965, the Tar Heel State boastedmore than 12,000 dues-paying members, a number that exceeded the UKA’s mem-bership in the rest of the South combined (US House of Representatives 1967).

Similar to the Citizens’ Councils and the many self-styled segregationist organ-izations that emerged in particular states or local communities during this period, theUKA sought to maintain the racist status quo in the South, embodied by Jim Crow-style segregation. Couching their defense of white supremacy as a form of “Christianpatriotism” in the face of a growing challenge by communist-influenced civil rightsorganizations and the federal government, Klan members adopted a highly militantanti-civil rights stance (Chalmers 1981; Rich 1988). Most nights of the year, the UKAwould host a rally somewhere in North Carolina, featuring refreshments, souvenirs,raffles, music, and prayer as a prelude to a two-hour slate of fiery segregationistspeeches by Klan leaders. The night would climax with the burning of a thirty-to-seventy foot tall cross, which robed Klan members ceremoniously encircled while“The Old Rugged Cross” played over the sound system (Cunningham 2008).

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By the end of 1965, tens of thousands of North Carolinians had attended theserallies, with several thousand paying a ten dollar initiation fee—along with another$15 for robes—to join one of the nearly 200 klaverns organizing throughout the state(Williams 1964). Not surprisingly, this rapid upswing in Klan activity increasinglydrew the attention of the local media, which eagerly covered the Klan’s rallies, as wellas their periodic street walks (i.e., daytime marches by robed Klansmen and helmetedmembers of the UKA “security guard”) and frequent attempts to intimidate blackresidents or white liberals through cross burnings, beatings, and shotgun fire.

While these acts of violence tended to be perpetrated by a small militant core, thebroader membership engaged in a number of more above-board activities. Eachklavern held weekly meetings and encouraged attendance at rallies. Members paidmonthly dues and sponsored turkey shoots and fish fries on weekends. Manyklaverns organized parallel “Ladies Auxiliary Units” to support UKA social eventsand pursue Klan-centered charitable works. The organization offered its own grouplife insurance plan and also made forays into Klan versions of more formal ceremo-nies, including church services and weddings (Cunningham 2008). For most mem-bers, UKA membership required a significant outlay of both time and materialresources.

Related earlier research on United Klans established that the uneven patterning ofthe UKA’s mobilization across North Carolina’s 100 counties can be explained by thediffering degree to which desegregation posed a threat to the white supremacist statusquo. In particular, Klan presence was higher in areas characterized by threats posedby demographic, economic, or political forms of racial competition—i.e., countieswith large African American populations, relatively high proportions of non-whitesemployed in the manufacturing sector (where workplace competition was mostpronounced), and increasing NAACP activity.

Cunningham and Phillips (2007) marshaled evidence that Klan presence could beexplained more fully by considering these structural features alongside basic socialfeatures of the counties targeted by the UKA’s mobilization efforts. Specifically,controlling for racial competition, the level of Klan activity in any given countyexhibited a significant contagion pattern, with nearby UKA klaverns increasing thelikelihood of Klan presence. This contagion effect was most powerful in countieswith dense connections to regional social and economic networks, suggesting that thediffusion of UKA activity was rooted in social processes as well as the co-presence ofracial competition for economic and political resources.

The diffuse nature of threats was also evident in the fact that, while the UKAwasstrongest in counties characterized by overall levels of racial competition, the Klan’srecruits were not disproportionately drawn from workplace or industry settings wherewhite and black workers were likely to compete for jobs (Cunningham, forthcoming).Instead, perceptions of racial threat tended to spread widely within aggrieved groups,echoing Blumer (1958) and Bobo and Hutchings’s (1996) argument that ethnicantagonism emerges broadly within competitive contexts (see also Bonacich 1972;Olzak et al. 1996). Further, as social movement theory would predict, Klan mobili-zation tended to occur among aggrieved individuals who were biographically avail-able, or free from personal constraints that raise the costs and risks associated withparticipation (McAdam 1986, 2003; Schussman and Soule 2005; Wiltfang andMcAdam 1991).

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Thus, mobilization was more likely when enabled and sustained both by personalnetworks and individuals’ perceptions that they were free to act on racial grievances.Some individuals sympathetic to UKA ideology, for instance, might shy away fromthe organization for fear of losing their jobs. But others—small business-owners inparticular—possessed the autonomy to act on grievances shaped by their ownexperiences and connections (see, e.g., Brown n.d., p. 13; Young 1968, p. 155;Lambreth 1964; O’Daniel 1965). The fact that ethnic grievances were defined anddiffused through these sorts of relational patterns suggests that, at the communitylevel, certain institutional arrangements were more conducive to ethnic mobilizationsthan others. The analysis here extends this idea, developing a comparative analysis oftwo specific communities to explore how associational (or meso-level) processesmediate competitive contexts and ethnic mobilizations.

Analytic approach

The analysis that follows focuses on UKA mobilization in and around two NorthCarolina cities between 1964 and 1966. Employing a paired-case comparative anal-ysis, I draw on a range of archival and secondary data to explain the pronounceddifference in Klan outcomes across areas that otherwise look roughly equivalent interms of conventional macro-level proxies of competition. The dependent variable isthe level of UKA organization in the home county of each city (note that Charlotte islocated in Mecklenburg County, and Greensboro in Guilford County), as captured bythe Klan’s presence and public appeal. While the secretive nature of much of theUKA’s actions makes it impossible to measure directly the degree of contentioncreated by its presence, the appeal of a militant defense of white supremacy in eachcity can be proxied by the group’s support base, both in terms of membership andpublic engagement through rallies and other Klan events.

As Table 1 illustrates, Charlotte was largely insulated from the UKA, as the Klannever managed to maintain more than one moderately-sized klavern in the city or inother communities in Mecklenburg County. Greensboro, in contrast, was known as aKlan hotbed, with five klaverns located within its city borders and another three unitsin surrounding Guilford County (US House of Representatives 1967). Greensboro’srate of 3.82 UKA units per 100,000 white residents was more than nine times greaterthan Charlotte’s rate of 0.42. Several of Greensboro’s klaverns had memberships thatexceeded 50, and UKA rallies held in the county typically attracted crowds of severalhundred (FBI 1966). Charlotte’s lone klavern, in contrast, averaged only 30 members

Table 1 KKK organization in Greensboro and Charlotte

Guilford Co. (Greensboro) Mecklenburg Co. (Charlotte)

UKA klaverns (1964–1966) 8 1

Klaverns/white resident (x 100,000) 3.82 0.42

Average estimated membership per klavern > 50 30

Average estimated rally attendance 375 < 100

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even during its peak, and a number of rallies held nearby were lackluster. The crowdat a November 1966 event held in a field just north of Charlotte’s city limitsnumbered only one hundred, and three separate rallies the following year failed evento match that turnout (Adams 1966; FBI 1966; Raleigh News and Observer, 6November 1965).

Each of these factors points to a pronounced difference in UKA presence andsupport across the two cities. To explain these varying Klan outcomes, I focus on“meso-level” factors, by which I mean the associational settings within local com-munities that operate beneath the “macro”-structural compositional characteristicscaptured by conventional ethnic competition analyses. Examples of such meso-levelsettings include associations such as schools, workplaces, civic organizations, andother formal or otherwise commonly-recognized gathering places within communi-ties. As spaces that enabled or insulated residents from interracial contact and servedas venues for the accrual of resources and status, formal (e.g., schools) and informal(e.g., neighborhoods) associations served as settings where perceptions of inequity,privilege, and competition were forged.

Thus, the analysis that follows emphasizes the spatial locations and social activ-ities and functions of these spaces, particularly those that bear upon the constructionor maintenance of perceived inequities across groups. While conventional macro-proxies of competition provide a baseline sense of the likelihood that white residentssaw civil rights policy as threatening to the racial status quo, the degree to whichsweeping civil rights-related changes would alter the economic, political, and sociallandscape was shaped in part by how these associational structures served to enableand to constrain the perceived opportunities of both white and black residents. Thepresence of meso-level settings where civil rights reforms would significantly equal-ize opportunities across racial groups, I hypothesize, intensified white residents’perceptions of racial threat and facilitated the reactive mobilization of groups likethe UKA.

Meso-level dynamics: comparing Greensboro and Charlotte

Located fewer than 100 miles apart in the central Carolina Piedmont, Charlotte andGreensboro were North Carolina’s two largest cities during the 1960s. Both wereapproximately 70 % white. Median annual family incomes were similar, both around$5,500. Unemployment levels were comparable as well—for working-age males,2.1 % in Charlotte and 1.7 % in Greensboro, with rates for black male workersequivalent across the cities, at 2.8 % (US Bureau of the Census 1960; 1972). Theireconomies were emblematic of the Piedmont region circa the mid-twentieth century,characterized by a growing textile manufacturing and service sector workforce. Bothcities possessed large and well-organized civil rights infrastructures. The NAACP, byfar the most widespread and influential civil rights organization in North Carolina atthe time, was strong in both places; at the outset of the 1960s, Greensboro boasted1,665 NAACP members, while Charlotte—the site of the state’s NAACP headquar-ters—had more than 1,800. At that time, no other North Carolina county possessed amembership exceeding 1,000 (Gavins 1991; Meier and Bracey 1987). Despite thesesimilarities, Greensboro was a UKA hotbed, the most-highly mobilized community in

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central North Carolina, while Charlotte and other communities in surroundingMecklenburg County remained largely insulated from Klan incursions.

To account for this stark difference in KKK mobilization, I focus on the associationalmakeup of both cities, to provide a sense of how conventional macro-level proxies of ethniccompetition (such as the proportion of African-American residents, or the degree of racialoverlap in the labor market) were refracted through the social and spatial organization ofassociations in each community. The key idea is that structural modes of competition fosterethnic mobilization only when perceived as sources of viable racial threat. The degree towhich such perceptions of competition emerged varied, dictated in large part by the ways inwhich racial interactions occurred within each community’s associational spaces.

Specifically, I emphasize how rates of interracial contact in city neighborhoods, prevail-ing racial arrangements within each city’s central workplaces, and the level of racial inequityin both secondary and collegiate education created a sense of racial vulnerability amongwhite Greensboro residents that significantly exceeded that in Charlotte. In the civil rights-era South, this heightened sense of threat enhanced the resonance of the appeals of racistgroups like the KKK. Table 2 summarizes the measures emphasized in the discussionthat follows, showing how Greensboro and Charlotte compare in each case.

Both Charlotte and Greensboro were distinct from most North Carolina commu-nities, with economies centered not on agriculture but instead on a mix of manufac-turing and service work. In 1960, fewer than 3 % of workers in either city worked inthe agricultural sector, while more than half were employed in either the manufac-turing or service workforce. Greensboro’s economy was more heavily tied to manu-facturing, with 37.6 % of male workers employed in that sector, versus 22.8 % inCharlotte. By 1967, that disparity had grown, with Greensboro workers nearly twiceas likely as those in Charlotte to be employed by manufacturing firms. The increasedpredominance of manufacturing in Greensboro was counter-balanced by a higherproportion of service workers in Charlotte. In that city 35.2 % of workers, versus28.6 % in Greensboro, were employed in professional, technical, clerical, sales, orother service fields. Among white collar workers, such inter-city differences wereeven greater. Nearly 18 % of the Charlotte workforce was involved in white-collarservice work in 1967, versus only 12.8 % in Greensboro (Employment SecurityCommission of North Carolina 1968; US Bureau of the Census 1963).

The different weighting of manufacturing and service work across the cities wassignificant, given the distinct hiring practices associated with each sector. Both areas ofthe workforce were highly segregated racially, though in different ways. Prior to 1960,manufacturing plants were predominantly white spaces, with the overall proportion ofblack workers hovering between 3 % and 4 %. While employers hired black workers inincreasing numbers over the ensuing decade, they remained confined almost entirely inunskilled or semi-skilled positions that ensured their functional and physical separationfrom higher-status white workers. By 1966, black manufacturing workers held only0.6 % of North Carolina’s white collar positions, but comprised more than a third of theindustry’s lower-skilled operatives and laborers. While these positions were formallydivided by skill levels, in fact the majority of jobs were “semi-skilled,” requiring a levelof training possessed by large numbers of both black and white workers. Racialsegregation in manufacturing, then, was largely a product of higher-status jobs beingreserved for whites, a practice that became considerably more tenuous as the 1960swore on (Fulmer 1973; Rowan 1970).

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Service-sector work, in contrast, tended to be segmented into high- and low- skilledpositions that required significantly different levels of education and training. The vastmajority of positions in banking and insurance industries, for instance, were held bywhite workers, with African Americans typically employed in low-skill service jobs.Only 5 % of Charlotte’s clerical and sales workers were black, and African Americansmade up an even smaller percentage of managerial, professional, and technical workers.Fewer than 2 % of the city’s clerical positions were held by black women, who wereoverwhelmingly employed as domestic servants. A similarly high percentage of blackmen worked as laborers, janitors, or in unskilled or semi-skilled service or craft positionsand were almost entirely absent frommanagement, professional, and sales positions (USBureau of the Census 1963; Employment Security Commission of North Carolina1968). The result was that black workers occupied the bottom end of a segmentedlabor market, which effectively precluded racial competition for the majority ofpositions. Unlike the manufacturing sector, where black and white workers were

Table 2 Comparison of key structural & associational features in Greensboro & Charlotte

Guilford Co.(Greensboro)

Mecklenburg Co.(Charlotte)

Total population 246,520 272,111

Proportion nonwhite residents 20.9 24.6

Median family income 5,417 5,632

Nonwhite/white income 0.53 0.46

Overall unemployment rate (rate for black workers in parentheses) 1.7 (2.8) 2.1 (2.8)

Number of NAACP members (1959) 1,665 1,810

Median years of education (for men 25 and over) 9.8 11.4

Ratio of black/white years of education (1960)a 0.73 0.63

% of black residents over 25 with high school or greatereducation (1960)a

32.0 20.9

% of black residents over 25 with 4 or more years ofcollege (1960)a

9.8 4.8

Number of black students at colleges (1964)b 3,818 1,048

Percent of enrolled black college students from local oradjacent counties (1968)b

23.4 12.7

% employed in manufacturing (1960) 37.6 22.8

““(1967)d 51.7 26.7

% employed in service (1960) 28.6 35.2

% employed in white collar service (1967)d 12.8 17.8

Degree of segregation (index of dissimilarity)c:

for SMSA (1960) 66.9 75.6

for central city (1960) 84.0 87.1

All figures from U.S. Census (1960; 1972), except:a Bullard and Stith (1974)b NC Board of Education (1969)c Van Valey et al. (1977)d Employment Security Commission of NC (1968)

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frequently employed in the same plants, possessing similar training and separatedprimarily by informal practices that reserved most desirable jobs for whites, whiteprivilege in the service sector was both deep-seated and durable in the face of civilrights legislation (Hanchett 1998; Leach 1976).

To the extent that segregation in manufacturing, to a greater degree than service work,required themaintenance of informal racist practices that reserved high-status positions forwhites, workers in that sector felt a more acute sense of racial threat as civil rightschallenges mounted. Greensboro possessed a significantly larger manufacturing sectorthan Charlotte’s service-centered economy, a fact that itself facilitated the UKA’sGreensboro-area recruiting.3 But these economic distinctions were reinforced andexacerbated by educational and residential patterns in each city.

Greensboro was home to an exceptionally large skilled black workforce, in partbecause of the presence of two black colleges: North Carolina A&T and BennettCollege. One of the state’s two land grant colleges, A&T enrolled more than 3,000students by the 1960s. Bennett College, a Methodist black women’s school, had sincethe 1920s grown steadily, building a national reputation both for academic excellenceand as a strong force for advancement in the city’s black community (Brown 1961;Chafe 1980). Importantly, both schools were located less than a mile from the city’scenter and main business district, which provided local business owners—especiallythose in small establishments who were freer to stretch racial norms without attractingbroad attention (Chafe 1980)—with easy access to a large pool of young blackworkers with considerable skills. This labor resource was especially appealing to atleast some black employers when the labor market tightened, and the fact that A&Toffered high-quality training in a range of technical fields ensured that a significantstream of students possessed the skills required to fill machinist, draftsman, and otherpositions for which candidates were chronically in short supply.4

3 Note that deindustrialization, as captured primarily by the outmigration of manufacturing jobs, wouldshift this calculus in two contrasting ways. On one hand, fewer available manufacturing positions wouldcreate more acute competition for a smaller number of those jobs. At the same time, such changes wouldreduce differences in workforce composition across the two cities, as Greensboro’s traditional industrialbase shifted toward the sorts of service industries that were increasingly predominant in Charlotte. Whilesuch processes are obviously salient, they emerged in North Carolina in the decades following the KKK’srise and fall (indeed, according to US Census data, the overall manufacturing sector grew by more than22,000 jobs in Greensboro and Charlotte between 1960 and 1980). During this later period, increasingethnic diversity and related emergent patterns of occupational segregation within the overall workforcewould also complicate the ethnic boundary-construction processes that affected the sorts of conflictexamined here (see, e.g., Okamoto 2003).4 Files documenting the American Friends Service Committee’s Greensboro-based program on “meritemployment” regularly highlight the significance of the skilled labor force produced by both A&T andBennett. One AFSC staffer noted that trained machinists were “as scarce in this area as hen’s teeth.” A&Tdropouts who had completed their drafting requirements were frequently channeled by the AFSC toopenings in the drafting room of Western Electric, one of the city’s largest employers. When the meritemployment program yielded businesses willing to consider African American candidates to fill openingsas chemists, draftsmen, engineers, or clerical workers, A&T and Bennett became the primary conduits tolink to appropriately trained workers (see, e.g., Memos from Behrman to File, 24 January 1955 and 17 May1955, AFSC Archives, Box: Southeastern Regional Office 1947–1956, Folder: Merit EmploymentProgram, Visits to Businesses, Southeastern Regional Office 1955; “Meeting with counselors at A&TCollege,” AFSC archives, Box: American Section 1958, Folder: Southern Program—High Point R.O.1958, Projects—Miscellaneous, Community Relations File; and Memo from Herbin to Fairfax, 3September 1958, AFSC Archives, Box: Southeastern Regional Office 1957–1959, Folder: MeritEmployment Program, Visits with Community Leaders & Orgs., Southeastern Regional Office 1957).

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The impact of this student base on Greensboro’s workforce was especially pro-nounced. Not only did the two colleges enroll a sizable number of black students—in1964, their combined enrollments totaled 3,818—but Greensboro’s black studentpopulation drew significantly from local communities. Nearly a quarter of all studentsattending A&T and Bennett hailed from Guilford or adjacent counties, an unusuallyhigh figure for black colleges during this period (North Carolina Board of HigherEducation 1969). This local impact diffused further, to the city’s younger African-American students, as both campuses hosted a range of programs that exposedGreensboro’s high school students to advanced academic work.

Such programs undoubtedly contributed to the fact that African Americans inGreensboro were, in a relative sense, exceptionally well-educated. While only 14.7 ofNorth Carolina’s black adults had earned high school diplomas in 1960, a full 32 % ofGreensboro’s black population had high school diplomas (North Carolina Board ofHigher Education 1969; Powell 1970). Black adults in Greensboro had, on average,more schooling than any other comparably-sized city in the South, an average of8.8 years. The percentage of black residents who had attended at least some collegesimilarly dwarfed that of most other southern cities; nearly one in five had done so inGreensboro, a rate nearly four times greater than in cities such as New Orleans,Tampa, Fla., Columbus, Ga., and Greenville, SC (Bagwell 1972; Ladd 1966; USBureau of the Census 1972).

The quality of black education in Greensboro was exceptional as well. Two-thirdsof Guilford County’s African American students attended public schools accreditedby the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools, and more than halfof the accredited elementary schools in all of North Carolina could be found inGreensboro. Nearly two-thirds of the city’s black teachers possessed advanceddegrees. Well prior to the 1960s, the guidance staff at Greensboro’s “Negro” highschool, Dudley High, organized programs to encourage students to train for jobs thathad traditionally been closed to African Americans. School administrators alsopartnered with a “merit employment” program organized by the American FriendsService Committee, to coordinate site visits to area businesses, provide training forprofessional positions, and arrange panel presentations by A&T graduates who hadbecome racial “pioneers” in various fields (North Carolina State Advisory Committee1962; Chafe 1980).

White Greensboro residents, in contrast, had relatively low levels of education.More than a quarter of the city’s white adults had fewer than 8 years of schooling, andbarely half were high school graduates. The majority of white children in Greensborowere enrolled in non-accredited schools, a proportion much higher than in the city’sblack community. Whites still enjoyed a significant educational advantage—localblack residents had an average of 73 % of the schooling achieved by whites, andblack residents were only 70 % as likely as whites to possess a four-year collegedegree. But given the enormity of the barriers limiting black educational opportuni-ties in the region, this racial gap was smaller in Greensboro than nearly anywhere elsein the South (US Bureau of the Census 1960; Bullard and Stith 1974; Ladd 1966).The broad effect of this educational dynamic was to create a pool of black workerswho could compete with local whites for the majority of available skilled positions.As discussed above, this sort of racial competition had long been suppressed artifi-cially in the textile industry, by Jim Crow policies that reserved many skilled and

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semi-skilled jobs for whites. As the grip of formal segregation was loosened by civilrights advances, the resulting climate of perceived competition was felt more acutelyin Greensboro than in the vast majority of southern communities.

The dynamic was quite different in Charlotte. While Greensboro’s economicinequalities were attenuated by relatively high levels of black schooling alongside aweak white educational profile, white Charlotteans were the best educated in thestate. The city’s black residents, on the other hand, not only possessed 37 % lessschooling than their white counterparts but also fared significantly worse than theirAfrican-American peers in other Piedmont cities (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1963;Ladd 1966). While in Greensboro nearly a third of black adults were high schoolgraduates, only 20 % had earned a diploma in Charlotte. The proportion with four ormore years of college was less than half of that in Greensboro. Further, Charlotte’sblack university, Johnson C. Smith, enrolled 1,048 students in 1964 (Greensboro’sblack college population was nearly four times larger), and only 133 of those studentshailed from Mecklenburg or adjacent counties (North Carolina Board of HigherEducation 1969). The consequence was that Smith attracted local black students ata considerably lower rate than did Greensboro’s black institutions of higher learning.And these educational inequities were exacerbated by the fact that Smith’s campuswas physically as well as socially distant from the downtown business districts.Unlike A&T and Bennett in Greensboro, both of which bordered on the city’s centralbusiness district, Smith’s Biddleville neighborhood was located on the periphery ofthe city, separated from even the outskirts of downtown by a highway and largecemetery (Hanchett 1998).5

In summary, given their comparatively low levels of education, Greensboro’swhite workers were, as a group, relatively ill-equipped to compete for positions inan open market. This shrinking labor market advantage was exacerbated by thecounty’s relatively highly-educated black population, most visible through the largeproportion of local students attending Greensboro’s black colleges. In Charlotte,racial educational inequities were much more pronounced, with whites faring betterand African Americans faring worse than their counterparts in Greensboro. Thelocation of black colleges relative to each city’s downtown commercial districtmattered as well. In Greensboro, A&T and Bennett’s proximity to downtown busi-nesses facilitated formal and informal interracial interactions, which created a loosersense of racial separation than in Charlotte.

This spatial split was reinforced by Greensboro’s lesser degree of overall segre-gation. The “index of dissimilarity” for its Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area(SMSA) was 66.9 in 1960, compared to 75.6 for Charlotte’s SMSA (for comparison,the average value for 33 other southern SMSAs was 73.8) (Van Valey et al. 1977).The result was that, while the overall black population in both cities was approxi-mately 30 %, racial patterns in residential areas were quite distinct. In Charlotte,African-American residents lived in neighborhoods spatially separated from white

5 Note that this account of colleges open to African Americans in Charlotte does not include CarverCollege, which opened in 1949 as a community college intended to serve black residents in parallel with thewhite Charlotte College. In 1961, Carver was renamed Mecklenburg College and relocated to a newcampus, a controversial move in that its de facto function was to reinforce segregated schooling in the post-Brown era. Falling enrollments caused the school to close in 1965, and it therefore did not significantly alterthe black educational landscape in the period considered here (Leach 1976, pp. 81–90).

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residents to a degree greater than Greensboro and most other southern cities (Douglas1995; Van Valey et al. 1977). More than 90 % of Charlotte’s nearly 60,000 African-Americans lived northwest of the downtown central business district. Meanwhile, themost affluent area of the city, comprising ten census tracts in the southeasternquadrant, was home to more than 40,000 whites and not a single black family (USBureau of the Census 1972).

Throughout the 1960s, this pronounced residential segregation was exacerbated bythe city’s municipal planning projects. As a “Model City” eligible for the funding ofmunicipal infrastructural initiatives through LBJ’s Great Society programs, Charlottewas able to propose and initiate a much more ambitious program of large-scaleprojects than Greensboro or most other southern cities throughout the middle yearsof the decade. Among the “resume of improvements” trumpeted by city officialsduring this period was the federally-funded construction of I-85, which effectivelyserved as a racial barrier separating historical black and white neighborhoods on thenorth side of the city. Other urban renewal projects resulted in the razing of Brooklynand Blue Heaven, two longstanding black communities, to make way for “redevel-opment in uses more appropriate for its central location.” Little effort was made,however, to build new housing for those displaced, which meant that racially-motivated mortgage policies and realtor actions channeled those residents to thecity’s increasingly-segregated northwestern quadrant. Other efforts to provide publichousing options served the same purpose when they resulted in the relocation of blackfamilies to low-income projects concentrated in black areas of the city. “We aregetting a compact Negro community in practically one area of town,” argued FredAlexander, Charlotte’s first black City Council member. “We’re building our futureWatts right now” (Douglas 1995; Lassiter 2006; Smith 2004).6

While residential patterns were not by any means progressive in Greensboro,boundaries created by the spatial separation of white and black neighborhoods weresignificantly more stringent in Charlotte. The presence of these clear racial bound-aries reduced the anxieties that at times bubbled over in more porous Greensboroneighborhoods, providing recruiting fodder for the Klan. When, for instance, FrankWilliams, a black minister at Greensboro’s Mt. Zion Baptist Church, moved into ahouse purchased for him in 1967 by members of his congregation in a previously all-white neighborhood, a group of Klansmen engaged in a sustained harassment cam-paign. While the public nature of this campaign—which included hurled bricks andbottles, near-constant verbal abuse, blinding lights flashed in the house’s windows,cross burnings, and a black dummy hung in effigy—was unusual, the overalldynamic was anything but exceptional. Several months earlier, a black family thathad rented a house in a white neighborhood had been subjected to similar harassment,including a message from a Klansman that he would “kill this nigger to teach a lessonto others” (Chafe 1980; Guy 1967).

6 For more detail on Charlotte’s urban renewal efforts, and Alexander’s take on the process, see “Resume ofImprovements During Period 1959–1965” and “Brooklyn Area Blight Study,” UNCC archives, ManuscriptCollection 91, Box 40, Folder 12; Notes from NAACP Executive Committee meeting, 13 January 1966,UNCC Kelly Alexander Papers, MSS 55, Box 2, Folder 8; “Can Charlotte Have a Race Riot?” flyer forCharlotte-Mecklenburg Council on Human Relations public forum, 8 November 1966, UNCC archives,Manuscript Collection 91, Box 39, Folder 5.

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These educational and residential dynamics correlated with, and in many caseshelped to produce, stark inequities across a range of broad racial progress indicators.Bullard and Stith (1974) found that Charlotte, in the 1960s, had above-average levelsof racial inequity in overcrowded housing, low value owner-occupied housing,median education, unemployment, low occupational status, median family income,infant mortality, and family stability. Greensboro, on the other hand, exhibited thelowest level of racial inequity on more than half of these indicators, and ranked aboveCharlotte on nearly all of them.

Again, for our purposes, these indices demonstrate how this pronounced racialinequity in Charlotte was expressed within the city’s associational makeup—i.e., itsneighborhoods, schools, health care facilities, and workforce—and minimized thedegree to which macro-level proxies of ethnic competition translated into perceptionsof racial threat within the city’s white population. While the desegregation of publicfacilities created a seismic shift wherever it occurred, the contours of this changediffered based on the extent to which civil rights pressures would alter the overallsocial landscape of a community. In Charlotte, its reverberations were contained by asocial structure that limited opportunities for non-hierarchical interracial contact inneighborhoods, schools, and workplaces. In places like Greensboro, the effect wasfurther-reaching, and the attendant breakdown of controls that had tenuously insulat-ed whites from direct competition with similarly-equipped black residents destabi-lized white identities previously predicated on racial purity and its attendantprivileges.

This tenuous hold on racial advantage was most strongly perceived by thosevulnerable to threats posed by racial competition. Nowhere in the Piedmont wasthere a larger vulnerable white population than in Greensboro. As an organizationwhose appeals were explicitly directed toward providing alternative vehicles for themaintenance of white identity, the UKA, not surprisingly, resonated strongly in thatcommunity. Its rallies were both more frequent and larger than in the more densely-populated Charlotte area. The multiple UKA klaverns that dotted Greensboro and itssurrounding county, many of which maintained large memberships, demonstratedthat these rally appeals translated into deeper engagement with the group, a phenom-enon that was noticeably lacking in Charlotte.

Discussion

Empirical studies informed by ethnic competition theory have uncovered compellingrelations between the structural contexts that produce inter-group competition and thepresence of ethnic conflict. The dynamics of such relationships are well-developedtheoretically; the typical assertion is that the presence of competition enhances thesalience of ethnic boundaries and enables mobilization along ethnic lines. Howcompetition translates into contention is less well-understood, however. While somerecent work has focused on micro-dynamics associated with individual perceptions ofcompetitive contexts, it remains unclear how the relations between macro-environments and micro-mobilizations are mediated by meso-level associationalcontexts. As individuals’ experiences of inter-group competition, shaped in large partby the interactions that solidify ethnic identities, often coalesce within local

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institutional settings, it is important to understand how community structures compelor inhibit individuals from mobilizing around ethnic identities. To begin to addressthe ways in which ethnic competition is mobilized “on the ground,” the analysis herefocuses on how the socio-spatial makeup of communities mediate perceptions.

This study thus begins to interrogate the settings conducive to contention. In particular,the mobilization of ethnic competition requires the activation of boundaries, which Tilly(2003, p. 21) defines as shifts in social interactions “such that they increasingly a)organize around a single us-them boundary, and b) differentiate between within-boundary and cross-boundary interactions.” The analysis here, which demonstrateshow particular associational arrangements enable the activation of certain militantstrains of an “us-them” boundary, builds on the idea that this boundary activationmechanism is necessarily forged within identifiable social settings that reflect and refractsalient aspects of the overall composition of communities. Elucidating how those meso-level settings operate lends insight into the dynamics of ethnic competition.

More generally, this analysis expands the link between traditional research on socialmovements and other forms of contention—in this case, ethnic conflict—that fall underthe broader rubric of contentious politics. By focusing on the meso-level processesthrough which inter-group competition is mobilized, the approach here incorporateskey social movement processes—i.e., factors associated with material and social resour-ces generative of collective identity in aggrieved settings—into models of ethnic com-petition that have predominantly focused on the broad compositional dimensions thoughtto produce ethnic grievances. Conversely, by emphasizing the role of mobilizationsettings—in particular, how such contexts relate to the production of threat and griev-ance—this approach aligns with recent calls by social movement scholars to pay renewedattention to grievance-formation processes (Van Dyke and Soule 2002; vanStekelenburg and Klandermans 2009). The fact that the analysis here moves beyondexisting work on individual-level expressions of ethnic competition, which havepredominantly focused on attitudes or discrete political acts such as voting (Aguirreet al. 1989; Belanger and Pinard 1991; Coenders and Scheepers 2008; Hwang et al.1998; Scheepers et al. 2002; Schneider 2008; Tolsma et al. 2008), enables a clearintegration of social movement and ethnic competition approaches. By drawing on acase of sustained mobilization, I emphasize the presence of durable forms of conten-tion that require coordinated commitments to collective action rather than merely thecoalescence of individual grievances and propensities.

Of course, the specific question I explore here—how formal and informal associ-ations shape the patterning of inter-group contact, and thereby the degree to whichcompetitive contexts translate into strongly-perceived threats—only addresses narrowslices of the meso-level processes at work. In this sense, this article is intended toillustrate and to highlight the importance of such processes, rather than as a holisticexplanation of how ethnic competition is mobilized on the ground. Among otherlimitations, the bounded analysis here focuses predominately on factors that produceeconomic competition, in contrast with studies by Blalock (1967), Olzak (1990), andothers that have demonstrated the importance of political forms.

Political factors were almost certainly significant in the Charlotte/Greensborocomparison, as Charlotte’s mayor, Stanford Brookshire, was supported heavily bythe city’s business leaders and African-American voters and he engineered a pro-gressive approach to race relations widely viewed as an exemplar of southern

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liberalism. Attorney General Robert Kennedy noted the “striking progress” made bythe city’s leadership, and recommended that Brookshire share his ideas and experi-ences broadly with other communities “confronted with the same initial difficulties”as those that Charlotte overcame (Kennedy 1963; Leach 1976; Watters 1964). InGreensboro, the political context looked quite different, with significantly higherlevels of civil rights contention (in particular around the 1960 sit-in movement, whichbegan in Greensboro, and an extended round of protests surrounding the integrationof public facilities in 1963) and city leaders who consistently favored a more laissezfaire approach to the desegregation of public accommodations. Unlike in Charlotte,where the Mayor’s office and Chamber of Commerce were tightly coupled,Greensboro’s business elites had little overlap with the city’s political leadership.The resulting lack of coordination contributed to Greensboro’s inability to develop aneffective and peaceful response to mounting civil rights contention in the early 1960s(Chafe 1980; cf. Luders 2006).

While a full examination of the role played by political forms of competition isbeyond the scope of this particular article, one take-away point involves the interrela-tionship of these cities’ economic and political spheres. In contrast with contemporaryand historiographic accounts that have placed significant weight on the role played bythe styles and strategies adopted by each city’s political leaders (Chafe 1980; Douglas1995; Leach 1976; Smith 2004; Watters 1964; Wolff 1970), the analysis here suggeststhat the “progressive” approach adopted by Brookshire in Charlotte was enabled atleast in part by institutional arrangements that ensured that civil rights policy wouldhave limited impact on racial inequities in the city, akin to the low “concession costs”that Luders (2006) suggests facilitated business leaders’ accommodation to civilrights demands. While the impetus for progressive policy was strongly rooted in avisible cadre of civic leaders focused on Charlotte’s image, the demarcated scope ofracial changes associated with such policy approaches undergirded their progressiveorientation. In Greensboro, in contrast, political resistance to changes in the racialstatus quo was exacerbated by the fact that racial integration, in the presence ofunusual levels of racial equity in education and training, would significantly shrinkwhite workers’ local labor market advantage. In effect, forging a liberal course withcivil rights issues was easier to do in Charlotte, because the implementation of civilrights policies in that city posed relatively little threat to whites’ privileged positions.

Such political dynamics are strongly intermeshed with the modes of economiccompetition that has informed the account above. While these dimensions provideeffective explanations for variations in KKK mobilization, factors exogenous to thisframework undoubtedly mattered as well. Beyond their direct impact on the humancapital imparted to black and white students, educational institutions exerted politicaland cultural influence over discourses and actions associated with race relations andcivil rights reform. Similarly, newspapers and other local media differed in theirorientations, audience, and degree of influence. By 1963, civil rights protest inGreensboro was considerably more aggressive and widespread than in Charlotte, inlarge part due to Greensboro officials’ reluctance to facilitate or otherwise shepherdthe transition to desegregated public accommodations. This differing tenor of civilrights mobilization, though conditioned by many of the associational dynamicsemphasized above, itself shaped white residents’ orientations to racial grievances,and surely influenced the range of acceptable reactions and counter-mobilizations.

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Finally, the sway of local KKK organizers was not uniform across these commu-nities. While Charlotte was not barren of committed UKA adherents (longtimeresident Joe Bryant had been a key organizer with several Klan outfits for more thana decade, and later took over the UKA’s state leadership when North Carolina’s“Grand Dragon” Bob Jones was sent to prison in 1969), Greensboro was home toGeorge Dorsett, a regionally-prominent UKA chaplain. A charismatic speaker andorganizer, Dorsett was a featured presence at nearly all UKA rallies around the state,and he was closely tied to the UKA’s leadership. His influence was substantial, assignaled by his ability to attract later several hundred adherents to the ConfederateKnights, a Klan splinter group that he formed after breaking away from United Klansin 1967 (Drabble 2003; FBI 1969; interview with George Dorsett, 20 February 2005).The presence of Dorsett and a cohort of committed organizers in Greensboro meantthat the UKA could effectively translate the opportunity created by community’stenuous racial status quo into successful recruitment campaigns.

While largely beyond the scope of this article, a complete analysis of contentiousoutcomes in these cities should assess and adjudicate among the roles played by eachof these factors. Building from the foundational approach introduced here, suchstudies can provide more nuanced insight into the dynamics of ethnic competitionand conflict. By looking at how resources and status might be conferred withinassociations and thereby impact the grievance-formation process, analysts can bridgebetween macro-level claims that competitive arrangements (as captured throughaggregate population compositions) spur the mobilization of group conflict, andmicro-accounts of the ways in which “threats” come to be perceived and encodedas inter-group prejudice. The meso-level approach here seeks to account for thehistorically, materially, and socially contingent manner in which threats are attributedand acted upon, while taking seriously the power of social environments to enableand constrain individuals’ beliefs and actions.

Following the rich extant literature on ethnic competition, such dynamics canapply to a wide range of contentious outcomes, from discriminatory legislation, tovoting patterns in charged elections, and to the efflorescence of collective violencedriven both by durable organization and “spontaneous” emotion. Indeed, associa-tional dynamics lie at the heart of threat-based mobilizations, including those ofcontemporary movements like the Tea Party, whose conservative anti-interventionistbrand of populism has yielded its most political punch in relatively homogeneouscongressional districts (Williamson et al. 2011). McVeigh and Farrell (unpublishedpaper) have found that, controlling for deprivation and compositional factors tied tothe movement’s core issues, the Tea Party has flourished in environments with highlevels of residential and educational segregation. Consistent with the approach here,such analyses demonstrate how meso-level patterns of segregation produce an atti-tudinal homogeneity that enables the movement’s grievances to resonate among localpopulations.

Indeed, as competition theorists have long posited, the perception of threats posedby out-groups lies at the heart of these forms of contention. Focusing on the structuraland cultural significance of community associations provides one powerful way toexplain how such threats are constructed. By emphasizing the ways in which localcontexts mediate broad structural shifts and contentious outcomes, we can extend ourunderstanding of how ethnic competition is mobilized.

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Acknowledgments Earlier versions of this article were presented at the American Sociological Associ-ation’s 2011 Annual Meeting in Las Vegas, and at Sociology colloquia at East Carolina University and theUniversity of Connecticut. I thank participants in those sessions—in particular Bob Edwards, MelindaKane, Lee Maril, Claudio Benzecry, and Mary Bernstein—as well as Wendy Cadge and two Theory andSociety reviewers for their helpful comments.

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David Cunningham is Associate Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at Brandeis University. Hiscurrent research focuses on the causes, consequences, and legacy of racial violence, with an emphasis onthe US South. His book Klansville, U.S.A.: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights-era Ku Klux Klan isforthcoming in 2012 from Oxford University Press.

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