Social Media and Social Movements: Strengths, Challenges, and Implications for the Future

Background

On February 1, 1960, four freshmen students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College went into a store in Greensboro, NC and sat down at a lunch counter that had been deemed for whites only. The four students were not served but remained seated at the whites-only counter until the store closed. Although the student sit-ins appeared to be an unplanned event, there was a great amount of planning that took place before the sit-ins occurred. All four of the students were members of an NAACP Youth Council and had been in contact with other activists who had participated in sit-ins in the late 1950s (Polletta, 2006). The actions of the four students—Ezell Blair Jr., David Richmond, Franklin McCain, and Joseph McNeil—suggested a spontaneous, impulsive form of resistance, rather than a planned social movement. Consequently, Polletta (2006) argued that the spontaneous nature of the sit-ins suggested a powerful moment when a group of individuals suddenly become a collective force undertaking social injustice. Yet, these events were part of a much larger, powerful, and historically significant form of collection action in the United States: The Civil Rights Movement.