THE PERSISTENCE OF POLITICAL ATTITUDES AMONG 1960s CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVISTS

Abstract

A scattering of recent research has studied the current political beliefs and attitudes of individuals identified as “1960s activists.” In contrast to much of the treatment accorded such people in the popular media, this research tends to find most of these activists currently liberal on a wide variety of political topics. However, in the absence of panel data, most of this research has had to assess any change in the activists' attitudes either by assuming the activists' past positions or by trusting to their retrospective reports.

In this paper we report on panel data from a large group of white activists, mostly students, who spent the summer of 1965 organizing voter registration drives in Southern black communities. In some specific areas on which the activists tended to hold rather extreme positions in 1965, they may have moderated by 1984. However, their overall pattern of response on a wide variety of issues is basically stable over this twenty-year period.