Media coverage and elite attention prevented anti-black attitudes from staying abstract and dormant

Evidence

If there had been no civil rights movement or urban riots, or if these events had gone without media coverage and sustained elite attention, then attitudes toward black activists and activism might well amount to an abstracted racial resentment. None of these conditions obtain. On the contrary, the mass media provided intensive coverage of black protest (Funkhouser, 1973; Garrow, 1978), the mass public developed fairly clear assessments of the aims of civil rights leaders (Sheatsley, 1966), and political leaders and institutions helped focus public attention on black grievances. Indeed, some have argued—and have provided data from national surveys that suggest—that the presidential elections of 1964 and 1968 served to make race one of the key features of conventional partisan political alignments and political thinking among the mass public (Carmines & Stimson, 1982). — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3427

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Elite public silence helped segregationist defiance escalate in Charlotte. — Matthew D. Lassiter, The Suburban Origins of “Color-Blind”…, 57