Speaker
Sarah Gaby
Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminology
UNC Wilmington
Abstract
Recent scholarship has conclusively found that historical incidents of racial violence lead to contemporary inequalities in many areas of political and social life. While these findings are critically important, the persistence of effects from the late 19th and early 20th century on contemporary patterns of racial inequality in the 21st century raises new and pressing questions. Specifically, if violent acts can produce deep and lasting disparities in areas like housing segregation and imprisonment, can anti-racist mobilization counter these effects? We investigate whether—and in what ways—mobilization during the Civil Rights Movement disrupts or reinforces the legacies of racial violence across key areas including housing, imprisonment, arrests, and education. Building on four widely cited studies of legacy effects, we incorporate measures of protest during the peak years of the Civil Rights era. We find that backlash effects intensify inequality across most domains and analyze how these patterns vary, offering new insights into the durability of racial violence legacies and the complex pathways through which they may—or may not—be disrupted.