"It Was like a Fever ..." Narrative and Identity in Social Protest

TLDR

The 1960 student sit‑ins were actually coordinated, yet participants described them as spontaneous, prompting an examination of narrative’s role in early mobilization beyond conventional frames. The authors analyzed campus media, letters, speeches, and correspondence to reveal that the sit‑ins’ narrative framed spontaneity as independent, urgent, locally driven moral action rather than bureaucratic planning. Narratives portraying the sit‑ins as spontaneous forged a new “student activist” identity and attracted high‑risk participation, with the storied representations compelling involvement.

Abstract

Although the 1960 student sit-ins were not nearly as uncoordinated as contemporaneous and subsequent accounts suggested, their repeated characterization in participants' accounts as "spontaneous" merits explanation. Analysis of campus newspaper articles and letters to the editor, speeches, and organizational and personal correspondence shows the emergence of a coherent and compelling narrative of the sit-ins, in which spontaneity denoted not a lack of prior coordination but independence from adult leadership, urgency, local initiative, and action by moral imperative rather than bureaucratic planning. Narratives of the sit-ins, told by many tellers, in more and less public settings, and in which spontaneity was a central theme, helped to constitute "student activist" as a new collective identity and to make high risk activism attractive. It was the storied character of representations of the sit-ins that compelled participation. This case suggests the more general importance of narrative—as distinct from collective action "frames"—in accounting for mobilization that takes place before the consolidation of movement organizations.