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The Price of Civil Rights: Black Lives, White Funding, and Movement Capture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Megan Ming Francis
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Abstract

What influence do funders have on the development of civil rights legal mobilization? Fundraising is critical to the creation, operation, and survival of rights organizations. Yet, despite the importance of funding, there is little systematic attention in the law and social movements and cause lawyering literatures on the relationship between funders and grantees. This article recovers a forgotten history of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's (NAACP) campaign to protect black lives from lynchings and mob violence in the early twentieth century. I argue that funders engaged in a process of movement capture whereby they used their financial leverage to redirect the NAACP's agenda away from the issue of racial violence to a focus on education at a critical juncture in the civil rights movement. The findings in this article suggest that activists tread carefully as the interaction between funders and social movement organizations often creates gaps between what activists want and what funders think movements should do.

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Law & Society Review , Volume 53 , Issue 1 , March 2019 , pp. 275 - 309
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© 2019 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

The author would like to acknowledge the generous time and thoughtful feedback of many scholars including: Rachel Cichowski, Michael C. Dawson, Paul Frymer, Desmond King, H. Timothy Lovelace, George Lovell, Kenneth W. Mack, Michael McCann, Maribel Morey, Aziz Rana, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Steven Teles, Mark Tushnet, Sophia Jordán Wallace, John Fabian Witt, and Emily Zackin. My appreciation to spirited feedback during presentations at CLASS Workshare at the University of Washington and the American Politics Seminar at Johns Hopkins University. Finally, I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers who were instrumental in improving this article.

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