Allen, Barbara. 1996. "Martin Luther King's Message on Civil Rights, Community, and Collective Action." Presented at "Voices from the Commons," the Sixth Annual Conference of the International Association for the Study of Common Property, Berkeley, CA, June 5-8, 1996.

Abstract

"Scholars interested in collective action dilemmas have recently turned to the American Civil Rights Movement to explore social incentives, reputational concerns, and 'narrowly rational' expressive benefits as motivations for commitment to difficult and dangerous forms of political participation. Civil rights protests from 1954-1968 have been expressed in formal models as a case study assurance game, yielding not only valuable insights concerning rationality assumptions and coordination problems, but also have advanced our efforts to model the decline of public action in accommodating and unresponsive policy environments. As useful as these models have been, they have failed to incorporate a central feature of this case, its religious foundations and concern for the transcendent good as well as material benefit. This omission not only limits such models' effectiveness in explaining the case of civil rights protests, it allows us to misinterpret the ontology of much collective action. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's political thought and other historical documents reveal that the Civil Rights Movement must be viewed in a context of covenantal relations, a perception not captured by our usual presentations of a rational calculus and the coordination of interests. His message, delivered most often in the form of a jeremiad, demands a change in consciousness as a condition for common action directed at political transformation. Political transformation resulted not merely from individual expressions of rights, but also depended on beliefs according value to the community in which these rights gained much of their significance. These political sermons link common action to such beliefs - a transcendent common purpose - evoking the covenantal roots of the American polity. By examining these foundations of the Civil Rights Movement through King's voice, I suggest an important role for community as a variable in our institutional analysis of commons dilemmas, emphasizing the significance of moral theory in addressing problems of collective action."