Black Leadership Matters: An Organizational and Political Comparison of Black Lives Matter and the Civil Rights Movement

As the Black Lives Matter movement develops and seeks policy change, the movement has received comparisons to the civil rights era of the 1960s. This paper compares the two movements' organizational structures and leadership. Using the civil rights era as a test case, I provide theoretical and empirical arguments about the challenges faced by Black Lives Matter and suggest that the movement would benefit from a more formalized hierarchical structure. I conclude that the likelihood of political success depends upon a social movement organization's leadership, whose capacity for articulating goals, identifying opportunities, accessing policymakers, and maintaining authority within the organization impacts political responsiveness.