Narrative, Free Space, and Political Leadership in Social Movements

Interviews with leaders of civil rights efforts in four rural communities in the South suggest how narratives nurture political resistance among repressed and subordinated groups. Narratives provide group members historical precedents of individual and collective resistance, an alternative explanation of the group's condition, and an exposition of the virtues of a group that others consider virtueless. This discussion of narratives permits us to understand them as a formative element of local leadership and as an explicitly political element of social movements. This discussion also permits us to interpret social movements as a set of related local efforts of resistance and in terms of the spaces in which narratives occur.