Civil Rights Within The Civil Sphere

    The image I’ve selected for this week’s blog post is a photograph of a picket line of protestors in New York City in 1960. The image is in black and white and showcases a racially diverse line of men dressed in suits, two with clerical priest collars, all holding protest signs. They are lined up in front of a building with letters spelling out Woolworth Co. The storefront in the background is made entirely of glass panels showcasing the elaborate window decorations inside. Pedestrians are maneuvering around the protesters on the sidewalk. The central focus of the photograph is the protest signs the men are holding, reading “segregation is morally wrong!” Towards the right side of the photo, farther back in the lineup of men, signs read “we support southern sit-ins!” and “we walk for human dignity!” All the signs are white, with bold lettering and large exclamation marks. In small letters, all the signs spell out ”CORE.” The men hold the signs on sticks. They all have straight faces and look in the direction of the camera. There are no signs in the photograph of the protest being anything but peaceful because all the men look composed in their body language and facial expressions.

The historical context of the photograph is about the Woolworth Company store’s lunch counter segregation. The Woolworth Company refused to serve African Americans at their lunch counters in their store’s southern locations. Protests arose in response to Woolworth’s blatant segregation as a part of the broader Civil Rights Movement. I find it interesting that in this photo, we see both Black and White men participating in the protest. The picketers, primarily ministers, were part of a church committee that organized the protest in collaboration with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). 

    Jeffrey Alexander discusses the civil sphere, a moral realm situated separately from political, economic, religious, and family life. The civil sphere is a domain of social life that aims to produce unity and solidarity. It contains institutions within it to reproduce logic and social goods such as salvation or monetary value. The civil sphere can be understood through cultural codes and communicative institutions like mass media or public opinion polls, or regulative institutions like laws, parties, and voting. These cultural codes provide structure and sanctioning power to the civil sphere. Inspired by Durkhiem, Alexander uses binary codes (similar to sacredness and profaneness) to describe the motives, relationships, and institutions in the civil sphere as either civil or anti-civil (Alexander 2006, Durkheim 1895). However, “Actors are not intrinsically either worthy or moral: they are determined to be so by being placed in certain positions on the grid of civil culture” (Alexander 2006:55). These moral attributes are not fixed but instead imposed by society, similar to Durkheim's concept of social facts and deviance (Durkheim 1895).

We can analyze this photo using Alexander’s theory of binary codes. The language on the signs frames the segregationist “other” as morally wrong and of the anti-civil category. Conversely, the men in protest align themselves (the “we”) with civility with the words “moral,” “support,” and “human dignity.” Alexander writes, “the world of the ‘we’ becomes narrowed; the world of the ‘they’ becomes larger and assumes multifarious forms. It is not only groups outside of the nation-state that are disqualified from gaining entrance to civil society, but many groups inside it as well” (Alexander 2006:194). In this context, racial groups were being barred from civil society. Even though many members of these racial minorities are citizens of the country – inside civil society – they are being “disqualified from gaining entrance” through racist practices. Social movements like the Civil Rights Movement reflected in the photograph advocate for social change when the civil sphere is too fragmented and no longer unites people or provides equal opportunities. The civil sphere is the domain of social life where people organize and exercise their human rights and address injustice.

1. Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2006. “Uncivilizing Pressures and Civil Repair.” Pp. 193–209 in The Civil Sphere. Oxford University Press, USA.

2. Durkheim, Émile. 1982. The Rules of Sociological Method. 1. ed. New York, N.Y: Free Press.

3. “Protest by Ministers, Unknown Creator.” April 14, 1960. From Library of Congress. Retrieved March 27, 2025 (https://www.loc.gov/item/95514178/)