system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How did protestors during the Civil Rights Movement find the time to engage in such long protests?

I am curious if there was significant unemployment/underemployment among that population. And if it's possible that there is less long-term protesting currently in the United States because of higher employment rates among those with racial/equality/environmental grievances.
gpt
This is a great question that is commonly asked by social movements scholars: who is most likely to protest? You should check out the book "Freedom Summer" by Doug McAdam. It's about the civil rights movement and looks at why some university students spent their summer in the south helping people of color register to vote in a very hostile environment. 

Originally, sociologists thought protests were caused by things like high unemployment, alienation from their community, worsening conditions, etc. This school of thought is referred to as strain and breakdown theory. As we learned more about protest and saw everyday, middle-class folks take to the streets in the 1960s, our theories changed. Scholars realized that being unemployed or living in a bad environment weren't enough to get people marching in the streets. There are lots of structural factors and individual factors that cause people to protest. I'll briefly talk about the individual factors because that seems more relevant to your question.

In general, scholars have found that younger people with a supportive social network who have extra time and resources are more likely to protest. People who are more likely to hear about a protest (because they see a sign while walking around their university campus) or know a friend who will be going are more likely o protest. These and other personal characteristics that effect the likelihood of engaging in a protest are called "biographical availability." However, this doesn't give us the whole picture because there are lots of instances when people protest who have jobs, don't have time, don't have money, etc. 


 Social movements scholars are still trying to answer this question.