public schools, blacks were the targets of 530 acts of violence (direct
intimidation of black children and parents, bombings, and burnings)
designed to prevent school integration. This violence generated the
perception of another sort of setback in black progress. For the first time
since well before World War II, when lynchings had occurred at an
average rate of seventy-eight per year, blacks had to be concerned about
the basic safety of their families. The new violence was not limited to
the education issue, either. Peaceful civil-rights demonstrations of the
time were frequently confronted by hostile crowds—and police.
Still another type of downturn occurred—in pocketbook prog-ress.
In 1962, the income of a black family had slid back to 74 percent of that
of a similarly educated white family. By Davies’s argument, the most
illuminating aspect of this 74 percent figure is not that it represented a
long-term increase in prosperity from pre-1940s levels but that it repres-
ented a short-term decline from the flush mid-1950s levels. In the next
year came the Birmingham riots and, in staccato succession, scores of
violent demonstrations, building toward the major upheavals of Watts,
Newark, and Detroit.
In keeping with a distinct historical pattern of revolution, blacks in
the United States were more rebellious when their prolonged progress
was curtailed somewhat than they were before it began. This pattern
offers a valuable lesson for would-be rulers: When it comes to freedoms,
it is more dangerous to have given for a while than never to have given
at all. The problem for a government that seeks to improve the political
and economic status of a traditionally oppressed group is that, in so
doing, it establishes freedoms for the group where none existed before.
And should these now established freedoms become less available, there
will be an especially hot variety of hell to pay.
We can look to much more recent events in the former Soviet Union
for evidence that this basic rule still holds. After decades of repression,
Mikhail Gorbachev began granting the Soviet populace new liberties,
privileges, and choices via the twin policies of glasnost and perestroika.
Alarmed by the direction their nation was taking, a small group of
government, military, and KGB officials staged a coup, placing
Gorbachev under house arrest and announcing on August 19, 1991,
that they had assumed power and were moving to reinstate the old
order. Most of the world imagined that the Soviet people, known for
their characteristic acquiescence to subjugation, would passively yield
as they had always done. Time magazine editor Lance Morrow described
his own reaction similarly: “At first the coup seemed to confirm the
norm. The news administered a dark shock, followed immediately by
a depressed sense of resignation: of course, of course, the Russians must
Robert B. Cialdini Ph.D / 195