“Standing Up in the Heartland”: The Oklahoma City Lunch Counter Sit-Ins, 1957–1964

As discussed in previous chapters, the Master Narrative provides a static description of social action, obscuring the complicated relationships between agency, culture, social structure, and situations in social movements. The Border Campaign provides an alternate, more dynamic typology by incorporating spatial, temporal, and cultural dimensions to structural axes of inquiry. This approach better captures the disparate actions of individuals by considering how their actions coalesce into collective action without collapsing or eliding them into agency or structure. Emphasizing the relationship between agency and structure illumines how they are mediated by ideas embedded in cultural systems and thus influence people’s actions.