ABSTRACT
For much of their history in the United States, African Americans have been excluded from the normal, routine processes of political participation such as lobbying, voting, elections, and political parties. Indeed, in the Republic’s more than 200-year history, African Americans have been included as nearly full participants for less than 50 years-the 10-year Reconstruction period from 1867 to 1877 plus the years since the adoption of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. As for much of their history, African Americans have been excluded from the interest group, electoral, and party systems, and they have had to resort to social movements to challenge the exclusionary system. William Gamson makes this point when he observes that in the United States certain groups have been systematically denied entry into the political process and gain entry only through protest or system crisis-what he calls “the breakdown of the normal operation of the system or through demonstration on the part of challenging groups of a willingness to violate ‘rules of the game’ by resorting to illegitimate means of carrying on political conflict.”1
