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When Americans assess the legacy of the civil rights movement, we usually count laws passed and barriers dismantled. Brown vs. Board of Education. The Civil Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act. These milestones reshaped American institutions. But they do not fully explain what happened.
Recent research suggests that the movement also produced a large and lasting psychological transformation — one that unfolded not in legislatures or courts, but in how Black Americans came to understand their own agency, their capacity to act in the world.
Noah Love and I, both researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center, examined more than 200 billion words published in American newspapers over the past century. Using methods from psychology, linguistics and data science, we sought to answer a simple question: Did the civil rights movement change how Americans — particularly Black Americans — expressed personal agency?
Personal agency is the belief “I can achieve my goals.” Decades of psychological research show that agency predicts effort, persistence, innovation and well-being. People who believe their actions matter try harder and persist longer; people who don’t, disengage. Agency is one of the most powerful drivers of human behavior that psychologists have identified.
But agency is difficult to measure historically. There were no national surveys of this mindset in the 1930s or 1950s. So we turned to language.
Language, at scale, provides a window into collective psychology. The words people use — especially repeatedly, over time — reflect how they think about causation, responsibility, effort and possibility. Psychologists have shown that changes in word use reliably track changes in emotion, personality and cognition.
We assembled two huge newspaper corpora: one consisting of newspapers owned and operated primarily by Black Americans and another consisting of predominantly white-owned newspapers. They spanned more than 100 years. We then analyzed for words that connote agentic thinking, such as terms associated with effort, initiative, control and achievement. We also tracked words capturing optimism and imagination.
We didn’t rely on a single definition or dictionary but drew on different theoretical traditions and methods, including one lexicon generated by an artificial intelligence large language model.
The results converged and were striking.
From the 1920s through the early 1950s, Black and white newspapers expressed similar levels of agency, and by some measures Black agency was lower. Then, beginning in the early 1960s, Black agency rose sharply. Within a few years, it surpassed white agency. And it stayed there — for decades.
The same pattern appeared for optimism and imagination. Around the time of the civil rights movement, Black newspapers increasingly used language associated with hope, possibility and future-oriented thinking. These were not brief spikes around particular events. They were sustained, multiyear shifts.
This matters because psychological change is often the missing link between structural reform and human outcomes. Laws do not act by themselves. They work through people — through their willingness to try, to persist, to innovate and to believe that effort is worthwhile.
The civil rights movement was an extraordinary display of agency in action: students staging sit-ins, families boycotting buses, ordinary citizens confronting violence and arrest. What our data suggest is that these visible acts coincided with — and likely helped generate — a deeper internal transformation. A sense of “we can” replaced a sense of “nothing will change.”
This does not mean the movement solved racism or erased inequality. It did not. Substantial gaps between Black and white Americans remain, particularly in health, education and imprisonment. Our findings do not minimize those realities.
But they do challenge the sentiment sometimes heard recently that the civil rights movement achieved little or nothing of lasting value — a claim expressed as some landmark legal progress of the 1960s has been rolled back in the 2000s. One of the movement’s most enduring achievements appears to be psychological. It cultivated a mindset that fuels continued striving, resilience and innovation. This is part of what the United States celebrates every June 19, marking the anniversary of enslaved people’s emancipation in Texas in 1865.
Causation, of course, runs both ways. Legal victories likely strengthened agency, and increased agency likely fueled further action. We see this as a reinforcing cycle: Agency drives action; successful action strengthens agency. Over time, that cycle can reshape a culture.
This research also points to a broader lesson about social change. Structural reforms matter deeply — but they are most powerful when they also alter how people see themselves. Progress is sustained not only by policy, but also by psychology.
The civil rights movement did more than change American law. It changed American minds. That psychological shift — measurable, durable and still visible today — may be its most important legacy.
Martin Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of the forthcoming “Agency: The Psychological History of Human Progress.”
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Ideas expressed in the piece
The article argues that the civil rights movement’s most underappreciated legacy is a profound and durable shift in how Black Americans see their own capacity to act in the world, contending that changes in law and institutions were accompanied by a large psychological transformation in personal agency.
It explains that personal agency — the belief “I can achieve my goals” — is a central driver of effort, persistence, innovation and well-being, and suggests that without such a mindset, even major legal victories cannot fully translate into improved life outcomes.
Drawing on an analysis of more than 200 billion words from Black-owned and white-owned American newspapers over the past century, the article describes how the authors tracked language associated with effort, initiative, control, achievement, optimism and imagination as a way to infer collective psychology over time.
It reports that from the 1920s through the early 1950s, Black and white newspapers expressed similar, and sometimes lower, levels of agentic language in Black outlets, but that beginning in the early 1960s — in tandem with the civil rights movement — Black newspapers showed a sharp rise in language of agency, optimism and future-oriented imagination that soon surpassed white newspapers and remained elevated for decades.
The article maintains that these shifts were not momentary spikes around famous events but sustained, multiyear changes, suggesting a deep cultural reorientation among Black Americans from a sense that “nothing will change” toward a collective belief that “we can” act effectively in the world.
It situates this linguistic and psychological change within the visible activism of the era — sit-ins, boycotts and mass demonstrations — arguing that the movement was itself an extraordinary assertion of agency whose public courage helped generate an internal shift in how many Black Americans understood their own power.
While acknowledging persistent and substantial racial gaps in health, education and imprisonment, the article contends that its findings challenge recent claims that the civil rights movement accomplished little of lasting value, especially as some of its legal gains have been eroded in recent decades.
To connect law and psychology, the piece emphasizes that reforms work only through people: legislation such as Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act may remove formal barriers, but their real impact depends on whether individuals and communities feel empowered to seize new opportunities and push further for change.[5][6]
The article further suggests that this interplay between external victories and internal belief forms a reinforcing cycle: increasing agency fuels action, successful action strengthens agency and, over time, this loop can reshape a community’s culture and expectations, much as grassroots organizers in groups like SNCC sought to destroy “psychological shackles” and demonstrate that ordinary people could perform extraordinary tasks.[4]
It links this psychological legacy to the broader meaning of Juneteenth, proposing that the holiday now marks not only emancipation from slavery but also the enduring, hard-won sense of possibility that undergirds continued striving for equality.
Finally, the article generalizes from this case, arguing that the civil rights era illustrates a broader lesson about social progress: structural reforms are essential, but the most powerful and lasting change occurs when policies also transform how people see themselves, making psychology — not just law — central to understanding what social movements achieve.
Different views on the topic
Many historians, legal scholars and activists continue to frame the civil rights movement’s core legacy primarily in structural terms — desegregation, federal civil rights protections and expanded voting rights — emphasizing landmark rulings like Brown v. Board of Education and statutes such as the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act as the movement’s defining achievements rather than focusing on psychological shifts.[5][6]
In this structuralist view, the most urgent debates center on the erosion of those legal gains, the persistence of residential and school segregation, mass incarceration and racial wealth gaps, leading some commentators to question whether a focus on “mindset” risks understating how deeply entrenched institutional racism remains despite the movement’s victories.[5]
Social democratic and Marxist perspectives that have praised civil rights strategist Bayard Rustin underscore a different skepticism: Rustin is cited for refusing to reduce inequality to a matter of psychology or to what white people think about Black people, instead stressing economic structures, labor power and social policy; these observers worry that emphasizing inner beliefs can distract from struggles over jobs, housing, unions and welfare-state protections.[2]
Within Black psychology, deconstructionist and reconstructionist scholars argue that mainstream, Eurocentric frameworks have long mischaracterized Black behavior and experience, focusing on individual traits while neglecting the role of racism, poverty and biased institutions; these researchers contend that genuine liberation requires transforming systems such as education and criminal justice, not just cultivating agency within individuals.[1]
Moreover, Black psychologists working from Afrocentric or reconstructionist approaches highlight concepts like Black self-concept, racial identity and “cultural mistrust” as rational responses to a history of oppression, arguing that distrust of white-controlled institutions should not be pathologized as a deficit in agency but understood as an adaptive stance in an unequal society.[1]
Some movement veterans and scholars influenced by Ella Baker’s critique of charismatic, top-down leadership insist that the most significant transformation was the creation of durable grassroots power and participatory democracy — the belief that “strong people don’t need strong leaders” — and caution that celebrating psychological uplift without measuring shifts in local control, organizational capacity and material conditions gives an incomplete picture of what freedom requires.[3]
Additionally, internal debates within the civil rights and Black freedom movements reveal unease with “feel good” narratives that stress pride, identity and attitude change while, in critics’ view, underplaying confrontations over economic justice and political power; Bayard Rustin, for example, became critical of cultural nationalist projects he saw as emphasizing symbolic affirmation over structural reform, signaling a broader concern that psychological narratives can become a substitute for harder fights over policy and redistribution.[2]
Finally, some historians of organizations like SNCC argue that the destruction of “psychological shackles” in the South was inseparable from hard-won, risky campaigns for voting rights, desegregation and community control, and therefore caution against treating shifts in language or self-concept as autonomous achievements rather than as byproducts of sustained, collective confrontation with entrenched power.[4]
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