Groups across the political spectrum use social media as a tool for effecting change. This article analyzes posts on the micro-blogging platform Twitter to compare the online advocacy of the NAACP—one of the oldest and most established racial justice organizations—to Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100)—a newer organization that emerged at the start of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013. Using data from an original dataset composed of 4,094 tweets posted from April 2016 to December 2016, I show that the NAACP is exponentially less likely than BYP100 to address issues related to gender and sexuality but significantly more likely to advocate for electoral political strategies like voting. Newer organizations do better at addressing a diverse African American constituency, but can neglect effective yet incremental reform strategies in favor of revolutionary rhetoric and action. This article encourages a consideration of how Black social movement organizations that are ostensibly very different can leverage multiple movement frames in service of a collective goal to combat racial violence and inequality. I conclude by considering organizational constraints that explain the differential rates with which these organizations discuss certain issues and the relative values of radical and mainstream political organizing.

This paper examines the relationship between race, socialism, and democracy in America. It is organized into five sections and a conclusion. The first section explores how socialism has been viewed by many black leaders and intellectuals as necessary, imperative perhaps, in the black struggle for material equality, and further investigates the relationship of this black perspective on socialism to white opposition. The second section uses the most recent historical work to identify the factors that have the stalled the development of socialism in America. I also assess how these factors have changed or not in terms of making the socialist project more likely. In the third section, I analyze available poll data on American opinion about socialism from the 1930s to the present. While the data show unambiguously increased support for socialism since the 1930s, socialism does not today command the support of a majority of the American people. In the fourth section I examine the paradigmatic Franklin Roosevelt presidency on how liberal Democratic presidents have avoided the socialist label while embracing socialist programs. The fifth section is a brief examination of what socialism—really existing socialism—means in the early twenty-first century, and the idea of “socialist smuggling” as manifested in the presidencies of FDR and Lyndon Johnson. The speculative conclusion asks what are the prospects for the socialist project, and whether the white liberal cosmopolitan bourgeoisie rather than the white working class might become a mass base for the socialist project.