It’s a system of power that is always deciding in the name of humanity who deserves to be remembered and who deserves to be forgotten. . . . We are much more than we are told. We are much more beautiful.
—Eduardo Galeano1
American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
—James Baldwin, “A Talk to Teachers”2
BY THE TURN OF THE MILLENNIUM, the history of the civil rights movement had become a national story. When asked to name a “most famous American” other than a president “from Columbus to today,” high school students most often chose Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks.3 Students chose two freedom fighters who in life had challenged the racial injustice at the heart of American society and who had often been treated as “un-American” for doing so. Now the civil rights movement had come to embody American grit, courage, and resolve, and these two activists could be invoked as the country’s most famous emblems.
Arguably beginning when President Ronald Reagan signed the bill in 1983 to make the third Monday of January a federal holiday for Martin Luther King Jr., the political uses of memorializing the movement took on heightened possibility as a national narrative. Fifteen years of opposition to the holiday gave way to recognizing its political utility. The civil rights movement became a way for the nation to feel good about its progress—and King’s legacy became enshrined in his “dream speech.” His popularity expanded. By 1987, 76 percent of Americans held a favorable opinion of the civil rights leader, almost the reverse of his popularity at the end of his life (only 28 percent of Americans had a favorable opinion of him in 1966).4 President after president, from Reagan to Bush to Clinton to Obama, hailed King’s “dream” in their tributes to him. With these national stamps of approval, the civil rights leader’s broader commitments to challenging the “giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism” and his legacy of sustained struggle shrank further into the background.5
At the same time, memorials to the civil rights movement became national events—from President Bill Clinton’s trip to Little Rock for the fortieth anniversary of the Little Rock Nine’s desegregation of Central High School, to Congress’s decision to have Rosa Parks’s coffin lie in honor in the Capitol, to the First Family’s trip to Selma, Alabama, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery march. These national events honored not just the work of the civil rights activists but the advancement of the nation itself. They marked the Americanness of the civil rights struggle, and held up the power of US democracy and progress to the world.
Political leaders, pundits, and citizens came to see and tell the story of the modern civil rights movement as one of progress and national redemption.6 Jim Crow was framed as a horrible Southern relic, and the movement to unseat it became a powerful tale of courageous Americans defeating a long-ago evil. Activists from Paul Robeson to Malcolm X—who had once been deemed national security threats—showed up on postage stamps. A movement that had challenged the very fabric of US politics and society was turned into one that demonstrated how great and expansive the country was—a story of individual bravery, natural evolution, and the long march to “a more perfect union.”
A story that should have reflected the immense injustices at the nation’s core and the enormous lengths people had gone to attack them had become a flattering mirror. The popular history of the civil rights movement now served as testament to the power of American democracy. This framing was appealing—simultaneously sober about the history of racism, lionizing of Black courage, celebratory of American progress, and strategic in masking (and at times justifying) current inequities. This history as national progress naturalized the civil rights movement as an almost inevitable aspect of American democracy rather than as the outcome of Black organization and intrepid witness. It suggested racism derived from individual sin rather than from national structure—and that the strength of American values, rather than the staggering challenge of a portion of its citizens, led to its change.7 The movement had largely washed away the sins of the nation, and America’s race problem could be laid to rest with a statue in the Capitol.
In the process, politicians and others shrank the progressive, expansive, challenging vision of the modern Black freedom struggle into something more passive, individualistic, and privatized—a dream diluted and distorted. The celebration of the movement became a way to avoid acknowledging the “enormous gap between [America’s] practices and its professions,” as historian John Hope Franklin had explained.8 And it became a way to take the beauty and power away from one of the most successful social movements of the twentieth century and the vision it offers us for today.
The recounting of national histories is never separate from present-day politics. What of the past is remembered, celebrated, and mourned is at the core of national identity—and the process of what is told and not told is often a function of power. The act of making an historical tribute necessarily resolves it and fixes it in time and place. As anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot observes, the task of commemoration “help[s] to create, modify or sanction the public meanings attached to historical events deemed worthy of mass celebration . . . to create a past that seems both more real and more elementary.”9 The use of the word “history” itself is slippery, Trouillot reminds us: “In vernacular use, history means both the facts of the matter and a narrative of those facts, both ‘what happened’ and ‘that which is said to have happened.’”10 Thus, reflection on popular uses of history is crucial as “we move closer to an era when professional historians will have to position themselves more clearly within the present, lest politicians, magnates, or ethnic leaders alone write history for them.”11 Memorials in their essence are for the dead, for events long since over. And the task of honoring can also be a form of stripping and silencing.12
Racial injustice is America’s original sin and deepest silence.13 The ways the country came to honor the civil rights movement were not simply about paying tribute to these courageous acts and individuals in the past but also about sanctioning what will—and will not be—faced about the nation’s history and present. Explained former Birmingham mayor David Vann: “The best way to put your bad images to rest is to declare them history and put them in a museum.”14 So, paradoxically, the ways the nation has memorialized the civil rights movement has become a way to maintain such silences. The history of American racism had become just that . . . history. While these tributes honored the movement, they simultaneously depoliticized the scope of the struggle, distorted the work of the activists honored, demonized Black anger, and obscured ongoing calls for racial justice through a celebration of a nearly postracial, self-correcting America.
No better proof of the country’s progress was the election and presidency of Barack Obama. Movement symbolism was highlighted throughout the 2008 election, both by the Obama campaign itself and by others. Candidate Obama accepted the Democratic nomination for president on August 28, 2008—the forty-fourth anniversary of the March on Washington.15 Posters decorated churches and community centers, telephone poles and schools, delineating this historical progression: “Rosa sat so Martin could walk. Martin walked so Obama could run. Obama ran so our children could fly.” By voting for him, individuals could help realize the dream. Many trumpeted Obama’s victory as the culmination of the civil rights movement and a testament to a “postracial America”—an America that had largely moved past its history of racism. Even those who did not share such a rosy view of American progress were awed by the immensity of seeing the election of a Black man to the presidency of the United States. Given the momentous nature of his victory, referencing the history of the movement became more central to the presidency of Barack Obama than that of any of his predecessors—and the president himself, his supporters, and many commentators regularly appealed to its legacy.
And the public who elected him rejoiced in it. Used as a way to bask in our own association with this grand historical line, the civil rights movement had become our national redemption song. The election of President Obama made many of his supporters feel like we had overcome. It had delivered us. And therein lay the danger—rather than a rung on a steep ladder, the election became the zenith, the top of that climb, where all who wished could take credit for the triumph.
Many people, President Obama included, didn’t subscribe to this postracial idea. Indeed, he explicitly said that the United States was not a postracial society. But he did subscribe to the idea that we were almost there. At the historic Brown Chapel in Selma, Alabama, during the campaign in 2007, he said the civil rights generation “took us 90 percent of the way there, but we still got that 10 percent in order to cross over to the other side.”16 Just 10 percent—not a fundamental, woven-into-our-institutions racism requiring policy and institutional transformation but a remnant racism. And therein lay the seduction of the almost-there.
To support this almost-there, 10-percent-to-go idea, the version of the movement promoted in these memorials and public tributes distorted and diminished the history of the period. The genius of this almost-there frame was that it acknowledged the history of racism but then simultaneously claimed that America had now largely moved past it. It honored the role of courageous struggle but then asserted that we didn’t necessarily need such civil disobedience anymore (and, in fact, contemporary protesters were often treated as an affront to King’s legacy).
A narrative of dreamy heroes and accidental heroines, the story was narrowed to buses and lunch counters and Southern redneck violence. It became a key way that Americans publicly acknowledged the country’s legacy of racial injustice—in the past—where the death-defying courage and sacrifices of these heroes and heroines vanquished it, as opposed to in the present, where our own resolve might be needed as well. And it became a way the nation celebrated its own identity; President Obama at the fiftieth anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery march characterized the civil rights movement as a “manifestation of a creed written into our founding documents.”17
This frame was advanced not just by liberals; conservatives joined in. In the second Republican presidential debate in 2015, contenders Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Donald Trump all named Rosa Parks as the woman they would chose for the ten-dollar bill. Weeks before the 2016 election, Trump lawyer Michael Cohen tweeted a photo of Trump, Muhammad Ali, and Rosa Parks to demonstrate that candidate Trump was “a man for ALL people!” When controversy over President Trump’s nomination of Jeff Sessions for attorney general sparked massive controversy, supporters of Sessions detailed his long embrace of Rosa Parks. And when he met with the pope on his first foreign trip, in May 2017, Trump gave him a firstedition set of Martin Luther King Jr.’s writings and a piece of granite from the King memorial sculpture in Washington, DC.18
Invoking the civil rights movement had become a clever suit to assert one’s enlightened bona fides. It crossed party and ideology. Simply everyone was doing it. In the process, these inspirational stories, with their distortions, embellishments, and omissions, had taken on the power of a national fable. This fable became a new way to paper over the long history of struggle and enduring racial injustice in the United States today. With their element of self-congratulation, these often bipartisan acts of memorialization whitewashed the history of the movement, becoming a veil to obscure enduring racial inequality, a tool to chastise contemporary protest, and a shield to charges of indifference and inaction.
While seemingly bestowing great honor on freedom fighters of old, this national mythologizing of the civil rights movement also took the movement away from everyday people, from community leaders and young activists and elder freedom fighters seeking to understand where the country was and how to build movements today. It turned it into scratchy church clothes, admirable but uncomfortable, and not meant for daily use but appreciation from afar. The iconization of King and Parks and the erasure of many other leaders and participants seemed to suggest that Americans, particularly young people of color today, could not do what these civil rights heroes and heroines did. At a time when new movements for racial and economic justice have emerged on the national scene, this fable of the movement became a potent obstacle and bludgeon used to diminish contemporary efforts, making today’s activists seem inappropriate troublemakers who lacked the gravitas of yesterday’s activists and who just weren’t going about it the right way.
The public spectacle of these memorials at times provides a shield for present-day action and inaction, a live-action “split screen”: a coterie of political leaders dedicating the Rosa Parks statue on the day the Supreme Court heard arguments in Shelby County v. Holder (the suit that successfully challenged part of the Voting Rights Act); President Trump taking Martin Luther King’s writings as a gift to Pope Francis in the same week he introduced a budget that gutted many of the social programs these freedom fighters had won. The “split screen” was not simply ironic; it was useful in rendering contemporary issues and injustices as far different from the ones these movements fought against.
During President Obama’s second term, a new movement brewing over years blossomed onto the national scene. Growing outrage over the “new Jim Crow,”19 the execution of Troy Davis, the killing of Trayvon Martin and subsequent acquittal of George Zimmerman, the incarceration of Marissa Alexander, the police killing of Michael Brown and the movement on the streets of Ferguson that subsequently erupted, and the death in custody of Sandra Bland and the “Say Her Name” campaign galvanized into what has become known as Black Lives Matter (BLM). Alongside these were courageous struggles for immigrant and indigenous rights, in which new generations of Latinx and Native Americans joined elders to carry the fight in new directions, from United We Dream, undocumented student organizing, and #Not1More (opposing deportations) movements to Standing Rock and #NoDAPL (No Dakota Access Pipeline).
For many participants and longtime activists, including Harry Belafonte and many former members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the continuities of struggle were readily apparent. But this national fable of the civil rights movement became a weapon some used against these new movements for justice, as comparison after comparison was made to the civil rights movement to find BLM wanting. Across the political spectrum, from presidential candidate Mike Huckabee to Reverend Barbara Reynolds to Atlanta mayor Kasim Reed, many made comparisons with the civil rights movement to critique and chastise new movements for justice, holding up the civil rights movement as the “right” way to do it and Black Lives Matter as the wrong way. In advance of the grand jury verdict in Ferguson, former Republican presidential candidate and Arkansas governor Huckabee wrote a blog post instructing the protesters in Ferguson to be more like Martin Luther King Jr. The Reverend Barbara Reynolds, herself part of the civil rights movement, took to the pages of the Washington Post to draw a deep distinction:
Many in my crowd admire the cause and courage of these young activists but fundamentally disagree with their approach. Trained in the tradition of Martin Luther King Jr., we were nonviolent activists who won hearts by conveying respectability and changed laws by delivering a message of love and unity. BLM seems intent on rejecting our proven methods.20
In July 2016, Atlanta mayor Kasim Reed invoked King’s spirit and the power of free speech but then explained to reporters the large police presence at demonstrations following police killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile: “Dr. King would never take a highway.”21 There is something deeply ahistorical and ironic to call for voices muted, tactics softened, disruption avoided, and more honorable spokesmen located, when these very criticisms were lobbed at the civil rights movement as well. And there is something convenient, too—a way of justifying remove, by making it seem as if people would join movements such as BLM if the upstanding likes of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King were part of it, but these new movements were just going about it the wrong way. Looking more deeply into the Black freedom struggle challenges such misuses of civil rights history and reveals the politics behind this mythmaking.
Public tributes and invocations of the movement provide lessons on the past to secure our national identity in the present.22 The fable of the civil rights movement traffics in an “epistemology of ignorance,” as philosopher Charles Mills has explained it, selective and distorted in what is seen and remembered. “White misunderstanding, misrepresentation, evasion and self deception on matters of race are among the most pervasive mental phenomena of the past few hundred years,” Mills writes. “And these phenomena are in no way accidental, but prescribed . . . which requires a certain schedule of structured blindnesses and opacities in order to establish and maintain the white polity.”23 These stories flatter us as a country, minimizing our failings and marking our progress as inexorable, as opposed to deeply contested and often eroded.
This book thus takes up the political uses and radical possibilities of civil rights history in twenty-first-century America. Given the centrality and misuse of civil rights history in current American politics, a considered analysis is urgently needed to grapple with the “structured blindnesses” in this national fable—to see the ways the stories they tell and the elements they leave out and distort are perilous for our present. These civil rights mis-histories befuddle us. Inspiring and powerful, they leave us in our feelings of sadness, surprise, awe, and guilt, and in doing so, help to obscure what the movement entailed, how it happened, what it stood for, and how it challenges us today. By diminishing the substance and scope of American racism and what the movement actually involved, these renderings work to maintain current injustice, at times chastising contemporary protesters in ways similar to the ways civil rights activists were demonized, and blind us to how we might do it again.
They are not the histories we need. As a nation, we need fuller histories—uncomfortable, sobering histories—that hold a mirror to the nation’s past and offer far-reaching lessons for seeing the injustices of our current moment and the task of justice today. “The historian’s task,” as British historian Tony Judt reminds, “is to tell what is almost always an uncomfortable story and explain why the discomfort is part of the truth we need to live well and live properly. A well-organized society is one in which we know the truth about ourselves collectively, not one in which we tell pleasant lies about ourselves.”24 To know the truth about ourselves collectively reveals the immensity and ongoing nature of the modern Black freedom struggle, the injustices that continue in many of our current policies, and the problematic assumptions that support them.
The modern Black freedom struggle remains one of the most important examples of the power of ordinary people to change the course of the nation. But the popular stories we get impoverish our ability to see how change happens. A more expansive history transforms how we imagine what a movement looks like, sounds like, and pushes for, and understand how it is received and often reviled. It shows us that leadership, vision, steadfastness, and courage came in many forms, as did the opposition to it. Giving us necessary tools for understanding the past, it suggests lessons for long-distance runners in the struggle for racial and social justice today.
This book, in certain ways, expands on my last. The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks opened with an analysis of Rosa Parks’s funeral. In October 2005, Parks became the first woman and second African American to lie in honor at the US Capitol.25 But, as I argued in the book’s introduction, the congressional and presidential stampede to honor her could not be separated from the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina two months earlier and the growing national outrage about the federal government’s inaction and negligence. Searing, persistent racial and social inequality had pierced national and media consciousness in the aftermath of the storm, and Rosa Parks’s coffin on display at the Capitol became a way to paper over those more unsettling images from New Orleans. Resurrected in the Capitol as a national saint, this honor for Parks became a way to lay the nation’s history of racial injustice to rest—a gross distortion of what the lifelong freedom fighter had believed. This, however, necessitated a distorted, gendered image of a quiet, tired Parks confined to the bus on that long-ago December evening—an “accidental” heroine rather than a long-standing activist whose belief in the need for continuing struggle lasted until her death.
The outpouring of interest in The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks and in numerous other recently published civil rights histories suggest that many Americans hunger not only for a more substantive civil rights history but also for a critical analysis of the ways these popular fables are wielded in the present. As I have traveled around the country, it has become clear to me how much people crave analyses of the political uses of these fables and wish to know why we get the histories we get and what the stakes are in turning Rosa Parks into a quiet, meek, children’s book character. There is a deep desire to understand the process by which she, and by extension the movement, are honored and simultaneously distorted in ways that diminish her legacy, the work of other activists, and the movement’s disruptive, far-reaching challenge.
At the same time, I have seen a profound hunger for a fuller history of the modern Black freedom struggle—an abiding desire for a more accurate accounting of how it happened, to understand the long history of racial struggle in this country and how we might continue to build struggles for justice today. Over and over, I have heard people say that they suspected that there was more to the story; they describe feeling uneasy with popular accounts of the movement but didn’t have the knowledge to upend them. Over and over, from fast-food workers in the Fight for $15 to activists of the Moral Mondays movement to BLM organizers across the country, I have heard how these fuller histories of Rosa Parks and the civil rights movement are more challenging and empowering for where we are today, sustaining community organizers in their work, identifying the forces of injustice more fully, and furthering their imagination in the struggle for a more just society. And so this book, A More Beautiful and Terrible History, seeks to accomplish a related goal—to deconstruct the stories and memorials of the civil rights movement we have received and construct new knowledge and the more robust and fuller history we need for today.
Rosa Parks plays a key role in this book, as does Martin Luther King Jr. Even after spending more than a dozen years researching and speaking about Parks, I continue to be astonished by the incessant, absurd, and chilling misuses of Parks and King. These two freedom fighters have been turned into Thanksgiving parade balloons—floating above us larger than life; unthreatening, happy patriots. Asking little of us, they bob along proud of our progress.26 King and Parks are embraced yet simultaneously stripped of their political substance and courageous steadfastness (and what their legacies demand of us today). These elaborate spectacles of honor and tribute function to distract us from the responsibility of harnessing such resolve in ourselves and from reckoning with what Parks’s and King’s legacies reveal about the nation and its current policies and direction. An important trove of Rosa Parks’s papers is finally open at the Library of Congress, providing new vantages for examining her work and the broader history of the movement. Similarly with King: the more we look, the more we see how misused and limited our views of him have become—particularly the ways King’s work in the Jim Crow North and his critique of liberal racism have been largely ignored.
Included here too is a broader cast of characters—Barbara Johns, Ruth Batson, Ellen Jackson, Marnesba Tackett, Coretta Scott King, Gloria Richardson, Ella Baker, Mae Mallory, Milton Galamison, Claudette Colvin, Mary Louise Smith, Albert Cleage, Johnnie Tillmon, Julian Bond, Dan Aldridge, Pauli Murray, Anna Arnold Hedgeman, Lawrence Bible, E. D. Nixon, Johnnie Carr. Leadership and vision took many forms and grew in many places. Each chapter returns to a moment we are familiar with—the Montgomery bus boycott, Boston’s busing crisis, the Watts riot, the March on Washington—and shows it anew, in wider context with richer detail and analysis to examine the distortions and silences that have been embedded in our popular understandings. At the same time, this book introduces lesser-known struggles—Black parent battles against unequal schooling in Los Angeles and New York, the welfare rights movement of the 1960s and the Poor People’s Campaign, long-standing efforts challenging the injustices of law enforcement and the criminal justice system in the decade before the bus boycott and in the years before uprisings in Watts and Detroit. By showing how much larger, more beautiful, and more terrifying the Black freedom struggle was, it seeks to return the movement to those of us who need it now—so we might see a way forward in the perilous times in which we live.
Perhaps white America needs this form of hypocrisy to survive.
Perhaps white Am—E. Franklin Frazier, on viewing The Birth of a Nation27
National histories provide narratives about the past that ennoble the present. “Writing our national history,” the late historian Nathan Huggins reminds, “we do so with a master narrative in our heads that sustains our collective sense of national purpose and identity, and resonates with our most compelling myths.” What is needed, Huggins argued, is to “face the deforming mirror of truth.”28
The popular histories of the civil rights movement do just the opposite, casting a flattering mirror on the nation. While produced under very different circumstances, they have served a function similar to the popular histories of Reconstruction that developed at the turn of the twentieth century to legitimize the rise of Jim Crow America.29 Both have become the necessary glue that binds and justifies current public policy and national identity.
The distorted histories of Reconstruction that developed in the late nineteenth century were necessary for the establishment of a segregated American polity. Promoting reconciliation and national unity, early popular historical treatments explained Reconstruction as a corrupt and misguided experiment brought on by Northern carpetbaggers and misguided Black people.30 By portraying American slavery as a relatively benign institution in which Black people were largely content, these versions demonstrated why no further federal government intervention was needed and allowed for Southern redemption and Northern indifference. These Reconstruction mis-histories reached their national pinnacle in D. W. Griffith’s 1915 award-winning film, The Birth of a Nation, with its portrayal of two families on opposite sides of the Civil War and its positive account of the Klan. It was the first film ever to be screened at the White House.
By depicting newly freed Black people as angry, sexually promiscuous, and dangerous people who illegitimately sought special rights, popular histories of slavery and Reconstruction cast the changes of Reconstruction as unnecessary and presented Black people as in need of control. At the same time, popular treatments were nostalgic for the good Black people of the past, who had served well and happily. Showing white people in a largely flattering light, they framed Black people as undeserving of full rights and as being responsible for their own problems, thus necessitating an end to the changes of Reconstruction. W. E. B. Du Bois, in his 1935 classic Black Reconstruction in America, referred to these stories as “the propaganda of history” for “giving us a false but pleasurable sense of accomplishment.”31
So too are these mis-histories of the civil rights movement necessary at the dawn of the twenty-first century in promoting the idea of an exceptional America moving past its own racism. Though vastly different on the surface (the latter seemingly positive, the former vicious and negative), popular histories of the civil rights movement operate similarly to show why no further government intervention is needed. A tribute to a quiet heroine and a dreamy hero proves that good values and individual acts are rewarded—that once revealed, real injustice is eradicated in a democracy like America. Excessive behavior (anger and recklessness, and refusal to behave respectably or to use proper methods for expressing grievances) by a new generation of Black people is again cast as the cause of many current problems, and such behavior must be checked and challenged to maintain this noble progress. Early histories of Reconstruction advanced national reconciliation and explained why no further action from the federal government was needed, while allowing for the criminalization of Black people and promoting a cheapened labor supply. And these recent civil rights commemorations and popular renderings of the civil rights movement often do the same.
Civil rights mis-histories give us a “pleasurable sense of accomplishment,” thus becoming a key linchpin in the idea of an almost postracial America. US democracy, in this version, is a self-cleaning oven, powerful, strong, and constantly self-improving; injustice is aberrational and once revealed is eliminated in a country built to move past its own mistakes. Self-cleaning ovens work by burning up everything in them; so too is history incinerated to make room for the fable. This “self-cleaning America” fable conveniently makes it seem as if the United States was destined to have a great civil rights movement, and that most people did the right thing at the time. This is a pleasurable idea, to be sure, but one that obscures a much more sobering reality: how hard and infrequent such courage was; how tenacious and steadfast activists had to be; how much pressure people exerted against the movement; and how part of that counter-resistance has been to dim and diminish the movement’s goals, trajectories, and visions.
The book opens with an analysis of the “Histories We Get,” tracing the development of this national fable and its uses, from the establishment of a federal holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr. to the avalanche of popular commemorations and memorials that occurred around the Obama presidency to the ways the civil rights movement has been invoked around Black Lives Matter and the turn of the Trump presidency. I use the word fable purposely, because fables are tales that provide morals on how to live or ways of understanding society. While containing real heroes and villains and nuggets of fact, they are stories embellished, fabricated, and distorted for a purpose. This history we get is a fable. Distorting and obscuring the truth, what has become the national story of the civil rights movement provides ways of understanding the past that have political uses in the present.
While in much of my previous work I have used the phrase the “Black freedom struggle” because it captures the movement’s ideological, regional, and temporal expansiveness, I also use the phrase the “civil rights movement” here. The national fable consciously honors the “civil rights movement,” and so the task here is to explicitly show that the civil rights movement was never what is now believed about it. Therefore, I consciously use the term “civil rights movement” to insist that the heart of the struggle, its most iconic people and moments, and the breadth of its vision, leaders, strategies, struggles, and accomplishments are far different from our popular renderings of them.
The nine chapters that follow, the “Histories We Need,” will examine and fill in nine key silences and distortions in the popular fable of the movement to show how our past—and present—look different by reckoning with this much fuller history of the modern Black freedom struggle. These chapters draw on my own research, particularly on Los Angeles, Boston, Detroit, and New York, and the long history of racism outside the South, and on the role of women and high school students in the movement (including new research on Rosa Parks32). And they build on a vast body of historical studies published over the past two decades to address the gaps in these popular notions of the civil rights movement. In many ways, this history is hidden in plain sight—an avalanche of recent research has challenged the national fable of the movement and American racism from myriad angles.33 The fable has grown more powerful at a time when academic scholarship, which decisively repudiates it, has gotten prodigiously richer.34 And so the task of putting these popular tales in conversation with the scholarship is more necessary today than ever.
These chapters take on many of the accepted stories of the movement to show them in a far different light. We see a decade-long movement challenging school and housing segregation and police brutality in Los Angeles before the Watts riots, which in turn reveals the willfulness of the “surprise” of public officials and journalists over Black anger. We see twenty-five years of Black struggle attacking school segregation and educational inequality in the Cradle of Liberty before “Boston’s busing crisis.” We see Rosa Parks not simply as the bus lady but as a lifelong criminal justice activist; Martin Luther King Jr. challenging not only Southern sheriffs but also Northern liberals; and Coretta Scott King not just as Martin’s “helpmate” but as a lifelong economic justice and peace activist pushing her husband’s activism in those directions. And we see that far from being acceptable, passive, or unified, the civil rights movement was unpopular, disruptive, and deeply persevering. It had a broad vision for what justice looked like and what equality would entail. Those who drove it forward were old and young, women and men, and most were labeled troublemakers for their work, not just in Selma and Birmingham but also in Detroit and New York. A majority of Americans didn’t like it, the federal government feared it, and many good people kept a distance. And we see the work and power of the organizing that made it possible, which shows that there was nothing natural or inevitable about the changes the movement wrought, highlighting the relentless courage, effort, and vision it took to imagine a different America.
These nine chapters revisit a set of events we think we know. The goal is to analyze gaps and omissions in how we have come to understand the civil rights movement, not to tell a comprehensive history of the movement. Many pivotal moments are not included, from the 1961 Freedom Rides to Milwaukee’s open housing movement, and many crucial freedom fighters, such as Fannie Lou Hamer and Bayard Rustin, are mentioned only briefly or not at all. The book’s focus on challenging certain key mythologies of the movement does not represent the sum total of important scholarship published over the past two decades on the modern Black freedom struggle but identifies some strands that are crucial to understanding what the movement encompassed and involved and how it has been distorted. It focuses on Black activism and does not cover the variety of struggles by Latinx, Asian Americans, and Native Americans occurring at the time. There is an emphasis on Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr.—in part because these activists are so regularly invoked, distorted, and misappropriated that it seems necessary to set the record straight around the breadth of their political work and vision, and the ways their efforts were received at the time. And there is an emphasis on the struggle in the North because it is so excluded from our popular renderings of the movement.
Suggesting the urgent need to learn from the history of the modern Black freedom struggle and map continuities with present struggles is not meant to claim that the civil rights movement is the gold standard by which everything must be measured. Today’s movements for racial justice do not have to be the civil rights movement. They face new conditions, innovate different strategies, build different webs of connections, use new technologies, and, particularly, embody intersectional justice in ways different from the movements detailed in this book.35 But the civil rights movement occupies an increasingly central place in our national identity, so the need to analyze its misuses and grapple with its substance has grown more urgent. The scope of its vision has been narrowed in the service of those in power. The diversity of people who conceived, built, and led that struggle has been diminished, in part because their example offers such a potent challenge to where we are today. The extent of their courage has been obscured—because to see their imaginative relentlessness is to understand more fully the power of what they were up against and how they saw it could be changed.
While the civil rights movement is regularly celebrated for the way it demonstrates the power of ordinary Americans to change the course of the nation, what a host of activists did and how they did it is far more beautiful than we’ve been taught. The terrible diversity of people and forces that stood in the movement’s way has been papered over as well. In an America of disproportionate Black poverty and persistent school inequality, with a criminal justice system riven with inequalities and an imperial foreign policy that justifies far-ranging constitutional abuses and record numbers of deportations, a fuller history of the movement is imperative for seeing a way forward. In an America that, across party lines, asserts its own exceptionalism, this history reveals long-standing investment in and deflection of racial injustice domestically and globally. In an America where Donald Trump’s overt racial appeals now occupy the White House, the country requires a more serious and sober history to see clearly who we are and how we got here—and where we must go from here. We need this history more than ever.