A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2018

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Introduction

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-7

Chapter 8-Afterword

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 2: “The Histories We Need”

Chapter 1 Summary: “The Long Movement Outside the South”

Popular civil rights narratives suggest the crucial activism, interventions, and racism were limited to the American South. This chapter exposes the North’s many efforts to challenge segregation, and it corrects the myth that anti-Black racism was a uniquely Southern issue. The author also stresses that the major civil rights protests and battles in the North spanned decades, from the 1940s to the 1980s.

The chapter discusses two case studies from Northern cities. The first is the long struggle to desegregate public schools in New York. A zoning system purposefully funneled Black and white children into separate schools, but “school officials […] cast the issue of segregation as something beyond [their] control” (37). Commentators invented the myth of “de facto” segregation—segregation that results not from policy but simply from people’s personal decisions. In reality, New York law absolutely enforced segregation. Distorting the causes of segregation became a powerfully persuasive tool in a long and ultimately unsuccessful struggle to genuinely desegregate New York City’s public schools.

While lambasting Southern cities for resisting desegregation, powerful people in New York and other cities outside of the South refused to challenge local systems that formally upheld segregation, like zoning or busing policy. The next case study is Boston. There is a well-known narrative of the “Boston busing crisis,” but again, the narrative holds that the real issue was not underlying racism and inequality. Officials outright denied racism and framed the issue around the logistics and finances involved in new busing routes. The author says that forced desegregation, which came to Boston in 1974, “provoked some of the ugliest antidesegregation demonstrations in the history of the civil rights movement” (55).

The image of a non-racist North was not invented in retrospect: It circulated even throughout the civil rights movement. The false, blameless image enabled city officials to skirt systemic factors that upheld white supremacy, while these same officials denied accountability for the plight of Black people. Southern segregationists as well as civil rights activists called out the hypocrisy of Northern officials who verbally supported African Americans but staunchly defended segregation under different guises. Among the Northern commentators’ key narratives was that Black people were responsible for their own conditions (51). This pervasive myth also deflected blame from people in positions of actual power. Civil rights activists and allies challenged the image of unmotivated Black children and unprincipled Black parents, but those images persisted in the popular imagination.

Chapter 2 Summary: “Revisiting the Uprisings of the 1960s and the Long History of Injustice and Struggle That Preceded Them”

There are again two central case studies in this chapter: Los Angeles and Detroit. Expanding the geographic scope from the eastern seaboard, Theoharis demonstrates that civil rights conflict and activism spanned the entire country. Many patterns in the Midwest and on the West Coast, however, mirrored cities on the East Coast.

The LA story is famous in popular memory as the “Watts Riot.” The author explains that in most enduring narratives of the civil rights movement,

systemic racial injustice and a noble movement are located in the South. The Watts riot becomes the first introduction to the Northern racial landscape outside the South—and Black communities there are cast as angry, alienated, and unwilling to work through ‘proper channels’ (64).

The myth that civil rights protests in LA and Detroit were wholly disconnected from the nonviolent activism of Martin Luther King Jr. served to discredit those protests. King (and Parks and others) however, “had pointedly criticized the willful disregard of movements and ‘resistance to change’” in both cities before conflict exploded into “riots” and “uprisings” in the 1960s (63). According to the 1960 Census, “Los Angeles was more segregated than any city in the South” (66), and yet city and school officials denied that public schools reflected any intentional segregation whatsoever (like officials elsewhere in the North).

A major topic of civil rights protests in LA was police brutality, and it was in this context that the uprising in and around the Watts neighborhood erupted in August 1965. A week-long battle between Black protestors and LA police resulted in 34 deaths and hundreds of injuries. The media presented the news as though it had exploded out of nowhere. In reality, Black activists and their allies had tried for decades to challenge racism in LA through many tactics.

In Detroit, the major uprising came in 1967. Similarly, it trailed many decades of protest against the city’s inequality, namely “deep housing and school segregation, job discrimination, and patterns of police harassment and brutality” (74). In 1963, 200 thousand people marched to address these issues. Activists carried out many more demonstrations for years, but city officials remained unmoved and upheld the false image of the city as racially progressive. The breaking point came in 1967 when police moved to shut down an after-hours bar at which many Black patrons were gathered to welcome home returning soldiers from Vietnam. Witnesses reported police shooting out lights, intentionally damaging Black businesses, and arresting thousands of people without cause (78). An unofficial city tribunal found police guilty of all charges. Theoharis makes it clear that ample evidence supported these charges.

After these uprisings, both “California and Michigan became key sites in the development of Black Power” (81). White officials’ and residents’ refusal to acknowledge Black grievances and work towards equality fueled enduring resistance efforts.

Chapters 1-2 Analysis

The first two chapters in “The Histories We Need” broaden the geographical and temporal scopes of the civil rights movement beyond its popular understanding. Conflict and protest predated the 1950s and extended well beyond the 1960s, particularly outside the South where officials distorted and effectively excused systemic racism and its impact, keeping resistance alive and adaptive. Acknowledging this wider scope of activism and pushback provides an opportunity to more deeply study American anti-Black racism and to credit underappreciated historical figures for their interventions and efforts.

Though popular memory has divorced Northern, Midwestern, and Western sites of civil rights activism from the “true” movement in the South, African Americans across the nation understood themselves to be “part of a national freedom movement” informed by King’s teachings and working against racist structures both widespread and regionally-specific (67). Theoharis discusses and credits individual activists—particularly Black women—who undertook huge efforts but who often go unacknowledged. In New York, for example, Ella Baker “worked in a variety of community organizations” in Harlem and directly challenged New York officials on zoning and teacher placement policies (36). Additionally, Rosa Parks and her family relocated to Detroit in the late 1950s following the Montgomery bus boycott that Parks helped launch. In Detroit, Parks continued protesting into her late life, and the community called on her as a veteran activist. There is more to come on Parks later in the book.

A constant among the case studies in these chapters is the fact that white city and school officials continually blamed Black people for their own conditions instead of acknowledging any systemic reasons for structural inequality. Sources have described Black protestors in and around the Watts neighborhood, for example, as violent and thoughtless, but “arrest data indicates that they had better than average educations, and that they were employed, socially conscious, and aware of international news” (73). Cities outside of the South maintained a veneer of liberalism, denying their segregation and racism; commentators ranging from Black activists to white Southern segregationists called out the hypocrisy of Northerners and Westerners who, despite their superficial language of inclusion, upheld the status quo through city policy and manipulative political rhetoric. White people often promoted narratives of particular cities—like Boston and Detroit—as “the apex of racial progress” despite their demonstrable inequality (77). These false images satisfied many white onlookers who regarded Black grievances as either fabricated complaints or reflections of poor work ethic in Black urban culture.

Theoharis emphasizes that civil rights activism outside of the South was not merely adjacent to the high-profile events in places like Alabama. The freedom movement was national (even international) in scope, and its practitioners openly discussed the broad contexts into which their own efforts fit. Separating the Southern narrative from the rest of the country characterized segregation outside of the South as anything from an inevitable accident to wholly nonexistent despite ample evidence to the contrary. Theoharis argues that the myth of the unique South in the history of American racism continues to falsely exculpate other regions in the ongoing freedom struggle for African Americans and other people of color.