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

“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.”

The author explains how a willful national misunderstanding of civil rights is a force of suppression in the present. While many activists compare ongoing struggles and the issues at the heart of the civil rights movement, others criticize modern activism as being too bold, disruptive, or violent, citing civil disobedience as the proper course. However, this criticism overlooks the fact that white Americans originally demonized King as too disruptive and radical, even characterizing him and fellow activists as national threats. Black Lives Matter (BLM) has a falsified standard of a fully peaceful civil rights movement to live up to.

“These renderings make it seem as if the movement happened naturally or inevitably, missing the staggering resolve and perseverance of small groups of people who actually pressed it forward, and in so doing attracted larger groups of people to their cause. And in the process, these dilutions and distortions render the problems African Americans now face as largely their own doing, and contemporary activism as so very different from this hallowed past.”

The “renderings” the author references are the popular, idealized narratives of the civil rights movement. Our public myths proclaim the inevitability of American values triumphing over inequality, but, in reality, the oppressed had to fight very hard and strategically to gain support. Imagining that the movement was natural and inevitable undermines modern Black concerns, since racism was, according to this fantasy, vanquished by the end of the 1960s. Contemporary activism, therefore, gets reviled or dismissed.

“And perhaps most consequently, the mythologizing of the civil rights movement deprives Americans of honest history that shows us where we are today in this country.”

This single sentence articulates one of the vital motivations behind the text: Truthful, evidence-based historical accounts reveal the patterns of national identity. We learn who we are by interrogating the words, actions, and products of historical actors. Distortions of civil rights history also obscure the reasons for America’s ongoing racial inequality. To address this inequality—and to understand their national identity—Americans must reckon with a more honest history.

“Similar to public officials in New York, Boston school officials did not defend segregation on its face, but blamed the problems in Black schools on Black children’s motivation and their parents’ values. While many of their white Southern counterparts in the 1950s and early 1960s explicitly defended segregation and states’ rights, a different lexicon of race emerged in Northern cities like Boston—one that framed white resistance to racial integration in a language of ‘neighborhood control,’ ‘taxpayer’s rights,’ and ‘forced busing,’ and cast African American and Latino youth as ‘problem students’ whose ‘cultural deprivations’ hampered their educational success.”

The weaponization of language and popular image are important themes in the book. The overt racism of many Southern politicians openly opposed desegregation on “moral” and legal grounds. Resistance took a very different form outside of the South, where commentators’ racism had the guise of liberalism, reframing resistance to desegregation as, for example, concern for taxpayers. To deflect accountability and maintain segregation, these commentators blamed the oppressed for their own oppression.

“Systemic school inequality extended above the Mason-Dixon Line, and activists fought for decades to challenge it, but city elites, white citizens, and much of the mainstream media—with tacit and sometimes explicit support from the federal government—protected systemic inequality in Northern cities. By ignoring this history, the fable makes it seem as though injustice is vanquished in the end, and that society, in time, appreciates those who fight injustice through proper channels.”

The scope of civil rights protest is much larger than is commonly understood. Northern cities actually upheld segregationist policy better than many Southern cities, and African Americans (and their allies) long fought for desegregation all across the country. Society does not always come to appreciate activists that address injustice. The status quo has many protectors, even when (or especially when) it perpetuates inequality.

“Focusing on that decade of struggle before the uprising reveals that in the face of mounting Black protests, white leaders and citizens developed a variety of mechanisms to ignore them: diminishing the problem, refusing to listen, reshaping the problem, asking for proof, demonizing activists as ‘troublemakers,’ blaming Black culture as the problem, and refusing to even acknowledge incidences of police abuse. Surprise following the uprisings in both Watts and Detroit became the ultimate way to ignore the long-standing nature of these grievances.”

In the 1960s, both Los Angeles and Detroit erupted into what have typically been called “riots.” The heightened violence and police control stemmed from the failure of local government and citizens to address grievances from their Black communities—grievances that became severe after white people in positions of power routinely blocked efforts for racial equality. White citizens rationalized these grievances until frustration mounted. The media cast the “riots” as surprises, disingenuously suggesting those involved were unruly, misinformed, and dangerous.

“The social profile of the ‘rioters’ culled from the arrest data indicates that they had better than average educations, and that they were employed, socially conscious, and aware of international news.”

Depicting Black activists as unintelligent, unruly, and impulsive has been a key media strategy in discrediting their complaints. While the media decried “rioters” in the Watts area of Los Angeles in 1965, evidence suggests that those involved were sophisticated and informed. The demographic data suggests that the “uprising” was intentional and connected to both a larger historical movement and the repeated denial of civil rights within home cities.

“Our popular history of the movement largely sidesteps how and by whom racial inequality was perpetrated and maintained. Without understanding how and why a system of racial injustice was propelled not only by people who were yelling but by people who were silent, not just by violence but by state bureaucracy, and by refusing to grapple with the various interests and benefits this system accrued for many and the fears people harbored of standing up against it, we miss a key lesson from this history.”

This is an early quotation in the chapter devoted to discussing polite racism, particularly outside of the South. The public image of civil-rights-era racism centers on overt violence, though racism was deeply embedded in both formal and informal social systems and cultural practice. Just as much as direct adversarial confrontation, intentional silence perpetuates inequality, and the author highlights the latter because it has pronounced implications for the present day. When we imagine racism only as overt, we fail to intervene in more subtle prejudice. The “key lesson” the author references is the depth and power of prejudice and that it requires ongoing work to dismantle.

“Perhaps the most important tool of ‘polite racism’ was the mobilization of a discourse seemingly steeped in the objectivity of social science that posited the dysfunctional cultural adaptations Black people had developed in the urban North as key to existing social and economic inequalities. The need to address ‘cultural deprivation,’ as it was often termed in the 1950s and 1960s, provided a way to explain and deflect movements for racial equality by saying that the most important task was to change the behaviors and values of Black people themselves.”

Deflection was a common theme of white commentary about civil rights protest during the 1950s and 1960s. Commentators invented an evasive narrative in which Black people were culpable for their own disenfranchisement. By placing the onus of change on Black communities, non-Black communities could maintain complacence.

“Using fewer photographs and often a paternalistic tone, these news outlets tended to treat local Black leaders as largely irrelevant or as troublemakers demanding too much too fast—functioning, as Stokely Carmichael put it, as ‘self-appointed white critics.’ By covering local issues as individual protests or disturbances rather than as a movement, they devoted little space to what segregation looked like in their cities, how it functioned, and who the people who protected it were.”

The media misrepresented civil rights protest in several ways. Through tactics like those mentioned in this quotation (publishing few pictures, using patronizing language), the white-controlled media undermined and demonized Black activism. These narratives helped dictate public opinion during the civil rights movement and beyond. These patterns in the press outside of the South also documented Northern hypocrisy, as Northern commentators condemned the South’s racism while perpetuating their own. To understand the power of rhetoric and silence during and following the civil rights movement, historians can observe what and how Northern newspapers reported (and failed to report).

“Because of these ongoing silences, Black activists increasingly pointed to the media as a key problem and highlighted the need for Black people to create their own media. The Black press had long covered issues in these cities far differently than white counterparts did.”

Though the chapter about the media focuses on the shortcomings of a mostly white-controlled press, Theoharis credits Black activists for creating their own media outlets that genuinely incorporated a Black perspective. Mainstream media outlets failed to interview many Black people or feature any Black authors. Without having sympathetic or unbiased connections in the mainstream media, Black people created their own outlets to report and reflect on the movement.

“A similar problem exists today. While uprisings in Cleveland, Baltimore, and Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 and 2015 prompted much reporting on the nature of injustice in law enforcement, municipal policy, and court practices, few stories focused on the groups in these cities that had highlighted such problems for years. Such silences are comfortable. It is easier to castigate protesters as ‘thugs’ unwilling to work through the proper processes than for media outlets to hold accountable neighbors and public officials who didn’t listen when they had. It is easier to cast the people who rose up as the problem, rather than focus on the readers who stayed silent for years amidst police injustice after injustice.”

Chapters often end with explicit connections between civil rights history and the book’s contemporary society. Northern media outlets have long identified racism as an impersonal force and have identified only a handful of individuals to hold accountable. In comparison to this type of simplification of the massive issue, few accounts truly interrogate how media outlets themselves perpetuated social inequality. Theoharis explains that it is always easier to blame others than to take personal responsibility or hold accountable friends and neighbors, and few newspapers have really honestly presented the right larger context and fully explained local iterations of systemic inequality accurately.

“Parks’s vision has been relegated to a bus seat, narrowing what she fought for her entire life and how she defined her bus stand. Indeed the movement itself has been constricted and diluted, framed narrowly around bus seats and lunch counters, rather than the equity, access, and justice these activists demanded.”

Theoharis relates the popular remembrance of Rosa Parks to the popular remembrance of the civil rights movement as a whole. Parks was a lifelong activist who supported radical causes and was a member of several civil rights organizations. She is remembered, however, as a tired woman who decided not to give up a seat on a segregated bus. The Montgomery bus boycott was a much more sophisticated and comprehensive effort than one merely targeting local segregation policies. Parks herself was a talented and practiced civil rights activist whose legacy extends far beyond the bus boycott story, even though the scope of that story is also so misunderstood. The chapter expands on the various aims of the bus boycott, and it explores Parks beyond her confined image in 21st-century America.

“The mounting militancy of the later 1960s didn’t come out of nowhere. It came from ignoring, denigrating, and rejecting the demands community organizers has made for years for real school desegregation and educational equity, open and affordable housing, jobs and a robust social safety net, equitable municipal services, and the transformation of the criminal justice system.”

Common narratives treat the 1960s’ increased militancy as an unwarranted and unwelcome shift. Black Power, as the new phase was and is still called, supposedly marked young Black activists’ betrayal of King’s peaceful movement in favor of rash violence. However, earlier chapters detailed long battles between African American communities and school boards, city officials, politicians, and more. When those in power repeatedly ignored or misrepresented those communities, savvy activists adjusted their activities. Black Power was the continuation of a carefully planned effort to create broad changes in American society well beyond desegregation of public spaces.

“While the civil rights movement is cast today as emblematic of the special power of American democracy, civil rights activists saw American racism at the heart of both its domestic and global projects.”

The civil rights movement’s global dimension is often obscured in popular narratives, though it was an essential wing of 1960s activism. The war in Vietnam is a case study in which activists at home (namely African Americans and the working class) were at the highest risk of being drafted in a failing war with mounting casualties. Scholars now understand how the racialization of Vietnamese people was a central part of training American soldiers. People being targeted by racism within the United States took note of these tendencies and protested them. The Vietnam War was one of the “global projects” the author mentions in this passage, but the Cold War involved constant conversations about American influence and intervention abroad.

“The LA walkouts show commonalities in the types of discrimination Black and Chicano students faced in city schools, and in the ways Black and Chicano young people together took the lead, highlighting their willingness to take dramatic action and engage in planning to make it happen. In doing so, they forced their parents and other adults in the community to action as well.”

Theoharis devotes a chapter to acknowledging the crucial role of young people in the civil rights movement. Like women, young people appear in photographs of the movement and some events are understood to center on them (like school desegregation, for example), but people today rarely credit young students and activists with sophisticated organizing. In truth, young people organized many large protests; in 1968, LA public school students staged a series of walkouts to protest curricular and hiring biases in their districts. Much of this activism happened in Latino, or Chicano activist circles. The movement for civil rights for this group intersected with the freedom struggle for African Americans (and the struggles for Asian American and Native American civil rights, as well). Though groups had community-specific goals, there were major visible moments of solidarity and commonality among their organizations.

“Students fought back to show that they were not the problem but that the education they were being provided was—a lesson this country still wants to ignore.”

The realm of youth activism called attention to the enormous barriers within the public school system (at every level from primary to post-secondary) that reflected racism. Students demanded curricula that acknowledged the cultural histories of racial and ethnic groups beyond the white middle class and wanted teachers and administrators who were themselves people of color. Teachers often pigeonholed students based on their race: White students might be determined worthy of college degrees whereas students of color might get pressured into manual labor vocations. As this quotation concludes, students highlighted these problems even as critics blamed the problems on the students themselves. Americans continue to skirt calls for educational reform related to race, blaming young people of color for the societal problems they face.

“Women regularly appear in tributes to the movement, but a clear sense of their leadership, lives, and organizing efforts is often missing. The women who are celebrated, such as Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King, are too often shrunken versions of themselves, and these limited images at times reproduce gendered silences in the movement itself.”

The women’s role in civil rights was diminished during the movement and has continued to be diminished in public remembrance. Theoharis elaborates on the cases of Rosa Parks, whose arrest launched the Montgomery bus boycott, and Coretta Scott King, longtime activist and wife/widow of Martin Luther King Jr. Both women were radical, accomplished, outspoken activists, but their celebrated legacies reflect few of their qualities beyond simplistic and symbolic value. Parks is often imagined as a passive figure, and Scott King is often celebrated only in her capacity as a helpmate to her husband. Such narratives diminish the women’s humanity, ingenuity, and perseverance. This historical silencing is a continuation of sexism that operated as these women worked. Even civil rights organizations failed to incorporate women into leadership or take them as seriously as their male counterparts. Sexism and racism are not wholly disconnected; part of reexamining the civil rights movement requires an intersectional understanding of how various prejudices shape society.

“Scott King saw the struggle for gay rights as intimately connected to the one for racial justice and stood firm against those who would cast the battle for gay rights as dishonoring the spirit of the civil rights movement.”

This passage illustrates intersectional analysis in action. Scott King remained an activist and public commentator until her death in 2006. In the 1990s, she openly supported gay rights and marriage equality, seeing that freedom struggle as intimately connected to the Black freedom struggle and other patterns of civil rights violations targeting minority demographics. Many commentators denied that the oppression of LGB individuals was another dimension of civil rights violations, and both religion and established social mores fueled this commentary. Scott King instead insisted that the injustice of anti-gay policy reflected and helped perpetuate other injustices. Her argument had both this abstract and more detail-oriented angles. For example, she highlighted the danger of AIDS to both African American communities and LGB communities. AIDS transmission was itself an intersectional phenomenon, as Black people of various sexualities might encounter it.

“Most popular renderings of the movement miss how the very people we celebrate today were viewed as scary or crazy or unwelcome in their own day. And they sidestep the kinds of reckoning the history demands: how people who questioned the racial practices of the status quo and refused to live by them were treated as ‘“radicals, sore heads, agitators, trouble makers,” to name just a few terms given them’ as Rosa Parks put it.”

There is a telling disconnect between the lived experiences and historical memory of civil rights activists, particularly the most famous and celebrated ones. Americans disrespected and feared the likes of King and Parks, and the way in which these figures are remembered does not reflect all of what those activists stood for, either. Americans appreciate a sanitized version of these historical actors that omits their critique of American society beyond challenging segregation and overt racism.

“It’s easier to be aghast at how unpopular the civil rights movement was and how surveilled Black activists were than to reconsider whom we fear and monitor today.”

The author again asks Americans to do the uncomfortable work of honest self-reflection. Most people do not know how much the government and everyday citizens feared and hated civil rights activists. The US of the post-9/11 era especially, however, has feared, targeted, and surveilled Muslim Americans because of their race, ethnicities, and religion. Many Americans also continue to calumniate Black activists, people of color, and critics of US policy.

“Looking at a fuller history of the Montgomery bus boycott reveals the work, sacrifice, perseverance, coalition-building, disappointment, disruptiveness, and collective action it took to imagine, build, and sustain it.”

The last chapter, which draws out lessons from the Montgomery bus boycott, expands on all of the points in this quotation. The boycott required a scale of planning and coordination that cannot be captured in the simplified narrative of a tired Rosa Parks deciding not to give up her seat and others following suit. A whole network mobilized to carry out the boycott, which lasted over a year. As they did so, they endured inconveniences and dangers. Representing the full scale and difficulty of the bus boycott would better represent the movement as a whole.

“The success of the Montgomery bus boycott was accomplished through a combination of tactics: years of spadework to lay a foundation for the movement to emerge; Rosa Parks’s willingness to pursue her case in state court; the yearlong consumer boycott and corresponding car-pool effort built by local people and their grassroots organization; the federal legal case Browder v. Gayle, with four women plaintiffs; a tremendous amount of fund-raising; and a campaign to get the word across the country about what was happening.”

Logistics of the Montgomery bus boycott surpass broad categories like “perseverance” and “organizing.” They indicate the scope of the event—the timeline and personnel involved in inventing it and carrying it out. Activists fought the battle on multiple fronts, both through the boycott itself, in the courts, and in the media. These simultaneous tactics enabled the boycott’s eventual success and the desegregation of the city’s buses. The author also stresses the central role of women in activism at every level—involvement for which they are seldom credited.