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

The main title of the book is A More Beautiful and Terrible History. What about this expansive history of the civil rights movement makes the truth “more beautiful” than popular images of it? What makes it “more terrible”?

Reflect on your own prior exposure to the story of the civil rights movement. To what extent did your previous historical understanding match the “fable” discussed in the book? Which of the fable’s simplified or sanitized elements have you most regularly encountered? What challenges to the fable have you encountered?

Typically, the “heroes” of the civil rights movement are understood to be Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. Which heroes does Theoharis credit in A More Beautiful and Terrible History? If King and Parks make this list, how do those historical figures come across in Theoharis’s account versus in popular imagination? If you detect other heroes (or groups of heroes), why might they get left out of popular narratives about the era?