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

“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 movements now served as a 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 inequalities. 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.”

This quotation summarizes the popular, distorted recollection of the American civil rights movement. Not even a century later, Americans largely understand the movement to have been a total triumph that obliterated American racism and ushered in a new era of equality. This narrative altogether shifts the onus of racism from American systems to bygone American people—but such misguided idealism allows racism to thrive, often unacknowledged or denied by those not subject to it. The author contrasts what we should remember about the mid-20th-century struggle versus what we do remember; this contrast frames the book.

“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.