A More Beautiful and Terrible History

The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History

Dados Bibliográficos

ID4156774
AutoresWalter D Greason (Monmouth University, West Long Branch, New Jersey, autor correspondente)
Ano2019
Volume105
Fascículo4
Páginas1081-1082
Data de publicação2019-03-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoJournal of American History (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314
EditoraOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/jahist/jaz137
OpenAlexW2917842541
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas34

Questions of memory and forgetting have become increasingly central as the politics of historiography have threatened to fracture the profession since Peter Novick's That Noble Dream appeared in 1988. One of the hallmarks of this conversation is the pervasive discussion of historical (and current) erasure both within and beyond the academy since 2012. Jeanne Theoharis marshals the energy of this moment with this statement in A More Beautiful and Terrible History: “Racial injustice is America's original sin and deepest silence” (p. xi). The project intends to caution historians against the distortions of the American civil rights movement by constructing a fuller history of the black freedom struggle. It builds on a series of manuscripts that Theoharis has edited or authored over the last twenty years. The three most compelling chapters address Martin Luther King Jr.'s condemnation of white moderates in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (1963) and the ways scholars, and educators more widely, have adopted King as a “great man” of American history at the expense of the youth and women activists between 1955 and 1972. A full reckoning with the ongoing peril that began with U.S. senator Harry Byrd's call for “massive resistance” in 1956 does not appear here, but the chapter on polite discourse and racial color-blindness that carries the analysis popularized by the sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw, and racial justice advocate Tim Wise moves this important approach to American history forward. The engagement with a wide array of youth leaders such as Brenda Holcomb and Larry Bible, as well as an historical appraisal of the importance of Coretta Scott King as a civil rights leader, is long overdue and a major contribution to the field

Economic Justice · Historiography · Injustice · Political science · Politics · Resistance (ecology · Sociology · White (mutation · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society