Freedom Then, Freedom Now: The Historiography of the Civil Rights Movement

Abstract

WHILE THE UNITED STATES tilted in the direction of political conservatism during the past decade, the history of the civil rights movement gained in popular appeal. Martin Luther King's birthday became a national holiday. Hollywood fictionalized the events surrounding the Mississippi Freedom Summer, drawing millions of customers to the box office. The multipart documentary series, Eyes on the Prize, I and II, portrayed this history much more accurately and won numerous awards and wide acclaim.' Much of this interest can be attributed to the regular cycles of nostalgia that prompt Americans to recall the historical era of their youth. In this instance, memories dredged up turbulent and unsettling times, yet they also harked back to inspirational moments when ordinary people exhibited extraordinary courage. Images of civil rights heroes and heroines making great sacrifices to transform their country and their lives contrasted sharply with the prevailing Reagan-era mentality that glorified the attainment of personal wealth and ignored community health. Returning to civil rights yesteryears made many Americans feel better about themselves and what they might accomplish once again in the future. This recent popular curiosity about the subject follows on a longer professional concern with charting the course of the civil rights struggle. Scholars who began writing about the movement in the late 1960s and 1970s focused on leaders and events of national significance. They conceived of the civil rights struggle as primarily a political movement that secured legislative and judicial triumphs. The techniques of social history, which were beginning to reconstruct the fields of women's, labor, and African-American history by illuminating the everyday lives of ordinary people, at first left the study of civil rights virtually untouched. Civil rights historians were not oblivious to these new approaches, but the most accessible evidence generally steered them in traditional directions. The documentary sources on which historians customarily drew, located in the archives of presidential administrations and leading civil rights organizations, revealed a political story that highlighted events in Washington, D.C.2 Even the oral histories contained in