Making Civil Rights Harder: Literature, Memory, and the Black Freedom Struggle

Abstract

In a March 2005 essay in Journal of American History entitled The Long Civil Rights Movement and Political Uses of Past, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall notes how [t]he civil rights circulates through American memory in forms and through channels that are at once powerful, dangerous, and hotly contested (1233). For most part, this circulation has resulted in a of civil rights [that]--distilled from history and memory, twisted by ideology and contestation ... distorts and suppresses as much as it (1233). With Martin Luther as its defining figure, this dominant chronicles a civil rights movement that begins with Brown v. Board and ends with passage of Voting Rights Act of 1965. Following this season of moral clarity comes collapse brought on by Vietnam War, urban riots, and reaction against excesses of late 1960s and (1234). According Hall, this simultaneously elevates and diminishes movement, for while it ensures that status of classical phase [of civil rights movement] as a triumphal moment in a larger American progress narrative, it also prevents one of most remarkable mass movements in American history from speaking effectively challenges of our (1234). Instead, Hall proposes that we tell a expansive ... more robust, more progressive, and truer story--the story of a 'long civil rights movement' that took root in liberal and radical milieu of late 1930s, was intimately tied 'rise and fall of New Deal Order,' accelerated during World War II, stretched far beyond South, was continuously and ferociously contested, and in 1960s and 1970s inspired a 'movement of movements' that 'defies any of collapse' (1235). (1) In end, Hall wants to make civil rights harder. Harder celebrate as a natural progression of American values. Harder cast as a satisfying morality tale. Most of all, simplify, appropriate, and contain (1235). In her essay, Hall joins a chorus of historiographers who are making civil rights harder by compelling us take a closer look at how we are framing story of movement. For instance, in their critiques of histories, Steven Lawson and Charles Payne have focused on vertical dynamics of that framing, noting how civil rights scholarship has passed through three generations, first wave taking a top-down or national focus, second wave a bottom-up or grassroots perspective, and third wave interactive dimension that is trying connect local with national, social with political (qtd. in Payne 414). Hall's critique is more horizontal, asking us dismantle Montgomery-to-Selma axis in favor of a more expansive timeline. Here, Hall echoes Peniel E. Joseph's call construct an alternative civil rights narrative challenge popular and narratives [that] have conceptualized this era literally and figuratively as 'King years' (7). Joseph agrees that this standardized historical and of 'the movement' obscures and effaces as much as it reveals and illuminates, (7) but whereas Hall wants dismantle King years in order resituate single short movement into a larger of multiple liberal and radical movements, Joseph wants relocate the black radicalism that has been chronologically situated during late 1960s [into] earlier landscape dominated by Southern movement's struggles against Jim Crow, thereby underscoring fluidity of two time periods too often characterized as mutually exclusive (7). Joseph too wants make civil rights history harder--first, by noting how the heroic period of has been strategically appropriated by state deliver sanitized images that extol resilience of democratic liberalism, and, second, by insisting that historians fight against false dichotomy between King's and Black Power, a dichotomy that reduces the rich and multilayered ideological tendencies within African-American discourse a series of cliches and false binaries that completely ignore international dimensions of black thought (7-8). …