Toward New Histories of the Civil Rights Era

Abstract

THE NOTED DIPLOMATIC HISTORIAN JOHN LEWIS GADDIS HAS OBSERVED that writing in the midst of struggle can lead to lack of scholarly detachment and asymmetrical approach. Cold war scholars, according to Gaddis, reflected the contemporaneous debates rather than viewing them with the detachment that comes after the end of era; they viewed events from the inside instead of from the outside. Late in the long-running cold war, many scholars did not know how to get perspective on foreign policy because they had never experienced anything but the cold war. Gaddis also argued that writing about the cold war tended to give side disproportionate attention and neglected both the interaction between the two sides and the role of ideas in the confrontation. The result, Gaddis concluded, was an abnormal way of writing history itself With the end of the cold war, however, he expects the historiography to revert to more normal history because historians will treat the cold war as a discrete episode.... within the stream of time.(1) Cold war historiography is not unique. Before the end of the cold war, civil fights scholarship, like much of contemporary history, shared some characteristics with histories of the cold war. Writing in the midst of the ongoing struggles for racial equality, historians have often lacked detachment because of their profound and justifiable moral commitment to the aims of the civil fights movement. In addition, as Gaddis suggested about cold war experts, few scholars of the black freedom struggle have had any personal experience of world apart from the movement; individuals born since 1940 can scarcely recall period before the movement gained widespread publicity. Historians of the movement have also generally taken asymmetrical approach to the campaign for equal rights. They have tended to emphasize one side of the struggle, the movement side, and to neglect their professional obligation to understand the other side, the segregationist opposition. To explain the most profound change in southern history, historians have resorted to telling the story from vantage point within the movement; only rarely have they sought detached view or broader perspective that would necessarily encompass all of the South to explain the momentous changes in racial relations. They have written about the movement essentially from the perspective of the movement without fully considering the larger history of the South during the entire era. As result, important parts of the story remain untold.(2) Unlike their cold war colleagues, however, civil rights scholars have not yet developed clear schools of interpretation or consistently clashing interpretations; nothing comparable to the orthodox, revisionist, and post-revisionist interpretations of the cold war yet exists in the writings on the movement.(3) Research that has covered topics for the first time has had no earlier interpretations to revise or refute. Writing on the movement has, nonetheless, involved implicit disagreement on number of issues. Scholars have variously suggested, for example, that the movement actually began in the 1930s with the New Deal, in 1954 with the case of Brown v. Board of Education, or even in 1960 with the sit-ins. By the focus of their works, historians have also placed different emphases on the roles of the federal government, major protest organizations, and prominent leaders, and they have stressed the efficacy of different strategies and tactics--violent or non-violent action, litigation or mass protest, national or grassroots efforts. Students of the movement have also reached conflicting conclusions about the results of the civil rights movement. Seldom have the disagreements among scholars become explicit in their publications; more commonly they are implied or have to be inferred by their more experienced readers. Having yet to develop thorough, critical, and radical interpretations of the civil rights struggle, historians have tended to share sympathetic attitude toward the quest for civil rights They also lack the advantage recently gained by diplomatic historians with the end of the cold war, and they cannot, and do not want to, declare the straggle to be over because racial discord has not ended and racial justice has not been achieved. …