Summary[]
The narrative of the civil rights movement has been coopted in such a way that it ignores root causes (class/economics) and is present in a progressive (complete) narrative, as if the issues of the past have been overcome. This narrative limits our moral imagination. As Dowd writes: “For many white Americans have moved through what the critical theorist Walter Benjamin termed "this storm . . . we call progress" without coming to terms with the past. That lack of accounting opens the way to a color-blind conservatism that is breathtakingly ahistorical and blind to social acts. It impoverishes public discourse, discourages investment in public institutions, and undermines our will to address the inequalities and injustices that surround us now.” She calls for a narrative that centralizes individual agency (while also acknowledging institutional and policy limitations) and moves away from the upward/downward arc of narratives – problems persist.
In justifying LCRM scholarship, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall calls for six ways scholars should reinterpret the black freedom struggle. First, by writing a “longer and broader” story, scholars can challenge the “trope of the South as the nation’s ‘opposite other.” Second, by moving the story back to the New Deal, historians can emphasize the relationship between “civil rights and workers’ rights.” Third, the scholarship can uncover the importance of women’s activism and how gender shaped participation in the movement. Fourth, the long view of the movement can highlight activism in every region of the country. Fifth, scholars can analyze the persistence of civil rights activism after the major political and legal victories of the mid 1960s. Finally, the long view of the movement can recognize the long history of backlash to civil rights activism (1239).