Strengths And Weaknesses Of The Civil Rights Movement

By engaging with the movement and its activists too uncritically, historians are more likely to reinforce than to correct the Manichean narrative that has characterized the Black Power scholarship since the late 1960s. A substantial correction can only be achieved if historians start to humanize the activists by fully portraying them with all their strengths and weaknesses, their achievements, their failures and their mistakes. Given the long history of racist vilification of African American activists, the temptation to write a rather uncritical, meaning “corrective” history can be strong. However, we should not commit ourselves to self-censorship and avoid certain topics simply because of the danger that racist detractors may appropriate our findings, or because we feel that we wrong the activists by critically evaluating their words and actions. Racists have never depended on historical facts to justify or rationalize their behavior. The best way to counter racist projections is to present history as a matter of human actions and interactions, with all their highs and lows, not as a narrative of heroes and villains. A study that sets out to correct common public misconceptions of the civil rights movement, criticizing reductive portrayals of Martin Luther King’s political and economic positions, while uncritically embracing first person accounts of radical activists, is not likely to achieve this goal. If historians want to make the civil rights movement “harder,” they need to
Let us make sure that we do not exhaust ourselves in efforts to change the hearts and minds of those Whites who have proved to be especially receptive to these messages. Moreover, if we choose to opt for an activist approach, we should pay attention to the fact that the narrative of colorblindness has enjoyed a wide appeal across the political