The Long Civil Rights Movement Summary

Similarly, African American students were often met with opposition. Anderson further

articulates that, “As African American students went to school daily, a cadre of white students

greeted them with racial epithets, kicks, shoves, death threats, and other forms of physical

harassment and intimidations.”

Jaqueline Dowd Hall, historian and author of the scholarly article “The Long Civil Rights

Movement and the Political uses of the Past” argues, “The roots of the dominant narrative lie in

the dance between the movement’s strategists and the media’s response.” The question that

many historians are actively asking in a variety of manners is, why has history glossed over this

narrative of the involvement of the grassroots movements
in the Civil Rights Movement? Hall

unsurprisingly concludes that, “The mass media, in turn, made the protests ‘one of the great

news stories of the modern era,’ but they did so very selectively.” This is particularly

enlightening regarding what the public was exposed to and what was withheld from the general

populous.
Hall further conveys, “Early studies of the black freedom movement often hewed

closely to the journalistic “rough draft of history”, replicating its judgments and trajectory.

While Hall argues that the media, in large part perpetuate an aggrandizing narrative that

leaves huge gaps in the complex storyline that is the Civil Rights Movement, she also has a

strong belief that the New Right also prolonged restrictedness in the history of the Civil Rights

Movement. Hall contends, “The answer lies, in part, in the rise of other storytellers—the

architects of the New Right, an alliance of corporate power brokers, old-style conservative

intellectuals and “neoconservatives.” Hall emphasizes that the New Right were “Reworking

that narrative for their own purposes, these new “color-blind conservatives” ignored the

complexity and dynamism of the movement, its growing focus on structural inequality, and its

“radical reconstruction” goals.”

Whether it be through the omitting of important details by specific groups like the
New

Right or the mass media, The Civil Rights Movement and the people behind it have remained a

vague mystery for many. Historians like Danielle McGuire, Raymond Arsenault, Anne Moody

and many others have presented new, unique evidence that the movement was more than it

seemed. Though each of these authors attack the topic in different manners, they each

successfully address the grassroots movement in a unique, effective way.