The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past

The civil rights movement circulates through American memory in forms and through channels that are at once powerful, dangerous, and hotly contested. Civil rights memorials jostle with the South’s ubiquitous monuments to its Confederate past. Exemplary scholarship and documentaries abound, and participants have produced wave after wave of autobiographical accounts, at least two hundred to date. Images of the movement appear and reappear each year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and during Black History Month. Yet remembrance is always a form of forgetting, and the dominant narrative of the civil rights movement—distilled from history and memory, twisted by ideology and political contestation, and embedded in heritage tours, museums, public rituals, textbooks, and various artifacts of mass culture—distorts and suppresses as much as it reveals.1

[1]  Gavin Wright.  The Civil Rights Revolution as Economic History , 1999, The Journal of Economic History.

[2]  Thomas M. Shapiro,et al.  Black Wealth, White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality. , 1995 .

[3]  K. Gotham.  Urban Space, Restrictive Covenants and the Origins of Racial Residential Segregation in a US City, 1900–50 , 2000 .

[4]  D. Mathews,et al.  Sex, Gender, and the Politics of ERA: A State and the Nation , 1990 .

[5]  L. Green.  Race, Gender, and Labor in 1960s Memphis: “I am a Man” and the Meaning of Freedom , 2004 .

[6]  A. Fairclough.  Historians and the Civil Rights Movement , 1990, Journal of American Studies.

[7]  Sheryll D. Cashin.  The Failures Of Integration: How Race and Class Are Undermining the American Dream , 2004 .

[8]  P. Zimbardo,et al.  The past and future of U.S. prison policy. Twenty-five years after the Stanford prison experiment. , 1998, The American psychologist.

[9]  David L. Chappell.  A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow , 2005 .

[10]  Steven C. Hahn.  A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration , 2003 .

[11]  Race, Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in Antidiscrimination Law , 1988 .

[12]  G. Gerstle.  The Protean Character of American Liberalism , 1994 .

[13]  S. Lawson.  Running for Freedom: Civil Rights and Black Politics in America Since 1941 , 1990 .

[14]  R. Wolters.  From Brown to Green and Back: The Changing Meaning of Desegregation , 2004 .

[15]  F. Wylie.  The content of our character , 1991 .

[16]  D. Henry.  Freedom Is Not Enough , 1953 .

[17]  Persistent Disparity: Race and Economic Inequality in the United States Since 1945 , 1998 .

[18]  B. Schulman.  From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938-1980 , 1991 .

[19]  Robert O. Self.  “Negro Leadership and Negro Money”: African American Political Organizing in Oakland before the Panthers , 2003 .

[20]  K. Jackson.  Race, Ethnicity, and Real Estate Appraisal , 1980 .

[21]  Meg Jacobs.  A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (review) , 2004, Journal of Interdisciplinary History.

[22]  T. Sugrue.  Crabgrass-Roots Politics: Race, Rights, and the Reaction against Liberalism in the Urban North, 1940–1964 , 1995 .

[23]  Carol B. Stack.  Call to Home: African Americans Reclaim the Rural South. , 1997 .

[24]  Mary L. Dudziak.  Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy , 2000 .

[25]  A. Derickson.  "Take Health from the List of Luxuries": Labor and the Right to Health Care, 1915-1949 , 2000, Labor history.

[26]  T. Sugrue.  Affirmative Action from Below: Civil Rights, the Building Trades, and the Politics of Racial Equality in the Urban North, 1945–1969 , 2004 .

[27]  Robert O. Self.  “To Plan Our Liberation” , 2000 .

[28]  W. Benjamin,et al.  Theses on the Philosophy of History , 1989 .

[29]  State of the Union: A Century of American Labor , 2003 .

[30]  N. Singh,et al.  Culture/Wars: Recoding Empire in an Age of Democracy , 1998 .

[31]  Matthew D. Lassiter.  The Suburban Origins of “Color-Blind” Conservatism , 2004 .

[32]  Barbara Ransby,et al.  Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision , 2003 .

[33]  W. Chafe.  The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II , 1986 .

[34]  S. Lawson.  Freedom Then, Freedom Now: The Historiography of the Civil Rights Movement , 1991 .

[35]  Quintard Taylor.  The Civil Rights Movement in the American West: Black Protest in Seattle, 1960-1970 , 1995, The Journal of Negro History.

[36]  R. Kluger.  Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality , 1975 .

[37]  L. Cohen.  A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America , 2004, Journal of American Ethnic History.