Oral History and the History of the Civil Rights Movement

Protest movements are difficult to incorporate into the narrative framework of our national history. They are disruptive: thousands of formerly quiescent people engage in protest. Ideological positions polarize as insurgents publicly challenge national beliefs and traditions. The shock of violence-of death and political assassination-punctuates their history. American historians and political leaders often settle for an elitist interpretation of social change -an understandable development, given the paucity of traditional historical records generated by the masses of insurgents and the centrality of electoral politics in the American tradition. Mass mobilization is attributed to great or charismatic leadership, and the leaders of movements are drafted into a sanitized pantheon of Great Men. The disruptions and subversive implications of the movements recede from historical vision as the progress produced by protest is memorialized by three-day weekends and commemorative coins. In recent years, the national veneration of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., has followed this pattern and has perhaps distorted the image of the civil rights movement that brought him to prominence. As Clayborne Carson, James H. Cone, and Vincent Gordon Harding have asserted, the recent canonization of King ignores his evolving radicalism in the middle 1960s. It also obscures the local origins and strengths of the civil rights movement itself. By separating King's radical critique of American society from parallel developments among the younger activists of the black struggle, and by overlooking the process of mobilization at local levels, the liberal interpreters of the King legend diminish the radical and populist origins of the civil rights movement. Such interpretations also obscure the movement's real consequences -a transformed black political consciousness, the increased political efficacy of thousands of movement leaders and participants, and expanded opportunities and possibilities for all black Americans.1