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Jeanne Theoharis - A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History

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Jeanne Theoharis A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History
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Explodes the fables that have been created about the civil rights movementThe civil rights movement has become national legend, lauded by presidents from Reagan to Obama to Trump, as proof of the power of American democracy. This fable, featuring dreamy heroes and accidental heroines, has shuttered the movement firmly in the past, whitewashed the forces that stood in its way, and diminished its scope. And it is used perniciously in our own times to chastise present-day movements and obscure contemporary injustice.In A More Beautiful and Terrible History award-winning historian Jeanne Theoharis dissects this national myth-making, teasing apart the accepted stories to show them in a strikingly different light. We see Rosa Parks not simply as a bus lady but a lifelong criminal justice activist and radical; Martin Luther King, Jr. as not only challenging Southern sheriffs but Northern liberals, too; and Coretta Scott King not only as a helpmate but a lifelong economic justice and peace activist who pushed her husbands activism in these directions.Moving from the histories we get to the histories we need, Theoharis challenges nine key aspects of the fable to reveal the diversity of people, especially women and young people, who led the movement; the work and disruption it took; the role of the media and polite racism in maintaining injustice; and the immense barriers and repression activists faced. Theoharis makes us reckon with the fact that far from being acceptable, passive or unified, the civil rights movement was unpopular, disruptive, and courageously persevering. Activists embraced an expansive vision of justice--which a majority of Americans opposed and which the federal government feared.By showing us the complex reality of the movement, the power of its organizing, and the beauty and scope of the vision, Theoharis proves that there was nothing natural or inevitable about the progress that occurred. A More Beautiful and Terrible History will change our historical frame, revealing the richness of our civil rights legacy, the uncomfortable mirror it holds to the nation, and the crucial work that remains to be done.A bracing corrective to a national mythology that renders figures like King meek and dreamy, not angry, intrepid and relentlessIts clarifying to read a history that shows us how little we remember, and how much more there is to understand. New York TimesTheohariss lucid and insightful study. . .proffer[s] a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the civil rights movements legacy, and showing how much remains to be done. Publishers Weekly, Starred ReviewAn important illustration of the ways that history is used, or misused, in modern social and political life. Required reading for anyone hoping to understand more about race relations and racism in the United States and highly recommended for all readers interested in 20th-century American history. Library Journal, Starred ReviewA hard-hitting revisionist history of civil rights activism. . . . An impassioned call for continued efforts for change. Kirkus ReviewsJeanne Theoharis is one of our nations finest civil rights scholars. She brings an incisive, urgent and unique critical perspective to our understanding of an era that is increasingly distorted and misunderstood. A More Beautiful and Terrible History is an important book that sheds new light on our recent past and yields a fresh understanding of our tumultuous present. Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and RedemptionA More Beautiful and Terrible History paints a vivid picture of the intentional and deadly omissions within popular histories of the 1950s and 1960s, cutting a path through hardened ground to give us the tools for a caring and inclusive future. Ericka Huggins, equity and inclusion educator and former member of the Black Panther PartyOnly truth sets us free. In this moment when we need fresh resistance movements, it is critical that we know the true history of the Black freedom struggle. Jeanne Theoharis debunks fables of the resistance to prove that the movements were not just spontaneous and did not immediately produce results; that young people and women were crucial to the leadership and drive; that polite racists impeded progress, not just virulent ones; and that those who became known as the leaders always understood that they were servants of the movement. The gift of this book is that Theoharis is a historical truth teller. A More Beautiful and Terrible History is crucial, and we must apply this wisdomfor today and alwaysto resist injustice in the face of racism, classism, and militarism. The Reverend Dr. William J. Barber IIIn A More Beautiful and Terrible History, Jeanne Theoharis debunks nearly a dozen national fables of polite civil rights workers humbly petitioning the nation to become a more perfect union. The propaganda of Americas exceptionalist history, she demonstrates, not only distorts the truth of the nations deep and recurring commitment to systemic racism. These mis-histories of the civil rights movement discredit the actual and necessary work of antiracist activists today, whose youthful courage and creativity are the real legacy of the past. Khalil Muhammad, author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban AmericaJeanne Theoharis is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College of City University of New York. She is author or co-author of seven books and numerous articles on the history of the Black freedom struggle and the contemporary politics of race in the United States. Theohariss New York Times bestselling biography The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks won the 2014 NAACP Image Award and the Letitia Woods Brown Award from the Association of Black Women Historians.

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To Julian Bond who taught me how to tell this story and carry this history - photo 1

To Julian Bond, who taught me how to tell this story and carry this history forward

And to my parents, Nancy and Athan Theoharis, for their commitment to and insistence on justice, truth-telling, and perseverance

PREFACE
A Dream Diluted and Distorted

Its a system of power that is always deciding in the name of humanity who deserves to be remembered and who deserves to be forgotten.... We are much more than we are told. We are much more beautiful.

Eduardo Galeano

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.

James Baldwin, A Talk to Teachers

BY THE TURN OF THE MILLENNIUM , the history of the civil rights movement had become a national story. When asked to name a most famous American other than a president from Columbus to today, high school students most often chose Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. Students chose two freedom fighters who in life had challenged the racial injustice at the heart of American society and who had often been treated as un-American for doing so. Now the civil rights movement had come to embody American grit, courage, and resolve, and these two activists could be invoked as the countrys most famous emblems.

Arguably beginning when President Ronald Reagan signed the bill in 1983 to make the third Monday of January a federal holiday for Martin Luther King Jr., the political uses of memorializing the movement took on heightened possibility as a national narrative. Fifteen years of opposition to the holiday gave way to recognizing its political utility. The civil rights movement became a way for the nation to feel good about its progressand Kings legacy became enshrined in his dream speech. His popularity expanded. By 1987, 76 percent of Americans held a favorable opinion of the civil rights leader, almost the reverse of his popularity at the end of his life (only 28 percent of Americans had a favorable opinion of him in 1966).

At the same time, memorials to the civil rights movement became national eventsfrom President Bill Clintons trip to Little Rock for the fortieth anniversary of the Little Rock Nines desegregation of Central High School, to Congresss decision to have Rosa Parkss coffin lie in honor in the Capitol, to the First Familys trip to Selma, Alabama, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery march. These national events honored not just the work of the civil rights activists but the advancement of the nation itself. They marked the Americanness of the civil rights struggle, and held up the power of US democracy and progress to the world.

Political leaders, pundits, and citizens came to see and tell the story of the modern civil rights movement as one of progress and national redemption. Jim Crow was framed as a horrible Southern relic, and the movement to unseat it became a powerful tale of courageous Americans defeating a long-ago evil. Activists from Paul Robeson to Malcolm Xwho had once been deemed national security threatsshowed up on postage stamps. A movement that had challenged the very fabric of US politics and society was turned into one that demonstrated how great and expansive the country wasa story of individual bravery, natural evolution, and the long march to a more perfect union.

A story that should have reflected the immense injustices at the nations core and the enormous lengths people had gone to attack them had become a flattering mirror. The popular history of the civil rights movement now served as testament to the power of American democracy. This framing was appealingsimultaneously sober about the history of racism, lionizing of Black courage, celebratory of American progress, and strategic in masking (and at times justifying) current inequities. This history as national progress naturalized the civil rights movement as an almost inevitable aspect of American democracy rather than as the outcome of Black organization and intrepid witness. It suggested racism derived from individual sin rather than from national structureand that the strength of American values, rather than the staggering challenge of a portion of its citizens, led to its change. The movement had largely washed away the sins of the nation, and Americas race problem could be laid to rest with a statue in the Capitol.

In the process, politicians and others shrank the progressive, expansive, challenging vision of the modern Black freedom struggle into something more passive, individualistic, and privatizeda dream diluted and distorted. The celebration of the movement became a way to avoid acknowledging the enormous gap between [Americas] practices and its professions, as historian John Hope Franklin had explained. And it became a way to take the beauty and power away from one of the most successful social movements of the twentieth century and the vision it offers us for today.

The recounting of national histories is never separate from present-day politics. What of the past is remembered, celebrated, and mourned is at the core of national identityand the process of what is told and not told is often a function of power. The act of making an historical tribute necessarily resolves it and fixes it in time and place. As anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot observes, the task of commemoration help[s] to create, modify or sanction the public meanings attached to historical events deemed worthy of mass celebration... to create a past that seems both more real and more elementary.

Racial injustice is Americas original sin and deepest silence. So, paradoxically, the ways the nation has memorialized the civil rights movement has become a way to maintain such silences. The history of American racism had become just that... history. While these tributes honored the movement, they simultaneously depoliticized the scope of the struggle, distorted the work of the activists honored, demonized Black anger, and obscured ongoing calls for racial justice through a celebration of a nearly postracial, self-correcting America.

No better proof of the countrys progress was the election and presidency of Barack Obama. Movement symbolism was highlighted throughout the 2008 election, both by the Obama campaign itself and by others. Candidate Obama accepted the Democratic nomination for president on August 28, 2008the forty-fourth anniversary of the March on Washington. Posters decorated churches and community centers, telephone poles and schools, delineating this historical progression: Rosa sat so Martin could walk. Martin walked so Obama could run. Obama ran so our children could fly. By voting for him, individuals could help realize the dream. Many trumpeted Obamas victory as the culmination of the civil rights movement and a testament to a postracial Americaan America that had largely moved past its history of racism. Even those who did not share such a rosy view of American progress were awed by the immensity of seeing the election of a Black man to the presidency of the United States. Given the momentous nature of his victory, referencing the history of the movement became more central to the presidency of Barack Obama than that of any of his predecessorsand the president himself, his supporters, and many commentators regularly appealed to its legacy.

And the public who elected him rejoiced in it. Used as a way to bask in our own association with this grand historical line, the civil rights movement had become our national redemption song. The election of President Obama made many of his supporters feel like we had overcome. It had delivered us. And therein lay the dangerrather than a rung on a steep ladder, the election became the zenith, the top of that climb, where all who wished could take credit for the triumph.

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