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

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2018

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Introduction

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-7

Chapter 8-Afterword

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 5-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 2: “The Histories We Need”

Chapter 5 Summary: “Beyond a Bus Seat: The Movement Pressed for Desegregation, Criminal Justice, Economic Justice, and Global Justice”

This chapter again discusses how popular civil rights narratives both are narrow and obscure important elements of the movement. The chapter also elaborates on the proper context in which to understand the influence and legacy of Rosa Parks: not as a tired, seated woman but as a savvy longtime activist highly influential in her field.

This is also the first chapter that centrally discusses Black Power, a phase of civil rights characterized by militancy that emerged in the late 1960s. Modern Americans are often critical of Black Power, misrepresenting it as unnecessarily violent and impulsive: “There’s a convenience in making Black radicalism all about the guns and leather jackets,” Theoharis explains, “because it obscures the larger goals for social, political, and economic transformation that ran through the Black freedom struggle and the deep resistance Black activists encountered” (128). Black Power represented new tactics towards old ends.

As the chapter subtitle indicates, desegregation was only one major issue within the movement, even though it has become the enduring public face of activist efforts. Desegregation itself was not just about sharing public space; it was a blow to a bigoted system that attacked Black people from many angles (130). Theoharis elaborates on the famous Montgomery bus boycott—the recognized start of the formal civil rights movement—to illustrate the breadth of movement goals. Parks, who launched the boycott, was motivated by the injustice of the acquittal of two white men who brutally killed a Black youth named Emmett Till (130). Till’s murder and the courts’ failure to hold the killers accountable exemplified a criminal justice system that regularly persecuted Black men for invented or minor crimes while it protected white people from consequences of extreme violence.

Similarly, “[o]ne of the Montgomery bus boycott’s initial demands was the hiring of Black bus drivers” (130), indicating the centrality of economic justice in civil rights activism. Activists also stressed needs for monetary safety nets in an improved welfare system.

While, for modern commentators, the imagined full success of the civil rights movement reflected the triumph of American democracy, civil rights leaders called out hypocritical contradictions in American democracy, and these contradictions situated American efforts in a larger context of global justice. Protest against US military action in Vietnam was the most obvious expression of this global dimension of the struggle for justice. These goals (other than desegregation) are largely erased or overlooked in celebratory modern tellings of the movement.

Chapter 6 Summary: “The Great Man View of History, Part I: Where Are the Young People?”

This is the first of two chapters addressing major specific demographic omissions in public histories of civil rights. Young people have not only been overlooked as key contributors to the movement but also continue to be demonized as antithetical to proper activist channels. Theoharis says that high schoolers “blazed the trail in many crucial battles of the Black freedom struggle, often against the wishes and ‘better judgment’ of their parents and other adults in the community” (142). Their goals and tactics became mainstream and effective in many cases.

Young people were active in the movement from its outset. Certain organizations reflected this fact. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) emerged as its own entity rather than “a youth wing” of other organizations (145).

Students led sit-ins all over the country and organized effectively in various corners, but a major case study Theoharis discusses is the series of school walkouts in Los Angeles in 1968. A particularly important detail about these student walkouts is that they were largely carried out by young Latinos in the city as part of the Chicano Movement for Mexican and other Latino Americans. Young Latino Americans shared some grievances with African Americans, namely that they typically attended segregated and subpar schools and had no representative curriculum or relatable teachers and administrators as advocates. Mass walkouts met police brutality and community outrage, but they persisted throughout the year, publicizing issues that the mainstream public preferred to ignore. Many participating students later became community leaders in the 1970s. After being blamed for the racial discrepancy in schools (allegedly due to bad attitudes and upbringings), students forced the public to reckon with the possibility that the schools themselves were the failures and that major reform in personnel and curricula was needed.

Chapter 7 Summary: “The Great Man View of History, Part II: Where are the Women?”

Students were not the only key demographic whose efforts have been obscured in ensuing decades. Women played numerous leading and supporting roles in civil rights activism and yet are often remembered only in connection to male peers or as diminished symbols instead of multifaceted humans; the author calls this the “great man view of history” (from the chapter title), the view that “great men,” and not women, make history. The “shrunken versions” of women like Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King reinforce sexist notions about women’s subservience and prescribed notions of femininity during the civil rights era and beyond (154).

The chapter opens with a call-to-action:

[W]e need to both examine and critique the gender roles and assumptions that were embedded in [the great man view of history] and to grapple with the full expanse of women’s organizing efforts, leadership, and intersectional vision within the struggle itself (155).

The author thus offers a few case studies, examining the personal and activist accomplishments of Coretta Scott King versus image Americans typically ascribe to her. Scott King was an accomplished student, singer, and activist long before meeting her husband, Martin Luther King Jr. After his death, she continued his work and augmented it with her own. For example, she filled in as an organizer and speaker for events immediately following his death, and she sought public platforms for civil rights issues beyond her husband’s immediate work, despite criticism from African American men. She continued doing so for decades.

Theoharis also revisits the famous March on Washington to explain how women were almost entirely left out of the event despite their crucial efforts in the larger movement. The planning committee, which included only one woman, failed to incorporate women speakers (the woman on the committee, Anna Arnold Hedgeman, volunteered to organize a list but was overruled). The result was an awkward on-stage “Tribute to Women” that asked some key women activists, including Parks, to stand and wave. Furthermore, “[a]fter the rally, no women were part of a delegation of ten leaders who met with President Kennedy” (171).

These examples highlight how racism and sexism were intersectional bigotries that shaped the public memory of Black women within the civil rights movement.

Chapters 5-7 Analysis

This penultimate section of the book, which offers a close look at the movement’s underacknowledged activists, is dedicated to specific groups—young people and women—who were critical to the movement but remain unrecognized for it. Chapter 5 articulates the many specific goals of the movement that all of these activists understood and fought for.

As in previous sections, Theoharis fills voids in the public recollection of the civil rights movement by offering overlooked historical accounts. She also explains why these memory lapses exist and how they still impact public opinion. Out of the movement’s many goals, desegregation has both become the iconic objective and been reduced to mean simply sharing multiracial spaces. In contrast, the civil rights movement aimed to overturn fundamental assumptions and organizing systems within American society. Nevertheless, part of the national consciousness’ resistance to acknowledging the movement’s full reality is due to the discomfort that comes with genuine introspection; acknowledging the movement’s radical goal and its many avenues beyond superficial desegregation would be an admission that change on such a broad scale was necessary but did not happen, and this admission challenges the idealized national self-image. Overemphatically celebrating desegregation (as evidenced by public transportation lifting a segregation mandate) makes it appear as though activists fully achieved their goals, putting to rest any need for ongoing Black activism.

Theoharis makes it a habit to highlight activists who should be recognized either differently from how they have been memorialized (as in the case of Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King) or otherwise included in historical narratives. Students and women broadly fit this description of such misunderstood or neglected activists, but the author specifically mentions Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith, teenagers who were arrested for refusing to give up bus seats before Parks (144), Anna Arnold Hedgeman, “the only woman on the [March on Washington] committee, who was largely responsible for the significant presence of white Christians at the march” (166), and Pauli Murray, civil rights lawyer and activist and “trailblazer for years in highlighting the twin harms of racial and gender injustice” (167). Both ignoring and misrepresenting women’s and other underappreciated activists’ stories perpetuates gender stereotypes that relegate women to background support, often in the role of “self-sacrificing mother figures” (155) rather than sophisticated, intelligent, and creative public thinkers and organizers.

Whereas the book’s previous section focused on central case studies from New York, Los Angeles, Boston, and Michigan, this section continually revisits the more famous Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama and the March on Washington. These events are central in public recollection of the movement (unlike, for example, school desegregation in Boston or challenging New York City officials over zoning policy), but they are routinely stripped of their larger context. Chapter 5 details how the bus boycott was inseparable from protests for economic and police reform and elaborates on the March on Washington’s connection to “the idea that Black people were owed restitution by the nation and had come to claim their rightful payment” (131). Closer looks at student and women activists in these movements and others stress that these demands were shared by activists throughout the movement—activists who worked in many locations and through many tactics.