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

Though historians have several timelines of civil rights activism, the movement is typically understood to span the 1950s and 1960s period during which Black leaders, activists, and their allies overthrew segregation policy and the landmark Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were passed to outlaw race-based discrimination and protect African Americans’ voting rights. In the popular imagination, the era began in earnest with the desegregation of Southern public schools and public spaces like lunch counters and buses. Generally, popular accounts of the movement center key individuals, namely Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, though these individuals’ memorialization has been distorted.

The author’s central thesis is that the civil rights movement is much more complex and enduring than is acknowledged by popular accounts. Civil rights activism in the mid-century grew out of longtime injustices, and its goals were not fully realized with the passage of civil rights legislation.

A fable is a fictional story intended to communicate a moral. Theoharis routinely uses the term to describe the enduring American narrative of the civil rights movement. In this context, the term “fable” highlights the amount of fiction that informs the popular narrative, transforming historical fact into a story carefully crafted to exculpate white society from its longstanding and institutionalized anti-Black racism.