Rethinking the Movement

As any casual observer of mega-bookstore shelves knows, the history of the modern civil rights movement is a well-studied field. Over the past decades it has attracted a sizable army of historians, sociologists and other scholars who continue to produce an apparently endless stream of innovative monographs,

biographies and overviews that chronicle and analyze the struggle to overturn Jim Crow. Movement participants too have filled many thousands of pages with their recollections of the history they made, while documentary filmmakers have put to excellent use the dramatic footage of racial violence that cast the struggle in an often appropriately manichean light.

On a popular level, the civil rights movement has been absorbed into--indeed, appropriated by--our political culture; its story is commemorated with a national holiday and venerated in proliferating historical museums and exhibits, as well as primary and secondary school curriculums. Politicians of all stripes pay ritual homage to the movement's goals of equality and dignity, bending them to fit their particular agendas. If the Founding Fathers and the Civil War exert a greater hold on the national imagination, no other social movement in American history--neither abolitionism, feminism, socialism or communism, nor trade unionism--even approximates the attention the civil rights movement has received.

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