Scan barcode
kyladenae94's review against another edition
3.75
mc1945's review
3.5
oldsouls_lovebooks's review
3.0
This book is very informative in regards to particular moments in the Civil Rights Movement, both in the Jim Crow South and North, however, I feel it was too repetitive. I find that certain authors of nonfiction books repeat themselves in order to simply extend the page count otherwise it won't be considered as much of a definitive text. In that regard, the book rehashed many things said previously especially in one chapter in particular where it felt more like a recap of everything said in the previous ones. I also wish it delved more into what the title suggests, The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History. Examples of this misuse was interspersed throughout but not as much as I was expecting. I imagined far more specific contemporary examples of this and then a debunking with historical fact, but unfortunately, I found more examples of this said in the introduction than the rest of the chapters. The examples of hypocrisy, whitewashing, revision, and co-option done by Mike Huckabee, Trump, Ted Cruz, Obama, Clinton, Reagan, Bush, etc. were more prevalent in the preface and introduction than the entirety of the text.
I don't want to overstate though, it did give examples of how the Civil Rights Movement as well as other forms of Black Liberation struggles are used against current activists and progressive movements that are simply continuing the fight against imperialism, militarism, racism, capitalist exploit, the surveillance state, and de-funding of welfare programs. Theoharis quotes Obama from his March on Washington anniversary speech to show the way in which he and others paint Civil Rights and Black Power as diametrically opposed in order to suggest only one was about racial and economic justice. This is then used to denigrate current movements as also not being in the spirit of the "respectable" Civil Rights. She also highlights the way in which the news media helped and harmed movements. She points to how John Lewis praises the bravery of journalists going out and reporting on what was happening in the South, despite the fact that they often had a different tune when it came to protests in the North. The beginnings of the "inner city" and "be more like King" narratives that are thrown at BLM today had already begun to take root in the era of King ironically.
Despite my critiques this book is still worth the read and I did discover new information. For example, I didn't realize the movie The Butler did much to paint a respectability narrative that wasn't an entirely accurate depiction of Eugene Allen's life. The movie gives him two sons: the one who dies in Vietnam (true) and the one who becomes a Black Panther much to his dismay (false). The son who represents the "scary" radical isn't real. "By the film's end, Louis rejects the Panthers' "violence" for more "reasonable" electoral politics and "respectable" women. While Black Power is rendered as dangerous youthful naivete, war is treated as patriotic. Charlie attends Howard University... and he enlists in the army at a time when protest movement among Black soldiers was rising and Black anticolonialism was burgeoning–yet none of this is depicted."
I also had no idea Harry Belafonte was disinvited to Coretta Scott King's funeral in 2006 because he, along with her and Rosa Parks, were highly critical of the war. Once President Bush was expected to come to the funeral it was seen as better to not have Belafonte present despite being one of the Kings' most closest comrades. That is just one example of how they began to slowly quiet and neuter the message of those large figures like Coretta Scott King, especially once they were no longer around to speak out against them, and those that had their back were excluded from having a seat at the table even when it was simply to grieve and say goodbye.
adamrshields's review against another edition
4.0
I am very interested in how framing and bias can distort history. Some books I have read that have informed my perspective on this are Battle for Bonhoeffer (about how this works with an individual, not just more extensive history), and Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?: A Historical Introduction by John Fea (which looks at a historical topic and the ways that Christian nationalism, in particular, distorts historical analysis) and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory by David Blight (which looks at how there was an intentional misremembering at the end of the Civil War to reunify the United States by orienting the US toward a vision of white racial superiority instead of orienting the country toward the rights of newly freed Black citizens.) I have heard about A More Beautiful and Terrible several times, but some quotes from Jamar Tisby in one of his newsletters caused me to pick it up finally.
Once I read for a little while, I looked up some background on the author. Jeanne Theoharis is a political science professor at Brooklyn College. She is the daughter of Athan Theoharis, a historian who specialized in the history of the FBI, J Edgar Hoover, and other US intelligence agencies, which is a fascinating background for a father when Jeanne specializes in civil rights history. Liz Theoharis is Jeanne's sister, a professor at Union Seminary, an ordained minister in the PCUSA, and co-chair of the modern Poor People's Campaign, along with William Barber. Again, it is essential background to know that Jeanne Theoharis is writing about the use and misuse of civil rights history while her sister is helping to lead one of the most important civil rights organizations that is actively organizing for civil and economic rights. (I also know locally active people in the Poor People's Campaign.)
Each chapter is about one aspect of the civil rights story and how the traditional framing can distort the way we remember and think about civil rights history. I think this is a reasonable organizational method, but it also leads to some repetition because the chapters have overlapping content.
Chapter one is about desegregation, but instead of telling the story of a Southern Brown v Board, it tells of a failed story of integration in Boston. The Massachusetts legislature passed the Racial Integration Act in 1965, eleven years after Brown. But school boards refused to acknowledge school segregation. Nearly 25 years after the NAACP chapter in Boston created an Education committee and organized around desegregation, there was a federal lawsuit and an order to use bussing to integrate Boston schools and federal supervision of the plan until the late 1980s. Resistance to busing was strong, and White flight reduced the city's White population. The 1974 Supreme Court case limited the desegregation busing to municipalities, effectively limiting busing and allowing residential segregation and white flight to continue school segregation. Primarily, we think of school desegregation as a success story in the US.
The year 1989 was the high point of school integration, and like in Boston, federal oversight largely had stopped by the late 1980s. Schools have been segregating again so that the likelihood of a Black or Hispanic student going to an 80% or more Black or Hispanic school was roughly the same as in the late 1960s to early 1970s when many districts were only starting their desegregation efforts. As I have said before, the Louisville school district, where my mother spent part of her elementary years (she is a couple of weeks younger than Ruby Bridges), did not desegregate until the school year I was born. School segregation today is different from school segregation in the past. It is not overtly legal for one reason. It is also not complete in the same way. Historically, school segregation was universal; no Black students were in a White segregated school. Today's schools are technically integrated, but most white students attend majority-white schools, and most minority students attend majority-minority schools. Part of this is that schools are economically isolated and that class and economics have a racial dimension. It is also that neighborhoods are still largely racially segregated because of historic housing patterns. But all of that is background, which gives context to how we tell the story of school desegregation efforts as a hero story.
The second chapter is about how the view of race riots of the 1960s tends to ignore resistance to community organizing that had often gone on for decades before riots. Primarily focusing on LA and Detroit, I learned about the Detroit Great March in 1963, several months before the March on Washington, which had at least 125,000 in attendance (using Wikipedia's numbers) and maybe as many as 200,000 (using the book's estimate). When riots are framed as starting out of the blue, instead of contextualizing them within a larger civil rights movement, often a failed one, it further diminishes how civil rights history is a history of many local movements, not just a few big players. The other part of this is that most racial riots in the civil rights and post-civil rights era are in northern or western cities, where civil rights gains were much less tangible. One of the book's central themes is that while southern racism was more overt, the more subtle racism of the North and West was more likely to be sustained and unchanged.
The third chapter was about polite racism and the "white moderate" and how geography class and economics matter to how racism was viewed. In many ways, this is the message of the Letter From a Birmingham Jail. But it also matters to the following chapters. It is easier to portray overt racism with batons and firehoses than polite racism of zoning restrictions and media bias.
The fourth chapter is about the problems of civil rights media coverage. Generally, national media was based in the North, covering civil rights in the North as a local story, while civil rights in the South was a national story—resisting using similar words to describe similar situations in the North as the South. In the South, the media portrayed school segregation as a problem of racism but tended to both not use the word segregation when describing schools in the North and to frame the story as a result of housing choice, as if housing segregation was not also a systemic reality. While media coverage was essential to the civil rights gains in the South, the lack of nationalized media coverage in northern civil rights protests also contributed to the lack of progress. The northern media was also much more favorable toward government officials and white counter-protestors in northern cities than against southerners, even when many of the issues were very similar.
The fifth chapter is about how we tend to forget that the civil rights movement was not solely about race. It was also about economic justice, criminal justice reform, and global justice issues. The Montgomery bus boycott was not just about riders; it was also about the refusal of the bus company to hire black workers. The 1963 March on Washington was officially titled the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Martin Luther King Jr's popularity was never high, but it moved significantly lower when he argued that the Vietnam War was unjust. The US State Department and intelligence agencies worked to hinder international cooperation between the civil rights and peace movements in the US and other peace and justice movements worldwide.
Chapters six and seven discuss the "Great Man View of History" and how youth and women were significant to the civil rights movement. These chapters also touch on how many think of the modern youth-oriented BLM and anti-police brutality movement differently from the historic youth-oriented restaurant and transportation protests. (The quote from Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed suggesting that MLK never shut down a highway is shockingly historically ignorant.) SNCC leadership was very young. John Lewis was the head of SNCC from the ages of 23 to 26. And he was replaced by Kwame Ture (Stokley Carmichael), who was 25, and then H Rap Brown, who was also 25. The historic Civil Rights movement was dependent upon women as organizers. Still, the leadership as a whole, partly because it was oriented around clergy, was almost entirely male and tended towards overt sexism. The March on Washington only included male speakers. And only allowed men to come to the White House after the march. Post-1963, women were more resistant to sexist leadership. They took more visible roles in civil rights organizations, but stories still focus on the movement's few "great men" and ignore how many local actors were required for a mass movement.
Chapters eight and nine are about the ways that systems work. Government systems, political officials, the FBI, and the police mattered to keeping segregation and oppression in place. Lyndon Johnson may have signed many of the most important Civil Rights bills, but he also used the FBI to subvert the civil rights movement in ways that were very much illegal by law at the time. He also used the FBI as a political source of information for his 1964 campaign and to discredit political opponents. Many of the rumors that the FBI planted in the media are still believed. The modern civil rights movement systems, a decentralized and largely leaderless movement, are lessons learned from the historic civil rights movement. There are weaknesses to a decentralized movement, but also strengths.
There are weaknesses to A More Beautiful and Terrible History. It probably relies on educational desegregation a bit too much. But like her frequent references to Rosa Parks and MLK, the history that people know influences historical memory. And so, in trying to reframe a historical story, it is necessary to reference the parts that people know best. It is harder to reframe a reasonably well-known "hero story" like the civil rights movement than to tell a relatively unknown story. To reframe a story, you must show why the traditional story is inadequate or inaccurate and then build the case for the new framing. That is a slow and necessarily repetitive process. But this type of reframing is essential, and I highly recommend A More Beautiful and Terrible History.
This review was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/a-more-beautiful-and-terrible-history/
gdonahue's review
4.0
readingtheend's review
3.0