THE UNSETTLED HISTORY OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Analytical Paper for HIST 31346-R - The Civil Rights Movement

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The long Civil Rights Movement as defined by Jacqueline Dowd Hall is a narrative that stretches far beyond the borders of the 1950s and 60s.[1] Hall argues it began in the late 1930s and continued into the 1970s. There is a prevalent notion within general American knowledge that the Civil Rights Movement was a spontaneous vocation. However, this misconception is not at the fault of those who understand it as such. This belief is due to the responsibility of several actors, American media, educational systems, and most importantly, historians because “the Civil Rights Movement circulates through American memory in forms and through channels that are at once powerful, dangerous, and hotly contested."[2] Therefore, when these actors narrow and freeze the movement in time to focus solely on events and leaders such as Brown v. Board, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, the “narrative simultaneously elevates and diminishes the movement,” and prevents it from “speaking effectively to the challenges of our time.”[3] In other words, the common recount of the movement ignores root causes that are still present in our current “progressive” narrative, as though the issues of the past have been overcome. There is a misconception that the Civil Rights Movement was a sudden call for racial equality, therefore Jacqueline Dowd Hall argues that it is the historian’s duty to banish the fables of the movement as told by mainstream media and reconstitute towards individual agency and struggles for economic equality.

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Jacqueline Dowd Hall’s “The Long Civil Rights Movement” is an article that resolves the myths of the Civil Rights Movement constructed by the mainstream media as well as historians. She revisits the master narrative of the movement, one that embraces the beginning and end of the black freedom movement. A narrative that permeates American culture and limits it to radical race-based oppression in the 1960s South. Hall argues that African Americans suffered more than just social inequality in the midst of white presence, but also economic and health-based oppression within every space they existed. The Great Depression of the 1930s only exacerbated already present African American struggles. They were the first the be laid off, displaced in neglected and polluted areas of America, and limited to low waged jobs. Government legislation such as the New Deal, however, attempted to assist such calamity and granted aid such as public housing and welfare benefits. Ironically, the New Deal intensified inequality by favoring normative familial and economic relations. For example, to receive welfare, the recipient must be a member of a nuclear family headed by a male breadwinner and tended by a woman homemaker. This unfortunately was an “an ideal from which most people of color were excluded.”[4] Therefore, structural racism within the New Deal made concepts of space, class, and gender all factors of racism. These struggles and stereotypes of welfare recipients continue long after the traditional “ending” of the Civil Rights Movement.

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To mend this narrow understanding, Hall not only urges readers to reconsider the varietal causes of the Civil Rights Movement, but for historians to broaden their discourse. Historians hold the responsibility of uncovering and retelling the stories of the past. However much they decide to chronicle history is up to the individual. As a result, the historiography of the movement has limited it to a mushroomed demand for civil rights shepherded by the single agency of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The movement as previously discussed, is more complex and rather was a fight for social, health, and economic equality, not one or the other. As a result of this reduced history, Hall advises for a more spatial approach that dismantles the Brown v. Board to Civil Rights Act chronology in favor of a more expansive timeline. A timeline that does not “reduce history to formulaic mantras” and instead platforms underrated figures such as Ella Baker and various grassroots organizations.[5] Hall asks historians to recognize their impact on shaping the general knowledge of history since they “can and must play a central role in a struggle that turns so centrally on understanding the legacy of the past.”[6] To effectively describe the long Civil Rights Movement, historians have to emphasize individual agency, thwart off simple dichotomies that pit race against class, and resist an easy closure. Their responsibility to history lends to how the reiterations school teachers and the media ultimately spread knowledge to the general public. Thus, this limited history is “twisted by ideology and political contestation, and embedded in heritage tours, museums, public rituals, textbooks, and various artifacts of mass culture—[that] distorts and suppresses as much as it reveals.”[7]

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Hall’s call for the reconstitution history of the Civil Rights Movement is not only so that it can “speak effectively to the challenges of our time,” but because of repercussions it can cause within societal behavior.[8] When the movement is simplified as the struggle for racial equality, its true complexity is erased from history and from current issues faced today. This misinterpretation in effect develops what Hall calls, color-blind conservativism. People who practice this emphasize racial colorblindness as the problem of the past and answer to today’s inequality. It is essentially a form of microaggression that disacknowledges the vast history of African American oppression and the legacy of the movement. Color-blind conservatives define the movement’s only objective “as the elimination of racial classifications and the establishment of formal equality before the law…the principle for which King and the Brown decision, in particular, stood.”[9] In other words, they have embraced the hegemonic narrative of short Civil Rights Movement, and have applied it to people of color within their social lives. This is problematic because people of color, specifically African Americans, literally carry their race, and rejecting that invalidates the experiences and hardships they are encumbered within their daily lives. Therefore, “the stories we tell about the Civil Rights Movement matter; [because] they shape how we see our own world.”[10]

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There is a misconception that the Civil Rights Movement was a sudden call for racial equality, therefore Jacqueline Dowd Hall argues that it is the historian’s duty to banish the fables of the movement as told by mainstream media and reconstitute towards individual agency and struggles for economic equality. Hall’s article essentially aims to "to make civil rights harder,” by asking the reader to reinterpret its causes and accomplishments and compare how that translates to today.[11] African Americans and other people of color are still victims of a type of inequality that is harder to identify. It is not an inequality that blatantly forbids racial integration or normalizes daily acts of public racism. Therefore, if we make the movement “harder to celebrate as a natural progression of American values” and “harder to cast as a satisfying morality tale," similarities between then and now can be effectively revealed.[12]

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Reference

Jacqueline, Dowd Hall. “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past” in The Journal of American History. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005. 1233-1263.

[1] Dowd Hall, Jacqueline. “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past” in The Journal of American History. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005.

[2] Ibid. 1233.

[3] Ibid. 1234.

[4] Ibid. 1241.

[5] Ibid. 1262.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid. 1233.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid. 1237

[10] Ibid. 1269.

[11] Ibid. 1235.

[12] Ibid.