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

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2018

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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 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 2: “The Histories We Need”

Chapter 3 Summary: “Beyond the Redneck: Polite Racism and the ‘White Moderate’”

The author explains that popular understandings of racism cast it as “violent” and “aggressively personalized” (84)—easily detectable and blatant acts committed by individuals against other individuals. In fact, racism is systemic and perpetrated by society at large in overt and covert ways. This chapter focuses on “polite racism,” behaviors that surreptitiously uphold white supremacy. The previous examples—like New York’s zoning and articulating a “busing crisis” instead of a crisis surrounding desegregation—are examples of polite racism.

Polite racism also comes from bystanders who observe racial injustice but do not intervene: “While many White Americans supported segregation with their actions, others supported it through their inaction—their unwillingness to see how their home, neighborhood, school, or desire for police protection derived from disparity” (85). Indifference can be as effective as hate in perpetuating racism; the author contends that this fact goes largely unacknowledged because it makes many people uncomfortable to think about playing a crucial role in a destructive system through their complacency (86).

The author revisits the examples from the previous two chapters to illustrate how “colorblind” discourse emerged in the North as a “cloak” under which white Northerners could voice support for desegregation in the South while upholding it quietly in their own cities.

If not denying racial inequity outright, polite racism also included the previously discussed narratives that blamed Black people for their own struggles instead of acknowledging a larger, inherently unequal context: “The need to address ‘cultural deprivation,’ provided a way to explain and deflect movements for racial equality by saying that the most important task was to change the behaviors and values of Black people themselves” (94). Any narratives that enabled non-Black people to deny responsibility or skirt blame might be considered polite racism, and together, the phenomenon amounted to an enormous push for white supremacy, particularly outside of the more overtly racist and segregationist South.

The deflections foundational to polite racism, Theoharis explains, have remained central to more modern criticisms of civil rights protest and activism. “Cultural” explanations of Black struggle have morphed from frameworks of protesting forced school desegregation into generational complaints that young Black people are not protesting in the proper form established by earlier figures (97). Accusations insist that the Black community has become “lost”; this accusation again misattributes racial inequality to Black behavior and culture. To examine the history of polite racism entails interrogating how it still functions today.

Chapter 4 Summary: “The Media Was Often an Obstacle to the Struggle for Racial Justice”

The media was a major tool for spreading disinformation and mischaracterizations of civil rights activists during the civil rights movement. Several destructive patterns are discernable in a white-controlled national press from the era, mostly consisting of major newspapers outside the South. Theoharis introduces many examples throughout the chapter from the widely read papers in the cities she previously examined: the New York Times, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and a few papers from Detroit, Michigan.

Papers in cities in which “uprisings” occurred depicted these events as shocking and explosive with no prior indicators. In general, mainstream papers treated Black activism outside the South as isolated, as “individual protests or disturbances rather than as a movement” (102), which ignored the legitimacy of their causes. In many cases, Northern papers (and most of the country’s major papers were published in the North) dedicated much space to lambasting Southern segregationists’ outright racism while denying and sidestepping racism in their own cities of publication. They claimed that Northern cities were free from “official segregation” and sported long histories of racial harmony (108, 106). Theoharis says that “their myopia went largely unchecked” (103), and the narratives perpetuated over time.

One essential omission in reporting was an African American perspective. Few mainstream papers genuinely engaged with Black perspectives or even quoted Black speakers or political leaders. White journalists’ spoke about Black people, not with them in their reports.

As “the national news became another obstacle to racial justice, another form of protection for segregation and inequality in much of the country” (105), a Black press emerged that did publish Black perspectives, forging its own place in the historical record at the time.

The author remarks on what might have been achieved if, for example, the New York Times honestly and openly discussed desegregation efforts, the backlash within New York City, and the ongoing history of systemic anti-Black racism there. She argues that “New York officials would have felt watched […] the movement’s wings would have had more power […] [there] would have [been] increased […] pressure on school officials to act” (111-12). The media was thus a hugely destructive element in civil rights activism. In historical memory, the press emerges as a heroic entity that won over hearts and minds to pull the South out of its deplorable bigotry—and the fact that the press actually reflected the bigotry outside of the South has remained greatly underacknowledged in the public imagination.

Chapters 3-4 Analysis

Chapters 3 and 4 discuss historical actors that typically skirt blame for racism or are even celebrated as heroes in popular depictions of the civil rights movement. One group is “white moderates”—white people who likely voiced public support for desegregation in Southern cities while quietly working to uphold it in their own neighborhoods. The other group is the mainstream media, mostly controlled by white men. Neither group is cast as a regular villain or obstacle in public memory, but the author examines how they created deceptive mythology and upheld policy essential to perpetuating disenfranchisement and oppression of African Americans and other people of color.

These chapters ruminate on places and events introduced earlier in the book. In Chapter 3, for example, the author revisits the New York City school system to discuss “colorblind” rhetoric and policy; in Chapter 4, she addresses the Watts uprising to discuss the LA press’ “amnesia” about decades of activism preceding the “riot” (113). Chapters continue to be divided into subsections that often address these regional examples.

The author continues to stress the importance of reexamining “Histories We Need” in the context of her present-day. The era’s media coverage “naturalized” the civil rights triumphs; in other words, the popular narrative presented progress as inevitable instead of a hard-won revolution. This narrative has remained in the public sphere ever since. The lesser-known or intentionally erased stories, the author contends, would be valuable and informative to study and analyze in greater depth to better understand the historical and enduring contours of American power structures.

Though these chapters focus on white inaction and the machination of biased narratives, they also revisit key takeaways from earlier in the book, namely that crucial obstacles to civil rights originated in the North and that we should understand moments of visibility as connected parts of a long and expansive movement rather than isolated events. Repeating these earlier points stresses their importance and allows the author to continually flesh out the implications of several major events in the movement’s history.