Historiography of the Civil Rights Movement

The Traditional Interpretation

In the 1960s, when the Civil Rights Movement was at its zenith, and the first histories of it were being written, ‘History’ was still regarded as being about politics and ‘great men’.  So the first accounts of the Movement were about the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, and about Martin Luther King. 

The media of the time, particularly the TV, romanticised King’s non-violent campaign as right versus wrong, freedom versus oppression, good versus evil.  The TV documentary Eyes on the Prize – advised by historian Harvard Sitkoff – followed much the same line, focussing on the traditional narrative and the leaders & politicians. 

Even worse, films such as Mississippi Burning (1988) and Ghosts of Mississippi (1996), whilst retaining the inspirational element of the moment, had white leads ‘saving’ the Black community … threatening to deprive the African Americans of agency in their own movement. 

Writing in 2005, American historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall reflected critically:

“Martin Luther King Jr is this narrative's defining figure – frozen in 1963, proclaiming ‘I have a dream’.”

Local Studies

From the 1980s, Civil Rights historians researching the Movement’s local roots uncovered all kinds of challenges to the traditional interpretation:

1.  Local or National? 

Writing in 1981, Harvard Sitkoff could still represent the struggle for Black equality as ‘top-down’, with King deciding where the campaigns would be held.  By contrast, having studied the Movement at local level, historians such as Clayborne Carson (1986) and Mills Thornton (2002) have argued that protests arose out of local tensions, with the SCLC sometimes invited to help, and sometimes told not to interfere. 

2.  United or Divided? 

Early histories tended to stress the divisions in the Movement, particularly between the ‘moderate’ SCLC and the more radical SNCC, Black Panthers etc. 

Recent historians, however, have found that this is too simplistic and stereotyped.  Activists used the best tactics at hand to achieve their goals – thus we find the SCLC planning a march on Washington in 1968 at the height of the violence, but SNCC ‘militants’ able to step back to embrace compromise and electoral solutions.  Yes there were divisions but also collaboration, such as in Atlanta in 1960 when militant students demanding desegregation of restaurants were persuaded by Martin Luther King to accept a six-months’ delay … to give the Council time to desegregate the schools as well.  American historian Tomiko Brown-Nagin has labelled this sort of local cooperation: “pragmatic civil rights’ (2011), whilst Andrew Fearnley represents the Movement as overlapping “layers” rather that opposing blocs (2021). 

3.  The Role of women

The traditional narrative almost ignored Black women’s contribution to the Movement.  Historians now realise that women such as Septima Clark and Ella Baker were vital to the SCLC, and historian Sara Evans (1980) found similarly that women – including white women – were significant in the early years of the SNCC. 

Women – with their tradition of ‘sisterly support’ – were even more important at local level, and capable of decisive action: Stephen Milner (1989) recounts how on one occasion, when the Black male leaders had been arrested, a group of older Montgomery women dressed as men and threated the policeman trying to turn them back: “If you hit one of us, you’ll not leave here alive”. 

4.  The White response

In the traditional accounts, the white response was usually demonised as KKK racism, lynchings and bullying sheriffs.  Local studies which found differences between the traditional image of black activism and actuality, however, have also found differences between the traditional image of the white response and what actually happened. 

In his 1989 study of Montgomery, Mills Thornton (1989) found racism and opposition in the white community, but considerable disagreement about how they should respond, and that most preferred negotiation to confrontation – Joseph Crespino (2007) wrote of ‘practical segregationists’ who gave ground amenably but as slowly as possible. 

Meanwhile Michal Belknap’s local study (1987) found that lawmen like Birmingham’s Bull Connor were NOT the norm, even in the South; that terrorism was condemned and countered by southern newspaper editors, sheriffs, and courts; and that FBI harassment, newly enfranchised blacks on Councils & the bad publicity in the media, were restoring law and order well before the federal laws came into effect.  It was the federal government & courts, he concluded, that were slow to respond, not the local law enforcement. 

White communities were not all “the bedsheeted bigotry of the Ku Klux Klan and the tie and jacket prejudice of the White Citizens' Councils,” concluded Steven Lawson (1991) – by comparison to the 1,111 lynchings of Black people in the 1890s, and 281 in the 1920s; there were 6 in the 1950s and 3 in the 1960s, and murders such as that of Emmett Till caused national outrage. 

5.  The ‘Two Kings’

The 1980s also saw a re-interpretation of Martin Luther King (tbf, King re-interpreted himself, admitting before his death that "the dream I had in Washington back in 1963 has too often turned into a nightmare”.)

At first, historians started to write about the ‘two Kings’ – one the King of 1954-65 campaigning for political rights, the other the King of 1965-68 fighting against poverty and Vietnam.  Over time, however, historians have realised that King’s Christian faith made him politically left-wing throughout his life.  Michael Honey (2018) described him not just a Civil Rights hero but also “a labor hero”. 

6.  Long or Short? 

Historians had always known that the Civil Rights Movement had pre-1954 roots, but until the 1980s thy had with Steve Lawson (2011) regarded the period 1954-68 as ‘unparalleled’ (and many still do), and therefore distinct.  Even today traditional histories – even your AQA GCSE specification – start with Brown v Topeka in 1954, and end with King’s assassination in 1968 … with the later years presented (if at all) as an afterword of disturbances and demise. 

Local studies, however, have undermined the idea that the 1960s were special, and instead portrayed Black activism of that period as a continuity rather than a separate movement, for example: 

• William Chafe (1981), investigating the Greensboro sit-ins – described by Clayborne Carlson as “a simple, impulsive act of defiance” – found instead a history of Black activism in Greensboro: in 1958 and 1959 CORE and SCLC had held workshops on non-violent protest, and there had been sit-ins in Oklahoma and other places.  The Greensboro students had been encouraged by a local businessman, and the press had been alerted – there was nothing ’spontaneous’ or ‘impulsive’ about the Greensboro sit-ins. 

• Rosa Parks, also, famous for her Montgomery bus protest, had been active for decades, tracing back to the Highlander Folk School … and the man who bailed her out of jail, ED Nixon, was not only a member of the NAACP but also of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. 

• Similarly, Aldon Morris (1989) noted the existence of a protest network of black churches, colleges, and civic groups fostering and maintaining ongoing activism over decades. 

So the question was: how different – how much of a discontinuity with what had gone before – were the 1960s?  Meier & Rudwick (1976) argued that the fight for Black rights was in fact a series of discontinuities, with each generation inventing anew its own targets and its own tactics. 

In a watershed article in 2005, Jacqueline Dowd Hall:

1. argued for a ‘long civil rights movement’ stretching back to the 19th century, with some massive successes before the 1950s and ‘60s, particularly the Second World War, and forward to the present day;

2. directed attention to the reforms won by the civil rights movement in the 1970s, after the national movement's alleged demise. 

3. rejected the ‘trope’ of the South as the nation's ‘opposite other’ – “an image that southernizes racism and shields from scrutiny the institutionalized patterns of exploitation, segregation, and discrimination in other regions of the country”;

4. explored the connections between race and class and civil rights and workers' rights;

5. highlighted the role of women, both in the Civil Rights Movement and in the opposition to it;

6. claimed that the idea of a Civil Rights Movement ending in 1965 has been created as much by modern neoconservatives trying to strip it of its ‘affirmative action’ element, as by the hero worship of the time. 

Post-2005

According to an article by Andrew Fearnley (2021), recent Civil Rights research is investigating:

1. how racial segregation operated through financial and government institutions in the North, and how Black urban communities in the North ended up ‘overpatrolled and under-protected’ by the police. 

2. how and why ideas and tactics spread so quickly (including the role of the Great Migration). 

3. the troubles of 1964-68 – were they riots, or a rebellion – Elizabeth Hinton, America on Fire (2021), calls them “a sustained insurgency”. 

4. a rejection of the perception of Black Power as the ‘evil twin’ of Civil Rights, including an appreciation of its international scope and sophisticated ideology (particularly the application of the word ‘colony’ to describe Black America)

5. an increasing emphasis on the significance of Malcolm X.