The Long Civil Rights Movement
This article reviews Brandon M. Terry’s book 'Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope,' which challenges the romanticized historical narrative of the American Civil Rights Movement. It explores the tension between the nation's constitutional ideals and the reality of systemic inequality.
Why it matters
It provides a critical academic perspective on American history, questioning how the Civil Rights Movement is interpreted in modern political discourse.
“ The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing,” says the Black nurse Belize in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, set in the 1980s, “He set the word ‘free’ to a note so high no one can reach it.”
This statement may sound overly despairing to someone keen to reconcile America’s high principles to the daily experience of living in the nation, as Belize’s (white) interlocutor Louis is. Whatever the turpitudes of the Reagan administration, whatever the horrors of the AIDS epidemic, for Louis the nation has kept its holdings in the sacred honor that carried the Revolution, twenty years after the fulfillment of Black civil and political rights.
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