History teaching is within the confines of a curriculum and under the pressure of examinations is riven with unfortunate compromises and unintended outcomes. The question of the civil rights movement in America is a case in point. Textbooks in the UK tend to focus on the 1950s and 1960s, centring mainly around the story of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement in the south. The narrative becomes more complex after the passage of the Voting Rights Act 1965 and then after 1968 most text
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