In the latest episode of the Explaining History Podcast, we explore the historiography of the civil rights movement and the problem of the “happy ever after” narrative – the idea that the struggles of the 1950s and 60s somehow “solved” racism in America.**
The Problem of Happy Ever After
For many years, there was an impression in British high schools – and, I suspect, in schools across the world – that the civil rights movement had a happy ending. The struggles of the 1950s and 60s, the marches, the speeches, the sacrifices, culminated in something like victory. And then, well, everything was sorted.
This is, of course, nonsense. History doesn’t work like that. The civil rights movement achieved significant gains – in voting rights, in education, in employment, in desegregation. But the idea that racism was somehow “solved” in 1968 is absurd. The murder of Emmett Till in 1955, the brutal beatings on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King – these were not the end of the story.
The problem is partly pedagogical. For the purposes of teaching a module, you have to have a beginning and an end. You might end a study of civil rights in 1968. But the idea that students sometimes take away from the classroom – that it’s all sorted now – is deeply misleading.
The Historiographical Challenge
As Kevin Verney notes in his book *The Debate on Black Civil Rights in America*, the historiography of the African American experience since 1980 is “for obvious reasons less expansive than for other decades.” Evaluating this period poses special challenges for scholars, since it involves making assessments of trends and developments that are not yet fully complete.
Historians are usually the last members of the academic community to provide commentary on contemporary developments. They are “instinctively reluctant to venture where angels fear to tread.” Those who do venture into such territory are more usually journalists, economists, political scientists, and sociologists.
This is not to say that historians do not hope to have some influence on current affairs. Rather, they most commonly seek to do so by presenting past events in a new light that might influence contemporary thinking. C. Vann Woodward’s seminal study *The Strange Career of Jim Crow* (1955) was intended both to correct public misconceptions about the history of segregation and to ease the region’s move towards integration.
The Dangers of Hindsight
The downside of focusing on nationally known leaders and major political developments is that it risks overemphasising the importance of events and individuals that command high levels of public attention in the short term but, when viewed more dispassionately over a broader timescale, may be seen to have had only limited significance.
This is particularly evident in the treatment of the 1980s and 90s in many textbooks. There is often a chapter on the Black Panthers, then a brief mention of a black middle class emerging, and then – bizarrely – a section on performers like Michael Jackson and Will Smith. As if the entire political struggle of the previous decades had been reduced to entertainment.
There is something deeply offensive about this. After all the struggles, after the marchers beaten on the bridge at Selma, after Malcolm X and Martin Luther King gunned down in cold blood, the conclusion is that African Americans have produced some entertainers. Really? That’s all there is to say?
The Jackson Debate
Jesse Jackson, who died this year, is a useful case study. The first serious biographical study of Jackson appeared in 1975, but it was not until his high-profile presidential campaigns of 1984 and 1988 that he became a sustained focus of scholarly attention.
Adolph L. Reed’s 1986 work *The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon: The Crisis of Purpose in Afro-American Politics* was deeply critical of Jackson’s 1984 campaign. Reed portrayed Jackson’s campaign as “empty symbolism” irrelevant to the needs of the vast majority of African Americans. Jackson personified, Reed argued, “an anachronistic style of thinking in African-American society” – an elitist and hierarchical form of church leadership associated with the civil rights struggles of the 50s and 60s.
The perils of passing judgment so soon after the event were highlighted when, in 1988, Jackson fared significantly better – at one point even seeming to have a real chance of being selected as the Democratic Party candidate. Although such expectations ultimately proved unrealisable, this impressive showing undermined Reed’s argument that Jackson was only running a token campaign.
Race vs. Class
A key debate in the historiography of the post-civil rights era is whether the major division in American society is race or class. William Julius Wilson’s 1987 study *The Truly Disadvantaged* controversially argued that inner-city problems were evidence of the “increasing irrelevance of race” in American life. The main division, he concluded, was not between blacks and whites, but between haves and have-nots.
Wilson’s thesis was in keeping with the right-wing political philosophy of the Reagan and Bush administrations, which opposed affirmative action programmes on the grounds that advances in race relations since the 1960s meant there was no longer any justification for giving special consideration to minority groups.
But liberal and radical African American scholars highlighted the extent to which African Americans comprised a disproportionately high percentage of inner-city residents and experienced much higher levels of crime, poverty, and deprivation than their white counterparts. Other studies of the 1990s demonstrated the alarming extent of both individual and institutionalised racism in American law enforcement agencies.
Michael C. Dawson argued that newly affluent black Americans identified much more closely with other, less fortunate African Americans than with middle-class whites. A minority oppressed for centuries, he argued, would not exchange racial loyalties for class ones so easily.
The Unfinished Story
The human cost of inner-city decay was made clear in a series of revelations by journalists and street gang members which showed the disturbing levels of alienation and violence in ghetto youth culture. The story of African Americans since 1980 is not a happy ever after. It is a story of continuing struggle.
The election of Barack Obama in 2008 was an achievement of sorts – but for working-class African Americans, the gains were debatable. And then came the enormous racialised backlash that Trump represents. Trump is in large part the product of a kind of inability by white America to accept an African American president – but he is also the product of Obama’s refusal and inability to break with neoliberalism.
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