The Long Civil Rights Movement and the （民权运动和）.pdf

The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past Jacquelyn Dowd Hall The black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society . . . and su^est s that radical reconstruction of society is the real issue to be faced. —Martin Luther King Jr. Stories are wonderful things. And they are dangerous. —Thomas King Th e civil rights movement circulates through American memory in forms and through channels that are at once powerful, dangerous , and hotly contested . Givil rights memorials jostle with the Souths ubiquitou s monument s to its Confederate past . Exemplary scholarship and documentarie s abound , and participant s have pro - duced wave after wave of autobiographical accounts , at least two hundre d to date . Images of the movement appear and reappear each year on Martin Luther King Jr . Day and durin g Black History Month . Yet remembrance is always a form of forget- ting, and the dominant narrative of the civil rights movement—distilled from history and memory , twisted by ideology and political contestation , and embedded in heri- tage tours , museums , public rituals, textbooks , and various artifacts of mass