“Remembrance is always a form of forgetting,” writes Jacquelyn Dowd Hall in her influential exploration of the “long civil rights movement” that began not in the mid-1950s but earlier, in the “liberal and radical milieu of the late 1930s.”

“The dominant narrative of the civil rights movement—distilled from history and memory, twisted by ideology and political contestation, and embedded in heritage tours, museums, public rituals, textbooks, and various artifacts of mass culture—distorts and suppresses as much as it reveals,” she writes.

For it is the short civil rights that has been canonized. The period between the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring segregated public schools unconstitutional and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, has become what Hall calls the “master narrative” of civil rights.

The longer, more radical movement—“I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic” wrote Martin Luther King. Jr. in 1952; in the year of his assassination, he told the New York Times “in a sense, you could say we are engaged in a class struggle”—has been intentionally obscured. Hall makes the case that the history of the civil rights movement has been “distorted” by those forces arrayed against it.

In the short version, the civil rights movement lasts a decade and is a victory of “moral clarity” followed by a period of decline amidst anti-war protest and urban riots, stagflation and malaise. Conservatives who had opposed civil rights now touted the ahistorical and anti-historical idea of colorblindness as a cure-all…even as they pushed white backlash against “student rebellion, [B]lack militancy, feminism, busing, affirmative action,” Hall writes. Even the Democratic presidents since have been part of the reaction: Jimmy Carter was Reaganite before Reagan; Bill Clinton went further than Reagan in dismembering welfare; and as a freshman Senator from Delaware in the 1970s, Joe Biden worked to maintain the segregation of white suburbs.

“By confining the civil rights struggle to the South, to bowdlerized heroes, to a single halcyon decade, and to limited, noneconomic objectives, the master narrative simultaneously elevates and diminishes the movement,” writes Hall. “It ensures the status of the classical phase as a triumphant moment in a larger American progress narrative, yet it undermines its gravitas. It prevents one of the most remarkable mass movements in American history from speaking effectively to the challenges of our time.”

The 1963 March on Washington, which featured King’s frequently (and selectively) quoted “I Have a Dream” speech, was fully titled, after all, a march “for jobs and freedom.” Movement leaders realized that economic justice and racial justice were intertwined. That was the heritage of the long civil rights movement, which other historians have rooted in what they call the “Black Popular Front” and “civil rights unionism” of the 1930s and 1940s. It was, after all, veterans of those earlier labor/left struggles like E.D. Nixon, Ella Baker, Anne Braden, Bayard Rustin, and Francis Pauley, who were the teachers and mentors of the 1950s and 1960s generation.

While the New Deal denied programs and benefits to more than half of all Black workers and most (87 percent) Black women wage-earners, the booming economy of World War II gave hope that the benefits of the state-subsidized middle class (essentially affirmative action for suburban whites) would be shared. But Cold War reaction empowered northern business leaders and southern elites to use a “mass-based but elite-manipulated anticommunist crusade” to “roll back labor’s wartime gains, protect the South’s cheap labor supply, and halt the expansion of the New Deal.”

Hall describes six major threads braiding together during the long civil rights movement. First, racism was a national problem, not one simply confined to the South. Second, racial justice and economic justice, race and class, civil rights and workers’ rights, were inseparable. Third, “women’s activism and gender dynamics were central to both the freedom movement and the backlash against it.” Fourth, civil rights struggles outside the South beginning in the mid-1960s included the turn to Black nationalism. Fifth, the gains of the 1960s were the basis of efforts in 1970s to expand social and economic rights. Sixth, the resistance to all this and the consequent backlash against it have an equally long history.

For Hall, this longer history works to make civil rights “harder to celebrate as a natural progression of American values. Harder to cast as a satisfying morality tale. Most of all, harder to simplify, appropriate, and contain.”

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