Below is an excerpt from an article, “An argument for how to tell the story of the civil rights era,” written by NULab Faculty Caleb Gayle for The Washington Post.
“It is sometimes a gift and sometimes a curse that we are capable of reading history as having a plot. When it comes to the civil rights movement, competing plots have shaped — and sometimes harmfully warped — our collective memory.
In “Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope,” Brandon M. Terry, a professor of social sciences at Harvard, presents, as the book’s subtitle puts it, “a tragic vision of the civil rights movement.” In doing so, he dismantles two familiar narrative modes used for the era — the romantic and the ironic — and interrogates how the potency of storytelling has convoluted our idea of the movement.”
You can read the full review in The Washington Post here: “An argument for how to tell the story of the civil rights era.”
