Historians interpreting overlooked stories from Civil Rights era
The gripping black-and-white photographs of civil rights protesters in the South reflect the black-and-white morality tale that generally accompanies them. Hateful, jeering white mobs and attack dogs versus peaceful marchers asking to vote and to walk in the front door.
That story line is true, but so are others. A new generation of historians is exploring some of the untold stories of the civil rights movement and its legacies: the experiences not of heroes or murderous villains, but of ordinary Southern whites. And their research is challenging some long-held beliefs about the nation’s political realignment and the origins of modern conservatism.
"You want to pry below these great narratives of good and evil and black and white,” said Jason Sokol, 29, who wrote There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975 (Alfred A. Knopf). "For those of us who didn’t live through it, there's more of an effort to not simply celebrate the civil rights movement and how extraordinary it was, but to place it within the broader arc of the 20th century."
Read entire article at New York Times
That story line is true, but so are others. A new generation of historians is exploring some of the untold stories of the civil rights movement and its legacies: the experiences not of heroes or murderous villains, but of ordinary Southern whites. And their research is challenging some long-held beliefs about the nation’s political realignment and the origins of modern conservatism.
"You want to pry below these great narratives of good and evil and black and white,” said Jason Sokol, 29, who wrote There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975 (Alfred A. Knopf). "For those of us who didn’t live through it, there's more of an effort to not simply celebrate the civil rights movement and how extraordinary it was, but to place it within the broader arc of the 20th century."