A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History

A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History (2018) explores both the history and the historical memory of the American Civil Rights Era. Author Jeanne Theoharis, also known for her first book The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (2013), demonstrates the myriad ways that commentators have distorted historical events in more modern contexts.

Americans’ reckoning with civil rights is a story filled with myth, simplistic characterizations, and the dangerous insistence that the movement marked the end of racism and proved the equalizing power of American democracy. Theoharis details these fallacies and asserts that, as a society, Americans neglect both the movement’s full scope and the ongoing perpetuation of racial inequality.

The book won the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize in Nonfiction. Theoharis organizes her corrective into an introduction on “Histories We Get” and nine main chapters on “Histories We Need,” each focused on a particular, erroneous element of civil rights mythology. While familiar histories stress sanitized main characters, peaceful protest, and American solidarity, Theoharis suggests that if we are to truly pursue racial equality, we must acknowledge a much deeper and more complex narrative. The result of such an inquiry is an unfamiliar, messy story of systemic processes and public complacency with inequality. There are many important but relatively unknown historical activists, but there are also many villains. Theoharis discusses each.

Most of the archival material that grounds the book comes from distinct cities and events. Readers encounter New York City in the throes of a battle over school desegregation and zoning policy, Boston as parents used a “busing crisis” to euphemize their disdain for desegregation, and both Los Angeles and Detroit as sites of longstanding conflict that erupted into prominent “uprisings” or “riots” in the late 1960s. Using records from local newspapers, organization meetings, and more, Theoharis reconstructs these historical conflicts and exposes them from many largely unprecedented angles.

She also revisits the movement’s well-known moments to elaborate on their larger contexts and the significance of their historical distortions. For example, she discusses the multifaceted efforts of Rosa Parks and the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, including protests to segregation, police brutality, criminal justice, and job discrimination. Parks has been remembered as a quiet, tired woman, but she was a longtime activist who worked on each of these civil rights issues.

“The Histories We Need,” as Theoharis calls them, would allow historically accurate discussions about racial inequality. These corrected histories would be an uncomfortable reckoning, particularly among white Americans, but the correction would also provide the perspectives necessary for real change. This is the author’s call-to-action in A More Beautiful and Terrible History.

This study guide references the 2018 Beacon Press edition of the text.