Rosa sat down, Martin stood up, and the white kids came down and saved the day. — Julian Bond

Julian Bond’s cynical formulation of the commonly accepted—though deeply flawed—narrative of the USA’s Civil Rights struggle is just as prevalent today as it was during the Nixon administration, and—as J ...more

“American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.” - James Baldwin

This microhistory looks at our memorialization of the Civil Rights movement and its impact on our current political atmosphere. It is a sobering indictmen ...more

I found this book while browsing library lists curated around the BLM movement last year, and to be honest, I ALMOST skipped right over it. It was so very nearly a case of a bad cover preventing me from reading a great book.

I don't know WHAT it is about the cover that doesn't work for me... Maybe i ...more

I wanted to like this book more than I did. I enjoyed the author's biography of Rosa Parks, and I'm interested in the premise of this book - essentially the ways in which the narrative of the civil rights movement has been over-simplified and -sanitized, and how that impacts current political discou ...more

In this important book, Professor Harris argues that the common and “official” narrative of the civil rights movement in the United States is wrong—she calls it a “fable.” The fable is neatly summarized in Julian Bond’s quip: “Rosa sat down, Martin stood up, then the white folks saw the light and sa ...more

This is a very enlightening book. It might cause a variety of feelings in the reader--anger, disgust, embarrassment, dismay, indignation, and remorse, to name a few. As the title suggests, it tackles the history of the civil rights movement--you know, the one we were all taught in school or read abo ...more

Instead of telling us the "beautiful and terrible history" advertised in the title, the author goes on redundantly for most of the book about how everyone else has failed to get the history right. This is a shame, because at the very end the reader finally gets a chapter of useful lessons from the c ...more

Best taken in small chunks, a lot to be absorbed here. As the author shows, although certainly the high profile people in the civil rights movement such as King and Parks deserve praise, there were many people who contributed to the cause and enduring suffering. Many of them were women whose work go ...more

If this book had been printed on sticks of dynamite, it could not have done more to blow wide open my perception of our current national fable about the Civil Rights movement and whose purpose it serves. What the author makes quite clear is that the sanitized version we have of the people and events ...more

The premise of the book sounded very intriguing and definitely something that needs to be discussed: how the Civil Rights Movement (and broader history) has been misused, appropriated, not given the full context it should when being taught (the "history we get" vs. "history we need").

It's well-rese ...more