With a tone of defiance and pride, and the authority of having grown up on the southeast side of Washington, DC, during the turbulent 1960s-70s, Kim Staunton narrates this blistering re-examination of the Civil Rights movement. Author Jeanne Theoharis takes exception to the popularized notion that a few statues and plaques honoring Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., somehow solved the problems of racial inequality in the United States. The truth is that even after the 1965 Civil Rights Act many Northern city school systems, including New York and Boston, remained as segregated as their Southern counterparts. Staunton does adopt a sense of optimism while noting the movement’s decades of incremental victories and reminding us that much work is still to be done. B.P. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

Theoharis…is particularly attuned to how the legacies of Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. have been co-opted into a narrative of uplift, with civil rights history sanitized for public consumption…[A More Beautiful and Terrible History] is a bracing corrective to a national mythology that renders figures like King "meek and dreamy, not angry, intrepid and relentless"…Each chapter of Theoharis's book presents a historical narrative that is largely unknown outside scholarly books, or otherwise unsung…It's clarifying to read a history that shows us how little we remember, and how much more there is to understand.

★ 12/18/2017
Theoharis (The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks), professor of political science at Brooklyn College, illuminates how the conventional wisdom about America’s civil rights story erases much of the movement’s radicalism and abounds in comforting clichés. She points out that by the mid-1980s the civil rights movement had become “a way for the nation to feel good about its progress.” Theoharis discusses how focusing on Southern desegregation ignores the physically and emotionally violent controversies that accompanied attempts at greater integration in supposedly liberal Northern cities such as Boston; similarly, depicting white Southerners as racist rednecks obscures the more genteel forms of discrimination practiced by people motivated by “indifference, fear, and personal comfort.” Rosa Parks is famous for having refused to give up her seat on a bus, but she and her fellow activists organized around much broader issues of social justice, many of which remain to be sufficiently addressed. Citizens and politicians of the 21st century revere Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. as heroes, yet many criticize Black Lives Matter activists as unworthy of their memory. Theoharis’s lucid and insightful study challenges that view, proffering a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the civil rights movement’s legacy, and showing how much remains to be done. (Feb.)

A bracing corrective to a national mythology that renders figures like King ‘meek and dreamy, not angry, intrepid and relentless’…It’s clarifying to read a history that shows us how little we remember, and how much more there is to understand.”—New York Times

“Theoharis’s lucid and insightful study. . .proffer[s] a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the civil rights movement’s legacy, and showing how much remains to be done.”—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“An important illustration of the ways that history is used, or misused, in modern social and political life. Required reading for anyone hoping to understand more about race relations and racism in the United States and highly recommended for all readers interested in 20th-century American history.”—Library Journal, Starred Review

“A hard-hitting revisionist history of civil rights activism. . . . An impassioned call for continued efforts for change.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Theoharis’s view of history is expansive, including women and young people without whom the movement would have been impossible, detailing forgotten stories of activists’ fights to gain a foothold in the ostensibly less racist North, and criticizing politicians (including Barack Obama) for oversimplifying complex figures. To call this slim volume a compelling attempt to reconcile fact and fable is to underestimate its ambition; what Theoharis desires is nothing less than to show us ‘who we are and how we got here.’”—O Magazine

“Jeanne Theoharis is one of our nation’s finest civil rights scholars. She brings an incisive, urgent and unique critical perspective to our understanding of an era that is increasingly distorted and misunderstood. A More Beautiful and Terrible History is an important book that sheds new light on our recent past and yields a fresh understanding of our tumultuous present.”—Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

“A More Beautiful and Terrible History paints a vivid picture of the intentional and deadly omissions within popular histories of the 1950s and 1960s, cutting a path through hardened ground to give us the tools for a caring and inclusive future.”—Ericka Huggins, equity and inclusion educator and former member of the Black Panther Party

“Only truth sets us free. In this moment when we need fresh resistance movements, it is critical that we know the true history of the Black freedom struggle. Jeanne Theoharis debunks fables of the resistance to prove that the movements were not just spontaneous and did not immediately produce results; that young people and women were crucial to the leadership and drive; that polite racists impeded progress, not just virulent ones; and that those who became known as the leaders always understood that they were servants of the movement. The gift of this book is that Theoharis is a historical truth teller. A More Beautiful and Terrible History is crucial, and we must apply this wisdom—for today and always—to resist injustice in the face of racism, classism, and militarism.”—The Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II

“In A More Beautiful and Terrible History, Jeanne Theoharis debunks nearly a dozen national fables of polite civil rights workers humbly petitioning the nation to become a ‘more perfect union.’ The propaganda of America’s exceptionalist history, she demonstrates, not only distorts the truth of the nation’s deep and recurring commitment to systemic racism. These ‘mis-histories’ of the civil rights movement discredit the actual and necessary work of antiracist activists today, whose youthful courage and creativity are the real legacy of the past.”—Khalil Muhammad, author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America

With a tone of defiance and pride, and the authority of having grown up on the southeast side of Washington, DC, during the turbulent 1960s-70s, Kim Staunton narrates this blistering re-examination of the Civil Rights movement. Author Jeanne Theoharis takes exception to the popularized notion that a few statues and plaques honoring Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., somehow solved the problems of racial inequality in the United States. The truth is that even after the 1965 Civil Rights Act many Northern city school systems, including New York and Boston, remained as segregated as their Southern counterparts. Staunton does adopt a sense of optimism while noting the movement’s decades of incremental victories and reminding us that much work is still to be done. B.P. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

2017-10-30
A hard-hitting revisionist history of civil rights activism.Theoharis (Political Science/Brooklyn Coll.; The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, 2013, etc.) argues persuasively that the reality of the civil rights movement has become a benign national fable, invoked by public officials and liberals to assert their "enlightened bona fides" and by critics of activist groups such as Black Lives Matter in an effort to silence them. Central to this fable are distorted images of Rosa Parks, depicted as a quiet, meek woman, and Martin Luther King Jr., whose achievements are attributed to his "loving, nonviolent approach." As activist Julian Bond once put it, "the narrative of the movement has been reduced to ‘Rosa sat down, Martin stood up, then the white folks saw the light and saved the day.' " Theoharis strongly believes that turning the civil rights movement into "museum history" promotes the false idea of "an exceptional America moving past its own racism." She also points out that racism is not limited to the South; she shows how the "polite racism" of the North "framed resistance to desegregation in the language of ‘neighborhood schools,' ‘taxpayer's rights,' and ‘forced busing.' " Denying personal animosity toward blacks, Northerners revealed racism in "silence, coded language, and the demonization of dissent." Theoharis takes the media to task for their coverage of uprisings in Detroit, Los Angeles, and New York; reporters, she writes, failed to investigate the "racial inequities embedded in their city's schools, policing, or municipal structures" and presented the violence as a stunning surprise rather than the culmination "of a protracted struggle." Similarly, she criticizes the movie Detroit (2017) for "completely erasing the history of Black life and activism in the city" before the killings depicted. She also criticizes Barack Obama, who as candidate and president warned black men not to use racism as an excuse for personal failure, thereby diverting focus from civil rights organizing to "inward self-help." Chronicling the efforts of many activists, the author underscores her message that reform requires courage and hard work.An impassioned call for continued efforts for change.