Looking Back: Historical Language and Historical Memory
From Hassan Jeffries

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Our understanding of social change, our conceptions of leadership, our understanding of the possibilities of interracial cooperation are all affected by how we remember the movement. Even much of the language that we use to discuss social issues derives from movement days. We think of the movement as a movement for “civil rights” and against “segregation.” Even those seemingly innocuous terms carry their own historical baggage.

“Segregation” became the accepted way to describe the South’s racial system among both Blacks and whites. In its denotative meaning, suggesting separation between Blacks and whites, it is not a very accurate term to describe that system. The system involved plenty of integration; it just had to be on terms acceptable to white people. Indeed, the agricultural economy of the early-twentieth-century South probably afforded a good deal more interracial contact than the modern urban ghetto.

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“White supremacy” is a more accurate description of what the system was about. “Segregation” is the way apologists for the South liked to think of it. In implies, “We’re not doing anything to Black people; we just want to keep them separate from us.” It was the most innocent face one could put on that system. When we use the term as a summary term for what was going on in the South, we are unconsciously adopting the preferred euphemism of nineteenth-century white supremacist leadership.

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If “segregation” is a poor way to describe the problem, “integration” may not tell us much about the solution. It is not at all clear what proportion of the Black population was interested in “integration” as a general goal. African Americans have wanted access to the privileges that white people have enjoyed and have been interested in integration as a possible avenue to those privileges, but that view is different from seeing integration as important in and of itself.

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Even in the 1950s, it was clear that school integration, while it would potentially put more resources into the education of Black children, also potentially meant the loss of thousands of teaching jobs for Black teachers and the destruction of schools to which Black communities often felt deeply attached, however resource-poor they were. There was also something potentially demeaning in the idea that Black children had to be sitting next to white children to learn.

The first Black children to integrate the schools in a given community often found themselves in a strange position, especially if they were teenagers. While some black people thoughts of them as endangering themselves for the greater good for the community, others saw them as turning their backs on that community and what it had to offer. It is probably safest to say that only a segment of the Black community had anything like an ideological commitment to “integration,” while most Black people were willing to give it a try to see if it really did lead to a better life.

We might also ask how “civil rights” came to be commonly used as a summary term for the struggle of African Americans. In the late 1960s, after several civil rights bills had been passed, a certain part of white America seemed not to understand why Black Americans were still angry about their collective status. “You have your civil rights. Now what’s the problem?” In part, the problem was that “civil rights” was always a narrow way to conceptualize the larger struggle. For African Americans, the struggle has always been about forging a decent place for themselves within this society, which has been understood to involve the thorny issues of economic participation and self-assertion as well as civil rights. . . .

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One hypothesis, of course, would be that “civil rights” becomes so popular precisely because it is so narrow, precisely because it does not suggest that distribution of privilege is part of the problem.

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The “civil rights” language also implies the movement was about Negroes; they were the ones who did not have “civil rights.” From the viewpoint of a Septima Clark or an Ella Baker, the movement was about enriching American democracy, and those in whose name it was made were not the only ones who profited from it.

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Related Resources

Alridge, Derrick. “The Limits of Master Narratives in History Textbooks: An Analysis of Representations of Martin Luther King, Jr.” Teachers College Record, Volume 108, Number 4, April 2006. Read a description and download here.

Jeffries, Hasan Kwame. “Remaking History: Barack Obama, Political Cartoons, and the Civil Rights Movement.” In Civil Rights History from the Ground Up: Local Struggles, a National Movement edited by Emilye Crosby (University of Georgia Press, 2011).

Kohl, Herb. “The Politics of Children’s Literature: What’s Wrong with the Rosa Parks Myth.” A critical analysis of children’s books about Rosa Parks and the Civil Rights Movement. (Published by Rethinking Schools, posted on the Zinn Education Project website.)

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