articulates that, “As African American students went to school daily, a cadre of white students
greeted them with racial epithets, kicks, shoves, death threats, and other forms of physical
harassment and intimidations.”
Jaqueline Dowd Hall, historian and author of the scholarly article “The Long Civil Rights
Movement and the Political uses of the Past” argues, “The roots of the dominant narrative lie in
the dance between the movement’s strategists and the media’s response.” The question that
many historians are actively asking in a variety of manners is, why has history glossed over this
narrative of the involvement of the grassroots movements …show more content…
Hall further conveys, “Early studies of the black freedom movement often hewed
closely to the journalistic “rough draft of history”, replicating its judgments and trajectory.
While Hall argues that the media, in large part perpetuate an aggrandizing narrative that
leaves huge gaps in the complex storyline that is the Civil Rights Movement, she also has a
strong belief that the New Right also prolonged restrictedness in the history of the Civil Rights
Movement. Hall contends, “The answer lies, in part, in the rise of other storytellers—the
architects of the New Right, an alliance of corporate power brokers, old-style conservative
intellectuals and “neoconservatives.” Hall emphasizes that the New Right were “Reworking
that narrative for their own purposes, these new “color-blind conservatives” ignored the
complexity and dynamism of the movement, its growing focus on structural inequality, and its
“radical reconstruction” goals.”
Whether it be through the omitting of important details by specific groups like the