American History: A Survey (Brinkley), 13th Edition

Where Historians Disagree – The Civil Rights Movement

The civil rights movement was one of the most important events in the modern history of the United States. It helped force the dismantling of legalized segregation and disfranchisement of African Americans, and also served as a model for other groups mobilizing to demand dignity and rights. And like all important events in history, it has produced scholarship that examines the movement in a number of different ways.

The early histories established a view of the civil rights movement that remains the most widely accepted. They rest on a heroic narrative of moral purpose and personal courage by which great men and women inspired ordinary people to rise up and struggle for their rights. This narrative generally begins with the Brown decision of 1954 and the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, continues through the civil rights campaigns of the early 1960s, and culminates in the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. Among the central events in this narrative are the March on Washington of 1963, with Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous "I Have a Dream" speech, and the assassination of King in 1968, which has often symbolized the end of the movement and the beginning of a different, more complicated period of the black freedom struggle. The key element of these narratives is the central importance to the movement of a few great leaders, most notably King himself. Among the best examples of this kind of narrative are Taylor Branch's powerful studies of the life and struggles of King, Parting the Waters (1988), Pillar of Fire (1998), and At Canaan's Edge (2006), as well as David Garrow's important study, Bearing the Cross (1986).

Few historians would deny the importance of King and other leaders to the successes of the civil rights movement. But a number of scholars have argued that the leader-centered narrative obscures the vital contributions of ordinary people in communities throughout the South, and the nation, to the struggle. John Dittmer's Local People: The Struggle for Civil-Rights in Mississippi (1994) and Charles Payne's I've Got the Light of Freedom (1995) both examine the day-to-day work of the movement's rank and ?le in the early 1960s and argue that their efforts were at least as important as those of King and other leaders. The national leadership helped bring visibility to these struggles, but King and his circle were usually present only briefly, if at all, for the actual work of communities in challenging segregation. Only by understanding the local origins of the movement, these and other scholars argue, can we understand its true character.

Scholars also disagree about the time frame of the movement. Rather than beginning the story in 1954 or 1955 (as in Robert Weisbrot's excellent 1991 synthesis Freedom Bound or William Chafe's remarkable 1981 local study Civilities and Civil Rights, which examined the Greensboro sitins of 1961), a number of scholars have tried to move the story into both earlier periods and later ones. Robin Kelley's Race Rebels (1994) emphasizes the important contributions of working-class African Americans, some of them allied for a time with the Communist Party, to the undermining of racist assumptions. These activists, Kelley shows, organized some of the earliest civil rights demonstrations—sit-ins, marches, and other efforts to challenge segregation—long before the conventional dates for the beginning of the movement. Gail O'Brien's The Color of the Law (1999) examines a 1946 "race riot" in Columbia, Tennessee, arguing for its importance as a signal of the early growth of African-American militancy, and the movement of that militancy from the streets into the legal system.

Other scholars have looked beyond the 1960s and have incorporated events outside the orbit of the formal "movement" to explain the history of the civil rights struggle. A growing literature on northern, urban, and relatively radical activists has suggested that focusing too much on mainstream leaders and the celebrated efforts in the South in the 1960s diverts our view from the equally important challenges facing northern African Americans and the very different tactics and strategies that they often chose to pursue their goals. The enormous attention historians have given to the life and legacy of Malcolm X—among them Alex Haley's influential Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) and Michael Eric Dyson's Making Malcolm (1996)—is one example of this, as is the increasing attention scholars have given to black radicalism in the late 1960s and beyond and to such militant groups as the Black Panthers. Other literature has extended the civil rights struggle even further, into the 1980s and beyond, and has brought into focus such issues as the highly disproportionate number of African Americans sentenced to death within the criminal justice system. Randall Kennedy's Race, Crime, and the Law (1997) is a particularly important study of this issue.

Even Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the great landmark of the legal challenge to segregation, has been subject to reexamination. Richard Kluger's narrative history of the Brown decision, Simple Justice (1975), is a classic statement of the traditional view of Brown as a triumph over injustice. But others have been less certain of the dramatic success of the ruling. James T. Patterson's Brown v.

Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (2001) argues that the Brown decision long preceded any national consensus on the need to end segregation and that its impact was far less decisive than earlier scholars have suggested. Michael Klarman's From Jim Crow to Civil Rights (2004) examines the role of the Supreme Court in advancing civil rights and suggests, among other things, that the Brown decision may actually have retarded racial progress in the South for a time because of the enormous backlash it created. Charles Ogletree's All Deliberate Speed (2004) and Derrick Bell's Silent Covenants (2004) both argue that the Court's decision did not provide an effective enforcement mechanism for desegregation and in many other ways failed to support measures that would have made school desegregation a reality. They note as evidence for this view that American public schools are now more segregated—even if not forcibly by law—than they were at the time of the Brown decision.

As the literature on the African-American freedom struggles of the twentieth century has grown, historians have begun to speak of civil rights movements, rather than a single, cohesive movement. In this way, scholars recognize that struggles of this kind take many more forms, and endure through many more periods of history, than the traditional accounts suggest.

http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/sayitplain/flhamer.html - Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977), Testimony Before the Credentials Committee, Democratic National Convention, Atlantic City, New Jersey - August 22, 1964

http://www.ellabakercenter.org/page.php?pageid=19&contentid=9 - Ella Baker Center for Human Rights

http://www.historynow.org/06_2006/pdf/MS%20Sit-in%20account%20Anne%20Moody.pdf - Coming of Age in Mississippi, Anne Moody (short excerpt)

1			Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, and Anne Moody were all intimately involved with the civil rights struggle, though their names are not as well known as Martin Luther King or Malcolm X. Read the selections above. Do you think such "grass-roots" organizers played a more or less crucial role in the movement? Or is it possible to rank one above the other? After reading these selections, do you agree that the civil rights movement would be better described as plural movements? Why or why not?

Where Historians Disagree - The Vietnam Commitment

In 1965, the Department of Defense released a film intended for American soldiers about to embark for service in Vietnam and designed to explain why the United States had found it necessary to commit so many lives and resources to the defense of a small and distant land. The film was titled Why Vietnam?—a question many Americans have pondered and debated in the decades since. The debate has proceeded on two levels. At one level is an effort to assess the broad objectives Americans believed they were pursuing in Vietnam. At another is an effort to explain how and why policymakers made the specific decisions that led to the American commitment.

The Defense Department film itself offered one answer to the question of America's broad objectives, an answer that for a time most Americans tended to accept: The United States was fighting in Vietnam to defend freedom and stop aggression; and it was fighting in Vietnam to prevent the spread of communism into a new area of the world, to protect not only Vietnam but also the other nations of the Pacific that would soon be threatened if Vietnam itself were to fall. This explanation—that America intervened in Vietnam to defend its ideals and its legitimate interests—continued to attract support well after the war ended. Political scientist Guenter Lewy contended, in America in Vietnam (1978), that the United States entered Vietnam to help an ally combat "foreign aggression." R. B. Smith argued that Vietnam was a vital American interest, that the global concerns of the United States required a commitment there. And historian Ernest R. May stated: "The paradox is that the Vietnam War, so often condemned by its opponents as hideously immoral, may well have been the most moral or at least the most selfless war in all of American history. For the impulse guiding it was not to defeat an enemy or to serve a national interest; it was simply not to abandon friends."

Other scholars have taken a starkly different view: that America's broad objectives in Vietnam were not altruistic, that the intervention was a form of imperialism—part of a larger effort by the United States after World War II to impose a particular political and economic order on the world. "The Vietnam War," historian Gabriel Kolko wrote in Anatomy of a War (1985), "was for the United States the culmination of its frustrating postwar effort to merge its arms and politics to halt and reverse the emergence of states and social systems opposed to the international order Washington sought to establish." Economist Robert Heilbroner, writing in 1967, saw the American intent as somewhat more defensive; the intervention in Vietnam was a response to "a fear of losing our place in the sun," to a fear that a communist victory "would signal the end of capitalism as the dominant world order and would force the acknowledgment that America no longer constituted the model on which the future of world civilization would be mainly based."

And Marilyn Young, in The Vietnam Wars, 1945 - 1990 (1991), argues that the United States intervened in Vietnam as part of a broad and continuing effort to organize the post-World War II world along lines compatible with American interests and ideals.

Those who looked less at the nation's broad objectives than at the internal workings of the policymaking process likewise produced competing explanations. Journalist David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest (1972) argued that policymakers deluded themselves into thinking they could achieve their goals in Vietnam by ignoring, suppressing, or dismissing the information that might have suggested otherwise. The foreign policy leaders of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations were so committed to the idea of American activism and success that they refused to consider the possibility of failure; the Vietnam disaster was thus, at least in part, a result of the arrogance of the nation's leaders.

Larry Berman, a political scientist, offered a somewhat different view in Planning a Tragedy (1982) and Lyndon Johnson's War (1989). Lyndon Johnson never believed that American prospects in Vietnam were bright or that a real victory was within sight, Berman argued. Johnson was not misled by his advisers. He committed American troops to the war in Vietnam in 1965 not because he expected to win but because he feared that allowing Vietnam to fall would ruin him politically. To do otherwise, Johnson believed, would destroy his hopes for winning approval of his Great Society legislation at home.

Leslie H. Gelb and Richard K. Betts produced another, related explanation for American intervention, which saw the roots of the involvement in the larger imperatives of the American foreign policy system. In The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked, published in 1979 and written in collaboration with political scientist Richard K. Betts, Gelb argued that intervention in Vietnam was the logical, perhaps even inevitable, result of a political and bureaucratic order shaped by the doctrine of containment. American foreign policy operated in response to a single, overriding imperative: the need to prevent the expansion of communism. However high the costs of intervention, policymakers believed, the costs of not intervening, of allowing South Vietnam to fall, would be higher. Only when the national and international political situation had shifted to the point where it was possible for American policymakers to reassess the costs of the commitment—to conclude that the costs of allowing Vietnam to fall were less than the costs of continuing the commitment (a shift that began to occur in the early 1970s)—was it possible for the United States to begin disengaging.

More recent studies have questioned the idea that intervention was inevitable or that there were no viable alternatives. David Kaiser, in American Tragedy (2000), argues that John Kennedy was not, in fact, the hawkish supporter of escalation that he has often been portrayed as, but a man whose deep skepticism about the judgment of his military advisers had led him to believe that the United States should find a negotiated settlement to the war. His successor, Lyndon Johnson, harbored no such skepticism and sided with those who favored a military solution. The death of John Kennedy, therefore, becomes a vital event in the history of America in Vietnam. Fredrik Logevall, in Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of the War in Vietnam (1999), argues that there were significant opportunities for a negotiated settlement of the war in the early 1960s, but that American leaders (including both Kennedy and Johnson) chose a military response instead—in part to protect themselves politically from charges of weakness.

That the debate over the Vietnam War has been so continuous over the past quarter-century is a reflection of the enormous role the United States's failure there has played in shaping the way Americans have thought about politics and policy ever since. Because the "lessons of Vietnam" remain a subject of intense popular concern, the debate over the history of Vietnam is likely to continue.

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/vietnam/causes.htm - "The Causes of the Vietnam War," Andrew Rotter

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/vietnam/interpretations.htm - "Changing Interpretations of the Vietnam War," Robert McMahon

2			Read the two articles above on the causes and interpretations of Vietnam. What historical arguments does the Rotter excerpt draw on to make its case? Which interpretation do you find the most convincing?

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/cia-and-the-vietnam-policymakers-three-episodes-1962-1968/index.html - "CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers," Harold Ford

http://www.counterpunch.org/kolko11082003.html - "The Vietnam War Reconsidered" (Review), Gabriel Kolko

3			Read the assessment of American intelligence during Vietnam by Harold Ford above. How does he describe the nature and accuracy of CIA intelligence in the years leading up to the Vietnam War? Which of the historical interpretations of Vietnam does this report buttress or refute? Do you agree with the conclusions Gabriel Kolko draws from Ford's report?

http://www.rethinkingschools.org/war/pdfs/viet173.pdf - Bill Bigelow, "Rethinking the Teaching of the Vietnam War"

4			One of the most complicated tasks facing historians is how to teach the recent and controversial past. Read the essay above by Bill Bigelow and summarize his conclusions. How does he address the origins of the Vietnam War? Which historical interpretations does he seem to rely upon? Do you agree with his assessment?