This semester I am teaching an African American History course, and today’s lecture was about the differences between the two understandings of the civil rights movement—the standard one that is part of the American civil religion, often referred to as the “classical” or “heroic” period; and, as Jacquelyn Dowd Hall and Kevin Mattson have called it, the “harder” history of the “long civil rights movement,” a history that fits much less easily into nationalist pieties of progress and respectability. This was a poignant lecture because of today’s date: April 4th is the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot and Read more