In the scrum of our recent politics, a debate emerged over the last several weeks about whether protests and protesters should be “civil.” The debate brought a civil rights imaginary back into public view once again. Thomas Sugrue wrote a needed corrective to the impression that the civil rights movement was “civil” in the way some political pundits recently insisted it was, calling civility “White America’s Age-Old, Misguided Obsession.” (I would add this: it’s telling activists tended to use the word “freedom” for their own movement and not “civil rights.”) The whole debate recalled for me an influential book I Read more