ABSTRACT
Many students only know the Civil Rights Movement through a distorted mythology dominated by selected rhetoric from Martin Luther King Jr., and images of nonviolent protesters often being attacked by white hoodlums. Journalist and author Fred Powledge acknowledges this phenomenon, writing, “In the minds of untold numbers of Americans,… [King] was the Civil Rights Movement. Thought it up, led it, produced its victories, became its sole martyr.” 2 According to scholar Charles Payne, “In most popular discourse about the movement, King serves a normative role—the apostle of nonviolence, advocate of interracial brotherhood and Christian patience.” Payne has also argued that these images and interpretations dominate many movement studies that “are strongly predisposed toward the normative … downplaying the role of pressure, economic or otherwise, reducing the movement to a ‘protest’ movement, treating nonviolence as if it were somehow natural while treating militance as inevitably doomed to failure.” 3 I find that many of my students, already steeped in the popular images of King as the movement, expect a normative, top-down view of the movement that reinforces their sense that long-suffering, loving, well-behaved, forgiving African Americans petitioned, peacefully and patiently, for citizenship rights which were then granted by a well-intentioned (if slow) federal government. Much like the perverted picture of the movement portrayed in the popular movie Mississippi Burning, in their minds the bad guys were stereotypical redneck whites who were defeated by the heroic federal government, personified by the FBI and the martyred Kennedy brothers. As in Mississippi Burning, blacks played a relatively passive role—victims more than actors— in a drama where equality was bestowed upon them.
