SHATTERED DREAMS, INFINITE HOPE: A Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement, by Brandon M. Terry
In February 1959, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Coretta Scott King and Martin’s friend and colleague Lawrence Reddick took a six-week trip to India that included stops in London, Paris, Beirut, Jerusalem and Cairo. The journey deepened King’s understanding of Gandhian principles of nonviolence and the global scope of the struggle for justice and human dignity in the face of racism and imperialism.
Upon his return to Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, in Montgomery, Ala., King, just weeks past his 30th birthday, delivered a sermon calling on his parishioners to reckon honestly with all the ways the world might thwart their ambitions. “Who here this morning,” he asked, “has not had to face the agony of blasted hopes and shattered dreams?”
Taking its title from this sermon, Brandon M. Terry’s searching, timely and provocative new book, “Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope,” is an extended meditation on what King called “the tragic element in life.” Terry, a professor of social sciences at Harvard, examines how competing histories of the civil rights movement have shaped Americans’ understanding of civic ideals, political commitments, moral principles and social policies.
“Our era,” he writes, “is decades into the building of both a grand edifice of civil rights memorialization with universalist aspirations and a stubborn regime of post-Jim Crow racial inequality whose burdens fall far more narrowly.” Terry aims to guide readers through a disorienting landscape where the legacy of the civil rights movement is, at different times and for different political purposes, celebrated, attacked, ignored and undermined.
He begins by considering what it means for the civil rights movement to be enshrined in history as “exemplary.” The movement is not merely a set of iconic figures and events, Terry suggests; it is also the primary example used to make sense of abstract concepts like citizenship, democracy, freedom and civil disobedience. “By rethinking our interpretive practices we can make visible the often overlooked connective tissue binding political philosophy, political rhetoric, historical imagination and narrative,” he writes.
This task is urgent because we are living amid a crisis of authority in African American political life and American liberalism more broadly, one that, Terry argues, leaves “our inherited and formerly authoritative narratives and interpretive categories for understanding the civil rights movement … in decay.”
On one hand, the romantic narrative of the movement as the natural fulfillment of American ideals is outdated and underwhelming. Terry traces this classic story of the movement from Taylor Branch’s award-winning, multivolume narrative history of King (the first book of which was published in 1988) to President Obama’s invocations of Black freedom struggles as symbolic of the possibility for national unity. “The romance of civil rights — the mythic arc of deliverance, exemplarity and moral progress — has lost its grip,” Terry writes. “Its heroes, at least as they are presented to us, feel embalmed.”
On the other hand, he is unpersuaded by ironic and nihilistic accounts of African American life and history offered by so-called Afropessimist thinkers such as Frank B. Wilderson III and Calvin Warren. In place of a romantic and redemptive narrative of civil rights history, Afropessimism contends that the movement did little to fundamentally alter a social order that is irreparably wedded to anti-Blackness.
“The structure of feeling that Afropessimism taps into goes far beyond the general despair of left melancholia and reflects the intellectual canonization and practical foreclosure of a set of collective scripts regarding heroism, achievement and meaning,” Terry writes. He finds claims that slavery continues to define modern Black experience to be hyperbolic, ascribing a grand meaning to otherwise mundane actions and incidents. “For those who yearn for a life of bourgeois endurance to be imbued with the drama of a heroic Black past, the Afropessimist worldview offers a surprisingly amenable blend of solipsism, pathos and fatalism,” he maintains.
Finding both romanticism and pessimism inadequate as responses to our past and present, Terry endorses instead a vision of civil rights history drawn from King’s emphasis on the tragic. Tragedy, in Terry’s view, is “a way of seeing and feeling that does not deny hope, but refuses easy optimism.” He praises scholars of the “long civil rights movement,” including Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Glenda Gilmore, Nikhil Pal Singh and Thomas Sugrue, who have challenged the conventional chronology, geography and narrative scope of movement histories.
Rather than starting with the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 or the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, these scholars begin decades earlier, with World War I, the Great Migration and the dynamic international political organizing that took shape before World War II and expanded with postwar decolonial movements. Instead of focusing primarily on the South, their histories have explored the creativity and resilience of civil rights activists in New York City, Chicago and Philadelphia, as well as the entrenched system of “Jim Crow North” that activists confronted.
“Long civil rights historiography,” Terry writes, “seeks not merely to extend timelines or diversify our memory but to excavate submerged political possibilities — particularly those forged in the crucible of internationalism, labor radicalism and left-liberal reconstructionism — and to understand the conditions under which they were abandoned or foreclosed.”
“Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope” is a bold debut by a wide-ranging interdisciplinary thinker. It is also, as Terry notes in his acknowledgments, an “idiosyncratic book.” At times, the scaffolding of his argument, with its nuanced, often knotty considerations of key philosophers and political theorists — from Immanuel Kant and Hannah Arendt to contemporary thinkers like Alessandro Ferrara and Samuel Fleischacker — overwhelms his engagement with the rich array of scholarship on Black freedom struggles that has emerged over the past two decades.
Ideally, Terry’s book will encourage those less familiar with the historiography of the civil rights movement to seek out work not only by scholars he praises but by those he doesn’t mention, such as Marcia Chatelain, Keisha N. Blain and Crystal Marie Moten, among many others. They, too, help to sharpen his analysis of “the enduring, intergenerational social movement and accumulation of power required to overcome the oppressed social condition of African Americans” — what W.E.B. Du Bois called the “long siege.”
“Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope” arrives at a moment when the federal infrastructure to enforce civil rights law in housing, employment, education and environmental policy has been upended, and when politicians are working to keep the history of racial discrimination out of classrooms, libraries and museums. Terry addresses this situation briefly in the conclusion, insisting that the “practice of tragic hope” is infused with an appreciation of human agency, historical contingency and solidarity in the face of daunting circumstances.
“Most challenging of all,” he writes, “tragic hope takes seriously the possibility that we are not, yet, in the worst of all worlds, and it is part of our responsibility to prevent further catastrophe from coming into being.” A challenge indeed.
SHATTERED DREAMS, INFINITE HOPE: A Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement | By Brandon M. Terry | Belknap | 549 pp. | $35
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