Thinking About the Civil Rights Movement in a Conservative Age

Abstract

Recent studies of the civil rights movement have turned their attention to the period after 1965 and to regions outside the south. Disputing established popular and academic narratives that limit their discussion to voting rights and Jim Crow legislation, these works claim that we must understand the movement as a broader protest against the unequal distribution of political and economic power. This argument challenges the growing appropriation of civil rights rhetoric by conservatives, who have used the discourse of equality and reverse discrimination on behalf of whites and the wealthy.