Brandon Terry’s remarkable new book Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope challenges the romantic narrative of the Civil Rights Movement that has long dominated American political discourse. I often describe this romanticization as a kind of whitewashing of the long civil rights campaign: the production of a more palatable, less disruptive account of Martin Luther King, Jr. and his legacy for a white American audience. Terry traces precisely this phenomenon, carefully reconstructing America’s “symbolic investment in King as a modern Moses” and even noting that “neoconservatives rarely miss an opportunity to conscript King’s image to their cause.”
This romantic narrative is reproduced not only in the build environment, or what Terry beautifully calls the “permanence of asphalt, concrete, and bronze”: streets, schools, and memorials that enshrine the civil rights heroes, but also in political discourse. This narrative celebrates a selective King as a prophet of racial reconciliation and erases his critiques of capitalism, American militarism and imperialism, and white liberal gradualism, while marginalizing his “radical” contemporaries such as Malcolm X and the Black Panthers. By now, this romantic story is familiar terrain in American mythology: a version of King whose legacy reassures rather than unsettles with the Civil Rights Movement as the paradigmatic story of American justice.
Terry’s book moves beyond correcting the historical record to consider the political function of narratives themselves. What does it mean to elevate a specific struggle to what Terry calls an “exemplary event”? To commemorate the Civil Rights Movement as exemplary is, after all, not merely to describe the past but to make an argument about the present and the future. Exemplary events, Terry suggests, “help us define and communicate values, understand other events and phenomena we encounter, guide our imagination, and disclose or order our normative and political judgments.” Terry insightfully recounts how these narratives are engaged in the project of world-making: “What abstractions and concepts do they scaffold? What judgments do they appear to authorize?” These questions urge us to consider how stories about the past become benchmarks for evaluating our present and imagining our future.
And yet, as I find myself discussing Terry’s brilliant book with my colleagues and students, an unsettling feeling inevitably erupts. Terry’s concern with the romanticization of the Civil Rights Movement feels oddly off-center today, not necessarily incorrect but no longer the central threat to Black historical memory. Much of this is a matter of political context. 2026 is, after all, not 2015.
Terry began this project during the Obama years, and signs of those origins are apparent throughout the book. One of the recurring figures that Terry invokes to explore the romanticization of the Civil Rights Movement is President Barack Obama himself, who often invoked King and the moral symbolism of the long civil rights struggle. Terry powerfully recalls the striking image of Barack and Michelle Obama walking hand in hand with their daughters, Marianne Robinson, John Lewis, and many other civil rights advocates as they marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, a bright symbol of American democracy and racial progress. As the first Black President, Obama powerfully championed the romantic narrative of the Civil Rights Movement on a national stage.
But reading Terry’s book now, I am struck less by the limits of that symbolism and more by the brutal reality of our current political climate. We no longer inhabit a political moment in which the primary danger is the selective appropriation of King’s legacy on behalf of a liberal nationalism. We inhabit the era of Donald Trump, an era marked not by the romanticization of Black history but active efforts to erase, ban, and delegitimize it altogether.
As limiting as the romantic civil rights narrative may be (and limiting surely it is), I admit that I find it tempting to conclude that a romantic version of Black history is preferable to no Black history at all. And perhaps there is some truth to this intuition. But the intuition ultimately urges us to return to the very questions that animate Terry’s project. What is at stake in the stories we tell ourselves about our past? What do those stories authorize, obscure, or foreclose? Or put in Terry’s terms, what do we lose when we get these narratives wrong?
As I thought more about these questions, I found myself returning to other moments in American history that looked more like 2026 than 2015. In particular, I came back to the opening of Ida B. Wells’s autobiography, Crusade for Justice, written near the end of her life and published posthumously by her granddaughter. Wells does not begin her autobiography with the triumph of Black history but an anxiety about historical erasure.
Wells recounts the story of a young Black woman attending a meeting of the YWCA, in which participants were asked to name a “heroic” woman comparable to Joan of Arc. The young woman offers Wells’s name, having “heard [her] mentioned so often,” but when pressed to explain Wells’s accomplishments, she cannot. For Wells, this is not demonstrative of a personal failing on the part of the young woman but revealing of something larger and more insidious: the systematic erasure of Black history from American public memory.
This erasure matters, Wells argues, because ignorance is politically consequential. Racial injustice persists, in part, because Black Americans do not know the history of Black struggle and the realities of white terror. Wells’s autobiography was not conceived of as a personal reflection as much as a political testimony, an attempt to ensure that future Black generations would know “how the agitation against the lynching evil began.” In this sense, Wells views history as a form of political resistance. She wants to get the record straight—hence the title of The Red Record, one of her most famous anti-lynching pamphlets devoted to documenting racial violence in painstaking detail.
Reading Wells’s autobiography now, Terry’s concerns begin to look less historically distant than they initially seem. The struggle is not simply over whether the Civil Rights Movement is romanticized but over whether Black history will be remembered at all and who controls the terms of that remembrance. Wells understands that historical ignorance is not politically neutral but actively fostered to allow racial injustice to persist.
Terry, of course, knows all of this. In the concluding chapters of the book, he acknowledges that the “genuflections that conservatives once routinely performed in the honor of the romantic narrative of the civil rights movement have also become more embattled in recent years,” particularly amid assaults on affirmative action and the broader backlash against “so-called wokeness.” The Civil Rights Movement no longer occupies the uncontested symbolic position that it did when Terry began this project.
And yet Terry wrote the book this way anyways. He insists that getting the history right matters, and I am deeply sympathetic to that commitment. I want my students to encounter a King beyond the familiar excerpts of the “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” that circulate every January. I want them to wrestle with King’s writings on Vietnam, labor and capitalism, and Black Christianity.
At the same time, I am very aware that I write and teach in a political moment in which even this cannot be taken for granted. I am grateful to work at a university where my research has not yet become a political or professional liability, and I am still permitted to teach classes that center King and Wells. We are still living in a moment in which we must insist that Black history is American history.
For this reason, I find Terry at his most compelling in his engagement with Afro-pessimism and what he calls a “tragic vision” of the Civil Rights Movement. One of the book’s greatest accomplishments is that Terry manages, as he says of W.E.B. Du Bois, to show us how to “take Afro-pessimism seriously without succumbing to its confusions.” He refuses both the easy optimism of romantic narratives and the immobilizing fatalism that accompanies Afro-pessimism.
Instead, Terry offers tragedy as an alternative framework. Tragic narratives, he argues, reject both the “confident teleology of romantic narratives and the paralyzing resignation of irony,” forcing us instead to confront the “complexity, contingency, and conflict inherent in human struggles for justice.” We must continue, he argues, “even in the face of impossible odds,” and without “losing [our] grasp on the fact that it is death that colors the waters.”
I find Terry’s tragic vision of Black history extraordinarily difficult and incredibly compelling in our present moment. Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope asks us to confront the past honestly without surrendering our future entirely. After reading this powerful book, I am convinced that Terry and I unequivocally share at least one commitment: that the stories we tell ourselves about our past exert enormous power over our future. The struggle over Black history, I remain convinced, is inseparable from the struggle for America’s future.
