This is the twentieth anniversary year of the Tet Offensive; of chaos at the 1968 Chicago Convention and Columbia University; of the Orangeburg Massacre and the deaths of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy and the movements they led; and the twenty-fifth anniversary year of the March on Washington and the death of President John F. Kennedy. Taken together, they’ve given birth to an industry of reminiscence and revision.
For the Civil Rights Movement, which spans these dates, and was the creator of many of the elections and the actors, we look back on so fondly now. There remains, of course, an enormous untold story. Despite an avalanche of personal recollection, historical tomes, and other attempts at remembering, much is left undiscovered and untold today. And much of what we are told now about them is simply wrong.
At the recent twenty-fifth year reunion conference of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, a concluding panelist, historian Allen Matusow, made several suggestions, which future conferences should examine. He said a future conference should discuss the notion of participatory democracy, what he called the “limiting aspects of the beloved community.” He suggested future examination of the relationship of SNCC to American liberalism. And he said, “The people who went to Mississippi went there to testify to American liberalism. When they got there they found they could not trust liberals.” “I wonder,” he asked, “If they hadn’t given up on liberalism too soon.”