“How we understand the legacies of the Civil Rights Movement depends on how we remember the movement in the South. If we remember it as confined to the South, as just about legalized segregation and voting rights, then its legacy looks pretty simple. It succeeded; it removed a terrible stain from American democracy. If we remember it as being broader and wider and deeper and longer than that, then its legacy looks very different.”—Jacquelyn Dowd Hall
In this video produced by the Gilder Lehrman Institute, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall argues that the Civil Rights Movement was as much about economics as it was about legal rights. And the work of the Movement continues—and is still needed—today.
Hall is director of the Southern Oral History Program at UNC and co-author of Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World. Like a Family was included in our Publishing the Long Civil Rights Movement pilot project.