Description: The romantic vision of the civil rights movement is exhausted, and its inverse, Afropessimism, offers a self-defeating irony. To resolve this impasse, Brandon Terry transforms the standard story of America's democratic awakening through a tragic reading of the civil rights movement: as an ongoing struggle still worthy of affirmation.
Brief description: Brandon M. Terry is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University and Codirector of the Institute on Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. He is the coeditor, with Tommie Shelby, of To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. and editor of Fifty Years Since MLK.
Review Quotes: Brandon Terry's magisterial study of the example of the Civil Rights Movement is a field-defining intervention. With remarkable beauty and clarity, Terry reveals the ethical, philosophical, and political stakes of the genres through which we narrate the most consequential episodes of twentieth-century American history.--Adom Getachew, author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination