One key detail that tends to be left out of the history of the US civil rights movement, as told today in documentaries and classrooms, is that in the minds of many of its leaders and supporters, it failed. Despite the passing of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act there was, in the 1960s and 1970s, a view that “the dream”, as articulated by Martin Luther King Jr, had been overwhelmed by a torrent of American nativism and racism.
By the start of the 1970s, both King Jr and Malcolm X had been assassinated and the non-violent, moral pressure strategies of civil rights had been largely abandoned by the young, in favour of the militant and militarised cult of self-reliance embodied in the Black Panther Party. The great chronicler of those years of betrayal, grief and radicalised anger was James Baldwin.
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