A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History by Jeanne Theoharis
📚 Four Thursdays in September: Sept. 3, 10, 17 & 24
🕕 6–7 pm
💻 Virtual via Zoom
🤝 Hosted by PSL St. Louis and 50501 St. Louis
🗣️ Facilitated by Ángel Flores and Zen
📖 Participants will read assigned chapters before each discussion.
What if the story we’ve been taught about the Civil Rights Movement is incomplete?
A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History asks us to look beyond the familiar story of the Civil Rights Movement and see more fully both its beauty and its terrible realities—the courage, solidarity, community, and possibility people created alongside the violence, repression, racism, and enormous resistance they faced. The movement was broad, disruptive, persistent, and often deeply unpopular, driven by women, young people, organizers, and ordinary people rather than simply a handful of celebrated heroes. Looking at that fuller history also challenges how we think about movements today: who gets called too radical or disruptive, whose resistance is considered legitimate, and what organizing, solidarity, persistence, and courage are required to create lasting change.
Join us for facilitated discussions, breakout groups, and opportunities to connect the reading directly to the movements and organizing happening around us now. Together, we’ll explore what movements for justice truly require, how power responds when movements become effective, whose stories are remembered, and what the Civil Rights Movement can teach us about building lasting change.
Come read, question, discuss, and learn together.
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