What is the Civil Rights Movement and
how has that changed? How has our understanding
that the Civil Rights Movement changed with the
times? And in many ways Martin Luther King
was the Civil Rights Movement and the
Civil Rights Movement was Martin Luther King.
That his many early histories of
the Civil Rights Movement were simply
biographies of Martin Luther King.
And many of these studies took these
flashpoint narratives which King was
involved with which make up the national
narrative of the Civil Rights Movement
say the Montgomery bus boycott, Little Rock,
Greensboro sit-ins, the Freedom Rides all
those kinds of things, and took those
communities and kind of gave a very
detailed look at what was going on at a
local level, at a grassroots level and
built the movement from there.
The Civil Rights Movement has come a long way
since you know just barely 30 odd years
ago when the history of the Civil Rights Movement 
were simply histories of Martin Luther
King. Now it's a much more complex, wider,
longer, multi-perspective, multi-layered,
more complicated vision of what the
Civil Rights Movement is.
And so we've moved from this very narrow approach to
a very all encompassing both
chronologically and thematically
approach
and the connects those different kind of
things and strands together.
