Stimulating and insightful, these essays on the relationship among the media, popular culture, and the postwar African American freedom struggle offer new perspectives on the nature of the Civil Rights Movement and its legacies. At the same time, they suggest how much the struggle itself shaped important trends in American culture and mass media in the 1950s and 1960s. Bringing together a range of voices seldom heard together, this book challenges readers to reconsider the ways in which a simplistic "master narrative" of the Movement has come to dominate popular, and even some scholarly, understandings of the meaning of the freedom struggle.

Stimulating and insightful, these essays on the relationship among the media, popular culture, and the postwar African American freedom struggle offer new perspectives on the nature of the Civil Rights Movement and its legacies. At the same time, they suggest how much the struggle itself shaped important trends in American culture and mass media in the 1950s and 1960s. Bringing together a range of voices seldom heard together, this book challenges readers to reconsider the ways in which a simplistic "master narrative" of the Movement has come to dominate popular, and even some scholarly, understandings of the meaning of the freedom struggle.