The Civil Rights Movement

W.E.B. Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk in 1903 — one of the most important books in American history, introducing the concept of "double consciousness" and the problem of the color line. Booker T. Washington was already the most famous Black man in America, and they disagreed fundamentally about strategy: accommodation and economic self-sufficiency versus full political equality, now. Both men were right about different things. The argument between them defined the century.

Fifty years later, Martin Luther King Jr. was standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Malcolm X was watching on television, unsatisfied with the pace and the framing. Their wives — Coretta Scott King and Betty Shabazz — outlived them both and spent decades carrying the work forward. The Civil Rights Movement wasn't one movement. It was a long argument across generations, carried in churches and courtrooms and streets.