Civil Rights After 1980 – The Unfinished Revolution

# Episode Description

In this solo episode of the Explaining History Podcast, we tackle one of the most persistent problems in how we teach and understand the civil rights movement: the "happy ever after" narrative.

For many years, students have been taught that the struggles of the 1950s and 60s culminated in victory – that the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act somehow "solved" racism in America. This is, of course, nonsense. History doesn't work like that. The civil rights movement achieved significant gains, but the idea that racism was so...