The “nine-word problem” of civil rights discourse
🇺🇸 It’s MLK Jr. Day and Inauguration Day today here in the U.S. — so we’re off today, but we have a brief issue for you while we’re out.
Issue #249: autofiction, Carter’s legacy, and making good memories
Matthew Teutsch, director of the Lillian E. Smith Center at Georgia’s Piedmont University, teaches college students about the U.S. civil rights movement. His courses have taken various forms, and he’s posted several syllabi on Medium: There’s a general survey featuring essays by James Baldwin and speeches by activist Fannie Lou Hamer; another course specifically focused on memoirs by women in the civil rights movement; and a third course (which I personally would love to take) on comic book monsters created by Black and Indigenous authors, and the ways those monsters express various forms of protest, progress, and resistance.
Teutsch’s goal is to solve the “nine-word problem” of civil rights discourse:
This isn’t just a problem for civil rights education. It’s a problem for all of history. Over time, political and cultural movements are flattened until they become stories that lack nuance, inner conflict, and humanity. Three-dimensional people become avatars for ideologies. And lesser-known figures vanish from the narrative entirely.
I asked Teutsch to recommend just one primary source, out of all his syllabi, for anyone who wants to deepen their understanding of U.S. history. He emailed me back: “I would recommend Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream, which influenced King and which was reissued during the movement. Here is something I [wrote] about their friendship at the African American Intellectual History Society.”
Lillian E. Smith, if you’re unaware, was a close friend of Martin Luther King, Jr. The friendship started when Smith sent King an unsolicited letter praising his efforts at peaceful protest, the mid-20th-century’s version of a cold email. By that point, Smith had written the novel Strange Fruit (published in 1944, it was briefly banned from the U.S. postal service because it features an interracial romance). At the time, she was one of the first white women in the South vehemently and vocally opposing racial segregation.
Their friendship lasted until Smith’s death in 1966. King wrote to her family to say: “She was one of the brightest stars in the human firmament. Probably no southerner seared the conscience of white southerners on the question of racial injustice than Lillian Smith.”
📖 Also today
- If you’re a fiction reader (or writer), I recommend this essay by Brandon Taylor examining a popular subgenre of contemporary first-person novels: tales told by coolly removed, internet-addicted narrators who seem to feel nothing but witness everything. (Sweater Weather)
- One of the late Jimmy Carter’s oft-overlooked career milestones: signing a 1980 executive order to fund historically Black colleges and universities. (Quintessa L. Williams)
📷 Some practical wisdom
One question to ask yourself if you’re feeling vaguely dissatisfied with life: What memories do I want to make? Am I making them? (Miyah Byrd)
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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis
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