Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope: A Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement

by Brandon M. Terry

Overview

A landmark reinterpretation of the civil rights movement that challenges reductive heroic narratives of the 1950s and 1960s and invigorates new debates and possibilities for the future of the struggle for liberation.

We are all familiar with the romantic vision of the civil rights movement: a moment when heroic African Americans and their allies triumphed over racial oppression through courageous protest, forging a new consensus in American life and law. But what are the effects of this celebratory storytelling? What happens when a living revolt against injustice becomes an embalmed museum piece?

In this innovative work, Brandon Terry develops a novel theory of interpretation to show how competing accounts of the civil rights movement circulate through politics and political philosophy. The dominant narrative is romantic. This “arc of justice” narrative is found in popular histories, the speeches of Barack Obama, and even the writings of the liberal philosopher John Rawls. Despite being public orthodoxy, these romantic visions are exhausted and unpersuasive on their own terms. The breakdown of the authority of this history of justice has created space for a rival ironic mode, embodied in the political ideas of Afropessimism. While offering a sympathetic critique, Terry ultimately finds Afropessimist thought self-undermining and unworkable.

Instead, he argues, the civil rights movement is best understood in tragic terms. By challenging the attachment to triumphant pasts, Terry demonstrates that tragedy exemplifies what the civil rights movement has been and can still be. Provocative and original, Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope offers an optimistic political vision without naïveté, to train our judgment and resilience in the face of reasonable despair.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674299702
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	10/21/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	560
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Brandon M. Terry is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University and Codirector of the Institute on Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. He is the coeditor, with Tommie Shelby, of To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. and editor of Fifty Years Since MLK.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Contents

Introduction

Part One: A Critical Theory of Exemplarity, Judgment, and Narrative

1. On Exemplarity and Disclosure: The Experience of Exemplarity

2. Between Aesthetics and History: Kant and the Problem of Judgment

3. The Defeated Cause: Judgment, History, and Narrative

Part Two: Romance

4. The Romance of Civil Rights: From Red Sea to Ruins

5. The Tangible Ruins of Our Present: The Crisis of Authority in Black Political Life

6. Beyond Silence and Romance: Rawls, Mills, and the Tasks of Political Philosophy and Critique

Part Three: After Romance

7. The Changing Same: Ironic History and Its Politics in African American Critical Thought

8. The Tragic Vision: The Meaning of Long Civil Rights Movement History

Conclusion

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

Editorial Reviews

Searching, timely and provocative…Finding both romanticism and pessimism inadequate as responses to our past and present, Terry endorses instead a vision of civil rights history drawn from King’s emphasis on the tragic.
-- Matthew F. Delmont New York Times Book Review

Terry’s interpretation of the civil rights movement inspires what he calls a tragic hope — the idea that because we have agency, we should still fight for progress even if victory is not guaranteed within our lifetime or ever. It’s an empowering view that underscores the political responsibility we all have to act, to do something, because the future is not yet written.
-- Abdallah Fayyad Boston Globe

A rich, comprehensive lesson in political philosophy and historiography. Terry leaves us with a guidebook for how to remember responsibly, helping us to avoid both nostalgia and nihilism, heroic fables and corrosive despair…The greatest compliment we can give a certain type of nonfiction is not that it reads like fiction but that it burns with prophetic fire, demanding that we think and live differently. Terry’s book does just that.
-- Caleb Gayle Washington Post

Eschews the conventional heroes, romanticism and rosy narratives of the civil rights era for a more complex and sober assessment of its modern day legacy.
-- Miguel Salazar and Laura Thompson New York Times

Brandon Terry has written a book that will change how the civil rights movement is thought about and mobilized in our scholarship and in our politics. He engages the historiography of the movement with philosophical sophistication and with an eye toward keeping emancipatory possibilities alive. He refuses the comfort of romance, rejects the conclusions of pessimism, and embraces the tragic as a way of telling a richly textured story about this extraordinary moment in history. In every sense of the phrase, this book is a tour de force!
-- Eddie S. Glaude Jr., author of We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For

A major achievement. Through a deeply engaging and necessary critique of Civil Rights paradigms that represent the contemporary orthodoxy in academic discourse, Brandon Terry forwards a bracing reconsideration of Black political thought itself. Terry’s debut book as a solo author promises to transform how we will think about the Civil Rights Movement over the course of the next generation.
-- Peniel E. Joseph, author of The Third Reconstruction

Brandon Terry’s magisterial study of the example of the Civil Rights Movement is a field-defining intervention. With remarkable beauty and clarity, Terry reveals the ethical, philosophical, and political stakes of the genres through which we narrate the most consequential episodes of twentieth-century American history.
-- Adom Getachew, author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination

Brandon Terry gives us a masterful account of how the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s serves as a touchstone for competing visions of race, political possibility, and human agency. Was it, as the dominant narrative assumes, a redemptive episode in Americaʾs unfinished journey toward racial equality? Or was it, as revisionist critics suggest, a moment of false hope in the face of persistent, unalterable racial subordination? Terry offers a compelling critique of both accounts, arguing instead for a chastened, tragic, but ultimately hopeful vision of political action and spiritual striving. Ranging impressively across philosophy, history, and Black political thought, this brilliant work shows how contested interpretations of the past shape political argument in the here and now.
-- Michael J. Sandel, author of Democracyʾs Discontent: A New Edition for Our Perilous Times

Brandon Terry is one of the very few great intellectuals of his generation. His long-awaited book is an instant classic that provides in a profound and poignant manner a glimpse of costly hope in our bleak times. His philosophical erudition, historical scholarship, and deep moral grounding in the Black freedom struggle put a smile on the faces of W. E. B. Du Bois, Toni Morrison, and Martin Luther King, Jr.!
-- Cornel West

From the Publisher