Journal of American Studies,  (), , –

© Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies . This is an
Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution
licence ([Link] which permits unrestricted re-use, dis-
tribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
doi:./S First published online  August 

“He Was Shot because America

Will Not Give Up on Racism”:
Martin Luther King Jr. and the
African American Civil Rights
Movement in British Schools
M E G AN H UN T , B E N J A M I N H O U S TO N , B R I AN WA RD
A N D N I C K ME G O R A N

This article examines how Martin Luther King Jr. and the movement with
which he is often synonymous are taught in UK schools, as well as the conse-
quences of that teaching for twenty-first-century understandings of Britain’s
racial past and present. The UK’s King-centric approach to teaching the
civil rights movement has much in common with that in the US, including
an inattention to its transnational coordinates. However, these shared (mis)
representations have different histories, are deployed to different ends, and
have different consequences. In the UK, study of the African American
freedom struggle often happens in the absence of, and almost as a surrogate
for, engagement with the histories of Britain’s own racial minorities and
imperial past. In short, emphasis on the apparent singularity of US race rela-
tions and the achievements of the mid-twentieth-century African American

Megan Hunt, School of History, Classics & Archaeology, the University of Edinburgh. Email:
[Link]@[Link]. Benjamin Houston, School of History, Classics and Archaeology,
Newcastle University. Email: [Link]@[Link]. Brian Ward, Humanities Department,
Northumbria University. Email: [Link]@[Link]. Nick Megoran, School of
Geography, Politics & Sociology, Newcastle University. Email: [Link]@[Link]. The
quotation in the title is taken from an anonymous survey of final-year undergraduate students
beginning modules on the African American freedom struggle at two universities in the North
East of England in . This response was to the question “In your own words, how would you
summarize [MLK’s] life and career?” Students taking the courses were drawn from American
studies, history, history and English, and history and politics degree programmes.

Downloaded from [Link] IP address: [Link], on 09 Jul 2021 at 10:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at [Link] [Link]
  Megan Hunt
freedom struggle facilitates cultural amnesia regarding the historic and con-
tinuing significance of race and racism in the UK. In light of the Windrush
scandal and the damning  Royal Historical Society report on “Race,
Ethnicity and Equality in UK History,” this article argues both for better,
more nuanced and more relevant teaching of King and the freedom struggle
in British schools, and for much greater attention to black British history in
its own right.

I
Writing to the Maroon Tiger as a Morehouse College student in , Martin
Luther King Jr. argued that, alongside cultivating the practical skills necessary
for a successful and virtuous life, education should help students avoid having
their minds “invaded by legions of half-truths, prejudices, and propaganda …
Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from
the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.” Ironically,
however, and as this article explains, King’s historic legacy now embodies the
very issue he described. In the US and elsewhere, the systemic misrepresenta-
tion of his life and career only exacerbates the problematic treatment of the
history of race. This article suggests some of the global repercussions of
these distortions by examining how the civil rights movement and King are
taught in the UK.
King’s life – his social activism, ideas, leadership, and multiple legacies in
the US and globally – are all now hotly contested and highly politicized
topics within public education, as well as in wider public and political dis-
courses. Indeed, this article contends that the routine oversimplification in
classrooms of King’s beliefs, tactics, and ultimate significance diminishes,
rather than enhances, popular understandings of the entwined histories of
race, white supremacy, and a variety of liberation struggles in the US and
beyond. The same relentlessly celebratory, triumphalist tendency in depic-
tions of King as a prophet of racial harmony and American civic perfectibil-
ity also undermines the global and contemporary relevance of his calls to
radically restructure US social and economic life. At a time when scholarship
on the African American freedom struggle is increasingly concerned with its
international links and ramifications, this article examines how King, and the
movement with which he is routinely presented as synonymous, are being


Martin Luther King Jr., “The Purpose of Education,” Jan.–Feb. , in The Papers of
Martin Luther King, Jr, Volume I, Called to Serve, January  to June , ed.
Clayborne Carson, Ralph Luker, and Penny A. Russell (Berkeley: University of
California Press, ), –.

Downloaded from [Link] IP address: [Link], on 09 Jul 2021 at 10:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at [Link] [Link]
 The Civil Rights Movement in British Schools 
taught in British schools, as well as the consequences of that teaching for
twenty-first-century understandings of Britain’s own racial past, present,
and possible futures.
This article samples eight major textbooks and seven curricula specifications
that cover King and/or the African American freedom struggle more generally,
providing a clear sense of King’s place in UK secondary schools and the pol-
itical consequences of those representations for contemporary social-justice
campaigns. Some of the textbooks consulted are broad survey texts of
world history, while others are more targeted, as most UK exam boards
offer specific courses on particular aspects of postwar America. Comparing
our findings with those of similar studies conducted in the US, we argue
that a more nuanced understanding of King can help UK teachers and stu-
dents grapple with the ongoing issues of racism, poverty, and war that King
identified when he visited the UK for the final time in November ,
just five months before his assassination. We also hope to underscore the
global resonance and implications of the growing literature of the African
American freedom struggle and its cultural memory. This is not simply an aca-
demic exercise given the highly charged contemporary significance of teaching
global and racial history in a Britain still grappling with the long domestic
aftermath of empire and colonialism; growing racial, ethnic, and religious


There is now an impressive literature on connections between the modern African
American freedom struggle and global liberation movements, including several that focus
on US–British and Irish relationships. See, for example, Anne-Marie Angelo, “The Black
Panthers in London, –: A Diasporic Struggle Navigates the Black Atlantic,”
Radical History Review,  (Jan. ), –; Brian Dooley, Black and Green: The
Fight for Civil Rights in Northern Ireland & Black America (London: Pluto, );
Robin D. G. Kelley and Stephen Tuck, eds., The Other Special Relationship: Race, Rights,
and Riots in Britain and the United States (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ); Mike
Sewell, “British Responses to Martin Luther King, Jr and the Civil Rights Movement,
–,” in Brian Ward and Tony Badger, eds., The Making of Martin Luther King
and the Civil Rights Movement (Basingstoke: Macmillan, ), –; Joe Street,
“Malcolm X, Smethwick and the Influence of the African American Freedom Struggle
on British Race Relations,” Journal of Black Studies, ,  (July ), –; Stephen
Tuck, The Night Malcolm X Spoke at the Oxford Union: A Transatlantic Story of
Antiracist Protest (Berkeley: University of California Press, ); Tuck, “The March on
London: British–American Connections during the Civil Rights Movement,” Bulletin of
the German Historical Institute, Supplement  (), –; Brian Ward, Martin
Luther King in Newcastle: The African American Freedom Struggle and Race Relations in
the North East of England (Newcastle upon Tyne: Tyne Bridge Publishing, ); Rob
Waters, Thinking Black: Britain, – (Berkeley: University of California Press,
); Clive Webb, “Reluctant Partners: African Americans and the Origins of the
Special Relationship,” Journal of Transatlantic Studies, ,  (Dec. ), –.

Individual resources are cited as and when they are referred to in the text. A full list of text-
books and curricula consulted is provided at [Link]

Downloaded from [Link] IP address: [Link], on 09 Jul 2021 at 10:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at [Link] [Link]
  Megan Hunt
diversity; and a resurgent white nationalism that fuelled support for Brexit and
found expression in the Windrush generation scandal.
Our survey of UK textbooks highlights many of the same issues that
American scholars note about school coverage of the African American
freedom struggle and US racial history. The strongest alignment is in the
emphasis on King himself, which undervalues the significance of grassroots
activism, local leadership, and other important national civil rights figures.
As one British textbook summarizes, “King’s early life illustrates black pro-
blems and opportunities in mid-twentieth century USA. The story of his activ-
ism reads like a history of the civil rights movement. He was involved in most
of its significant events.” Here King is not merely at the centre of the narra-
tive, but becomes it. The entire history of the movement is traced through a


The Windrush generation refers to those who settled in the UK from British colonies in the
Caribbean in the mid-twentieth century, the first of whom arrived on the MV Empire
Windrush in . Granted citizenship of the United Kingdom and Colonies by the 
British Nationality Act, many who arrived as children travelled on their parents’ passports
and never received their own documents. In  they were granted indefinite leave to stay,
and so were never formally naturalized. In late November  news reports began to
surface of members of the Windrush generation losing their jobs, access to National Health
Service care, and welfare benefits. Others were threatened with deportation or detained
because they lacked official paperwork retrospectively deemed necessary under the Home
Office’s “hostile-environment” policies. Introduced by then Home Secretary Theresa May in
, the “hostile environment” was designed to curb immigration and deport huge
numbers of non-British residents. See “Windrush Generation: Who Are They and Why Are
They Facing Problems?”, BBC News,  April , at [Link]/news/uk-,
accessed  June ; Amelia Hill, “‘Hostile Environment’: The Hardline Home Office
Policy Tearing Families Apart,” The Guardian,  Nov. , at [Link]/uk-
news//nov//hostile-environment-the-hardline-home-office-policy-tearing-families-
apart, accessed  June .

Assessing teaching standards in every US state in , the Southern Poverty Law Center
(SPLC) concluded that “the [national] state of education about the civil rights movement
is, in a word, dismal.” Sixteen states did not require any instruction about the civil rights
movement, and only three states – Alabama, Florida, and New York – received an A
grade. See “Teaching the Movement: The State of Civil Rights Education in the United
States,” report by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance Programme,
Montgomery, AL, Sept. , . State history standards have often faced more general criti-
cism, most notably in a  report from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. See Sheldon
M. Stern and Jeremy A. Stern, The State of State US History Standards  (Washington,
DC: Thomas B. Fordham Institute, ), at [Link]/publications/
/_SOSHS/ SOSS_History_FINAL.pdf, accessed  June .

Derrick Alridge writes of a “messianic master narrative” that has emerged around King, as
US textbooks “present prescribed, oversimplified, and uncontroversial narratives [that]
obscure important elements in King’s life and thought.” Derrick Alridge, “The Limits of
Master Narratives in History Textbooks: An Analysis of Representations of Martin
Luther King, Jr.,” Teachers College Record, ,  (April ), –.

Vivienne Sanders, Civil Rights in the USA, – (London: Hodder Education, ),
–.

Downloaded from [Link] IP address: [Link], on 09 Jul 2021 at 10:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at [Link] [Link]
 The Civil Rights Movement in British Schools 
very selective rendering of his actions and ideas, which invariably ignores the
more radical aspects of his social philosophy and overlooks the hundreds of
thousands of other African Americans who articulated their own ideas of
freedom and how it might be achieved.
While both UK and US schools tend to ignore the transatlantic and global
coordinates of the civil rights movement, that neglect has a particular social
and cultural significance in the UK, conveniently consigning histories of
racial prejudice and discrimination, along with the development of mass pro-
tests to combat them, to another place as well as another time. By celebrating
King’s stoic heroism and the initial legislative successes of the nonviolence
with which he has become synonymous, Britain’s imperial past is partially
occluded; focus on the apparent singularity of US, especially southern, racial
problems facilitates cultural amnesia regarding the historic and continuing
significance of race and racism in the UK. Therefore our analysis of how
King is misremembered in US and UK educational systems reveals remarkably
similar themes, ideas, and assertions, but the implications of these distortions
and oversimplifications are revealingly different.
Understandably, overstretched teachers on both sides of the Atlantic rely on
textbooks, many of which have been critiqued by professional historians for
their triumphalist representations of the past and failure to properly interro-
gate enduring problems of inequality. In Lies My Teacher Told Me, James
Loewen argues that “[t]he stories that history textbooks tell are predictable;
every problem has already been solved or is about to be solved.” King fits per-
fectly into this hegemonic framework as a timeless prophet who forced the
nation to acknowledge its original sin of slavery and correct its ugly racist leg-
acies. While ideas of US perfectibility are less culturally ingrained in the UK,
textbooks nevertheless propagate a similarly King-centric narrative, in which
the  bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama marks “the real start of the
US civil rights movement,” and King’s death in Memphis, Tennessee in


Though there is increasing evidence that UK schools are using King and other American
civil rights heroes to mark Black History Month, British children are most likely to encoun-
ter King first in a formal classroom. By contrast, in the US, the annual King holiday – cele-
brated on the third Monday of January since  – provides what John Wills calls “the
stories, images and interpretive frames that give meaning to King and efforts to end segre-
gation in US society,” and exposes children to these topics before they formally study them.
See John S. Wills, “‘Some People Even Died’: Martin Luther King, Jr., the Civil Rights
Movement and the Politics of Remembrance in Elementary Classrooms,” International
Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, ,  (), –, –.

James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got
Wrong (New York: Touchstone, ), .

Downloaded from [Link] IP address: [Link], on 09 Jul 2021 at 10:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at [Link] [Link]
  Megan Hunt
April  serves as its conclusion. In this schema, Brown v. Board of
Education () is little more than a shadowy precursor to the “real” move-
ment, and King is completely detached from earlier examples of black protest
in all its varied forms. The black power era, too, becomes little more than a
discrete, usually tragic, period of dangerous radicalism and militant excess,
an ill-judged departure from the lofty, all-American ideals and nonviolent
tactics of the early s southern campaigns associated with King.
Especially important is the neglect of how generations of African American
activists, from Ida B. Wells to W. E. B. Du Bois, and from King to
Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael, all understood how the realities of
racial segregation, disenfranchisement, and wider forms of racial discrimin-
ation were bound up with the workings of American, indeed global, capitalism.
Coverage of King’s own forays into the urban North, notably the SCLC’s
 Chicago campaign, is variable. In Vivienne Sanders’s Civil Rights in the
USA, –, the aims, tactics, and results of the Chicago movement are ana-
lysed over three and a half pages with some nuance and sophistication.
Covering the Cicero riots, for example, Sanders affirms that systemic racialized
inequalities and violence were national, not merely southern, problems.
However, Paterson, Willoughby, and Willoughby’s Civil Rights in the USA
– affords the entire Chicago campaign just  words, representing
it as somewhat peripheral to the story of the modern freedom struggle,
rather than illustrative of important national themes and critical in the devel-
opment of King’s own critique of American racism.


Sanders, , added emphasis. Most UK textbooks note that the Supreme Court’s 
Brown decision had overturned the doctrine of “separate but equal” at the legal heart of
Jim Crow society in the South. However, they often present this as more of a “sign of
change,” rather than an event that was itself the product of years of black courtroom protests
and which had an inspirational effect on local black activism, not least emboldening Jo Ann
Gibson Robinson and the Women’s Political Council in Montgomery to step up pressure
to desegregate the city’s buses. Civil rights historians have long debated the periodization of
the movement, but tend to make a much stronger case for Brown as the origin of the move-
ment’s “‘classic’ phase” than do most UK textbooks. See Steven F. Lawson, “Long Origins
of the Short Civil Rights Movement,” in Dannielle McGuire and John Dittmer, eds.,
Freedom Rights: New Perspectives on the Civil Rights Movement (Lexington: University
Press of Kentucky, ), –. Another catalytic event that receives little attention in
UK textbooks is the murder of Emmett Till. Sanders, , includes the famous image of
Till’s bloated corpse, and notes that his murder “encouraged many blacks to become civil
rights activists”. Paterson, Willoughby, and Willoughby feature Till’s murder in a small
-word “Key Event” box, separate from the main text. See David Paterson, Doug
Willoughby, and Susan Willoughby, Civil Rights in the USA – (Harlow:

Heinmann, ), . Sanders, –.

Paterson, Willoughby, and Willoughby, . It is worth noting that Paterson, Willoughby,
and Willoughby’s volume covers a much longer period of American history, and is
divided into four sections: African American rights, labour rights, Native American

Downloaded from [Link] IP address: [Link], on 09 Jul 2021 at 10:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at [Link] [Link]
 The Civil Rights Movement in British Schools 
Certainly, there is little appreciation in UK textbooks of how King
applauded key tenets of black power, even as he rejected the slogan itself
and refused to renounce nonviolent tactics and interracial cooperation. In text-
books on both sides of the Atlantic, King thus appears dehistoricized and
depoliticized: a simple, moral advocate for nonviolence and racial tolerance,
rather than a figure whose evolving ideas on wealth inequality and insistence
on the intimate links between racism, imperialism, war, poverty, and capitalism
demanded a radical overhaul of American life, politics, and socioeconomic
structures. This misrepresentation impedes a fuller understanding of black
power, underestimates its connections to other minority activism within the
US, and neglects its global manifestations and influence. There is little recog-
nition of the fact that, while their language and protest methods were often
very different, King and many black power advocates shared similar under-
standings of how racial injustice was intertwined with powerful structural
and ideological forces. Artificially setting King apart from earlier and later
phases of the freedom struggle reduces his championing of racial pride,
searing indictments of white supremacy, and denunciations of systemic
inequalities to a more benign, cross-racial call for moral improvement and
legal changes designed to make the existing socioeconomic system function
more equitably; it thus avoids grappling with King’s growing conviction
that the system itself was fatally flawed and intrinsically racist. In this teaching
model, it is unsurprising that King’s seventeen-minute “I Have a Dream”
speech attracts far more attention than his work on the Poor People’s
Campaign, which occupied the last eighteen months of his life.

II
British students are not required to learn about the US civil rights movement.
Since it is not a mandatory part of any school curriculum, it is impossible to
determine national norms and practices on the subject. Educational standards
are also a devolved power, with Scotland and Northern Ireland developing cur-
riculums separate to those in England and Wales. Scottish students undertake
National examinations at age fifteen, and Highers at seventeen, with each
examination accredited by the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA).
Some Scottish schools and colleges also encourage students to undertake
Advanced Highers at eighteen, but Highers are the main university qualifiers.
Schools and colleges in England and Wales choose from four exam boards

rights, and women’s rights. In their previous volume, Civil Rights and the USA, –
(Harlow: Heinemann, ), the authors gave two pages to discussion of Chicago.
However, this coverage was still significantly underdeveloped.

Downloaded from [Link] IP address: [Link], on 09 Jul 2021 at 10:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at [Link] [Link]
  Megan Hunt
(OCR, Edexcel, WJEC, and AQA), each of which offers at least one history
qualification at GCSE (national exams sat at age sixteen) and A level (sat at
age eighteen), complete with its own teaching specifications, restrictions,
and unit combinations. In Northern Ireland, GCSEs and A levels are
awarded by the Council for the Curriculum, Examinations and Assessment
(CCEA). There is no accepted body of knowledge that forms a prerequisite
for studying history at university, and not all universities require A level history
(or its equivalent) for entry into undergraduate history programmes.
However, publishers do produce textbooks with specific exam boards in
mind, with some working in official partnership with a particular board.
Critics have lamented the “pernicious influence” of “shoddily written” text-
books, which “promise to enable teachers and students to produce the results,”
but which “crowd out other worthwhile textbooks for A level which stretch
students more.” Prior to the introduction of the National Curriculum
and GCSEs in the s, British history teachers tended to express ambiva-
lence towards textbooks. According to W. E. Marsden, more specific standar-
dized assessment, which itself undergoes regular reform, has propelled the
perceived “need” for textbooks to ensure that teachers and students are
confident that their learning materials are sufficiently targeted towards exam


In England and Wales, for example, “America, –: Opportunity and Inequality,” is
an optional course for AQA GCSE History. In  , students were entered for this
topic, which accounted for around % of a student’s studies in GCSE History. In Scotland,
“Free at Last? Civil Rights in the USA, –,” is one of ten options within category 
“European and World Contexts” at National  (GCSE equivalent). If selected, this course
would account for % of a student’s grade in National  History.

The current history specifications for Northern Ireland mention civil rights legislation in
one optional A level module, entitled “The American Presidency, –.” If chosen,
this module would account for % of a student’s A level. There is no option to study
US history beyond  at GCSE level in Northern Ireland.

This includes nine of the  Russell Group universities, a self-selecting body of “research-
intensive universities.” See Profile, June , [Link]
rg_text_june_updated.pdf, accessed  June .

Edexcel and Pearson Publishing are the same company, for example. See [Link] and
S. Foster, “The Political Economy of History Textbook Publishing in England,” in
J. Nicholls, ed., School History Textbooks across Cultures (Oxford: Symposium Books,
), –.

Nicola Sheldon, “History Examinations from the s to the Present Day,” Project Paper,
Institute of Historical Research, , at [Link]/history-in-education/project-
papers/[Link], accessed  July . Frequent syllabus changes have increased the pres-
sure on authors and publishers to remain up to date. John D. Clare, a prolific textbook
author, describes “writing at a frenetic pace” without copy editors. Quoted in Nicola
Sheldon, “History Textbooks from –,” project paper, Institute for Historical
Research, , , at [Link]/history-in-education/project-papers/[Link].

Downloaded from [Link] IP address: [Link], on 09 Jul 2021 at 10:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at [Link] [Link]
 The Civil Rights Movement in British Schools 
success. As Nicola Sheldon writes, “students no longer do wider reading or
read the works of leading academic historians (despite the fact that quotations
from secondary works are often used in exams).”
Emphasis on attainment and exam results obviously affects teaching choices.
Nevertheless, schools try to offer units that teachers feel confident with and
want to teach, with an eye to materials that are already available, unless con-
siderable sums of money exist to resource a new course. Consequently, teachers
often speak of a “self-perpetuating” cycle of units: certain topics are taught year
after year simply because the school already has relevant resources and teacher
expertise. There is also a need to appeal to students, especially those beyond age
thirteen, for whom historical study is usually optional. Religious studies, the
other subject in which King occasionally appears, is compulsory until age eight-
een in state-funded schools across England and Wales, and until age fourteen
in Northern Ireland, although students across the UK can be withdrawn by
their parents. In Scotland, schools are obliged to provide time for
“Religious Observance,” often referred to as “Time for Reflection” in non-
denominational schools. Often only those schools with a religious affiliation
require students to take formal exams in the subject.
King’s presence in compulsory religious education in the UK emphasizes his
background within the black Baptist tradition and eventual occupation as a
minister, focussing on his practical application of Christian teaching rather
than on any formal contribution to theology. This befits the British tradition
of teaching religion in terms of secular and ethical considerations rather than


W. E. Marsden, The School Textbook: Geography, History and Social Studies (London:

Woburn Press, ). Sheldon, “History Textbooks from –,” .

“Section () of the Education Act  requires the syllabus to reflect that the religious
traditions of Great Britain are in the main Christian whilst taking account of the teaching
and practices of the other principal religions represented in Great Britain.” See Department
for Children, Schools and Families, “Religious Education in English Schools: Non-statutory
Guidance ,” , at [Link]
system/uploads/attachment_data/file//DCSF--.pdf, accessed  June
. For Northern Ireland, see Department for Education, Statutory Curriculum, at
[Link]/articles/statutory-curriculum, accessed  Aug. .

Curriculum for Excellence: Religious Observance (Time for Reflection), , at https://
[Link]/improvement/documents/rme-cfe-briefi[Link].

Recent research by the Religious Education Council of England and Wales shows that many
schools are failing to provide religious education, despite a legal imperative to do so. See the
 report at [Link]/news/religious-studies-gcse-entries-
fall, accessed  June .

Luker has written that King was “perhaps the greatest American preacher of his era – but he
was only very derivatively a theologian.” Ralph Luker, “Plagiarism and Perspective:
Questions about Martin Luther King, Jr.,” International Social Science Review, ,  (Fall
), –, . See also Keith D. Miller, Voice of Deliverance: The Language of
Martin Luther King, Jr., and Its Sources (Athens: University of Georgia Press, ).

Downloaded from [Link] IP address: [Link], on 09 Jul 2021 at 10:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at [Link] [Link]
  Megan Hunt
strictly theological ones, and promoting interfaith understanding. “[R]outi-
nely included among Christianity’s most celebrated saints and sages,” King
was “the quintessential model of Christian activism in his time,” according
to Lewis Baldwin. Drawing on the resources of the church to advance his
social-justice campaigns, King prioritized public service over ecclesiology.
To this end, he often appears alongside Mahatma Gandhi, a crucial
influence on King’s understanding of nonviolent protest. While scholars con-
tinue to debate King’s commitment to Gandhian ideas and the extent to
which he absorbed them through intermediaries in the black church and his
education, King’s “openhearted reception of the theory and practice of non-
violent resistance from Gandhi” was nevertheless “an exemplary act of inter-
religious learning and receptivity,” according to John Thatamanil.
Textbooks that present King alongside Gandhi therefore stress how core
ethical and moral values can transcend religions, as well as alerting students
to the concepts of anticolonial struggle and solidarity. However, they also
raise questions about how the British educational system dehistoricizes
world figures (especially those of colour) and what it means to hold a non-
Christian figure like Gandhi in such reverence while prioritizing Christian
experiences.


Scholars have attributed this to the influence of Ninian Smart, whose work in the late s
and the s encouraged a non-confessional religious education in schools, “chiefly to
advance an understanding of religion and to promote religious tolerance.” See L. Philip
Barnes, “The Contribution of Professor Ninian Smart to Religious Education,” Religion,
,  (Oct. ), –.

Lewis Baldwin, The Voice of Conscience: The Church in the Mind of Martin Luther King, Jr.
(New York: Oxford University Press, ), .

John Thatamanil, “The Hospitality of Receiving: Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King,
Jr., and Interreligious Learning,” in Lewis V. Baldwin and Paul R. Dekar, eds., “In an
Inescapable Network of Mutuality”: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Globalization of and
Ethical Ideal (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, ), –, –. Hodder argues that
the attempt to cast King as “America’s Black Gandhi” was both strategic and short-lived.
“The translation of Gandhi into American culture was a selective process which sectioned
off the readily transferable message of nonviolence and civil disobedience from what was per-
ceived as Gandhi’s more exotic and culturally contingent eccentricities.” See Jake Hodder,
“Casting a Black Gandhi: Martin Luther King Jr., American Pacifists and the Global
Dynamics of Race,” Journal of American Studies, First View, , published online  May
, at [Link] accessed  May . See also
Miller.

According to Thatamanil, , King “had neither the time nor the inclination to attend to
the Indic elements of Gandhi’s thought.” Miller, . King nevertheless faced accusations
from white Southern Baptist leaders that he was “rejecting the cardinal tenets of biblical
Christianity for the heathen philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi.” See Bill J. Leonard, “A
Theology for Racism: Southern Fundamentalists and the Civil Rights Movement,”
Baptist History and Heritage, ,  (Winter ), –, .

Downloaded from [Link] IP address: [Link], on 09 Jul 2021 at 10:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at [Link] [Link]
 The Civil Rights Movement in British Schools 
In Directions, a religious-education textbook for eleven- to fourteen-year-
olds, a chapter on Christians and justice profiles both King and Gandhi along-
side Desmond Tutu, Mother Teresa, and the Dalai Lama, despite the fact that
Gandhi and the Dalai Lama are not Christian figures. In such depictions, King
is simply a peaceful leader, using marches to draw attention to the mistreat-
ment of African Americans. He sits alongside Gandhi and other exalted
moral leaders, disconnected from his own life story and the realities of the
civil rights movement. In Directions, King “led a peaceful campaign of civil dis-
obedience,” after “a black woman, who had paid for her ticket on the bus, was
told to give up her seat to a white man.” That even Rosa Parks remains
unnamed in this summary exemplifies not only a wider pattern of neglecting
or marginalizing the role of women in histories of the movement, but also the
routine presentation of King as a unique, almost superhuman, moral exemplar.
In this context, the mythologized King, Gandhi, and their decontextualized
moral counterparts serve as little more than what sociologist Steven Hitlin
calls “Bright Lights, signposts of what a culturally defined moral person
might be like.” It would appear that Newt Gingrich was right: King “trans-
cends all of us.”
Similar oversimplifications of King in UK history classrooms derive from a
more complicated backstory. Here, the teaching of the civil rights movement,
and of African American history in general, must be viewed in light of twenty-
first-century political upheavals surrounding the UK’s history curricula, and
damning findings regarding the lack of diversity in the history profession. It
is a component of a complex dynamic that encompasses recognition of what
subjects are popular with students and teachers, the need for meaningful diver-
sity within history teaching, and highly politicized discussions surrounding
British identity in an era of burgeoning nationalism, xenophobia, and racial
chauvinism. In the year , only one in six units of A level study in
England had to be devoted to British history. By , this had expanded
to one in four, reflecting a political concern to develop a greater, very particular
sense of national identity. In , Conservative Education Secretary
Michael Gove announced his explicit desire to privilege Britain’s “island
story,” championing a parochial history that squandered the opportunity to


Ina Taylor, Directions, Volume I (Cheltenham: Nelson Thornes, ), .

Steven Hitlin, Moral Selves, Evil Selves: The Social Psychology of Conscience (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, ), .

Quoted in Robin Toner, “Saving a Dissenter from His Legend,” New York Times,  Jan.
, A.

Richard J. Evans, “The Wonderfulness of Us (The Tory Interpretation of History),”
London Review of Books, ,  ( March ), at [Link]/v/n/richard-j-
evans/the-wonderfulness-of-us, accessed  Jan. .

Downloaded from [Link] IP address: [Link], on 09 Jul 2021 at 10:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at [Link] [Link]
  Megan Hunt
teach schoolchildren about Britain’s changing place in and relationships with
the rest of the world in favour of a jingoistic fetishization of key dates, heroes,
and events from a triumphalist version of Britain’s past. In , Richard
J. Evans, Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge, com-
plained that the extent to which Gove’s revised history curriculum focussed
“exclusively on British history” was “comical.”
However, while Gove’s changes to the National Curriculum only applied to
compulsory pre-GCSE teaching (i.e. pre-fourteen) in England, many teachers
and academics suspected that his sights were also set on post-fourteen teach-
ing. After all, as Evans wrote at the time, there is a noticeable “change of dir-
ection” for young people who elect to carry on beyond the mandatory history
provision to study history at GCSE and/or A level. At that point, Evans
observes, “Out goes British history, out goes the long sweep of the centuries,
out go social, economic and cultural history. Students take Modern World
History, which is emphatically focussed on politics and international relations
[and] ‘education for citizenship’, as the exam boards put it.” Units in
American history prove popular within this model, with civil rights, the
Great Depression, and Vietnam widely taught at GCSE level. A  report
by the exam group Cambridge Assessment cited “Civil Rights in the USA
(–)” as the second-most-popular module chosen for the affiliated
OCR A level, after “The Russian Dictatorship (–).” Third on the
list was “Dictatorship and Democracy in Germany (–),” before
the first British entry, “The Mid-Tudor Crises (–)” appeared in
fourth place.
While OCR is currently the smallest of the three providers of A level history
qualifications in England, the backlash to its  survey was indicative of a
wider pattern. In , conservative historian Niall Ferguson praised


Richard J. Evans, “Michael Gove’s History Curriculum Is a Pub Quiz Not an Education,”
New Statesman,  March , at [Link]/culture/culture///
michael-gove%E%%s-history-curriculum-pub-quiz-not-education, accessed  June
.

Devolved powers ensured that Gove’s reforms applied only to England, despite the fact that
Gove is himself Scottish, educated in Aberdeen.

Evans, “The Wonderfulness of Us.”

Cambridge Assessment, “Top  Topics Studied by A Level History Students,”  Aug.
, at [Link]/news/top--topics-studied-by-a-level-history-
students, accessed  Nov. .

History was the fifth-most-popular A level subject in , when according to the Joint
Council for Qualifications, , students took A level examinations in history. See
[Link]/examination-results/a-levels//main-results-tables, accessed  Jan.
. For OCR’s recent market share see Annual Qualifications Market Report –
, , at [Link]
attachment_data/file//AQMR_-_academic_year__to_.pdf, accessed 

Downloaded from [Link] IP address: [Link], on 09 Jul 2021 at 10:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at [Link] [Link]
 The Civil Rights Movement in British Schools 
Gove’s desire to overhaul the curriculum, lamenting that approximately 
percent of A level students studied Nazi Germany (an out-of-date figure
that has circulated since ), and that “all three” of his children “had
heard of the Reverend Martin Luther King, but none could tell me anything
about Martin Luther.” Tom Utley offered a similar parental anecdote as part
of a Daily Mail attack on Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who marked
British Black History Month in  by lamenting the scarcity of black
history in British schools. “I thought it odd, and still do, that at the age of
 our son had been instructed to study [King], before he’d learned the
basics of the story of our past,” Utley wrote, recalling the time that his son mis-
understood teacher instructions, and wrote an essay on Martin Luther, rather
than Martin Luther King. “Like so much else he was taught, this choice of
subject matter [Martin Luther King rather than Martin Luther] struck me
as nakedly political in intent,” Utley reflected, “more concerned with indoc-
trination than education.” Notwithstanding the profound influence on
Gove’s “island story” that Ferguson and Utley paradoxically ascribed to a
German theologian, their complaints reflect right-wing dissatisfaction with
the perceived levels of both world and modern history in UK schools, a
popular battlefield in culture wars rooted in differing interpretations of
Britain’s imperial past, the historical construction of race, and the continued
impact of historic, often transnational, regimes of racial oppression. Indeed,
Ferguson himself was eventually sidelined by Gove, after his ideas regarding
Britain’s place in a broader Western ascendancy proved too global for
Gove’s attempts to “put British history at the heart of a revived national

July . Cannadine, Keating, and Sheldon argue that UK exam boards are famously
“secretive and unaccountable.” See David Cannadine, Jenny Keating, and Nicola
Sheldon, The Right Kind of History: Teaching the Past in Twentieth-Century England
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, ), .

Niall Ferguson, quoted in Anushka Asthana and Amardeep Sohi, “Niall Ferguson: ‘Rid our
schools of junk history’,” The Guardian,  March , at [Link]/educa-
tion//mar//niall-ferguson-history-schools-gcse, accessed  Jan. . According to
data from AQA, the most popular exam board for A level history, “The Tudors:
England, –” was the most popular A level entry in . The next-most-
popular module, “Tsarist and Communist Russia, –,” was sat by fewer than
half the numbers that selected Tudor history. “Democracy and Nazism: Germany, –
” was AQA’s fourth-most-popular topic, with “The Making of Modern Britain,
–” third. AQA, Topic Entry Data, .

Tom Utley, “If Corbyn Wants to Teach Our Children History, I Suggest He Starts with the
Masses killed by Marxism,” Daily Mail,  Oct. , at [Link]/debate/
article-/TOM-UTLEY-Corbyn-wants-teach-children-history-suggest-starts-
[Link], accessed  Oct. .

Downloaded from [Link] IP address: [Link], on 09 Jul 2021 at 10:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at [Link] [Link]
  Megan Hunt
curriculum” – a curriculum that embodied a resolutely white version of that
history.
Like the efforts to expand black studies in Britain’s universities, calls for
more black history in UK schools are often dismissed by those who seek to
protect the privileged place of white, Eurocentric history. Noting this often
“subliminal effort to hold on to the right to interpret the Black British experi-
ence and to assert what is best for Black British people,” Mark Christian refer-
ences criticisms of black studies penned in the s and s, in which
leading white academics Ernest Cashmore and Barry Troyna asserted that
the positive image of “the black man” in “Black or Afro-studies … has no
necessary connection with life in England in the late twentieth-century –
not even for blacks.” The idea that African history could be considered
“meaningless to contemporary Black youth, yet ancient Roman history is
not questioned as being futile to the lives of working-class White youth,” is
at the heart of British education, Christian argues, and “has proved to be a
major obstacle to the development of a coherent and stable Black Studies cur-
riculum in the British education system.” Emphasizing further structural pro-
blems, Christian notes that “[v]ery few scholars have emerged from the British
education system to teach Black Studies in the fullest sense.” As a  Royal
Historical Society (RHS) survey revealed, black and ethnic-minority students
largely rejected history as an area of study. While  percent of all academics in
Britain are white, for historians the figure rose to . percent. Black historians
made up just . percent of history departments in the UK.

III
For those invested in the value of non-white British experiences and the idea
that studying and teaching history beyond Gove’s carefully solipsized island is
a fruitful and rewarding endeavour, King offers interesting avenues for


Michael Gove, “All Pupils Will Learn Our Island Story,” speech to the Conservative Party
Conference,  Oct. , at [Link]
, accessed  June .

Mark Christian, “Black Studies in the UK and US: A Comparative Analysis,” in Jeanette
R. Davidson, ed., African American Studies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ),
–, ; Ernest Cashmore and Barry Troyna, “Black Youth in Crisis,” in Cashmore
and Troyna, eds., Black Youth in Crisis (London: George Allen & Unwin, ), –, .

Christian, . Birmingham City University launched the UK’s first black studies degree in
. The UK’s first postgraduate course in black studies opened at Goldsmiths, University
of London in September .

Royal Historical Society, “Race, Ethnicity & Equality in UK History: A Report and
Resource for Change,” Oct. , at [Link]
[Link]/wp-content/uploads///RHS_race_report_EMBARGO__
[Link], accessed  Nov. .

Downloaded from [Link] IP address: [Link], on 09 Jul 2021 at 10:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at [Link] [Link]
 The Civil Rights Movement in British Schools 
exploration. But if US textbooks routinely confine the African American
struggle to what Jacquelyn Dowd Hall calls “a single halcyon decade” and
“limited noneconomic objectives,” there is a tendency to compartmentalize
it still further in the UK, by teaching the civil rights movement only in its
American manifestation and ignoring the links and networks that encouraged
and facilitated transatlantic protest movements and solidarity. Although
individual teachers may well make their own links between local, national,
and international history, our study of UK textbooks and curricula shows
that they are not being formally supported or encouraged to do so.
By neglecting British links to the long African American freedom struggle,
including British involvement in the Atlantic slave trade which made that
struggle necessary, UK curricula and textbooks limit teachers and students
to a grand historical narrative that often feels extremely distant – both geo-
graphically and culturally. This prevents students from making connections
between global histories and those of their own communities. King’s 
visit to Newcastle upon Tyne, for example, is not just “a fascinating piece of
local history,” as Brian Ward notes, but a reminder of how individual
stories contribute to and connect with “far bigger historical and geographical
worlds.”
King’s decision to accept an invitation to Newcastle, a city he had probably
never heard of, reveals much about his “evolving sense of international leader-
ship and responsibility, but also about how expressions of approval and
encouragement from overseas strengthened his resolve to continue the struggle
in the US, especially at times of acute political and personal crisis.” A vocal
critic of America’s continued military involvement in Vietnam, King was keen
to stress the global intersections of racism, imperialism, and capitalism when he
visited the UK in . Exasperated by US foreign and domestic policy, King’s
vexed but often productive relationship with President Lyndon Johnson had
deteriorated. He was also subject to increasing scrutiny and harassment
from the FBI, which had wiretapped his phones since . Moreover,
King’s increased emphasis on the economic and social inequalities endemic
to capitalism and strident calls for federal intervention in addressing those pro-
blems alienated many who had supported black demands for basic civil and
voting rights. Erstwhile civil rights allies, such as Roy Wilkins of the
NAACP and Whitney Young of the National Urban League, began to


Evans, “The Wonderfulness of Us.”

Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the
Past,” Journal of American History, ,  (March ), –, .

Ward, Martin Luther King in Newcastle, . For more on King as a global figure see Jason
Sokol, The Heavens Might Crack: The Death and Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.

(New York: Basic Books, ). Ward, .

Downloaded from [Link] IP address: [Link], on 09 Jul 2021 at 10:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at [Link] [Link]
  Megan Hunt
question King’s patriotism and lambasted him for distracting attention from
the black freedom struggle and risking white support. Black power leaders
questioned the wisdom of King’s tireless pursuit of interracial alliances,
while some, including the Black Panther Party, doubted the effectiveness of
King’s nonviolent philosophy in the face of continued racial brutality,
embraced armed self-defence tactics, and offered alternative means of
protest. King’s Newcastle visit, and British responses to it amid heated domes-
tic debates over immigration policy and proposed legislation to protect minor-
ity rights, reflected all of these themes: thus it offers the potential to scrutinize
key issues in King’s final years, and to do so in relation to crucial developments
in Britain’s racial history, not least the simultaneous escalation of minority and
white supremacist activism.
As is the case in the US, however, few UK textbooks cover this later period
of King’s life, other than to briefly reference urban rebellions that “began” in
Watts, Los Angeles, just days after Lyndon Johnson signed the  Voting
Rights Act, and spread across American cities in subsequent summers. Such
unrest, usually attributed to the national rise of black power, rather than com-
munity responses to specific, local events, often works to cast King as the
“moderate” voice – simultaneously downplaying his radicalism and relegating
black power to a reactionary and damaging deterioration of the “true” move-
ment. In her A level textbook Civil Rights in the USA, –, Vivienne
Sanders poses the following “key question:” “What was the impact of
Watts upon Martin Luther King?” but provides no details of the events that
precipitated the rebellion, the scale of the damage, or even the loss of thirty-
four lives until much later in the book, when the uprising is briefly reassessed
as part of both “The Rise of Black Power in the s” and “The factors that
stopped Johnson doing more for blacks.” As such, there is a problematic
compartmentalization of civil rights issues – chapters on King as the main-
stream movement, followed by the black power declension narrative, and a
final assessment of presidential approaches. Thus, while Sanders notes


For King’s new public radicalism and increasingly isolated and embattled position see Adam
Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference
and Martin Luther King, Jr. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, ), –, –,
–; Thomas Jackson, From Human Rights to Civil Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr. and
the Struggle for Economic Justice (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, );
Sylvie Laurent, King and the Other America: The Poor People’s Campaign and the Quest
for Economic Equality (Berkeley: University of California Press, ). For the split with
Johnson see Sylvia Ellis, Freedom’s Pragmatist: Lyndon Johnson and Civil Rights
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, ), –, –. For the FBI campaigns
against King see Kenneth O’Reilly, Racial Matters: The FBI’s Secret File on Black
America (New York: Free Press, ), –, –, –.

Sanders, Civil Rights, , added emphasis, , –.

Downloaded from [Link] IP address: [Link], on 09 Jul 2021 at 10:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at [Link] [Link]
 The Civil Rights Movement in British Schools 
King’s assessment of the riots as “a class revolt,” Watts serves only as a turning
point in the dominant textbook narrative, in order to make sense of King’s
later disappointments in Chicago and explain the rise of “extremists” such
as Stokely Carmichael. “[S]erious rioting in Los Angeles gave a violently
unpleasant foretaste of things to come,” Paterson, Willoughby, and
Willoughby write. “The civil rights movement had suddenly entered
another phase.”
Consistently presented as the heroic early movement’s more militant, more
violent, less temperate descendent, “Black Power is often reduced,” historian
Peniel Joseph writes, “to symbols associated with its advocacy of self-defense
(i.e., the Black Panthers).” The prominence of this narrative in public
memory and popular culture, Joseph argues, “creates a situation in which
the BPM [black power movement] can be conveniently blamed for the
demise of the Civil Rights Movement, rather than being viewed as an alterna-
tive to the ineffectiveness of civil rights demands in critical areas of American
life.” Recuperating the histories of civil rights activity outside the South, as
well as what Joseph calls “the multilayered roots of Black Power-era radical-
ism,” scholarly work by Timothy Tyson and Jeanne Theoharis, amongst
others, complicates this crude dichotomy. Yet such binaries endure in text-
books, and are reinforced by Hollywood films such as The Butler (Lee Daniels,
), which implies that black power attracted an angry, radical, and uncouth
section of black society that was opposed to the further development of an
interracial America and disrespectful of its elders.


Ibid., .

Paterson, Willoughby, and Willoughby, Civil Rights, . The authors never reveal that 
people were killed in Watts, just that “, troops were required to restore order and
, people were arrested.”

Peniel E. Joseph, “Toward a Historiography of the Black Power Movement,” in Joseph, ed.,
The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights–Black Power Era (New York:
Routledge, ), –, . Murch illustrates that many key Black Panthers actually repu-
diated the label Black Power, “and chose instead to emphasize the international, and ultim-
ately ‘intercommunal’ nature of their organizing.” Donna Murch, “When the Panther
Travels: Race and the Southern Diaspora in the History of the BPP, –,” in
Nico Slate, ed., Black Power Beyond Borders: The Global Dimensions of the Black Power
Movement (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ), –, .

Joseph, . See Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of
Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ); Jeanne Theoharis,
“Hidden in Plain Sight: The Civil Rights Movement outside the South,” in Mathew
Lassiter and Joseph Crespino, eds., The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism (New York:
Oxford University Press, ), –.

The Butler presents black power as a negative force, dividing black America after a time of
great unity. See Eddie Glaude, “Princeton Professor Analyzes ‘Lee Daniels’ The Butler.’
Radio Interview with Dean Richards,” WGN Chicago,  Aug. , [Link]
com////princeton-professor-analyzes-lee-daniels-the-butler. The Butler

Downloaded from [Link] IP address: [Link], on 09 Jul 2021 at 10:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at [Link] [Link]
  Megan Hunt
By the end of Sanders’s chapter on King, she notes, “Within the southern
context, King was a political radical who sought the vote for the disfranchised
and a social radical who sought racial equality.” Such qualifiers are rare in a
textbook committed, perhaps inevitably, to weighing King’s contribution to
the movement in the reductive “pros-and-cons” style of an A level exam essay.
There is no place here for the fact that, as early as , King had written
how “American capitalism has seen its best days,” no recognition of his commit-
ment to confronting economic inequalities even during the early phase of his
activism. Likewise, the textbook devotes only a paragraph to King’s criticisms
of the Vietnam War (a conflict erroneously defined as beginning in ) and
offers no real insight into the range of responses his antiwar stance generated.
It is not uncommon for the later chapters of King’s life to be largely omitted
from textbook narratives, as his demands for a drastic overhaul of American
society and values raise difficult questions of both the past and the present.
King had been radicalized by the movement itself, and by its bitter disappoint-
ments when faced with the limitations of white liberalism. As Julian Bond
noted, King’s
last years were marked by changes in black America’s demands and white America’s
response. In  in Montgomery, blacks had peacefully asked for seats at an abundant
table; they could gain, and no one would lose. As the movement eliminated legal seg-
regation and attacked segregation’s legacy, demanding relief from the residual damage
it continued to do, many whites began to believe blacks wanted the entire table for
themselves.
Such insight is far removed from the focus on a short but effective period of
peaceful change currently propagated by school textbooks: a valorizing narra-
tive, in which King led the US closer towards the nation it was destined to
become. Indeed, since the moment of his assassination in April , when
Thomas Jackson argues white Americans set aside “their recent fear of King
as a radical incendiary,” the slain activist was frozen “as a moderate ‘civil
rights’ leader appealing to the nation’s highest ideals.” King’s “I Have a

personifies this ideological divide through its protagonist Cecil Gaines (Forrest Whitaker),
who struggles with and temporarily disowns his son Louis (David Oyelowo) during the
latter’s transition from peaceful nonviolent activist to black power advocate. See Megan
Hunt, “‘Southern by the Grace of God’: Religion and Race in Hollywood’s South since
the s,” PhD diss., Northumbria University, , –, at [Link]

[Link]///hunt.megan_phd.pdf. Sanders, .

Martin Luther King, “Notes on American Capitalism,” n.d. (), in The Papers of Martin

Luther King, –. Sanders, , .

Julian Bond, “Remember the Man and the Hero, Not Just Half the Dream,” Seattle Times,
 April , available at [Link]
[Link], accessed  Jan. .

Jackson, From Human Rights to Civil Rights, .

Downloaded from [Link] IP address: [Link], on 09 Jul 2021 at 10:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at [Link] [Link]
 The Civil Rights Movement in British Schools 
Dream” speech, delivered from the Lincoln Memorial during the March on
Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August , became the central
image and soundtrack of this vision of King. It was “King at his best,” accord-
ing to Sanders, because “the morality [of the March] could not be doubted.”
It is never mentioned that the March, co-organized by eminent labour leader
A. Philip Randolph and socialist intellectual Bayard Rustin, was for “Jobs and
Freedom,” reflecting a clear understanding that economic opportunity and
racial equality were intimately connected. Textbooks also dedicate little, if
any, attention to the frustrated militancy evident in the early sections of
King’s speech, when he implicitly indicted the Kennedy administration’s
failure to act forthrightly on civil rights and explicitly condemned a socio-
economic system in which “the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in
the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.”
Regularly presented as a powerless bystander to the turbulence of the late
s, King usually serves as a welcome reminder of what historian–activist
Van Gosse calls the “‘good’ sixties,” before his “dream” turned nightmare
in the wake of black power, rioting, and the travesty of Vietnam. In
Montgomery, as in many campaigns during the late s and early s,
King’s image of respectability was consciously crafted. But endorsing respect-
ability was not merely an expedient performance; it helped shape and construct
an image of the movement that cemented itself in public consciousness. As
such, it contributed to the rejection and fear of other forms of black political
organization, especially those that were not rooted in the church and/or non-
violence, or which posited radical solutions to deep systemic inequalities.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the representation of Malcolm X,
whose major role in the development of African American political thought
and protest usually serves only to highlight King’s putative moderation and
render the latter more palatable as the embodiment of shared national
values. In school textbooks, the two men and their ideas are regularly stripped
of complexity, their common ground eroded, their respective efforts to build


None of the textbooks assessed for this article afford the March on Washington its full
title – the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Martin Luther King, “I Have a Dream,”  Aug. , in James M. Washington, ed., I Have
a Dream: Writings and Speeches that Changed the World (San Francisco:
HarperSanFrancisco, ), –.

Van Gosse, “Consensus and Contradiction in Textbook Treatment of the s,” Journal
of American History, ,  (Sept. ), –.

Marisa Chappell, Jenny Hutchinson, and Brian Ward, “‘Dress Modestly, Neatly … as if
You Were Going to Church’: Respectability, Class and Gender in the Montgomery Bus
Boycott and the Early Civil Rights Movement,” in Peter J. Ling and Sharon Monteith,
eds., Gender and the Civil Rights Movement (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, ), –, –.

Downloaded from [Link] IP address: [Link], on 09 Jul 2021 at 10:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at [Link] [Link]
  Megan Hunt
international bonds forgotten, so that they can be conveniently presented as
polar opposites.
In a manner that reflects the overly prescriptive nature of standardized
assessments and mark schemes, UK students are frequently required to
compare King and Malcolm X, to list differences between them, emphasizing
King’s middle-class southern and Christian background in contrast to
Malcolm X’s urban, working-class credentials and cachet among African
Americans living in the “North” – an elastic term that is often a synonym
for “cities” and usually encompasses anywhere not in the South, thereby
flattening distinctions between, for example, the North East, the Mid-west
and the West Coast. “Martin Luther King and his civil rights successes in
the South seemed irrelevant to blacks living in the poor areas of American
cities,” John Clare writes in GCSE textbook Modern World History, “where
poverty, deprivation and unemployment were rife.” While Malcolm X
did, of course, offer alternative visions of and pathways to African American
liberation, and was undoubtedly more rooted in the urban North than was
King, statements such as this falsely imply not only that the black South
was entirely under King’s influence, but also that it was largely middle-class.
It also obscures the widespread rebellions that erupted in northern cities in
the wake of King’s assassination and which were, in part at least, reflections
of his importance in those communities.
Such factual lacunae and interpretive flaws have a lasting impact on how
students dichotomize the civil rights movement between the South and the
North, a geographical error that also encourages the tendency to exaggerate
the discontinuities between ostensibly civil rights struggles (associated with
the South before ) and black power protests (associated with the post-
 North). In these constructions, King and Malcolm X form the basis
for deceptively simple, value-laden comparisons, contributing to ideas of a mis-
guided “descent” into black power. Malcolm’s embrace of Islam, the evolution
of his religious beliefs, and their impact on his political ideology and activism


Murch, “When the Panther Travels,” , argues that the internal migration of millions of
Americans between  and  necessitates a diasporic approach to northern civil rights
and black radicalism.

John Clare, AQA B: Modern World History (Oxford: Pearson/Heinemann, ), .

Works that challenge these dichotomies include Brian Purnell and Jeanne Theoharis, eds.,
with Komozi Woodard, The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North: Segregation and
Struggle Outside the South (New York: New York University Press, ); Thomas
Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North
(New York: Random House, ); Matthew D. Lassiter and Joseph Crespino, eds., The
Myth of Southern Exceptionalism (New York: Oxford University Press, ); Jeanne
Theoharis and Komosi Woodard, eds., Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles outside
the South, – (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ).

Downloaded from [Link] IP address: [Link], on 09 Jul 2021 at 10:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at [Link] [Link]
 The Civil Rights Movement in British Schools 
are rarely given much attention in this framework. Nor is the fact that his
assassination in  prevented his engagement with the formal adoption of
black power that Stokely Carmichael first popularized in . Malcolm’s
influence on Carmichael and other black power radicals is undisputed. But
the frequency with which students assume that Malcolm X was physically
present for this “new” wave of protest reveals their repeated exposure to a fact-
ually problematic as well as intellectually unsophisticated timeline. The refusal
to view King and Malcolm as individuals whose ideas and activism evolved and
occasionally overlapped obscures their shared understanding of an inter-
national system of white supremacy historically rooted in colonialism and
empire, and sustained by the workings of global capitalism. Like their
American counterparts, British textbook authors have found little room to
explore this common intellectual and often transnational ground. Moreover,
they are also largely reluctant to engage with what Gosse provocatively
describes as “one of the hardest facts about the sixties: when it came to non-
white activists, national, state, and local government agencies engaged in sys-
tematic oppression.”

IV
Considerable work has been undertaken by historians, educational specialists,
and sociologists to document King’s legacy in the US, while geographers have
discussed his memory as embodied in the particular (street names and muni-
cipal buildings) and the global (his vision of an interconnected Beloved
Community). Similarly, much has been written about what Thomas
Jackson calls “the plasticity of the King icon,” which enabled President
Ronald Reagan “to turn King into a color-blind opponent of racial ‘quotas’


Gosse, .

See Aldridge, “The Limits of Master Narratives”; Wills, “Some People Even Died”; Lewis
V. Baldwin and Rufus Burrow Jr, eds., The Domestication of Martin Luther King Jr.:
Clarence B. Jones, Right-Wing Conservatism and the Manipulation of the King Legacy
(Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, ); Derek H. Alderman, “School Names as Cultural
Arenas: The Naming of US Public Schools after Martin Luther King, Jr.,” Urban
Geography, ,  (), –; Alderman, “Street Names and the Scaling of Memory:
The Politics of Commemorating Martin Luther King, Jr within the African American
Community,’ Area, ,  (June ), –; Joshua F. J. Inwood, “Searching for the
Promised Land: Examining Dr Martin Luther King’s Concept of the Beloved
Community,” Antipode, ,  (), –; Lewis V. Baldwin and Paul R. Dekar,
eds., “In an Inescapable Network of Mutuality:” Martin Luther King, Jr. and the
Globalization of an Ethical Idea (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, ).

Downloaded from [Link] IP address: [Link], on 09 Jul 2021 at 10:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at [Link] [Link]
  Megan Hunt
and affirmative action.” The civil religion that has absorbed King has long
been used “as a tool of social cohesion and political legitimation,” Jana
Weiss writes. Yet, as Ward observes, “despite a flourishing literature on
race and the construction of social memory in the US, [scholars] have paid
relatively little attention to international efforts to commemorate the
African American freedom struggle,” or to the ways in which its legacy circu-
lates beyond America.
The scramble to define King’s “meaning” and legacy have the most acute
political consequences in the US, where civic pride and national identity are
often rooted in ideas of the country as an ever-improving, ultimately perfect-
ible nation, ideas frequently challenged by the manifest persistence of racial
inequalities and injustice. King “was a man who wrested justice from the
heart of a great country,” Reagan observed on the first King Day public
holiday in , “And he succeeded because that great country had a heart
to be seized.” But King’s legacy and enduring global celebrity have conse-
quences for contemporary discussions of race all over the world. In Why
I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race, Reni Eddo-Lodge’s
best-selling  treatise on the overt and subtle manifestations of white
supremacy in modern Britain, the author explicitly refers to King on four occa-
sions. She draws attention to concurrent but largely forgotten events in the
UK that echoed King’s rhetoric and tactics, such as the  Bristol Bus
Boycott, and recalls the “American-centric educational displays and lesson
plans” she encountered in school – her only formal introduction to black
history before university. Most tellingly, Eddo-Lodge, a black British
woman, discusses the correspondence she received from white people, who
used King’s words “in attempts to prove to me that my work is misguided,
that I am doing it wrong.” Recounting King’s speech at the  March on
Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Eddo-Lodge’s British critics informed
her that “Martin Luther King, Jr. wanted a world in which people were not
judged on the colour of their skin, but on the content of their character.”
Discussing the white backlash to ideas of “safe spaces” for people of colour
to discuss problems and strategies for change, Eddo-Lodge suggests that


Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights, –. See also, Ronald Turner, “The
Dangers of Misappropriation: Misusing Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Legacy to Prove the
Colorblind Thesis,” Michigan Journal of Race & Law, ,  (), –.

Jana Weiss, “Remember, Celebrate, and Forget? The Martin Luther King Day and the
Pitfalls of Civil Religion,” Journal of American Studies, ,  (May ), –, .

Ward, Martin Luther King in Newcastle upon Tyne, . A recent exception is Sokol, The
Heavens Might Crack. See also Alan Rice, Creating Memorials, Building Identities: The
Politics of Memory in the Black Atlantic (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, ).

President Ronald Reagan quoted in Peter Goldman, “Dr. Kins Last Victory,” Newsweek, 
Jan. , .

Downloaded from [Link] IP address: [Link], on 09 Jul 2021 at 10:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at [Link] [Link]
 The Civil Rights Movement in British Schools 
King’s words are now being used “to mean that white people should not be
judged on the colour of their skin. That the power of whiteness as a race
should not be judged.”
In the  paperback edition of her book, Eddo-Lodge reflected on its
initial success and the conversations it provoked. Despite quoting King’s
 “Letter from Birmingham Jail” at length in her original text to illustrate
King’s “grave disappointment with the white moderate … more devoted to
‘order’ than to justice,” Eddo-Lodge was met with further declarations
from whites that “Martin Luther King Junior would never approve of [her]
work.” Using a reductive, highly selective rendering of King’s legacy to
admonish the work and viewpoint of one of the most influential black
voices in modern Britain, Eddo-Lodge’s critics demonstrate just how readily
King’s legacy is coopted by conscious and unconscious defenders of white priv-
ilege on both sides of the Atlantic. British historian David Olusoga, himself of
mixed racial heritage, describes Eddo-Lodge’s book as “a retreat, a place of
greater safety, where black people go for confirmation that their lived experi-
ences are not a fantasy, a place they go in an effort to remain sane.” That
white critics repeatedly used King’s decontextualized and dimly understood
words to challenge the significance of such a profound and insightful piece
of work demonstrates that how King is taught has enormous political ramifi-
cations beyond the US.
Further complicating this issue are complaints from many black commen-
tators who echo Eddo-Lodge’s concern that attempts to acknowledge black
culture within British schools are often disproportionately centred on the
African American experience. “An American-centric understanding of black
history and identity makes Black History Month in the UK something like
looking into a broken mirror,” wrote Yomi Adegoke in The Guardian in
October . “You see yourself reflected within its fragments and the
shards create a picture, though the whole thing is distorted.” British children
are more likely to learn about the Black Panther Party of Oakland, California
than about South London’s Black British Panthers, Adegoke continued,
reflecting a wider critique of Britain’s education system and its failure to
educate students, black and white alike, on the legacy of slavery, colonialism,


Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race (London:

Bloomsbury, ), , , –, original emphasis. Ibid., –.

David Olusoga, “We Risk Losing Slices of Our Past if We Don’t Root Out Racism in Our
Universities,” The Guardian,  Oct. , at [Link]/commentisfree//
oct//we-risk-losing-slices-of-our-history-if-we-dont-root-out-racism-in-our-unversities,
accessed  May .

Downloaded from [Link] IP address: [Link], on 09 Jul 2021 at 10:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at [Link] [Link]
  Megan Hunt
and racism in modern Britain. “Personal engagement is much more likely
when the students are themselves encouraged through history teaching to
have a sense of their own personal identity and their place in the world,”
the Historical Association, the UK’s leading historical charity, reported in
, while Nardia Foster has condemned how British schools often
account for “black history” purely through the American civil rights move-
ment. Perhaps most alarmingly, the Historical Association also noted, “In
an all-white school, little black history may be taught at all on the grounds
that there are no black pupils to whom it would be relevant.”
In the wake of such concerns, addressing the misrepresentation of Martin
Luther King Jr. in British schools may appear incidental, secondary to a
more urgent debate over how to teach more and better black British
history. When reflecting on how little she knew of black British history,
Reni Eddo-Lodge writes of being “kept ignorant.” Without question,
black British history and culture deserve a much more conspicuous place in
the UK school curriculum, as they do in the media and public life. The
erasure, or marginalization, of that history contributes to the kind of
mystified or distorted history that, as James Loewen points out, “usually
signifies a continuing injustice in the present, like racism.” Recent scandals
involving the UK government’s shocking mistreatment of the Windrush gen-
eration are testament to what April-Louise Pennant and Nando Sigona have
called a “contested history of settlement, integration and exclusion” in
which the rights and claims to “Britishness” of nonwhites are routinely ques-
tioned and sometimes denied. As Pennant and Sigona argue, the fact that the
seventieth anniversary of the Empire Windrush’s  arrival from the
Caribbean coincided with the deportation or detention of some of those
who had arrived as British subjects and citizens decades ago, plus news that
the Black Cultural Archive (which stands in Windrush Square, Brixton)
faced closure due to lack of funding, “calls into question how much their


Yomi Adegoke, “It’s Black History Month – and at Last We’re Celebrating British
Heroes,” The Guardian,  Oct. , at [Link]/commentisfree//
oct//black-history-month-british-culture-identity?CMP=share_btn_tw, accessed 
Nov. .

The Historical Association, T.E.A.C.H.: Teaching Emotive and Controversial History, –
(London: The Historical Association, ), ; Nardia Foster, Out of Slavery: Learning
about the History of British Black Caribbean People (Bristol: Redcliffe, ), .

The Historical Association, . This reflects the SPLC’s findings from the US, in which
southern states, and those with large African American populations, tended to require

more formal learning about the civil rights movement. Eddo-Lodge, .

James Loewen, “Preface: Lies My Teacher Told Me in the Age of Alternative Facts,” in
Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me (New York: The New Press, ), xi–xx, xx.

Downloaded from [Link] IP address: [Link], on 09 Jul 2021 at 10:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at [Link] [Link]
 The Civil Rights Movement in British Schools 
presence, sacrifices and contributions are valued in Britain.” Citing Britain’s
“bout of amnesia,” seventy years after “plead[ing] with its Commonwealth
subjects to come to work and rebuild the country,” Pennant and Sigona laid
blame squarely on the inadequacies of the curriculum. “It’s very rare that
the contributions and histories of black people in Britain – which go back
way further than  – are incorporated or acknowledged within the curric-
ulum,” they write, noting that the arrival of the Empire Windrush was only
introduced to (non-compulsory) history specifications in . Even then,
to focus on the arrival of the Windrush implies that Britain was exclusively
white before  and that those on board were overwhelmingly welcomed,
rather than being, in many cases, the targets of racist abuse and
discrimination.
Official interest in issues of race in Britain’s schools has traditionally
focussed on rectifying alleged attainment gaps among students from
different racial groups, rather than addressing the inadequacies of curriculum
content. Thus Kehinde Andrews criticizes policymakers for “embracing the
idea that it was the children who were ‘underachieving’.” The UK Black
Supplementary Schools Movement, which has provided additional education
at the grass roots since the s, reflects this frustration. Founded to promote
pride in and awareness of black history and culture, Black Supplementary
Schools simultaneously help students “to succeed using the tools and


April-Louise Pennant and Nando Sigona, “Black History Is Still Largely Ignored,  Years
after Empire Windrush Reached Britain,” The Conversation,  June , at [Link]
[Link]/black-history-is-still-largely-ignored--years-after-empire-windrush-
reached-britain-, accessed  June . In December  the BCA received a
£, interim payment from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport
after more than  Members of Parliament signed a letter urging the government to
commit funds to the archive, which had received Heritage Lottery Funding since .
Sally Weale, “London’s Black Cultural Archives get £, Stopgap Funding for
Survival,” The Guardian,  Dec. , at [Link]/uk-news//dec//
london-black-cultural-archives-gets-thousands-stop-gap-funding-for-survival-heritage,
accessed  June . The significance of the archive was made clear when it emerged that
the Home Office had destroyed the landing cards of thousands of Commonwealth migrants
in , thus eradicating the evidence of their legal arrival in Britain between  and
. The BCA argued that such documents should have been passed on to them when
they were no longer “needed” by the central government. “BCA exists to ensure the pres-
ervation of this history,” it announced, “as our remit is to preserve the narratives of the
people.” Quoted in Eleanor Rose, “Black Cultural Archives Urge Government to Hand
Over Important Documents to Avoid Second Windrush Fiasco, Bosses Claim,” Evening
Standard,  April , at [Link]/news/uk/black-cultural-archives-urge-gov-
ernment-to-hand-over-important-documents-to-avoid-second-windrush-a.html,

accessed  Nov. . Pennant and Sigona.

Kehinde Andrews, “Why Britain’s Schools Are Failing to Tackle Racism,” The Guardian,
 Aug. , at [Link]/commentisfree//aug//racism-schools-gov-
ernment-reforms-targets, accessed  Nov. .

Downloaded from [Link] IP address: [Link], on 09 Jul 2021 at 10:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at [Link] [Link]
  Megan Hunt
assessment strategies they would encounter in mainstream education.”
Andrews notes that the teaching of black history within these schools has
always drawn on a “[d]iasporic politics that connects the students and teachers
to an international politics and identity.” Andrews names Marcus Garvey,
Malcolm X, and Nelson and Winnie Mandela as key figures for the
Supplementary Schools, concluding that “the general teaching of black
history was focussed on the global Diaspora and how those experiences
influenced Britain.”
Perhaps, then, the problem is less that there is too much attention given to
King and the African American freedom struggle in mainstream British
schools, and rather that these topics are rarely presented in any meaningful
way alongside equivalent – and often interconnected – struggles in the UK,
the British Empire, or, later, the Commonwealth. While many of the
modular options available to secondary students in the UK theoretically
offer considerable opportunities to discuss the contemporary importance of
historical topics and issues, the Historical Association reported that the vast
majority “do not require any connection [to be] made with the present.”
The US civil rights movement too often becomes “the story of the struggle
against racism,” Eddo-Lodge writes, “eclipsing the black British story so
much that we convince ourselves that Britain has never had a problem with
race.” Racism is therefore projected as a peculiarly American problem,
evident still in staggering inequality, mass incarceration, debates over
Confederate monuments and, most recently, widespread uprisings in response
to continued police brutality and a presidency that is openly hostile to minor-
ities. Yet there are clearly comparable and concurrent flashpoints throughout
British history and contemporary politics that could and should be better
probed in classrooms across the UK. To do so would encourage students to
draw links between global manifestations of racism, and the legacies of
slavery throughout the Atlantic World; it would challenge assumptions that
“Britain does not have the same deep rooted problems as the US did,” as
one British university student put it when quizzed about the value of studying
the African American freedom struggle.


Kehinde Andrews, Resisting Racism: Race, Inequality, and the Black Supplementary School
Movement (London: Institute of Education Press, ), .

Kehinde Andrews, “The Problem of Political Blackness: Lessons from the Black
Supplementary School Movement,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, ,  (), –, .

The Historical Association, , added emphasis.

Eddo-Lodge, , added emphasis.

Here, a student was answering the question “What relevance do you think studying MLK
and/or the civil rights movement may have for modern Britain?” For further information
on this informal, anonymous survey, see the affiliation note.

Downloaded from [Link] IP address: [Link], on 09 Jul 2021 at 10:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at [Link] [Link]
 The Civil Rights Movement in British Schools 
None of the “standard” curricula or textbooks consulted for this article
made any attempt to link King or the African American civil rights movement
to events in the UK during the s and s – a pivotal period in the devel-
opment of modern Britain that shaped its racial present. This ignores trans-
atlantic visits by high-profile African American leaders including King and
Malcolm X, but also the importance of transnational activist networks and
exchanges of ideas in the development of British antiracism, and civil rights
and black power groups. While these groups often adopted the rhetoric,
tactics, and symbolism of the American groups that inspired them, their com-
position and priorities reflected the specific issues they faced in the UK, as well
as British conceptions of what it meant to be “black” at that time – a term that
often encompassed those of Indian or Pakistani origin as well as those from the
West Indies and Africa. “America was not the starting point of this exchange,
nor Britain the final destination,” Stephen Tuck writes. Rooting his analysis
in Malcolm X’s  speech at the University of Oxford, Tuck concludes that
the British activists and organizations that conversed with, invited and cele-
brated African American civil rights and black power leaders invite us to
“de-center the United States in the study of the modern global anti-racist
struggle.” In this context, the imperative is not to omit study of the
African American freedom struggle, but rather to place it within a wider
story of racial discrimination and efforts to resist it throughout the world,
including the UK. While the distinctiveness of civil and human rights struggles
in various locales at particular historic moments needs to be acknowledged,
they did not happen in isolation. Their intertwined histories help shed light
on the underlying structural coordinates of racial, gender, economic, and
many other kinds of social inequality around the world and on the diverse
movements that have emerged to confront them.
Opportunities for teachers to explore these connections exist, but the
resources to assist them are sparse. The Black Curriculum syllabus provides
teacher training and materials on twelve varied topics, from the influence of
Caribbean music in the UK to contemporary issues around migration and
deportation. Assembly plans developed for Black History Month  by
Historians of the Twentieth Century United States (HOTCUS) showcase


In a rare and fleeting reference to the influence of African anticolonial struggles on King,
Sanders, Civil Rights, , notes that “African Americans were fascinated by the emergence
of independent African nations,” and that King attended independence celebrations in
Ghana, along with Vice President Richard Nixon, Adam Clayton Powell, and A. Philip
Randolph.

Stephen Tuck, “Malcolm X’s Visit to Oxford University: US Civil Rights, Black Britain, and
the Special Relationship on Race,” American Historical Review, ,  (Feb. ), –, .
 
Ibid., . See [Link]/ourcurriculum, accessed  June .

Downloaded from [Link] IP address: [Link], on 09 Jul 2021 at 10:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at [Link] [Link]
  Megan Hunt
King’s visit to Newcastle, as well as connections between the Montgomery bus
boycott, the March on Washington and the Bristol bus boycott. A teaching
pack created with schoolteachers as part of Freedom City  provides mate-
rials that illuminate, rather than obscure, King’s radicalism and encourage stu-
dents to interrogate its significance in modern Britain. Older online
resources from the UK National Archives document British responses to
the African American civil rights movement, including telegrams sent from
the British Embassy in Washington DC, advising politicians in London of
the situation in the American South. Documents available date from 
until King’s assassination in , providing a valuable window into British
diplomatic responses to the unfolding racial crisis in the US. As well as dem-
onstrating global connections, these resources encourage engagement with
what Loewen calls “the raw materials of history” – the primary sources from
which textbooks so often insulate students. Each document is supplemented
with discussion questions or exercises for students to complete, some of which
encourage students to write newspaper reports from a British perspective util-
izing the information in the sources. Not replicated in textbooks or curricula,
only a highly proactive teacher or student would be likely to find and utilize
these invaluable resources.
The teaching materials on King most readily available to UK teachers pre-
dominantly exist in history and religious studies curricula and textbooks, aug-
mented by resources created by charities and individual teachers, some of
which are available for download via the TES (previously known as the
Times Educational Supplement) website. Like the National Archives resources,
these materials are not necessarily reflective of official educational policy, but
they offer further frameworks for understanding King’s significance and
legacy in UK schools. Indeed, the extent to which these materials reflect or
diverge from the dominant presentation of King in textbooks and curricula
is indicative of the various forces that compete to shape King’s legacy in
Britain. Educational antiracism charities, for example, use King as a spring-
board for discussions of race in contemporary society, and are often more
invested in an ongoing dialogue about equality and social justice than are
“standard” history texts. For example, True Tube, a BAFTA-winning media
charity, offers an assembly plan for schools wishing to mark Martin Luther
King Day in the UK, which “outlines a brief history of Martin Luther


See [Link]
accessed  Oct. .

See [Link] accessed  May .

See “Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement,” Heroes and Villains, The
National Archives, at [Link]/education/heroesvillains/g, accessed

 June . Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me (), .

Downloaded from [Link] IP address: [Link], on 09 Jul 2021 at 10:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at [Link] [Link]
 The Civil Rights Movement in British Schools 
King’s work and asks if discrimination still exists in British society.”
Concluding with a video that explores racial profiling, this assembly also exam-
ines the  murder of Stephen Lawrence and the findings of the subsequent
MacPherson inquiry, which found institutional racism at the heart of
London’s Metropolitan Police. These resources use King’s legacy to
explore enduring problems of race in Britain, and to encourage students to
offer their voices for change.
Show Racism the Red Card (SRTRC), another antiracism charity, coordi-
nated screenings of the  film Selma, Ava DuVernay’s depiction of the
 voting rights campaign in Selma, Alabama, as part of the Into Film
Festival, which enables students and teachers to engage with cinema in new
and educational ways. While some lucky school groups attended special screen-
ings to supplement their studies and stimulate debate, additional resources
were published on the Into Film website for use by any teachers or
schools. As well as prompting students to think about the contemporary
implications and legacies of the events depicted in Selma, the resources encour-
age cinema literacy, urging students to consider how King is presented, not
simply in terms of characterization, dialogue and plotline, but also through
music, camera angles, and setting. As such, these resources encourage stu-
dents to analyse and critique cinematic representations of history, and to ques-
tion the decisions and underlying power dynamics that profoundly shape the
creation of popular memory and memorialization – key components of con-
temporary historiographical debate and valuable tools for an engaged citizenry.
Materials and initiatives like this, however, are very much the exception.

V
Academics seldom engage with the specifics of what is being taught in schools,
although university instructors often spend a good deal of time filling in his-
torical gaps, correcting factual errors, and exposing interpretive oversimplifica-
tions that their students bring with them from school. That is important,
necessary, and perhaps inevitable work, given the pressures on teachers and
the difficulties involved in keeping up with the literature in their field.


True Tube, Stop and Search Me, Film and Assembly Plan (), at [Link]/
film/stop-and-search-me?tab=film, accessed  Nov. .

State-funded schools can join the Into Film Club for free, where they have access to thou-
sands of titles and related-resources. For Selma-specific resources see [Link]fi[Link]/
resources/. For an account of the SRTRC screenings of Selma see [Link].
org/news////selma-screening, both accessed  July .

Into Film, “Civil Rights on Film: Selma Assembly,” at [Link]fi[Link]/resources/; Into
Film, “Selma: Film Guide,” at [Link] both accessed 
July .

Downloaded from [Link] IP address: [Link], on 09 Jul 2021 at 10:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at [Link] [Link]
  Megan Hunt
Rather than seeing this as a necessary evil, or as an additional chore in their
own busy schedules, however, university teachers might do well to think of
this more positively. They are, after all, uniquely positioned to bridge the
gap between what is popular and taught in schools and the latest scholarship.
That historical study has become increasingly politicized in recent years
should raise significant questions for historians of the US working in the
UK, as well as for those interested in memory and race in a British context.
It is encouraging to see that, even as teachers face more restrictions on their
time and resources, they still elect to mark King’s life and legacy in assemblies
and other settings where they have more freedom. King’s legacy and celebrity
offer a significant opportunity to introduce students to struggles for racial
justice in Britain and its empire, documenting how transnational networks
of solidarity were fostered against historic patterns of prejudice and discrimin-
ation. King’s life and legacy are also profoundly important in their own right,
as demonstrated by the ways in which selective, decontextualized soundbites
from King’s career have been used to question and undermine the work of
prominent black British authors interested in opening up difficult national
conversations on race. In short, King’s legacies matter outside the United
States, and, as political and ideological battles rage over how best to define,
appropriate, and deploy his memory, academic historians would do well to
work with those involved with public education, to offer better, more
nuanced, and more internationally relevant introductions to King, the
African American freedom struggle, and the global fight for human rights
and social justice to which they contributed.
Ultimately, then, this article poses a range of interlocking questions about
how racial histories are and might be taught and presented to the British
public, including highly impressionable schoolchildren growing up in a multi-
cultural, globally connected society. The challenge is to teach King and the
modern US freedom struggle better and more comprehensively, but it is also
to provide histories of race and racism that remain sensitive to the distinctive-
ness of particular locales, groups, institutions, and contexts, while also being
attentive to transnational forces of oppression, solidarity, and resistance.
These are important challenges. Perhaps counterintuitively, however, given
that the substantive focus of this article is on how a more nuanced, explicitly
transnational approach to King and the civil rights movement can illuminate
the history of British race relations, the biggest challenge is to promote the
teaching of black British history in its own right and on its own terms.
Instead of relying on the African American freedom struggle to provide an
all-too-rare rare glimpse of nonwhite history in British classrooms, there
should be proper coverage of black British history – ideally a coverage that
explores its manifold connections to other global histories, including, but
not limited to, the African American experience.

Downloaded from [Link] IP address: [Link], on 09 Jul 2021 at 10:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at [Link] [Link]
 The Civil Rights Movement in British Schools 
The political and social stakes of this project are extraordinarily high. As
David Olusoga has summarized, “with black history and black people largely
expunged from the mainstream narrative of British history, we have been
left with a distorted and diminished vision of our national past.” This
erasure, much like the elision of King’s radicalism and a preoccupation with
his charismatic leadership that neglects the ideas, rhetoric, influences, and net-
works that enabled that leadership, fosters dangerously superficial, parochial,
and misleading understandings of the past. Too often, on both sides of the
Atlantic, the “legions of half-truths, prejudices, and propaganda” that King
decried have been pressed into the service of reactionary, racially circum-
scribed, national mythologies that privilege and unite some people, while deni-
grating and excluding others.

SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL
To view supplementary material for this article, please visit [Link]
/S.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES
Megan Hunt is Teaching Fellow in American History at the University of Edinburgh. She is
working on her first monograph, Southern by the Grace of God: Religion, Race, and Civil
Rights in Hollywood’s South, having previously published on films such as Selma, Mississippi
Burning, and The Help. Research for this article was supported by Freedom City , a
city-wide commemoration of Newcastle University’s award of an honorary doctorate to
Martin Luther King in November .

Benjamin Houston is Senior Lecturer at Newcastle University. He is author of The Nashville

Way: Racial Etiquette and the Struggle for Social Justice in a Southern City () and recent
articles in Slavery & Abolition and Public Historian.

Brian Ward is Professor in American Studies at Northumbria University. He has published

widely on the US South, African American history, popular music, and the Atlantic World.
His most recent books are A&R Pioneers: Architects of American Roots Music on Record
(: co-authored with Patrick Huber) and Martin Luther King in Newcastle upon Tyne:
The African American Freedom Struggle and Race Relations in the North East of England ().

Nick Megoran is Professor of Political Geography at Newcastle University and co-convenor of

the Martin Luther King Peace Committee. He is the author of numerous books and articles on
peace, nonviolence, and education.


David Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History (London: Macmillan, ), .

King, “The Purpose of Education.”

Downloaded from [Link] IP address: [Link], on 09 Jul 2021 at 10:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms
of use, available at [Link] [Link]