Seeing Like an Activist: Civil Disobedience and the Civil Rights Movement

"There are few movements more firmly associated with civil disobedience than the civil rights movement.

In the mainstream imagination, civil rights activists eschewed coercion, appealed to the majority's principles, and submit willingly to legal punishment in order to demand necessary legislative reforms - and facilitate the realization of core constitutional and democratic principles.

Their fidelity to the spirit of the law, commitment to civility, and allegiance to American democracy provided the blueprint for activists pursuing racial justice, and set the normative horizon for liberal philosophies of civil disobedience.

Seeing Like an Activist charts the emergence of this influential account of civil disobedience in the civil rights movement, and demonstrates its reliance on a narrative about black protest that is itself entangled with white supremacy.

Liberal political theorists whose work informed decades of scholarship saw civil d