Yes there is substance. A lot of it. It all comes down to pop history, and the 'master narrative' that is taught in schools, both within the US, and outside of it - because this isn't a localised issue. The master narrative is a popular, watered down version of the Civil Rights Movement, and it frames the CRM as a set period of struggle, limiting understanding of the full scope of the struggle. It's also the story of the movement most of us grow up learning.

Charles Payne paraphrases the idea of the master narrative in Time Longer Than Rope, a collection of essays he edited on African American activism:

Traditionally, relationships between the races in the South were oppressive. In 1954, the Supreme Court decided this was wrong. Inspired by the court, courageous Americans, black and white, took protest to the street, in form of sit-ins, bus boycotts, and freedom rides. The protest movement, led by the brilliant and eloquent Dr. Martin Luther King, aided by a sympathetic federal government, most notably the Kennedy brothers and a born-again Lyndon Johnson, was able to make America understand racial discrimination as a moral issue. Once Americans understood that discrimination was wrong, they quickly moved to remove racial prejudice and discrimination from American life, as evidenced by the Civil Rights Acts 1964 and 1965. Dr. King was tragically slain in 1968. Fortunately, by that time the country had been changed, changed for the better in some fundamental ways. The movement was a remarkable victory for all Americans. By the 1970s, southern states where blacks could not have voted ten years earlier were sending African Americans to Congress. Inexplicably, just as the civil rights victories were piling up, many African Americans, under the banner of Black Power, turned their backs on American society.

This is the way the story is most commonly told. It has Dr. King as the leader of the movement, and the Kennedy brothers and Lyndon Johnson as the liberal leaders that helped him along. It's quite comprehensive really, and it is the story of the movement. But it's a simplified story. It's a romanticised perspective, and it omits massive chunks of African American activism from the historical story.

One of the major problems with the CRM is locating its beginning and end points. The 'classic' CRM, the one described above, starts with Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and finishes with the black nationalist movements of the late sixties and early seventies. It limits the story of African American activism to a period that is about twenty years long, when the black population had been actively in pursuit of equality for much, much longer. It is in effect, a "streamlined, homogenised version of the movement" which focuses on men at the top, and ignored everyone else like the women who organised through

So, this begs the question, what was the Civil Rights Movement really?

The short CRM(as I shall refer to the twenty year period encapsulated by the narrative above), was but a part of a much longer movement that had begun decades before, and continues through to the present day with issues such as police brutality and disenfranchisement. The difficulty is in pinpointing a starting point. Charles Payne's book starts with 1850, suggesting that could be a good period. Emancipation and reconstruction in the South could also serve. Either way, the beginning of African American activism in the United States started long before the Supreme Court decision of '54.

The longer CRM wasn't one cohesive organisation, with a leader at the top that ran everything. The movement was a grassroots one, which was only made possible by the people at the bottom who worked within communities to elicit change. In Arkansas and Mississippi in 1919, black tenant farmers set up a campaign to get better compensation for their crops from white plantation owners. Septima Clark, the daughter of two freed slaves, was a key figure in the movement, but is not recognised by the narrative. She helped to establish a chain of schools across the South that educated adult African Americans in a period where they were denied access to education. The citizenship schools that she helped run taught these people how to read and write, allowing them to pass the literacy tests instituted at Southern polls by state governments to prevent African American voting. By 1969, just over a decade after they began, 700,000 new voters able to register, having gone through the education system set up by Clark.

There are many other examples of grassroots activism in America prior to the short CRM. In Florida in 1919 and 1920, there was a voter registration drive by black Floridians that was organised through "African American secret societies, women's clubs, unions, churches, and other institutions that bolstered black dignity and thrived outside of Jim Crow." These sorts of groups were able to form a black identity, and a wide social movement that worked to empower the African American population. Without this sort of early grassroots organising, the short CRM and Dr. King could never have succeeded. This was the foundation of everything they achieved.

There is no doubt that Dr. King was an enormously charismatic man, an eloquent speaker, and a brilliant organiser. But within the context of the long CRM, he is just the most public image of activism. When we look at the long movement, it's easy to see the work that went in before King's appearance on the scene - getting African Americans to vote, and to organise. Like Ella Baker says, the movement made him more than he made it. King was able to do what he did because of those who came before him, while activism was already in play decades before.

Overall, Dr. King made an enormous contribution, and for that he should be remembered and honoured. But to keep to the narrative that is so commonly espoused by the education system, media, and other sources, is to diminish the achievements of thousands of others who worked tirelessly out of the public eye to make the CRM possible. It ignores the efforts of women, students, and others, while smoothing over the racial tension that existed between black and white activists("Inspired by the court, courageous Americans, black and white").

In short, it is a shallow and badly described version of a deeply nuanced story.