I'm Christopher Leiden, and this is open source.

All about our friend Brandon Terry and his tragic vision of the civil rights movement.

Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope is your title, Brandon Terry.

For something more than a book, it's a map of our minds and our memories,

a catalog of our judgments and feelings around an epic era in American history,

and it's not quite over. I take it as a response, finally, to the charge leveled by the great

W.E.B. Du Bois that the real plot of the civil rights story got lost or suppressed long ago.

And I take you as a sort of meta-historian

telling the story of how the story gets told and revised and retold.

Friend and Terry, welcome back to open source,

and thank you for this monumental book.

Let's get to the heart of it,

which seems to me was your choice

to put civil rights history

into that tragic framework,

not least because you believe tragedy

is more hopeful

than the alternative romantic telling of the story.

Tragedy, I hear you arguing through this book,

is not pessimistic. It is the alternative to

pessimism looking forward. But let's note at the outset we're talking already about literary forms,

tragedy as an alternative to romance. These are storytellers categories, and you're saying

...