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

On today’s episode of Justice Matters, co-host Mathias Risse speaks with Brandon Terry, a political theorist at Harvard University whose work seeks to reshape how we understand African-American political thought, especially the memory and meaning of the civil rights movement. Today they discuss topics related to his recently published book, “Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope: A Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement.” Together they discuss: why Brandon wrote the book, his reasons for choosing the title, different interpretations of Martin Luther King Jr’s role., the different narratives of the Civil Rights movement including the romantic view, the afro-pessimist view, and Brandon’s tragic vision that he lays out in the book, and Brandon’s reflections on the current state of politics in the United States. Brandon M. Terry is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University and Co-director of the Institute on Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. He is the coeditor, with Tommie Shelby, of “To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr.” and editor of “Fifty Years Since MLK.” Terry has published work in Modern Intellectual History, Political Theory, The New York Review of Books, Time, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, Dissent, The Point, and New Labor Forum and been interviewed by The Ezra Klein Show, Vox, the New York Times, and other media outlets. “Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope: A Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement” is available from Harvard University Press:

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Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope: A Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement is an episode from Justice Matters by Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.

This episode is 00:40:39 long.

This episode was published on Mar 16, 2026.

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