Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope: A Conversation with Brandon Terry

Join the Center for Racial Justice and Equitable Futures and faculty fellow Alex Livingston for a talk with Brandon Terry to discuss his new book, (Belknap Harvard, 2025). Named one of the New York Times’s 100 notable books of 2025, Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope is a a landmark reinterpretation of the civil rights movement that challenges reductive heroic narratives of the 1950s and 1960s and invigorates new debates and possibilities for the future of the struggle for liberation.

Advanced registration is highly encouraged. This event is co-sponsored by the Political Theory Workshop at Cornell and the Central New York Humanities Corridor. The talk runs from 4:45 to 6:15pm.

Author photo by Kevin Grady/Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

Brandon M. Terry is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University and the co-director of the Institute on Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. Born in Baltimore, Terry earned a PhD with distinction in Political Science and African American Studies from Yale University, an MSc in Political Theory Research at the University of Oxford, and an AB, magna cum laude, in Government and African and African American Studies from Harvard College.

An award-winning scholar of African American political thought, political theory, and the politics of race and inequality, Brandon is the author of Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope: A Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement (Harvard University Press). He is also the editor, with Tommie Shelby, of To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Harvard University Press, 2018) and the editor of Fifty Years Since MLK (Boston Review/MIT, 2018).

He is currently working on two book projects. The first is on the political thought and judgment of Malcolm X, tentatively titled Home to Roost: Malcolm X Between Prophecy and Peril (Penguin/Random House), that concerns the political thought and legacy of Malcolm X for pressing academic and activist debates about crime, political theology, identity politics, and internationalism. The second, To Save the Soul of America: Martin Luther King and a New Public Philosophy, aims to move beyond King’s iconic activism to recover his philosophical writings for an age of disorientation and despair. The book explores how King’s philosophy can conceptually and normatively sharpen professional philosophy and contemporary political struggles regarding questions of peace, justice, dignity, and democracy.

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. He currently serves on the boards of Boston Review, Embrace Boston, and NOMOS, the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy.

A landmark reinterpretation of the civil rights movement that challenges reductive heroic narratives of the 1950s and 1960s and invigorates new debates and possibilities for the future of the struggle for liberation.

We are all familiar with the romantic vision of the civil rights movement: a moment when heroic African Americans and their allies triumphed over racial oppression through courageous protest, forging a new consensus in American life and law. But what are the effects of this celebratory storytelling? What happens when a living revolt against injustice becomes an embalmed museum piece?

In this innovative work, Brandon Terry develops a novel theory of interpretation to show how competing accounts of the civil rights movement circulate through politics and political philosophy. The dominant narrative is romantic. This “arc of justice” narrative is found in popular histories, the speeches of Barack Obama, and even the writings of the liberal philosopher John Rawls. Despite being public orthodoxy, these romantic visions are exhausted and unpersuasive on their own terms. The breakdown of the authority of this history of justice has created space for a rival ironic mode, embodied in the political ideas of Afropessimism. While offering a sympathetic critique, Terry ultimately finds Afropessimist thought self-undermining and unworkable.

Instead, he argues, the civil rights movement is best understood in tragic terms. By challenging the attachment to triumphant pasts, Terry demonstrates that tragedy exemplifies what the civil rights movement has been and can still be. Provocative and original, Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope offers an optimistic political vision without naïveté, to train our judgment and resilience in the face of reasonable despair.