Once a neglected area, African American history is now the subject of extensive scholarly research. The Debate on Black Civil Rights in America is the first full-length study to examine the changing academic debate on developments in African American history from the 1890s to the present. It provides a critical historiographical review of the very latest thinking and explains how and why research and discourse have evolved in the ways that they have. Individual chapters focus on particular periods in African American history from the spread of racial segregation in the 1890s through to the postwar Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement of the sixties and seventies. The concluding chapters address the modern day black experience and the images of African Americans in popular culture. Appraising both the existing scholarship and the changing philosophy of the historical profession, this work will be invaluable to scholars, students and general readers alike.