Dr. Michael Collins, 2021-22 Glasscock Internal Faculty Research Fellow | Department of English, Texas A&M

The Glasscock Center is excited to continue its series, which highlights humanities research at Texas A&M, and the vital role it plays at the university and in the world beyond the academy.

For this highlight, we invited Dr. Michael Collins to tell us about his recently published book and how his time as a Glassock Center Internal Faculty Residential Fellow facilitated his work. 

Dr. Michael Collins is a Professor in the Department of English and an Advisory Board Member for the Glassock Center. Dr. Collins has a wide range of academic and creative interests, including interdisciplinary literary studies (particularly economics and literature, medical humanities, and law and literature) and the African and African American diaspora. His most recent book, The Anti-Civil Rights Movement: Affirmative Action as Wedge and Weapon (2024, University of Kansas Press), explores the emergence of anti-affirmative action and anti-DEI sentiments as a dominant feature of US politics. 

The core argument of The Anti-Civil Rights Movement, Dr. Collins argues, “[T]hat the current political moment grew out of a massive backlash to civil rights advances that began not long after the Civil War.” He spends most of the book examining the backlash to the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) Supreme Court decision, which required the desegregation of public schools, and which provoked a campaign of massive resistance in the South and elsewhere. That campaign pioneered a key tactic of what Dr. Collins’s book calls the Anti-Civil Rights Movement: the replacement of segregation ideology with an ideology of absolute color blindness that condemns as unconstitutional, or even racist, any measures taken to the break massive resistance—and sometimes just plain indifference—that “for decades starved many minority communities of the oxygen of opportunity.” 

“To pump opportunity into communities,“ Collins says, the federal government passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The act became a basis of affirmative action measures like Lyndon Johnson's Executive Order 11246, which President Trump recently revoked. Collins’s book chronicles efforts to bring anti-affirmative action and anti-voting rights lawsuits, reshape the Supreme Court and the media landscape, and redefine the vocabulary of the Civil Rights Movement in order to shift interpretations of the Constitution led by civil rights heroes like Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, and Ling-Chi Wang and Henry Der, former leaders of the influential organization Chinese for Affirmative Action.

Dr. Collins explains that the course releases granted during his time as an Internal Faculty Residential Fellowship in 2021–22 gave him time to “make crucial progress on this book.” Because it explores the creation and destruction of meaning, Collins says, The Anti-Civil Rights Movement offers readers a way to understand how human choices regarding rhetoric shape both how we understand one another and how we frame arguments regarding civil rights.