When former U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore tweeted an ode to civil rights icon Rosa Parks this past December, Jeanne Theoharis clapped back. “You better tell that man to keep your name out his mouth,” responded the Distinguished Professor of Political Science, borrowing a line from the Joshua Bennett poem Frederick Douglass is Dead.

When previous Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed chastised Black Lives Matter protestors for blocking a city highway, telling reporters that Martin Luther King Jr. “would never take a freeway,” Theoharis called the comment “historically absurd.” In an article for The Root, she highlighted how “dangerous and distorted ideas” of the civil rights movement are used to chastise the activists and called out Oprah Winfrey, the Rev. Barbara Reynolds, and former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee for similar offenses.

Theoharis’ scholarship has propelled her to become one of the most vocal apostles of the truth and the whole truth about this era of America’s past. She outspokenly rebukes those who would appropriate its message or pervert its larger context for political purposes and fact checks others who simply don’t have their stories straight. A few years ago, she received the NAACP Image Award for her work in unearthing little-known information about Rosa Parks in The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (Beacon Press, 2013).

In her most recent book, A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History (Beacon Press, 2018), she explores the naked truth of what civil rights icons were up against, an exercise that she says contains valuable lessons for social, economic, and criminal justice issues of today. She argues that a more accurate and complete history of the movement is actually far more interesting and more beautiful—if at times more frightening—than the fables.

“The fables are all about making the United States look good,” says Theoharis, in an interview in her Brooklyn College office. “It’s like our democracy is this self-cleaning oven. We had a problem, they protested, and we fixed it. Today the civil rights movement is seen as American as apple pie. But at the time it was considered very anti-American, King was seen by many as a demagogue, and it made a lot of people very uncomfortable. And so the people who pushed it forward were even more tenacious, courageous, and relentless than we have realized.”

King’s poll numbers from the 1960s showed that twice as many disapproved of him as approved. Today, Americans rank him in the same high regard as Albert Einstein and President John F. Kennedy—who, Theoharis points out, signed off on intense surveillance of King after the March on Washington.

In the book, Theoharis makes the case that a national distortion of civil rights began when President Ronald Reagan decided to flip his position and sign the bill that would dedicate a national holiday in honor of King because he saw the political utility of it. She traces the travesty to more modern times, pointing out how President George W. Bush solemnized the national funeral for Parks just two months after Hurricane Katrina, “in part to paper over the issues that Katrina had raised,” she says. “All of these questions about enduring racial and social injustice had become much more central all of a sudden, so putting Rosa Parks to rest was figuratively like putting racism to rest. This woman who was denied a seat on the bus was now lying in state in the capitol like, look how far we’ve come.”

Theoharis’ scholarship has won her many fans including her mentor, the late Julian Bond, another civil rights activist who told her that she taught him a thing or two about Parks. (A More Beautiful and Terrible History is dedicated to Bond, as well as to Theoharis’ parents who she says insisted on justice and truth-telling.)

“The myth of Rosa Parks is so not interesting. It makes her seem sort of prissy and bland and not relevant to the issues we face today,” she says. “Really she was kind of a shy badass who fought for reform in the criminal justice system, desegregation, antipoverty programs, and global justice. When you see how burned out she is by the time she makes her bus stand, how they’ve tried a million things, you can see the bigger historical arc. And then she keeps fighting for another 40 years in Detroit.”

In addition to appearing on The New York Times bestseller list, the The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks solidified Theoharis as a public intellectual—even Winfrey posted a picture of herself in bed with the tome—and landed the professor on the media’s radar. She has since been featured on NPR, MSNBC, and has written high-profile pieces for Time magazine and The Nation, among other publications.

A More Beautiful and Terrible History—the title is a nod to a quote from a speech James Baldwin gave to teachers in 1963—has already gotten some advance press on NPR and The Intercept and is currently racking up plaudits in reviews in top publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Theoharis’ work is informed by her own experiences as an activist as well as a witness to historical whitewashing. Her mother is Armenian and taught her much about the genocide that is not recognized by the United States government. “I grew up very familiar with the idea that history can be there yet not acknowledged, that there are politics that go along with what is told and not told that aren’t always honest,” she says.

What she hopes readers take away from her latest book is a more nuanced understanding of the civil rights movement. For example, that the Watts riots didn’t happen in a vacuum and were the culmination of years of peaceful and long-ignored struggle that preceded it; that school desegregation was as much an issue in the North as it was in the South; that King found white moderates who overlooked injustices in their own backyards as dangerous as the Klu Klux Klan; that his wife, Coretta Scott King, wasn’t some stand-by-your-man cliché but rather a rebel in her own right who greatly influenced her husband’s perspective, especially around global issues; and that much like today’s Black Lives Matter activists, King was derided as disruptive, seditious, and too aggressive.

Theoharis says that some King scholars have offered a corrective narrative around some of these issues but they haven’t been vocal enough in the mainstream, which would help pave the way for today’s activists to claim the mantle. She recalls finding some of Parks’ notes for a speech, where she referenced earlier black revolutionaries like Crispus Attucks, Harriet Tubman, and Mary McLeod Bethune.

“It’s much easier to fight if you know you are standing on the shoulders of other freedom fighters,” she says.