In a recent lecture on the issue of commemoration and civil rights memory, scholar Renée Romano provocatively asserted that although it was important to recognize the achievements of antiracist movements in history, it was currently more important to focus on the racial oppression that had plagued U .S. society for centuries. In other words, she invited historians to investigate and expose the worst rather than the best aspects of American racial history in order to contribute to progress in the current society. This is only the latest development in a historiographical war that has been going on since the Reagan era. For more than three decades now, conservatives, liberals, and radicals have fought over the meaning of the civil rights movement in U .S. history and over the ways it should be remembered. This article identifies and analyzes three distinct interpretive wars since the 1970s. The first covers the 1970s and l 980s, the second runs from the early 1990s through the late 2000s, the third, currently in progress, seems to have taken shape during Obama's presidency. With the recent emergence of new protes! movements such as Black Lives Malter in response to police killings of people of color, the civil rights movement has become once again an object of heated debate redrawing the contours of conservatism, liberalism, and radicalism, thus reflecting the ongoing culture wars in American society.