The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory / Edition 1

by Renee C. Romano, Leigh Raiford, Derek H. Alderman, Owen J. Dwyer, Rebecca Edwards

Overview

The movement for civil rights in America peaked in the 1950s and 1960s; however, a closely related struggle, this time over the movement's legacy, has been heatedly engaged over the past two decades. How the civil rights movement is currently being remembered in American politics and culture—and why it matters—is the common theme of the thirteen essays in this unprecedented collection.

Memories of the movement are being created and maintained—in ways and for purposes we sometimes only vaguely perceive—through memorials, art exhibits, community celebrations, and even street names. At least fifteen civil rights movement museums have opened since 1990; Mississippi Burning, Four Little Girls, and The Long Walk Home only begin to suggest the range of film and television dramatizations of pivotal events; corporations increasingly employ movement images to sell fast food, telephones, and more; and groups from Christian conservatives to gay rights activists have claimed the civil rights mantle.

Contests over the movement's meaning are a crucial part of the continuing fight against racism and inequality. These writings look at how civil rights memories become established as fact through museum exhibits, street naming, and courtroom decisions; how our visual culture transmits the memory of the movement; how certain aspects of the movement have come to be ignored in its "official" narrative; and how other political struggles have appropriated the memory of the movement. Here is a book for anyone interested in how we collectively recall, claim, understand, and represent the past.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820328140
Publisher:	University of Georgia Press
Publication date:	05/01/2006
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	408
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

DEREK H. ALDERMAN is professor of cultural and historical geography at the University of Tennessee. He is the coauthor of The Political Life of Urban Streetscapes: Naming, Politics, and Place and Civil Rights Memorials and the Geography of Memory.

GLENN T. ESKEW is a professor of history at Georgia State University. He is the author of But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle, editor of Labor in the Modern South, and coeditor of Paternalism in a Southern City.

Renee C. Romano (Editor)
RENEE C. ROMANO is an associate professor of history and African American studies at Wesleyan University and the author of Race Mixing.

Leigh Raiford (Editor)
LEIGH RAIFORD is an assistant professor of African American studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	ix
	Introduction: The Struggle over Memory	xi
Part 1	Institutionalizing Memory	1
	Interpreting the Civil Rights Movement: Contradiction, Confirmation, and the Cultural Landscape	5
	The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and the New Ideology of Tolerance	28
	Street Names as Memorial Arenas: The Reputational Politics of Commemorating Martin Luther King Jr. in a Georgia County	67
	Narratives of Redemption: The Birmingham Church Bombing Trials and the Construction of Civil Rights Memory	96
Part 2	Visualizing Memory	135
	The Good, the Bad, and the Forgotten: Media Culture and Public Memory of the Civil Rights Movement	137
	Debating the Present through the Past: Representations of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1990s	167
	Integration as Disintegration: Remembering the Civil Rights Movement as a Struggle for Self-Determination in John Sayles's Sunshine State	197
	Restaging Revolution: Black Power, Vibe Magazine, and Photographic Memory	220
Part 3	Diverging Memory	251
	Down to Now: Memory, Narrative, and Women's Leadership in the Civil Rights Movement in Atlanta, Georgia	253
	Engendering Movement Memories: Remembering Race and Gender in the Mississippi Movement	290
Part 4	Deploying Memory	313
	Deaf Rights, Civil Rights: The Gallaudet "Deaf President Now" Strike and Historical Memory of the Civil Rights Movement	317
	Riding in the Back of the Bus: The Christian Right's Adoption of Civil Rights Movement Rhetoric	346
	Rosa Parks, C'est Moi	363
	Selected Bibliography on Civil Rights and Historical Memory	367
	Contributors	371
	Index	373

Editorial Reviews

This is a very impressive collection of essays that contributes in important ways to the already strong literature on the Civil Rights Movement, and its enduring legacy, meanings, and consequences.

University of California Berkeley - Waldo E. Martin Jr.

A timely and comprehensive exploration of Toni Morrison's novels to date as they relate to black masculinity, Mayberry's Can't I Love What I Criticize? is a major contribution to ongoing literary, historical, and social discussions regarding African American gender relations and the formation of community.

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill - W. Fitzhugh Brundage

This challenging collection offers a fundamental reframing of the 'civil rights’ struggle. By treating that struggle as the site of 'intense ideological struggle,' as one author puts it, these essays provide the questions which will allow to better understand the current historical moment as well as the past.

Duke University - Charles M. Payne

Succeeds in showing how the memories of the civil rights movement are fiercely contested, inherently political, and deployed by different people to vastly different ends. Perhaps most importantly, it illustrates that the movement, both in terms of its legacies and its real social and political gains and shortcomings, is far from finished and still wide open to interpretation and debate.

Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

Above all, the essays in this collection seek to highlight the relevance to contemporary politics and culture of these struggles over a 'proper' telling of the civil rights story.

Journal of American History

Timely and important . . . This collection is an important opening statement in what is sure to become a vital conversation for scholars of the civil rights movement and of American memory.

Reviews in American History

Romano and Raiford have compiled a volume that deserves a wide readership by historians and especially the public. It is a timely volume, with original, interdisciplinary research (only three of the thirteen essays have been published before) that provokes further reflection on the meaning of the Civil Rights Movement. . . . The editors have done an admirable job of compiling essays from a variety of perspectives. . . . Classes on historical methods, public history, contemporary America, and the Civil Rights Movement would especially benefit from these essays, but historians will find uses for them in other classes as well. . . . This is an excellent book and all the contributors, the press, and especially the editors deserve congratulations for bringing this work together. It is a labor well worth the time and energy that produced it.

H-South

Will inspire its readers to rethink the complexities of this important chapter of U.S. history and of how the story of the Civil Rights Movement is being told and retold as the actual events move further into the past.

Southern Cultures

"A timely, thoughtful, and pathbreaking survey of Americans’ struggle to make sense of the most important upheaval in recent American history. The authors ask vital questions about who remembers the civil rights struggle and how they do so. It is unquestionably a major contribution to the emerging scholarship on the civil rights movement and its legacy."—W. Fitzhugh Brundage, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

"This is a very impressive collection of essays that contributes in important ways to the already strong literature on the Civil Rights Movement, and its enduring legacy, meanings, and consequences."—Waldo E. Martin Jr., University of California Berkeley

"This challenging collection offers a fundamental reframing of the 'civil rights’ struggle. By treating that struggle as the site of 'intense ideological struggle,' as one author puts it, these essays provide the questions which will allow to better understand the current historical moment as well as the past."—Charles M. Payne, Duke University

"Romano and Raiford have compiled a volume that deserves a wide readership by historians and especially the public. It is a timely volume, with original, interdisciplinary research (only three of the thirteen essays have been published before) that provokes further reflection on the meaning of the Civil Rights Movement. . . . The editors have done an admirable job of compiling essays from a variety of perspectives. . . . Classes on historical methods, public history, contemporary America, and the Civil Rights Movement would especially benefit from these essays, but historians will find uses for them in other classes as well. . . . This is an excellent book and all the contributors, the press, and especially the editors deserve congratulations for bringing this work together. It is a labor well worth the time and energy that produced it."—H-South

"Above all, the essays in this collection seek to highlight the relevance to contemporary politics and culture of these struggles over a 'proper' telling of the civil rights story."—Journal of American History

"Succeeds in showing how the memories of the civil rights movement are fiercely contested, inherently political, and deployed by different people to vastly different ends. Perhaps most importantly, it illustrates that the movement, both in terms of its legacies and its real social and political gains and shortcomings, is far from finished and still wide open to interpretation and debate."—Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

"Timely and important . . . This collection is an important opening statement in what is sure to become a vital conversation for scholars of the civil rights movement and of American memory."—Reviews in American History

"Will inspire its readers to rethink the complexities of this important chapter of U.S. history and of how the story of the Civil Rights Movement is being told and retold as the actual events move further into the past.”—Southern Cultures

From the Publisher