What Can and Can’t Be Said: Race, Uplift, and Monument Building in the Contemporary South by Dell Upton (review)

In the past thirty years around the South, a flurry of new monuments commemorating the civil rights movement and African American history have taken their place in the memorial landscape. In What Can and Can’t Be Said: Race, Uplift, and Monument Building in the Contemporary South, architectural historian Dell Upton explores the motivations of those promoting these new monuments, the political debates about them, and the messages the monuments communicate about black experiences, southern history, and the state of contemporary race relations. Focusing as much on the process of lobbying for and constructing new monuments as on the final products, Upton offers detailed case studies of many of the new memorials, including a chapter on the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Upton traces three phrases of monument construction, from early monuments in the 1970s and 1980s that commemorated prominent leaders of the civil rights movement, to more populist memorials that sought to commemorate the everyday people who participated in the civil rights struggle, to a third phase of monuments that commemorate a broader sweep of African American history. These many monuments, Upton argues, “are less about remembering the movement than they are about asserting the presence of black Americans in contemporary Southern society and politics” (p. vii). Black southerners lobbied for monuments as a way to insist on their rightful place as full citizens in the South’s commemorative landscape.

And yet, Upton finds, what these monuments can say about America’s history or present is sorely circumscribed by a number of factors, the most important of which is the very narrow range of permissible discourse about race in the contemporary South. Black history monuments are being inserted into a landscape that is populated with memorials to white supremacy, and white people only accept newer monuments if they do not seek to challenge or displace existing memorials. The result, Upton argues, is that both black and white populations have tacitly accepted a construction he calls “dual heritage,” which suggests that black and white southerners have parallel and distinct, but equally honorable, histories (p. 15). Many black history monuments, Upton points out, draw on the tradition of war memorials yet cannot present any enemies. These monuments can only portray a story of progress decontextualized from any history of white racism and oppression. Moreover, the power of this ideology of dual heritage means that many white citizens view black challenges to white supremacist monuments as attacks on white southern heritage and on the historical record itself. Upton makes a compelling case that white southerners continue to have final say over most memorial representations in the South.

The everyday workings of local and state politics also affect what black history monuments can communicate, since most of the public officials who have to approve monuments see them as a way to foster economic development and tourism. Black elites share the impulse to tell a positive story of progress, Upton argues, one that emphasizes black respectability and the leadership of the black middle class. Finally, the conventions of the Western monumental form itself and an American memorial tradition that prefers positive, forward-looking commemorations contribute to the tendency to build monuments that ignore contested aspects of the past and emphasize transcending hardships. Thus even though many of the black activists who initially sought monuments wanted to make clear the racial straggle was not over, the memorial landscape instead communicates a very different message.

What Can and Can’t Be Said can feel somewhat episodic with its many detailed histories of specific monuments, but it offers an original approach to exploring the nature of change and continuity in the South since the civil rights era. In the end, Upton illuminates both the difficulties of crafting a shared historical narrative that acknowledges “the long, bloody history of race...