Memory and Reconciliation in the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute

Memory and Reconciliation in the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute Victoria J. Gallagher The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute is located in downtown Birmingham, Alabama across the street from Kelly Ingram Park where black citizens were sprayed with fire hoses and confronted by police attack dogs in the spring of 1963. Across the street, on the side of the Institute, is Sixteenth Street Baptist church where four young black girls were killed by a bomb blast on September 15,1963. To the right of the front entrance of the Institute is a statue that memorializes the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, a key leader of the civil rights efforts in Birmingham during the late 1950s and early 1960s who endured bombings and physical attacks on himself and his family. Visiting the Institute on a Sunday, and walking through the gallery that depicts segregated Birmingham, I met the father of two boys who were the first to integrate an all-white school in Birmingham during that turbulent time. He now serves as a volunteer at the Institute. He took me over to the portion of the gallery devoted to segregated schooling and showed me the picture of himself and his sons on that most difficult day, surrounded by angry white people yelling and shaking fists. In Birmingham, at the Institute, historical conflicts are localized and brought close to home. Memorials and monuments, including those like the Institute that are devoted to honoring the accomplishments and reminding us of the tragic losses accrued during the civil rights movement, have proliferated in the last decade. Various theoretical explanations of the motivations, social consequences, and material nature of such artifacts have been offered along with close and provocative analyses of specific memorials.1 While national memorials such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Holocaust Museum, and the Aids Quilt have tended to dominate such scholarship, critics and theorists have begun paying attention to the increasing number of civil rights-related museums and memorials appearing in communities around the country, particularly in the Southeast.2 Among such public commemorative artifacts, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute is unique, combining a Victoria Gallagher is Associate Professor of Communication at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina. She wishes to thank Carole Blair and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. © Rhetoric & Public Affairs Vol. 2, No. 2,1999, pp. 303-320 ISSN 1094-8392 304 Rhetoric & Public Affairs memorial to a living civil rights activist (the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth) with an interactive museum that recreates the story of black citizens, racism, and civil rights efforts in Birmingham, Alabama.3 By enabling visitors to look at, listen to, and feel the kinds of institutional discourse experienced by blacks, whites, and other racial and ethnic groups throughout the history of Birmingham, the Institute meets its professed goal, establishing a space for rethinking and re-envisioning our past, our current and future selves, and our relationships to one another. Yet it also creates a largely unnoticed but silently powerful institutional discourse of its own, entrenched in a highly Americanized theme, a "tradition of progress." The goal of this paper is to describe and analyze the rhetorical consequence, form, and content of the Birmingham Institute. Whereas traditional rhetorical criticism emphasizes the intent of a rhetor and determines effect (and rhetorical success ) based largely upon the extent to which the rhetor accomplishes his or her goal(s) via language, criticism of material artifacts such as memorials requires a broader conceptualization of effect that can account for both their material form (emphasizing visual vocabularies and contexts in addition to linguistic ones) and the social functions they enable. In the case of memorials, the consequences of materiality include issues of partisanship, particularly institutionalization of memory and, thereby, value. As a result, the highly contested nature of race relations and civil rights in the United States means that related memorials enact a dialectical tension between reconciliation and amnesia, conflicts resolved and conflicts simply reconfigured. Analysis of the Institute's visual vocabularies and material presence provides a way to illuminate this tension and determine its implications. To that end, the first section of the paper draws from recent scholarship on visual grammar and argument, cultural memory, and...