The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory (review)

Roger Rosenblatt, a journalist and media commentator, remarked some years ago that "even when . . . we don't understand, when people do things in vast numbers, it is interesting. And they are trying to tell us something, or they're trying to tell themselves something." Rosenblatt's statement could have described the tendency in U.S. popular culture to raise anew narratives of the modern Civil Rights Movement. For roughly two decades civil rights memory projects have decorated the cultural and physical landscape. Certain feature films—however contested their content—like Mississippi Burning (1988), The Long Walk Home (1991), and Ghosts of Mississippi (1996), as well as countless documentaries, including Eyes on the Prize (1987, 1990), are but one indication of the tendency. The establishment of memorials and museums to mark the Civil Rights Movement represent an even more significant barometer, given the financial investment required to create such sites. Occupying formerly segregationist strongholds are the Civil Rights Memorial (Montgomery), the National Civil Rights Museum (Memphis), the Civil Rights Institute (Birmingham), the National Voting Rights Museum (Selma), and the Rosa Parks Library and Museum (Montgomery). All of these have appeared on the landscape only since 1989. A national memorial honoring Martin Luther King Jr. is scheduled for dedication in Washington, D.C., in 2008. There is talk of a major history site at the old Woolworth's store in Greensboro (site of the 1960 sit-ins) and another at the bus station in Montgomery (where Freedom Riders were beaten in 1961).

Surprisingly, scholarship has not followed practice in tracking the public memory of the Civil Rights Movement. Memory-studies scholarship has infiltrated nearly every discipline in the humanities and social sciences since the mid-1980s, typically forwarding as its major assumption that collectivities "remember" in ways at least relevant to, if not completely self serving of, present interests. Although important works by Michael Eric Dyson, the Black Public Sphere Collective, Geneviève Fabre, and Robert O'Meally take up issues related to civil rights memory, it is the central concern of none of them. Renee Romano and Leigh Raiford's collection of essays on the subject is a powerful beginning to fill the void.

Its editors begin with the assumptions that "the struggles over the memory of the civil rights movement are not a diversion from the real political work of fighting for racial equality and equal rights in the United States; they are key sites of that struggle." They go on to assert that "there exists today what we might call a consensus memory, a dominant narrative of the movement's goals, practices, victories, and, of course, its most lasting legacies." The case-study chapters each address in some way how the "consensus memory" has been forged or challenged. In the first two sections, the essays address Civil Rights Movement memory as instantiated in memory sites and film and media portrayals. The third section takes up race and gender issues as they were played out during the Mississippi summer project and during voting-rights work in Atlanta in the 1940s. The final section addresses how the rhetoric of the Civil Rights Movement has been appropriated by other groups, focusing on the deaf-rights movement and the Christian right.

Particularly notable is Romano's chapter on narratives that emerged from the highly publicized Birmingham church bombing trials of Thomas Edwin Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry in 2001 and 2002. Romano argues forcefully that the stories told by attorneys on both sides construct an understanding of racial justice issues as safely assigned to an almost unrecognizable past. Also important is Edward P. Morgan's analysis of news accounts of civil-rights anniversaries. His claim that "the public memory that emerges elevates some aspects of the struggle to the level of iconic myth, attributes others to demonic forces that seem beyond comprehension, and obscures portions of the civil rights struggle that challenge hallowed beliefs about American traditions of tolerance and equality" is...