Defining Moments: African American Commemoration and Political Culture in the South, 1863-1913 (review)

Scholars in recent years have increasingly debated the history of Civil War commemoration. David W. Blight's monumental Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001) sets the standard for treatment of the topic. He argues that Northern and Southern whites' growing desire for sectional reconciliation eventually overcame interpretations of the war that stressed emancipation and racial justice. While Blight explores American culture as a whole, Kathleen Ann Clark places the focus squarely on the actions of African Americans in the South. She examines what Blight would term the "emancipationist vision" by studying black efforts to celebrate freedom, equality, and racial progress. Clark argues that African American war commemorations provided a visible challenge to white supremacist appropriations of memory throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the same time, African Americans often disagreed about the role gender, white accommodation, and colonization would play in achieving racial uplift.

Clark begins with an examination of "celebrations of freedom" in the few years that followed emancipation. African Americans in cities throughout the South asserted control over public spaces to commemorate anniversaries of emancipation and Union victory. Black marchers and militia companies reminded all Southerners of the role slavery and African American military service played in the war. In chapter 2, Clark temporarily abandons chronological narrative for theoretical interpretation. She argues that black leaders stressed the importance of "manhood" in achieving and maintaining freedom and equal rights. Black women did not receive the rights of citizenship and often found themselves excluded from prominent positions at rallies and demonstrations. The final three chapters advance the story into the early twentieth century. As Reconstruction ended, African Americans sought to demonstrate the success of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. Faced with increasing white violence and the rise of Jim Crow, they fought to keep alive the memory of emancipation, military service, and political participation. Fairs and industrial exhibitions served to highlight racial progress. At the same time, some leaders favored emigration or accommodation of white prejudice in an effort to further economic and educational advancement.

Clark surpasses Blight in providing a full picture of the actions of countless African Americans in the South who worked to preserve the memory of freedom, equality, and Union victory. She stresses the contested nature of Civil War memory in arguing that "white supremacist ideologies did not dominate national or even southern society and culture in the tumultuous decades following Reconstruction." Instead, she argues, "Americans, North and South, black and white, struggled to exert authority over an unknown future" (144). Clark's account of the large numbers of Charleston whites who abandoned their city to escape black Fourth of July celebrations underscores African American success at visibly challenging white supremacist traditions.

Clark provides a similarly complex discussion of black moderates who worked with whites during the postwar years. These "accommodationists" accepted a certain amount of discrimination in exchange for economic support and access to public spaces for demonstrations and commemorations. Blight depicts Booker T. Washington's "Atlanta Compromise" as the last gasp in a relentless march toward whitewashed reunion. Clark, however, demonstrates that such strategies developed in the years immediately following the war, and were often tied to class divisions within black communities.

Still, readers of Blight's work will find many familiar themes in Clark's book. Although she attaches more importance than Blight to the "modest ceremonies" that "sought to promote black interests" in the era of Jim Crow, she tells essentially the same story of "the declining influence of emancipationist visions of history" (227–28). Clark's use of a limited evidentiary base, confined mostly to Georgia and the Carolinas, makes it difficult to accept her book as a major supplement to Blight's work. Her discussion of class would also benefit from fuller treatment. Exploration of the possible divisions between the most destitute freedwomen and the ladies of the emerging...