Re-Remembering a Segregated Past: Race in American Memory

Utilizing comparative oral histories from the American south and north, the article explores how different groups of African American and white Americans frame their personal and, by association, collective histories and how these narratives can help guide the development of a new trope concerning race relations in the United States. Even as the groups were separated by region, era, class and context, a surprising unity in the responses regarding race emerged, and the respondents' use of language, silence and local color helped to illuminate the past in order to construct meaning that transcends the traditional historical narrative. Oral history has the ability, through the process of allowing people the space to tell their stories, to assist society in better understanding a shared past and enables a more nuanced collective memory.