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

This study went to press just as Americans waded into a very public and divisive national discussion about the presence of Confederate monuments in public spaces, following the murder of nine African American women and men at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Since the summer of 2015, numerous Confederate monuments have been removed in cities such as New Orleans, Baltimore, Memphis, and Dallas. In this timely and well-argued book, Dell Upton analyzes the extent to which this commemorative landscape and the racial politics it long reinforced influenced the construction and dedication of monuments devoted to the civil rights movement since the 1970s.

Through a number of detailed case studies, What Can and Can’t Be Said explores the challenges that organizations and municipalities faced in their efforts to commemorate the civil rights era. While Upton reflects on the aesthetic form these new monuments and memorials have taken, he is primarily interested in how artists and their supporters navigated public committees and other stakeholders who often embraced competing memories and ideas about slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the civil rights movement. According to Upton, these artists were forced to work within what he describes as a “dual heritage,” “which treats white and black Southerners as having parallel, equally honorable paths” (15). African Americans may have gained access to political power in some places by the 1970s, but white power brokers managed to influence commemorative projects that were deemed to be a threat to the memory of the Confederacy or white comfort levels, thus limiting “what can and can’t be said.”

Upton explores three stages 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 memorialize grassroots leaders and groups who participated in the civil rights struggle, to a final phase of monuments that commemorate a broader African American historical narrative. 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” (vii). Black southerners campaigned for monuments as part of a larger effort to claim their rightful place as full citizens in the South’s commemorative landscape.

The first four chapters of the book explore the evolution of southern memory and its influence on civil rights commemoration. Chapter 1 examines white supremacist symbolism in southern public spaces, focusing on the controversial history of a Confederate monument erected in 1898 in Montgomery, Alabama; the bust of Confederate lieutenant general and early Ku Klux Klansman Nathan Bedford Forrest, erected in 2000 in Selma, Alabama; and the Liberty Monument, an obelisk erected in New Orleans in 1891 to commemorate a coup perpetrated by local whites in 1874, which was removed in 2017. Chapter 2 explores more recent proposals, beginning in the 1990s and early 2000s in Bowling Green, Virginia, and Savannah, Georgia, to erect generalized monuments to African American history, in which local committees decided to “accentuate the positive” rather than acknowledge the legacy of slavery or segregation (66). Upton deploys the term “uplift” here to describe the insistence that monuments commemorating African American history convey positive lessons rather than complex emotions such as sorrow, anger, or vindication, which might alienate key constituencies.

In the third chapter, Upton probes the erection and dedication of monuments to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as the iconic hero of the civil rights movement, with specific focus on the national memorial to him in Washington, D.C., dedicated in 2011. The debate surrounding how King ought to be memorialized often revealed disagreements between those committed to highlighting nonthreatening themes of love and peace as opposed to those hoping to acknowledge King’s commitment to economic justice and his more controversial...