Clio's Foot Soldiers: Twentieth-Century U.S. Social Movements and Collective Memory by Lara Leigh Kelland (review)

In this original and thought-provoking study, Lara Leigh Kelland examines how U.S. social movements on the left in the 1960s and 1970s created new historical narratives and forms to further their goals of progressive social change. Kelland chronicles five social movements—civil rights, Black Power, second-wave feminist, gay and lesbian liberation, and Red Power—charting how movement activists generated both new knowledge about the past and crafted novel memory practices through their development of community-based history institutions and genres. Members of these identity-based movements shared the experience of being marginalized, or even erased, in dominant narratives of U.S. history; thus movement activists recognized the power of telling their group's history from their own perspectives. Through creating new archives, linking current struggles to prior histories of resistance, and inserting oppositional historical narratives into school curricula, newspapers and other media, and community events, movement historians helped to create politicized collective identities.

Kelland's study moves chronologically; she begins with the civil rights movement's citizenship and freedom schools, which emphasized black history and connected contemporary struggles for racial equality to resistance during slavery, the abolitionist movement, and Reconstruction. Movement activists also drew on popular education traditions from the labor movement, namely, the use of music "to transmit collective memory that challenged mainstream American historical narratives" (p. 12). For example, in the Sing for Freedom workshops organized by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), participants sang traditional spirituals with new lyrics about the civil rights movement, thus connecting "their contemporary struggles to those of generations of enslaved ancestors" while at the same time transmitting "cultural heritage to a new generation" (p. 20). Theater, too, proved to be an important pedagogical tool, providing students who took on parts in new dramas such as Martin Duberman's In White America "with an opportunity to imagine themselves as part of their shared past" (p. 34). Kelland argues that through its promotion of grassroots direction and authority, the civil rights movement "set a precedent for the democratized use of history in the liberation movements that followed" (p. 35).

Like the civil rights movement, Black Power and Red Power activists established autonomous, community-based educational institutions, ranging from preschool through college. The Red Power movement also used the tactical occupation of historically significant spaces, mobile protests, the reclamation of archival documents and artifacts from government agencies and museums, and the assertion of control over powwows, to establish cultural self-determination and build a Pan-Indian identity. The gay and lesbian liberation movement, in contrast, built autonomous archives and developed new forms of popular education, slide shows and films shown in community centers that "asserted the endurance of same-sex-loving practices and individuals," fostering a collective identity "based in visibility and resistance" (p. 102). For the gay and lesbian liberation movement, changing the production of knowledge about homosexuals in the academy was a key goal, and thus the Gay Academic Union worked to legitimate gay and lesbian scholars and their work and to bring the insights of community-history projects into the mainstream.

Kelland presents a kaleidoscopic view of liberation movements' memory practices. Her chapter on second-wave feminism focuses in particular on visual forms, including Judy Chicago's "The Dinner Party" project and the less-well-known Helaine Victoria Press (HVP), co-founded in 1973 by a student of Chicago's and dedicated to researching, producing, and distributing "historically themed postcards that educated feminists on women's history" (p. 86). In addition to consciousness-raising, these examples of second-wave memory practices lead Kelland to contend that in comparison to the other liberation movements of this time, feminist collective-memory work was "distinctively more project based, less institutionalized, and relied more on personal relationships and intimate interactions" (p. 96). I wondered if including different community-based...