Interpreting the Civil Rights Movement: Place, Memory, and Conflict

Owen J. Dwyer

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Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration Race, History, and American Society Cultural Identity and Heritage

Abstract

Produced over the past decade, monuments and museums dedicated to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s have desegregated America's memorial landscape. Tracing a broad arc across the US South, the material elements of this landscape — historic markers, monuments, parks, registered buildings, and museums — present a distinct challenge to representations of an elite, white American past. This challenge, however, is offered in a distinctly gendered manner, inasmuch as the role of women in organizing and leading the movement is obscured. Further, the historical narratives concretized at these sites are mediated by conventions associated with civil rights historiography and the tourism development industry. The result is a complex, sometimes ironic landscape. Via the narratives they embed and the crowds they attract, these landscapes are co-constitutive with contemporary politics of representing the past in the United States. This paper offers an overview of current memorial practices and representations of the Civil Rights movement found at the country's major memorial landscapes.

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References

20005. The Practice of Everyday Life 1994Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s 1989Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire 1992On Collective Memory 1993Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.1985The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change.1995Race rebels: culture, politics, and the black working class 1993Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century.

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