Save
Save chapter to my Bookmarks
Cite
Cite this chapter
Print this chapter
Share
Share a link to this chapter
Free
Preface
Dell Upton
Description: What Can and Can’t Be Said: Race, Uplift, and Monument Building in the...
What Can and Can’t Be Said: Race, Uplift, and Monument Building in the Contemporary South
~~Images of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s made deep impressions on me when I was growing up in New York State. I remember seeing television coverage of the integration of Little Rock Central High School, which interrupted my mother’s daily appointment with American Bandstand. The Birmingham...
Author
Dell Upton
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2015 by Dell Upton
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-21057
View chapters with similar subject tags
Chapter images ()
Loading image navigation...
No image index could be found for this publication.
Close this Panel
Show previous images Show next images
Preface
Images of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s made deep impressions on me when I was growing up in New York State. I remember seeing television coverage of the integration of Little Rock Central High School, which interrupted my mother’s daily appointment with American Bandstand. The Birmingham demonstrations, the March on Washington, the bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the murders of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, and the Selma–Montgomery March were all lodged in my mind, often through photographs that appeared in Life magazine. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated while I was in college.
Thirty years later, as I traveled across the South for research, I visited the sites of the events that I recalled so vividly from my childhood. What I usually discovered, particularly at urban sites, was that the landscapes in which the dramatic scenes took place had been eradicated by urban renewal and replaced by monuments that recorded, in an abstract and context-free manner, those historic moments. The civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century was a campaign to erase the legal and social structures that created the New South sixty to seventy years earlier, and they took place in a New South landscape that had itself been erased by the end of the twentieth century.
This absence prompted me to think about the monuments and their role in creating a New New South. That, not the civil rights movement itself, is the subject of this book. Simply put, I argue that the monuments are less about remembering the movement than they are about asserting the presence of black Americans in contemporary Southern society and politics. Despite claims that the South has transcended racial differences, they remain open sores. The construction of monuments to the civil rights movement and to African American history more generally frequently exposes those sores to view. Monument builders must contend not only with varied interpretations of African American history but with the continuing dominance of white supremacy, both in its traditional forms and in the subtler, more modern assumption that such monuments must meet white approval and that whites are neutral arbiters of what is fair and truthful in such memorials. What Can and Can’t Be Said explores the contentious origins of a number of these Southern memorials, as well as of the national memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington, DC, as well as examining their context—memorials to white supremacists of the past that are still cherished by many Southern whites.