Acknowledgments

Upton, Dell

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Acknowledgments

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

~Among the compensations of the scholar’s solitary life are the advice and assistance of friends old and new. That is one of the pleasures of research. My gratitude belongs first to Catherine W. Bishir, all-knowing scholar of North Carolina architecture. When I was working on another project, Catherine pointed out that it was really the monuments that...

Author

Dell Upton

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-21058

Acknowledgments

Among the compensations of the scholar’s solitary life are the advice and assistance of friends old and new. That is one of the pleasures of research. My gratitude belongs first to Catherine W. Bishir, all-knowing scholar of North Carolina architecture. When I was working on another project, Catherine pointed out that it was really the monuments that interested me. It was a simple observation that quickly turned me around. Second, I am indebted to Karen Kevorkian and Betsy Cromley, who read the manuscript in an earlier form.

Over the years I have benefited from discussions of this material with Craig Barton, Michele Bogart, Erika Doss, Owen Dwyer, Dianne Harris, Bill Littmann, Maurie McInnis, Louis Nelson, Daves Rossell, Kirk Savage, Abby Van Slyck, and my colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Virginia; and the University of California, Los Angeles, as well as the many audiences before which I have presented aspects of the project. I also owe more than I can describe to my longtime friends and scholarly interlocutors the late Barbara Carson, Cary Carson, Tom Carter, Paul Groth, Fraser Neiman, the late Orlando Ridout V, and Stephen Tobriner.

The staffs of the Alabama Division of Archives and History, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, and the Selma Public Library in Alabama; the Savannah-Chatham County Public Library; the New Orleans Public Library; the New Hanover County Public Library and the Rocky Mount Public Library in North Carolina; the South Carolina Division of Archives and History; the South Carolina State Library; the Richland County, South Carolina, Public Library; and the Bowling Green, Virginia, City Manager’s Office were all generous with advice and guidance. Rebecca A. Baugnon, Special Collections Librarian of the Library at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington; Jim Baggett, Archivist at the Birmingham Public Library; Beckie Gunter of the South Carolina Lieutenant Governor’s Office; Marsha Mullin, The Hermitage; Charles Reid, Clerk of the South Carolina Senate; Glenda Anderson, former Archivist of the City of Savannah Research Library and Municipal Archives; and Michael B. Brown, former Savannah City Manager were especially helpful, as were Derek Alderman, Mayor Richard Arrington, Aaron Lee Benson, Robert M. Craig, Michael A. Dobbins, Walter Edgar, Pat Godwin, Robbie Jones, Abigail Jordan, Edward Lamonte Jr., Bruce Lightner, Faya Rose Touré, Ellen Weiss, and Perdita Welch.

Last, this project could not have been completed without the support of an NEH Fellowship and of research monies and sabbatical leaves from the University of Virginia and the University of California, Los Angeles, and a subvention for the publication of the photographs kindly granted by David Schaberg, UCLA Dean of Humanities.

And, as always, Karen.

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Book details

BOOKWhat Can and Can’t Be Said: Race, Uplift, and Monument Building in the Contemporary South

Dell Upton

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00240

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-21055

An original study of monuments to the civil rights movement and Black history that have been erected in the American South over the past three decades, this powerful work explores how commemorative structures have been used to assert the presence of African Americans in contemporary Southern society while showing how the construction of such monuments frequently exposes the myth that racial differences have been overcome.

Examining monuments whose creation has been particularly contentious, from the Martin Luther King, Jr., National Memorial in Washington, D.C., to more obscure memorials such as the so-called "multicultural monument" in Bowling Green, Virginia, Dell Upton shows that monument builders must contend not only with varied interpretations of the African-American past but also with the continuing presence of White supremacy—not only in its traditional forms but also in the subtler, more recent assumptions that Whites are neutral arbiters of what is fair and accurate in such monuments.

Upton argues that Southerners, White and Black, share a convenient fiction—a “dual heritage” that allows them to acknowledge the Black past without relinquishing cherished White historical mythologies. In his conclusion, Upton considers how these two pasts might be reimagined and memorialized as a single Southern American history.

*For the A&AePortal edition of this book, the author's black-and-white images were replaced with color.*

Author

Dell Upton

PublisherYale University Press

Print publication date November 2015 (in print)

Print ISBN 9780300211757

EISBN 9780300262261

Illustrations 59

Print Status in print

Publisher (in print)

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