“Civil War Memory in the Civil Rights Movement and Contemporary Culture.”

Abstract

Memory in Civil Rights Movement and Contemporary Culture.AMERICAN ORACLE: The Civil in Civil Rights Era. By David Blight. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2011.REMIXING THE CIVIL WAR: Meditations on Sesquicentennial. Edited Thomas J. Brown. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2011.The bloodiest war in American history, Civil ensured survival of union, ended chattel slavery, and accelerated technological development, territorial expansion, and economic concentration. Yet its promise of a new birth of freedom was soon betrayed violence and disenfranchisement. Now, as nation marks Civil Sesquicentennial, two important books consider war's legacy and memory.In. American Oracle, Blight revisits Civil Centennial commemoration, which both consistently reflected and studiously ignored upheavals of Civil Rights Movement. In early 1960s, nation restaged battles of a century earlier. A February 1961 ceremony to mark founding of Confederacy paraded directly past Montgomery's Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, whose young pastor Martin Luther King, Jr. had come to prominence five years earlier during Montgomery bus boycott. In April of that year, northern state commissions threatened to commemoration of first shot fired at Fort Sumter because Charleston's segregated Francis Marion Hotel would not accoimnodate New Jersey delegation's one black member, Madeline A. Williams. The dispute was resolved after reluctant intervention of President John F. Kennedy resulted in alternate lodging arrangements across bay at Charleston Navy Yard. A year later, Blight relates, Southerners and their coimnission members threatened not to boycott a ceremony at Lincoln Memorial commemorating Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, but also to secede from national Centennial altogether (18).1 No Civil enthusiast in period costume could more faithfully reenact battles of one hundred years prior than did almost compulsive repetition of debates about federal authority, states'-rights, secession, and-above all, even if seldom acknowledged outright-race. rights intruded over and again on Civil War (13), Blight concludes, yet the official Civil Centennial could never find adequate, meaningful ways to balance Civil remembrance with civil rights rebellion (11).No scholar knows subtleties and sophistries of Civil memory better than Blight, whose magisterial Race and Reunion: The Civil in American Memory (2001) remains authoritative treatment of Civil memory in American culture.2 In that work, Blight documents how narratives of reconciliation-of mutual valor and shared sacrifice-often worked hand-in-hand with white supremacist narratives to erase a narrative of black emancipation. Asimilar whitewashing colored Civil Centennial, which became largely a series of public rituals and events mired in conservative, sometimes pro-Confederate, racially divisive, and Cold (11). Such impulses issued in a commemoration characterized crass commercialism, by a consensual evasion of story of Emancipation, and a commitment to only ends of reconciliation and patriotism (11). It was, in other words, an astonishing acquiescence to racism and blatant avoidance of present (19).With official observance marked unintentional irony, umeflective nostalgia, and selective memory, it fell in large part to writers, those unofficial historians, to offer more complex, ambivalent acts of remembering Civil and more critical, searching analyses of its role in national memory. Blight examines works of four writers-Robert Penn Warren, Bruce Catton, Edmund Wilson, and James Baldwin-who reflected fifty years ago on what Wilson referred to as this absurd centennial.3 To various degrees, Blight states, each of these writers wrote with an awareness of public dimensions of Centennial commemoration, though all of them pursued their art for its own sake (10). …