“Generations and Collective Memory” Revisited: Race, Region, and Memory of Civil Rights

Abstract

Using the spontaneous memories of a national sample of Americans in 1985, Schuman and Scott (1989) largely confirmed Mannheim's theory of generational identity by demonstrating that respondents' age structured their recall of important national and world events over the past 50 years. But they did not find the predicted age patterns for whites' recollections of civil rights. I argue that their failure was the consequence of ignoring regional differences in the impact of the Civil Rights movement on whites. Because the South was the target of and the battlefield for civil rights, “civil rights memory” should be greater for southern whites who experienced the movement as mature teenagers or young adults than for their equal-aged peers elsewhere or for southern whites in different age groups. I also hypothesize that this cohort of southern whites should attribute more historical importance to civil rights than do others. Both hypotheses are supported by analysis of the 1993 General Social Survey and Schuman's and Scott's original 1985 data. The theoretical import of the study is that where highly charged events happen shapes consciousness and memory, suggesting that Mannheim's idea of the “social location” of generational identity formation is place-specific, as well as age-dependent.