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

Article in The Professional Geographer · November 2000

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660 Volume 52, Number 4, November 2000

Interpreting the Civil Rights Movement:

Place, Memory, and Conflict*

Owen J. Dwyer
Indiana University–Purdue University at Indianapolis
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 ele-
ments 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 gen-
dered manner, inasmuch as the role of women in organizing and leading the movement is obscured. Further, the histor-
ical 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 move-
ment found at the country’s major memorial landscapes. Key Words: Civil Rights movement, memory, landscape.

Introduction sit-in protests in Greensboro, NC, to the motel

in Memphis where Martin Luther King, Jr., was

T he past decade has witnessed a remarkable

profusion of efforts to commemorate the
Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
Beginning with Maya Lin’s Civil Rights Monu-
ment in Montgomery, AL in 1990, and the Na-
tional Civil Rights Museum at the site of Mar-
tin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in Memphis,
TN in 1991, no fewer than a dozen museums and
monuments associated with the movement have
been produced over the past ten years (Auch-
mutey 1997; Lee 1998; Sack 1998). Clustered in
the South, the most extensive memorial land-
scapes span a broad arc that traces the history of
the movement from the site of lunch counter
assassinated. Monumental “memory works” are
being undertaken in towns and cities whose
names are synonymous with the struggle against
white supremacy: Topeka, KS; Little Rock, AR;
Jackson, Oxford, and Philadelphia, MS; Bir-
mingham, Selma, and Montgomery, AL; Albany,
Atlanta, and Savannah, GA; Orangeburg, SC.
Alongside, and in many cases predating, this
self-consciously monumental infrastructure of
civic memory is a locally produced, multipur-
pose-built environment that serves to memori-
alize the past. These landscape elements are char-
acteristically locally funded, non-monumental
efforts undertaken, for instance, to mark the

* I am indebted to John Paul Jones III, Karl B. Raitz, Richard H. Schein, and Susan David Dwyer for their thoughtful comments and patient
support. This research is supported by a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement grant, SBR-9811145, from the National Science Foundation and a
Dissertation Research Grant from the Otis Paul Starkey Fund of the Association of American Geographers.

Professional Geographer, 52(4) 2000, pages 660–671 © Copyright 2000 by Association of American Geographers.
Initial submission, July 1999; revised submission, October 1999; final acceptance, October 1999.
Published by Blackwell Publishers, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK.
 Interpreting the Civil Rights Movement
graves of civil rights activists and (re)name civic
infrastructure (e.g., streets, schools, clinics, and
community centers; see Alderman 1996) in
honor of civil rights activists. The result of all
this ongoing “memory work” is a rich, multi-
layered landscape consisting of traditional ex-
pressions of civic memory (e.g., monuments
and museums, murals and historic plaques) as
well as more mundane elements such as street
signs and community centers. In both cases,
the objects in the built environment serve as el-
ements in a continuing struggle to define the
contemporary significance of America’s civil
rights revolution.
Conceived of as “materialized discourses”
(Schein 1997)—built environments that em-
bed and conduct meanings through their repre-
sentation of social identities and their politics—
memorial landscapes are shaped by and in turn
influence the society that produces them (Dun-
can 1990; Sandage 1993; Foote 1997). The
narrative content of these memorials reflects
the types of archival materials that survive, the
intentions of their producers, and contempo-
rary politics regarding Civil Rights movement
historiography. In turn, through their symbolic
power and the large number of visitors who
travel to them, these landscapes play a role in
contemporary America’s racial politics (Hay-
den 1995; Savage 1997; Jones 2000). A sense of
irony attends to this landscape: while their
manifest purpose is to summarize and synthesize
into a coherent narrative the people, places, and
events associated with the movement, these
memorials serve to open new chapters of strug-
gle associated with the meaning and signifi-
cance of its memory.
In the course of producing this memorial
landscape, the public portrayal of American
history has been transformed (Ruffins 1992;
Weyeneth 1995, 1996). Unlike the majority of
representations of American history displayed
in public space, the civil rights memorial land-
scape presents an explicitly antiracist rendering
of the past. While numerous studies of the cul-
tural landscape have focused on its ideological
functions (e.g., Monk 1992), civil rights memo-
rials present an example of the manner in
which landscapes serve to disclose the other-
wise invisible presence of hegemonic concep-
tualizations of history and identity, in this case,
those embedded in assumptions regarding the
proper content of public history (Cresswell
661
1996; Johnson 1996). In concert with public
history’s deepening engagement with social
history, these landscapes embody the possibil-
ity of de-centering the legacy of American pub-
lic history away from the hagiographic com-
memoration of elite individuals and their
homes and toward the remembrance of more
mundane, socially representative lives and land-
scapes. In essence, it is a movement against a ver-
sion of history that underwrote white suprem-
acy toward one that celebrates its downfall.
Nevertheless, there are significant contra-
dictions and exclusions in the memorial land-
scape’s treatment of the civil rights era. The
museums and memorials associated with this
landscape are major heritage attractions, and
the tourism industry is responsible in part for
their development and promotion. This influ-
ence on memory’s landscape requires careful
consideration. Additionally, at the country’s
largest civil rights memorials, there is a grow-
ing consensus as to what the movement stood
for and who the protagonists were. This main-
stream narrative is forcing certain elements of
women’s, working-class, and local histories to the
margins of the landscape in order to focus on
charismatic leaders and dramatic events. Further,
in its treatment of racism, the landscape presents
a simplified image which, while compelling in its
brutal honesty, nevertheless overlooks contem-
porary racism’s more insidious elements.
Taken as a whole, the memorial landscapes
associated with the Civil Rights movement are
sites at which the meaning of “civil rights,” how
such rights are achieved, their current status,
and their future promise is currently under-
going active negotiation. In the process of chal-
lenging traditional conventions regarding whose
history should be remembered as well as where
and how that history should be commemorated
(Ruffins 1992; Johnson 1994; Cresswell 1996),
these memorial landscapes re-inscribe certain
hegemonic narratives. This paper offers a re-
view of the historical-spatial representations
embodied in and through the memorial land-
scape in an effort to understand what visions of
the past, present, and future are being autho-
rized at these sites of memory.
Inclusions / Exclusions, Part One
Birmingham’s Kelly Ingram Park, named after
the first American casualty of World War I, is a
662 Volume 52, Number 4, November 2000
one-block area of civic green space closely as-
sociated with the Civil Rights movement. At
one time a segregated park for whites only, it is
the site at which Bull Conner’s police attacked
protesters with dogs and fire hoses in 1963. The
park, which sits astride the relict border be-
tween the white and black business districts and
across the street from the historic 16th Street
Baptist Church and the Civil Rights Institute,
was redesigned in 1992 to commemorate the
protests that led to the desegregation of the city.
Rededicated as “A Place of Revolution and
Reconciliation,” the park is circumscribed by
the “Freedom Walk,” a broad, slate-stone walk-
way along which large, dark steel sculptures of
iconic figures from the protests have been in-
stalled. The pathway is straddled by the instal-
lations so that visitors are confronted by a cor-
don of snarling police dogs, jailed protesters,
and enormous water cannons, all of which they
must walk between and among if they are to
complete their journey around the park. The
overall effect conveyed via the sculptures’ fig-
ural realism and close, visceral presence on the
walkway is that of a spatial primer in the tactics
of provocation and confrontation employed by
protesters to secure their rights. The inscrip-
tion on the base of one of the installations,
showing two black children behind a jail cell’s
bars, reads, when looking through the bars:
“We ain’t afraid of your jail.” From the chil-
dren’s perspective, looking out from within the
cell, the visitor reads along the top of the sculp-
ture: “Segregation is a sin.” In the process of
problematizing police violence and glorifying
the resistance of the marchers, the subject-
object relation of racism is upended and ele-
ments of the white power establishment are
scrutinized in a very public manner.
In addition to the park’s compelling name
and confrontational bearing, the fact that the
endeavor was funded entirely by local govern-
ment and corporations, overcoming significant
opposition in the process, testifies to the re-
markable changes in public history that have
accompanied the memorialization of the move-
ment (Kaimann 1992; NEA 1992; Howett
1993; Cox 1995; Upton 1999). Before consid-
ering these changes more fully, however, it is
important to note that the narratives embodied
at sites like this one, while recently installed,
are part of a much older tradition of using
memory to confront racism’s hegemonic narra-
tives of memory, identity, and history (hooks
1992, 1994; Kelley 1994). Here I am following
Young’s (1993) distinction between memorials
as a generic term for texts that serve to com-
memorate and monuments as a particular type of
memorial that employs materials and forms
commonly associated with the plastic arts.
While the production of a monumental infra-
structure dedicated to the black freedom strug-
gle is a recent phenomenon, antiracist commu-
nities have long memorialized a suppressed
history of transgression, resistance, and oppres-
sion. These alternative memories contest racist
conceptualizations of the past, especially those
that sought to naturalize its historical origins
(hooks 1992). As anti-apartheid activists in the
context of South Africa observed, “Ours is
the struggle of remembering against forgetting.”
To illustrate, in the US before the Civil War
and emancipation, the primary conduits of this
alternative memory work were oral practices
involving story, song, and sermon (Hine 1986;
Stewart and Ruffins 1986; Ruffins 1992, 1994).
Prominent among its elements were: historical
geographies contrasting the worlds of slavery
and freedom; alternative geographies of planta-
tion landscapes that called forth places associ-
ated with African origins, clandestine worship,
and memories of slave uprisings and “bad men”
who defied slavery; and celebratory geogra-
phies associated with festivals, weddings, and
communal processions (Aptheker 1939; Gen-
ovese 1976; Upton 1985; Vlach 1993). In those
instances where blacks had a significant degree
of control over their own communal institu-
tions, especially in the segregated cities of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
alternative “monuments” included the (re)nam-
ing of schools, churches, libraries, and parks to
create a toponymic landscape of memory
(Lewis 1991, 1995). Considered in light of this
broader context, the insurgent narratives con-
cretized at sites like Kelly Ingram Park are not so
much a new innovation as they are the continua-
tion of a tradition of alternative memory works.
While vibrant and of central importance to
the communities from which they emerged,
these older memory works were nevertheless
largely confined to the private and semipublic
spaces associated with African-American com-
munities. The situation recalls de Certeau’s
distinction between the tactical politics of place
that seek to subvert and the strategic politics of
 Interpreting the Civil Rights Movement
space that seek to occupy (de Certeau 1984).
Antiracist representations of African Ameri-
cans created before the Civil War and emanci-
pation, most explicitly in the South, embodied
a transgressive and resistive memory practice.
In contrast, white supremacist imagery enjoyed
official endorsement and scientific legitimacy
(Van Deburg 1984; Boskin 1986; Morton
1991). Throughout later American history as
well, memorial landscapes, statuary, and archi-
tecture have been initiated, designed, and au-
thoritatively interpreted by white elites, ignor-
ing or marginalizing the presence of African
Americans in the process (Bodnar 1992, 1994;
Radford 1992; Burnham 1995). For instance,
the memorial statuary commemorating the loss
and sacrifice of the Civil War—produced be-
tween 1880 and 1920, a 40-year period corre-
sponding to the ascendancy of postReconstruc-
tion white supremacy—is almost exclusively
dedicated to whites (Winberry 1983; Savage
1997). In the few public monuments to the role
played by African Americans, either as soldiers
or in emancipation more generally, they are
portrayed vis-à-vis whites in the diminutive,
following their white officers or crouching be-
fore Abraham Lincoln in return for their free-
dom. There are even a few isolated memorials
in the South to “loyal” slaves who served the
South during the war (Savage 1997). Cast as
such, the relative absence and marginalized
presence of African Americans on the memo-
rial landscape has served to conflate white his-
tory with public history, in the process con-
firming the dominance and centrality of whites
to history (Morrison 1992).
Relative to this past of private commemora-
tion and public absence and marginalization,
memorial landscapes associated with the Civil
Rights movement offer a vigorously public and
authoritative challenge to white supremacy.
The significance of this lies partly in the fact
that, among memorial media (e.g., textual, audio,
video, visual/plastic), monuments and muse-
ums differentiate themselves inasmuch as they
must pass a higher threshold of public scrutiny
and capital investment. The formal and public
situation of these monuments confirms the sta-
tus of their narratives as “real” history and pro-
vides an influential basis for identity formation
(Halbwachs 1980; Nora 1989; Young 1993;
Koonz 1994). As a result, they are among the
preeminent spaces in which dynamic relation-
663
ships between that which is forgotten and re-
membered, between history and identity, are
simultaneously confirmed and contested.
Inclusions / Exclusions, Part Two
As a result of these recent monuments, relative
to a past of enforced absence and marginaliza-
tion, the public portrayal of history in the
United States has never been more inclusive of
such a distinctly antiracist perspective. There
are, however, notable exclusions in the por-
trayal of the movement. Primary among them
is the manner in which the role of women, most
of whom were local working-class activists, is
obscured by the overwhelming attention given
over to the “Great Man” paradigm of history
that focuses more on leaders than on organizers
or participants and valorizes the national at the
expense of the local.
Indicative of this situation is the manner in
which the life and career of Martin Luther
King, Jr., has assumed a prominent place on the
memorial landscape: in Atlanta with his birth-
place, church, and crypt; in Birmingham, the
site of his 1963 campaign against segregation;
in Selma with his leadership of the Voting
Rights March of 1965; the site of his assassina-
tion in Memphis in 1968; and, finally, in the
form of a national holiday and the naming of
civic infrastructure across the country in his
honor. While this attention to King is in keep-
ing with the tenets of mainstream public his-
tory, which tend to stress the primacy of the in-
dividual leader, it plays out on the memorial
landscape in a particularly gendered manner.
Often pictured alongside King are his male
lieutenants, Ralph David Abernathy, Andrew
Young, or Jesse Jackson, while little or no men-
tion is made of King’s female advisors. For in-
stance, Ella Baker, who for over 50 years was
active in antiracist politics and was a moving
force in the development of the Student Non-
Violent Coordinating Committee, is generally
ignored (Payne 1989; Mueller 1990). Likewise,
the significant role played by Septima Clark, a
pioneer in the creation of the movement’s Free-
dom Schools, which emphasized participatory
democracy, and critical literacy and organized
local communities for voting rights, is neglected
(Brown 1990; McFadden 1990; Ling 1995).
This relative absence of women on the me-
morial landscape stands in contrast to recent
664 Volume 52, Number 4, November 2000
scholarship demonstrating the predominance
of women in organizing and staffing the move-
ment (Payne 1990). Further, it was local orga-
nizers who made it possible for someone like
King to be effective at—to use Neil Smith’s
(1993) term in a different context—”jumping
scales,” that is, using his international status in
order to transform what had been a local issue
into a national or international crisis (Ruddick
1996). Jo Anne Robinson’s relative anonymity
illustrates this ironic marginalization: she was
one of several local activists in Montgomery
who organized the bus boycott and who in turn
invited a young Martin Luther King to act as its
spokesperson, the position that brought him na-
tional and international attention (Burns 1997).
Further, in those cases where individual
women are memorialized, it is often within a
non-contextualized framework that privileges
genius and stalwart courage at the expense of
personal embeddedness within broader social
networks. For instance, in the case of Rosa
Parks, no mention is generally made of her par-
ticipation in activist training at the Highlander
Folk School, a labor and civil rights training
center located in Tennessee, or her affiliation
with the NAACP at a time when it was danger-
ous to belong to that organization. In addition
to being a seamstress who had the courage to
refuse segregation, Rosa Parks was an activist-
organizer who existed within the framework of
a larger community (Brown 1990; Burks 1990;
Burns 1997), an aspect that is overlooked in
commemorations.
In fact, the most prominent role allocated to
women on the memorial landscape—or for
that matter the role accorded to the vast majority
of movement participants—is that of allegory.
This role echoes the longstanding tradition
within Western art of the female form being em-
ployed, not to memorialize individual women,
but rather to embody some feminized virtue or
vice, in the process confirming an individual’s
masculinized character and destiny (Warner
1985; Monk 1992). On the memorial land-
scape, the presence of what might be described
as “the feminized mass,” by virtue of its num-
bers and enthusiasm and position as congrega-
tion vis-à-vis the pulpit or as marchers vis-à-vis
the head of the march, plays the allegorical role
of confirming the righteous leadership of indi-
vidual men.
This gendered presence and absence is at
once confirmed and re-inscribed when the rep-
resentational spaces in and through which the
movement is commemorated are considered.
For instance, while the formal leadership of
movement may have come from businesses,
churches, and national organizations, it was of-
ten private citizens who served as catalysts and
made efforts to organize for change (Morris
1984; Mueller 1990). Within the major muse-
ums, the movement is represented as having
been won on the streets, from the pulpit, and in
the courtroom—places intimately associated
with masculinized leadership in the move-
ment’s iconic legacy. Little or no mention is
made of the private and semipublic spaces of
citizenship: schools, neighborhoods, and homes
where activists found food, shelter, and com-
munity. In this sense, there is a distinct privileg-
ing of the public over the private as the spaces
generative of civil rights—a situation which
maps closely onto the traditionally gendered
division between public and private space.
Likewise, there appears to be a gendered
scaling of participation: women are cast as local
actors, whereas men are national and inter-
national ones. The conflation of space, scale,
and identity yields the notion that an elite and
mostly male leadership won civil rights at a na-
tional scale, transcending space to move be-
tween various corridors of power, shuttling
between pulpit and street, courtroom and
legislative chamber. For their part, a feminized
body of participants, while not invisible, are
thoroughly localized and led.
Narrating the Movement
As these observations attest, civil rights memo-
rial landscapes do not simply present an already
available history and geography of the move-
ment. Rather, the narratives they represent are
themselves choices, ones that in contemporary
America are highly politicized. The politics as-
sociated with representing the movement on
the memorial landscape mirror positions that
divided the movement itself regarding the rela-
tionship between leaders and participants. One
primary difference was expressed by Ella Baker
when, in response to those in the movement
who called for a more central role for Dr. King,
Baker answered, “My theory is, strong people
don’t need strong leaders” (Mueller 1990, 51).
Both Baker and Septima Clark wanted to estab-
 Interpreting the Civil Rights Movement
lish vibrant local organizations capable of re-
sponding to local conditions. To this end, they
encouraged King to lead fewer marches and fo-
cus more on developing local leaders and orga-
nizations. While they did not deny the utility of
leadership and politics at the national scale,
Baker and Clark also felt that its influence
tended to inhibit the leadership capabilities and
participation of non-elites.
In a similar vein, the historical narratives
represented at civil rights memorial landscapes
are dominated by two historiographical per-
spectives that differ markedly in their represen-
tation of agency and leadership in the pursuit of
civil rights (Harris 1986; Lawson 1991; Flem-
ing 1994; Weyeneth 1995, 1996). The first per-
spective, reflecting the “Great Man” school of
historiography, emphasizes elite-led institu-
tions (e.g., the NAACP, the SCLC) and their
leaders. This interpretive paradigm portrays
the movement as a series of key moments (e.g.,
the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the March on
Washington) that, under the orchestration of
charismatic leaders, served to shift the balance
of power between a vanguard black community
and those seeking to maintain white suprem-
acy. The narrative is characterized by an over-
arching, if unstated, telos of inevitability that
animates a regional transformation undertaken
at seemingly preordained locales.
In contrast, a second perspective on civil
rights history shifts attention away from the
“Great Man” in order to stress difference and
agency within African-American communities,
noting that the grassroots struggle for civil rights
was an everyday activity (Morris 1984; Carson
1986; Hine 1986). What has been conceived of
as a single unified movement in pursuit of inte-
gration and voting rights is reconceptualized as
multiple “black freedom movements” striving
to create and sustain antiracist identities. This
perspective is manifested in memorial elements
that narrate the tensions between national and
local aspects of the movement. Accordingly,
the representational focus shifts from the doc-
umentation of national legislative and judicial
campaigns toward the activities of grassroots
organizations. This version of civil rights his-
tory examines social networks within black
communities, class and gender differences
among African Americans, color conscious-
ness, and the role of local black churches in re-
sisting racism. What emerges is a sense of the
665
importance of local conditions among motiva-
tions for organizing, as well as the deeply am-
biguous connections between local activists
and national leaders and their institutions
(Chafe 1980; Norrell 1986; Beifus 1990).
No single memorial site is wholly given over
to one perspective or the other; rather, a dy-
namic tension exists between the two. Out of
this interrelationship emerges a complex me-
morial landscape that draws upon the two
schools to narrate tensions that characterized
the movement itself. A case in point is the Bir-
mingham Civil Rights Institute’s treatment of
the tension pervading the relationship between
Fred Shuttlesworth, the leader of the local or-
ganization, and Martin Luther King, Jr. In par-
ticular, Shuttlesworth clashed with King over
the aims of the demonstrations, yet relied upon
King’s “star power” to attract national and in-
ternational attention (Eskew 1997). The Insti-
tute’s portrayal of this episode has drawn criti-
cism from local activists and churches for
focusing too much on the leadership—although
its focus differentiates between the local and
national—to the exclusion of the “foot sol-
diers” of the movement (Birmingham News
1992; Hopson 1992; Patterson 1993). Partially
in response to these critics, the Institute has de-
signed a new exhibition gallery that makes
available interviews with local activists via in-
teractive workstations in order to include more
information from the “regular” people who
staffed the movement.
Nevertheless, these two perspectives on civil
rights history, by turn sweeping and fabulous or
contextual and mundane, attract considerable
controversy as to which is more accurate and
compelling. Proponents of the former believe
that an emphasis upon individual greatness and
dramatic events is required in order to attract
visitors in an entertainment market saturated
with the spectacular and hyperreal. Ironically,
tourism professionals have noted that it is the
widespread desire to touch the authentic past,
to know “is this what it was really like?,” that
motivates many visitors to attend civil rights
sites (Smiley 1998).
Further, critics of the “Great Man” approach
charge that it undercuts the potential for future
activism, inasmuch as its authorial intentions
present the movement as the result of the com-
bined forces of history and individual great-
ness. These critics champion an alternative ap-
666 Volume 52, Number 4, November 2000
proach that strives to initiate a dialogue with
and among visitors as to the mundane, socially
embedded character associated with social
change. The selfguided cybertour through the
Birmingham Civil Rights Institute’s archives,
mentioned earlier, is illustrative of this concern
to undermine the strong authorial intentions of
the sweeping narrative of traditional public his-
tory. This tour through the archived oral histo-
ries introduces a multiplicity of perspectives on
the movement. Likewise, a focus on the dy-
namics of the local political scene is manifested
at the National Voting Rights Museum in
Selma. Faced with what they considered to be
the inadequate treatment of the 1965 voting
rights campaign in the local schools and history
museum, a group of activists came together to
re-present the voting rights struggle in a way
that reflected more of the experiences of the
local women who organized it. One exhibit,
“The I Was There Wall,” consists of a mirror
covered with post-it notes on which the mem-
ories of participants have been written. “Living
History” exhibits celebrate the role played by
local activists, while other exhibits preserve the
material effects of activists who marched on
Montgomery. The emphasis here is definitively
upon mundane heroics.
The antimonumental impulse finds its most
robust expression in protests of a lone poverty
rights activist, Jacqueline Smith, in Memphis
at the National Civil Rights Museum ( Jones
2000). In a daily protest which has lasted over
ten years, she questions the appropriate forum
for commemoration, arguing that the most fit-
ting memorial would be the creation of institu-
tions which support the ongoing struggle for
increased access to democratic rights, economic
goods and services such as schools and emer-
gency shelters, and organizations that focus on
continued activism. The presence of these alter-
native narratives testifies to the ongoing rele-
vance of the issues memorialized — or not
memorialized—on the landscape, inasmuch as
the selection and interpretation of past events for
commemoration has as much, if not more, to do
with today’s political context than with the past.
The Role of Tourism Development
The effort to memorialize the movement has
not occurred within a vacuum removed from
the influence of the political economic context
of heritage tourism. The development of civil
rights memorial landscapes coincides with, and
is in part a result of, a phenomenal rise in heritage
tourism among African Americans (Leerhsen and
Smith 1991; Yardley 1992; La Tempa 1993;
Spritzer 1993; Mines 1998). This contrasts
sharply with the previous absence of attention
paid to blacks by the tourism and museum in-
dustry. In a manner analogous to the social-
spatial transgressions of the Civil Rights move-
ment, the public commemoration of its mem-
ory has opened the doors of museums and
monuments to blacks, inviting them into places
that heretofore were the domain of white elites.
Memorials to the Civil Rights movement offer
African Americans, and antiracists more gener-
ally, an opportunity to take part in a tourism
that recognizes their impact on American his-
tory. Further, museum personnel at sites asso-
ciated with the Civil Rights movement have
noted that African Americans often visit as part
of a family reunion, highlighting the welcome
afforded them and suggestive of the sites’ rela-
tive importance among cultural attractions
(Travel Industry Association of America 1993,
1996; National Tour Association 1997).
The amount of money involved in this sort
of tourism is considerable. The Travel Industry
Association of America estimates that a tourbus
of 28 to 32 people spends approximately
$5,000–$7,000 per day on travel-related goods
and services (Travel Industry Association of
America 1996; Smiley 1998). Both interviews
with state tourism officials and the widespread
presence of state-produced promotional litera-
ture testify to the desire on the part of local and
state governments to rectify their public image
and attract tourist dollars at the same time
(Nabbefeld 1992; PR News 1993; Smiley 1998;
Fuller 1999). These twin motivations suggest
why states like Alabama and its neighbors pro-
mote an unabashedly heroic recounting of the
movement a mere 40 years after public calls for
massive resistance to integration.
Heritage tourism’s representation of history
has been widely assailed as compromised by
this political and financial expediency (Lumley
1988; Burnham 1995). For instance, among
many of the largest civil rights museums, treat-
ment of contemporary racism and racial politics
is conspicuously absent. Portrayals of racism at
these sites focus on white supremacy’s most vi-
olent and widely scorned expressions: segrega-
 Interpreting the Civil Rights Movement
tion, lynching, and the Ku Klux Klan. Absent is
a sustained treatment of the more mundane
and insidious forms of racism that constitute
themselves as ways of knowing and negotiating
difference that valorize whiteness over other
social identities. In fact, most of the memorials
and museums fail to make convincing connec-
tions to the present condition of racism in the
United States. For instance, little or no men-
tion is made of affirmative action or discrimi-
natory loan policies.
This absence of a sustained treatment of
contemporary racism’s institutional and episte-
mological manifestations is particularly appar-
ent relative to the rich historical contextualiza-
tion of the movement’s origins offered at the
major museums. At these sites, resistance to
slavery, Reconstruction-era politics, and the
reign of Jim Crow are variously cited as ante-
cedents and precursors of the movement and
are depicted in considerable detail. Similarly
expansive are the strong connections drawn be-
tween the movement and a worldwide struggle
for “human rights.” The movement is cited as a
precursor to transnational efforts to increase
access to free speech, freedom of religion, and
the end of political violence and torture. Refer-
ences to Amnesty International and the United
Nations abound. This expansive “scale-jumping”
vision of both past and future stands in marked
contrast to the scanty treatment of contempo-
rary racism in the United States. In fact, the
connections drawn to the worldwide struggle
for human rights suggest a shifting of attention
away from the mundane and local toward the
fabulous and global.
Interviews and fieldwork conducted over the
summer of 1998 and 1999 with curators and
historians at memorials in Atlanta, Birming-
ham, Memphis, and Selma suggest that the fi-
nancial dependency of these institutions on
governmental, corporate, and philanthropic
donors limits the degree to which they can en-
gage in a thorough appraisal of contemporary
racism (Huntley 1998; Rowley 1998). While
they are widely accepted on a national and in-
ternational basis, their funding situation is of-
ten threatened by local controversy. This situa-
tion suggests that a focus on the national,
general, and otherwise distant past is “safe,”
whereas sustained treatment of the local, spe-
cific, and contemporary is not. Thus, in a com-
plex and ambiguous manner, these museums
667
obscure as much about contemporary, localized
racism as they portray about its national past
and the future of international human rights.
This situation renders the monuments vul-
nerable to becoming mere repositories of a his-
tory that, while powerfully decrying the racism
of the past, does not always make clear its con-
nections to a local present (Trouillot 1995).
The issue of police brutality and repression is a
case in point. Given its ongoing significance,
this is a particularly difficult issue for sites to
address. An early edition of the official Illinois
African-American heritage guide noted the site
at which Fred Hampton and Mark Clark,
members of the Black Panther Party, were as-
sassinated by the Chicago police and FBI in
1969. Upon review, however, reference to the
site was omitted from the guide because it was
deemed “too controversial” from the perspec-
tive of those who would not accept the role of
the state in supporting white supremacy (Weye-
neth 1995, 1996).
It would be inappropriate, however, to dis-
miss civil rights memorials, prima facie, as cor-
rupt due to the influence of state and corporate
promotion. Rather, their involvement is more
productively understood within a broader social-
spatial context (Sherman 1994; Urry 1995;
Johnson 1996) that appreciates the political
economy of heritage tourism and the shifting
positions that characterize contemporary racial
politics (hooks 1994; Marable 1995). For in-
stance, in the case of the well-capitalized sites
in Birmingham and Memphis, interviews indi-
cate that the promise of increased tourism rev-
enue helped secure necessary financial and po-
litical support in the face of protests against
their “controversial” subject matter (Tabor
1991; Nabbefeld 1992; Patterson 1992; Hus-
ton 1994; Smiley 1998).
In the case of the King National Historic
Site in Atlanta’s Sweet Auburn district, it was
the confluence of local, national, and inter-
national politics that were responsible for the
establishment of the site. Initiated by Coretta
Scott King in 1971 and managed by the Na-
tional Park Service since 1980, the site has been
strapped by budgetary constraints and, until re-
cently, consisted of little more than a small vis-
itor’s kiosk on an empty lot adjacent to King’s
grave and birthplace (National Park Service
1997). Nevertheless, it attracted over one mil-
lion visitors annually. With Atlanta’s successful
668 Volume 52, Number 4, November 2000
bid to host the 1996 Summer Olympics and the
threat of international scrutiny, previously un-
cooperative authorities at the federal, state, and
local levels appropriated funds for the con-
struction of a multimillion dollar visitor center
and the restoration of King’s childhood neigh-
borhood. Just as during the 1950s and 1960s,
when the threat of embarrassment before an
international audience over the condition of
civil rights in the United States was in part re-
sponsible for the federal government’s grudg-
ing support for the Civil Rights movement, the
specter of international visitors arriving in At-
lanta to seek out the legacy of the Nobel Peace
prize winner and finding only a small kiosk mo-
tivated otherwise indifferent politicians to take
action (Lissimore 1997; McCollough 1997).
Further, heritage tourism can function as le-
gitimate public history insofar as historical inter-
pretation situates persons, materials, and
events in their multiscalar social-spatial con-
texts ( Johnson 1996). For instance, the sites in
Atlanta, Birmingham, Savannah, and Memphis
have installed scale reproductions of the land-
scape of segregation. Visitors are invited to
walk among and across the boundaries charac-
terizing white supremacy. These sites strive to
create emphatic connections to the present by
attempting to recreate the social-spatial milieu
of the past.
Perhaps the most fitting endorsement of the
relevance of these sites comes from the activists
who make them the site of their protests. The
number and variety of groups protesting at
these sites suggests their political relevance as
well as the high degree of indeterminacy of the
movement’s contemporary meaning. The King
National Historic Site is a case in point (Lissi-
more 1999). In 1985, the Ku Klux Klan staged
a rally at the King National Historic Site to
protest what they described as the “corruption”
of King’s message of equality by the “anti-
white” policy of affirmative action. In another
instance, African Americans living in the vicin-
ity of King’s birth home in Atlanta protested
the proposed renaming of a street in honor of
Mahatma Ghandi, claiming that it would de-
tract attention away from King and the historic
Auburn Avenue neighborhood in which they
resided. In a related incident, expatriate Paki-
stanis protested the installation of a statue of
Mahatma Ghandi at the site, claiming that
Ghandi, as a young officer in the British army,
was responsible for atrocities in Africa and was
thereby an inappropriate figure to commemo-
rate at the King National Historic Site. As
these examples demonstrate, the memorial
landscape does not so much seal and settle the
movement as it opens a new chapter of struggle
intimately associated with the mechanisms of
memory—place, narrative, and interpretation.
As sites of historic memory, memorials become
constitutive of contemporary racial politics.
Conclusion
What emerges from an inquiry into the pro-
duction, content, and interpretation of these
sites is a sense that while the memorial land-
scape dedicated to the Civil Rights movement
progressively challenges the most outrageous
claims of white supremacy, it also elides certain
histories and represents others in hegemonic
fashion. Productive comparisons may be drawn
between the politics of the movement and
the politics associated with representing it on
the landscape. The movement’s political en-
ergy derived in part from the manner in which
its participants transgressed and violated the
norms of white supremacy. They shattered its
boundaries, both literally and figuratively.
These actions served to articulate new bound-
aries and new discourses regarding what was to
be considered “just,” “moral,” “racist,” and
“revolutionary.” These new discourses, con-
cretized at civil rights memorials, are now the
object and medium of contemporary politics
such that memory and the future of memory
are implicated in one another’s production.
The result of their authoritative visibility
and the impermanence of their meaning is that
memorial landscapes do not finally pronounce
the legacy of the Civil Rights movement.
Rather, they make possible and inevitable a
new dialogue about the source, content, and
longterm meaning and implications of the
movement. Due to their large and diverse visi-
torship and the controversies they spark, the
memorial landscapes offer a valuable perspec-
tive from which to assess contemporary “racial
formations” in the United States (Omi and
Winant 1994). Like the contentious debates
over the place of the Confederate battle flag
(Leib 1995), Congressional redistricting (Ingalls
et al. 1997), and the struggle to rename streets
in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., (Alderman
 Interpreting the Civil Rights Movement
1996), the study of memorial landscapes dedi-
cated to the Civil Rights movement offers a geo-
graphic perspective on the confluence of mem-
ory, identity, and political action (Natter and
Jones 1997). In writing the past in such a power-
ful fashion, civil rights memorials are sites at
which the agenda for the next Civil Rights move-
ment is presently undergoing negotiation. j
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OWEN J. DWYER is an Assistant Professor in the
Department of Geography, Indiana University—
Purdue University at Indianapolis, Indianapolis, IN
46202. E-mail: odwyer1@pop.uky.edu. His research
interests include urban cultural landscapes, American
social movements, and race theory.