Looking Back: Struggles Over Remembering and Representing Civil Rights Organizers
In 2004 Andy Warhol's Mustard Race Riot", inspired by Life magazine photographs of the attacks on children in Birmingham's Kelly Ingram Park in 1963 achieved a record sum. Birmingham would rebuild its image by facing its past as represented in the Freedom Walk tourists may take through Kelly Ingram Park today and Birmingham's Visitors' Bureau's recommendation to Remember the courage of the past to appreciate the triumphs of today in Birmingham's Civil Rights District". Since the 1980s there has been evolving an archive of Civil Rights heritage sites and in cinematic and literary narratives of the era attention is paid to millennial concerns. The dominant popular representation of the civil rights era is an integrationist success story; movies and fictions often involve the amelioration of racism and white-on-black violence. The mimetic pull on the civil rights narrative typically celebrates closure on decades of struggle for racial justice and critics have begun to explore this tendency towards nostalgia. However, racial clashes as they originate in the dramatic and often violent conditions of civil rights history have left a bitter legacy that ghosts the present. Racist murders, for example, make pressing demands on collective memory and on the nation's capacity to withstand the violent history that haunts race relations. In the movie Ghosts of Mississippi, a character asks When are these fellows gonna get it through their heads that the 1960s are over?" but is met with silence. The ritualistic violence of white supremacists is more difficult to put to rest even in the most conciliatory of movie and novels.This paper explores how the chronological range of the Civil Rights era has continued to grow. It explores this idea through the children of southern whites and blacks who fought on both sides of the racial struggle and through actors in movies about the era whose parents were heavily involved in the Movement. It explores the prosthetic" memories of those who posed as former activists to garner kudos from participation in the era's key struggles; and it closes by considering films that extend the black-and-white civil rights paradigm to the struggles of new immigrants in the South.
Sharon Monteith, University of Nottingham