{ INTRODUCTION

What Can and

Can’t Be Said

[Southerners] want the New South, but the old Negro.

—RAY STANNARD BAKER, FOLLOWING THE COLOR LINE, 1908

In the spring of 1999 twenty members of Congress traveled to Alabama to

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visit sites and monuments associated with the civil rights movement of the
1950s and 1960s. Georgia representative John Lewis, a renowned veteran of
the movement, had asked members of Congress of both parties to join him
on the pilgrimage to inspire them with the “spirit of the movement that
transformed the law and to start them talking together about race and rec-
onciliation.”1
Lewis’s tour belonged to a remarkable process of rethinking and reinter-
preting the cataclysmic events of the 1950s and 1960s and their implications
for the present-day United States, a process that shows little sign of slowing
since it began in the late 1970s. One finds counterparts of the congressional
visit in tours offered to high schoolers, university alumnae, academics, and
fraternal organizations. A more somber manifestation of the process can be
seen in the trials of men accused of complicity in the Southern racial murders
of the 1950s and 1960s. In 2006, the Federal Bureau of Investigation began its
Civil Rights Cold Case Initiative, undertaken to investigate nearly one hun-
dred cold-case killings in the knowledge that, as with the perpetrators of the
Holocaust, the time for personal accountability is rapidly passing.2
As trial after trial has resulted in the convictions of aged white men, pub-
lic commentators have used the occasion to emphasize that the South and
the nation have changed, that a sordid chapter in American history has been
closed with the imprisonment of those with blood on their hands. The corol-
lary, sometimes explicitly stated but more often implied, is that race is no lon-
Copyright 2015. Yale University Press.

ger a significant element of American life. In the face of strong evidence to

the contrary, the conservative majority of the United States Supreme Court

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AN: 1088918 ; Dell Upton.; What Can and Can't Be Said : Race, Uplift, and Monument Building in the Contemporary South
Account: s8438901.main.ehost
 endorsed this rosy view in its 2013 decision striking down a key provision of
the 1965 Voting Rights Act. To invoke racial injustice now is to demand spe-
cial rights, to play the race card, to “go back and bring up the old problems,”
and to stir up “a simmering pot of hate,” in the words of James McIntyre, an
attorney who defended Ku Klux Klansman Edgar Ray Killen in his 1967 and
2005 trials for the murder of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County,
Mississippi, in 1964.3
The Lewis tour, the FBI cold case trials, and the Supreme Court’s decision
mark a new stage in a struggle to define the civil rights movement’s legacy.
Even as politicians, museum curators, and filmmakers increasingly celebrate
the goals and results of the movement, a new generation of scholars is reas-
sessing the civil rights era unsentimentally, offering complex and not always
flattering accounts of the motives and actions of its dominant figures. The
proliferation of civil rights monuments in the past three decades is an impor-
tant part of this reconsideration. Not only do they commemorate key events
of twentieth-century America’s defining moral drama, but they publicly
articulate definitions of Southern society and the South’s place in the twenty-
first-century nation that have been arduously hammered out in local com-
munities. The focus of monument building in the South, meaning for
our purposes the states of the former Confederacy, has expanded from com-
memorating the “classic” or “modern” civil rights movement—the years
between 1954 and 1968—to depicting the long history of black Southerners
and their place in the region’s life. With few exceptions these memorials
depict a South purged of its troubled racial past and ready to compete in
the new global economy. Yet it was rarely the intention of those who con-
ceived these monuments to present such a whiggish interpretation. Most
wanted a franker view of the past and sometimes a more open-ended inter-
pretation of the present. Why they failed to achieve these goals is one of the
subjects of this book.4
As these monuments have been contested city by city, state by state, the
nature of the works themselves has changed in a way that makes it possible
to trace three broad, overlapping periods of memorial construction. Monu-
ments of the initial period commemorate leaders of the movement. They
tend to be of two sorts. Many of the earliest are vernacular monuments bor-
rowed from the private funereal tradition, such as that erected to the civil
rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, for
whose deaths Killen was tried, at Mount Nebo Missionary Baptist Church in
Philadelphia, Mississippi. It is an ordinary granite gravestone, inscribed much

2 INTRODUCTION

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 as a private grave marker might be. The monu-
ment, one of the earliest of the civil rights
memorials, even has sepia medallions carrying
the three men’s photographs, a common fea-
ture in twentieth-century Southern cemeteries
(fig. 1). Like the Mount Nebo memorial, most
vernacular monuments are stock commercial
grave markers, but even some purpose-made Fig. 1. Memorial to murdered civil rights
workers James Chaney, Michael
stones follow funereal conventions.5 The tall Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman (1976),
gray granite marker erected by the Southern Mount Nebo Missionary Baptist Church,
Christian Leadership Conference’s female Philadelphia, Mississippi. The memorial
was decorated for the forty-first
wing, the SCLC Women, near the site of Viola anniversary of killings, which had been
Liuzzo’s 1965 murder in Lowndes County, Ala- observed the day before the photograph
was taken. Photo: Dell Upton.
bama, has the Gothic pointed-arch shape com-
mon on nineteenth-century gravestones, inset with a pink marble rose that
recalls the inscribed tributes and physical offerings one finds in most ceme-
teries (fig. 2).
A second, more conventional type of memorial erected in the first period
was what I call the great leader monument. These represent the movement
through honoring prominent men—almost always men, and usually the
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Such standing figures or busts fit squarely
into an international nineteenth-century tradition created to honor the he-
roes of bourgeois republics.6 They single out otherwise ordinary men as mod-
els of achievement in democratic societies. Often, as in the figure of Medgar
Evers (Thomas Jay Warren, 1991) erected near Evers’s home in Jackson, Mis-
sissippi, only the pedestal separates the figure from its witnesses. In his dress,
scale, and demeanor, Evers could stand unnoticed in a crowd of onlookers. In
Raleigh, North Carolina, Martin Luther King Jr. (Abbe Godwin, 1989–91)
stands directly on the ground, but his somewhat-larger-than-life-size scale
differentiates him from visitors (fig. 3). Clad in his clerical robes, which seem
to be twisted around his legs by the passing traffic on a suburban road, King’s
preacher’s gestures strikingly evoke the Buddhist mudras (hand positions) for
peace, charity, and dispelling fear.
Around 1989, the beginning of a second phase of monument building,
which we might label that of populist memorials, was marked, though not nec-
essarily inaugurated, by the dedication of the Civil Rights Memorial (Maya Lin,
1989) in Montgomery, Alabama (fig. 4). Commissioned by the Southern Pover-
ty Law Center and attached to its (former) office building, Lin’s monument also

INTRODUCTION 3

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 Fig. 2. Viola Liuzzo memorial (1991), Lowndes County, Alabama. Photo: Dell Upton.

belongs to the tradition of private funerary monuments. On the flat base of an

inverted black marble cone, the names of forty men, women, and children who
“lost their lives in the struggle for freedom” radiate from the center “like the
hands of a clock” (fig. 5). They are arranged in chronological order of their death.
Inscriptions recording the dates of the landmark case Brown v. Board of Educa-
tion and the assassination of Dr. King, as well as other texts that tally promi-
nent demonstrations, court decisions, and national legislation, are interspersed
among the victims’ names. By mixing famous names with obscure ones, Lin’s
monument exemplifies a new emphasis on rank-and-file participants in the
movement that parallels a shift in civil rights historiography away from lead-
ers and national movements toward “local people” and everyday organizing
against and resistance to racial oppression.7 Equally important, its creation co-
incided with a growing demand by former participants for recognition of all
who contributed to the struggle. This in turn can be seen as one instance of the

4 INTRODUCTION

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 Fig. 3. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Abbe Godwin, 1989–91), Raleigh, North Carolina.
Photo: Dell Upton.

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 Fig. 4. Civil Rights Memorial (Maya Lin, 1989), Southern Poverty Law Center, Montgomery,
Alabama. Photo: Dell Upton.

growing reluctance of Americans to settle for metaphorical representation of

the participants in any major event by iconic, allegorical, or representative fig-
ures (fig. 6).
The civil rights campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s are now almost
universally celebrated. Even the Trent Lotts and the Haley Barbours of the
political world give them lip service. Yet the nature, the significance, and
the outcome of these campaigns are by no means settled, and they remain
the subject of covert and indirect debate outside official public discourse.
Precisely because the civil rights movement is now sacrosanct and must be
discussed in hushed and reverent tones, the varied interpretations of
the black freedom struggle have increasingly come to be argued through the
medium of African American history in general, which constitutes the third
period of monument building.8
The periodization I have suggested refers to the initial appearance of cer-
tain kinds of memorials. They are supplemented, rather than supplanted, by
subsequent kinds. It is also the case that this developmental trajectory is

6 INTRODUCTION

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 Fig. 5. Civil Rights Memorial. Detail of inscription. Photo: Dell Upton.

restricted to the South. In other parts of the country, memorialization has not
proceeded beyond the Martin Luther King Jr. monument phase. This is a
result both of the whitening of King that we will encounter in our examina-
tion of the new King memorial in Washington, DC, and of the mistaken belief
that civil rights is strictly a Southern issue. Where Southerners have confront-
ed, however evasively and contentiously, the implications of racial inequality
for their society, other Americans have yet to do so. King statues are unthreat-
ening and demand no uncomfortable thought.9

As the Southern monuments have evolved, their makers have continually

confronted a central question: What can and can’t be said in this medium?
By this I mean, first, what is it possible to say using the inherited visual con-
ventions of the Western monumental tradition that most monument build-
ers prefer? Second, what is permitted to be said in contemporary American
public discourse?
What is it possible to say? A monument is a very special kind of object. It
has to present its case in a compacted manner, pressing familiar images and

INTRODUCTION 7

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 Fig. 6. Testament (John and Cathy Deering, 2005), Little Rock, Arkansas. Memorial to the
Little Rock Nine, who integrated Little Rock Central High School in 1957. Photo: Dell Upton.

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 metaphors into its service. Such conventional imagery is necessary for monu-
ments to be legible to a broad public. Equestrian monuments, for example,
date back to antiquity in the West. Since horses were the economic and sump-
tuary prerogative of political and military elites, to show a man mounted on a
horse is to suggest the command that he wields, the animal power of the horse
and the imposing mass of horse and man together conveying an impression
of majesty. The equestrian monument was a favored conventional form for
representing political and particularly military greatness well into the twen-
tieth century. Confronted with a statue of a man on a horse we understand,
without knowing anything in particular about the subject, that he is probably
a general or a king and probably not a scientist, a teacher, a cleric, or a woman.
Similarly, Maya Lin’s renowned Vietnam Veterans Memorial of 1982
fashioned a contemporary monumental idiom out of the raw materials
of disparate public and private commemorative practices (fig. 7). The use of

Fig. 7. Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Maya Lin, 1982), Washington, DC. Photo: Dell Upton.

INTRODUCTION 9

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 polished black granite and somber inscriptions was familiar in upscale cem-
eteries before being adapted for this war memorial, and the often-noted
emotional power of the long list of the names of the dead, required by the
competition program, has been familiar to Americans since the Civil War.
Where equestrian monuments rely on scale—their sheer mass and their sep-
aration from the viewer by a tall pedestal—to convey extraordinary power of
an abstracted sort, name-laden memorials to both war dead and ordinary
deaths convey the specificity of loss and, in the case of war memorials, the
magnitude of sacrifice through multiplicity.
Civil rights and African American history monuments, from aesthetically
ambitious ones such as Lin’s Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery to
the ordinary vernacular markers erected by churches and local organizations
across the South, derive their power from these same Euro-American tradi-
tions of funerary and public monument building. In doing so, they raise
important questions about their suitability as visual representations of the
black liberation struggle.
It is not an accident that, excepting the ubiquitous memorials to Martin
Luther King Jr., most civil rights memorials stand in Alabama, Georgia, and
other places where the great, telegenic mass demonstrations were held, rath-
er than in, say, Mississippi, the scene of quieter, less visible efforts and of more
sinister, more random, and less restrained violence. Similarly there are fewer
in states around the periphery of the Deep South, from Maryland to Texas to
Florida, where efforts were more local and less widely known. Another way
to put it is that they tend to be found in what has been seen to be the domain
of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a hierarchical, male-
dominated, publicity-oriented organization whose women’s branch, the SCLC
Women, has sponsored many of the monuments in the SCLC’s home territo-
ry. There are fewer in the areas worked most assiduously by the more radical,
grass-roots-oriented Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee or of
older organizations such as the Congress of Racial Equality and the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Monuments in those
areas tend to be locally sponsored and more modest in size and visual effect.
Remember that these monuments celebrate a social movement in which
dramatic incidents such as those in Philadelphia, Mississippi, or Birmingham
and Selma, Alabama, were anomalies. We understand increasingly that in
most places, for most of the time, the freedom struggle was a social move-
ment carried out through mundane, repetitive, distinctly nonphotogenic
(however emotionally fraught and often dangerous) activities such as voter

10 INTRODUCTION

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 registration, school teaching, and the refusal to
observe the everyday protocols of segrega-
tion—the small indignities that in South Africa
were lumped under the heading of “petit apart-
heid” (restriction of interpersonal encounters,
as opposed to “grand apartheid,” or racial sort-
ing at the level of entire cities and of the nation
itself). These kinds of antiracist actions were Fig. 8. Korean War Memorial (Russ Faxon,
1992), Nashville, Tennessee. Photo: Dell
carried on long before and long after the dra-
Upton.
matic, nationally reported events of the mid-
1950s to the late 1960s. They involved women at least as often as men. They
may be the closest the United States has ever come to a truly democratic
movement.
Although monuments celebrate a movement that was, for most partici-
pants most of the time, ethically nonviolent and nonresistant, their makers
draw almost instinctively on the visual forms and metaphors of war memo-
rials. Action monuments, such as Ronald Scott McDowell’s Dogs (1995–96;
also known as the Foot Soldier Monument) in Kelly Ingram Park, Birming-
ham, resemble the images of hand-to-hand combat found in some Civil War
memorials and in some of the modern war memorials erected in reaction
against Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial (fig. 8 and see fig. 31). Dogs’s inscrip-
tion, signed by then-mayor Richard Arrington Jr., refers to the youthful
Birmingham marchers as “foot soldiers,” a term quickly adopted by former
rank-and-file demonstrators elsewhere. And Lin’s use of the materials and
formal language for which she had become famous in the Vietnam Veterans
Memorial roots her Montgomery Civil Rights Memorial in the modern war
memorial tradition that she did so much to shape. The emulation of Lin’s vo-
cabulary in lesser known works such as Raleigh’s Civil Rights Monument
(Horace Farlow, 1996–97), which is part of the same complex that includes
Godwin’s Martin Luther King Jr. and which borrows Lin’s black marble and
plain lettering, roots the civil rights memorial landscape even more deeply in
the war memorial lexicon.
It is easy to understand why metaphors of war might be selected for
these monuments and their many cousins. Compared to the long history of
antiblack violence that has characterized American history from its begin-
ning, the more theatrical, more photogenic violence of the 1950s and 1960s
was recorded, distilled, and intensified on television along with similar
scenes of violence in Southeast Asia. And to many of those on the ground, it

INTRODUCTION 11

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 seemed like warfare. One movement veteran, Mack Freeman, related that
during the voter registration drives in Jacksonville, Florida, in the 1960s, “Just
like in battle, if you missed the rallying point, you had to figure out how to
stay alive until someone could come to get you the next day. . . . It was a war.
Men and women were killed. They were shot down.”10
In addition, the military metaphor resonates in a militaristic society such
as the contemporary United States, where many citizens believe that to die in
battle is the highest patriotic act and that any military action, however sordid,
is a defense of “freedom.” This awe of death in the line of military duty is in turn
reinforced by the traditional Christian veneration of martyrdom, whose ico-
nography war memorials often appropriate. In contemporary war and civil
rights memorials, as in religious belief, martyrdom is an act of legitimation. The
self-sacrifice of the martyr imbues religious and political claims with a self-
evident truth that makes any questioning of the act or of the cause that it sup-
ported illegitimate, even sacrilegious. The Vietnam Women’s Memorial (Glen-
na Goodacre, 1993), a supplement to Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial that
consciously echoes the Pietà format, likening the fallen soldier to Christ and his
nurse to the Virgin Mary, is among the most explicit invocations of Christian
themes of sacrifice and redemption in the service of politics. The monument to
the students murdered by police at Jackson State College (now University) in
1970—the “martyrs” of May 14—makes the
same claim more simply, using an inscription
on an ordinary gravestone (fig. 9). Martyrdom is,
moreover, a sign of worthiness, and since the
Civil War African Americans have hoped that
military service would demonstrate to white
America their fitness for full citizenship.
Nevertheless, other aspects of the war
metaphor are puzzling. Behind the rhetoric of
military sacrifice lies the reality of combat: the
military dead gave their lives, but they also
took those of others. And whereas soldiers act
with the aid of, and in service of, the state, civil
rights demonstrators challenged the state
to live up to its professed values. In the process,
Fig. 9. Memorial to the Jackson State they faced violence that was often state-
martyrs of May 1970 (ca. 1971), Jackson
sanctioned and sometimes state-instigated.
State University, Jackson, Mississippi.
Photo: Dell Upton. Thus violent civil rights conflicts seemed more

12 INTRODUCTION

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 like European pogroms or the 1989 confrontation in Tiananmen Square,
Beijing, than like battles between two armies.
Last, war memorials indict the depredations and celebrate the defeat of
specific enemies: the Union, the Confederacy, the Axis Powers. The civil rights
“war,” as far as nearly every memorial except those in Birmingham is con-
cerned, was a war without an enemy, or more accurately a war with an enemy
who still cannot be openly named. The combatants are still neighbors, and
many of the defeated remain bitter about their failure to thwart change. De-
spite the demographic oddity that the opponents of civil rights tended to be
older than the proponents, and thus are dying more quickly, their relatives and
progeny often continue to carry the torch of white resentment.
My point is that the dramatic incidents and conspicuous leaders that
Euro-American monuments customarily celebrate and for which a familiar
visual language has been developed were scarce in a movement that was
centered first of all around restructuring everyday life and ordinary land-
scapes. Even the dramatic events are difficult to commemorate in part be-
cause they were so thoroughly contextualized in a time and a place and
because they were already in themselves a kind of stylized enactment of
ordinary, less visible everyday conflicts. For example, the demonstrations of
April and May 1963, memorialized in Kelly Ingram Park, Birmingham, were
ritual enactments of black life in the city. Violent as these encounters were,
they dramatized for outsiders the dangers, indignities, and prohibitions that
made everyday living and working in “the most thoroughly segregated city
in America” so burdensome for African Americans. Thus, when memorable
moments of the demonstrations, familiar to most Americans through their
abstracted representations on television, in periodicals, and even in art, were
turned into monuments, they became representations of representations of
the reality they were intended to expose.11
The nearly instinctive turn to depictions of leaders, on the one hand, and
to representations of representations, on the other, raises a vital question
about memorialization: Are Americans, as citizens of an ostensibly demo-
cratic nation, able to understand a truly democratic movement, much less to
find a language to commemorate it that can successfully incorporate it into
our national myths in an effective way? What can and can’t be said within
the established visual conventions of the Euro-American monument build-
ing tradition, which were created to celebrate signal leaders and momentous,
temporally and geographically constricted events such as battles, rather than
long-term struggles by diffuse masses of people?

INTRODUCTION 13

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 The problems of visual representation lead directly to the second aspect
of the issue of what can and what cannot be said: What is permitted to be said?
Civil rights and African American history monuments have been
colored by four key preconditions. One is the tidal wave of monuments of all
sorts, dedicated to countless numbers of people, events, and causes, that has
inundated the American landscape in recent decades. There are many reasons
for this proliferation. They are a product of the political, economic, and demo-
graphic disruptions that have characterized the United States since the 1960s.
In the years following the Vietnam War, waves of new immigrants entered the
United States, encouraged by the abolition of country-of-origin restrictions
in the 1965 immigration act. The collapse of the traditional industrial order,
the outsourcing of manufacturing to Asia and Latin America, periodic energy
crises, and economic deregulation leading to repeated episodes of financial
chicanery destabilized the economy. The debacle in Vietnam and the intensi-
fication of militarism and xenophobic nationalism in reaction to it raised ques-
tions about the United States’ role in the world. Social changes ranging from
the renewed vigor of religious fundamentalism to the reordering of gender
and racial norms generated “culture wars” over “values.” Americans of all po-
litical persuasions were troubled by these changes and attempted to fix the
national narrative in a manner congenial to their own views. Monuments be-
came an important, if expensive, medium for doing so.
The late-twentieth-century surge in monument building was also the
product an accident of history: the great, unexpected popular and critical suc-
cess of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial (see fig. 7). All subsequent
monuments—especially, but not only, war memorials—stand in its shadow.
They take their cues from the visual vocabulary that Lin employed or, as in
the cases of the additions to the original memorial and to such newer works
as the Korean War memorials in Washington (1995) and Nashville, Tennes-
see (1992), or Washington’s National World War II Memorial (2004), they
vehemently reject it (see fig. 8).
Both supporters and opponents of Lin’s memorial saw in her work the
great potential of monuments as didactic tools. Lin’s audience viewed her
monument with considerable sophistication, understanding that a memo-
rial is an interpretation of the past, although not with enough sophistication
to accept that the interpretation might arise as much from the viewer’s mind
as from the artist’s, and they were either persuaded or outraged by what they
saw. Nevertheless, critics and defenders alike recognized the potential of
monuments not merely to commemorate or to remind but to argue one’s

14 INTRODUCTION

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 particular viewpoint. Monuments, however, are very blunt tools for these
purposes, especially in light of what might be called the democratization
of monument building. The erection of monuments was once the closely held
privilege of political and economic elites who were able to commandeer pub-
lic land and often public resources to honor their heroes, unimpeded by the
objections of others. The many statues of white supremacist politicians and
Confederates in the South offer vivid examples. Now more people have the
opportunity to erect monuments, but they also risk a louder, more varied, and
more potent opposition than the monument builders of earlier eras did. For
that reason, contemporary monument builders employ lengthy inscriptions,
explanatory books and pamphlets, interpretive centers, and other devices to
fix the interpretation of the past to accord with their views.12
The popularity and contentiousness of contemporary monument build-
ing engulfs the new Southern civil rights and black history monuments in a
very particular way, which creates the second of our preconditions: The new
memorials stand in the context, and often within the view, of older monu-
ments that present a white Southern view of history, a history that celebrates
white supremacy (fig. 10). The ubiquity of white supremacist monuments
means that black history memorials must adopt a visual language that is
similar to that of the older monuments in order to make their challenge leg-
ible to viewers. Most Confederate and other white supremacist monuments
were put up in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the era
when elites could celebrate their heroes unchallenged, and in this respect
they stand in contrast to the black history monuments, whose planners
sometimes chafe at the demands that their own works undergo a scrutiny
and criticism that their white predecessors escaped.
The white supremacist monuments also demand that the new genera-
tion of monument builders and the political authorities who oversee them
grapple with the vivid contrast between the racial messages of the two
groups of monuments. Do they cancel each other out? Does the endorsement
of the newer message implied by the monuments’ placement in public space
mean that the older monuments are obsolete or offensive? Should they be ig-
nored, altered, or removed? Most often, the answer is, None of the above.
Southern politicians, many whites, and some blacks have worked out a con-
voluted ideology that I call dual heritage, which treats white and black South-
erners as having traveled parallel, equally honorable paths. “White history”
and “black history” have their own integrity and work out their Hegelian des-
tinies independent of the other. This is particularly true of white history.

INTRODUCTION 15

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 Fig. 10. Confederate general Wade Hampton gazes at the African American History
Monument, South Carolina State House grounds, Columbia. Photo: Dell Upton.

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 Whereas commemorations of black history require some account of the im-
pact of slavery on black life, if not necessarily of slavers, the black presence is
treated as incidental to the “historical logic of whiteness” as understood by
white Southerners. Some Southerners attempt to find a common thread that
links the two, but historically the success of one relegated the other to failure,
so the celebration of both is at best paradoxical. To function properly, then,
the dual-heritage ideology necessitates that celebrants of each heritage re-
frain from criticizing, expatiating upon, or even directly acknowledging, the
other. Yet it is not possible to separate them: the historical developments of
the two are inseparable. Their juxtaposition and the arguments among their
disparate advocates are the medium through which a debate over race in
Southern society and in American society generally takes place. To under-
stand the new civil rights and black history memorials, one must take into
account, as I do in chapter 1, the nature and current status of the white his-
tory monuments.13
The third precondition is that of day-to-day politics, meaning the operat-
ing modes of urban, county, and state governments. Scholars of American
urban politics emphasize the necessity for relatively weak American public
officials to form governing coalitions, or regimes, of public and private parties
to accomplish their goals. It is no surprise that these regimes are usually
dominated by powerful businesspeople, so local governments’ agendas are
typically focused on economic growth. At the same time, regimes are inher-
ently unstable, and they must be continually repaired and remodeled to
bring in new partners, mollify some, and compensate for the desertion of
others. They also require consideration of the relatively weak as well as of the
economically powerful, since even the weak can vote, and they sometimes
do. In the peculiar setting of the contemporary urban South, where blacks
usually hold political power while whites retain economic power, the forma-
tion of a successful regime requires considerable ingenuity, as well as an
ability to avoid alienating large portions of the electorate.14
Thus civil rights and black history memorials get caught up in the specif-
ics of local symbolic and patronage politics and of economic development
efforts, and particularly in the effort of Southern urban and regional
growth machines to create a New New South, a parallel to and a successor of
the New South of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The
New South was an invention of journalists and businessmen who sought to
modernize the South through urbanization and industrialization, reintegrat-
ing it into the political and economic life of the United States. In the course of

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 this campaign, they needed to confront the “Negro problem.” Paradoxically,
one strategy was to create of a memorial landscape commemorating the
Civil War. Confederate monuments recast the war as a violent contest among
white men over high principles having nothing to do with slavery. In its
most abstract form, the soldiers’ cause was reduced to a single word—duty—
devoid of specific content. Implicitly, African Americans (and everyone
else who was not a white man) had no place in such a debate. In the New
South, blacks would be relegated, legally and extralegally, to a permanent,
nonpolitical underclass, a compliant labor force for an industrialized urban
region.15
In contemporary Southern cities, the civil rights monuments serve some-
thing of the same purpose. To draw the South into the global economy, to attract
outside investment and corporate relocation, depends in part on the rehabilita-
tion of the region’s reputation. Even today, scenes of the beatings of freedom
marchers or the firehosing of high-school students spring first to the minds of
many people outside the South when one mentions Selma or Birmingham.
Thus Southern political leaders must confront these images and lay them to rest
by portraying the New New South as a deracialized society.
Civil rights memorials, then, signal official acknowledgment of the
changes that have occurred in the past half-century. The public officials who
approve these monuments prefer to see the movement as a reform move-
ment that righted imperfections in a fundamentally just system through
peaceful political action leading to legislative and judicial reforms. This is a
viewpoint that is most comfortable with celebrating leaders who guided fol-
lowers toward concrete, now-achieved goals—hence the lasting popularity
of monuments to Martin Luther King Jr. The civil rights movement is a “won
cause,” as historian Glenn Eskew has called it. The South had paid in full what
the Montgomery Chamber of Commerce called the “price we had to pay for
our history.” This view strictly confines the movement to the years between
Brown v. Board of Education and the assassination of Dr. King and sees it as a
movement with the limited goal of achieving political rights. A century and
a half after the painful experience of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the
New South era of “racial capitalism,” to borrow historian Jacquelyn Dowd
Hall’s term, Southern leaders frame the classic civil rights movement as a sec-
ond, painful, but circumscribed rebirth.16
Monuments and the ceremonies that focus on them have become key
symbolic tools of this effort. The memorials are tombstones of racial strife
and heralds of a rebirth. Taking their cues from the spectacular economic

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 success of Atlanta, which billed itself during the years of the civil rights move-
ment as “The City Too Busy to Hate,” Southern urban leaders herald the birth
of a (non)racial order that fulfills the “nation’s commitment to liberty and jus-
tice for all” and forms the social basis for a reinvigorated, globalized regional
economy.
The niceties of day-to-day politics are further complicated by the intense
personalism and localism of Southern society. American political ideology has
long reduced structural socioeconomic problems to questions of personal mo-
rality, a theme that links early American commentators on poverty to modern
rightist politicians. This is compounded in the South by widespread evangelical
belief in personal sin and redemption. The possibility of transformation through
grace trumps history, so that a sinner as egregious as Alabama’s ex-governor
George Wallace could be embraced at the end of his life by his former African
American adversaries after a suitable expression of penitence.
The transcendence of family over principle, or the inability to see how
principle applies to family, in Southern socioeconomic hierarchies also pow-
erfully shapes the discourse. It led Essie Mae Washington-Williams, the
daughter of Senator Strom Thurmond and one of his father’s African Ameri-
can employees, to keep her father’s secret throughout his life. In general, the
continuing significance of personal and familial honor and shame, magnified
by the intricate bonds of everyday life, particularly in rural communities,
draw the bounds of what can and cannot be said even tighter. The familiari-
ty among blacks and whites that anti–civil rights whites formerly cited to
show that blacks were comfortable with the old racial order were real, even
if they did not mean to blacks what the whites thought they did. Experienced
civil rights advocates such as attorney J. L. Chesnut Jr. of Selma, for example,
often tell of the personally cordial relationships they formed with hard-line
segregationist judges and politicians who repeatedly rejected their efforts to
achieve changes in the racial order.17
A striking manifestation of the personalism and localism that are insep-
arable from this story can be found in the bizarre postscript to the 2005 trial
of Edgar Ray Killen. Killen spent the entire trial in a wheelchair, ostensibly un-
able to walk as the result of a logging accident that had broken both of his
legs. At one point he was hospitalized during a day of testimony. After his
conviction, Killen asked for release on an appeal bond claiming that “the rules
are too strict for my [physical] condition.” Judge Marcus Gordon granted a
compassionate release. Would such a release have been granted to a black
man convicted of a similar crime? It is difficult to tell, but Killen was a man

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 who, in his role as Baptist cleric, had buried Gordon’s parents and officiated
at his marriage, but whom Gordon had also convicted several years earlier of
making telephone threats. I am not suggesting that Gordon was either cor-
rupt or racially biased in granting Killen compassionate release on bond
while his case was being appealed. He was unforgiving of Killen’s crimes in
his concluding statement and in sentencing Killen to three consecutive max-
imum sentences in the murders. Yet in the context of a small community, Kil-
len was a neighbor as well as a criminal, and that surely affected Gordon’s
judgment. It did not, however, lessen his anger when soon after his release
Killen was seen walking around a gas station with no apparent difficulty.
Gordon immediately revoked the bond.18
The political and developmental agendas of public officials are powerful
forces in shaping the content and siting of the black history memorials erected
in recent decades. Yet there are other actors, too, whose goals sometimes
intersect with officials’ but more often challenge them. Overattentiveness to
the established voices of public officials, the mass media, and self-appointed
community leaders, for example, can mislead one into believing that this par-
ticular story of the civil rights movement—of a largely successful campaign,
conceived and carried out by signal leaders, notably Martin Luther King Jr., to
achieve relatively limited goals of access to political participation for African
Americans, of racial progress and reconciliation, of a deracialized contempo-
rary South—is more widely accepted than it is. This narrative has congealed in
public discussions of the movement, and it suits some members of the public,
black and white, to endorse it, but around the edges most of its assumptions
remain disputed among many of the civil rights movement’s participants, op-
ponents, and successors.
Consequently, a fourth precondition that affects the new civil rights and
African American history monuments has to do with tensions and concerns
among African Americans who are not public officials. Those who initiate
civil rights and black history monuments, whose imaginations conceive the
ideas, and whose energy and tenaciousness drive the projects to completion
often have additional or entirely different agendas from those of officials.
Many see the movement in the context of the longer history of racial politics
in the United States and are not comfortable with treating the issue as one
so neatly resolved in a nonracialized New New South. They wish to interpret
the 1950s and 1960s as one episode in an ongoing struggle and are less will-
ing to allow it to pass as a triumph of good over nobody. They are also unwill-
ing to allow the entire blame to fall on a few people, however guilty, at the

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 bottom of the social order while granting a pass to the higher-ups who toler-
ated their behavior, and they refuse to ignore the continuing socioeconomic
inequalities of the South. Yet even in the most recent monuments the neces-
sity to claim broad public consensus offers a powerful incentive to suppress
difficult aspects of the past and to offer a rosy assessment of the present.
Despite the diversity of the new monuments, they share several qualities.
First and most important, the proponents of these monuments seek to inject
an African American presence into the public commemorative landscape.
Most organizers’ narratives of their efforts begin with “There are no . . .” or “I
was struck by the absence of. . . .” Since Reconstruction, black Americans have
been highly conscious of the material landscape as proof of African American
accomplishment, of membership in civil society, and have carefully pointed
to buildings and landscapes as evidence of social progress. Now African
Americans also want to be full participants in civil society and to have that ac-
knowledged in the landscape of civic commemoration.
Second, scholars currently prefer to interpret monuments in terms of
collective memory and to distinguish between history and memory as variet-
ies of recording the past. Although memory certainly plays a central role in the
creation of monumental narratives, to understand them it is important to take
seriously the builders’ belief that they embody history, defined as objective
reality, not an interpretation or a memory. Monument builders emphasize the
truthfulness of their representations. Sometimes this claim extends to the
physical artifacts, which are assumed to be history in themselves rather than
simply records of it. Through their veracity monuments are believed to have
the power to enlighten their audiences and to instruct future generations. This
perception is not restricted to the creators of black-themed monuments.
Defenders of Confederate monuments and memorials often claim that to alter
or remove them would be to “erase history.” At the same time—and this some-
times leads to uncomfortable verbal and visual contortions—monuments
are treated as explanations of the current nature of American society. They
must not make any assertion that contradicts the makers’ view of things-as-
they-are, nor should they raise any issue that would upset the current social
and political equilibrium, usually through alienating some group of viewers.
Art historian Michele Bogart has recorded the dictum of a New York City offi-
cial that public monuments on city property should not express an opinion
“that could be offensive to another public constituency.” Because race remains
an open sore in Southern society (and American society generally), that atti-
tude reinforces the dual heritage fiction.19

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 For African Americans, particularly for the middle-class black people
who are responsible for most monuments, history has a deeper meaning
than it does for the general population. Historian Manning Marable argued
that most blacks understand, at least intuitively, that “their moral claim on
American institutions is inextricably bound to the past.” It demonstrates the
centrality of African Americans to American society and culture, a centrality
that was often ignored or denied as part of the white-supremacist effort to
exclude blacks from civil society. Early African American historians—mean-
ing black historians of the black past—shared the “racial vindication” goal of
other black leaders of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, seek-
ing to write a “functional and pragmatic” history that would create a positive
racial consciousness among African Americans and demonstrate to whites
that blacks were worthy of full citizenship.20
This historiographical tradition began soon after Emancipation, and it
reinforces the emphasis on positive achievement. Middle-class African Amer-
icans found themselves trapped between the disapproval of whites whose
genteel values they shared and the behavior of lower-class blacks, which they
thought violated those values and exposed all African Americans to blanket
condemnation. They believed themselves charged to demonstrate through
their own demeanor and accomplishments that blacks were capable of gen-
tility and to instruct their economic inferiors in proper conduct. It followed
that accounts of black life, including the historical experience of African
Americans needed to be relentlessly upbeat, accentuating the transcendence
of hardship, rather than hardships themselves—accomplishments rather
than injuries. This attitude has been shared by many historians of the Afri-
can American experience and of the civil rights movement, and it guides
most monument builders. “We don’t need to deal in horrors, we need to
deal in honor,” is the way one black South Carolina legislator put it. In the
monument building process, uplift also takes the shape of assertions that
monuments are for “the children” or coming generations, as a record of black
accomplishments that might otherwise be forgotten.21
The demand for uplifting African American–themed monuments is also
a corollary of more broadly held American attitudes toward commemoration.
Since the early nineteenth century, Americans have demanded that their pub-
lic monuments evince a positive outlook: that they honor achievement more
than mourning loss. The latter has been, and remains, understood as more
appropriate to private memorials in cemeteries and to impromptu ones at the
sites of disasters. When mourning seeps into formal public monuments, as

22 INTRODUCTION

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 critics of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington and of the recent
September 11 memorial in New York believed it did at those sites, it becomes
controversial. Public monuments ought not to remind us of social divisions or
serious wrongs committed by one group of Americans against others, much
less of continuing injustices. Monuments should speak to everyone’s condi-
tion and represent values or goals shared by everyone in the public as it is
commonly defined. They ought to be forward looking, not backward looking.
They should inspire rather than remind. They should promote self-esteem
and mutual regard. And above all, particularly in the case of civil rights and
African American history monuments in the South, they must not offend
white people.22
While African American history monuments are usually initiated by
black people, it doesn’t mean there is a single “black” viewpoint about them
or about black history. There has been a significant component of social class
and color consciousness in the promotion of these monuments. Like other
projects of uplift, they are usually initiated by middle-class, educated African
Americans. Lower-class and politically radical or nationalist blacks are often
hostile or uninterested, as when some African Americans accused the black
fraternity that created the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in Washington,
DC, of doing the white man’s work, or when a dark-skinned, homeless man
in Birmingham told me in 2005 that the monuments in Kelly Ingram Park are
for “the near whites,” not people like him. Differences of viewpoint also arose
over the degree of frankness or reticence about racial oppression and conflict,
about the use of historicist, abstract, or mythic (Afrocentric) visual language,
and about the inclusion or exclusion of particular individuals and incidents.
Few nonblack people evince openly racist or white supremacist views of
the new monuments (with conspicuous exceptions discussed in chapter 1).
Instead, much white opposition or obstruction can best be classified under
the historians’ rubrics “color-blind conservatism” or “color-blind structural
racism—a racism without overt racists.” It is a conservatism that praises
individual African Americans’ achievements while refusing to acknowledge
how economic and political structures constrict most Americans of color and
protect white dominance. In monument building, color-blind conservatism
is willing to acknowledge African American “contributions”—the word itself
connotes a marginal addition to something larger and more important—
while refusing to relinquish the centrality of white agency in “freeing” slaves
or in “granting” rights. And it insists on having the last word wherever there
is disagreement over the appropriateness of a monument or an inscription.

INTRODUCTION 23

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 At the same time, however, controversies over the monuments cannot be
divided into simple “black” and “white” sides, any more than members of ei-
ther race can be assumed to have a single viewpoint. Whites and blacks and
occasionally Native Americans and Asian Americans have been found at ev-
ery position in every controversy.23
What makes the monuments most interesting, then, is not only the var-
ied positions of the protagonists but how they transform. As the intellectual
historian David Hollinger has written, “To focus . . . on a belief or value attrib-
uted to an individual or to a collectivity of individuals is at once to move back
from . . . authentic, contingent relationships; where historical subjects are
said to hold a belief or value, those subjects are endowed with merely ab-
stract, static characteristics.” Instead, Hollinger says, we should see conflicts—
or, to put it more grandly, political or philosophical differences—as starting
points of debates in which all parties’ positions are defined and redefined
in contact with those of their antagonists. Even those who seem doggedly
to cling to a single position repeatedly edit and modify it under criticism from
interlocutors.24
In examining the new civil rights and African American history monu-
ments, then, the process is as important as the product, which only rarely
matches the initial proposal. One examines a statue or memorial, not as an
embodiment of a singular viewpoint, but as a less than seamless manifesta-
tion of disparate ideas. It is in the negotiation that the historical and political
qualities of monuments emerge, not from a static memory. Monuments have
stakeholders who claim a right to determine their content, as the drawn-out
process of creating the September 11 memorial in New York so vividly dem-
onstrated. Most debates over black history monuments deal explicitly or
implicitly with the question of stakeholders. Who are the stakeholders?
Who has a rightful claim to that authority? With whose voice will a monu-
ment speak? Who is the primary audience? Whom should it be? These key
questions should be kept in mind in viewing the monuments discussed in
this book.25
The issues, though, are more complex than the simple matter of uplift,
personal relations, or the delicacy of white sensibilities. As I show in chapter
1, the continuing political power of white supremacist symbols, evinced by
the deference accorded to them by civic authorities, imposes a significant
limitation on expression in the new African American memorials.

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