Easily the most surprisingly engaging book of my summer vacation reading was W. Fitzhugh Brundage’s The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (Harvard University Press, 2005). I purchased this book probably six years ago at my favorite used bookstore in D.C. It’s been waiting all this time to reveal its treasures.
Brundage, the William B. Umstead Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (NC’s premier community college!), offers in this book a fascinating approach to race, gender, place, and memory in the South from 1865-2000. The Southern Past examines the ways in which commemorative celebrations, preservation societies, tourism, and public policy literally carved Southern narratives–black and white–into the landscape of the South, enshrining selected memories as acts of power and resistance. What results is a fascinating and unique look at the way “the South” gets defined and redefined in the span of 100 tumultuous years. The following is a chapter-by-chapter summary.
Chapter 1: A Duty Peculiarly Fitting to Women. Brundage begins the journey in an unlikely place: the preservation efforts of civic organizations dominated by white women. Groups like the Ladies Confederate Monument Association, United Confederate Veterans, Daughters of the American Revolution, Daughters of the War of 1912 and many others emerged from the ashes of the Civil War to reclaim and restate southern history. Participating women raised funds, commissioned monuments, and organized ceremonies that commemorated a “civilization” narrative that selectively omitted the ugliness of slavery and celebrated the achievements of white southerners. The Confederacy was styled “the crucible of southern identity and white heritage” (p. 2), making “southern” synonymous with “white.” Non-whites were outside the reach of “civilization” and devoid of history. As Brundage observes: “These and similar appeals by organized white women provided crucial ideological ballast for white supremacy by rooting the contemporary racial hierarchy in a seemingly ordained historical narrative” (p. 32). Originally, monuments commemorating the white southern past were located in cemeteries. But in time, the favored locations became courthouse squares and other prominent public spaces of power. The shift indicated something of the shaping power and influence white women were acquiring even without the franchise. These women were able to imprint the regions public spaces with white cultural authority and a narrative that stubbornly defied northern sentiments while minimizing black counter-narratives.
Chapter 2: Celebrating Black Memory in the Postbellum South. Though white women dominated public spaces following the Civil War, it would be a mistake to conclude that African Americans were completely shut out of southern history and memory. The movement to publicly honor the Confederacy made public proclamation of black history more difficult, but African American communities created parallel celebrations to advance a different narrative. Blacks seized opportunities unavailable during slavery. As Brundage points out, these “rituals of black remembrance represented a form of cultural resistance” (p. 59). These celebrations were initially organized by the Black church and clergy, but as Black civic organizations and lodges emerged the leadership shifted to such groups. And with the shift, Black women assumed more and more leadership and prominence in organizing and speaking. Emancipation Day, Juneteenth, and Independence Day celebrations were joyfully embraced and appropriated as opportunities to tell a rival history of the South, one replete with Black heroes and heroines, parades, readings of the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation, and speeches celebrating the black past and anticipating the black future. As late as the 1880s, the 4th of July was preeminently a Black holiday/celebration in many parts of the South, with whites retreating to private spaces while Black celebrations moved into public streets and squares. What emerged was a narrative celebrating black manhood and womanhood, victory over the horrors of slavery, a proud history dating back to Ethiopia and Egypt, and an insistence that black people owned a place in the country. What Whites forgot, Blacks remembered, and they both used public space to advance their notions of southern history.
Chapter 3: Archiving White Memory. At the close of the 19th century, White historical agendas ventured into the newly created domains of public archives and professional history. Southern states moved from moments to documents in an effort to enshrine White history. State governments began to support with public funds archives for the storing of historically significant documents. Propagating a particular understanding of the South became the ongoing business of the state. At the same time, the first wave of professional historians and standards of historical practice came to Southern institutions. Historians found ready support from those same White women activists so influential in carving the landscape with monuments to the Confederate past. Eventually, history would become “manly” work, but the trajectory was first established by southern women. Up until 1930, the narrative crafted by groups like the DAR controlled the permissible bounds and content of southern historical studies. As Brundage put it: “the archival impulse was an extension of the systematic colonization of public spaces by white elites. …The larger message of the public history movement in the South was unmistable: while the black past had no relevance for public life, white history was fundamental to it” (pp. 137-137).
Chapter 4: Black Remembrance in the Age of Jim Crow. Still unable to control public spaces and finances, having been disenfranchised and disempowered following Reconstruction, African Americans continued their efforts to advance another view of southern history. The years of segregation kept Blacks from imprinting public spaces as Whites had done, but it left public schools almost entirely in the hands of the Black community and educators. Schools became essential institutions for passing on collective memory and shaping black identity. ”Whereas the first generations of white professional historians supplied ideological ballast to white supremacy, black historians and teachers rebutted historical fallacies about black Americans and argued for historical truths that would hasten racial equality. Black teachers and scholars yoked their professional ambitions tot he pursuit of social justice–and their battle grounds were the Jim Crow schools of the South” (p. 141). Instrumental in the dissemination of Black history and culture during this period was Carter G. Woodson’s Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. Brundage’s review of Woodson and ASNLH was excellent. Woodson and colleagues, rigorous and enamored with the “science” of history, wrote and distributed curriculum and black history resources through the legion of Black teachers in southern public schools. The celebration of Negro History Week (now Black History Month) provided a very well-organized and systematic set of educational experiences and materials for cultivating Black identity and consciousness. The segregated school, systematically denied adequate resources, nevertheless became a bedrock institution for shaping the identities and aspirations of Black people.
Chapter 5: Exhibiting Southernness in a New Century. The next phase in the struggle to define the history of the South came with the rise of post WWI tourism. The southern economy had lagged for some time. Needing a way to revive the economic prospects of the region, southern business men turned to tourism. They decided that the prime marketable tourist attraction was the south’s history itself. Businessmen across the region formed partnerships to develop the infrastructure to support tourism: highways and hotels were built, tourist sites placarded as “historic,” while plantations and “old South” neighborhoods preserved or refurbished. The railroad and the advent of automobile travel made leisure in the South possible. By design, these roads and rails were planned to take travelers by the White shrines and monuments already planted in the landscape and to avoid Black neighborhoods and businesses. ”Although contemporaneous with the Harlem Renaissance, the Charleston ‘Renaissance’ provided no stage for the proud, independent, ambitious ‘New Negro'” (p. 225). White southerners regaled tourists with their best product. Think Gone with the Wind staged again and again for travelers through the region. Using Charleston, S.C. as a case study, Brundage shows how “white cultural and political ambitions–to create public spaces that at once demonstrated and justified their power–were advanced by powerful market force” (p. 226).
Chapter 6: Black Memorials and the Bulldozer Revolution. Now we’re in the 1950s and 1960s, which brought with it the radical social and neighborhood changes of the Civil Rights Movement, desegregation, and urban renewal. I most enjoyed this chapter because it retold the story of Hayti, a thriving Black community in Durham, NC. I well remember the vestiges of Hayti left in Durham following “urban renewal.” Pettigrew and Fayetteville Streets are shells of the once diverse and vibrant residential and buisness district that earned the reputation of “the Black Wall St. of the South.” What happened? Brundage shows how the failed promises of urban renewal, good ol’ boy business and political deals, and Black naivete conspired to bulldoze and abandon Hayti. White downturn Durham was revitalized while Black Hayti, a space that defined Black progress and identity, was demolished. Consequently, public space was once again “whitened” and Black culture and life marginalized. Historic buildings, homes, and churches were simply either torn down or set on fire as a practice exercise for city fire fighters. ”The destruction of the public spaces that had sustained black community life and the dislocation of entire black neighborhoods ruptured traditions of black sociability. Black neighborhoods after urban renewal became notorious for dense concentrations of public housing and underclass poverty, comer closer to fulfilling white stereotypes than they ever had before” (p. 268). As Brundage points out, urban decline would have been a far less severe fate than urban renewal. Chapter 6 provides a case study in the importance of zoning and planning for the preservation or destruction of cultural and historical identity in the landscape. Those who control those aspects of government succeed at establishing their vision of history and identity.
Chapter 7: Contested History in the Sunbelt South. Chapter recounts the rise of museums, “heritage” tours, and other institutions designed to “tell the story” of southern history. Brundage walks us through the evolution from institutions solely dedicated to either a white or black telling of the history to efforts to nuance, combine, and complicate the narrative. It’s a chapter that captures some of the progress being made in rejecting ideology and presenting a better, more inclusive portrait of the southern past. ”Black history may not crowd the southern landscape to the extent that white history does, but it is present and visible to a degree that was unimaginable as recently as two decades ago” (315).
Take-Aways: People, Memory and Idols
When I first picked up The Southern Past, I was concerned that it might make a dry read. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I could hardly put the book down, and would could have been antiquated and obscure reporting actually communicated great passion and depth. The engaging writing style along with the novel approach to the history makes this a very valuable resource in understanding race, memory, identity, and public conflicts over space. Brundage helps us to see the dynamics of power, class, and privilege underlying the naming of bridges and schools, the commissioning of sculptures and statues, and the funding of exhibits and museums. A kind of narrative warfare has been going on for several hundred years. Key to this warfare is the right use and instruction of memory. Much is at stake. In Brundage’s words:
When southern identity is assumed to be interchangeable with white identity, much more than semantics are at stake. White claims to power, status, and collective identity are advanced at the same time that black claims are undercut.
[O]lder notions of memoryas a passive process of storing and retrieving objective recollections of lived experiences have recently given way to an understanding of memory as an active, ongoing process of ordering the past. Similarly, collective or historical memory is not simply the articulation of some shared subconscious, but rather the prodcut of intentional creation. It consists of those common remembrances that identify ‘a group, giving it a sense of its past and defining its aspirations for the future.’ Collective remembering forges identity, justifies privilege, and sustains cultural norms. for individuals and groups alike, memory provides a genealogy of social identity.
Collective memory, then, should not be mistaken for an ‘objective’ record of the past. English dramatist Harold Pinter warns, ‘the past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend to remember.’
Within collective memories a dialectic exists between the willfully recalled and deliberately forgotten. (pp. 2, 4, 5)
The Southern Past provides a valuable service to the reader by making it clear that “histories” are about people. People make history and people are the subject of history. Sometimes we forget this, and then we’re liable to forget the people themselves. The Southern Past presents to us some unusual suspects in the shaping of our varied pasts–heroines, housewives, villains, nameless people fighting to name places. It’s a very human book precisely because it puts our humanity–good and bad–on display. Brundage provides a wonderful tour, but not like the tour guides at historical sites who never venture an opinion of their own. He shows us the sites, but he also tells us what these things mean, what implications follow, and how the people of the history must surely have felt. As a consequence, the book avoids the tired pretension to objectivity and treats the reader–like the subjects of the book–as a person.
And people are nothing if they’re not beings with this exquisite but flawed gift of memory. The Southern Past helps us recognize that the deconstruction of “race,” power, and privilege relies, in part, on the reformation of memory, which, as the quoted section above contends, is not simply the reordering of facts. The reformation of memory really requires reformation of heart, identity, and desire. We fight and quarrel because there’s something we want but don’t have. So we murder and still don’t have what we want (James 4:1-3). Our memories are often the projection of what we want rather than the recollection of what we were or had. The penchant of some southern whites to turn a willfully blind eye to the injustices of slavery, Jim Crow, and contemporary forms of racism while presenting slave owners as architects of civilization suggests a desire for respect and respectability challenged by the fuller truth. The memory of such injustices, a significant part of this fuller truth, passed on seemingly genetically from generation-to-generation of African Americans, suggests the continuing desire to be accepted as men and women of common humanity and dignity. We desire but we don’t have, James says, because we want to consume respect and respectability or humanity and dignity on our own lusts. In other words, these things, too–good and necessary in their rightful places–can become and have been idols at which we bow. And as long as we worship the idols of partial memory we may expect not only conflict with one another but, more seriously, conflict with the only true God. That means that reconciliation, shared memory/history, and shared space will be an incredibly difficult and personally risky proposition. Everything worthy having is.
I highly recommend The Southern Past. It’s a stimulating and revealing examination of ourselves, our attitudes, privilege, power, and desires.