Copyright by Kristen Elizabeth Hoerl 2005

The Dissertation Committee for Kristen Elizabeth Hoerl Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation:

The Death of Activism?: Popular Memories of 1960s Protest

Committee:

Dana L. Cloud, Supervisor

Barry Brummett

Richard Cherwitz

Rosa A. Eberly

Sharon Jarvis The Death of Activism?: Popular Memories of 1960s Protest

by

Kristen Elizabeth Hoerl, B.S., M.A.

Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

The University of Texas at Austin August 2005

For my parents, for whom the memory of 1960s activism is alive and well; and for my grandmother, who taught me to cherish memories and question history

Acknowledgements

Dana Cloud deserves special recognition for her direction of this dissertation. I

could not have asked for a more supportive and intellectually engaging advisor. She has

challenged me with her insightful comments on numerous drafts of this dissertation, and

has inspired me by her dedication to social justice. I also thank the members of my

dissertation committee, Richard Cherwitz, Barry Brummett, Sharon Jarvis, and Rosa

Eberly for reviewing this dissertation and for shaping my previous scholarship in rhetoric

and popular media. Rosa Eberly also provided me with valuable places, physically and

figuratively, from where I could begin thinking and writing about the relationship

between public tragedies and shared memories.

Numerous graduate student colleagues at The University of Texas at Austin have

helped me during my process of completing this dissertation. I am especially grateful to

Lisa Foster, Angela Aguayo, and Caroline Rankin for their advice, encouragement, and friendship. I am also indebted to my parents Lesley and Donald Hoerl, to my brother,

Kent Hoerl, and to my grandmother, Wanda McCollom, for supporting me and for making the struggles of ordinary people central to our family history.

v The Death of Activism?: Popular Memories of 1960s Protest

Publication No.______

Kristen Elizabeth Hoerl, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2005

Supervisor: Dana Cloud

Between 1988 and 2002, the films Mississippi Burning (1988), Ghosts of

Mississippi (1996), Malcolm X (1992), Panther (1995), Berkeley in the Sixties (1990), and The Weather Underground (2002) recalled 1960s protest movements. This

dissertation examines these six films and journalistic coverage of them to explore the

relationship between popular culture and historical understanding. More specifically, this

dissertation develops answers to the following questions: How do particular texts in

popular culture ascribe meaning to the past? How do particular texts establish themselves

as important sources of historical knowledge? How do counter-memories of activism

become part of broader cultural discourses?

I apply methods of rhetorical criticism to films and journalism reviews to explain

how popular culture has attributed meaning to 1960s activism. Patterns across films about 1960s protests symbolically declared the death of activism, but they did not

establish the popular meaning of activism entirely. The films’ narrative genres, stylistic

devices, and journalism reviews appeared in different and often contradictory ways to

vi construct a range of messages about the role of activism. Each of these films’ rhetorical stances regarding historical reality contributed to their roles as a source of popular memory. Mainstream journalism reviews also contributed to the meaning of 1960s activism by conferring, or denying, legitimacy to particular films as sources for remembering the past. While these films’ status as truth contributed to their roles as sources of historical information, this status did not guarantee the films’ positions as part of popular memory. Documentary films that did not adopt conventions of entertainment film had limited popular appeal. Alternatively, films that were hybrids of documentary and entertainment films functioned as sources of popular memory by adopting both generic narratives that appealed to mainstream audiences and stylistic devices that establish films as sources of historical information. I conclude that films that produce contradictions between the generic conventions of film and the cinematic depictions of the past open spaces for secondary sources to deliberate about the past. Thus, the counter-hegemonic potential of films might not actually rest in the films themselves, but in the controversies that they provoke elsewhere in popular culture.

vii Table of Contents

Introduction...... 1 The rhetoric of popular memory...... 5 Films for consideration ...... 7 Charting the landscape of popular memory...... 10 Narrative and argument analysis...... 10 Formal analysis ...... 11 The intertextuality of popular memory...... 13 Journalistic framings of 1960s protests...... 15 Journalistic framings as deliberative topoi ...... 18 Chapter preview...... 20 Notes to Introduction ...... 27

SECTION ONE: POPULAR CULTURE AND CONTENTIOUS PUBLICS 29

Chapter One: The rhetoric of film, memory, and truth...... 30 Publicity and publics...... 30 Films as rhetorical texts ...... 32 The rhetoric of documentary film...... 33 The rhetoric of entertainment film...... 35 Political hegemony...... 37 Popular memory...... 39 Popular memory and political power...... 41 The rhetorical implications of truth claims...... 46 Notes to Chapter One...... 50

Chapter Two: Publics, counter-publics and the trajectory of 1960s social movements ...... 54 Participatory democracy and the public sphere ...... 55 Counter-publics and contentious political engagement ...... 56 From reformism to radicalism: Civil Rights and New Left activism ...... 63 The Civil Rights Movement during the early 1960s...... 63 viii State violence against the Civil Rights Movement...... 65 The emergence of the New Left: Students for a Democratic Society..67 Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement ...... 67 From resistance to confrontation ...... 68 The rise of the Black Power Movement ...... 69 Growing confrontation in the Vietnam Anti-War Movement ...... 70 Radicalism and revolution at the end of the decade ...... 73 Killing activism, framing activists...... 74 Activism in 1968 and beyond ...... 77 The rage and death of the New Left...... 78 Activism in the new millennium...... 81 Notes to Chapter Two ...... 83

SECTION TWO: MEMORIES OF MISSISSIPPI 84

Introduction to Mississippi Burning and Ghosts of Mississippi...... 85 Notes to Introduction to Section Two...... 89

Chapter Three: Memory and counter-memory in Mississippi Burning...... 90 Memory and amnesia in Mississippi Burning...... 91 Mississippi Burning as an historical cop action docudrama ...... 91 Burning violence against blacks into popular memory...... 95 Forgetting civil rights activism in Mississippi...... 101 Amnesia as a source for invention in journalistic memory...... 104 Notes to Chapter Three ...... 113

Chapter Four: Melodrama and the scapegoat in Ghosts of Mississippi...... 114 The instrumental role of popular memory ...... 116 The triumph of a civil rights hero in Ghosts of Mississippi...... 118 Leaving racism to the past ...... 119 Melodrama in journalism...... 121 Signifiers of realism in Ghosts of Mississippi...... 123 The narrative scapegoating of Byron de la Beckwith...... 124 Fidelity to history as the closing of journalism critique ...... 127 ix Truth and drama in Ghosts of Mississippi...... 130 Hegemony and counter-hegemony in films about civil rights...... 132 Notes to Chapter Four...... 134

SECTION THREE: BLACK POWER IN POPULAR MEMORY 135

Introduction to Malcolm X and Panther ...... 136 Notes to Section Three Introduction...... 140

Chapter Five: Doxa and counter-memory in Malcolm X...... 141 A popular film about an unpopular black leader ...... 142 Malcolm X as a reaffirmation of the American Dream myth...... 145 History and ideology in Malcolm X...... 151 Restoring liberal hegemony in Malcolm X: Tragic consequences of isolated activism...... 152 Challenges to liberal hegemony in Malcolm X and journalism reviews.....155 Journalistic counter-memories about Malcolm X...... 162 Convention as a force for imagination in popular film...... 169 Notes to Chapter Five ...... 173

Chapter Six: Truth and ideology in Mario Van Peebles’ Panther...... 174 A controversial film about a radical movement...... 175 Panther as an historical blaxploitation docudrama...... 176 Entangling archival and fictional film in Panther ...... 181 Distinguishing fact and fiction in journalism reviews of Panther...... 186 Telling lies or empowering the oppressed? ...... 186 Distinguishing art and history ...... 189 Agitprop: reality or ideology?...... 191 Celebrating film as art, not fiction...... 193 Challenges for a critical memory of social protest ...... 195 Notes to Chapter Six ...... 201

x SECTION FOUR: REMEMBERING WHITE RADICALS IN DOCUMENTARY FILM 203

Chapter Seven: The rhetoric of objectivity in Berkeley in the Sixties and The Weather Underground ...... 204 Codes of objectivity in participatory documentaries ...... 209 Protest and political empowerment in Berkeley...... 211 Verbal evidence of activism and repression on campus ...... 211 Visual evidence of activism and the myth of photographic realism..217 The legitimacy of Radicalism in The Weather Underground...... 222 Talking-heads redefine “violence” ...... 223 The filmic construction of false balance...... 228 Authorizing dissent in public memories of television news ...... 230 Reframing dissent as deviance in journalism reviews ...... 238 Newspaper frames of activism as absurd, violent, and inept...... 239 Leaving activism to the children of the past ...... 244 Struggles for popular memory and dissent after 1980...... 248 Notes to Chapter Seven...... 253

Conclusion: Activism and memory in the new millennium ...... 256 Commemorating the death of activism in popular film...... 259 The death of activism in the academy (and how to resuscitate it)...... 265 The counter-hegemonic potential of popular memory...... 266

Bibliography ...... 270

Vita…...... 306

xi Introduction

Film director Rob Reiner once told the press that people don’t learn about the past from schoolbooks, “they get their history through movies.”1 The recent trial and conviction of Edgar Ray Killen provides a powerful example of the educational role of Hollywood films. In the heat of late June 2005 a jury found Killen guilty for manslaughter in the 1964 murders of civil rights activists George Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman. National broadcast media consistently referred to the case as the “Mississippi Burning trial” after the commercially successful film that was loosely based on the events surrounding the murders of the three Mississippi Freedom Summer activists.2 By naming the trial in terms of a docudrama about the past, news media attested to Hollywood’s influence on popular knowledge about the past. Indeed, the American Broadcasting Network used recreated footage from the film to illustrate events surrounding Killen’s conviction (Gibson, 2005; and Sawyer, 2005). News media emphasis on the film at the time of the trial also elucidated the role of popular memory in shaping social life in the present. As several reporters noted, had the film not cast Mississippi in such a damning light, the state would not have been pressed to prosecute Killeen in the present (Axtman, 2005, p. 01). Parallels between the 1988 film and coverage of the recent trial are striking. Both the film and trial coverage focused on individual whites for racial violence against blacks in the South during the 1960s. Likewise, both credited government institutions led by whites, the FBI and the Mississippi legal system, for finding justice for black people in Mississippi. These texts provided an incomplete picture of racism and of activism in the United States. They obscured the systemic violence and racism against blacks that has persisted in the United States. They also ignored how civil rights activists, who were

1 mostly black and lacked direct access to institutional resources, had a central role in changing race relations in the South during the 1960s. By putting blacks and civil rights activists in the backgrounds of struggles for social justice, these texts crafted memories of the past that forgot activism. Texts like these create messages that give ordinary people a marginal role in the process of social change in the United States. In this dissertation, I explore a broader pattern of filmic representations of 1960s protests that symbolically constructed the death of activism. Over the past fifteen years, several films recalled violent events in the history of 1960s social movements. Films that followed Mississippi BurningMalcolm X (1992), Panther (1995), and Ghosts of Mississippi (1996)also brought black activism from the 1960s to the attention of Hollywood filmgoers. Documentary films, including the 1990 film Berkeley in the Sixties and the 2002 film The Weather Underground, recalled events in the history of student and antiwar activism from the 1960s. Many of these films garnered national news media attention at the time of their release. As newspapers reviewed and covered these films, they also brought events from the history of 1960s activism to the attention of newspaper readers across the United States.

These events bear importance to political life at the end of the millennium. During the 1960s, protesters engaged in contentious, collective efforts to pose challenges to corporate and political elites. As Tarrow (1998) argues, confrontational methods of

activism have an important place in democratic politics. For people who lack regular access to institutions and resources of their own, contentious, collective dissent is often the main and only recourse that they have against better-equipped opponents (p. 3). Recent attention to 1960s activism in commercial film, documentaries, and newspapers raises questions about popular memory and its implications for political and social life at the end of the millennium. Collective protest and confrontational dissent had been

2 declared dead by political leaders and educators in years prior to these films’ release dates. During the early to mid-1980s, politicians and professors from both liberal and conservative perspectives declared the death of activism and the demise of the New Left. In 1987, former activist and media scholar Todd Gitlin wrote that New Left activists’ hope for a more just society ended in feelings of rage at the end of the 1960s (Gitlin, 1987, p. 420). A year later, former activist and California senator Tom Hayden described the 1960s as “a time of idealism rusted by tragedy” (as quoted in Hertzberg, 1987, sec. 7, p.1). According to many scholars from the political Left, the death of activism took place under the growing conservative political climate of the 1970s. Epstein (1991) lamented the defeat of the left during the mid-seventies as a key to understanding the demise of racial activism in the United States, and Miller (1987) suggested that demands for broad social change from the new left atrophied with the rightist victories of 1968.

Scholars and former activists who decried the death of the left complemented the assertions of conservative presidential administrations. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan characterized antiwar protest as a “temporary aberration” and announced the end of the “Vietnam Syndrome.” Three years later, Reagan’s Secretary of State George Schultz cast activism as inherently anti-American and concluded that protesters were responsible for America’s defeat in Vietnam, for upending world stability, and for threatening the cause of freedom (Dionisopoulos and Goldzwig, 1992, pp. 64-69).

Likewise, President George H. W. Bush celebrated the downfall of political dissent in the United States when he told reporters during the 1991 Persian Gulf War that the nation was overcoming the Vietnam Syndrome as it was “pulling together, unlike any time -- in this kind of situation -- any time since World War II.” Political rhetoric announcing the demise of the “Vietnam Syndrome” and political dissent negated anti-war protest as a dangerous national phenomenon and as irrelevant to contemporary political life.

3 Despite the prevalence of conservative political rhetoric that announced the danger and irrelevance of activism for the nation’s political culture, recent films about 1960s protest and newspaper coverage of them suggest that popular culture has not entirely forgotten 1960s activism. Over the past several decades, the ghosts of activism have haunted the landscape of popular culture. What meanings have these films attributed to protests from the 1960s? How have these meanings intervened in political discourses that have chimed the death knell for activism? As the rest of this dissertation elaborates, these films complemented the assertions of political leaders and scholars that activism is dead. Hollywood films about black struggles depicted the death of activism literally. While activists featured Mississippi Burning and Ghosts of Mississippi only appeared in scenes that depicted their murders, activists featured in Malcolm X and Panther were killed in the films’ concluding scenes. White activists depicted in the documentaries Berkeley in the Sixties and The Weather Underground did not literally die in these films; however, public protest did experience a figurative death as former activists featured in these films concluded that public spaces for dissent and deliberation no longer exist in the United States.

Before I analyzed these films, I expected to find that films and journalism reviews of them attributed the literal and figurative deaths of activism to protester violence and obscured the role of state violence in the history of social movement activism. Thus, I

anticipated I would argue that films and their newspaper reviews ultimately encouraged audiences to disregard social protest. This thesis would extend the conclusion frequently made by critical media and rhetorical scholars that commercial media shut down spaces for critically thinking about the role of social, economic, and political power relations. In the process of developing my argument, I came upon a few surprises. These films did not uniformly blame activism for movements’ decline. Some films featured

4 state-supported violence as the catalyst for the decline in movement activism toward the end of the 1960s. Messages critical of the state suggest that some spaces in popular media do interrogate power relations. I was also surprised to find that patterns across newspaper reviews of these films did not consistently attend to these films as representations of the past. For example, reviewers predominantly characterized Panther as an illegitimate representation of the Black Panther Party and of the FBI; conversely, reviewers characterized Ghosts of Mississippi as an accurate, but ultimately shallow rendering of civil rights history. Although patterns across different texts sometimes worked concomitantly to create a particular meaning about activism, different texts sometimes worked against one another in a struggle to establish meaning about the past. Frequently, different texts struggled not only to establish particular messages about the meaning and purpose of 1960s activism, but to establish what images and messages in popular culture count as legitimate representations of the past. Given these observations, this dissertation also explores how particular texts have established themselves as legitimate sources of historical information. In particular, I answer the question, “How have messages critical of prevailing power relations become part of the “common sense” framing of 1960s activism in popular culture”?

THE RHETORIC OF POPULAR MEMORY

By answering this question, this dissertation advances scholarship in rhetoric, memory, and media studies. I argue that the struggle over meaning and memory of 1960s activism in popular culture is a rhetorical struggle. A rhetorical perspective on the study of meaning suggests that history is constructed symbolically. Documentary and docudrama films about 1960s activism, as well as news media reviews and reports, functioned rhetorically by creating narratives and arguments. Films about 1960s activism created these narratives and arguments through the use of particular stylistic devices, 5 such as editing, film quality, and sound. Films and newspaper coverage about them also rhetorically constructed films’ roles as sites or topoi for remembering the past. That is, film’s narratives, argument structures, and formal elements created messages, not only about events from the past, but about the role of popular media in communicating that past to audiences. As this dissertation argues, messages attain particular rhetorical force when they rhetorically assert their status as sources of historical information, and when secondary sources confirm or deny this role. In this way, the meaning of activism was constructed intertextually across a myriad of films and journalism reviews that sometimes affirmed, and sometimes renounced one another.

The rhetorical nature of discourses about 1960s activism in popular culture has implications for social movement activism and participatory democracy in the future. Films, especially Hollywood entertainment films, attract broad audiences; thus, they are likely to gain the attention of more audiences than historians’ lectures and books do. Thus, depictions of 1960s social movements in mainstream media provided resources for cultural knowledge about the role of activism in the history of political change in the United States. Representations of 1960s protests encouraged particular understandings of what it means to be politically engaged, of ordinary people’s relationship to the state, and of how subordinated groups ought to proceed when predominant authorities and institutions do not seem to be serving their interests. Protest movements of the 1960s

challenged prevailing assumptions that leaders of liberal, capitalist democracies primarily act in the interests of those they purportedly represent, and demonstrated that social gains may be won through collective dissent. Thus, popular culture might construct images of public dissent as an effective means to win social justice. Conversely, popular messages that frame activists as illegitimate and violent may discourage audiences from considering the social movements as legitimate means of political participation. Worse

6 yet, pejorative frames of activism may teach people not to be publicly engaged at all. In an era of growing corporate control over multiple avenues of social life, people with modest resources of their own can ill afford the absence of citizen discourses of dissent.

FILMS FOR CONSIDERATION

To understand how popular culture texts cultivate particular frameworks for audiences to make sense of violent events in the history of 1960s activism, this dissertation performs a critical reading of the patterns and contradictions across six aforementioned films about the 1960s and across news media texts about these films. These films include the docudramas Mississippi Burning (1988), Ghosts of Mississippi (1996), Malcolm X (1992), and Panther (1995) It also includes the documentary films Berkeley in the Sixties (1990) and The Weather Underground (2002). I have chosen these films specifically because the movements for civil rights, black power, students’ rights, and an end to the war in Vietnam represented in these films were prominent activist movements during the 1960s in terms of both the numbers of activists involved and in national news media attention to protest movements during the 1960s. These films represented both the early and later years of the decade. Mississippi Burning and Ghosts of Mississippi featured the early successes of civil rights activists and violence directed toward activists while the films Malcolm X and Panther recounted the emergence of the Black Power Movement and the violent blows that radical activists faced toward the latter half of the decade. The documentaries Berkeley in the Sixties and The Weather Underground featured confrontational strategies of radical activists near the end of the decade. By focusing on several movements and on different historical moments in the history of several movements, I provide a more holistic account of how popular films have constructed memories of 1960s activism.

7 I also chose these films because they are more likely than other texts to contribute to the popular memory of 1960s activism than other texts in commercial media culture. I define popular memory in opposition to more commonly used terms “public memory” and “collective memory.” Publics constitute collectives brought together to deliberate shared problems and common relationships to the political, economic, and social institutions that structure their lives. Popular memories constitute those memories constructed by popular media that provide a basis for shared common discourses about the past. Rather than presume that such memories are automatically shared publicly, I view popular memories as resources for deliberation that may be embraced or rejected. I do not purport to know how audiences might have used these texts; instead, I make an argument about the meanings constructed by texts in popular culture. Although no single text can constitute the popular memory of 1960s activism, some texts have a stronger presence as popular memory than others. That is, the texts that circulate more broadly are more likely to contribute to popular memory of that culture. In order to delimit my study to those texts that played a prominent role in creating memories of 1960s activism, I focus on films that garnered extensive national media attention and/or circulated widely in commercial theatres at the time of their release. Panther, the least commercially successful docudrama to be featured in this dissertation, earned 8 million dollars at the box office. By contrast, Malcolm X earned 48 million. Although Malcolm X had a considerably larger audience than either Panther, that each of these films was able to generate large revenues and circulated in theatres throughout the United States demarcates these films as popular, or accessible to a broad spectrum of society, rather than as specialized or alternative. Other docudramas I explore also garnered a large national audience. According to the Internet Movie Database, Mississippi Burning earned $34 million at the box office, and Ghosts of Mississippi earned $13 million.

8 The documentaries I have selected for this dissertation, Berkeley in the Sixties, and The Weather Underground, did not have the same circulation as the commercial entertainment films featured here, but I believe that these texts are also worthy of study to understand popular memories of activism. Aside from Panther, these documentaries were the only films to feature the perspectives of activists who used strategies of confrontation to challenge prevailing political and economic institutions. That these perspectives appeared in documentary, not entertainment media, and primarily reached audiences though independent venues may tell us something significant about the ways that popular culture created the meaning of 1960s activism. Although these documentaries were not made for commercial distribution, they aren’t completely foreign to popular culture either. Each of these films was nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary the year following their release (“Academy”). By recognizing these films as exemplary, these awards drew national television and news media attention to these texts, and encouraged audiences to view them as legitimate sources of information about 1960s activism.

Finally, I chose to primarily study films instead of other forms of commercial media because they provide a useful starting point to begin theorizing popular memories of activism. Television programs such as American Dreams, the 1967 Buffalo Springfield song, “For What It’s Worth,” and even the 1999 print magazine

advertisements for the 2000 Volkswagen Bug automobile contributed to the meaning of

1960s activism in the past decade.3 In order to develop a cogent argument about the rhetorical strategies by which popular culture attributes meaning to 1960s activism, I chose to limit my study to film as a subset of popular media. Thus, I explain the role that films have played as major contributors to the meaning of 1960s activism in popular culture.

9 CHARTING THE LANDSCAPE OF POPULAR MEMORY

Narrative and argument analysis

Several rhetorical devices in films and journalism reviews of these films helped to construct popular meanings of 1960s activism. I distinguish these features as narratives features, formal features, and secondary features of films. In my analysis of the films Mississippi Burning, Ghosts of Mississippi, Malcolm X, and Panther, I explain that the films’ narratives make rhetorical arguments about the role of activism and its attendant violence in 1960s political culture. I answer the following questions about each film’s narrative: Who are the films’ protagonists and antagonists? What is their relationship to activists in the film? What demarcates the moment of climax in these films? What are the consequences of activism for the lives of protagonists in these films? What explicit conclusions do these films offer about the role of 1960s activism for America’s civic life? What is the outcome of violent confrontations between prevailing authorities and activists of these movements? I also explain how several films fit within a particular genre, or story type, to establish the social meaning of the film. Schatz (1981) argues that particular film genres contribute to the social meaning of a film by establishing particular expectations from audience members (p. 5) and by reinforcing prevailing ideologies (p. 261). By describing how the narrative framings of 1960s activism frequently conform to generic expectations, I point to the ways in which form and content in films construct meanings about social relations in the past and present.

The documentaries Berkeley in the Sixties and The Weather Underground also constructed meaning of 1960s activism through argument. Rather than convey arguments through narrative structure, these films crafted the meaning of activism predominantly through talking-head interviews and visual images. Nichols (1991) distinguishes documentary films from fictional films according to documentaries’ use of explicit 10 language that makes explicit social commentary and claims on the past. Although I do not share all of Nichols’ assumptions about the differences between documentary and fiction films, I find Nichols’ description of the features by which documentaries construct arguments useful. He demonstrates that verbal images in documentaries frequently make explicit claims on the past, and that visual images often provide the material evidence, or support for the explicit claims made in the films (p. 125). In Section Three of this dissertation, I identify the primary verbal arguments that talking heads provide about the role of 1960s activists. These talking heads are the central spokespersons for protest events that took place during the 1960s; thus, I explain how the repetition of particular claims by these spokespersons forms the basis for the films’ arguments and how talking heads provide verbal support for these claims as well. I also describe the visual images featured in these films and explain how these visual images constitute the primary evidence for the claims asserted by former activists in these films. By comparing and contrasting the range of verbal and visual messages provided by these documentaries I shed light on ways in which documentaries construct meaning about 1960s activism. By highlighting the most vivid images and most repeated statements offered by former activists, I also demonstrate how these films constructed predominant meanings about the role of social protest from the 1960s.

Formal analysis

My discussion of the films’ arguments and plot development explains how these films create meaning about the past, but it does not describe how films themselves constitute sources of memory in popular culture. To explain how films establish themselves as sources of historical information, I also describe the film’s stylistic devices, which include their editing techniques, film quality, and use of sound. These elements signify the film’s rhetorical stance toward its relationship to history, or to the 11 extent to which images appearing the films existed outside of filmic construction. The rhetorical stances films take toward events outside of the film’s own production merit particular attention to this dissertation because they shape the ways in which predominant meanings of activism emerge in popular culture. In this dissertation, I identify the stylistic cues that invite audiences to understand these films as either as fictions or as representations of a historic reality that existed outside of the film’s construction. Conversely, I explain how codes of objectivity, including visual images and sounds, signify that events would have taken place regardless of the films’ recording of them. Since documentaries are not complete representations of events in the world outside of film, documentaries achieve their rhetorical goals by convincing audiences of their indexicality to the past. Nichols (1991) defines indexicality as the “bonds created between a film’s images and the historical world outside of the film” (p. xii). According to Nichols, visual images provide evidence for documentary’s claims and encourage audiences to believe that “the world fits within the framework of its representations” (p. 110). Nichols concludes that through the use of image, documentary filmmakers legitimate their films as having direct bearing on the historical world itself (p. 117). In contrast to Nichols, Plantinga (1997) argues against thinking about nonfiction film as a recording of reality. He emphasizes that the distinction between fiction and non-fiction film should be based on “the stance taken toward the projected world of the text and to the text’s indexing” (p. 33). He explains that textual cues as well as secondary sources (producers, writers, directors, distributors who publicly identify the film as nonfiction) don’t reproduce the real, but make claims about the real instead (p. 38-42).

I position myself somewhere between these positions. While documentary films address events that did occur in a world outside of film production, the rhetorical role of documentary films is not established by the outside world itself, but by the textual cues

12 that invite audiences to read the films as representations of social reality. I suggest that codes of objectivity are not unique to documentary films, but also function to create meaning about the past in docudrama films as well. I argue that docudrama films are rhetorical hybrids that blend features of both conventional modes of entertainment and documentary films. Lipkin (2001) describes docudramas as films that make claims about historic reality in narrative terms. He argues that docudramas are distinguished from documentaries because docudramas recreate events rather than rely on stock footage to depict them. Consequently, docudramas’ recreations of events are indexically linked to the present, not to the past (p. 9). Lipkin insists that docudramas should not be disregarded as sources of historical information, for the narrative construction in docudrama films also provide evidence for arguments about the historical world (p. 6). In Chapters Two through Five, I explain how docudramas about 1960s activism have sought to meet the demands of narrative and documentary film modes by blending codes of drama and objectivity. By blending these codes, docudramas establish their relevance to historic events outside of their filmic construction in ways that documentary and entertainment films do not.

The intertextuality of popular memory

My methodology is premised on my belief that the accumulation of messages about 1960s activism in popular culture shapes how audiences are encouraged to make sense of violent incidents that took place as a result of social protest. Because several texts have referenced 1960s activism in popular culture, the meaning of dissent in the 1960s cannot be understood solely in terms of an individual, isolated text; instead, the meaning of 1960s activism emerges through the patterns and tensions across a collection of texts about the same event. To demonstrate how a larger story about activism emerges from these films, this dissertation describes the interplay between films and journalism 13 reviews. In my conclusion, I explain how the patterns which emerge across these films under investigation construct a particular meaning about 1960s activism. Throughout my analyses of each individual film, however, I also demonstrate how popular memories of protest are constructed intertextually through the films that ascribe meaning to the past and through newspaper coverage and reviews that establish relevance to films and to events depicted by these films. This second application of the intertextuality of memory is significant because it shapes the ways in which the films individually contribute to the broader popular memory of 1960s protest.

My analysis of journalistic attention to films about the 1960s demonstrates how secondary texts such as national news media coverage of these films help constitute the popular memory of 1960s activism and constrain memories provided by popular films. Dow’s (1996) analysis of messages about feminism in television programming after 1970 suggests that secondary texts are central to understanding how media messages function politically in particular historic moments. Dow argues that television programs featuring female protagonists are situated and restricted by their relationship to other forms of cultural discourse. Working from Fiske (1987), Dow adds that secondary texts “show how treatment of programming in mass media can both enable and constrain interpretation” (in Dow, pp. 6-7). Dow and Fiske convincingly argue that a multitude of discourses influence how particular texts come to have meaning in a particular cultural

milieu. It is the confluence of messages in mass media that shapes audience reception to individual messages. As Bennett and Woollacott (1987) suggest in their study of James Bond as a popular hero, the popularity of an icon emerges, not through isolated texts, but through the “the circulations and exchanges” between texts. They conclude that “it is impossible to analyze any particular text [that contributes to the popularity of an icon] without, at the same time, considering its relations to other texts of a similar nature” (p.

14 6). Thus, the cultural significance of heroes such as Bond or, in the case of this dissertation, 1960s protest movements is established intertextually across texts that shape and reinforce notions of taken-for-granted common sense. The study of intertextuality resonates with McGee’s (1990) observation that the

meaning of a text cannot be understood outside of the context in which it is presented.4 McGee’s emphasis on message consumers as creators of message meaning is based on the premise that different audience members have such vastly different experiences with texts and with non-mediated experiences, that we have no resources for developing shared understanding. This dissertation will argue, on the contrary, that texts disseminated by our increasingly centralized commercial media conglomerates do, in fact, create conditions for shared knowledge. Texts that reach national audiences such as films released in cities nationwide, network television programs, and articles in major newspapers give audiences a common set of experiences. When those texts share similar features, they create patterns of ideas that constitute the common sense of a culture. As scholars of communication and social justice, we need to pay attention to the ways that these patterns construct “common sense” notions that represent the interests of elites and obscure the perspectives of less privileged members of society.

Journalistic framings of 1960s protests

To explain how mainstream commercial news media contributed to the meaning of 1960s activism at the time these films were released, this dissertation explains how journalists framed these films in the years when they were released in theatres and home video. Gitlin (1980) describes patterns that emerge across news media texts in terms of “media frames.” Such frames, he argues, employ principles of selection, emphasis, and presentation” to organize discourse and “make the world beyond direct experience look natural” (p. 7). Working from Gitlin’s discussion of news frames, this dissertation 15 explores the principles of selection, omission, and emphasis in depictions of 1960s activists across journalism texts. Previous scholarship on news frames indicates that journalists routinely cover events in ways that affirm the core values and interests of political and economic elites. To understand how newspaper reviews and coverage of the films contributed to the popular memory of 1960s activism and to the role of film in shaping popular memory, I explore newspaper articles and reviews about these films from the 28 United States’ newspapers with the broadest circulation, as determined by the Lexis-Nexis news

database.5 When they are available, I also explore transcripts from broadcast television networks, Fox News, ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN. My analysis of each film, then, is accompanied by my analysis of approximately thirty news media reviews or reports.6 I have chosen these sources because they are representative of the national news coverage of these films at the time that these films were released to widespread audiences. I have also chosen to look at this range of sources because they reflect the range of messages about these films available to national news media audiences. Thus, the patterns that run across these newspaper articles indicate the extent to which popular media perpetuate particular frameworks for national audiences to make sense of 1960s activism. In his analysis of journalistic coverage of the New Left during the 1960s, Gitlin (1980) argues that news media emphasize scenes of disorder and violence in coverage of social protest. More recent scholarship suggests that news patterns have consistently framed activists within spheres of deviance (Hallin, 1994). Describing news coverage of the first Persian Gulf War, Reese and Buckalew (1995) explain that patterns in local television news stations in Austin, Texas, used framing devices to neutralize antiwar protest and advocate a prowar stance. Cloud (1994) also suggests that news coverage of the Persian Gulf War muted voices of opposition by characterizing antiwar positions as

16 acts of violence and aggression, and by appealing to national unity and therapy. In his analysis of the Million Man March of 1995, Watkins’ (2001) argues that journalists represent potentially polarizing issues and individuals in ways that confirm the presumed commonsense values and ideas of their audience; thus, media frames of Farrakhan neutralized the political and social significance of the march. These studies of journalism frames resonate with arguments made by Hall et al., (1978) who observe that news media align with state institutions to promote moral panics as a means to redirect challenges to the prevailing hegemony.

I extend these observations by explaining how a different rhetorical genre, the journalism review, shapes popular meanings of dissent. I also advance framing scholarship by noting how news media reviews and reports frame events from the past depicted by films. My study of how these films were framed by mainstream commercial media at the time of their release elucidates some of the factors outside of the films themselves within commercial media that contributed to these films’ emergence as popular memories of activism. By discussing these films’ representations of 1960s protests, news media provided their own memories of 1960s activism and reframed the memories of protest in popular film. Thus, news media coverage and journalistic criticism of several of these films provided another venue for audiences to recognize and make sense of these films. Ostensibly, journalistic attention to these films also helped commercial distributors determine the commercial films’ circulation in theatres and video rental stores across the country and helped potential audiences decide whether they would watch these films, helped theatres determine how long these movies would run, and helped filmmakers and producers determine whether additional films about the subject would be created in the future.

17 Journalistic framings as deliberative topoi

Because these films’ circulation and reception in journalism coverage influenced their roles as sites of popular memory about 1960s activism, I follow my descriptions of these films with descriptions about the predominant themes present in news media reports and reviews of these films. This approach follows Beamish et al. (1995), who examined news media coverage of the Vietnam anti-war protest movement. These authors note that individual articles frequently described protesters as both “troop blaming” and as “troop supporting” in different instances. Thus, they concluded that journalistic coverage played an ideological role as patterns of “instances” emerged across newspaper articles to attribute particular meanings to protesters. Because different perspectives of activists and of films about activists often appear in the same news media report or review, my description of news media frames about activists is also organized around the different instances that emerge across national news media coverage attending to these films. Although different perspectives often appear in the same newspaper report, instances that convey similar messages across several texts reveal patterns of thought and convey particular meanings and understandings about how we should remember 1960s protest.

Patterns of instances across news media coverage also provide guidelines for audiences to interpret and evaluate the meaning of these films and of 1960s protests for contemporary civic life. For scholars of rhetoric, particular instances in news media coverage may be more aptly understood as topoi, or subjects for deliberation, which serve as the foundation for the invention and judgment of arguments. In her study of public spheres revolving around controversial literary works, Eberly (2000) traces recurring topoi within letters-to-the-editor written in response to professional literary criticism. She argues that the recurrence of particular topoi, as well as the way different writers associated or disassociated different topoi, elucidate how citizens “reading and writing 18 publicly about provocative novels, endowed fictional texts with the capacity to effect social and political changes” (p. 6). Unlike Eberly’s study, this dissertation does not address the discourses that can properly be called “public.” Given the market imperatives directing mainstream news media, journalistic reviews and coverage are more likely to represent the perspectives of advertisers or target audiences that make commercial media profitable. Thus, their professional goals of news media institutions are often at odds with the interests of groups who may seek to counter prevailing economic and political institutions.7 My dissertation does, however, share Eberly’s emphasis on the discursive processes by which texts become meaningful and relevant for publics. Eberly’s discussion of topoi bears some resemblance to Gitlin’s (1980) description of news frames; in both cases, the choices of selection and emphasis within texts constructed for widespread consumption lay a foundation for public deliberation about the role of popular culture in political life. Even though I am studying how professional media rather than citizens or publics generate discourses about these films, the recurrence of particular topoi in news reviews and news media coverage of these films create frameworks for widespread audiences to make sense of the popular memories constructed in film. By studying the topoi that emerge through mainstream media attention to films about 1960s protests, this dissertation will highlight how news media texts may direct public deliberation about the political and social roles of docudrama and documentary films.

My study of the topoi that emerge within news media reviews of films about 1960s protest highlights the rhetorical potential of journalistic framing. I believe that journalism texts often set a standard for what constitutes common sense in popular culture. Outside of the academic disciplines of communication and rhetoric, journalism norms of objectivity are often assumed. Debates about media bias in popular culture

19 revolve around the belief that journalists can, and should, provide neutral or balanced coverage of events. In other words, conventional doxa assumes that news media represent value free coverage of recent events. This presumption of journalistic objectivity gives journalism its rhetorical edge; the presumption of journalistic neutrality which rarely goes unquestioned naturalizes its discourses.

CHAPTER PREVIEW

In my analysis of the films under investigation for this dissertation, Mississippi Burning, Ghosts of Mississippi, Malcolm X, Panther, Berkeley in the Sixties, and The Weather Underground, I detected one overarching pattern threading these films together. Collectively, these films told the story of activism’s demise. As the following chapters elaborate, scenes featuring the deaths of key activists in the history of the civil rights and black power movements were pivotal to the plots of these films; likewise, documentaries about white student movements highlighted the sacrifices that 1960s activists made to pursue justice in the face of overwhelming state repression. Films about black and antiwar movements toward the end of the decade also emphasized activists’ feelings of rage and alienation toward mainstream society in the face of ongoing state supported brutality. As I explain in my conclusion, the patterns across these films put a pall over the future of social movement protest by suggesting that ultimately, activism is doomed.

Patterns across films ascribe the death of activism in popular culture; but they do not necessarily constitute the memory of 1960s activism in popular culture. Although the death of activism is inscribed by these films, these films provide different and sometimes competing messages about the role of political dissent. Indeed, these films did not present ideologically coherent messages about the role of 1960s activism, nor did they convey this history with similar stylistic devices. Just as these films created different messages about activism, reviewers wrote different evaluations of these films. Although 20 reviews of the same film were consistent with one another, reviews of different films were markedly different. Some films were praised highly; others were panned. Surprisingly, reviewers’ evaluations of these films did not coincide with the films’ ideological stances. I explain that rhetorical devices in these films of style, narrative framework, and ideological stance all functioned to establish the film’s meaning as a source of popular memory; the combination of these devices contributed to the popular memory of 1960s activism. By conferring, or denying legitimacy to these films as sources for remembering the past, secondary texts in mainstream journalism also contributed to the memories that counted as doxa in popular culture. Thus I argue that the patterns and contradictions across texts may do more to construct the meaning of 1960s activism than these patterns do alone.

I am centrally concerned with the construction of popular memory and the possibilities for counter-memories to have legitimacy in popular culture. Chapter One presents a review of the literature that has shaped my thinking about the rhetorical features of films and public memory, and the implications of those features for political hegemony. To understand the implications of popular memories of 1960s protest for contemporary political life, Chapter Two provides an account of the rhetorical perspectives on social movements and the history of social movement activism written by activists and historians. The accumulation of evidence from the historic record

elucidates the relationship between powerful institutions and bottom-up social movements under late capitalism. The political trajectory of the New Left coincides in many ways with the theoretical development of publics and social movements theory in the past several decades. Both New Left movements and publics theory emerged out an interest in the development of participatory democracy among inclusive publics. Movements shifted their focus over the course of the decade to increasingly

21 confrontational and sometimes destructive strategies to achieve their goals. Likewise, theorists began to question the possibilities of all inclusive publics and turned their focus, among other things, toward counterpublics. I argue that scholars interested in public deliberation and the possibilities for participatory democracy must understand the trajectory of social movement activism as a response to increasingly brutal and coercive efforts by state agencies to silence and repress political dissent. The rest of the chapters in this dissertation describe the rhetorical devices that constructed popular memories of 1960s activism in film and journalism reviews. Section Two describes films about the civil rights movement in the first half of the 1960s: Mississippi Burning and Ghosts of Mississippi. These films provided ideologically conservative narratives in which the deaths of civil rights activists provided the catalysts for white public officials to institute civil rights in the South. The conventional narratives of these films were complemented by conventional devices of Hollywood entertainment films. My analysis of these films demonstrates how these films navigated competing demands of dramatic Hollywood film and historical fidelity. In Chapter Three, I argue that Mississippi Burning used stylistic visual cues that purported to represent both the past and a Hollywood melodrama; although the film purported to represent the past, its narrative more closely followed Hollywood conventions of a cop action drama that did not bear semblance to events from the history of civil rights. These contradictions sparked controversy and debate in mainstream journalism reviews, and thereby opened a space for mainstream journalism to incorporate counter-memories in popular culture. Conversely, Ghosts of Missisippi did not provoke much debate or counter-memory in journalism reviews. In Chapter Four, I explain why Ghosts of Mississippi did not constitute a prominent source of popular memory. Although Ghosts of Mississippi provided a narrative framework similar to Mississippi Burning (and was as partial and

22 selective in its telling of events about the past), it did not provoke the kind of controversy that Mississippi Burning did because it had narrative fidelity to historic events. Section Three describes films about the Black Power Movement that emerged in the years following events that inspired civil rights films: Malcolm X and Panther. Unlike earlier civil rights films, Malcolm X and Panther advanced counter-hegemonic ideas about race relations and the role of activism in the history of social change. These films featured radical black activists who rallied black urban communities to organize for economic justice and self-defense. They also framed state authorities and federal agents as villains who menaced black communities and crippled Black Nationalist movements. In this section, I argue that these films’ stylistic devices and narrative structures were pivotal to these films’ ability to introduce counter-memories into popular culture. In Chapter Five, I explain that Malcolm X positioned radical ideas of the black leader within an ideologically conservative narrative and filmic structure. By framing Malcolm X in the context of prevailing doxa, Malcolm X invited reviewers to include Malcolm X in popular memory; indeed, film critics and reporters applauded Malcolm X as an important alternative to memories that framed Malcolm X and black struggle outside the doxa of mainstream culture. Several of these reviews and reports critiqued race relations and role of history in maintaining social inequities.

In Chapter Six, I explore what happens when ideologically challenging messages are framed in an unconventional filmic genre. The film featured in this chapter, Panther, blended generic conventions of entertainment and documentary film. Thus, this film represented a rhetorical hybrid. The narrative of the history of the Black Panther Party presented by this film also incorporated events that have little evidence from within the historic record with events that did. This film’s blending of entertainment and documentary film genres and narratives troubled prevailing beliefs about the distinction

23 between truth and fiction in popular culture. Unlike reviews of Malcolm X, mainstream journalists predominantly dismissed Panther as a fiction. Based on my analysis of the rhetorical devices and secondary sources of Malcolm X and Panther, I conclude that counter-hegemonic films that challenge mainstream ideology can attain legitimacy in popular culture by embracing mainstream conventions. By presenting controversial and unfamiliar messages about the history of racism in the United States within conventional narrative frameworks that reinforce dominant ideology, Malcolm X created a space for controversial ideas to become part of popular memory. Without such legitimacy, films with counter-hegemonic messages are unlikely to receive support from mainstream journalists; nor are these films likely to prompt journalists to include counter-memories in their reviews and reports. Panther failed to become part of popular memory because it neither conformed to established doxa or to mainstream film conventions.

Chapter Seven, which comprises the fourth section of this dissertation, addresses films that diverge from the docudramas about black activism explored in Sections Two and Three. These films, Berkeley in the Sixties and The Weather Underground, are conventional documentary films about white student and anti-war activism from the 1960s. Similar to films about civil rights in chapters two and three, these films engaged conventional rhetorical stances. Stylistic devices in these films followed the conventions of participatory documentary by which talking head interviews and archival footage constitute the primary verbal and visual evidence for the films’ claims. Similar to films about the Black Power movement, these films also posed challenges to prevailing ideology that positions radical activists as deviant. These films featured the voices of former activists who argued that white activists expanded free speech rights on college campuses throughout the nation and impeded the United States’ efforts to wage an unjust war in Vietnam. Although these films included the perspectives of critics of student

24 activism in the latter half of the 1960s, these films primarily urged audiences to share perspectives of activists. The stylistic devices in these films prompted reviewers to characterize these films as balanced, reasonable, and objective; however, they did not provoke critics to include counter-memories in their reviews. Instead, reviewers foregrounded the critics of activists in the films. The stylistic devices in these films functioned as objectivity codes that obscured these films’ partiality and enabled reviewers to blunt the films’ ideological challenge. My analysis suggests that conventional documentaries that engage the rhetorical stance of objectivity have limited potential to extend counter-memories in popular culture. The films’ purported representations of “truth” close spaces for deliberation and belie their own ideological positions.

My comparisons across films and their reception in mainstream news media indicate that popular memories emerge through rhetorical devices in both films and journalism reviews that legitimate particular films as sources of entertainment and as sources of knowledge about the past. The legitimacy of particular films as sources of historic information is established intertextually through filmic conventions and through secondary sources that encourage audiences to attribute historical relevance to the messages constructed by these films. A film’s legitimacy as a source of historical information is central to films’ ability to become part of popular memory, but it does not guarantee a film’s ability to circulate additional counter-memories in popular culture. Conventional narrative films circulate counter-hegemonic texts more broadly than counter-hegemonic narrative films or documentaries. This observation suggests that films must appeal to conventions of popular film and dominant ideology in order to insert counter-memories into popular culture. Thus, convention is a force for imagination. For a counter-memory to become popular, it must produce tensions and contradictions

25 between lived and cinematic experience, or between prevailing ideology and the counter- memories. These tensions prompt the inclusion of counter-memories that rarely gain a hearing within popular media into popular culture. The counter-memories that emerged in journalism reviews of Mississippi Burning and Malcolm X also point to the counter- hegemonic potential of mainstream journalism reviews of popular film. Films might not advance controversial claims themselves, but the provoke controversy and open spaces for deliberation about the past elsewhere in popular media. Thus, the counter-hegemonic potential of films might not actually rest in the films themselves, but in the controversies that they provoke.

26 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

1Reiner gave this statement to film critic Joel Siegel during a press junket in 1996 for his film, Ghosts of Mississippi (Vargas, 1996, online archives).

2For examples, see Cooper et al., 2005; Gibson, 2005; Sawyer, 2005; and McLaughlin, 2005. 3Rolling Stone magazine rates Buffalo Springfield’s 1967 song, “For What It’s Worth” as the 63rd greatest song of all time. See www.rollingstone.com/news/story/_/id/6595908/buffalospringfield.

4McGee (1990) argues that no single text constitutes the common sense of contemporary culture; rather, fragments of texts have come to stand in place of any homogenous, common sense of our culture. Since it is up to individuals to assemble fragments of discourse they are presented with, McGee concludes that consumers of discourse, not speakers or writers, make meaning of popular discourse (p. 287). 5These newspapers are: The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, The Baltimore Sun,

The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, The Buffalo News, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The Columbus Dispatch, Daily News, The Denver Post, The Hartford Courant, The Houston Chronicle, The Los Angeles Times, The Miami Herald, The New York Times, Newsday, The Omaha World Herald, The Plain Dealer, The San Diego Union-Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Times, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The St. Petersburg Times, The Star Tribune, The Times-Picayune, The Tampa Tribune, The Times-Picayune, USA Today, and The Washington Post. 6For instance, my study of Ghosts of Mississippi will include an analysis of nineteen news media reviews and seven interviews that the films’ leading actors gave to reporters on national television news programs.

27 7My interest in the circulation of discourses and their implications for publics should not be confused with Warner’s (2002). According to Warner, the circulation of discourse constitutes the public arena because the act of addressing a public brings the public into being (p. 90). Thus, he concludes that the world is made up of the circulation of cross referencing discourse (p. 94). Although I agree that the scene of circulation presupposes the idea of a public invested in shared concerns and interests, I do not believe that the scene of circulation constitutes the public. A narrow public that shares the interests of the commercial marketplace, (and is invested in liberal capitalism) is predominantly reflected in the discourses produced by popular culture. To make arguments about the relationship between alternative publics and the circulation of discourses, I would look outside of the landscape of commercial media toward other sites of circulation, including spoken and vernacular discourses that don’t circulate in the ways that written discourses, the focus of much of Warner’s work, do. I would also look toward sites that provide opportunities for debate and deliberation among its members. Finally, as my interest in social movements attests, I would look for forums in which debate and deliberation produce not only recognition of shared interests, but the foundation for people to act collective to reach a common goal.

28 SECTION ONE

POPULAR CULTURE AND CONTENTIOUS PUBLICS

29 CHAPTER ONE

THE RHETORIC OF FILM, MEMORY, AND TRUTH

Scholarly debates about the rhetorical role of truth, power, and memory in popular culture point to the ways that power relations are mediated in popular culture. This chapter reviews the literature on the rhetoric of publicity, film, power, memory, and truth. This literature review describes the scholarship that has informed my own position, the theoretical controversies about these concepts, and my own positions about the rhetorical nature of film, truth, and memory. I argue that popular culture is a site of popular memory; as such, it represents a source of contestation between competing publics.

PUBLICITY AND PUBLICS

Media messages, including popular memories, play a role in how audiences think about public life and their role as citizens in the United States. Schudson (1992) explains that television news events, such as the Watergate committee hearings and the Kennedy assassinations, create “cultural flashpoints,” which enjoin audiences “to care about a relation to public discourse and public action” (p. 66). It is only when publics recognize themselves as such that they are able to deliberate effectively about their common interests, and media convey information that helps audiences identify their collective interests and that encourage audiences to imagine themselves as a collective. According to some scholars, the structural features of mass media have created conditions for public life. Warner (2002) argues that publics are constituted by attention to widely distributed texts. “The idea of texts that can be picked up at different times and in different places by otherwise unrelated people,” enables us to imagine “a public as an entity that embraces all the users of that text, whoever they might be” Warner’s

30 consideration of publics as entities that can be imagined through engaging mass media texts resonates with Anderson’s (1983) observation that news media coverage itself makes it possible for audience members to imagine themselves as members of a public

interested in common issues.1 According to Warner and Anderson, by witnessing others read the same texts at relatively the same time, the mass media become integral to the public’s formation. As Dayan and Katz (1992) have argued in their discussion of media events, more recent forms of mass media, including television, also make it possible for individuals to consider themselves in relation to a widespread constituency

(p. 138).2 Mass dissemination of television news programming, newspaper articles, and news magazines enables readers to imagine a public observing the same texts at approximately the same time. The idea that we can locate publics textually may describe how people perceive collective life in cultures saturated by the commercial mass media; however, scholarship examining the possibilities for imaging the public through contemporary forms of mass media has forgone Habermas’ (1996) early project of exploring the limitations and possibilities for achieving democratic public life. Models of publics that privilege dissemination over deliberation as the constitutive feature of public life collapse publicity and the public. Warner’s (2002) thesis suggests that publicity and the public sphere are one when a public is dominated by commercial interests. Thus, he suggests that we

cannot consider common interests outside of the spectacle of mass media. Instead of promoting a model of public life that features open deliberation, Warner’s emphasis on an indeterminate, unlocatable public that may be imagined through mass media texts overlooks considerations of participatory democracy in favor of models of public life that may be reasonably understood within the context of the commercial mass media.

31 A similar thesis is advanced by DeLuca and Peeples (2002) who argue that the model of the public sphere needs to be adapted to include a notion of the “public screen” in which political actors create public issues through their visual spectacles that grant media access. Scholarship that focuses on commercial media as a site for the formation of public life or of publics is misguided, in my view, when it fails to consider the implications of principles of framing and selection that shape how political actors become representative of a public. By foregoing critical observations about contemporary publics, such scholarship eschews the ideals social equality and democratic government. Instead of presuming that that popular culture constitutes the public realm, media and rhetoric scholars interested in causes of social justice and democracy need to explore how it is that particular actors come to represent the culture-at-large in commercial media, and who is excluded from representation in that process.

FILMS AS RHETORICAL TEXTS

I have premised this dissertation on the notion that commercial media provide audiences with messages that they can use to make meaning of their experiences that take place outside of popular culture. Burke (1941/1967) argues that all texts in popular culture provide audiences with “equipment for living.” Works of art may compel readers (or viewers) when these texts are representative of common experiences within the broader social structure in which these readers and viewers live. Thus, literary or artistic endeavors, indeed, all texts, provide strategies that enable readers or viewers to assess situations, develop attitudes about them, and identify socially appropriate strategies for responding to them (in Brummett, 2001, pp. 758-760). The rhetorical role of popular culture, then, may be found in popular culture’s ability to guide audiences’ experiences and understandings of the world in which they live. Of particular interest to me in this dissertation is the rhetorical function of documentary and Hollywood entertainment film. 32 In the following section I explain the rhetorical perspectives scholars have taken to explain the social function of documentary and Hollywood entertainment films.

The rhetoric of documentary film

Literature on the persuasive function of documentary films suggests that documentary films function rhetorically as they reflect upon contemporary social issues. Rhetoric scholars Anderson and Benson (1991) and Dow (2004) define documentaries as social commentaries.3 Film scholars also attest to film’s instrumental rhetorical purpose. According to Nichols (1991), documentary films are distinguished from entertainment films by their instrumental rhetorical purpose. He writes, “[T]here is urgency to the category of documentary film that isn’t as marked in fiction” and concludes that, unlike fictional film, “words in documentaries are preludes to action” (p. 110). Plantinga (1997) concurs that nonfiction films are unique “instruments of action” (p. 45). These scholars suggest that the relationship between the subject matter addressed in documentaries and historical reality outside of film is central to understanding how documentaries function rhetorically. Documentaries have salience to a world that is more tangible or real than the world of film itself, and films’ relationship to lived human experience outside of viewing films may propel audiences to belief or action. Although Nichols and Plantinga distinquish “fiction” films from “non-fiction” films, I prefer to distinguish films as either “documentary” or “entertainment” films because the distinction between fiction and non-fiction tends to belie the rhetorical nature of both filmic genres. The distinction between “fiction” and “non-fiction” suggests that one genre represents an objective reality and that the other has no relevance for lived experience outside of film. As several filmmakers and scholars (including Nichols) attest, both documentaries and entertainment films select and frame content to construct a particular world view for audiences. Nichols (1991) characterizes documentary film as 33 “a fiction unlike any other” (p. 110). Likewise, documentary filmmaker Grierson referred to documentaries as “the creative treatment of actuality” and documentary filmmaker Wiseman described them as “reality fictions.”4 Anderson and Benson (1991) explain that the process of constructing any text into a recognizable and meaningful message necessarily imposes some form onto the social actuality that the film depicts (p. 1). Benson (1980) also remarks that the formal composition of film and content constitute the rhetorical structures that establish meaning to a film. Since documentaries are mediated representations of historic reality, they are necessarily partial and incomplete representations of actuality or “real life.” Benson (1980) states that documentaries rely on historical realism, but do not necessarily provide accurate accounts of events. He urges critics to attend to the ways in which behaviors depicted in documentary film are contextualized by filmmakers, not within the context in which they occurred (p. 253). Plantinga’s assessment of documentaries’ relationship to the real reflects a rhetorical approach to the study of documentary film. Plantinga (1997) adds that images are subject to same misrepresentations that complicate any evidence. Thus, audiences and film critics “must approach the indexical bond between a moving image and a profilmic scene with skepticism about what it shows or proves” (p. 64). For Plantinga, judgment is based on textual cues within documentary films and intertextual cues that convince audience that documentaries have social significance. Rosteck (1994) and Dow (2004) elucidate the rhetorical strategies by which documentary texts make the partial and selective realities they depict appear natural or self-evident. According to Rosteck, the convention of documentary films is a powerful signifier lending legitimacy to the film as a source of historical truth (p. 183). Dow (2004) contributes to the discussion of documentaries’ rhetorical role by describing the ideological effects of documentary

34 convention. She argues that “codes of objectivity” in television documentaries obscure films’ partiality (p. 59). Codes of objectivity, including the voice of God narration style and commentary by at least two persons with different points of view give the impression that the film’s portrayal of events provides a commonsensical and impartial representation of social life (p. 59). This review of literature on the rhetorical implications of documentary film indicates that documentary films function rhetorically when they purport to represent a world that exists outside of films themselves. As reflections of real world problems and as suggestions for possible solutions, documentaries solidify particular world views and encourage people to respond to those views in specific ways.

The rhetoric of entertainment film

In contrast to scholars of documentary film, scholars of Hollywood entertainment film indicate that films do not have to purport to represent historical reality to have rhetorical significance. Although the perspectives offered by these film critics fundamentally depart from one another, they commonly suggest that the structure of films’ narratives and their place within the cultural milieu have relevance for contemporary political and social relations. Brummett (1991) argues that films “rhetorically manage the meanings by which agents approach particular problems” (p. 125). For Brummett, the connections between films’ formal construction and the patterns of experiences that appear across texts in social life give films a rhetorical dimension (p. 125).5 By contrast, Rushing and Frentz (1980, 2000) and Frentz and Rushing (2002) suggest that films respond to political and social tensions by tapping into enduring psychic structures of human thought. Rather than equip people to engage the world, Rushing and Frentz contend that films reveal the collective unconscious and contemporary social tensions that audiences rarely acknowledge consciously.6 35 Alternatively, other scholars characterize formal structures in films themselves as expressions of an ideological system. Scholars including Jameson (1979), Ryan and Kellner (1991) and Lipsitz (1990), argue that films function ideologically as they manage and contain social conflicts and anxieties. Social theorists Ryan and Kellner (1991) assert that films make rhetorical arguments as they make the world views that they represent appear natural and inevitable. They also argue that films merit attention as rhetorical documents for what their narratives reveal about contemporary social life. According to Ryan and Kellner (1991), cinematic narratives “transcode the discourse of social life” and thereby reflect the political climates in which they emerge (pp. 8-10). For fictional narratives to function rhetorically, plot and character development must reflect contemporary social circumstances and anxieties. Goodnight (1995) argues that two films adapted from popular novels during the early 1990s, The Firm and Jurassic Park, capitalize on particular fears and anxieties about public life. For Goodnight, anxieties expressed in these films have social consequences because these narratives suppress opportunities for reflection about the lack of public spaces during the 1990s and promote disaffection from public life as mass entertainment. As Goodnight attests, films exist within a cultural and political system; thus, they are expressions of conflict and tension within that system.

Jameson (1979) and Lipsitz (1990) suggest that as films express ideological

content, they have implications for social hegemony. Jameson argues that films, indeed all contemporary works of art, “have as their underlying impulse our deepest fantasies about the nature of social life, both as we live it now and as we feel in our bones it ought rather to be lived” (p. 141). He concludes that narratives within films offer “fantasy bribes” or imaginary solutions for repressive social conditions that exist outside of the film’s narrative (p. 141). By offering imaginary solutions for existing social problems,

36 popular films contain challenges to prevailing social relations. Lipsitz (1990) also acknowledges that generalized myths in films draw their social power from ways in which they are positioned within particular social circumstances (p. 170). Unlike Jameson, Lipsitz (1990) maintains that films do not necessarily contain social conflict. Instead, they reflect the contested nature of political discourse itself (p. 170). Because I am centrally interested in the ability for social movements to intervene in established hierarchies of power, I prefer this latter perspective offered by ideology film critics. I believe that films are sites of struggle over meaning. While they predominantly reflect prevailing ideology, they also reflect the social tensions that emerge from the contradictions between that ideology and ordinary peoples’ lived experiences. Literatures on political hegemony and collective memory help me set up the foundations that shape my perspective on the rhetorical role of films that make meaning of the past.

POLITICAL HEGEMONY

Although I focus on the rhetoric of film and popular culture in this dissertation, I also explore the rhetorical discourses about truth and memory in popular culture. I argue that these discourses shape popular meaning about 1960s activism and have implications for power relations in the United States at present. Representations of 1960s activism in popular culture give cultural meaning to contentious civic engagement. In this era

dominated by images of corporate and private individualism, these representations have the potential to provide alternative models of human engagement that are based on collective goals and mutual concern for human equality. Such representations of activism also have the potential to encourage audience members subordinated by prevailing social hierarchies to join organizations that challenge the prevailing institutions that privilege elites.

37 As a scholar of commercial media, however, I also recognize that the social and political climate in which these messages are produced delimit the possibilities for witnessing texts that celebrate contentious collective activism. The variety of messages commercial media may construct about social movement activism is also constrained by the corporate media structure that produces these texts. McChesney (1999) argues that financial imperatives guide commercial media; consequently, messages that challenge corporate life and the ideals of capitalism are unlikely to receive widespread distribution or support from the media industry.

The control of media by wealthy elites helps to explain why many people in the United States adhere to positions that don’t serve their economic interests, or why people who do not benefit from the widening economic gap in this country (including many people of color, women, and other minorities) have not demanded structural changes in large numbers. Many rhetoric and media scholars find Antonio Gramsci’s model of hegemony to be a useful heuristic for explaining the relationship between popular culture and the persistence of unequal power relations in Western nations. Gitlin (1980) explains that Gramsci recognized that

Those who rule the dominant institutions secure their power in large measure directly and indirectly by impressing their definitions of the situation upon those they rule and, if not usurping the whole of ideological space, still significantly limiting what is thought throughout society. (p. 10, in Gitlin) Because elites have greater access to the resources for producing popular texts, commercial media are more likely to highlight the perspectives of elites. Rhetoric scholars including Dow (1996) and Cloud (1996), argue that the delimited world view offered by popular media encourage audiences to view the ideology of the dominant class as a reflection of the world at large, or as the full range of human experiences in a given social milieu. When they encourage audiences to perceive the perspectives of elites as

38 the common sense of the entire culture, commercial media serve the hegemony of the prevailing political system.

POPULAR MEMORY

Many social and rhetorical critics argue that the collective memories of a culture play a significant role in maintaining hegemonic relations. The broader field of collective memory scholarship attends to the ways in which memories may be shared through audience’s collective engagement with particular texts. Halbwachs (1950) coined the phrase “collective memory” to refer to the ways in which social norms and institutions are indistinguishable from individual memories (p. 76). Fentress and Wickham (1992) extend Halbwachs’ implications for mass media by noting that contemporary forms of public communication play a strong role in shaping individual memories in the present. They argue that particular events in the news media provoke “flashbulb memories” which prompt audience members to talk to one another about the news media (p. 8).

Unlike Halbwachs (1950) and Fentress and Wickham (1992), who suggest that collective memory may determine the memories of individuals, I do not believe that we can infer individual memories from the representations of the past depicted by mass media. Nor do I believe that commercially mediated representations of the past can be said to constitute the memories of publics and individuals who observe them. Thus, I use the term “popular memory” to identify those texts which construct for audiences a representation of the past that may be shared collectively, but don’t necessarily represent the memory of the individuals who constitute a culture. Rather than suggest that texts that reference the past are uniformly remembered by the individuals who engage them, I explore how representations of the past recur across sites of memory in popular culture and invite, although they do not guarantee, audiences to draw particular meanings from these memories. Texts in popular culture are the predominant lieux de memorie in the 39 modern era. According to Nora (1989), lieux de memorie or sites of memory have become an obsession in modern society. He argues that these collective, visible remains of the past, including “remains, testimonies, documents, images, speeches, any visible signs of what has been” (p. 13) have become central to contemporary society because traditional memories have disappeared from the terrain of modern life. Popular memories may be shared broadly; thus, they play a key role in shaping how contemporary media audiences link themselves to a common past. Collective memory scholarship asserts that memory sites say more about contemporary social life than they do about the past. As Kammen (1991) argues, “[S]ocieties…reconstruct their pasts…with needs of contemporary culture clearly in mind─manipulating the past in order to mold the present.” (p. 3). Many rhetorical critics argue that representations of the past resolve contemporary social conflicts by reasserting the legitimacy of prevailing power relations. Scholars have attributed this role to collective memory in disparate artifacts including memorial structures (Bodnar, 1992; Ehrenhaus, 1989; Kammen, 1991), public address (Browne, 1993; Browne, 1999; Dionisopolous & Goldzwig 1992), and film (Biesecker, 2002; Ehrenhaus, 2001; Owens, 2002).7

Scholars who have theorized films as sources of collective memory suggest that films symbolically resolve social tensions by constructing images of shared national

identity. Sefcovic (2002) argues that significant films are sources of cultural memory because they enact and disseminate particular cultural values (p. 330). Specifically Sefcovic describes how two films about union struggles produced in 1954, On the Waterfront, and Salt of the Earth express differing philosophies about the tensions between individualism and community in American identity. Sturken (1997) suggests that a string of films about the Vietnam War during the late 1980s and early 1990s also

40 served to provide national closure for a war that had badly damaged the collective psyche and national resolve. More recently, several scholars have argued that the 1998 film Saving Private Ryan reillusioned national identity and provided moral justification for war in the wake of the Vietnam syndrome. (See Biesecker, 2002; Ehrenhaus, 2001;

Hasian, 2001.8) Hasian and Shugart (2001) explain that the film Indochine was an allegory for post-colonial relations between France and Vietnam after the Vietnam War that reflects upon the needs of contemporary audiences struggling to grapple with the legacy of post-colonial relations (p. 329). Film scholars have also pointed to the ways in which entertainment films have negotiated racial conflicts in the United States’ recent past. In their analyses of films about the civil rights movement, Madison (1999) and Brinson (1995) maintain that recent films about civil rights symbolically restore white hegemony. Madison argues that recent films about race symbolically reassert the subordination of blacks by relegating them to the background of stories about their own struggles. Brinson (1995) asserts that the 1988 film Mississippi Burning communicates the myth of white superiority to resolve cultural tensions about the authority of the white power structure in the late 1980s. For these scholars, films that purport to represent events from the past are significant, not only because they attribute particular meanings to the past to resolve contemporary conflicts, but because they engage the past in order to reframe contemporary understandings about political struggle and conflict; by providing national closure for traumatic conflicts at home and abroad, memories constructed by Hollywood direct attention away from the structures of power operating in the United States that have maintained social and economic hierarchies throughout its history.

POPULAR MEMORY AND POLITICAL POWER

The cultural hegemony of wealthy elites portends weak publics and limited deliberation among groups speaking outside the spheres of commercial media, for it 41 constrains possibilities for critical deliberation about problems and injustices that result from unequal social relations. The control of the common sense of a culture is a rhetorical concern that dates back to Greece during the fourth century BC, where Isocrates counseled would-be orators in attend to the common sense or doxa of the community. Poulakos (2001) notes that doxa is commonly translated as opinion, but he also indicates that doxa more specifically referred to the accepted norms and beliefs of the society (p. 69). According to Poulakos, Isocrates believed that orators could secure new beliefs from an audience if they related new beliefs to the community’s accepted beliefs and traditions (p. 69). Poulakos also notes that Isocrates viewed experience from

the past as a rich resource for developing conclusions about the future (p. 72).9 In my view, the concepts of experience and doxa are closely related; experiences with the past function as resources for shaping doxa, and shape the possibilities for public deliberation about contemporary social issues. As a preeminent resource for experiencing events from the past, popular media informs popular opinion about the past; consequently, popular media inform possibilities for deliberating about future courses of action as well. Although I do not disagree that popular media are controlled by and predominantly reflect the interests of dominant (predominantly white, wealthy, male) segments of society, texts about activism suggest that popular media do not automatically reflect the interests of dominant social groups in any absolute way. Many social movements of the 1960s struggled against bourgeois domination on behalf of marginalized people: people of color, poor people, and women. Thus, there is some kernel of resistance to elite domination of popular culture, at least in texts that recall 1960s activism. Rather than view hegemony as a total bourgeois domination of the common thought of a culture, I conclude that popular culture is a site of struggle over

42 doxa between dominant groups and ordinary people who lack immediate resources to political power.10

I argue that dominant leaders are able to maintain their legitimacy with subordinate classes, at least in part, because texts in popular culture have relevance to the audiences who engage them. To achieve consent from the broader segments of the population, the dominant culture must make cultural texts commensurable with the experiences of some of the marginalized groups who consume them. This perspective accords with that of other scholars, such as Lears (1985) and Lipsitz (1990). Lipsitz declares that hegemony “is not just imposed on society from the top; it is struggled for from below” (p. 16). Popular memory, then represents a subset of doxa that texts struggle over by inviting audiences to recall the past in particular ways. While mainstream media tend to reflect the beliefs and opinions of dominant groups, people in subordinate positions of power may participate in the construction of popular texts in order to intervene in prevailing doxa. My position complements Owens’ (2002), who argues that elements of conflict in films about events from the past also expose challenges to the social order and shifts in hegemonic relations. In her analysis of Saving Private Ryan, Owens points to the ways in which the film simultaneously reflects ideologically conservative longings for a national identity based on white masculine power and the contradictions and ruptures within that ideology cased by the legacy of the Vietnam War. She concludes that the “full measure of horror” depicted in the film destabilizes the film’s ideological claims to a “just war” (p. 274). Owens might share her position on the hegemonic implications of film with film scholar Winn (2001), who argues that the 1995 film Malcolm X revealed both elements of dominant ideology and ruptures within that ideology (p. 464). For Owens and Winn, contradictions within Hollywood films reflect the outcomes of political and social struggle.

43 Other scholars point to the ways in which different cultural forms represent the interests of different, and often oppositional groups. Bodnar (1992) distinguishes “official” from “vernacular” expressions that contribute to memory. In contrast to official memory, which “reduces the power of competing interests that threaten patriotic sentiments,” vernacular culture “represents how people react to the actions of their leaders” (p. 8). Sturken (1997) notes the distinction between history, “a narrative that has in some way been sanctioned or valorized by institutional frameworks or publishing enterprises” and memories that are “asserted specifically outside of or in response to historical narratives (p. 4). Along a similar vein, Lipsitz (1990) distinguishes memory and counter-memory. While memories represent “a story-telling that leaves history to the oppressor, counter-memories constitute “a way of remembering and forgetting that starts with the local, the immediate, and the personal …[and] forces revision of existing histories by supplying new perspectives about the past” (p. 2). Representations of conflicts from the past in popular culture, including commercial media, indicate that people immersed in social struggle have reached back to the past to call forth forgotten insights and solutions. Lipsitz (1990) argues that “cultural forms create conditions of possibility, they expand the present by informing it with memories of the past and hopes for the future” (p. 16). But Lipsitz is not utopian about the possibilities for popular memory. He concludes that memories perpetuated by commercial media “also engender accommodation with prevailing power realities, separating art from life, and internalizing the dominant culture’s norms and values as necessary and inevitable” (p. 16). Thus, popular memories contain countervailing tendencies. While popular memories predominantly elicit a memory in keeping with the prevailing social order, they also may elicit an alternate, or counter-memory that challenges that order.

44 The mingling of representations of the past that have been institutionally sanctioned and those that have emerged from local, personal experiences of groups subordinated by those institutions suggests that recollections of the past in popular culture are never complete or fully representative of the population at large. Thus, commercial media, a predominant source of popular memory, provide spaces for memory and counter-memory and make available their competing claims on the past. Sturken (1997) notes that memories may inform us of “the stakes held by individuals and institutions in attributing meaning to the past” (p. 9). Thus, she notes that memories may be invoked strategically for political ends. Paradoxically, Sturken also argues that cultural memory and history are “entangled rather than oppositional” (p. 5). Because the boundaries between history and memory are typically so fluid, she reasons that it “may be futile to maintain a distinction between them” (5). For Sturken, then, the political implications of cultural memory are unclear. While she notes that they may be employed for political ends, she also emphasizes that cultural memories are not politically prescribed.

In contrast to Sturken, I argue that it is important to distinguish memory from counter-memory or official history from vernacular representations of the past. Because popular memory sites are battlegrounds for political struggles at present, they are not neutral texts. As this dissertation will elucidate, popular memories legitimate the perspectives of particular groups and obscure the views of others. This dissertation

elucidates the rhetorical strategies through which popular culture negotiates the tension between memory and counter-memory. Identification of these strategies highlights the possibilities for counter-memories to become part of popular culture and delineates the conditions in which they may do so. The presence of counter-memories in popular culture, including memories of 1960s activists, transfigures popular culture’s support for the prevailing political order. Alternatively, many of the framings of these counter-

45 memories within film and journalism also neutralize the challenge counter-memories pose to the establishment and restore legitimacy to the dominant political system.

THE RHETORICAL IMPLICATIONS OF TRUTH CLAIMS

The concept of truth is central to the rhetorical construction of popular memory because it is the legitimating frame that gives particular memories ideological weight. Rhetorical appeals to truth in popular media legitimate particular representations as significant cultural memories and block alternative representations of the past from establishing a position as credible memories in popular culture. Critical theorists in rhetoric and social theory have questioned notions of truth. Many scholars of mass media and rhetoric have convincingly argued that the distinctions between “truth” and “fiction” are not as transparent or objective as Enlightenment thought has suggested.11 Several scholars have also suggested that the distinction between “real life” and “media” is moot because the media are as much a part of our reality as experience external to that media.12 For critics of ideology, claims of truth frequently represent a truth that is partial. As an alternative to the concept of absolute truth, Hartsock (1983) advocates standpoint epistemology, or the position that particular class and subject positions shape individuals’ own understandings of reality. Thus, she suggests that scholars interested in questions of truth consider in whose interests particular truth claims are made and whose realities stand in for the truth of an entire society. While ideology scholars locate interests and truths in material relations, post-Marxist scholarship locates truth in the production of discourse and culture. Foucault (1980) describes truth as a category of discourse that is an effect of power. He writes that knowledge or truth claims are produced by the workings of power (p. 131) which he locates in the production of knowledge. Foucault concludes that knowledge and power continually intersect or overlap in discursive practice. Despite their marked differences, Marxist and post-Marxist scholars agree that the status of truth 46 is constructed through relations of power. Concomitantly, the individuals or texts that establish the particular events and ideas as true also construct and maintain social relations. Recently, social theorist Eagleton (2003) has called for a relegitimation of truth claims, and has argued that rejection of truth claims as ruling class mystifications or attention to truths as relative to specific viewpoints does not always make sense or resolve social conflicts. Eagleton asserts that truths can be discovered by argument, evidence, experiment, and investigation. He acknowledges that much of what is taken as true may turn out to be false, but insists that what is not true for some people can not be true for others (pp. 107-109). Most of Eagleton’s examples focus on claims of fact. For example, he asserts that it “cannot be raining in a particular part of the world” only from his particular viewpoint (p. 109). I share Eagleton’s concern over the dismissal of truth claims at the stasis of fact because these claims form the basis for public judgment regarding the social justice of particular events and decisions. Indeed, the accumulation of evidence about the past from a collection of sources, government documents, personal testimony, and photographic recordings is important to determine how events have transpired, and whether or not particular individuals have wielded excessive force to oppress others.

I would also add that truth claims function rhetorically. Certainly, references to a particular recording of an event as “the truth” legitimates particular perspectives as natural, inevitable, or superior to others. Truth claims should be evaluated, not only according to whose interests are advanced by particular truth claims, but also according to the verifiability of such truth claims within the broader historic record. Because claims to truth call for consensus and agreement, they often shut down critical deliberation and the search for additional evidence about the past. The search for truth is a necessary step

47 in the struggle for social change and justice, but questions about what counts as truth should remain open to deliberation and critical interrogation. In this dissertation, I focus on films and journalism reviews of films as sites of popular memory where the struggle for political hegemony takes place over the meanings of a real or “true” past. Power relations are mediated in popular culture, in part, by rhetorical devices that frame particular messages in popular culture as true or real representations of the past. I argue that popular memories are constructed, not only through the construction of particular texts, but through the circulation of particular messages about the past in popular culture. To explain how films function rhetorically, I interpret the narratives, and editing techniques that create meaning about activism. I also examine media frames across journalism texts to understand how secondary sources circulated particular meanings generated by films, and to understand how filmic genres met expectations of mainstream film critics. Through my analysis of both filmic devices and news media framings, I assess the ways in which filmic conventions of entertainment and documentary films help to construct popular memories of activism.

In Sections Two and Three, I suggest that films about civil rights acquired status as sources of popular memory by rhetorically managing the tensions created by the imperatives of documentary films and entertainment films. These films adopted both generic narratives that appeal to mainstream audiences and stylistic devices that established films as sources of historical information. In Section Four, I explain how documentary films that engaged codes of objectivity to construct meaning about the past had a more limited rhetorical role in popular culture. Because their status as objective sources of information was uncontested, documentaries did not prompt debate and deliberation about the past; I could be said that they were just “too true.” Alternatively, films that blended narrative genres of popular entertainment films with stylistic devices

48 of documentary films created ideological contradictions. Those contradictions propelled counter-memories into popular culture, and thereby reframed established doxa about the past.

49 NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE

1For instance, Benedict Anderson has argued that the emergence of novels and newspapers contributed to the formation of national identity by enabling readers to imagine themselves as members of a widespread community. Writing from a communication studies perspective, John Durham Peters also argues that the public emerges through its mediated representation. 2For example, Dayan and Elihu Katz argue that the practice of witnessing televised events, such as the Academy Awards and the Watergate hearings, in concert with individuals throughout the United States unite the audience as members of a widespread community.

3According to Anderson and Benson (1991), documentaries are “social documents that speak to us about difficult public matters” (p. 3). 4Anderson and Benson (1991) cite Grierson and Wiseman in their history of the controversy surrounding Wiseman’s () documentary Titicut Follies (pp. 1-2). 5Brummett (1991) describes films as homologies, or “formal linkages across messages, media, and content” that parallel “patterns of experience that appears across texts in social life and popular culture” (p. 125). A homological interpretation of films directs critics to understand narrative structures in films as significant, not for the

particular issues featured in the film’s narrative, but for the film’s reflection of broader human experiences depicted in the relationships among characters and plot development (p. 110). 6Rushing and Frentz (1980) also eschew the immediate subject matter depicted in films for the archetypes, or “enduring structures of thought” that films evoke (p. 106). Rushing (1999) Rushing and Frentz (1980, 2000) and Frentz and Rushing (2002) argue

50 that films perpetuate and transform enduring cultural and archetypal myths to respond to developments in human thought and technology. By incorporating myth into films about contemporary themes, films appropriate archetypal imagery for rhetorical purposes.

7In contrast to scholarship that uncovers the prevailing power structures or ideological frameworks evoked within public memory, several scholars have reinforced the unifying function of collective memory (Dickinson, 1997; Jorgensen-Earp & Lanzilotti, 1988) or have highlighted the multiple meanings that may be taken from collective memory artifacts (Blair, Jeppseon, & Pucci, 1991; Hasian 2001, Hubbard & Hasian, 1998, Sturken, 1998). Scholarship that focuses solely on the processes by which audiences perceive social unity through shared memory obscures critical understandings of the ways that references to the past support the interests of dominant social groups. Conversely, scholarship that emphasizes the multiple meanings that may be attributed to texts overlooks the frames that make particular texts intelligible for audiences.

8Although Hasian (2001) suggests that Saving Private Ryan contained polysemic and polyvalent dimensions allowing viewers to read the film in divergent ways, he concludes his essay by suggesting that the majority of viewers celebrated the film as an illustration of America’s resolve in fighting the “Good War” (p. 355). For the purposes of this literature review, the debates about the film that emerge across these articles are submerged by their shared understanding that the film had greater implications for understanding the present than it did for understanding the United States’ role in World War II or the Holocaust. 9Poulakos cites Isocrates’ work in Areopagiticus, “Through experience one can reach conclusions on the basis of past events” (p. 75, Poulakos, p. 72); and in Demonicus, “In your deliberations, let the past be an exemploar for the future; for the unknown may be soonest discerned by reference to the known” (p. 34, Poulakos, p. 72).

51 10Most scholars theorizing hegemony seem to agree that popular media adapt representations of social life for the audiences who consume them, the implications of shifts in the prevailing ideology of popular culture are less certain. In the field of rhetoric, Condit (1994) suggests it is possible for commercial media to play an emancipatory role for subordinated audiences. According to Condit, texts in popular culture today reflect a process of negotiation, or concordance between contested interest groups. Other scholars exploring ideologies within popular culture and political speech disagree. Rhetoric scholars Cloud (1996) and Murphy (1992) suggest that dominant groups may allow reform in the representation of marginal groups, but ultimately preserve the legitimacy of the prevailing social order. I argue that shifts in the prevailing doxa elicited in popular texts carry potential to open greater spaces in popular culture for critical questioning of dominant groups; however, I part with Condit insofar as I do not view the shifts as a concordance between competing publics. Instead, I argue that subordinate groups shift prevailing doxa by drawing attention to contradictions within the dominant ideology.

11The view that reality is socially constructed through language, most notably advanced by Berger and Luckman (1966) rests on the premise that versions of reality are the results of communication, and not on reflections of objective truth. Likewise, Scott (1967) argues that truth is not fixed but created moment by moment (p. 17). For Scott,

the search for truth represents human efforts to make moral decision in an inherently uncertain world (p. 16). Following from Scott’s assertion that rhetoric is epistemic, several rhetorical scholars have argued that even a scientific community’s version of reality depends upon rhetoric. See, for instance, Weimer (1977) and Overington (1977) for seminal essays in the rhetoric of inquiry.

52 12Baudrillard (1988) eschews the idea of representation because reality itself is inaccessible in the absence of images (p. 27-28). Scholars in the field of rhetoric who trouble the distinction between mediated representation and a reality external to that representation include Brummett (1991, p. xvii) and Dow (1996, p. 5).

53 Chapter Two

Publics, counter-publics and the trajectory of 1960s social movements

The scholarly literature on publics theory and on the history of New Left activism during the 1960s suggests that progressive social change for human rights depends on the ability of contentious publics to organize and challenge prevailing institutions. The democratic goals and ideals envisioned by 1960s activists who constituted the New Left resonate with scholarship theorizing publics and counterpublics. Thus, the history of New Left activism elucidates how social movements have sought to enact publics that mirror models of public life illuminated by scholars over the past several decades. The New Left’s trajectory over the course of the decade also illustrates the limitations and possibilities for realizing democratic public spheres in the United States during the latter half of the twentieth century. Rhetorical scholarship has yet to fully attend to the role of violence and confrontation in the rhetoric of social movement protest and the process of social change in the United States. While rhetorical scholarship has featured the role of deliberation and argument as central to the welfare of democratic life in the United States, it has not fully explored the social, political, and economic conditions that have delimited the efficacy of deliberation and of democratic civic engagement in recent United States history. Contentious collective activism prompted by ordinary people’s inability to deliberate with powerful decision makers should also be part of our academic memory of civic engagement in the United States. In this chapter, I describe the theoretical literature about publics and the historical record about 1960s activism constructed by activists and historians.

54 PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE

Many scholars point to the Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, as the beginning of the New Left during the 1960s. The SDS sought to enrich democracy in the United States by implementing participatory democracy nationally and locally. The principles of participatory democracy called for deliberation among ordinary people to facilitate collective decision-making and individual empowerment. In contrast to representative democracy in which the voices of the few speak for the interests of the many, participatory democracy includes vocal participation in decision-making for all individuals affected by those decisions. The SDS’s founding document, The Port Huron Statement noted:

The political order…should provide outlets for the expression of personal grievance and aspiration; opposing views should be organized so as to illuminate choices and facilitate the attainment of goals; [and] channels should be commonly available to relate men to knowledge and to power so that private problems…are formulated as general issues. (“Port Huron,” 1963/1992, p. 452)

According to this statement, the SDS regarded public deliberation as central to participatory democracy. Presumably, members of a society would peaceably resolve conflicts and recognize their common interests if they engaged in face-to-face discussion rather than leave decisions to political leaders. Several features of participatory democracy resonate with scholarship written about public life at roughly the same time that the SDS began developing its model of participatory democracy. In 1962, Jurgen Habermas argued that collective deliberation was central for the public sphere to empower its members. His book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, (1996/1962) extolled a model of public life where all of its members could deliberate openly about issues of common concern. According to Habermas, this public sphere was most closely realized during the 17th and 18th centuries as literary salon culture and the emergence of the press enabled members of the 55 bourgeois to engage in rational-critical debate about their shared interests (p. 51). In this sphere, questions of status between interlocutors did not matter as long as each member regarded the force of the better argument as the highest virtue (pp. 33-36). For Habermas, the public sphere that developed at this time contributed to the dissolution of domination by the aristocracy because it enabled the rising bourgeois to establish consensus about what was practically necessary and in the interests of everyone within that sphere. Written decades earlier, Dewey’s (1957/1927) description of a democratic public resonates with the New Left’s vision of participatory democracy. According to Dewey, publics arise when people recognize that the actions of particular groups and individuals have far-reaching consequences beyond the decision-makers themselves (pp. 15-16). Common interests emerge when publics perceive that conjoint, combined, and associated action among members will lead to desired consequences for everyone (p. 34). Although Dewey does not feature deliberation in his model, it is ostensibly through communication between potential members that publics are able to recognize themselves, determine their common interests, and coordinate action. The resonance between the ideals of the New Left and theories of ideal publics suggests that deliberating publics were central to the goals of activists during the 1960s, and that such goals bear relevance to scholars interested in the relationship between communication and social justice.

COUNTER-PUBLICS AND CONTENTIOUS POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT

As both the history of the New Left and critical responses to Habermas indicate, models of democracy based on collective deliberation among individuals of equal status do not represent actually-existing democracy. Critics of Habermas point to the exclusivity of his model, noting how women (Landes, 1998), the working-class (Eley, 1997; Negt and Kluge, 1993) and blacks (Baker, 1995; Hanchard, 1995) were removed 56 from the centers of decision-making in the bourgeois public sphere. Thus, groups whose interests did not neatly map onto the interests of the white, male bourgeois class were excluded from decision-making about issues of national and international consequence. Informed by experiences of the early civil rights and antiwar movements, the New Left also began to recognize the limitations of the model of participatory democracy that they had envisioned. Between 1960 and 1963, activists sought to deliberate with members of the Kennedy administration to demonstrate the importance of enforcing racial integration and ending the Cold War. Political leaders’ seeming disinterest in peaceful resolutions to the Cold War led activists to believe that deliberation with establishment leaders was fruitless (Gitlin, 1987, p. 96). Likewise, the Democratic National Committee’s refusal to recognize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964 highlighted the exclusionary practices of mainstream politics (Bloom, 1987, p. 182- 183). Civil rights and peace activists’ who believed in the power of deliberative principles and sought inclusion within legitimated spheres of political activity found that the system would not include them or deliberate with them.

The experiences of New Left activists in the early years of the 1960s indicates that in stratified societies such as the United States, we cannot consider a single, all encompassing public without recognizing that some members are more fully represented than others. (Indeed, it may be difficult to discern that any widespread public constituted

by shared interests exists at all, given that our interests are dispersed across a variety of social identifications and class stratifications). As Eley (1997) and Negt and Kluge (1993) argue, the notion of the public itself is often an ideological fiction that legitimates unequal social arrangements. Likewise, rhetorical scholar, Michael McGee (1975) argues that references to “the people” motivate people to act in accordance with the “collective fantasy that the language invokes” (p. 247).

57 Instead of focusing on the notion of a single, overarching public constituted by common procedural models for deliberation, several scholars and activists have advanced notions of multiple, and often competing publics that collectively constitute civic life. Rhetoric scholars Hauser and Eberly describe how publics converge around discursive practices that highlight members’ common interests and shared stakes in resolving particular problems. Hauser (1999) concludes that publics are reticulate, or based on the web of relations that shape our discussions about particular issues (p. 71). Eberly (2000) suggests that literary public spheres emerge when individuals read and respond publicly to controversial novels. For Eberly and Hauser, publics may be recognized through the texts that illuminate how members of publics deliberate with one another.

Other scholars have noted how political dissidents have formed counterpublics in response to problems of social injustices and state repression. Fraser (1997) suggests that groups excluded from mainstream political organizations may constitute “subaltern counterpublics” as they recognize their own identities, interests, and needs in opposition to dominant social groups (p. 81). According to Fraser, societies that permit “contestation among a plurality of competing publics” (p. 82) approximate the ideal of participatory democracy more closely than do societies that insist on the viability of an all encompassing public. Young’s (1997) model of democratic inclusion also features social difference as central to democratic communication. She argues that social spaces where differentiated groups struggle and engage one another across their differences facilitates the inclusion of diverse perspectives and enables a more comprehensive understanding of the issues that call people to act conjointly. [See also Asen & Brouwer’s (2001) edited collection of essays that provide a series of case studies identifying various formations of counterpublics who have challenged prevailing power structures.]

58 The SDS represented one counterpublic that came into ascendancy toward the middle of the 1960s was based on the New Left’s growing recognition of themselves as a movement that opposed the political establishment. Informed by the exclusionary policies of mainstream politics, New Left activists turned their attention to creating democratic decision-making publics within marginalized communities. Although the SDS began to eschew formal political participation, several of the movement’s programs grew out of activists’ faith that participatory democracy could enrich decision-making practices within smaller groups. Particularly during their incipient years, members of the SDS implemented the deliberative principles of participatory democracy within their own organization. Meetings among activists were frequent, and decisions about movement goals and strategies were made collectively. Activists’ faith in the powers of participatory democracy for empowering citizens also propelled the SDS’ Economic Research and Action Project which sought to engage people in poor, predominantly black, urban communities in collective deliberation about their common problems and shared interests.

The strategies of protesters in the SDS suggest that the New Left held an ambivalent position about the possibilities of achieving a widespread participatory democracy in the United States. On one hand, the New Left rejected the notion of an all encompassing public as they began to organize local communities on the basis of their exclusion from political power. On the other hand, the New Left remained committed to enacting the models of democratic engagement within these smaller communities. Thus, they expressed continued faith in deliberative democracy even as they withdrew from deliberation with mainstream publics. Ambivalences regarding the possibilities of participatory democracy appear in Fraser’s (1997) writing as well. For Fraser, the liberatory potential of counterpublics lies

59 in their ability to function simultaneously as spaces of withdrawal for subordinate groups and as training grounds for agitational activities direct toward the wider public (p. 82). Thus, she suggests, effective counterpublics employ practices of participatory democracy among members, but engage in more confrontational practices that make demands of oppositional forces rather than seek deliberation and common ground with them. Fraser’s description of counterpublics as spaces for withdrawal suggests that counterpublics provide a foundation for the emergence of contentious social movements. In their analyses of several instances of social protest that took place during the 1960s, Bowers, Ochs, and Jensen (1993) identify agitation in acts in which “people outside the normal decision-making establishment advocate significant social change and encounter…resistance within the establishment such as to require more than the normal discursive means of persuasion” (p. 4). Bowers, Ochs, and Jensen suggest that social movements are defined by their contentious relationship to established institutions and authorities who have excluded them from participation in formal decision-making process. The resonance between Fraser and Bowers et al. indicates that the study of counter-publics is essential to the study of social protest because counterpublics provide

the conditions necessary for social movements to function.1 Although counterpublics provide spaces for marginalized groups to withdraw from and challenge the predominant social order, they also establish conditions for

transforming the social order they oppose. The dual nature of counterpublics is illustrated by SDS activities after the middle of the decade. While the SDS employed participatory democracy in their own organization, their strategies for ending the war in Vietnam became increasingly confrontational. Although members of the SDS deliberated with each other at length about the best strategies that would achieve the movement’s goals, protest events including the student takeover of several buildings on

60 the Columbia University campus and students’ efforts to halt the train at the Oakland Army terminal near Berkeley represent the SDS’s turn toward non-deliberative strategies. Social movements’ confrontational strategies have often been effective for achieving political and social change in the United States. As Zinn’s (1980/1995) history of social change in the United States suggests, collective activism has been an effective means for marginalized groups in society to seek political redress from established institutions in a liberal democracy. Social movements in the United States have exposed contradictions between equality and liberty in liberal democracy and have effectively called upon established institutions to resolve those contradictions by including marginalized groups in the democratic process. Although movements emerged in opposition to mainstream institutions, the success of agitational social movements in the United States has often rested on activists’ commitment to widespread participation in the decision-making processes in the United States. Social movements during the 1960s emerged as counterpublics because their members believed that the ideals of a participatory democracy needed to be implemented throughout the United States. That is, 1960s activists struggled against dominant institutions in order to gain fuller inclusion within them.

Social movements’ simultaneous extrication from and desired participation within dominant political institutions represents another sign of the New Left’s ambivalent

attitude toward participatory democracy. The SDS emerged as a counterpublic as it sought to eradicate exclusionary political practices and eventually open up spaces for greater political participation in spheres of influence in the United States. The forums for deliberation and activism that the New Left created were modeled after the democratic ideals that they hoped would reanimate political life throughout social life in the United States.

61 The literature on publics theory, as well as the trajectory of New Left activism during the 1960s, conveys several lessons that inform this dissertation and my understanding of social movement activism in the history of the United States. Counterpublics that question the state and resist appeals to an all inclusive public provide important alternatives to mainstream political institutions in the United States. The presence of counterpublics also provides marginalized groups the space for addressing their own goals and interests regarding issues of widespread social consequence. The history of New Left activism also suggests that state violence restricts the development of social movements and counterpublics in late capitalism. The emancipatory potential of social movements rests in their ability to transform the mechanisms for decision-making to include previously subordinated groups. When members of counterpublics are physically threatened or silenced for demanding that their voice be recognized by the state (or any other influential institution), subordinated groups have fewer resources for ensuring that their voices are recognized or that their needs are met by decision-makers in prevailing institutions.

The history of state violence against agitational social movement activists in the United States demonstrates that participatory democracy represents a model for public life that has yet to be realized. Although the presence of counterpublics in the history of the United States attests to the difficulties of achieving a more fully democratic public sphere that is inclusive of all of the individuals who purportedly constitute it, I believe that the notion of participatory democracy is fundamental to achieving a just and egalitarian society. When we recognize our shared interests as humans who all ultimately want the same things for ourselves and our loved ones, the possibilities for widespread social justice and human equality may be actualized. This rest of this chapter chronologically outlines the trajectory of 1960s activism, the patterns of violence

62 between protesters and the state throughout the decade, and the social conditions that prompted increasingly confrontational protest strategies toward the end of the decade.

FROM REFORMISM TO RADICALISM: CIVIL RIGHTS AND NEW LEFT ACTIVISM

During the early years of the 1960s, some of the most active social movement organizations sought social change by working within prevailing political institutions. Through the course of the 1960s, members of these organizations became increasingly frustrated by political leaders’ unwillingness to respond to activists’ appeals. In response to political leaders’ intransigence, activists began to engage in collective protests which used the presence of collective protesters, rather than the appeals of argument, to compel political leaders to meet activists’ goals. Frequently, mass protests were met with physical brutality and repression from state authorities and whites who benefited from prevailing social relations. According to McPhail et al., police principally used force to disperse even peaceful protest during the 1960s (pp. 50-51). State-sanctioned violence against civil rights, student, and Vietnam antiwar protesters further alienated activists from the prevailing political establishment. As the decade progressed, activists used increasingly confrontational strategies to compel political leaders to meet their demands. When conditions for African-Americans did not improve, and an end to the war did not appear in sight, groups such as the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and The Weather Underground advocated the force of arms to fundamentally change the political order that they believed was inherently oppressive.

The Civil Rights Movement during the early 1960s

Civil Rights activism between the late 1950s and early 1960s featured both strategies of reformism and passive resistance. Civil Rights activists sought to achieve integration and equal opportunity with whites by seeking changes within formalized

63 institutions. Concurrently, activists increasingly turned to acts of nonviolent civil disobedience to draw national attention to the issues of civil rights in the south. These early years were also marked by perpetual state intransigence against integration and by violence against civil rights activists and blacks at the hands of state authorities and anti- segregationist whites. Toward the end of the decade, intransigence to civil rights prompted many black activists to disregard the legitimacy of the prevailing political system altogether. The slow process of integration following the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education pointed to the limitations of strategies that sought change from within the legal system. Despite federal orders to integrate universities, governors in the South continued to prevent black students from attending college. In 1962, white students in Oxford, Mississippi, rioted when federal orders demanded that black student James Meredith be allowed to attend the University of Mississippi. Black students were not allowed to attend the University of Alabama until 1963, when President Kennedy ordered federal troops onto the campus. Bacciocco (1974) writes that the generation of black activists who came of age during the 1960s concluded that social change would not be won through the legal system and sought to replace reformism with the strategy of resistance as a means for achieving racial integration (p. 31). During the early 1960s, many of these students organized their activist efforts as members of the Student Non- violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Thus, the history of civil rights activism may be read as a history of the movement’s growing militancy against state and civil authorities as powers that be responded to the movement with continued violence and repression.

During the early 1960s, thousands of black activists at in least 100 cities refused to leave the lunch counters until they were served. These sit-in protests represented early

64 activist efforts to resist segregation, rather than seek to establish integration through legal means. During the Freedom Rides of 1961, black and white student activists traveled throughout Southern states by bus to sit-in at segregated restaurants and rest areas. In response to activists’ efforts, several stores in the South began to integrate their stores in the early years of the 1960s. Likewise, protest activities garnered the attention of federal authorities who desegregated major railroads operating through the south by October 1961 (Bacciocco, 1974, p. 41). Thus, the sit-in movement demonstrated how collective agitation could compel prevailing institutions to comply with their demands.

State violence against the Civil Rights Movement

In cities including Rock Hill, South Carolina, and Birmingham Alabama, segregationists attacked the buses carrying Freedom Riders and local police repeatedly beat and arrested activists when they got off of these buses. A series of beatings and murders against civil rights activists, including the 1961 beating of SNCC fieldworkers Travis Britt and John Hardy, the 1961 murder of black farmer Herbert Lee at the hands of Mississippi State Representative E.H. Hurst, the 1963 murder of SNCC fieldworker Jimmy Travis, the 1963 murder of Medgar Evers, and the 1964 murders of Freedom Summer activists Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney point to the lengths many whites were willing to go to prevent the integration of blacks in prevailing institutions in the South. Federal and state authorities did little to prosecute whites who repressed activists with violence. A federal grand jury acquitted Hurst on the basis of false charges that Hurst acted in self-defense (Bacciocco, 1974, p. 46). Likewise, Medgar Evers’ murderer, Byron de la Beckwith was not convicted for Evers’s death until 1994 despite the strong physical evidence against him (Nossiter, 1994/2002, unpaginated preface).

65 In addition to the courts’ failure to convict men for the deaths of civil rights activists, federal agents passively stood by as state authorities intimidated SNCC volunteers and blacks attempting to register in Selma, Alabama in September and October of 1963. Public officials who turned a blind eye to attacks against civil rights activists suggested that violence against protesters was not only life-threatening but condoned by prevailing government authorities. Thus, many people in the movement, particularly younger activists in SNCC, increasingly doubted the efficacy of nonviolent strategies, and began advocating direct action against the country’s racism.

State violence against peaceful protest confirmed many activists’ skepticism toward strategies of civil disobedience for ending racism in the United States. On May 2, 1963, Martin Luther King and other members of the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC) organized six thousand people, including grade-school children, to march in Birmingham, Alabama. During the march, Alabama Governor Bull Connors ordered the police to blast demonstrators with fire hoses, and set police dogs on protesters who included women and children. Attacks on children in Montgomery, in addition to the continued exclusion of African-Americans from American educational and political institutions, sustained many black people’s feelings of disdain toward established political institutions. In 1964, white and black civil rights activists from Mississippi organized the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) to challenge the exclusion

of blacks from Mississippi politics. At the National Convention in Atlanta that year, the Democratic Party’s white leaders refused to recognize the MFDP as a legitimate arm of the party. The Democratic Party’s exclusionary practices during the 1964 convention confirmed many activists’ position that the nation’s injustices would not be eradicated through efforts toward achieving reform within the system.

66 The emergence of the New Left: Students for a Democratic Society

Taking lessons from early antiwar and civil rights activism, many activists concluded that political empowerment for marginalized groups could not be achieved by working within formal political institutions. Toward the middle of the decade, activists’ strategies increasingly turned to strategies that resisted principles of representative democracy. Student activists began to reimagine political participation to include ordinary citizens working outside of formal institutions to achieve common goals and an end to social injustice. As the decade wore on, the state’s efforts to repress peaceful protest through force and intimidation encouraged many activists to question the efficacy of passive resistance as well.

Student and antiwar activists learned from the experiences of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party that reformist goals and party politics could provide only limited gains for marginalized groups in the United States. The Kennedy administration’s seeming disinterest in peaceful resolutions to the Cold War also led activists to believe that the democratic system in the United States was immoral and oppressive (Gitlin, 1987, pp. 94-96). Consequently, many young activists increasingly repudiated the political system in the United States that excluded many of the individuals it purported to represent. Toward the end of the decade, many of these students

determined that radical politics was necessary to dislodge the prevailing political system.

Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement

In 1964, student movements began to develop across college campuses in the United States. In addition to seeking greater civil rights and an end to the war, students began to call for changes in university policies that would recognize the rights of students and marginalized groups (Anderson, 1995, p. 101). The most notable of these movements emerged on the California State University at Berkeley. In the fall of 1964, 67 the university administration banned the promotion of “off campus” materials, including civil rights leaflets, on campus. A series of student protest activities rallied against the administration’s clamp down on free speech. These protests were dampened by frequent police arrests. During protest on December 2, Mario Savio argued that the threat to free speech at Berkeley was the consequence of a broader social system that oppressed its members. Savio implicated all institutions in the United States as oppressive to the people who functioned within them and highlighted the imperative for social movements to place pressure on the system from the outside in order to achieve social change. Administrative responses to the protests at Berkeley demonstrated that university and government leaders would not tolerate systematic critique against the United States. Governor Brown called upon 600 police officers who arrested 770 student protesters (Anderson, 1995, p. 103). Despite efforts to shut down protests, students achieved their goals. At the start of the new year, the university administration at Berkeley legalized rallies. Although California’s political and educational system was repressive, it was not impenetrable. Indeed, the responses of Berkeley officials indicate that social protest can be effective at the times when administrations verbally insist that it is not.

FROM RESISTANCE TO CONFRONTATION

Toward the middle of the decade, social movement activists began to engage in more contentious, confrontational politics as activists increasingly witnessed, either directly or on television, the establishment’s use of force and brutality against nonviolent protest. During a peaceful civil rights march on May 7, 1965 in Montgomery, Alabama, one hundred deputies and state troopers severely beat and injured over forty protesters (Anderson, 1995, p. 115). For many activists, state repression of the Montgomery march demonstrated that the doctrine of non-violence was insufficient to end systematic oppression against African-Americans in the United States (Bacciocco, 1974, p. 92; 68 Bloom, 1987, p. 184). Many black people well acquainted with the brutality of the establishment in the early years of the 1960s began to riot against white businesses in their communities as an expression of rage and dissent against racial injustice and inequality. Police treatment of African-Americans and growing economic and political struggles also sparked race riots in urban ghettos throughout the country. One of the deadliest riots took place from August 11 -14, 1965 in Los Angeles, California, leaving 34 people dead, 1,000 injured, and 4,000 in jail (Anderson, 1995, p. 132).

The rise of the Black Power Movement

In response to systematic oppression of activists, many members of the civil rights movement began to invoke the ideals of Black Power. Influenced by the work of Franz Fanon and Malcolm X, advocates of Black Power insisted that equal strength must replace strategies of persuasion and non-violence as means for achieving greater rights for blacks (Bacciocco, 1974, p. 94). Black activists expressed their growing support for the Black Power movement in 1966 when SNCC elected Stokely Carmichael and CORE elected Floyd McKissick to lead them. In contrast to earlier leaders John Lewis and James Farmer, these younger leaders expressed growing disinterest in working within the system to achieve greater rights for blacks. Instead, Carmichael and McKissick argued that black activists must wrest political power for themselves. Taking up Carmichael’s call for African-Americans to join the Black Power Movement, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in Los Angeles during the fall of 1966. The Panthers’ platform aimed to overthrow the establishment, achieve economic equality through socialism, and bear arms to protect blacks from the white establishment. During the next several months, the Panthers established a legal system of armed patrol cars to trail police through the slums of Oakland as a means to hinder police brutality against blacks (Foner, 1970, p. xvii). 69 Over the next several years, Party members also created free breakfast programs for community children, provided sickle-cell anemia testing for blacks, led community meetings to raise awareness of racism and oppression in the United States, and rallied for dramatic restructuring of economic and political power in the United States. Not all leaders of the civil rights movement supported the movement’s turn toward the strategies of the Black Power Movement. Martin Luther King and his supporters in the Southern Christian Leadership Council continued to argue on behalf of nonviolent protest within the movement. Disagreement among civil rights activists over what protest strategies would serve the movement best led to fragmentation among activist organizations and contributed to the eventual disappearance of civil rights activism toward the end of the decade (Marable, 1984, pp. 107-108). However, the decline of civil rights activism cannot be entirely attributed to the emergence of the Black Power Movement. Many activists concurred with H. Rap Brown’s incendiary remarks that “violence is as American as apple pie.” The violent suppression of civil rights activism and systemic abuses against blacks frustrated many activists and prompted more militant perspectives in the movement.

Growing confrontation in the Vietnam Anti-War Movement

Although most student activists adhered to the principles of civil disobedience and peaceful protest, confrontational politics had a prominent place in student activism, particularly as efforts toward expanding participatory democracy began to flail. SDS members who looked like part of the elite establishment struggled to organize a movement of mostly poor, mostly black communities. As older SDS members became frustrated by the inability to enact participatory democracy, and as more members joined the SDS to protest the war, the social movement organization turned further from deliberative politics toward strategies of resistance and performance. Student activists 70 began to eschew participatory democracy as they acknowledged that peaceful protests were not prompting an end to the war; indeed, United States involvement in the war was becoming more intense in the years that the student antiwar movement expanded. In February of 1965, President Johnson escalated the United States’ role in Vietnam by ordering the bombing of North Vietnam under the name Operation Rolling Thunder. This bombing prompted antiwar activism among many liberal and radical organizations. Leaders of the antiwar movement initially sought to engage leaders and ordinary citizens in deliberation about the war. Several organizations, including the SDS participated in national “teach-ins” across university campuses during the spring of 1965 to draw links between universities and the destruction in Vietnam. Many activists concluded that the teach-in movement did little to facilitate and end to United States’ involvement in Vietnam. Thus, students’ faith in argument and reason as a foundation for social change began to wane. Chafe (1995) quoted one protester who concluded that a responsible citizen was “utterly unable to write to his Secretary of State because there is no common ground of communication” between activists and administration officials (p. 325). Reflecting Savio’s call for activists to “put their bodies upon the gears” of the “machine,” activists increasingly engaged in confrontational protest to express dissent against the war. Rather than appeal to values and procedures of established institutions, activists began seeking ways to disrupt established procedure.

Several large-scale demonstrations took place during the spring and autumn months of 1965. On Easter Sunday, 20,000 protesters including both moderate and radical activists participated in an antiwar rally in Washington, D.C. That same month, 30,000 protesters attended a New York City Peace Parade. On October 15 and 16 of 1965, the International Days of Protest, nearly 100,000 activists participated in demonstrations in 80 cities and university campuses across the country (Anderson, 1995,

71 p. 141). Public authorities sometimes reacted with violence and anger toward these protests. When 10,000 activists gathered for a “peace invasion” on the Oakland Army Base near Berkeley, California, activists were met by 300 policemen and a number of belligerent Hell’s Angels. Police officers and ordinary people also beat and threatened activists in other large cities including Boston, New York City, and Washington, D.C., (Anderson, 1995, p. 144). Public protests became increasingly confrontational as the decade progressed. In 1966, students engaged in the draft resistance movement beat on the car of White Official Robert McNamara during his visit to Harvard. That same year, several hundred activists at Berkeley attempted to stop or board the trains at the Oakland Army terminal to disseminate antiwar literature to soldiers and prevent the trains from moving forward. Performance-based protests also became more common as many activists questioned both activist and establishment organizations as oppressive to individual spirit and authenticity. A growing number of activists chose performance and individual acts of liberation over the more traditional, organized protests activists. In San Francisco, the Diggers ignored civil authority, eschewed organization, and suggested that social justice could only be wrought by individuals who acted out the ideals they sought: “Don’t demand food,” they opined, “Get it and give it away” (Gitlin, 1987, p. 224).

The politics of performance and confrontation created spectacles rather than seek identification with others who shared common beliefs and interests. These shifts in protest marked a political climate in which changing people’s minds seemed either impossible or irrelevant to the cause of social justice. Thus, efforts to persuade others were transplanted with efforts to achieve recognition. While spectacular protests were not the prevailing forms of dissent at any point during the 1960s, they garnered extensive

72 media attention. Consequently, they played a strong role in shaping public attitudes about social protest during the last half of the decade.

Radicalism and revolution at the end of the decade

Andrew Kopkind famously noted that “to be white and radical in America” in the summer of 1967 was “to see horror and feel impotence” (Anderson, 1995, p. 182; Gitlin, 1987, p. 246). After 1967, state suppression of protest and dissent began climbing toward a terrifying climax. Toward the end of the decade, police and federal troops beat even moderate student activists to hinder protest against the war. In 1967, students at twenty- one universities protested their campuses’ ties to Dow Chemical Corporation, a leading manufacturer of napalm. A demonstration against Dow recruiters who visited the University of Wisconsin ended in violence as police equipped with riot gear and tear gas beat several of the 300 protesting students (Anderson, 1995, p. 177). Physical intimidation was part of a larger systemic effort to quell activism on campus; the same year that police bloodied several University of Wisconsin activists, the state legislature passed a resolution demanding that the university expel protesters. As the intransigence of the prevailing political system would not allow room for dissent or disagreement, civil disobedience began to lose its appeal. Radical activism grew in appeal as government officials appeared as equally likely to descend upon a passive resister as they would a violent one. Abandoning efforts to generate public sympathy for the antiwar movement through acts of civil disobedience, student activists increasingly disregarded passive forms of collective protest for more overt actions to hinder the war effort. Protest activities in Berkeley that occurred during Stop the Draft week between October 14 and October 21, 1967 represented one such instance of resistance. Near Berkeley, some 10,000 protesters marched on the draft induction center in Oakland, California and pulled 73 over objects such as trash cans to disrupt the city and close the induction center. In Washington D.C., Stop the Draft week activities concluded at the Pentagon, where many radicals meditated in order to levitate the Pentagon and “exorcise” its “demons” (Anderson, 1995, p. 178). Activists at Berkely and in Washington were met by police armed with nightsticks, batons, and cans of Mace. According to Anderson (1995), the confrontation at the Pentagon “was a last sit-down” for activists fed up with passive resistance (p. 179). For these protesters, decision-makers could only be compelled by force.

Killing activism, framing activists

The years 1967 and 1969 also witnessed continued frustration among civil rights activists and the growth of the Black Power Movement that repudiated passive resistance to racial discrimination. When Martin Luther King was shot on April 4 1968, riots rippled throughout urban ghettos. After the rioting subsided, 3,000 people were injured and 46 of them had died (Anderson, 1995, p. 192). For many activists, King’s death represented the death of the nonviolent wing of the civil rights movement (Anderson, 1995, p. 192; Gitlin, 1987, 313). While law enforcement officials began using violence to repress antiwar activism, police and FBI officials terrorized and killed members of militant civil rights activists and poor blacks. As the more moderate wing of the Civil Rights Movement subsided, Black Power activists began to garner national attention as they denounced racist police officers and the castigated the judicial system that continually exonerated the killings of blacks when little evidence demonstrated that police officers lives had been threatened. The Black Panther Party garnered national attention on May 2, 1967 when 24 armed Panthers walked to the steps of California’s capitol building in Sacramento and read their statement of principles which advocated black independence and self-defense (Foner, 1970, p. xxi). 74 In response to the Panthers’ disavowal of state authority, police officials engaged in a pattern of violence and repression against militant black activists. Between 1968 and 1971, the FBI’s COINTELPRO (Counter-intelligence Program) resulted in frequent arrests of Black Panther Party members, raids of party offices, and the deaths of at least 29 party members. As Churchill (2001) and Foner (1970) demonstrate, party office raids were often based on false pretenses. Likewise, many of these arrests were made on dubious charges that could not be substantiated in court. On September 27, 1968, the courts sentenced Newton to two to fifteen years in prison for the voluntary manslaughter of Police Officer John Frey even though court proceedings demonstrated that Newton did not have a gun with him at the time Frey was shot. A May 29, 1970 California Court of Appeals decision reversed the conviction and acknowledged that Newton was unconscious at the time of the shooting (Foner, 1970, p. xxv). In 1969, police escalated violence against Black Panther Party members. In the most clear and notable instance of systemic repression of Panther Party activism, Chicago police shot and killed Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in their sleep. Although police officers claimed they shot in self-defense, a Federal Grand Jury concluded that charges were false and that

Hampton and Clark were asleep when they were shot (Foner, 1970, p. xxvi).2 State police and federal troops continued to beat back antiwar and student activists with excessive force as activists engaged in increasingly destructive protest tactics. On March 2, 1968, Yippies exploded two cherry bombs at Grand Central Station, harming no one. Fifty cops broke up the protest with nightsticks, badly injuring several activists (Gitlin, 1987, p. 238). In April, 1968, students who protested Columbia University’s treatment of blacks and sponsorship of war related research were also repressed with excessive police force. After students occupied several university building, the university administration called in hundreds of New York City police

75 officers who arrested 692 protesters and struck many of them with billy clubs and brass knuckles. Adding to the mounting violence of 1968, democratic presidential candidate Robert Kennedy was shot to death on June 6 by Sirhan Sirhan in Los Angeles California. Just as Martin Luther King’s assassination symbolized the death of the nonviolent wing of the civil rights movement, Robert Kennedy’s death represented the last hope for activists who held out for the possibility that the democratic system could be reformed to facilitate social justice and equality in the United States. By the time of the Democratic National Convention from August 25-28, multiple activist organizations, including nonviolent antiwar activists, the SDS, the Black Panthers, and the Yippies planned to demonstrate against the Democrats and the political system the Democratic Party represented. Yippies garnered extensive media and political attention when they announced plans for outlandish activities such as lacing Chicago’s water supply with LSD and painting activists’ cars yellow to hijack unsuspecting convention delegates (Anderson, 1995, p. 219).

Chicago Major Daley and other city officials took these threats seriously and amassed a 12,000 number police force to govern the city during the convention. Daley also ordered plainclothes police to infiltrate movement organizations. One agent for every six protesters participated in the demonstrations in Chicago during the convention

(Anderson, 1995; Gitlin 1980). After Daley denied activists’ permits to rally or to camp out in nearby city parks, Chicago police charged the crowd of protesters that began marching toward the convention site. Reporters covered the attacks as police beat and gassed protesters who cried, “the whole world is watching.” Anderson (1995) estimates that 90 million Americans witnessed the events on national television (p. 224).

76 Despite images of violence against protesters that news coverage exposed, news media polls suggest that a majority of conservative and moderate audiences sympathized with the city and Major Daley (Anderson, 1995, p. 224). The lack of expressed sympathy from more moderate audiences to the violence in Chicago indicates that the New Left had become severely marginalized from mainstream America. For many non-activists, events at Chicago signaled a breakdown of civil society caused by movement activists. Alternatively, the events in Chicago confirmed radical activists’ conclusions that United States’ political system was corrupt and that the public was impervious to reason and deliberation.

ACTIVISM IN 1968 AND BEYOND

Waves of state violence and repression severely weakened nonviolent student movements at the end of the decade. By the end of 1968, members of the SDS could not come to agreement over the best ways to respond to state repression. The Weathermen, a militant faction of the SDS, publicly endorsed “the violent overthrow of an inherently violent society” and called for a complete overhaul of the United States’ political system. (The group later referred to themselves by the more gender neutral moniker, “Weather activists.”) When eight leaders of the protests at Chicago during the 1968 Democratic convention were put on trial for inciting riots, Weather activists revisited Chicago in protests referred to in newspapers as “the Days of Rage.” Protesters marched down the streets of Chicago wearing helmets and several activists carried clubs and wore gas masks. Despite talks of engaging in bloody confrontations with police, most of the brutality was directed toward activists. Chicago police shot at protesters, hit six of them, and arrested protesters en masse.

77 The rage and death of the New Left

In contrast to the weak publicity accorded them by the Days of Rage, Weather activists garnered national publicity when they destroyed several buildings that advanced the war effort. Between September 1969 and May 1970, 250 major bombings targeting ROTC buildings, draft boards, and other federal offices were linked to the white left (Gitlin, 1987, p. 401). Although many members of the SDS struggled to maintain momentum for nonviolent student activism, Weather activists came to the forefront of the movement and reframed movement activism in revolutionary terms. Gitlin (1987) argues that the New Left’s turn toward revolutionary aims contributed to the demise of the student movements at the end of the decade; torn by factionalism within the movement and violence from without, the New Left’s base began to dissolve.

This disillusion was marked by the deaths of many activists in the fall of the New Left in 1970. On March 6, the home of Weather activist Cathy Wilkerson blew up on West 11th Street in New York when one member accidentally connected the wrong wire to a pipe bomb the group was manufacturing. Weather activists Ted Gold, Diana Oughton, and Terry Robbins died in the explosion. Gitlin (1987) describes the bombing as a “flashpoint for …death surrounding the left” at the end of the decade (p. 402). The May 4 1970 shootings at Kent State University in Ohio also punctuated the demise of the

New Left. After the university’s ROTC building mysteriously burned down, Ohio Governor James Rhodes called in the National Guard to enforce a ban on collective protest on campus. After students began throwing rocks at members of the National Guard, the guardsmen fired into the crowd, shooting several students and killing four. Ten days later, police officers fired upon and killed two protesters at Jackson State University, a black student college in Mississippi.

78 In contrast to the terror that student and radical activists faced in the fall of 1970, protests emanating from mainstream America following the shootings at Kent State and Jackson State did not result in violence. While the SDS began to dissolve, the antiwar movement peaked with record numbers of middle-aged and middle-class people participating in the October 15 Moratorium protests and the November 15 Mobilization protests. Zinn (1980/1995) provides reasons to be optimistic about the role of antiwar activism during the 1960s. He notes that growing antiwar activism during 1968 influenced Johnson to scale back bombing efforts and seek a resolution to the war (p. 491). Likewise, Zinn notes that the growing antiwar movement at the end of the decade persuaded Nixon from escalating the war because he did not want to divide American public opinion by escalating the war (p. 492). Furthermore, the protests that took place across 400 university campuses in the aftermath of Kent State and Jackson State indicate that the shootings did not deter student activism. Protest events after Kent State generated some of the largest number of participants of the Vietnam antiwar movement. It wasn’t until the war’s conclusion in 1974 that activism diminished on college campuses in the United States.

Unlike New Left student movements at the end of the decade that challenged the structure of American political and social life, protests emanating from mainstream America called for minimal change within a system that went unquestioned. Activists

who sought more fundamental social change in the United States began to experience protester fatigue and withdrawal after facing continual struggle against system violence. The Nixon administration’s techniques of repression intimidated activists. The government’s use of firearms to silence unarmed student protesters demonstrated that mass protest was potentially deadly and would not be protected by the state; the government seemed willing to kill to shut down protest.

79 The court’s reaction to the shootings at Jackson State confirms the state’s belligerent attitude toward protesters seeking structural social change in the United States. A local grand jury found the attack against students at Jackson State “justified” and U.S. District Court Judge Harold Cox declared that students who engage in civil disobedience “must expect to be injured or killed” (Zinn, 1995, p. 454). After both criminal and civil trials against the National Guardsmen who shot the students at Kent State, no one has been convicted or held accountable for the shootings at Kent State. Following protest events in Berkeley in 1969, Governor Ronald Reagan also suggested that political leaders were willing to engage in extraordinarily violent acts to eradicate dissent. “If it takes a bloodbath,” Reagan told reporters, “let’s get it over with” (Gitlin, 1987, p. 414-415). As New Left groups could not come to agreement over the strategies most appropriate for responding to system violence and the intransigence of the prevailing political system, it dissolved its base for organizing protest and splintered into movements based on particular interests.

The trajectory of leftist activism during the 1960s suggests that contentious collective protest emerged out of the exclusions of particular groups from prevailing deliberative and decision-making bodies in the United States. It also indicates that activists’ efforts to deliberate with political leaders and seek social change through established political institutions eroded over the course of the decade. Movements for civil rights, free speech, and an end to the war in Vietnam began to employ strategies of nonviolent resistance after political leaders failed to acknowledge the arguments for greater equality and an end to the war. As the decade progressed, state sanctioned repression and violence against activists prompted many social movement organizations to replace strategies of civil disobedience for more confrontational strategies of protest. Bloody confrontations that marked the end of the decade represented for many activists

80 the withering of radical activist movements and the demise of participatory democracy in the United States.

Activism in the new millennium

The cultural climate increasingly emphasized private, individual interests during the decades after the 1960s. Gitlin (1987) argues that, rather than focusing on widespread social problems and collective engagement in political-decision making, former activists turned their attention to personal salvation (p. 424). Activist events on college campuses over the past several decades indicate that Gitlin’s assessment is somewhat misleading. Although protests for widespread social change waned in the 1970s, activism has not disappeared completely from the United States’ political landscape. Indeed, the 1970s witnessed the growth of social movements for women’s liberation and for environmental protection. Student protest in the United States also played an important role in the anti- apartheid movement during the early 1980s against the South African government. Likewise, student activists on university campuses in the United States have continued to engage in protest to demand that companies in the United States not use workers from sweatshops overseas. Contentious collective dissent in recent years indicates that agitational activism for structural change in the United States and overseas is not dead. Indeed, the 1999 Seattle protests and 2003 Miami demonstrations against the World Trade Center and International Monetary Fund indicate that thousands of engaged citizens continue to engage in mass civil disobedience to challenge political and economic institutions that they believe are unjust. Likewise, worldwide protests against the George W. Bush administration’s 2003 war on Iraq demonstrate that dissent is alive in the United States. In New York City, over a hundred thousand people demonstrated against the war (Eaton, 2003, p. B11). Hundreds of thousands or protesters throughout other cities worldwide 81 likewise rallied against Bush’s foreign policy during the last two weeks of March in 2003 (see Cowell, 2003, p. B11; Lichtblauh, 2003, A15; and Lueck, 2003, p. A14). Recent protests demonstrate that contentious collective activism has not died out completely. Throughout the history of the United States, activism has appeared in waves in response to political, social, and economic circumstances. Thus, it is often declared dead only to resurface. During the most recent waves of activism in the United States, films about 1960s social movements framed activism in ways that sent confusing messages about the history of activism in this nation’s recent past. The record of civil rights activism conveys important lessons about what may be gained from collective, contentious dissent; however, popular memories of civil rights provide a hazier image of that legacy for contemporary media audiences.

82 NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO

1Several essays in Asen and Brouwer’s (2001) Counterpublics and the State describe how social movements function as counterpublics. See, for example, Palczewski’s essay on the role of the Internet within social movements, and Cloud’s essay on the implications of the 1998 Indonesian Revolution for social movement theory.

2In 1982, a federal district court ruled that the police had violated Hampton and Clark’s civil rights (Churchill, 2001, p. 107).

83 SECTION TWO

MEMORIES OF MISSISSIPPI

84 Introduction to Mississippi Burning and Ghosts of Mississippi

The civil rights movement is remarkable. When it became clear that white legislators refused to act for the interests of blacks, black Americans seized the initiative, took control over their own lives, and demanded their rights. Activists not only put an end to formal segregation and increase black people’s voting rights throughout the South; they achieved these aims in spite of physical threats and bodily injury imposed on them by state police and white separatists. The movement provides an exemplary model of how a group of committed people with few financial resources of their own can bring about widespread social change. Although the civil rights movement made racial equality a focal point for the entire nation, it did not eradicate racism in the United States. A 2004 The National Urban League report states that notable gaps between African-Americans and whites remain, especially in the area of economics. Twenty-five percent of blacks live in poverty compared to twelve percent of whites; male earnings are seventy percent that of white males; and African-American unemployment is twice the national average.1 Given that African-Americans have yet to achieve equal status with whites in the United States, collective protest and agitation may still play a role in advancing civil rights and racial justice. The memory of the civil rights movement may thus serve as an important resource for African-Americans and other subordinated groups who continue to struggle for civil liberties in the United States. Understanding how civil rights activism advanced racial justice in the recent past may serve as a model for how justice might be achieved in the near future. Attention to images of civil rights activism in popular media provide one avenue for understanding how contemporary black audiences have been encouraged to envision possibilities for social change in the decades after the movement’s decline.

85 In this section, I explain how two films, Mississippi Burning (1988) and Ghosts of Mississippi (1996) encouraged audiences to remember events from the history of the civil rights movement. Mississippi Burning told the story of the FBI’s efforts to solve the case of three civil rights activists who disappeared in Neshoba County, Mississippi, in 1964. Eight years later, Ghosts of Mississippi narrated the story of the 1994 prosecution of Byron de la Beckwith for the 1963 murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi. The directors of these films told reporters that they believed the films would influence how audiences understood racism in America’s recent past. Alan Parker, the director of Mississippi Burning, stated that he made the film because he wanted to bring people “largely ignorant of the events from two decades ago” to “some level of understanding [about events] that radically changed the South and the nation” (Hall, 1988, p. C01). Given that the imperatives of commercial media call for the entertainment value of films more than they call for historical accuracy, these filmmakers faced an interesting rhetorical challenge. How did these films negotiate the competing demands of commercial media and historical accuracy necessary for these films to become part of popular memory?

Both generic conventions of melodrama and conventions of documentary film contributed to these films’ status as engaging resources for understanding the history of the civil rights movement. In the process, they constructed particular messages about the role of activism and the process of social change during the civil rights movement. Directors Parker and Reiner suggested that they wanted their films to influence how audiences perceived race relations and social injustice. Reiner stated that he hoped Ghosts of Mississippi would represent “a step” in changing our memory of race relations in the United States (Vargas, 1996, transcript #2658-1), and Parker asserted that his film was more than a “history lesson”; it was “about the racism that’s within all of us. And

86 it’s about now” (Hall, 1988, p. C01). Both Reiner and Parker suggest that films provide resources for understanding social struggles from the past and may encourage audiences to recognize contemporary instances of social injustice. By highlighting the ways in which Mississippi Burning and Ghosts of Mississippi represented racial injustices that have been predominantly forgotten, they imply that these films are significant sites of counter-memory. I take issue with the claim that these films univocally provided counter- hegemonic discourses. Both of these films indicated that white authority figures, not black activists, played a pivotal role in winning justice and civil rights for African- Americans in the South. The narratives within these films contradicted the record of activism constructed by activists and scholars. According to this record, black activists took the lead in prompting an end to racist institutions in the South and in finding justice for activists who were murdered by white separatists during that decade. The narratives of these films obscured the history of civil rights activism that contemporary groups might emulate to achieve social justice in the present; however, these films should not be entirely dismissed for reasserting inequitable race relations. By misrepresenting the FBI’s role in the civil rights movement, one of these films, Mississippi Burning, opened a space for journalists to include counter-memories of activism into popular culture.

The next two chapters describe the narrative and visual devices that constructed the film’s messages about civil rights as resources for understanding the past. These chapters also explain how news media attention to these films contributed to the popular memories that the films evoked. My analysis of the narrative and visual features in these films and of the journalistic responses to them demonstrates how popular memories emerge through the combination of both compelling narratives about the past and textual cues that encourage audiences to read these narratives as sources of historical

87 information. It also suggests that secondary sources to films about the past including journalists and reviewers may play more of a role in constituting popular memory than the films themselves.

88 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION TO SECTION TWO

1The 2004 National Urban League Report executive summary also notes that a black person’s average jail sentence is six months longer than a white person’s for the same offence (thirty-nine months compared to thirty-three months), and that blacks are twice as likely to die from disease, accident, behavior, and homicide at every stage of life than whites. In 2005, Booker (2005) also reported that blacks represent forty-four percent of the prison population serving long-term sentences (p. 12).

89 Chapter Three

Memory and counter-memory in Mississippi Burning

Mississippi Burning represents the first Hollywood film to bring memories of the civil rights movement into popular memory. As network television news coverage of Edgar Ray Killen’s recent conviction attests, it is one of the most successful films to have done so. The film’s ability to become part of popular memory stemmed from its use of melodramatic narrative and documentary film conventions. Conventions of Hollywood melodrama propelled Mississippi Burning’s popularity while visual cues more typical of documentary film constituted this film as a source of historical information. Although Parker advocated Mississippi Burning as a resource for promoting social justice, scholars and film critics derided the film for subordinating the experiences of African-Americans and reasserting white hegemony in popular culture. [See Brinson (1995) and Madison (1999) for criticisms of the film in communications scholarship.] I argue that this film prompted counter-memories in journalism by depicting events that simultaneously resonated with and contradicted the record of civil rights activism established by activists, historians, and journalists. Mississippi Burning’s paradoxical presentations of the civil rights movement prompted film critics to challenge the film’s historical accuracy. Indeed, contradictions between Mississippi Burning’s representations of events and activists’ memories encouraged news critics to provide alternative memories of civil rights activism that complemented the memories of many civil rights activists and historians. By adopting the generic conventions of Hollywood entertainment within films that purported to represent the past, Mississippi Burning invited critical reflection about the past. Thus,

90 both the melodramatic narratives and resonances to events from the civil rights movement in these films opened limited spaces for counter-memories of civil rights protest to become part of popular memory.

MEMORY AND AMNESIA IN MISSISSIPPI BURNING

Mississippi Burning garnered particular salience as a source of popular memory in contemporary culture by incorporating elements of documentary film in a conventional Hollywood melodrama. While the film’s resonance with Hollywood cop action dramas propelled the film’s circulation, other features within the film─including brutal images of violence against blacks─constituted the film as a form of historical information. Both the film’s circulation and legitimacy as a source of historical information prompted mainstream newspaper critics discuss both the history of violence against activists in the civil rights movement and the film’s historic accuracy. Thus, both commercial success and historical legitimacy are necessary for films to inform how popular audiences understand the past. By negotiating these competing demands, Mississippi Burning opened up additional spaces for popular culture to remember the history of political repression against civil rights activists.

Mississippi Burning as an historical cop action docudrama

Mississippi Burning featured the struggles of two fictional FBI detectives in their quest to solve the mysterious disappearance of three unnamed civil rights activists in a fictional town in central Mississippi. Although scenes in the film bore semblance to stock documentary footage of violence against civil rights activists, the film’s narrative more closely resembled a fictional melodrama than a documentary about the civil rights movement. This narrative followed the conventions of what Brown (1993) refers to as a cop action drama. Within this film genre, protagonists form an antithetical partnership in

91 order to root out an inhumane villain who threatens the community. Mississippi Burning revolved around the efforts of fictional FBI agents Rupert Anderson, played by Gene Hackman and Alan Ward, played by Wilem DeFoe, to solve the case of the missing men. Much of the film focused on the tension between Anderson, a former Mississippi sheriff- turned FBI agent, and his superior, Ward, a by-the-books agent put in charge of the case. The film depicted Ward as a Northerner who felt outraged by the South’s treatment of African-Americans was unable to solve the men’s disappearance. Under Ward’s direction, bureau agents fruitlessly searched for signs of the missing activists and were continuously rebuffed by white locals. Anderson was also depicted as an FBI agent committed to solving the case of the men’s disappearance, but he displayed little of the earnest concern of his partner. Instead, he made wisecracks about Ward’s ineffective methods for finding the missing activists and made small talk with local white Southerners to determine who might have had information about the case. Anderson also romanced the deputy sheriff’s wife, Mrs. Pell, who eventually provided him with the information crucial to solving the case.

The heroic efforts of Ward, Anderson, and Mrs. Pell contrasted sharply with the actions of the film’s central antagonists Sheriff Stuckey and Deputy Sheriff Clinton Pell. Throughout the film, local police under Stuckey collaborated with local Klu Klux Klan members to undermine the FBI investigation; the film frequently provided startling images of KKK leaders and police beating and threatening to lynch African-Americans in response to the FBI’s continued investigation into the activists’ disappearance. Likewise, the film conveyed spectacular images of black churches and homes being terrorized and burned by segregationists as the FBI agents get closer to solving the case. The trenchant racism within Mississippi’s law enforcement agencies was a central theme throughout the film. Violent images of Klansmen beating black people in response

92 to the FBI’s investigation suggested that the FBI could not prevent or hinder the Klan’s unmitigated torture of blacks and civil rights activists. Indeed, when Anderson questioned Frank Bailey, the police officer who shot one white activist in the head in the first scene, Frank told Hackman, “Still suits in Washington D.C. ain’t gonna change us…unless it’s over my dead body [pause] or a lot of dead niggers.” Bailey concluded his meeting with Anderson by declaring, “there ain’t a court in Mississippi that’d convict me.” For Anderson, Bailey’s confidence in the racism of Mississippi’s legal system proved that Ward’s commitment to formal procedures for FBI conduct would never pose a challenge to the authorities who sanctioned violence against blacks. Thus, Anderson concluded that federal agents would have to act outside of the law in order to seek to root out the killers responsible for the deaths of blacks and activists in Mississippi.

After Mrs. Pell was brutally beaten by her husband for confiding in Anderson, Ward acquiesced to Anderson’s call to “fight fire with fire” and handed the case over to him. The following scenes portrayed FBI agents tricking and terrorizing Klan members to confess their involvement in the activists’ deaths. Anderson threatened Deputy Pell in a barber shop with a razor blade positioned at Pell’s throat and tricked one Klan member into believing that he needed FBI protection to survive impending attacks from fellow Klansmen. In another scene, Anderson flew an unnamed African-American agent to Mississippi to interrogate the town’s mayor and threaten him into providing the names of the Klansmen responsible for the deaths of the activists. Through these coercive actions, FBI agents attained the evidence they needed to prove that the men had impeded the civil rights of the activists. Thus, the threats of violence against Klan members, which were warranted by the Klan’s own disregard for the law, enabled Ward and Anderson to find some justice for the community. The film’s final scenes depicted the men who helped to murder the activists, including Sheriff Stuckey and Deputy Pell, being arrested by federal

93 agents. By demonstrating how the activists’ killers could only be brought to justice through the FBI’s use of “dirty tricks,” this film’s conclusion suggested that people must sometimes go outside of the law to achieve justice and social equality. Anderson’s enthusiasm for going outside legal parameters to apprehend the killers fit closely with the conventional plot development of the cop action genre. According to Ames (1992), villains in crime dramas take actions that “place them outside the pale of civilization,” and “grant their pursuers the moral right to abandon the restrictions of law.” Ames explains that the depiction of the unconscionable villain is an essential element of action films; “it provides the legitimating premise for the extreme violence (and the elaborate special effects needed to depict it), which is a primary selling point of the movies” (Ames, 1992, p. 52). As Ames suggests, the good cop versus evil villain plot development and spectacular action sequences typical of the cop action genre is a formula for commercially successful film. Brown (1993) explains that the commercial success of early cop action dramas such as Die Hard (1988) and Lethal Weapon (1987) prompted a series of sequels and low budget films with similar themes and action sequences (p. 85). Thus, it is likely that Mississippi Burning’s adherence to conventions of the cop action drama made the film compelling, or marketable, as a Hollywood blockbuster. Mississippi Burning provided a site of popular memory, at least partially, because

it was, well, popular. The accolades and box office success Mississippi Burning received attests to the film’s artistic commercial success. After the film was released to theaters in December 1988, it generated $34 million at the box office (“Business data,” 1988). The film also ranked number twelve among top video rentals in 1989 (“Top video,” 1989, p. 13). Awards given to the film also suggest that the film was able to meet the standards for compelling film within Hollywood’s creative community. The National Board of

94 Review of Motion Pictures chose it as the best film of 1988 (McGilligan & Rowland, year, p.G01). Later that year, the film was nominated for an Academy Award for best picture, and Gene Hackman and Frances McDormand won Academy Awards for best actor and best supporting actress (respectively) for their performances in the film (Curry, 1988, p. D01). These accolades attest to the film’s success, but they do not provide a complete explanation of how the film contributed to popular memory. Films that earn high box office revenues and receive Academy Award nominations might convey important social meaning, but are not often recognized by national news media as resources for understanding history. Thus, particular signifiers in conventional films prompted audiences to understand Mississippi Burning as a film about the past.

Burning violence against blacks into popular memory

Mississippi Burning’s status as a source of memory about the civil rights movement derived from its reflection of violent events from the history of the civil rights movement and from textual cues that borrowed the social conventions of documentary film. Although this narrative fit with generic conventions of Hollywood action drama, it incorporated visual cues that suggested the film was based on actual instances of racial injustice during the 1960s. As they emerged within the framework of a cop action drama, visual and narrative signifiers of realism attributed particular salience to Mississippi Burning as a source of historical information in contemporary culture. The film’s correspondence to actual events provided the strongest signal that the movie represented a site of popular memory. Frequently, the film provided images that resembled events from the history of the civil rights movement that garnered extensive national news media attention during the 1960s. Audiences with historical knowledge about events surrounding the civil rights movement might have recognized graphic images of Klan members beating and lynching African-Americans as tactics white 95 segregationists used to maintain the subordinate status of African-Americans in the South. Likewise, images of churches and homes being burned to the ground vividly recalled the ways in which segregationists terrorized the African-American community to dissuade them from fighting for civil rights at that time. Audiences with knowledge of the history of the civil rights movement might also have recognized the initial scenes in the film. The film’s introductory scenes featured three men, two white and one black, being chased down an otherwise deserted country road late at night by three other cars. The men pulled over when they recognized police lights flashing behind them. Then, a police officer approached the car, called the white man driving the car a “nigger loving Jew,” drew his pistol to the driver’s temple, and fired. As the screen went black, sounds of additional shots rang out, and another man’s voice declared, “at least I shot me a nigger.” These images bore some semblance to information regarding the real-life disappearances of George Chaney, Michael Goodman and Andrew Schwerner who came to Neshoba County, Mississippi in June 1964 as part of the Mississippi Freedom Summer project.

This project was a joint effort of the NAACP, CORE, SCLC, and SNCC to organize white and black activists to register blacks in Mississippi to vote. Organizers anticipated that activists would face violent resistance from Southern whites. They also believed that images of white, educated youth being brutalized by white segregationists

would rally middle-class Americans across the north and mid-west to the cause of the civil rights movement. As attention to the young men’s disappearance mounted, President Johnson ordered two hundred 400 marines and 200 FBI agents to find the young men. On August 4, FBI agents discovered the bodies of the activists in an earthen dam. Forensics indicated that the men had been shot in the head before they were buried alive.

96 Cagin and Dray’s (1988) history of events surrounding the activists’ disappearance suggests that Mississippi law enforcement officers colluded with KKK members in attacks on blacks and civil rights activists. Two police officials, Neshoba County Sheriff Rainey and his deputy Cecil Price, closely resembled the characters of Stuckey and Pell. Cagin and Dray indicate that these officers refused to interfere with growing KKK activity during the summer of 1964, (pp. 326-327) and that Rainey and Price had organized the crime or were covering up for those who had (p. 335). Because several features of the film corresponded to actual events from the history of the civil rights movement, audience members who recognized some of these events, but didn’t have extensive knowledge of the history of the civil rights movement, may have believed that the entire film was based on events surrounding the activists’ disappearance.

Images of journalists in the film also resonated with popular memories of journalists who covered the activists’ disappearance in 1964. Several scenes in the film depicted reporters as they questioned local and federal officials about the status of the missing activists and the state of race relations in Mississippi. Other scenes portrayed FBI agents watching newsreel footage of white Southerners beating and terrorizing civil rights activists. In one scene, Ward and several FBI agents watched newsreel footage of a Klu Klux Klan rally to understand the extent to which the lives of black people were threatened throughout the South. During the next scene, Ward demanded that FBI agents step up their efforts to find the men responsible for the activists’ deaths. This scene suggested that journalistic coverage of violence inflicted on civil rights activists incited the FBI’s moral outrage and prompted them to retaliate. Although there is little evidence to suggest that the media galvanized the FBI to fight racism in the South, television journalism helped to galvanize widespread support for the civil rights movement in the United States. In response to these televised images,

97 white audiences in the North and Western put pressure on political leaders and Southern businesses to support integration and voting rights in the South. Mississippi Burning did not illustrate the relationship between broadcast news media and the movement’s success, but it did distinguish national news media as important to the narrative of the FBI’s efforts to find the bodies of the missing activists and bring their murderers to justice. The film’s images of the press suggested that racism in the South was an important national issue at the time that Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner disappeared. For audiences who recognized the narrative’s fidelity to events that took place well before Parker directed Mississippi Burning, the film might have taken on particular salience as a lesson about an important national event.

Other visual techniques also encouraged audiences to read the film as a representation of actual events. These techniques borrowed from documentary film strategies that suggest the images projected by film reflected historic reality, and might have existed independently from the film’s production. For example, one scene interspersed images of the FBI investigation with documentary-style interviews of citizens speaking to reporters. While FBI agents and marines searched a muddy river bottom for the bodies of the missing activists, journalists covered their investigation and interviewed white residents who were also observing the FBI’s search. Interviewees spoke directly to the camera and described their opinions about race relations in their community. From this camera angle, the film’s audience was positioned to see the local white people being interviewed from the vantage point of the journalists depicted in the film. The first scene in this sequence featured a middle-aged woman who stood with her face to the camera while marines combing the river appeared in the background. A voice from behind the camera, presumably a reporter, asked, “How do you think the

98 negroes have been treated in this community? The woman responded, “They’re treated about fair. As good as they outta be.” A few seconds later, the film focused on a man sitting with his back to his pig pen as he told the camera, “If you ask me, the Negroes around here have been treated awful bad for a long time.” Moments later, the film focused on another man who sat in the driver’s seat of a truck. He told the camera, “I think Martin Luther King’s one of the leaders. I mean, J. Edgar Hoover said that he was a communist. I don’t know if they had proof to that effect, but, you know, I hadn’t seen it myself. But that’s what they say.” These scenes followed the conventions of the talking-head interview common to documentary film and news reporting. In addition to portraying journalists as important to the film’s narrative about FBI efforts to find the missing activists, the film invited audiences to understand the film as an extension of journalistic memory surrounding the activists’ disappearance. Images of people speaking directly to a camera typically appear in films that purport to have a one-to-one correspondence to the world outside of the film; thus, images of individuals speaking directly to the camera in Mississippi Burning suggested that the opinions expressed by the characters of local Mississippians in the film represented the opinions expressed by whites who lived in the South during the 1960s. For younger audiences who had limited knowledge of the history of the civil rights movement, these cues may have provided compelling signs that the film was a legitimate representation of historic reality, instead of a conventional action drama.

The film’s conclusion also encouraged audiences to perceive the film as a commentary about events from the past. At the end of the film, captions that described the sentences of the men apprehended for violating the activists’ civil rights also signaled that the film represented historic reality instead of a conventional action drama. As Stuckey, Pell, and other Klan members were arrested in the film’s final minutes, captions

99 at the bottom of the screen described the length and severity of their prison sentences. For instance, as the film depicted Frank Bailey’s arrest, captions at the bottom of the screen read, “Frank Bailey sentenced to ten years imprisonment.” Captions at the bottom of the screen depicting Pell’s arrest likewise read, “Clinton Pell sentenced to ten years imprisonment.” The film also denoted that Sheriff Ray Stuckey was acquitted. Although the names of the men provided on screen were fictional, these men had real-life counterparts who were arrested for violating civil rights laws in connection with the activists’ deaths. Cecil Price was sentenced to six years in prison, and, as the film suggested, Sheriff Lawrence Rainey was acquitted (Douthat, 1989, p. 19). For audiences who had witnessed the news coverage of documentary footage of the events surrounding Mississippi’s Freedom Summer, the film’s images were likely to have reminded them of the images they saw on television in previous decades. For audiences who had not, the captions at the bottom of the screen during their arrest cued audiences to believe that the film was based on “a true story”. The conclusion also suggested that this narrative carried important social lesson with it.

The film’s final moments also broke with the convention of the cop action drama by preventing its central protagonists from assuming the position of heroes during the conclusion. During the film’s final scene, the two FBI agents discovered that the town’s mayor hung himself in the wake of the mass arrests of the town’s police officers. A lower ranking agent asked Ward, “Why did he do it? He wasn’t involved.” Facing the camera, ostensibly toward the direction of the lower ranking officer, Ward answered, “Any one is guilty who watches this happen and pretends it isn’t. No, he was guilty all right, just as guilty as the crazy fanatics who pulled the trigger. Maybe we all are.” By facing the camera and invoking everyone who has witnessed racial injustice as guilty for violence against subordinated groups, Ward implied that audiences who have witnessed

100 brutality against African-Americans are also culpable for racially motivated violence in the United States. Instead of smoothing over tensions created by contradictions between American ideals and the realities of American political life during the 1960s, Mississippi Burning called upon audiences to take responsibility for racial injustice. In so doing, the film fit within the convention of documentaries that are constructed to draw attention to social issues or problems. By encouraging audiences to assume responsibility for racial injustices in the South, the film’s conclusion suggested that memories of past injustice have implications for the present. The film’s conclusion encouraged audiences to consider the film as a social commentary about race relations during the 1960s and attested to Parker’s interest in constructing a popular memory critical of prevailing race relations in the United States. Moments before the film’s closing credits, the film focused on the headstone of the unnamed black activist who was murdered which read, “1964-Not Forgotten.” By focusing on these words, the film suggested that audiences had a moral imperative to remember the slain activists and take action on their behalf. The film’s visual cues and resonances to stock footage of violence against blacks encouraged viewers to understand the entire melodrama as a representation of the past. Cues that cast the film as historic also attributed salience to the film’s final appeal to audiences to remember the slain activist. Ostensibly, the memory constructed by the film also reflected upon incidents of racism in the world beyond cinema.

Forgetting civil rights activism in Mississippi

Insofar as commercial media imperatives called for the depiction of whites in a predominantly fictitious cop action drama, Mississippi Burning’s successful navigation of competing demands delimited the film’s ability to project empowering images of activism to audiences. Although several events depicted by the film bore semblance to 101 the terrifying experiences of many blacks living in Mississippi during the late 1950s and 1960s, Mississippi Burning frequently departed from the record of activism constructed by activists and scholars such as Cagin and Dray (1988), Marable (1984), and Mills (1993). It also omitted information about key people who played a role in Mississippi’s civil rights movement in 1964. The film never mentioned the names Chaney, Schwerner, or Goodman; nor did it depict events surrounding the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project that brought over a thousand black and white activists from the North to Mississippi to protest the state’s racist policies. The film also excluded images of local black citizens who challenged Mississippi’s racist policies despite threats that local whites made to their lives and their families. Indeed, black activists brought the informant who knew where the bodies of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman were located to the attention of the FBI (Cagin and Dray, 1988, pp. 336-370). Because the film told the story surrounding the missing activists from the perspective of fictional FBI agents, Mississippi Burning hindered audiences from recognizing how ordinary people have been a central force for social change.

As the film deflated the role that activists played in finding the bodies of the missing activists, it inflated the FBI’s role in securing justice for African-Americans during the 1960s. Activists’ memoirs and academic histories of activism demonstrate that the FBI was not as committed to furthering the goals of the civil rights movement as the film suggests. Gitlin (1987) recounts how the FBI frequently looked on as state police beat activists during the Freedom Rides (pp. 136-140). In contrast with the memory constructed in Mississippi Burning, the documentary Eyes on the Prize (1987) quoted federal officials and activists who recounted that civil rights activists frequently asked for federal protection from abuse by local officials, but FBI Director Herbert Hoover rebuffed them by insisting that the bureau wasn’t in charge of protecting

102 individuals. Cagin and Dray’s (1988) history of events surrounding Freedom Summer explains that John Proctor, who was in charge of investigating events in Neshoba County, Mississippi, had an amicable relationship with Rainey and Price, and regarded Price as “a nice guy who would do anything for you” (p. 324). By framing the FBI as central to blacks’ ability to receive justice and civil rights in the South, the film ultimately suggested that activism did not play a pivotal role in the struggle for racial justice in this country, but the federal government’s commitment to it did. Ultimately, the film indicated that ordinary people need not organize to challenge corruption and fight social injustice; the system will find justice for them.

The film’s disregard for ordinary people as forces for social justice fit the conventions of the cop action drama. Victims in such films provide a catalyst for the protagonists’ moral outrage precisely because they have no direct relation to the assailant; their anonymity marks them as hapless victims who had no control over their misfortune. Mississippi Burning’s focus on FBI agents as central protagonists in a film about civil rights resembled typical crime dramas, but it conflicted with the film’s status as a representation of actual events. Thus, the conventions of the cop action drama undercut the film’s ability to represent the history of the civil rights movement from the perspective of those who actually struggled within the movement. By omitting images of activists central to the process of social change for civil rights, the film represents a site of popular amnesia about activism and protest in the United States. The conventions of cop action dramas also curtailed the film’s ability to represent injustices from the perspectives of African-Americans and thereby delimited its role as a site of memory about racial injustice. By replacing images of black activists with images of FBI officials, the film also undercut the film’s role as a site of counter-memory about the state’s role within a liberal democracy. Unlike black activists who struggled for

103 representation and justice from outside the legal system, the FBI agents in the film fought for justice and equality within the terrain of those institutions that the film critiques. Thus, the film’s construction of FBI agents as central heroes in the narrative about civil rights restored the legitimacy of political and legal institutions that it initially exposed as corrupt. Audiences are told that social injustices are not endemic to the political system; rather, they are the outcome of isolated instances of corruption within an otherwise healthy democratic political system. By creating a popular memory of the civil rights movement as the federal government’s fight against one state, the film encouraged cultural forgetting, not only of ordinary people’s struggles, but of people’s struggles against a political system that has yet to fully represent them.

AMNESIA AS A SOURCE FOR INVENTION IN JOURNALISTIC MEMORY

Mississippi Burning’s status as a source of popular memory was reinforced by secondary sources that attributed significance to the film’s social implications. Journalists played a central role in legitimating the film as a site of historical information. Despite the film’s disclaimer that it was a fictional account based on true events, many reviewers recognized the film as a legitimate site for remembering the past (Higashi, 2001, p. 226). Several critics noted that Mississippi Burning was one among few films that accurately depicted the brutality of the blacks and activists faced in Mississippi

during the 1960s. One of the first critics to review the film, Canby (1988) described the film as “utterly authentic,” and as “one of the toughest, straightest, most effective fiction films yet made about bigotry and racial violence” (p. C12). Canby also praised the film for honoring “the steadfastness of the legions of people who once fought for social change.” Although none of the other reviews examined here expressed the same unwavering support for the film, most reports and reviews of the film shared Canby’s praise for the film’s representation of Southern brutality against blacks during the 1960s. 104 Carter (1988) declared that the film was “at its most honest” when it portrayed “the raw brutality of Klan terrorism” (www.wsj.com/archives). Many reports emphasized that the film accurately depicted the violence and lynchings that blacks faced at the hands of whites in Mississippi during the 1960s (Barnes,1989, 3C; Kaufman, 1989, p. B1; King, 1989, sec. 2, p. 1; Lipper, p. 1F). For Rose (1989), Mississippi Burning deserved special praise because it was the first to draw national attention to the violence of the Klan in recent history. He told readers, “Until this movie came along, I could not explain to friends in Miami just how scary it could be in Mississippi during the 1960s” (p. 1C). Rose suggests that the film tapped into the reservoirs of individual and historic memories of violence against blacks that had been previously unimaginable to people who had not experienced racism in Mississippi during the 1960s.

By popularizing memories previously encapsulated within individual memory, the film prompted journalists to fill in the details left unexplained by the film. Virtually all of the reports and reviews of the film referenced Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman, and explained their disappearance as an instance of racially motivated violence endemic to Mississippi during the 1960s. Several reports also stated that their deaths mobilized white America and the federal government to take an aggressive stand against racism and violence against civil rights activists (Herbeck, 1989, online archives; Canby, 1989, sec. 2, p.1). By prompting some audience members to recall similar memories of injustice in

response to the film, Mississippi Burning provided an inventional resource for mainstream news media to remember racial injustice and deliberate its relevance to contemporary social relations. In addition to elaborating the events surrounding the activists’ disappearance, reporters and film critics recalled instances of violence against African-Americans that were not depicted in the film. Douthat (1989) quoted Florence Mars who described how

105 she was forced out of business after she testified before the federal grand jury investigating the murders of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman (p. 47). Lipper (1989) reported that when F.B.I. agents searched for the missing activists, they also found the bodies of other black men they weren’t looking for, including a 14-year-old boy, never identified, wearing a CORE T-shirt and two black men (sec. 2, p. 15). For one writer, Peterman (1989), the film prompted a “flood of memories.” He included among them the death of Medgar Evers in 1963, the Birmingham, Alabama church bombing in 1965, and his own experiences of being harassed by whites when family members agreed to testify against several white people in his community (p. 1D). These reviews demonstrate how the film’s depiction of power relations was a site for counter-memory, not necessarily because it represented the perspectives of activists, but because the images of violence in the film presented a topos that prompted reviewers to address racial injustices from the past. While the film resonated with the recollections of critics and former activists, it propelled additional discourses about the racism into popular culture. As the following section in this chapter demonstrates, such discourses did not always complement the memories constructed by the film. Instead, many journalists indicated that the real history of the civil rights movement was far different from the one Parker created.

Because Mississippi Burning encouraged both a popular memory of racism and a forgetting of the individuals who fought against racial injustice, journalistic reviews of the film offered both praise and condemnation of the film. In the month following its release, Mississippi Burning generated criticism from national news media, former civil rights activists, and the academy. Thereafter, reviewers also critiqued the film. Most reviews and reports about the film noted that the film focused on the perspectives and interests of whites even though it was purportedly about the struggles of blacks (Milloy, 1989, p. B03; Ringel, 1989, p. K01; Simon, 1989, online archives). Others complained

106 that by focusing on whites, the film presented blacks solely as victims (Carr, 1989, p. 46; Gabrenya, 1989, online archives; Will, 1989, p. 47). [See also Barnes, 1989, p. 3C; Minor, 1989, sec. 1, p. 16]. Several reviewers concluded that the film was another manifestation of racism in the United States. For Ringel (1989), the film represented white man’s “hatred and fear of that which is Other” (p. K01). For Staples (1989), the film was an example of “cinematic segregation.” Staples also described Parker’s defense of the film, which was that the focus had to be on white heroes to appeal to society, as “reminiscent of what a Montgomery, Alabama bus driver told Rosa Parks in 1955: Get up and go to the back of the bus, that's just the way things are” (sec. 2, p. 1).

Reporter Marquand (1989) quoted former civil rights activists who objected to the film’s representation of the movement. Judy Richards, a former member of SNCC, told Marquand that she and fellow activists were “incensed at the film's image of powerless blacks waiting to be saved by two white FBI heroes” (p. 11). Robert Moses, head of SNCC in 1964 told Marquand that the film’s representation of blacks was reminiscent of America’s historic racism. “‘We'd been working in Mississippi for years before 1964, and America never saw us. Now again they don't see us. Blacks in the movie are a plot device - a backdrop for the white heroes’” (p. 11). Reviewers suggested that the film belied the experiences of African-Americans and civil rights activists just after the moment the film gave representation to them. To compensate for the aspects of the civil rights movement that were misrepresented or missing from the film, many reviewers constructed histories alternative to the narrative told in Mississippi Burning. In response to the film’s narrative that positioned the FBI as central to the civil rights struggle, many newspaper critics and reporters provided their own short histories of the civil rights movement. According to these histories, activists, not federal officials, were primarily responsible for ending segregation and securing voting rights for African-

107 Americans. One report noted that blacks in Mississippi were far from being fearful victims and fought racist policies (Barnes, 1989, p. 3C). Other reviewers mentioned black activists including Fannie Lou Hamer (Italie, 1988, p. 5; Marquand, 1989, p. 11), Medgar Evers (Italie. 1988, p. 5; Marquand, 1989, p. 11 ), and Bob Moses (Staples, 1989, sec. 2, p. 1), who were central to the movement’s achievements. Journalists also emphasized that it wasn’t lone individuals who made a difference in the movement; instead, the sacrifices of “countless SNCC workers” (Marquand, 1989, p. 11), and “the bravery of thousands of black Mississippians” (Carter, 1988, p. online archives) prompted civil rights legislation and an end to formal segregation in the South. As Kaufman (1989) eloquently stated, the collective efforts of ordinary people “provided the organizational and emotional backbone of the movement” (p. B1). [See also Cohen, 1989, p. W09, and Nossiter, 1989, p. C01]. As these reviews indicated, reviewers’ recognition of the film’s misrepresentations of the civil rights movement invited critical reflection about the film and about the events that the film purported to represent.

In addition to arguing that black people deserved stronger roles in the film, many critics also complained that the film should not have heralded the FBI as heroes for the civil rights movement. Reporters and reviewers frequently explained that the film’s conclusion belied the real tactics that the FBI used to find the bodies of the missing activists. As many reports noted, the bureau paid $30,000 to a former member of the Klu

Klux Klan who was willing to act as their informant (Barnes 1989, p. 3C; Canby, 1989, sec. 2, p.1; and Carr 1989, p. 46; Kaufman, 1989, p. B1; Pollack, 1989, p. 6C; Staples, 1989, sec. 2, p. 1). Carter (1989) asserted that the bureau “most certainly did not solve the murders in the manner depicted in the movie-by roughing up, threatening and otherwise intimidating suspects and witnesses. Had it done so, its case would have been thrown out of court” (p. W09).

108 News reporters also quoted film critics and activists who argued that the FBI was far from supportive of the civil rights movement. According to Marquand (1989), members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, “chafed at the ‘savior’ role of the FBI in the film” because they recalled that “a number of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover's agents went along with the bigoted agenda of local police and, in some cases, the Ku Klux Klan” (p. 11). Likewise, Italie (1988) quoted former civil rights activists Myrlie Evers and Mary King who recalled that FBI agents primarily harassed activists rather than express concern for them. King wrote in her memoirs of the Mississippi Freedom Summer that:

Practically everyone working in the civil rights movement knew from firsthand experience of the duplicity of the FBI. In many instances, FBI agents could be seen watching a demonstration while fraternizing with sheriffs and local law officers....It has now become commonly accepted that some of these agents were themselves members of the Ku Klux Klan. (quoted in Italie, 1988, p. 5)

A review written by Staples (1989) similarly stated that the F.B.I. was “openly hostile” to investigations surrounding civil rights deaths. According to Staples, there were no black people in the bureau at the time of the activists’ disappearance (sec 2, p. 1). Finally, Peterman (1989) challenged the film’s distinction between federal agents who supposedly supported civil rights, and local officials who threatened blacks and activists. She argued that FBI agents were known among African-Americans for refusing to listen to their claims of racism. Peterman continued, “I remember two agents who came to my family's home after my father complained to the U.S. Justice Department about violations by the Macon County Board of Registrars. We opened the door, the agents walked in and said: “What you niggers complaining about now?”(p. D1). Secondary sources highlighted how the film provided images of racial injustice that accorded with the memories of activists and historians and then belied the experiences of activists who struggled against Southern racism. As they took note of this contradiction, these 109 reviewers constructed counter-memories that challenged the memory of the civil rights movement constructed by the film. By prompting critique and debate about the past, the film created a space for the invention of counter-hegemonic messages about civil rights. The film’s potential to incite controversy and prompt counter-hegemonic messages in journalism texts was evinced most clearly in reviews that addressed the implications of the film’s controversy for the present. Several reporters noted that racism has not yet been eradicated from public life or from the federal government. According to Peterman (1989), racially motivated violence has continued throughout the United States. The only difference, she added, is that it’s “the 1980s instead of the 1960s” (p. 1D). Rose (1989) also elucidated the critical potential of commercial media in his essay that described continued racial discrimination in the F.B.I. After Rose recounted the story of an African-American FBI agent who was harassed by white colleagues, he noted that “about 9 percent of the bureau's 9,500 agents are African-American or Hispanic. Of the 59 field offices nationwide, only one, in Philadelphia, is headed by an African- American. None is headed by a Hispanic” (p. 1C). Critics who drew parallels between instances of racism omitted in the film and contemporary racial injustice illustrate the social function of popular memory for contemporary audiences.

The production of memories of racism in Mississippi Burning engaged commercial news media as a source of critical memory. As the film provided reviewers

with an opening to introduce counter-memories into commercial media, it also gave reviewers a space to critique contemporary race relations in the United States. Marcuse (1964) writes that “rememberance is a mode of dissociation from the given facts, a mode of mediation which breaks, for short moments, the omnipresent power of the given facts” (p. 98). Indeed, in a few instances, journalistic reviews engaged memories produced by Mississippi Burning to disrupt the legitimacy of the American Dream myth typically

110 advanced by commercial media. Yoder (1989) praised the film for its potential to interest younger audiences in issues surrounding the civil rights struggle. With this history, Yoder believed people would then be “less tempted by the dangerous myth of national innocence and goodness lately preached in high places” (p. 3B). My analysis of Mississippi Burning as the offspring of melodrama and documentary film complements news reviews and reports about Mississippi Burning that regarded the film as both a successful entertainment film and as a source for generating memories about violence against activists in the civil rights movement. The film’s commercial success, in connection with reviews that deliberated about its role as a site of memory about the civil rights movement reflect the film’s ability to navigate competing demands of Hollywood market imperatives and Parker’s interest in representing social injustices in recent United States history. Together, the film and the secondary sources prompted by the film suggest that the film’s integration of features from documentary and melodrama film enabled the film to become a part of popular memory; it created dramatic tension necessary to captivate entertainment film-going audiences and it established itself as a film about the past.

This analysis also suggests that both films and journalism coverage of films shape the ways in which films become significant sites of popular memory. Journalists and reviewers played a central role in establishing Mississippi Burning as a source of popular memory. Reviews also revised the memory established in the film to reflect blacks’ experiences. Thus, these secondary sources constituted part of the popular memory that the film evoked. The popular memories of civil rights activism in 1964 were constructed intertextually, through the film that created memories of the past and through texts that challenged and reframed the film’s memories. By challenging the film’s memories, journalists were able to incorporate counter-memories into commercial media. For

111 newspaper readers, reviews might have been even more influential in the construction of popular memories of Mississippi than the film itself. Alternatively, the potential for these memories to invite criticism of the state or to celebrate black activism was limited. Although journalistic reviews of the film provided critical memories of American race relations, reviews were predominantly positive. Critics thereby encouraged audiences to embrace the film’s representations of the civil rights movement even as they condemned the film’s omissions of activists and blacks. For audiences who paid scant attention to these reviews, such reviews may have propelled the film’s popularity without drawing critical attention to the film’s misrepresentation of civil rights activism.

112 NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

1Several essays in Asen and Brouwer’s (2001) Counterpublics and the State describe how social movements function as counterpublics. See, for example, Palczewski’s essay on the role of the Internet within social movements, and Cloud’s essay on the implications of the 1998 Indonesian Revolution for social movement theory.

2In 1982, a federal district court ruled that the police had violated Hampton and Clark’s civil rights (Churchill, 2001, p. 107).

113 Chapter Four

Melodrama and the scapegoat in Ghosts of Mississippi

The critical memories within reviews of Mississippi Burning did not fundamentally challenge racism in Mississippi, but they did contribute to growing political tensions about the state’s racist past. In response to such tensions, state officials responded to political pressures to reopen cases against whites suspected of killing civil rights activists during the 1950s and 1960s. The first of these cases was that against Byron de La Beckwith for the murder of Medgar Evers in 1964. Beckwith’s conviction in 1994 prompted the creation of the second major Hollywood film about civil rights: Ghosts of Mississippi. In this chapter, I explain how Ghosts of Mississippi contributed to the memories of civil rights in popular culture that were initially introduced by Mississippi Burning. Insofar as Mississippi Burning represents the offspring of melodrama and documentary film genres, Ghosts of Mississippi is Mississippi Burning’s sibling. Following Mississippi Burning’s lead, Ghosts of Mississippi achieved status as popular memory by interweaving signifiers of realism into a melodramatic narrative. Visual elements and secondary sources related to the film told readers to understand Ghosts of Mississippi as a representation of historic events while the film’s narrative structure provided a memory of civil rights in terms of good overcoming evil. This film’s narrative also mirrored Mississippi Burning by featuring whites as heroes in the struggle for civil rights. While Mississippi Burning drew attention to traumatic memories of state sanctioned violence against activists, Ghosts of Mississippi assuaged that memory.

114 This narrative resonated within the patterns of messages that appeared across coverage of Beckwith’s trial in three prominent national newspapers: The New York Times, The Washington Post, and USA Today. Patterns across journalism coverage and the film demonstrate how particular narratives become naturalized in popular culture. In this regard, the narrative in Ghosts of Mississippi affirmed prevailing memory that left racism in the past. Ghosts of Mississippi and news reviews of the film ascribed particular meanings to Evers’ death and to Beckwith’s conviction. These media sources constructed a particular memory that suggested that racial injustice no longer plagued Mississippi. As these sources left racism in Mississippi’s past, they made activism irrelevant to the process of social change.

Although both films portrayed the history of civil rights in a narrative framework espousing white superiority, they did not inform popular memory equally. Ghosts of Mississippi generated less positive journalistic reception than its earlier counterpart. It also generated fewer counter-memories from journalism reviews. Although reviewers critiqued Ghosts’ partiality, they did not circulate the critical counter-memories that Mississippi Burning elicited. Ghosts of Mississippi’s fidelity to the historic and journalistic record surrounding Beckwith’s conviction closed journalism criticisms of the film even though the film ignored black activism as equally as Mississippi Burning. Unlike its more successful sibling, Ghosts of Mississippi did not become a prominent

source of popular memory because the conventions of melodrama that it adopted did not appeal to the expectations of conventional Hollywood filmgoers; consequently, this film had less potential to invite criticism from film reviewers. I conclude that fidelity to history in Ghosts of Mississippi provided a more limited opening for reviewers to attend to the history of violence against civil rights activists, and thereby had less counter- hegemonic potential than its earlier counterpart.

115 THE INSTRUMENTAL ROLE OF POPULAR MEMORY

Legislative action in years following Mississippi Burning’s release indicates that the controversy surrounding the 1988 film created an image problem for the state. Indeed, the film may have had an instrumental influence on political life in Mississippi. In the years immediately following Mississippi Burning’s release, politicians and activists called for legal and legislative action to redress the injustices that the state perpetuated against blacks during the 1960s. According to Nossiter (1989), Mississippi Burning “helped stimulate a mood of collective introspection about the past” (p. 229). In 1988, Ray Mabus hired the political relations firm Ogilvy and Mather to repair the state’s reputation (Nossiter, 1989, p. C01). Nossiter (1989) also reports that Mississippi’s tarnished image prompted state officials to integrate the history of the state’s racism into its own political memory. In June of 1989, Mississippi’s Secretary of State Dick Molphus delivered the state’s first public tribute to Chaney, Schewerner, and Goodman (p. 235). Black activists in the state also seized upon the state’s renewed attention to civil rights memory in 1989 to influence state leaders to release the Sovereignty Commission papers. Sealed previously by the state legislature, the papers revealed how public officials in Mississippi barred blacks from service on trials during the 1960s and kept men suspected of killing blacks and activists from prosecution despite strong evidence against them. With the reopening of the papers, former activists and family members of blacks slain in the 1960s had a rationale for asking the state to reopen these cases. Black leaders and civil rights organizations initially called upon state attorneys to reopen the case against. Although the deaths of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman prompted the state’s reconsideration of cases against men considered responsible for the deaths of black

116 activists, the first case to be successfully prosecuted was the case against Byron de la Beckwith for the 1963 murder of NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers. On June 12 1963, NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers was shot to death in front of his home in Jackson, Mississippi. Nine days later, police arrested Beckwith, an avowed white supremacist, for Evers’ murder. Although prosecutors created a strong case against him, Beckwith was set free after two juries of white men could not reach a unanimous verdict (Nossiter, 1989, unpaginated preface). Beckwith’s trials in 1964 were examples among many cases in which all white juries failed to convict whites of murdering blacks despite strong physical evidence against them. Following the release of the Sovereignty Commission papers in 1989, the Jackson City Council asked the state to reopen the case against Beckwith. In 1994, thirty years after Evers’ death, a jury comprised of white and black jurists convicted Beckwith. Beckwith’s conviction was unprecedented; never before had so much time lapsed between a homicide and the conviction of the person responsible for the crime. The trial against Beckwith is also remarkable for the media attention it garnered. Between 1989 and 2001, at least 376 articles in the nation’s leading newspapers featured Beckwith.

Just as Mississippi Burning prompted local political leaders and attorneys to improve images of race relations in the state, Beckwith’s prosecution prompted the construction of popular memories that suggested the state’s racist past had been reformed. In 1996, Ghosts of Mississippi recalled state district attorney Bobby DeLaughter’s efforts to bring Beckwith to trial and have a jury find him guilty of Evers’ death. Created after the box-office success of Mississippi Burning and after the successful prosecution of Beckwith, Ghosts of Mississippi spotlighted the state’s efforts to build a case against Beckwith and have him convicted of Evers’ death. Journalistic coverage and the film about Beckwith’s conviction helped to constitute the unresolved

117 case of Evers’ death as a contemporary social injustice; media attention to Beckwith in the 1990s also brought the racism embedded in Mississippi’s legal system during the 1960s into the national media spotlight. By engaging memories of Evers’ death as evidence for a contemporary trial, both Beckwith’s conviction and commercial media attention to it demonstrate how popular memories are inextricable from the contemporary situations that evoke them.

THE TRIUMPH OF A CIVIL RIGHTS HERO IN GHOSTS OF MISSISSIPPI

The narrative of Ghosts of Mississippi evoked the conventions of melodrama to construct a narrative about Beckwith’s prosecution that left racism (and activism) in the past. The plot revolved around the valiant efforts of Hinds County Assistant District Attorney, Bobby DeLaughter, to bring Beckwith to trial in the early 1990s. By framing DeLaughter as a hero struggling against Mississippi’s racist past, the film centered around a melodrama of good versus evil. According to the film, DeLaughter initially resisted requests to bring Beckwith to trial because he believed little evidence remained to prove Beckwith was Evers’ murderer. In addition to the lack of physical evidence tying Beckwith to the crime, DeLaughter’s wife and parents objected to the state’s interest in retrying the case. As the film accurately remembered, DeLaughter’s father-in- law Russell Moore, who died before the case was revisited, was the judge who originally presided over the court proceedings in the 1964 trials that failed to convict Beckwith. Frequently, DeLaughter’s family articulated racist beliefs, including the idea that integration had ruined their way of life. Despite these obstacles, De Laughter persisted in building a case against Beckwith. This film followed DeLaughter’s efforts to attain evidence against Beckwith, gain the trust of Evers’ widow, Myrlie, and convince a jury who found Beckwith guilty in the film’s final scene.

118 In contrast to the film’s heroic image of DeLaughter, the film depicted Beckwith as a despicable character who spouted anti-Semitic, racist statements in almost every scene that included him. When jurists announced Beckwith’s guilt, cheers resonated throughout the court house and among the crowd outside. Those who objected to Beckwith’s conviction were not visible in the film’s closing scene. Thus, this scene suggested that Beckwith and his racist sentiments had been eradicated from Mississippi. Indeed, as Myrlie Evers emerged from the courthouse with DeLaughter at her side, she announced to the crowd, “This is a new day for Mississippi.” As this final scene suggested, Beckwith’s conviction stood in metonymically for the value changes within Mississippi’s social and political order.

Leaving racism to the past

Ghosts of Mississippi framed DeLaughter as a hero who expunged Beckwith from Mississippi society in order to redeem the collective memory of race relations in Mississippi. As Deming (1985) explains, melodramas operationalize good and evil as real forces in the world (p. 6). She adds that melodramas represent the urge toward achieving resacrilization through the personification of good heroes and evil villains (p. 6). This film tells audiences that, although racism may have marred memories of Mississippi, recent efforts to seek justice for Mississippi’s most respected civil rights activists (and cast racists out of Mississippi’s social order) have established a progressive Mississippi for the 1990s. Mississippi’s civic identity was figuratively redeemed through DeLaughter’s personal transformation as well as through Beckwith’s conviction. DeLaughter’s conflicts with his family were central to the film’s narrative about the history of racism in Mississippi. Because the racist ideology of DeLaughter’s wife was fundamentally at odds with DeLaughter’s ideals, his relationship with her dissolved. As the case against 119 Beckwith progressed in the film, DeLaughter met and eventually married another woman, Peggy Lloyd, who applauded DeLaughter’s efforts to bring Beckwith to trial. When DeLaughter began to doubt whether seeing the case to trial was worth the risk to his family’s safety, Lloyd reminded him, “someday your children are going to be able to tell their children that it was their daddy that put away Byron de la Beckwith.” Through Lloyd’s conviction, DeLaughter was reassured that prosecuting Beckwith was “the right thing” to do. The narrative of Ghosts of Mississippi represented what Janice Hocker Rushing and Thomas Frentz (1974) refer to as a “social values myth” in which the changes in the values of a society are symbolically represented through the struggles of characters featured in film (pp. 69-70). In the beginning of the film, DeLaughter was caught at a crossroads, forced to choose between his convictions in furthering the cause of social justice and his ties to his racist parents and wife. After he chose to pursue Beckwith’s conviction, DeLaughter was able to build a new family. It is little coincidence that, within the film’s narrative, DeLaughter’s new family grew stronger as evidence against Beckwith mounted. Ostensibly, DeLaughter represented Mississippi’s “new [white] man.” Thus, the transformation of DeLaughter’s personal life metaphorically represented a transformed Mississippi free from its racist, violent past.

Although Ghosts of Mississippi (hereafter referred to as Ghosts) followed the

conventions of melodrama film closely, it projected both literal and metaphoric messages about the history of race relations in Mississippi. Unlike Mississippi Burning, Ghosts used the real names of people and events surrounding Beckwith’s prosecution, and corresponded closely to the history of the state’s efforts to hold Beckwith accountable for Evers’ death. The film’s strong resonance to actual events challenged critics to find an easy characterization of the film’s purpose. For example, Bernard (1996) characterized

120 Ghosts as “a civil-rights history lesson in the guise of a whodunit or maybe vice versa” (p. 61). For audiences who had followed news media coverage of Beckwith’s prosecution, the film might have been immediately recognized as a source of historical information about the relationship between civil rights activists and the state between 1964 and 1994.

Melodrama in journalism

The myth of social values transformation also emerged in journalistic coverage of Beckwith’s trial; thus, news coverage of Beckwith’s prosecution also helped to establish the film as a source of historical information about race relations and the history of the civil rights movement. Collectively, The New York Times, USA Today, and The Washington Post covered the trial in ninety-five articles. These articles described the events leading up to Beckwith’s arrest in 1990, the arguments made by attorneys defending and prosecuting Beckwith during his trial in 1994, and the Evers’ celebration following Beckwith’s conviction. As early as 1990, journalists acknowledged the significance of the case for public memory. According to one reporter from the Washington Post, Beckwith’s “case has hung unresolved in the collective memory of a state where many attitudes about race have changed dramatically” (LaFraniere, 1990, p. A1). Ostensibly, the memory of Beckwith’s previous trials and the murder of Medgar Evers belied a Mississippi that no longer held racist sentiments or cultivated racial inequity. Newspaper coverage of the events that led to Beckwith’s conviction positioned Beckwith’s conviction as a metonymy for Mississippi’s political and social transformation. Although newspapers set Beckwith’s case in the context of Mississippi’s violent and racist past, they featured Beckwith as central to that history. According to several reports, Evers’ murder was one of the first killings of a well-known civil rights 121 activist in Mississippi. (Dreifus, 1994, p. 69; La Franiere, 1990, p. A1; Smothers, 1994b, p. A18; Mayfield, 1993, p. 38). His was also one of the first deaths to galvanize the civil rights movement (Dreifus, 1994, p. 69, Parker, 1991, p. A1). Reporters frequently quoted DeLaugher, who told them, "This single, cowardly act of the person responsible for Medgar Evers's assassination has probably done more to hurt the state and the perception of Mississippi than any other single act I can think of" (LaFraniere, 1990, p. A1). Coverage prior to Beckwith’s conviction frequently characterized Beckwith and the 1964 trials against him in pejorative language or implicated him in the shooting. For example, a New York Times reporter described Beckwith as an “unregenerate hater” (Goodman, 1994, p. C14), and a USA Today reporter stated that Beckwith’s “grandfatherly … image falls apart as soon as he opens his mouth” (Howard, 1990, p. 3A). Although negative portrayals of Beckwith were not isolated to coverage of the prosecutors’ arguments against him during the trial, prosecutors’ remarks provided some of the most colorful denunciations of Beckwith. According to one report, DeLaughter compared Beckwith to a snake when he told jurors, Beckwith’s “venom has come back to poison him” (Booth, 1994, p. A1). By characterizing Beckwith as a hate-filled man, as the obvious suspect in Evers’ death, and in the image of a serpent, which is an archetypal symbol for evil, newspaper reports cast Beckwith as the villain centrally responsible for Mississippi’s damaged reputation.

By describing Beckwith as a modern-day villain amidst instances that highlighted institutional racism in the state’s legal and justice system, newspaper coverage of the events that led to Beckwith’s conviction positioned Beckwith as a metonymy for racist violence in Mississippi state history. Indeed, many reports acknowledged that the trial was not only about Beckwith; it was about “the Mississippi of the 1960s” (Mayfield, 1992, p. 3A ). [See also Booth, 1994b, p. B1; and Smothers, 1994a, p. A12.] According

122 to several newspaper articles, Beckwith’s conviction would not only undo a grave injustice from the past; it would rhetorically purify Mississippi’s image. Individuals quoted in several newspaper articles stated that Mississippi “was growing up,” (Smothers, 1994b, p. A18) and had begun a “cleansing process” (Nichols & Howlett, 1992, p. A1). As Booth (1994a) reported, “The guilty verdict was seen by many here as a sign that Mississippi …had moved far beyond the state-supported racism that almost tore the country apart in the turbulent 1960s” (p. A1). George Smith told Washington Post reporters, “reopening the case shows that, even though you’re black in Mississippi, our system works” (Mayfield, 1993, p. 38). Because Beckwith stood in for racism in Mississippi history, his conviction indicated that racist sentiments no longer had a home in Mississippi. Resonating with Myrlie Evers’ final speech at the end of Ghosts of Mississippi, newspapers noted that, for many people, Beckwith’s conviction demonstrated that racism in Mississippi had been left in the past.

Signifiers of realism in Ghosts of Mississippi

Ghosts of Mississippi’s strong resonance with journalism coverage constituted the film as an extension of journalistic memory; as such, the film acquired legitimacy as a source of historical knowledge that it might not have had in the absence of extensive national newspaper attention to Beckwith’s trial. For film audiences with little prior knowledge of Beckwith’s 1994 conviction, visual cues within the film itself also suggested that the film was a source of historical information about race relations in Mississippi. Indeed, the film opened with the caption, “this is a true story.” Following this caption, the film’s opening scenes established the film within the context of the history of slavery and the civil rights movement in the United States. As credits rolled, a sequence of sepia toned images projected events and figures pivotal to the history of the struggle for racial equality in the United States. The montage sequence provided images 123 of violence against black protesters, including police dogs attacking protesters with clubs and firehouses, of blacks registering to vote, and of black leaders and sports figures, including Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Frederick Douglas. By depicting events already popularized by mainstream media, these images encouraged audiences to view the film as an extension of civil rights memory in popular culture. Reviewers suggested that these documentary images provided some of the most emotionally charged moments in the film. Maslin (1996) wrote that the film opened with “rousing, majestic montage depicting landmarks of the civil rights struggle in America (p. C14), and Hartl (1996) explained that the film’s most “affecting moments” included

a telecast of President Kennedy's literate, poised endorsement of the movement's aims; the murder itself, which is handled with horrific straightforwardness; and Barnett's court appearance, which speaks volumes about what a Southern politician felt he could get away with in 1963. (p. F4) By establishing Ghosts as a historical account, visual and narrative resonances to journalistic coverage and the civil rights movement in the film imbued the story of Beckwith’s conviction with social significance.

THE NARRATIVE SCAPEGOATING OF BYRON DE LA BECKWITH

By sharing the same melodramatic narrative of Beckwith’s conviction with journalism coverage of the case from two years earlier, Ghosts encouraged audiences to understand the film as a dramatic, non-fiction narrative with important social implications. Ghosts and the news media framings of the trial suggested that Beckwith stood for something larger than himself; according to these texts, he was the embodiment of Mississippi’s violent and racist past. Likewise, the film and journalism coverage of Beckwith’s trial framed DeLaughter as a hero that embodied Mississippi’s emerging identity. Popular memory surrounding Beckwith’s conviction provided a melodrama

124 whereby Mississippi was transformed by the state’s efforts to convict Beckwith and embrace the goals of racial justice. By counterposing Beckwith and DeLaughter, both the film and newspapers constructed a resacrilization of Mississippi’s racist past. Because Beckwith represented the evils of Mississippi’s racist past, the climax to narratives constructed in both the film and in journalistic coverage called for Beckwith’s expulsion. The narrative framing of Beckwith’s trial provided a scapegoat for Mississippi’s history of violence against African-Americans and civil rights activists. Such scapegoating of Beckwith has implications for race relations and social injustice in the United States during the 1990s, when these memories were constructed. This film promoted an understanding of racism as isolated to individuals and to states, and not to systematic, structural inequities that persisted in the 1990s when the film appeared. Although Beckwith was responsible for the death of Evers, he was not solely responsible for the injustices done to African-Americans and civil rights workers during the 1960s. As the history of the civil rights movement attests, Evers’ death was part of a larger pattern of violence against blacks and civil rights activists used to intimidate those who would challenge segregation and demoralize the movement. The predominant framing of Beckwith as the cause for Mississippi’s tarnished reputation belied the continued poverty and de facto segregation of black and white neighborhoods in Jackson and elsewhere in

the nation.1 Commercial media’s attention to Mississippi as the source of America’s violence against African-Americans also scapegoated one state for racial inequities and state sponsored brutality against African-Americans that has persisted across the United States into the 1990s. In 1995, African-Americans were three times more likely to live in poverty than whites (Vobejda, 1995, p. A1). During the early 1990s, as the case against

125 Beckwith was growing, racial profiling was garnering news media attention as another incarnation of racism within America’s justice system. News reports indicated that, although African-Americans represented 12 percent of the population during the 1990s, they made up almost three-fourths of all routine traffic stops (Rogers. 2000, p. 94), comprised half of the nation’s prisoners (Thomas, 1995, p. A01), and were the most

frequent victims of police shootings (Thomas, 1995, p. A01).2 Images of violence against African-Americans were not relegated to memories of the 1960s either. The image of three white police officers beating Rodney King in 1991 bore resemblances to images of police officers beating activists and blacks in Southern states during the civil rights movement.

Parallels between images of blacks abused by the justice system in the 1960s and the 1990s indicated that state authorities had not yet accorded equal status to blacks when Beckwith was convicted. Thus, memories of Mississippi drew attention to systematic racism in the United States that has persisted for decades. Conversely, popular memory of Evers’ death and the struggles to prosecute Beckwith mirrored ongoing racial injustices in the United States’ legal system. The narrative scapegoating of Beckwith in popular memory symbolically designated racism to memory. Consequently, this popular memory discouraged audiences from paying critical attention to contemporary instances of racially motivated violence.

As the film relegated racism to memory, it also obscured memories of activists such as Medgar Evers who fought against institutionalized racism during the 1960s. Echoing lessons conveyed in Mississippi Burning, Ghosts suggested that collective activism and protest was not central to understand the process of social and political change in the United States. Indeed, Ghosts provided no images of the black activists who were pivotal in bringing Beckwith to trial in 1994, and depicted Medgar Evers solely

126 in the scene of his death. Thus, the film eschewed Evers’ efforts to report violence perpetrated against blacks in Mississippi and organize civil rights activists. The climate of social protest surrounding Evers’ death was equally obscured in the film. Audiences with little knowledge about the history of the movement told by activists and many historians may have concluded that the civil rights movement was fought by beneficent white authority figures, not by ordinary black and white activists who worked collectively for a common goal. The popular memory surrounding Beckwith’s trial also has implications for understanding popular memory. Parallels between journalistic and Hollywood portrayals of Beckwith indicate that memories become popularized through the narrative patterns that run across documentary, or journalistic texts, and dramatic, or entertainment media. The omnipresence of the melodrama of the scapegoat and the social values transformation myth that ran across these texts indicates that narratives are not exclusive to fictional films or to individual texts, but constitute the broader frameworks in which we understand our place in history. As narratives emerge through docudrama and in journalistic framings, they may become naturalized. In the absence of competing memories about the past, popular memories that emerge through news reports and film may acquire presence as an authentic representation of the past, and obscure the selectivity of the narrative’s frame.

Fidelity to history as the closing of journalism critique

Ghost’s authenticity was strongly affirmed by journalism coverage of Beckwith’s conviction, but journalism coverage of the film itself posed a challenge to the film’s history of events. Mirroring news media criticism of Mississippi Burning, several journalism reviews of Ghosts challenged discourses that left racism in the past and activism for dead. Following after its older sibling, Ghosts encouraged audiences to 127 recognize the film as a representation of historic reality and then belied the experiences of former black activists by focusing on whites as central protagonists. USA Today reported that syndicated radio program Hangin' N Hollywood derided the film as the “Most Offensive Film of 1996” because it “misrepresent[ed] history and dishonors the memory” of Medgar Evers (Ashley, 1996, p. 1D). Clark (1996) argued that the film’s failure to represent the activist community and Evers’ importance to the movement was a “debilitating factor throughout the film” (p. 13D), and Bernard (1996) lamented that the film presented only a “sketchy idea” of what Evers accomplished” (p. 61). Other reviewers complained that the film focused “excessively” on white heroes (Maslin, 1996, p. C14) and revealed the enduring racism within the Hollywood film industry (Ringel, 1996, p. 9P; Sterritt, 1996, p. 12). Wickham (1996) concluded that “Hollywood's dirty little secret is that white filmmakers fear telling the story of a black historical figure or event from a black perspective” (p. 13A).

Ebert (1996) quoted Godfrey Chesire’s review in Variety that highlighted the film’s implications for audiences seeking to understand the history of the civil rights movement. “‘When future generations turn to this era's movies for an account of the struggles for racial justice in America, they'll learn the surprising lesson that such battles were fought and won by square-jawed white guys.’” Ebert then explained that the film was not about civil rights, but “white redemption” (p. 33NC). “Myrlie Evers functions as a conscience who is usually off screen. Other black characters are found mostly in crowd scenes. What we get, really, is self-congratulation: Whites may have been responsible for segregation, but by golly, aren't we doing a wonderful job of making amends?” (Ebert, 1996, p. 33NC). Reviews that called attention to the partiality of Ghosts’ narrative demonstrated how texts that remain faithful to the historic record may also delimit historical understanding about contentious and traumatic events in the recent past. By

128 highlighting the film’s absence of strong black characters, these film reviews suggested that hegemonic discourses may never be fully naturalized in popular memory. As they call for additional memories that represent black activists’ efforts to achieve civil rights, these reviews invited counter-memories of activism. Reviews of Ghosts of Mississippi did not, however, produce many counter- memories themselves. Mainstream media reception to the film suggests that Ghosts was a more limited site of counter-memory about the 1960s than Burning. Unlike reviews of Mississippi Burning, reviews of Ghosts stopped short of describing the role that black activists and ordinary people played in fighting discrimination and in bringing Beckwith to justice. Furthermore, critics writing for print journalism didn’t condemn Ghosts as uniformly as they critiqued Mississippi Burning. Reviews suggest that the dearth of criticism surrounding Ghosts may be explained by the film’s fidelity to events surrounding Beckwith’s conviction.

Despite critiques of racism in the Hollywood film industry, reviewers frequently described Ghosts as a true, or accurate representation of the white establishment’s response to racism since 1964. Stack (1996) wrote that the film described events leading to Beckwith’s conviction “with convincing details” (p. C3); Ebert (1996) stated that events leading to his conviction were “remembered with fidelity” (p. NC33), and Ringel (1996) concluded that the film represented “the true story of the very different choices

made by two white men in Mississippi” (p. 9P). These reviews demonstrate how the film’s fidelity to historic events closed down spaces for critical reflection about the film’s representation of the history of the civil rights movement. Although Ghosts overlooked important people who advanced the cause of civil rights, it did not misrepresent white individuals who played a role in prosecuting and convicting Beckwith. The film depicted DeLaughter’s experience with careful fidelity to

129 the available historic record. Consequently, the film did not garner the same focus of criticism as Mississippi Burning had. Considered in relationship to reviews of Mississippi Burning that sought to reconstruct memories of civil rights to include black activists’ experiences, these reviews of Ghosts suggest that the films that misrepresent the record of activism may be more likely to promote counter-memories than films that simply omit key figures in the historic record. Ostensibly, films that meet criteria for historic accuracy do not compel critics to construct counter-memories.

Truth and drama in Ghosts of Mississippi

Paradoxically, reviewers suggested that the film’s limitation was not the film’s failure to establish itself as a representation of actual events; the problem was that it did so all too well. Most reviewers concluded that the film accurately depicted the trial, but sacrificed drama for truth. Clark (1996) described the film as “shallow” and “dull”(p. 13D), Maslin (1996) characterized the film’s conclusion as “suspense free” (p. c14), Sterritt (1996) wrote that the film was “more earnest” than “melodramatic” (p. 12), Hartl (1996) declared the film “competent,” but “unexciting” (p. F4) and Ebert (1996) concluded that the film’s moving story made for “uncompelling” film (p. 33NC). Both Ebert and Hartl likened the film to a made-for-television docudrama. Hartl (1996) elaborated his critique thusly. “Director Rob Reiner and screenwriter Lewis Colick get the job done of telling the story - and that's all they do. The movie is never dull or offensive, but it leaves you with an incomplete feeling. Surely there must be more to it than this” (Hartl, 1996, p. F4). These reviewers indicated that Ghosts did not engage or interest them; thus it did not meet the primary criteria for Hollywood film. Only two reviewers, Bernard (1996, p. 61) and Howe (1996, p. N44) suggested that the film represented a “satisfying” balance of drama and history. The majority of the mainstream

130 journalistic reviews of Ghosts emphasized the topos of entertainment as the ultimate criterion for Hollywood film; the topos of history and accuracy were incidental. Differences between mainstream press reviews of Mississippi Burning and Ghosts indicate that a docudrama’s ability to accurately represent oppressed groups is not an ultimate criterion for evaluating a commercial film in popular culture; instead, a film’s ability to entertain and engage mainstream audiences is. This criterion poses a challenge to filmmakers interested in contributing to popular memory about social injustices that are not easily attributed to evil individuals or manifested in discrete instances of spectacular violence; to become popular, filmmakers must find ways to make films about social problems interesting to audiences who primarily watch films for entertainment. The focus on dramatic appeal over the injustices a film represents or the accuracy of a film has implications for films’ ability to provide lessons about the past. Evaluative topoi of dramatic appeal, in place of accuracy or social justice in reviews of films suggest that films do not necessarily need to represent “truth” in order to gain salience as popular memory. Nor do films need to represent subordinated groups in ways that accord with their own memories of the past to gain status as a source of memory about social injustice. As Ebert (1996) explained in his review of Ghosts of Mississippi,

Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning (1988) was criticized for making white FBI agents into heroes of the civil rights era when the real FBI was conspicuous by its lack of enthusiasm for that assignment. But that film paid its way with great performances and tremendously moving drama. Ghosts of Mississippi generates nowhere near as much passion. It closes a chapter in history, but scarcely brings it to life. (p. 33NC) Ebert indicates that filmmakers’ adherence to fair portrayals of subordinated groups is not necessarily a significant factor in a films’ ability to become part of popular memory; instead, a compelling dramatic narrative, combined with some signifiers’ of the film’s relevance to the past, may be a stronger determinant in films’ status as popular

131 memory. In the absence of dramatic narrative, films about the past are less likely to contribute to popular memory.

HEGEMONY AND COUNTER-HEGEMONY IN FILMS ABOUT CIVIL RIGHTS

Although Mississippi Burning contributed more powerfully to popular memory of the civil rights movement than its younger sibling, patterns across these films constructed social knowledge about civil rights activism and the process of social change in the United States. Both Mississippi Burning and Ghosts taught audiences that social change results from the government’s efforts to take legal actions against white supremacists and members of the Klu Klux Klan. Audiences with little knowledge of the history of civil rights activism would not have been able to discern from either film that activists were primarily responsible for challenging institutionalized segregation and to making it possible for blacks to vote in the South. By portraying subordinated members of society as passive victims, these films reflected dominant political thought in the United States that presumes state officials fairly represent their constituents within a representative democracy and that the political and legal system is for holding officials accountable for acts of social injustice. Consequently, these films discouraged audiences from understanding both the history of social oppression in the United States and the ways in which such oppression may be resisted. As these films disabled audiences from understanding the history of civil rights activism from the past, they also prevent audiences from making connections between social injustices from the past and continued instances of institutionalized racism and state supported violence against activists. By ignoring images of ordinary people acting as agents of social change, these films leave the process of social change to the political system that stands to benefit from maintaining the status quo.

132 Distinctions between Ghost’s reception in mainstream press and Mississippi Burning’s reception indicate that, in the absence of a compelling narrative framework, films that purport to represent the past are not likely to become part of popular memory. Just as different films don’t contribute equally to popular memory, different films don’t equally invite critical reflection. By retaining fidelity to events from the past, Ghosts did not prompt the counter-memories critical of prevailing race relations that Mississippi Burning prompted. Ostensibly, docudramas that are caught in lies have more critical potential than films that do not.

Based on my analysis of Mississippi Burning and Ghosts, I propose that for a memory to become popular, it must produce tension between lived and cinematic experience; the more popular a film is, the more pronounced the contradictions that produce these tensions should be. The tensions that arise from this contradiction prompt the inclusion of counter-memories into popular culture. The discrepancy between the counter-memories that emerged in journalism reviews of Mississippi Burning and those that emerged in Ghosts also indicates that the most empowering potential of popular film may not lie in the films themselves, but in mainstream journalism reviews of them. Texts responding to popular films have the potential to critically engage audiences in questions about the role of the state and of activism; however, spaces for counter-memory may be confined to non-fiction that have narrower audiences than dramatic films do. Thus, the

counter-hegemonic role of secondary sources is a double-edged sword. While popular culture does not unilaterally produce hegemonic social relations, it does not go very far to disrupt them.

133 NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

1Booth (1994) presents coverage unique among articles covering Beckwith that explores the racial inequities that have persisted in Jackson into the 1990s.

2In 1991, 33 of the 47 victims of Chicago police shootings were black. Likewise, 152 blacks in Indianapolis were shot by police, compared to 85 white victims (Thomas, 1995, p. A01).

134 SECTION THREE

BLACK POWER IN POPULAR MEMORY

135 Introduction to Malcolm X and Panther

The civil rights movement achieved important but limited gains for African- Americans. Although blacks won desegregation and formal voting rights in the South, they continued to experience informal forms of racial discrimination, including economic poverty, and ongoing police brutality. By working within mainstream political channels to gain civil rights, moderate activists did not fully address endemic structural inequities between black and white communities across the nation (Bush, 2003, p. 42). As they came to ascendancy during the mid-1960s, the Black Power Movement offered a structural critique of the economic and political system in the United States that provided a framework for making sense of ongoing racial disparities. Activists involved in the Black Power Movement provided an important counterpart to the mainstream civil rights movement. This movement gave blacks a deeper understanding of the causes of economic subordination in the United States. By providing a critique of liberal capitalism, Black Power activists also provided a starting point for ordinary people to develop strategies for attaining racial justice not yet achieved through non-confrontational protest or appeals to the legislature. Specifically, the Black Power Movement advocated economic and social self-sufficiency for blacks as a means to end the subordinate status of brown and black people throughout the world. The movement also called for self-defense and confrontational protest as a means to protect subordinate groups from what they believed were racist and violent law enforcement agencies in the United States. Amidst growing social unrest in black urban ghettos across the country, Black Power advocates provided oppressed groups with a vision of a more egalitarian society and with strategies for working toward that future in the present.

136 Black Power activism advanced the aims of even moderate black activists. As Haines (1988) and Bush (2002) explain, civil rights legislation may not have been passed were it not for the threat that Black Power activists posed to the social order if formal rights were denied to black people. Umoja (2001) and Bush (2002) note that few sources in popular or institutional memory have attended to the perspectives of activists involved in the Black Power Movement.1 By excluding the Black Power movement, the prevailing memory of the civil rights movement in political memory discourages audiences from understanding how members on the fringes of black activism advanced cause of the civil rights movement for black communities across the country. For contemporary publics, this memory is equally, if not more important, than the memory of civil rights activism. Such memories may enable individuals to recognize the structural conditions that have perpetuated social inequality and provide a foundation for the emergence of counter- publics to challenge the legitimacy of institutions that disable them.2 During the 1990s, Hollywood released two films that constructed memories of the Black Power Movement for popular media audiences. In 1992, Spike Lee directed the film, Malcolm X. Based on X’s 1965 autobiography, co-written by Alex Haley, the film depicted Malcolm X as a courageous black leader who galvanized black communities with his critique of racism embedded within white society. Three years later, filmmaker Mario Van Peebles directed the film Panther to tell the story of one of the foremost Black

Power movement organizations, The Black Panther Party. Like Parker and Reiner, Lee and Van Peebles envisioned their films as interventions in contemporary discourses about racism and social injustice in the United States. Lee (1992) explained that he hoped black people would feel “all fired up” and “get inspired” by Malcolm X because it represented a faithful depiction of “what Black people in America have come through” (p. 68). Mario Van Peebles told the press that he wanted to make the film to inspire and

137 instruct the current generation of young blacks living in urban ghettos. He told reporters that kids today “knew the negative stuff” about the Panthers and “thought Huey Newton was a cookie." (Schaefer, 1995, p. O17). He added, “Few people know how they empowered their neighborhood” (Graham, 1995, p. 3NC). Both filmmakers suggest that they directed their films to tell a story about the Black Power movement that would give a voice to the experiences of African-Americans activists that would enable a younger generation of African-Americans to empower. Malcolm X (1992) and Panther (1995) represented unique counterparts to films about civil rights made between 1988 and 1996. As Section Two argues, the civil rights films Mississippi Burning and Ghosts of Mississippi focused on white characters as heroes for racial justice. By focusing on whites, these films illustrated how commercial media predominantly construct ideological discourses that reaffirm the legitimacy of prevailing social relations. In contrast, Malcolm X and Panther represented blacks as agents of social change who advocated collective action as a means to achieve structural economic change in the United States.

Malcolm X and Panther were able to reach Hollywood theatres in spite of market

pressures that resist narratives about black leaders.3 Indeed, Lee and Van Peebles struggled against the mainstream Hollywood industry to fund their films. These films and their reception in mainstream journalism illustrated the ways in which counter- memories of groups most critical of social and economic relations have been selectively included within popular memory. To the extent that such films became part of popular memory, they also indicated how films about radical social movements from the recent past may be adopted into popular memory. Both Malcolm X and Panther challenged prevailing liberal ideology that held faith in the social justice of the American political system. Although Malcolm X and

138 Panther both challenged this faith, they did not do so equally. Malcolm X framed the story of the radical black leader within the myth of the American Dream while Panther provided a much harsher condemnation of the United States’ political and economic system. Panther also presented the story of the Black Panther Party using unconventional stylistic devices that blended signifiers of truth with signifiers of fiction. The differences between these films explains contrasting reception from journalism reviewers; mainstream film critics embraced Malcolm X but rejected Panther as a false representation of the past.

Based on differences between journalistic reception between Malcolm X and Panther, I conclude that oppositional counter-memories may be more likely to become part of popular memory by appealing to narrative and stylistic convention. Counter- hegemonic messages films that resonate with prevailing knowledge about historic reality may be readily incorporated into popular memory because oppositional counter- memories that are positioned within convention narrative frames and stylistic devices soften the blow of political critique. Conversely, texts that do not appeal to prevailing understandings about past events may be dismissed.

139 NOTES TO SECTION THREE INTRODUCTION

1Katsiaficas (2001) explains that Hollywood portrayals of the Panthers have consistently hidden the ways that the BPP fundamentally broke with the legitimacy and power of the established system (p. viii).

2Memories of Black Power activism may teach subordinate groups that, current social inequities are not the result of their own failings as a focus on the achievements of civil rights movement would suggest, but are structurally conditioned by prevailing economic, legal, and political practices. Likewise, memories of Black Power activism may teach subordinate groups that confrontational, contentious acts of protest do not hinder, but advance the cause of social justice in liberal democracies.

3It is surprising that these films were able to generate media attention and reach national theatres. As McChesney (2001) attests, commercial media benefit economically from prevailing economic relations. Attention to white characters in earlier civil rights films suggested that films about blacks were not lucrative for the industry. Ostensibly, white audiences would not be interested in watching films primarily about blacks. If this were true, certainly audiences would not have been interested in watching films about influential black critics of white society.

140 Chapter Five

Doxa and counter-memory in Malcolm X

Although both Malcolm X and Panther received media attention, the Hollywood industry and entertainment press only embraced Malcolm X. Malcolm X featured counter- hegemonic ideas within a conventional Hollywood narrative structure and visual style. Based on my analysis of Malcolm X, I suggest that films about radical political figures may be more likely to win acceptance into popular culture if their narrative and filmic conventions meet the expectations of mainstream culture.1 Lee’s film told the story of Malcolm X within the framework of the American Dream, thereby, it invited mainstream film critics to incorporate the radical black leader into popular memory. Paradoxically, the film’s conventional appeal also created space for the film to include counter- memories into popular culture. By presenting the ideas and life of Malcolm X, the film also raised questions about the legitimacy of the American Dream. Thus, the film broke with established conventions even as it embraced them. By grounding counter- hegemonic messages within the familiar narrative structure of the American Dream myth, Malcolm X invited journalism critics to incorporate counter-memories about Malcolm X, the legacy of racism in the United States, and the rhetoric of history, within popular culture. This analysis of Malcolm X also reinforces a central claim in my dissertation that the legitimacy of individual films as sources of knowledge about the past is established intertextually, across the film and secondary sources that encourage audiences to attribute historical relevance to the messages constructed by these films. Journalists and film reviewers established the film as a legitimate source of information about the history of

141 racism and black struggle in the United States. I conclude that the relationship between a film’s representation of the past and the doxa of a culture is central to understand how this film attained legitimacy as a source of popular memory. Malcolm X was framed within prevailing ideology and within conventions of biopic film. In these ways, Lee’s film mainstreamed Malcolm X, making his radical political philosophy palatable to mainstream audiences and popular culture.

A POPULAR FILM ABOUT AN UNPOPULAR BLACK LEADER

Malcolm X represented a site of popular memory, in part, because the film had widespread appeal. According to Hollywood industry criteria, Malcolm X was one of the most successful films of Lee’s career. The film earned 9 million dollars in the box office during its first week in theatres, and grossed 48 million dollars in the United States (“Business data”). By comparison, other films of Lee’s career, Do the Right Thing (1989) and Jungle Fever (1991) grossed 28 million and 32 million (respectively). Arbiters of mainstream media applauded Malcolm X. In 1993, Denzel Washington was nominated for an Academy Award and Golden Globe Award for best actor in a leading role. The MTV movie awards gave Denzel Washington the award for best male performance in a film in 1992 and nominated Malcolm X for Best Movie that year (“Awards”, 1992). These accolades indicate that Lee’s Malcolm X was well regarded both by the motion picture industry and by some younger audiences Lee hoped to attract to the film. Thus, it was able to meet an essential criterion for popular memory; insofar as box office sales and national awards represent the taste of mainstream audiences, the film was popular.

Mainstream journalism coverage and newspaper reviews of Malcolm X help to explain the film’s commercial success despite the film’s attention to a previously unheralded black leader. In addition to receiving accolades within the television and film 142 industry, Malcolm X received strong reviews from mainstream newspapers during the first weeks of the film’s initial release. These reviews suggested that the film’s ability to meet mainstream expectations for Hollywood drama advanced the film’s popularity. Despite the film’ controversial subject matter, Malcolm X was one of Lee’s most conventional films. In contrast with Lee’s earlier films that made explicit commentary about contemporary race relations, this film followed the conventions of biographical film, or biopic. Such films typically construct hagiographies that celebrate the efforts and accomplishment of great leaders in history. Within this genre, dialogue, lighting, and sound construct a linear narrative celebrating the life of an exalter leader or heroic figure. Film critics Carr (1992) and Murray (1992) equated Malcolm X with earlier biopics Lawrence of Arabia (1962), The Last Emperor (1987), and Gandhi (1982). Reviewers indicated that the film’s conformity to Hollywood conventions for biographical films lent credibility to the film in ways that Lee’s previous films had not done. Because this film resonated with films already popular among reviewers and mainstream audiences, Lee’s emulation of these successful biopics helped to establish the film’s credibility within popular culture.

Reviewers also stated that the film not only met expectations for biopic film, but represented exemplary artistic skill. For instance, Carr (1992) wrote that if other biofilms won Academy Awards, then Malcolm X deserved to win “not only a few gold statuettes, but the hearts of a nation” (p. 45). Critics with the highest regard for the film described it as a “confident, superbly crafted picture” (Ringel, 1992, p. E1) and as “just short of a masterwork” (Lipper 1992, p. 7B). Writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, Guthmann (1992) concluded that Malcolm X was “clearly the movie of the year” (p. E1). Many critics highlighted the technical features of Lee’s filmmaking as reason for applauding Malcolm X. Reviewers commended Lee’s, “visuals and edgy editing,” (Murray, 1992, p.

143 D8) “constantly expanding vision” (Gabrenya, 1992, p. 1F) and “exhilarating scenes” (Howe, 1992, p. N44). In one extended description of Lee’s stylistic devices, Sterritt (1992) lauded Lee’s, “rhythmic editing patterns” and noted that the use of color in the film “enhances the moods of the story with an expressive color scheme that grows ever more dark and monochromatic” (p. 14). Reviewers who emphasized the aesthetic achievements of the film, such as its artful cinematography, indicated that the film’s popularity depended, at least in part, on the quality of its stylistic devices. The ethos of the film’s director and lead actor also strengthened the popular appeal of the film. Prior to making Malcolm X, Lee received acclaim and critical attention for his edgy and socially conscious films including Do the Right Thing and Jungle Fever. Denzel Washington’s acting performance also brought positive attention to the film. Several reviewers suggested that Washington would be a front-runner for an Oscar that year (Ebert, 1992, p. 3; Howe, 1992, p. N44; Guthman, 1992, p. E1). Film critics described his acting in the film as “brilliant” (Connors, 1992, p. 1J), “extraordinary” (Sterritt, 1992, p. 14), “magnificent” (Carr, 1992, p. 45), “splendid” (Pollack, 1992, p. 3F), and “electrifying” (Lipper, 1992, p. C1). In an extended description of Washington’s talent, Canby (1992) proclaimed that the actor, “has the psychological heft, the intelligence and the reserve to give the film the dramatic excitement that isn't always apparent in the screenplay” (p. C19). Reviews that hailed Washington’s performance affirmed the film’s appeal to mainstream audiences. They also attested to films’ reliance on celebrity to become part of popular culture. By the time Malcolm X was released in theatres, Washington had acquired celebrity status. Thus, the film’s popularity was established, in many ways, prior to the construction of the film itself. By appealing to audiences’ expectations for celebrity actors and for Hollywood biopic film, Malcolm X established itself as a form of popular entertainment.

144 MALCOLM X AS A REAFFIRMATION OF THE AMERICAN DREAM MYTH

The narrative framework of Malcolm X also propelled the film’s popularity. The film presented Malcolm X’s story as one principally about overcoming obstacles to achieve greatness. As such, Malcolm X represented an extension of the American Dream myth. Within this myth, class inequality is understood in terms of personal failure, rather than as the consequence of structural limitations beyond their control. As Winn (2003) writes, “the Dream assures Americans that no class system hampers their advancement even though many Americans experience structural class limitations daily” (p. 308). This myth is consonant with another popular American myth: the Horatio Alger tale. According to the latter myth, all individuals might triumph over humble beginnings (Weiss, 1969). Several scholars have demonstrated that commercially successful Hollywood films and other popular culture texts frequently present narratives that affirm the American Dream. [See Cloud, 1996; Hoerl, 2002; McMullen and Solomon, 1994; Winn 2000; and Winn, 2003, for examples.] By repeating themes common to the American Dream myth, Malcolm X established itself as a mainstream Hollywood film. Paradoxically, Malcolm X refigured the American Dream myth to incorporate one of its most ardent critics within it. This film told the story of Malcolm X’s emergence as a prominent black activist by depicting Malcolm’s life story as a series of transformations. Images in the film that depicted Malcolm’s early life foregrounded the scene that shaped Malcolm’s development. By witnessing Malcolm through each stage of his life, audiences were invited to understand Malcolm’s ascendancy as the consequence of witnessing racial violence and experiencing economic injustice during his youth. The first hour of the film juxtaposed images of Malcolm’s childhood in Michigan with his memories as an exuberant adolescent in Boston, and perilous lifestyle as a hustler in Harlem. Early scenes in the film suggested that Malcolm X, then Malcolm Little, learned 145 about the relationship between violence and racism early in his life. The first scene featured Klansmen who threatened Malcolm’s parents in the middle of the night until his father emerged from his home with a gun in his hand. In subsequent scenes, the film depicted his father’s death, presumably at the hands of Klan members. Scenes of Malcolm’s youth also implicated social institutions and businesses for oppressing blacks. According to the film, an insurance company declared his father’s death a suicide and refused to provide compensate his mother. After a social worker, a white woman, determined that his mother was unable to care for her children, Malcolm and his eight siblings became wards of the state, and were parceled out to state homes across Michigan. A following scene depicting Malcolm’s experience in elementary school further portrayed discrimination embedded in the social structure of American life. Although he was considered a very smart and popular student, Malcolm learned that his opportunities were limited because he was black; when he told his instructor that he wanted to be a lawyer someday, his teacher responded that this goal was not a realistic goal for a black man. “You’re good with your hands, and people like you. Be a carpenter.”

Scenes intermixed with depictions of Malcolm’s childhood portrayed Malcolm’s later years as an adolescent living in Boston and Harlem. While he lived in these cities, Malcolm went by the name of Red, after his red hair. One scene in the film featured

Malcolm’s first effort to straighten his hair through a painful process called “conking.” This scene demonstrated the lengths Malcolm and other blacks would go to conform to white society’s expectations. Other scenes of Malcolm’s life in Boston also featured Malcolm’s acceptance of white society and desire to fit into it; Malcolm dated a white woman, and wore garish zoot suits popularized by the swing-dance scene at that time. These scenes suggest that Malcolm’s experiences with racism, and his desire to emulate

146 the lifestyle of whiter, wealthier people, propelled Malcolm to a criminal lifestyle. After Malcolm determined that his work as a railroad kitchen crewman was demeaning and did not provide adequate income, Malcolm moved to Harlem and began running numbers for a hustler named West Indian Archie, who led a gambling racket in New York. In these scenes, Malcolm learned to carry a gun and became addicted to cocaine. Following a dispute with West Indian Archie, Malcolm returned to Boston, where he, his girlfriend, and best friend decided to rob the home of a wealthy white man. Police quickly caught them and sent the men to prison for eight to ten years. Malcolm concluded that their real crime was not robbery (which usually results in much shorter prison terms), “It was sleeping with white women.” As the film depicted Malcolm’s transformation from a promising youth to a druggie and a hustler, it demonstrated ways in which racist institutions and endemic poverty thwarted achievement for black men. Malcolm’s words narrated the scene to explain that criminals like West Indian Archie “were all victims of whitey’s social order” and forced into lives of crime and drug abuse.2

The scenes leading up to Malcolm’s conviction established a context for audiences to understand the significance of Malcolm’s moral and spiritual transformation. While he was in prison, Malcolm learned about the Nation of Islam, a black Islamic organization founded by leader Elijah Muhammad. As he learned about the history of black oppression through books and conversations with fellow inmate, Baines,

Malcolm became convinced of the inherent evil of white men and converted to Islam. Malcolm gave up “white men’s” evils, among them pork, cigarettes, alcohol, and white women. He also replaced the last name of Little with an X to symbolize his repudiation of the name given to his family by whites who had enslaved them. Images of Malcolm’s life in prison represented Malcolm’s transformation from a criminal eager to reap the material lifestyle of white society to a devout Black Muslim eager to extricate his self

147 from white American culture. After he was released from prison, he dedicated his life to Allah and to “telling the truth to white devil to his face.” The subsequent scenes in the film depicted Malcolm’s emergence as a spiritual leader and political activist, as well as the evolution of his own beliefs about the sources of black oppression in the United States. With Malcolm’s release from prison, the film shifted its focus from the context of racial injustice and poverty that Malcolm witnessed in his youth to his agency as an influential black leader. Once Elijah Muhammad recognized Malcolm’s conviction and talent for public oratory, Muhammad made Malcolm a Minister for the Nation of Islam. Influenced by Malcolm’s growing popularity, Elijah Muhammad gave Malcolm X the title of National Minister. Scenes depicting Malcolm’s years as National Minister illustrated his rise in national prominence and growing influence in the Nation of Islam during the early 1960s, a time period in which he became a nationally recognized figure for his sharp condemnation of the mainstream civil rights movement.

The depictions of Malcolm X that followed his years working for the Nation of Islam portrayed Malcolm’s betrayal by the Nation of Islam and his assassination in 1965. Upon hearing rumors that the Nation intended to oust Malcolm from the organization, Malcolm formed a new organization, The Muslim Mosque Incorporated, and called for organizations seeking to improve the lives of black people to work together. Soon after he founded the organization, Malcolm took a holy pilgrimage to Mecca, traveled across African and the Middle-East, and concluded from his visits that people of all races should unite on the basis of divinely inspired love. These scenes represented Malcolm’s final transformation. Upon returning from his Hajj, he adopted the African name El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz and expanded his vision for black emancipation to include the participation of whites concerned about social justice.

148 Scenes portraying Malcolm as Malik El-Shabazz illuminated the transformation in Malcolm’s thinking about the causes of racism during the last months of his life. Rather than understand racism as a white person’s disease, he concluded that Western nations’ control over the world’s resources was a fundamental cause for blacks’ subordinate status in the United States. Thus, rather than calling for a separate black nation, El-Shabazz called upon the United Nations to bring charges against the United States government for human rights abuses against African-Americans. By depicting Malcolm’s growing interest in establishing an international and interracial peace movement in the final months of his life, the final scenes suggested that Malcolm X might have been influential international figure for peace and justice had assassins not cut his potential short.

The final scenes in the film illustrated Malcolm’s efforts to generate support for his new vision in spite of impending threats to his life. One scene depicted the firebombing of Malcolm’s home by the hands of unknown assailants. The film predominantly indicated that members of the Nation of Islam conspired to end Malcolm’s life, but it also hinted that this organization did not act alone. In a scene that portrayed a phone conversation between Malcolm and members of his newly formed organization, a close-up image of a rolling audio-tape illustrated that the phone conversation was being recorded. Images of the tape resonated with an early scene during Malcolm’s visit to the

Middle-East in which Malcolm confronted two men who had been following him and accused them of working with the CIA. Images of the tape and of white men following Malcolm hinted that official, predominantly white federal authorities also sought to silence Malcolm. In the final moments of the film’s narrative, the film depicted Malcolm’s assassination during one of his speeches to the black community at the Audobon Ballroom in Harlem.

149 As the film depicted Malcolm’s life across a series of transformations, it suggested that even the most disenfranchised individuals may become great leaders through the use of their intellect and determination. Even Malcolm’s assassination reiterated themes consonant with the Horatio Alger narrative as his death represented his courage to face the most of dire consequences in order to overcome challenges. Critics’ positive reviews of the film indicate that the film’s narrative framework contributed to its popular appeal. Reviewers applauded the film’s resonance to myths about individual success and overcoming obstacles. Gabrenya (1992) characterized the film as a “personal story of one man's self-redemption” (p. 1F) and Charles (1992), praised the film as a “Horatio Alger tale” (p. 8E). Writing for The Chicago Sun-Times, Ebert (1992) also used the themes of Horatio Alger to describe Malcolm X in the film. “He was a strong role model who began on the streets, and through application of his intelligence, will and courage, became someone who made a difference (p. 3). Many reviewers indicated that this myth resonated powerfully in American popular culture. As Carr (1992) wrote, Lee’s Malcolm X was “a wonderfully American movie about that most American of pursuits - self-reinvention” (p. 45). Other reviewers indicated that the film’s incorporation of Malcolm into the American Dream myth lent legitimacy to Malcolm X as an important figure in American political history and to the civil rights movement. Tucker (1992) explained that “the completeness of Malcolm's transformation from drug- addicted thug to ascetic is itself compelling (p. 7B), and Yearwood (1992) quoted audience member John Slattery, who told him, “I'm in awe of how Malcolm was able to go from being in the street life to being a civil rights leader” (p. 1A). Reviewers’ focus on the film as an iteration of the American Dream myth suggested that the film’s appeal to prevailing ideology lent legitimacy to Lee’s Malcolm X as a compelling film; they also

150 indicated that the film’s narrative framework positioned audiences to embrace the radical black leader as an exemplary model of individual determination and courage.

History and ideology in Malcolm X

Journalism coverage and newspaper reviews portrayed the film represented a real or authentic portrayal of Malcolm X by characterizing Malcolm X as an educational resource. This characterization was prompted by Lee, who told reporters during a press conference that students should skip classes to attend his film on its opening day “because they would see history that isn't taught in class” (Santiago, 1992, p. 7E). In the week following the film’s opening, many newspapers conducted focus group interviews with younger audience members to report on their reactions to the film (Futterman, 1992, p. 1D; McCabe, 1992, p. A19; and Washington, 1992, p. 3D). By creating opportunities for students to discuss the film with reporters, newspapers attributed salience to the film as a source of historical information. Other newspaper articles affirmed the film’s educational role by describing how educators used the film to teach students about their own history. Lipper (1992) wrote that “several New York City schools, including Lee's alma mater, Junior High School 113 in Brooklyn, sent groups of students to the movie opening day” (p. 7B), and Wilkerson (1992) explained that teenagers in one teacher’s history class in Boston were “spellbound” by the image of the Black Muslim leader (p. A1). Reporter Horwitz (1992) suggested that students in Washington D.C. saw the film with their classes. One student, Casey Coleman, told her class after seeing the film, “So much of what [Malcolm X is] saying is the truth” (Horwitz, 1992, p. C1). Many reviews argued that the film deserved strongest praise for providing audiences with an opportunity to learn about the life of Malcolm X (Shakes, 1992, p. 2D; Yearwood, 1992, p. 1A).

151 The film’s resonance with the American Dream myth provides a partial explanation for journalists’ characterization of the film as a source of historical information about Malcolm X. As a popular myth that has been maintained throughout texts in popular culture, the American Dream has become common sense within liberal capitalist democracies. Cloud (1996) argues that the American Dream myth reinforces the ideological of liberal capitalism by making themes common to the myth appear natural or inevitable. By providing another iteration of this myth, Malcolm X tapped into a powerful structure of consciousness. As it did so, the film lent further legitimacy to the film as a common sense narrative about political and social life in recent United States’ history. Audiences with little prior information about Malcolm X were invited to understand the film as a representation of events from the past because it fit with themes common to American political and popular culture. By appealing to doxa of 1990s popular culture, the narrative of the American Dream myth conditioned audiences to accept the narrative as a realistic portrayal of the political figure’s life story.

Restoring liberal hegemony in Malcolm X: Tragic consequences of isolated activism

By framing Malcolm’s autobiography within the American Dream myth, the film positioned Malcolm X within mainstream political ideology. Communication scholars have attested to the ubiquity of the American Dream myth in popular texts in film (Winn, 2000; Winn 2003) and autobiography (Cloud, 1996). Cloud (1996) contends that the myth smooths over ruptures in liberal ideology by suggesting that everyone can succeed regardless of their race, gender, or class position. The American Dream myth in Lee’s Malcolm X delimited the film’s ability to depict the more controversial aspects of Malcolm’s life. The film’s positioning of Malcolm X’s life story within the American Dream myth also constrained the film’s ability to portray contentious collective activism as a 152 strategy for empowering African-Americans. Although the film provided resources for popular culture to draw attention to prevailing racism in the United States, it emphasized the efforts of one persuasive individual for generating widespread interest in advancing social change. For instance, the film framed the Nation of Islam’s growth and local uprising in the community’s where Malcolm spoke as a consequence of Malcolm’s intelligence and charisma. The film’s narrative framework thus presented Malcolm’s leadership in black communities outside the context of the struggles within the civil rights movement and in urban ghettos across the country where racial unrest was fomenting. In spite of the film’s representation of Malcolm’s political rhetoric, the film’s focus on Malcolm’s will and determination obscured the social and economic conditions that propelled his critique and compelled audiences to support him.

The film’s focus on the efforts of one individual also discouraged audiences from recognizing how Malcolm X was part of a much broader movement for the empowerment of blacks that grew in strength and numbers well into the late 1960s. By ending the film with Malcolm X’s assassination, the film inhibited audiences from understanding the process by which social change takes place. Social change results from the process of consistent, collective agitation by multiple groups and individuals over a prolonged period of time. Through watching this film, audiences with little prior knowledge of the history of the Black Power movement might have concluded that the movement perished with Malcolm’s own passing. Thus, the film didn’t prompt many journalists to attend broadly to the value of agitation and protest for marginalized communities. Such an emphasis would have seemed anathema to the film’s Horatio Alger narrative. In some ways, Malcolm X was already a more palatable figure than other Black Power leaders for mainstream popular culture. Malcolm X penned most of his

153 autobiography during his years as the primary spokesperson for the Nation of Islam. Groups advocating Black Nationalism including the Nation of Islam engage the rhetoric of self help that is both liberating and limiting for subordinated social groups. The focus on individual strength and will encourages economically and racially marginalized blacks to assert themselves; however, Shawki (1990) argues that the language surrounding self- help within Black Nationalism also resonates with liberal capitalist ideology that discourages people from recognizing structural inequities that make individual action a less effective means for achieving social equality or justice. Thus, there is a strand of the Horatio Alger narrative that weaves nicely into the narrative of empowerment within Black Nationalist ideology.

The Horatio Alger story is indeed potentially disempowering for ordinary people. The film told audiences that meaningful activism provides few personal rewards. While scenes depicting Malcolm’s role within and departure from the Nation of Islam featured blacks as agents of social change, they also highlighted the heroic sacrifices he and his family made so that Malcolm could advance social justice for blacks. Several scenes in the film indicated that Malcolm’s activism frequently kept him apart from his family. When Betty told Malcolm of her distrust of the Nation of Islam’s commitment to Malcolm, she reminded him of the precarious financial position the Nation had placed the family in. Foreshadowing of the film’s conclusion, Betty noted that should anything ever

happen to Malcolm, the family would have few financial resources to live on. The film’s conclusion compounded the disabling features of the film’s Horatio Alger narrative. Although the film hinted at the FBI’s involvement in Malcolm X’s assassination, it focused on the Nation of Islam as the central agent of Malcolm’s murder. Thus, the film suggested that black people themselves pose the greatest danger to the cause of black liberation. This focus on the Nation of Islam diverted attention from the

154 concentrated, systematic efforts of the FBI to quiet prominent black leaders including Malcolm X and Martin Luther King (Churchill & Vander Wall, 1990). By featuring Malcolm’s death as the conclusion to the narrative about his tireless resolve to promote social justice and structural social change, the film suggested that death is eminent for those chose who would challenge the social and economic order. By framing activism in terms of its ultimate demise, the film underscored the desirability of the established order; at the least, it discouraged audiences from considering the possibility of engaging in any concerted effort to challenge that order.

CHALLENGES TO LIBERAL HEGEMONY IN MALCOLM X AND JOURNALISM REVIEWS

Although Lee’s hagiographic approach to telling the story of Malcolm X discouraged audiences from understanding Malcolm X within the history of contentious collective black activism, it should not be regarded solely as a hegemonic neutralizing of radical activism’s challenge to liberal capitalism. Paradoxically, several messages within Malcolm X reframed prevailing doxa by embedding messages and images that contradicted the American Dream myth within its narrative framework. The film’s representations of racial injustice and of Malcolm’s political critique highlighted the ways in which opportunities for blacks were systematically constrained. Several scenes depicted Malcolm delivering speeches to large African-American audiences in an effort to garner support for the Nation of Islam and, later, for the Muslim Mosque Incorporated. In these scenes, Malcolm X condemned racist features of America’s culture and institutions including Christianity, telling audiences “White men tell us to wait for the hereafter. Well, the hereafter is here and now!” He critiqued economic relations, saying “You don’t have to beg white folks for a job…You’ll still end up poor and without anything.” He also challenged the problem of school history by asserting, “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock. Plymouth Rock landed on us!” In these 155 speeches, Malcolm X questioned the justice of United States policy and ideology, and thereby reframed ideas central to the doxa of American political memory. As it represented his speeches, Lee’s Malcolm X reframed this memory as well. The portrayal of Malcolm’s political philosophy and strategies for empowering blacks challenged the ideology propelled by the American Dream myth. During an extended scene in which Malcolm spoke to a large crowd attending a Nation of Islam convention, Malcolm lambasted the moderate civil rights movement for failing to address the needs of the average black person, and suggested that race relations were headed toward incendiary disaster.

There’s going to be a racial explosion. And a racial explosion is more dangerous than an atomic explosion. There’s going to be an explosion because black people are dissatisfied. They’re dissatisfied not only with the white man, but with these Uncle Tom Negro leaders that are trying to pose as spokesmen for you and I. Malcolm concluded this scene by calling for complete separation between blacks and whites. “Let the black man have his own house. Let the black man have his own house and his own property….This thing, this explosion, is gonna bring down his house…If [the white man] doesn’t do something about it, it’s gonna explode any day now.” In these scenes, the film painted some picture, albeit in broad strokes, of Malcolm’s political philosophy and influence that had been both controversial and pivotal to the trajectory of African-American struggle during the mid-1960s. In these moments, Malcolm X publicly broke with predominant leaders in the civil rights movement who believed the American political system could be reformed and encouraged blacks to renounce white society in order to achieve their own autonomy and freedom from oppression. Although it emerged within the framework of the American Dream myth, the film presented Malcolm’s public speeches that raised questions about the legitimacy of the Dream itself.

156 Iterations of Malcolm’s criticisms of the social order in Lee’s film demonstrated how Lee’s film broke with established conventions of Hollywood cinema even as it embraced them. Malcolm X also presented documentary images of violence against blacks that belied the prevailing myth of national progress toward racial equality and social justice. Images taken from stock footage of police violence against blacks and civil rights protesters provided visual evidence supporting Malcolm X’s charge that non- confrontational protest was counterproductive to blacks’ efforts to achieve social justice. In one scene depicting Malcolm speaking to a large crowd, the film cut back and forth between images of Malcolm and stock news footage of civil rights protests from the 1950s and 1960s. Footage depicted Martin Luther King’s arrest and police dogs and fire hoses police deployed to repress civil rights protesters in Birmingham, Alabama. The film also depicted Malcolm watching this footage on television in his hotel. According to the film, Malcolm X began to argue forcefully against the policy of nonviolence after he witnessed these images. As stock footage of police violence against black protesters in Birmingham appeared on screen, Malcolm’s words, spoken by Washington, thundered in the background:

The black people in this country have been victims of violence at the hands of the American white man for 400 years. 400 years! 400 years and we thought that by following those ignorant Negro preachers that it was God-like to turn the other cheek to brute who is brutalizing us.

The sequence of images of police brutality against blacks ended with Malcolm’s

conclusion: “to love the enemy is not intelligent. We have the right to defend ourselves.” Images of civil rights protest from the 1950s and 1960s drew national attention to the violence that non-confrontational black activists faced in the south. Newspaper film critic Murray (1992) noted that images of Klansmen burning down Malcolm’s home represented “visions lifted from the nation’s collective unconscious” (p. D8). Thus,

157 many audiences who witnessed previous broadcast news coverage of civil rights protests in Birmingham, Alabama were likely to recall these images as actual instances of political repression against blacks. These images positioned Malcolm’s beliefs as responses to experiences of injustices that have been naturalized by journalistic media. By featuring these images, the film used familiar images to introduce controversial material into popular memory of Malcolm X. Opening and closing scenes in the film also prompted nonfiction journalism texts to incorporate counter-memories of race relations within the film’s conventional narrative framework. During the opening credits to the film, images of four police officers beating Rodney King in 1991 appeared on the screen. Washington’s voice speaking Malcolm’s words to a cheering crowd accompanied these images. His words directly challenged assumptions underlying the American Dream myth: “I charge the white man with being the greatest murderer on earth,” Malcolm’s voice narrates scenes of King’s beating. “Everywhere that he has gone, [the white man] has created destruction...You are the victim of America….We’ve never seen democracy. All we’ve seen is hypocrisy…We don’t see the American Dream. All we see is the American nightmare” (Malcolm X, 1964, p. 26).

Images of police officers beating Rodney King in 1991 in the context of a film about Malcolm’s political philosophy and assassination suggested that targeted violence

against blacks by state authorities has been a persistent problem in the United States. These images appeared regularly in national television news coverage in 1991. Thus, these images framed the story of Malcolm X as a lesson for understanding and responding to race relations during the 1990s, when the film was first released. In this regard, images of the Rodney King’s beating served as a visual analogy that connected

158 past and present struggles for racial justice, and lent salience to the film as a site of political critique. By appearing alongside Malcolm’s critique of “the American nightmare,” footage of King’s beating encouraged audiences to understand Malcolm X’s criticisms of the state as relevant to contemporary instances of racial injustice in the United States. These images also provided a rationale for Malcolm’s disavowal of nonviolent protest that contemporary black audiences could relate to. The film’s use of contemporary images of violence against blacks within a film narrating one person’s self-transformation points to the ways in which film joined Malcolm’s rhetoric with more contemporary events to challenge dominant ideology. Indeed, these images provided vivid support for Malcolm’s conclusion that blacks were not living the American Dream, but were experiencing “the American nightmare” instead.

The role of video footage within Malcolm X suggested that common sense understandings of social life are shaped by a myriad of images in popular culture. Malcolm X appealed to prevailing understandings about race relations in the United States by reflecting both the familiar ideology and everyday images in non-fiction media that challenged that ideology. The closing scenes in the film also established Malcolm X as an important figure for empowering racial minorities in the present. In the film’s final scene, a contemporary Nelson Mandela repeated Malcolm’s words to a classroom of children: “We declare our right on this earth to be a human being, to be given the full rights of a human being, to be respected as a human being, in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.” Following his words, the screen provided close up images of a series of boys of African-American, Middle-eastern, and Asian origin stand up and declare boldly, “I am Malcolm X.” Images of boys of diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds universalized the problem of

159 racial injustice, and extended the issue more globally. The image of Nelson Mandela in particular encouraged audiences to identify with the challenges South Africa in the aftermath of apartheid. These scenes further established the film as a call for contemporary society to embrace the memory of Malcolm X and to apply his philosophy to current racial problems across the globe. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Mandela was embraced by political moderates in the United States as a central figure in ending apartheid government in South African. Thus, he has become an icon for global democracy and social justice. By showing Mandela repeating Malcolm’s famous call to give racial minority groups equal status “by any means necessary”, this film incorporated Malcolm into the history of black leaders who have been heralded by mainstream, white society. Conversely, this closing scene framed the strategy of confrontational black protest as just action within a liberal democracy. By framing Malcolm within the context of figures and myths resonant with dominant political values, Lee’s film mainstreamed Malcolm. But it did not mainstream his beliefs. Instead, I argue that the film’s use of conventional narrative and popular figures such as Mandela made Malcolm’s radical political philosophy more acceptable for mainstream commercial media.

In addition to providing counter-hegemonic messages about race relations, Lee’s film provided counter-memories of activism and dissent. Scenes within the film also challenged the individualist messages of the American Dream myth by portraying collective protest as an avenue for African-American empowerment. One pivotal scene depicting Malcolm X’s role in the Nation of Islam demonstrated how blacks might provide a unified front to challenge white-led state oppression. In this scene, leaders in the Nation of Islam learned that one of their members, Brother Johnson, had been brutally beaten by police and taken into custody. Within minutes, Malcolm X assembled a large

160 group of Muslim men, each wearing black suits and ties, and led them in an orderly march to police headquarters. Once Malcolm gained permission to look in on Brother Johnson, he demanded that Johnson be taken to a hospital. As the men marched in solemn procession to the hospital, local Harlem residents noticed them, and began to follow behind them. After they arrived at the hospital, the stoic Muslim men stood on the sidewalk between police officers guarding the hospital and a throng of local black citizens standing behind them. Harlem residents raised their fists in the air and chanted, “We want justice.”

When the police captain approached Malcolm and told him to move people along, Malcolm told him, “We’re of Islam with disciplined men. They haven’t broken any laws…yet.” Then the officer inquired, “What about them?” pointing to the mob behind Malcolm. Malcolm responded, “That’s your headache Captain. But if Brother Johnson dies, I pity you.” Malcolm turned to look at the crowd as its calls for justice rose in volume. Malcolm’s lips smirked slightly, suggesting his satisfaction with the community’s response to the march. After a doctor emerged from the hospital to report that Johnson will live, the crowd dispersed. Images of black protest in this scene illustrated Malcolm X’s claim that black communities would demand structural social and economic change in the United States if racially motivate violence and oppression continued unabated. Both the scene and

Malcolm’s political philosophy characterized contentious collective protest as a positive force for social justice, and contradicted the American Dream myth’s faith in individualism and faith in law and order as a social good. Film critic Howe (1992) described this scene as” particularly stirring” (p. 44). Likewise, reporter Santiago (1992) observed that the audience he watched the film with applauded loudly during this scene (p. 7E). These reviewers demonstrated the image of mass protest was pivotal to the

161 film’s depiction of Malcolm X as an important figure in black history. They also indicated that this scene was well received by audiences even though it depicted ideas that contradicted the film’s prevailing narrative.

Journalistic counter-memories about Malcolm X

The film’s narrative framework and use of stock footage positioned audiences to embrace the radical black leader and gave the film the appearance of “truth” as a legitimate representation of the past. By grounding unfamiliar ideas within the familiar narrative structure of the American Dream myth, Malcolm X opened space for mainstream journalism media to legitimate Malcolm in popular memory and integrate his ideas into popular culture. By establishing the memory of Malcolm X within the doxa of liberal capitalism, Lee’s Malcolm X invited journalists and mainstream press to attend to the film. Journalism reports and newspaper reviews of the film characterized the film as an alternative to prevailing memory about Malcolm X and race relations in the United States. These reviews exemplified how the film created room for counter-memories within the landscape of popular memory. Newspaper film critic Guthmann (1992) wrote, “the film dealt with an ideology and world view” that had never been “explored in a mainstream Hollywood film” (p. E1). In the week following the film’s opening, journalists covered audiences’ reactions to the film in several cities. Journalists’ attention to ordinary filmgoers and students who praised the film suggests that the film’s counter- hegemonic messages were not lost on audience members either. Many newspapers reported that younger audiences understood the film as an educational resource about ideas not taught in their classrooms. Thus, the film’s educational role was a central topos in news reviews and reports about the film. Kent MacLean described the film to Chicago Tribune reporter Yearwood (1992) as “a real education” (p. 1A). Several other students told reporters that they didn’t know who 162 Malcolm X was or what he stood for prior to watching the film (Lipper, 1992,p. C1; Murray and Yandel, 1992, p. C1; Washington 1992, p. 3D). One high school student, Sarah Paetsch told a reporter for Cleveland’s Plain Dealer, “It seems like Malcolm X is a taboo subject at school,” and concluded that his influence was more “far reaching” than she had realized (Washington, 1992, p. 3D). Another high school student, Terrell, told reporter Futterman (1992) that he considered skipping class to see the film, and concluded that Malcolm X was important because “it's something that really makes you think” (p. 1D). These quotations suggested that Lee’s film prompted audiences with little knowledge of Malcolm X to think and talk about his influence in the history of African- American struggle in the United States. Newspaper film critic Hartl (1992) also characterized Malcolm X as a significant source of memory about the black leader:

[Malcolm X] presents American history from the perspective of disenfranchised African Americans. But it accomplishes something that's never really been done on film before. For many Americans, especially those who are too young to have been exposed to Malcolm X's ideas when he was alive, the movie will be an education if not a revelation. (p. C1)

By recognizing the film as a source of information about a history rarely popularized my mainstream media or in classrooms, Hartl also pointed out that Lee’s film brought counter-memories of subordinated blacks to the attention of young film-going audiences. Journalistic attention to the film suggested that the film positioned audiences to

embrace the radical black leader. Several students told reporters that Malcolm X’s autobiography deserved particular attention among black communities. These students suggested that Malcolm X was an important figure in black history, but that most blacks had little understanding of his role in African-American political struggle. One high school student told reporter Santiago (1992) that Malcolm X was “someone that black people should know about” (1992, p. 7E). Another student declared to reporters Murray and Yandel (1992) that “[t]he positive side of black people is worth a day off from 163 school” (p. C1). Quotations from the film’s audience members suggested that schools provide few empowering messages about blacks, and described the film as an important contribution to the history taught in classrooms. Quotations from journalism reviewers and reports framed the film within the topos of education, a theme common to liberal ideology, and to popular doxa as well. In this way, reviews positioned Malcolm within popular memory. These reviews and reports also extended that memory. In addition to praising the film as an alternative source of information about the past, journalistic coverage demonstrated that Lee’s Malcolm X opened spaces for journalists to promote positive memories of Malcolm X and advance criticisms of enduring racism in the United States. Newspaper coverage of audience reception to Malcolm X featured audience members who revised their previous conceptions about the African-American leader. Futterman (1992) quoted one student, Jason, who told him, “I'll admit that before I saw this movie, the only things I thought about Malcolm X were all negative. I thought he fought racism with racism. This movie cleared up a lot of misconceptions for me” (p. 1D). Other individuals quoted by news reporters suggested that Malcolm X was a positive role model for blacks. Yearwood (1992) quoted on audience member, MacLean, who explained that (p. 1A) that he “grew up thinking Malcolm X was a violent man, but the movie showed me that Malcolm X was about self- defense, not violence.” Reporter Washington (1992) indicated that the Malcolm was a valuable role model for whites as well. According to Tuck, one of the students Washington quoted, uninformed people might mistake Malcolm for an “angry black man who hated whites.” But Tuck demurred: “He believed in everybody's rights” (p. 3D). These quotes suggested that the film’s portrayal of Malcolm cleared up audience members’ previous “misconceptions” about Malcolm X. As Murray and Yandel (1992) quoted Robert Hill, an instructor at Kennesaw State College, “There are a lot of

164 misconceptions about the man floating around, that he hated white people all of his life and was always violent….This film makes a point of showing all sides of Malcolm. We all should know him” (Murray and Yandel, 1992, p. C1). By evoking both the American Dream myth and images of King’s beating, Malcolm X positioned audiences to accept more controversial aspects of Malcolm’s leadership as salient and valuable to the history of African-American struggle. By suggesting that Malcolm X had a legitimate place in popular culture, the film and newspaper reviews and coverage of the film opened some space for additional memories counter to prevailing ideology to become part of prevailing doxa as well. By featuring these statements in coverage of the film’s reception, reporters helped to constitute the film as a site for introducing counter-hegemonic messages into mainstream newspapers.

Many critics noted that representations of Malcolm X constructed by mainstream media during Malcolm’s lifetime provided simplistic depictions of him; thus they praised the film for providing a more complex portrait of the black leader. Chisholm (1992) wrote that the film offered a “welcome multidimensional portrait of a gifted man” that reframed “the simplistic way in which the idea of Malcolm has been absorbed into mass culture” (p. E4). Mirroring Chisholm’s remarks, Billingsly (1992) declared that Malcolm X had painted “a fuller, truer portrait of Malcolm” than he had “ever seen portrayed in the popular media” (Harrison et. al, 1992, p. 1F). Billingsly (1992) added, “The press tried to portray Malcolm X as violent, though they could point to no violence that he had committed” (p. 1F). Carr (1992) identified the role of the film as a source of counter- memory that forced revision within popular memory most succinctly. He concluded that Malcolm X “will be that much harder to distort now that this film exists” (p. 45). These critics indicated that the counter memories supplied permanently altered the landscape of

165 popular memory. Presumably, the film’s authentic representation of Malcolm’s life in the film shadowed earlier portrayals that provided a partial view of his character. Newspaper coverage of the film also suggested that Malcolm X not only created a space for positive memories of Malcolm X to become part of popular culture, but prompted some audiences to think critically about history and memory. According to several reporters, the film called for critical reflection of institutions that had distorted Malcolm’s memory. Quoted by the New York Times, social studies teacher Grace compared students’ reactions to the film to “being introduced to ice cream for the first time.” He added, “the first thing [students] want to know is, ‘Why wasn't I told about him, and how could you let him be killed?’” (Wilkerson, 1992, p. A1). Grace’s response suggests that the film prompted some students to question the legitimacy of prevailing authorities that ignored Malcolm X. The St. Louis Dispatch also quoted an audience member who suggested that the film exposed the underlying racism within America’s educational system.

The only way I see it is to burn up all our old history books because our old history books show the black man … the brown man being a slave. Like he didn't invent anything. All of this wasn't made by the white man, and yet when you look at history books, that's all you see. (Futterman: 1992, p. 1D) Newspaper quotations such as the above suggest that the counter-memories evoked in the film opened a space for mainstream media to give a voice to individuals critically of prevailing race relations. Indeed, several film critics suggested that the film created opportunities for audiences to think about endemic problems of racism within the United States. Guthmann (1992) described the film as “a jumping-off point to a larger discussion of racism, violence and American politics” (p. E1) and Hartl (1992) characterized the film’s depiction of the American penal system as a “a powerful examination of the stultifying

166 pervasiveness of white culture in the United States (p. C1). Other reviewers remarked explicitly on the film’s counter-hegemonic status. Gabrenya (1992) concluded that Malcolm X was one of the first films to “embrace a clear point of view that challenges the traditional values of white-dominated American society” (p. 1F). Complementing Gabrenya’s assertion, Guthmann (1992) also argued that Malcolm X represented “a blatantly political film informing us, without equivocation, that something is radically, pitifully wrong with the United States of America” (p. E1). Newspaper reviews and reports pointed to the ways in which counter-memories supplied by the film transformed popular discourses about contemporary race relations. Presumably, racism could no longer be consigned to the past now that Malcolm X brought it back to the present.

Journalists’ coverage of audience responses to the film indicated that the film’s use of video footage of the police beating Rodney King helped to establish the film as a commentary on contemporary race relations. Observing Lee’s use of the footage, reviewer Guthmann (1992) concluded, “The message is clear: The racism and injustice Malcolm X spoke of are still with us” (p. E2). Lipper (1992) wrote, “Lee attempts to link the past with the present, noting how far blacks still have to go to achieve racial equality (p. 7B). Hartl (1992) also recognized the parallels established in the film between race relations during the 1960s and the 1990s. “As Lee makes clear in the opening credits, which include video clips of the Rodney King beating, his despairing view of oppression

by whites is anything but dated” (p. C1). Reviewing the film for St. Petersburg Times, Peterman (1992) explained that Malcolm X’s critique of the police state applied to both Rodney King’s beating and to the murder of Malice Green in Detroit. Peterman concluded that it would take little to convince black audiences that they were “living in a police state” (p. 1D). Reviewers suggested that images that joined Malcolm’s past with footage of Rodney King’s beating created continuity between Malcolm’s experiences

167 with racism and race relations in the 1990s. By linking Malcolm’s experience with Rodney King’s, Malcolm X prompted journalists to acknowledge state repression of blacks as systemic and enduring within America’s political system. By establishing continuity between Malcolm’s life experiences and racism in the present, the film invited many black audience members to recognize Malcolm’s struggles as their own. Thus, contemporary racism was another central topos that emerged in coverage of the film. Ms. McRath told Atlanta Journal and Constitution reporters, “It nearly brought me to tears at the end. Malcolm X went through most of the trials and tribulations that [black people] have experienced” (Murray and Yandel, 1992, p. C1). Tuck Woo compared his enthusiasm with the film to white students at his school who refused to see it and concluded, “It's very racist at my school,” (Washington, 1992, p. 3D). The film also created an opening for reporters and film critics to recognize racial injustices from Malcolm’s lifetime within a broader history of racism in the United States. One student, Traci, told reporters, "There's still racism in America….The [African-American] race has little to show for its 400 years in this country” (Washington, 1992, p. 3D). Press attention to the film suggested that this film constituted Malcolm’s story within a broader narrative of black struggle. As Murray (1992) wrote in his review of the film, “Malcolm X reminds us that some stories have brutal, bloody endings. And that some have yet to be concluded” (p. D8). Murray’s review suggests that the memory provided by Malcolm X was not only a narrative about racism; it was also a call to action.

Some audiences indicate that they were inspired by Malcolm X’s appeals for blacks to empower themselves and their communities. Student Terrell told reporter Futterman (1992) that he believed Malcolm would want blacks to “do something constructive” to improve their communities (p. 1D). Willie Howard told reporters Murray and Yandel (1992) that the film gave him “the greatest lesson of his life.”

168 Howard added, “I learned you have to tell the truth and fight for what you believe in no matter what comes at you. I almost cried" (Murray and Yandel 1992, p. C1). In his interview wit Gabrenya (1992), Freeman concluded,

Malcolm X provides an opportunity for us to make a conscious decision to take up our burden to rededicate ourselves to the ideals of empowerment and self- determination, to reaffirm our belief in self, and to recommit ourselves to the struggle for human rights. (p. 1F) By taking up Malcolm’s call to fight for justice and empowerment, Freeman, Howard, and Terrell suggest that the conclusion to America’s struggle for justice lies with contemporary media audiences. Newspapers that acknowledged the counter-hegemonic messages of the film point to the film’s role as a force for inspiring social change. Malcolm’s critique of racism and his call for social justice encouraged these audience members to envision alternatives for the future. By constructing popular memories of racial injustices past and present, Malcolm X also inspired their imagination for a more hopeful future.

CONVENTION AS A FORCE FOR IMAGINATION IN POPULAR FILM

By presenting images of injustice that had been forgotten in popular culture, the film invited new ideas to enter into other spaces in popular culture. The film’s narrative framework was central to the film’s counter-hegemonic potential because this framework enabled the film to resonate with culturally powerful belief systems and established the film’s status as a source of popular memory. My analysis of Malcolm X and journalism coverage of the film suggests that counter-memories may be inextricable from dominant ideology in popular memory. On the one hand, Lee’s Malcolm X evoked dominant memories of the American Dream to popularize memories of Malcolm X. On the other hand, the film’s hegemonic framing of Malcolm X in terms of the American Dream myth curtailed the extent to which counter-memories of activism could become part of popular

169 culture. Given the predominant framing of the Black Power Movement as deviant and violent in mainstream news media, it is likely that many mainstream audiences would not have been receptive to a less conventional narrative about Malcolm X. Yet, mainstream press celebrated Lee’s film. Lee’s use of established conventions and ideology of mainstream culture popularized memories of Malcolm X. They also invited journalists to address Malcolm’s political critique of race relations in the United States, and acknowledge the value of political protest and activism. My analysis also indicates that popular memories balance the liberatory impulses of imagination with the conservative tendencies of convention. The film’s conventional approach to telling the story of Malcolm X limited the extent to which journalistic media attend to Malcolm’s critique of the state. By positioning Malcolm X within the American Dream myth, the film backgrounded systemic features of economic and social life that limit advancement opportunities for marginalized groups. The film’s biopic framework and focus on individual heroism also foreshortened the film’s potential to act as a force for imagining collective agitation as a force for social change. These conclusions suggest that popular culture may never be an expansive site of counter-memory because it ultimately reinforces the ideology of the liberal capitalist system that gave rise to the commercial media industry itself.

Alternatively, this analysis of journalistic memories of Malcolm X indicates that

popular memories open spaces for commercial media to recognize social injustices and revision a just and equitable future. These may not be large spaces. Indeed, they might not be big enough to inspire the emergence of counter-publics engaged in collective activism. But they do create a wedge for the construction of new landscapes of memory that revision the past.

170 Mainstream, commercial films may have greater potential to integrate new attitudes and beliefs into popular memory than do radical, counter-hegemonic films. Memory fragments of a radical past may resonate broadly in popular culture when they are counted in the framework and images of the established present. Marcuse (1964) writes that the past may provide motive power in the struggle for changing the world. For Marcuse, memories are resources of the imagination, or forces for revisioning social relations. Through the rememberance of things past, the omnipresent power of the given facts may be open to critical interrogation (p. 98). Marcuse also insists that “the oppressive rule of the established language” may only be broken by the “subverting use of traditional material” (pp. 79-80). I would also argue that the converse is true; history itself requires the use of materials of the present in order to become credible and relevant to contemporary publics. The popular memory of Malcolm X constructed by Lee’s film and journalism reviews suggests that rememberance of injustices from the past may indeed reawaken political understanding and inspire political critique in the present, but they can only do so within the confines of prevailing doxa. Therefore, popular texts might do well to embrace conventions nurtured by prevailing doxa so that it may tear down the dominant ideology embedded within it.

This analysis of Malcolm X also reinforces a central claim in my dissertation, that the legitimacy of individual films as sources of knowledge about the past is established

intertextually, across the films themselves, and through secondary sources that encourage audiences to attribute historical relevance to the messages constructed by these films. The relationship between a film’s representation of the past and the dominant ideology, or doxa of a culture, is central to understand how films attain legitimacy as sources of popular memory.

171 Although films that resonate with prevailing knowledge about historic reality may be readily incorporated into popular memory, films that challenge prevailing understandings about past events may be dismissed. In my next chapter, I explore another film, Mario Van Peebles’ Panther (1995), which also depicted radical black activists who struggled for social and political empowerment within their communities. My analysis of Panther and journalism attention to it illustrates how films that fail to embrace dominant ideology might provide alternative understandings of the past, but have limited potential to incorporate counter-memories into popular culture.

172 NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE

1Winn (2001) notes that the film portrayed Malcolm X as a less radical, less volatile figure than other histories of the radical activist have presented (p. 463). Winn concludes that this portrayal was the outcome of compromises made between filmmakers and the Hollywood film industry that enabled Malcolm X to challenge Hollywood’s racist ideological legacy and remain a viable commercial movie (p. 463). My chapter extends Winn’s observations by attending to the rhetorical features of Lee’s Malcolm X that enabled the film to integrate new attitudes about racism and radical black activism into popular memory.

2Winn (2001) makes a similar argument about Lee’s Malcolm X (p. 459).

173 Chapter Six

Truth and ideology in Mario Van Peebles’ Panther

Mario Van Peebles’ film Panther shared many features in common with Lee’s Malcolm X. Both filmmakers sought to create empowering images of African-Americans who struggled for racial justice in the 1960s, and featured black activists who called for economic restructuring of society; likewise, both struggled up against a Hollywood entertainment industry that insisted that films about blacks were not lucrative, and found additional support for their films from black artists within the entertainment and film community. Although both films defied the industry by bringing their films to mainstream theatres, Panther did not achieve the box office success or industry accolades that Malcolm X received. Thus, Panther was not able to integrate counter-hegemonic messages about black activism into popular culture as forcefully as Malcolm X. I argue that Panther’s limitations stemmed, at least in part, from its unconventional narrative format. Van Peebles based his script on a novel that incorporated a fictional narrative into the film’s history of the Black Panther Party. Concomitantly, the film joined conventions of the blaxploitation film genre with conventions of documentary film. Panther’s limitations also resulted from the film’s controversial representations of black activism during the 1960s. Indeed, Panther suggested that white police and the FBI used illegal measures, including drug tracking, to undermine the movement’s success toward the end of the decade. In response to the film’s blending of fictional and historical events about the Panthers, news media critics castigated the film as a “false history.” The distinction between truth and fiction functioned rhetorically in journalism reviews of Panther by

174 delegitimating the memories of the Black Panther Party constructed by the film. I argue that both the film’s representation of the Panthers and news reviews of the film delimited the extent to which the film’s images of the BPP could become part of popular memory. Because the film adopted a narrative and visual style that challenged both popular conceptions of what constitutes a credible narrative and good cinema, reviewers refused to accept Panther as a legitimate representation of the past. I also conclude that secondary sources reinforced prevailing ideology in light of challenges that Panther posed to them by suggesting that the entire film should be read as a fiction.

A CONTROVERSIAL FILM ABOUT A RADICAL MOVEMENT

The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense emerged in Oakland, California in 1966. Over the next several years, party members took up arms to defend themselves against police brutality, created programs that cared for impoverished African-Americans in their communities, and sought dramatic restructuring of economic and political power in the United States. By 1969, the Black Panther Party had established chapters in almost every state in the United States and in several foreign countries. Although the Panthers successfully organized large numbers of African-Americans throughout the United States, the movement fell into decline in the early-1970s. Scholars and journalists have attributed the Black Panther Party’s demise to infighting within the movement and to the

FBI’s efforts to destroy it. Between 1968 and 1971, the FBI’s COINTELPRO (Counter- intelligence Program) resulted in frequent arrests of Black Panther Party members, raids of party offices, and the deaths of at least 29 party members. As Churchill (2001) and Foner (1970) demonstrate, many of these arrests were made on dubious charges that could not be substantiated in court. Likewise, party office raids were often based on false pretenses. In 1969, Chicago police shot and killed party leader Fred Hampton and his colleague Mark Clark. Although police officers claimed they shot in self-defense, a 175 Federal Grand Jury concluded that charges were false and that Hampton and Clark had

been shot in their sleep (Foner, 1970, p. xxvi).1 Despite the remarkable history of the Panther’s emergence and demise, popular media have paid scant attention to the movement. Recognizing the dearth of public knowledge about the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (referred to as the BPP throughout the rest of this paper), film director Mario Van Peebles made the movie Panther based on a novel written by his father Melvin Van Peebles. In contrast to previous films about civil rights activism and the Black Power Movement, Mario Van Peebles refused to compromise with Hollywood executives to make his film. Van Peebles told reporters covering the film’s release that he and his father refused to submit to the industry’s requests to feature a white actor and explained that he wasn’t willing to compromise the film’s message to receive a larger budget for the film:

If we were negotiating now, I’m sure [Hollywood producers] would say, ‘Make one of the lead Panthers white, and get Brad Pitt to star in the film.’ But I thought about what my dad said, which is that history goes back to the winner, and you’re surely not winning if you’re not telling your own history. So we held off until we could make the film our way.” (Kim, 1995, p. 3NC)

According to his own statements, Van Peebles created Panther to pose a direct challenge to the Hollywood industry’s penchant for representing the interests of white and affluent

audiences who make films profitable.2 Indeed, Panther posed a defiant challenge to the

Hollywood film industry. The film flouted convention. Both its narrative style and edgy editing techniques rebelled against Hollywood norms for historical film.

PANTHER AS AN HISTORICAL BLAXPLOITATION DOCUDRAMA

The film’s narrative represented a cross breed of docudrama and blaxploitation film genres. As a docudrama, the film featured several events from the history of Oakland’s Black Panther Party. Montage sequences in the film drew attention to the

176 Panthers’ free breakfast program for community children, sickle-cell anemia testing for blacks, and community meetings to raise awareness of racism and oppression in the United States. Scenes in this film also featured FBI Director Herbert Hoover’s efforts to discredit and destroy the movement; during the film, Hoover characterized Panthers as criminals in the news media and organized FBI efforts to terrorize BPP members and officers. The film spotlighted violent confrontations between BPP members and state officials. Key moments in the film highlight Huey Newton’s October 28, 1967 arrest for killing a police officer, police assaults on BPP offices in cities across the country between 1968 and 1969, and the April 6, 1968 confrontation between Panthers and Oakland police officers that ended in the shooting death of eighteen year old BPP member Bobby Hutton.

Scenes in the film equally highlighted the BPP’s resistance to state-sanctioned repression against blacks. These included the April 1, 1967 BPP-led protest of the shooting death of Denzil Dowell at a police station in Richmond, CA, the May 2, 1967 BPP march into the California state capitol in Sacramento, and the February 17, 1968 rally at the Alameda County Courthouse to free Huey Newton from prison. As the film recalled, Stokely Carmichael, leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, called for Huey’s release “by any means necessary.” The film also depicted Newton’s acquittal after the prosecution failed to collect evidence against him. These scenes

ultimately portrayed the BPP as a volatile movement that sought freedom from racial injustice and economic empowerment for black people. Panther’s narrative blended documentary films’ emphasis on representing events from the past with blaxploitation films’ emphasis on black empowerment from repressive forces of a white dominated society. Blaxploitation films are small budget action films that flourished during the early to mid-1970s (Briggs, 2003; Poniewozik, 2002). These

177 films featured black protagonists as criminal heroes who fought against white law enforcement officials. A critique of racial politics, or of racial biases inherent within prevailing power structures, underlies the narratives within these genres (Briggs, 2003). It is perhaps unsurprising that Mario van Peebles film echoed several features of the blaxploitation film genre. Poniewozik (2002) credits Melvin van Peebles, Mario van Peebles’s father, for creating the first blaxploitation film, Sweet Sweetback’s BaadAssss Song (1971) (p. 62). Indeed, this genre was entirely appropriate for a film about the Black Panther Party. Themes in blaxploitation films resonate with political critiques central to activists within the Black Power Movement. As Poniewozik concludes, the film genre “owed its world view to militant black groups like the Black Panthers” (p. 62). According to Poniewozik, Melvin Van Peebles 1971 film “stunned audiences” by showing a “strong black man who fought…and tangled with white cops, yet didn’t get killed for it by the end of the movie” (p. 62). McKissack (1997) suggests that this genre was constituted by the first series of films that primarily featured black actors and put blacks in powerful roles.

Panther reverberated themes central to the blaxploitation genre by featuring the Panthers’ use of armed self defense struggle to resist local white police and FBI agents who brutalized local blacks. Black resistance to repressive white authorities resonated with both the blaxploitation genre and with actual events from the history of the Black

Panther Party; however, other narrative elements in the film did not resonate equally with both filmic genres. As Panther blended documentary and blaxploitation film genres, it incorporated fictional events within a broader historical narrative. Initially, the film intertwined historical reality and fiction by telling the history of the Black Panther Party’s emergence in Oakland, California, through the film’s fictional main character, Judge. Judge, played by Kadeem Hardison, represented a student attending college on a GI

178 scholarship who was compelled by the Panther’s call for community self empowerment and self defense against a violent Oakland Police force. After he decided to join the Black Panther Party, Huey Newton (played by Marcus Chong) took him aside and asked him to mislead the Oakland Police Force by surreptitiously acting as a Party infiltrator. Much of the film’s drama revolved around Judge’s relationship with Detective Baker, who asked Judge to set the Panthers up for robbery, and Judge’s relationship with BPP member, Tyrone, who suspected Judge was working for the police. This narrative framework fit well with the blaxploitation genre’s depictions of blacks struggling to find justice within a corrupt political system. It also resembled many of the tactics that FBI agents used during the 1960s to infiltrate the Black Panther Party. Indeed, the blaxploitation genre itself can be considered a site of counter-memory about radical black activism. The genre’s resonance to actual events from the history of state repression against activists demonstrates how fictional forms themselves are rooted in counter-memories of injustices that have been disregarded by predominant political and institutional memory (Lipsitz, 1990, p. xiii). I would argue, however, that the film’s narrative framework disabled the film from incorporating the memory of political repression into popular memory. As a counter-memory that has been repressed in popular culture, this narrative itself was at odds with popular memory established by other texts. As a following section in this chapter explains, the film’s use of fictional characters to tell the story of political repression against the Panthers discouraged audiences from understanding the narrative’s resonance to historical events.

Although many scenes accurately depicted public statements and official decisions made by the FBI against the Panthers, the film’s conclusion portrayed a less- accepted theory about the Panthers’ demise. The film suggested that when Hoover realized the BPP would continue to grow in spite his efforts to disable it, he urged FBI

179 agents to collude with the Mafia to bring cheap cocaine and heroin into black urban ghettos. The final scenes of the film depicted fictional characters Alma, Tyrone, and Judge destroying a warehouse filled with drugs. When Tyrone was shot by a drug-dealer, he heroically convinced Alma and Judge to leave the warehouse without him. The film’s final image focused on Tyrone, who lit the warehouse on fire as police riddled his body with bullets. In the film’s final minute, Judge’s voice was heard reading the following words that appeared on screen: “In 1970, there were 300,000 addicts in the United States. Yesterday there were 3 million. The way I see it, the struggle continues. This film is dedicated to all of the Black Panthers who gave their lives in the struggle.” The film’s closing scene reinforced Panthe’sr counter-hegemonic role. Unlike most films valorizing the law and order system, including civil rights films, Panther directed blame for endemic poverty and drug use in black inner-cities on federal and state authorities. According to Panther, the rise in drug use among African-Americans was a consequence of the state’s efforts to shut down collective activism and community development among the black urban poor. The FBI’s use of illegal tactics to destroy the movement is well documented in government and historical texts, but there is no direct evidence that the FBI worked with the Mafia to bring narcotics into Oakland. Thus, the film’s narrative highlighted illegal and brutal FBI tactics that actually did occur as well as those that did not.

Several reviewers noted that the film’s final scene, as well as the scene of Bobby Hutton’s death, resembled scenes from Van Peebles’ earlier films, New Jack City, and Posse (Kehr, 1995, p. 37; Maslin, 1995, p. C18; Murray, 1995, p. 7B; Ross, 1995, p. 16). These scenes featured violent, armed struggles between competing factions. The nighttime settings for these scenes provided visually spectacular images; the darkness of night sharply contrasted with the brightness of explosions and broken glass shining in the

180 moonlight. Dramatic images of buildings being destroyed and bodies being wounded by gunfire were intensified by dramatic orchestral music. Scenes that shared visual cues from Van Peebles’ fictional films made it difficult for audiences to distinguish fictional narratives from real events in the history of the BPP. Audiences who did not identify with the black protagonists of blaxploitation films might have indicted the Panther’s actions as criminal, rather than blaming the political and economic system for reinforcing racism. The film’s narrative coherence with the blaxploitation genre may have inhibited audiences from reading it as a site of collective memory about a social movement that sought to eradicate racial and economic injustices against African-Americans. Particularly for audiences with little knowledge of COINTELPRO’s illegal tactics against activist organizations during the late 1960s, the entire film could be read as an implausible and sensational story.

ENTANGLING ARCHIVAL AND FICTIONAL FILM IN PANTHER

In addition to using narrative techniques that combined a fictional story with historical events in BPP history, Van Peebles used visual and aural techniques that simultaneously drew attention to and troubled the distinction between documentary and entertainment film. Panther interspersed black and white film with color film to depict actual, recreated, and fictional events. Simultaneously, this film integrated the voices of actual BPP activists as commentary for the recreated and fictional events portrayed in the film. Several montage sequences in the movie interspersed different images in color film with images in black and white film. The movie began by presenting black and white footage of speeches delivered by civil rights leaders Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and of white police officers beating African-Americans. Because black and white film typically represents vintage recordings of events that took place before the invention of color film, scenes shot in black and white suggest that the movie included actual footage 181 of BPP activism from the 1960s. Nichols (1991) explains that documentaries require both the viewers’ prior knowledge and textual cues to distinguish documentary film from fictional narrative discourse that pertains to the historical world (p. 24). Audiences recognize that documentaries pertain to the historical world, in contrast to fictional films that make no claims about a real or objective past, because they have developed skills of comprehension that help them recognize historical figures and events that occurred for reasons beyond the recordings of them. The montage sequences that opened the movie in black and white film provided audiences with visual cues for the film’s authenticity. Because black and white film typically signals that the footage is a vintage recording of an event from the past, the film prompted audiences to recognize the film’s resonance with an historical world that exists outside filmic experience. Viewers with even limited television exposure are likely to have seen images Martin Luther King and Malcolm X from earlier broadcasts, so the images of these civil rights figures lent further credibility to the film as a source of memory about the past. By providing ostensibly authentic images of civil rights activism and racial injustice, these documentary-type images suggested that Panther should be read as a text that addresses the historic record of African-Americans struggles for justice and frames the Black Power Movement as an extension of civil rights activism.

Panther’s black and white footage of both real and recreated events in BPP

history appeared intermittently between color footage. Initially, scenes in color corresponded with the film’s fictional narrative about Judge. The scene following the movie’s introduction to Seale and Newton depicted Judge in color. As Judge witnessed a car accident at the intersection in front of his house, Judge’s voice told audiences, “I guess you could say for me, the Black Panther Party started in my mom’s front yard.” By contrasting black and white images of actors portraying Newton and Seale with color

182 images of Judge’s experience with the movement, Panther visually distinguished fictional narrative from a documentary history. The film’s use of film blurred this distinction as the movie’s narrative also blended fictional with historical narratives about the Panthers. Although black and white footage of events from the civil rights movement ostensibly represented an authentic representation of the movement’s history in the initial scenes in the film, the author’s intermittent use of black and white film and color film conflated footage from the 1960s with scenes recreated by Van Peebles. For example, images of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X followed black and white footage of actors Marcus Chong and Courtney B. Vance portraying Huey Netwon and Bobby Seale (respectively) as Judge’s voice described how Newton and Seale started the movement. Judge told audiences, “What became the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense really started with two guys, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, ‘Defend Yourselves.’” Because black and white film was a visual cue representing realism in the initial scenes of the film, the appearance of Chong and Vance in black and white film blurred the distinction between real images and reconstructions of BPP activism.

The distinction between documentary history and the fictional narrative also became hazy as the film continued. Several montage sequences in the film provided images of BPP activism and FBI repression against the Panthers from documentary and

recreated images. Black and white footage of African-Americans picketing a business for its unequal employment practices intermingled with black and white images of actor Wesley Jonathan, portraying BPP member Bobby Hutton as he taught young children about community empowerment. These scenes were also interspersed with color images of actors representing Panther party members painting a mural that reads, “All Power to the People.”

183 As the film progressed, color film and black and white film collapsed the distinctions between documentary and fiction film that the first scenes initially established. During a montage sequence that transposed images of FBI attacks on BPP offices with images of the BPP’s growth in membership, black and white images of activists in line formation were interspersed with color images of party offices being besieged with gunfire and bombs. Words at the bottom of the screen during scenes depicting FBI attacks on Panther offices highlighted the cities, “Seattle”, “Des Moines”, “Denver”, “Los Angeles”, “Chicago”, “New York”, “Newark”, and “Little Rock”. Following conventions of documentary film, these captions suggested that these bombings depicted real events in BPP history. While captions marked the images of besieged Panther offices as a representation of real events, these images appeared in color. Because color film depicted the narrative revolving around the fictional Judge until this montage sequence appeared, the film’s use of color film in this sequence reminded audiences that the images were indeed, representations. In other scenes, black and white film and color film appeared arbitrarily. Both black and white and color film depicted the Panther’s demonstration at the California State legislature on May 2, 1967. Likewise, color film and black and white film portrayed the riots that occurred throughout urban centers in the United States after Martin Luther King was assassinated on April 4, 1968. As images of the same events appeared in both color and black and white film, Van Peebles scrambled the visual cues that had initially distinguished documentary from fictional footage in the film and blurred categories of archival footage, recreated events, and fictional narratives that audiences might have used to identify the film as either a historical or fictional film.

Aural cues that entangled actual footage of the BPP with dramatizations constructed by Van Peebles enhanced visual cues that conflated archival footage with

184 recreated footage of BPP history. During the montage sequence that featured FBI attacks on BPP offices, the voice of Kathleen Cleaver described the “pattern of harassment” against the party. For a moment, a documentary film image of Cleaver spoke to the audience from a microphone. Seconds later, actor Bokeem Woodbine portraying fictional character, Tyrone, appeared on screen as his voice urged members to embrace their African heritage. Following this scene, recreated footage of FBI members exchanging gunfire with BPP members accompany Tyrone’s voice. Then, scenes depicting FBI raids on Panther offices were interrupted by an archival photograph of Fred Hampton. As the final images of police officers chasing Panther Party members completed the montage sequence, Hampton’s voice concluded, “Stand up against the pigs. That’s what the Panthers are doing.” Because actors from the film appeared in both black and white and in color, viewers could not use visual cures of film color to distinguish documentary from recreated footage of the Panther Party. Because these voiceovers came from audio clips of activists speaking during the 1960s and from actors portraying fictional activists in 1995, it was hard to distinguish “real” from “fictional” portrayals of BPP activists. The voices of real BPP activists that corresponded to images of actors playing fictional Panther Party members, and, conversely, voices of fictional characters that corresponded to recreated scenes of actual events from BPP history conflated real with recreated images in BPP history. Likewise, the combination of these aural and visual techniques collapsed recreated events with fictional ones. Visually and aurally, Van Peebles radically denaturalized the signifiers that give films meaning as historic reality; the scrambling of cues suggested that historic truths are, to some extent, fiction, and that all fictions have at their core a basis in historic reality.

185 DISTINGUISHING FACT AND FICTION IN JOURNALISM REVIEWS OF PANTHER

Telling lies or empowering the oppressed?

News reviews indicated that the blurred boundaries between fictional and historical narratives in the film constrained the film’s potential to challenge prevailing assumptions about the Panthers. The co-mingling of fictional and actual events from BPP history provided fodder, if not a catalyst, for mainstream media condemnation of the film. Near the date of the film’s release on May 3, 1995, Panther was met with much opposition. Most notably, ex-Panther Bobby Seale and David Horowitz, leader of the conservative Center for the Study of Popular Culture, condemned the movie. While

Seale complained that the movie portrayed Panthers as “thugs,”3 Horowitz opined that the film ignored atrocities committed by BPP members and depicted the FBI as working closely with the Mafia to destroy the Panthers.4 In April, a month before the film’s release, David Horowitz placed full page advertisements in Variety and Hollywood Reporter that castigated the movie for its misrepresentation of the BPP (Fine, 1995, p. 1D; Sherman, 1995, p. 011). After Horowitz castigated the film in Hollywood industry journals, mainstream newspapers began draw negative attention to the film as well. Many reports that featured criticisms of the film evoked the topos of truth as a criterion for judgment. Several newspapers, including the Washington Post and USA Today, featured Horowitz’s and Seale’s condemnations against Panther. Horowitz’ and Seale’s complaints against the film emerged again during the second week of May as Van Peebles responded to criticism. In these reports, Horowitz condemned the film as a “two- hour lie” (Carroll, 1995, p. 31; Charles, 1995, p. 29; Graham, 1995, p. 63; Lieby, 1995, p. G01; Sherman, 1995, p. 011; Turner, 1995, p. 11; Vincent, 1995, p. E1). Likewise, reports cited Bobby Seale who denounced the film as “bootleg fiction” and announced that he signed a deal with Warner Brothers to write a more accurate screenplay about the 186 Panthers (“Black Panthers,” 1995, p. O17; Carroll, 1995, p. 31; Graham, 1995, p. 63; Howe, 1995, p. N49; James, 1995, sec. 2, p. 1; Lieby, 1995, p. G01; Sherman, 1995, p. O11; Turner, 1995, p. 11; Vincent, 1995, p. E1). News reports covering the controversy surrounding Panther frequently counterposed Horowitz’ and Seale’s condemnations of the film against Van Peebles’ defense of his film. According to many reports, Van Peebles lauded the film as a means of educating a predominantly complaisant and marginalized audience of “young black

kids about their history” (Turner, 1995, p. 11).5 Marcus Chong, who played the role of Newton in the film, also told reporters that the film would provide “an education that's different from the one they're getting at colonized school systems” (Jones, 1995, p. Y05). Both Van Peebles and Chong claimed that Panther represented an important counter- narrative to the black history taught in most schools. The Chicago Sun-Times quotes Van Peebles thusly:

[E]ducation is used to socialize the oppressed to the oppressor's point of view. One of the things we dealt with in this film is that most people had only heard what the media said about the Panthers -- that they were scary, militant guys with guns who were very angry at everything and everyone. Very few people knew that the Panthers had breakfast programs for children or that they helped implement sickle cell anemia programs for the poor. In school, you learn about slavery, but you don't learn about empowerment. (Kim, 1995, p. 3NC)

For Van Peebles, the film’s educational value rested in its ability to encourage black to

stand up for themselves collectively. In contrast to critics’ central topos of truth as criteria for evaluating the film, Van Peebles articulated a topos of empowerment. He told the press, “I hope that young people will come to this movie and see what happens when they work to empower their communities” (Turner, 1995, p. 11). Likewise, USA Today reported that Van Peebles wanted to “remind people of a forgotten group of aggressive proponents of black power” who believed in “all power to the people” (Fine, 1995, p. 1D). Melvin Van Peebles echoed his son during an interview on NPR. He told reporters 187 that the movie was more than a history lesson, because “history can tell a lot of stories…This history lesson also encourages the young people to be active” (Dowell, 1995, Lexis-Nexis transcript). The topos of education to empower young black audiences in Van Peebles’ press releases bore similarities to the topos of education in coverage surrounding Malcolm X. Paradoxically, this topos was not reflected in newspaper reviews or coverage of Panther.

Few reviews of the film shared the Van Peebleses’ arguments favoring the film. Instead, most reviews reiterated Horowitz’ and Seale’s central topos of truth to condemn Panther. When the film was released to theatres on May 3, 1995, a wave of negative reviews appeared in newspapers across the country. Several of these critics denounced Panther for privileging the perspectives of BPP members in the film. As Persall (1995) wrote, this focus created a “biased” representation of the Black Panther Party (p. 7). Writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, Stack (1995) told readers that Van Peebles movie reflected his “heedless pursuit to define black heroes -- and demonize whites” (p. E1). Reviewers also condemned the film’s portrayal of the FBI and its Director Herbert Hoover as an “outlandish cartoon” (Carroll, 1995, p. 31) and as “one dimensional” (Fine, 1995, p. 1D). In their critiques, reviews predominantly featured the film’s portrayal of the FBI in collusion with the Mafia against the Panthers. Reports characterized this plot as “a particularly big leap” (Lieby, 1995, p. G01), “far-fetched” (Carroll, 1995, p. 31), “outrageous” (Persall, 1995, p. 7), “wildly irresponsible” (Charles, 1995, p. 31), “wild speculation” (Ross, 1995, p. 16), “deeply paranoid” (Barnes, 1995, p.3E), and “crazily narrow” (James, 1995, sec. 2, p. 1). Likewise, CNN coverage of the controversy surrounding Panther quoted Horowitz when he described the plot as a “fantastic stretch.” Only one review suggested that the plot was “not so farfetched” (Jones, 1995, p. Y05). Instead, many reports concluded that the film presented a “simplistic” (Fine, May 3, 188 1995, p. 1D; Denerstein, 1995, p. 11D), “burlesque” (Murray, 1995, p. 7B), and “one- note” (Maslin, 1995, p. C18) approach to understanding history. These reviews suggested that the film’s plot was illegitimate and unacceptable for public audiences interested in understanding the history of the BPP.

Distinguishing art and history

A presumed distinction between art and history was central to these critiques. Thus, a third topos which privileged this distinction played a central in reviewers’ condemnations of the film. According to many critics, Panther presented an illegitimate portrayal of BPP history because it combined elements of both fact and fiction. Denerstein (1995) wrote that Van Peebles “choice of fictional character Judge” as the film’s major protagonist was a “major problem” (p. 11D); Kehr (1995) described the movie as a “confounding jumble of accepted fact, fictional invention and wild speculation” (p. 37); and Maslin (1995) characterized the film as a “fact-warping history lesson” (p. C18). Fine (1995) complained that Van Peebles tried to “pass off his story as history” even though it blended “fiction with fact” (p. 1D). Murray (1995) likewise complained that Panther’s “facts start drowning in movie cliché” (p. 7B). These reviews insisted that strong borders should separate emotion from fact, interpretation from history, and drama from accuracy. One reporter covering the debate between Horowitz and Van Peebles characterized Panther as a “glossy amalgam of fact and fiction” (Leiby, 1995, p. G01). Reporter Leiby (1995) also told Washington Post readers that Panther should not be sold as “a historically inspired work” (p. G01). Leiby and several other reporters suggested that the presence of fictional narrative in Panther negated the film’s messages about the history of the BPP. Gilbert (1995) warned readers that Panther’s “oversimplified, fiction-drenched account” was “definitely not a documentary” (p. 33). Strickler (1995) charged that Panther was “more intent on 189 building a conspiracy theory than in presenting history” (p. 3E) and Howe (1995) described Panther as a “fictionalized account” that is “more emotional than dispassionately dogged about the facts” (p. N49). Howe concluded that the film was not without some merit: “If historical accuracy is ignored, the movie's absorbing stuff, a rousing blend of drama, creative interpretation and likable performances” (p. N49). For these writers, documentary and fictional narrative must remain separate; fiction, ostensibly distinct from historical facts, contaminates everything in its presence. Because Panther incorporated fictitious elements in its portrayal of the BPP, these reviewers concluded that Panther conveyed an illegitimate perspective of racial discord in the 1960s. As they divorced fiction from fact, these reviews presumed the universal authority of history and eschewed the notion that all representations of the past are inevitably incomplete and limited by the scope of the individuals who construct them. Only one reviewer, Persall (1995), acknowledged that particular interpretations of the past may not speak for the perspectives of everyone implicated within them. “Nothing is more elusive or subjective than truth, but Panther, like JFK, has the blindside courage to ask: Whose truth is it, anyway?” (p. 2B).

In contrast to Persall, critics who condemned the fictitious elements in the film suggested that audiences would not learn the real history of the BPP by watching the film. Gilbert (1995) concluded that Panther “does not succeed at moving us any closer to

the truth” (p. 33). Commentary provided by some of the film’s harshest critics indicated that the film generated a storm of controversy, not because the film had limited educational value, but because the film might have persuaded audiences to perceive the film as a true history of the BPP.

190 Agitprop: reality or ideology?

A notion that Panther constituted “agitprop,” or agitational propaganda, emerged as another topos within reviews that criticized the film. Several critics who insisted on the centrality of “facts” and the illegitimacy of “fiction” presumed that young audiences were likely to be manipulated by the film. While several reviewers based their judgments of Panther on their own understandings of the history of the BPP, they did not assume that audiences were able to make similar assessments. Kempley (1995) wrote that “the trouble” with the film was that, “the movie itself comes with no disclaimer” that it is “not a documentary but a dramatization” (p. C01). Ross (1995) expressed particular concern for young audiences who might be easily manipulated by the film. “The sad part, of course, is that modern young moviegoers – most of whom weren’t born when the Panthers arose – will not know how much of this yarn is pure invention” (p. N49).

For other reviewers, the film was particularly damaging for its potential to influence African-Americans who might identify with the film’s protagonists. Working from the presumption that the film represented an illegitimate portrayal of the BPP, several of the film’s harshest critics lambasted the film as propaganda or “agitprop” for radical black activists. Howe (1995) said the movie made “absorbing, agitprop entertainment” (p. N49), and Ross (1995) stated that the movie was “wrapped in rhetoric, agitprop, and outlandish accusations” (p. 16). Such agitational propaganda, some reviewers suggested, might threaten American democracy. Carroll (1995) likened scenes in the movie to the “propagandizing and sloganeering … that once characterized Soviet socialist realism” (p. 31). According to Kamiya (1995) the movie was reminiscent of “nothing so much as a World War II propaganda film” (Gilliam, 1995, p. B01). Reviews that compared the film to propaganda for presumably non-democratic nationalist interests suggest that the film might provoke a new generation of radical black activists. 191 Following his critique of the film, Carroll (1995) asked ominously, “Could a Black Panther Party arise again?” (p. 31). Likewise, Vincent (1995) quoted Horowitz, who noted that the film “portrays the Panthers as idealists and all the police as Nazis. It’s an incitement to inner-city blacks” (p. E1). Reviewers who anticipated that the film would incite inner-city blacks conveyed some recognition that experiences for African- Americans in this country are not the same for wealthier, whiter Americans. These reviews suggested that black audiences might be encouraged to identify with the African- Americans in the film and may therefore challenge their own relationship with the state.

Indeed, the topos of truth, agitprop, and the borders critics articulated to separate fact from fiction lent support to critics who argued that perspectives about the past from marginalized groups represent a false sense of history. Critics who insisted on the centrality of “the facts” and the illegitimacy of “fiction” relied upon the presence of a transcendent and universal truth that all audiences must be able to grasp in order to understand the implications of Panther’s narrative. Despite scholarship exposing journalistic notions of objectivity as a myth, Panther’s reviewers featured notions of objective truth as the crux of their critique.6 The topos of truth and the distinction between fact and fiction drawn throughout these reviews affirm Fiske’s (1987) observations that appeals to truth and realism often blunt social critiques presented by popular media. When texts present a critical, or left-wing view of social life, Fiske, explains, they are condemned by the mainstream press as unrealistic (p. 34). By characterizing radical perspectives as false, critics draw attention away from the viewpoints of subordinate groups. Appeals to the topos of truth, and to the distinction between fiction and fact redirected attention from racism and social inequity toward questions of ostensibly objective concerns. These reviews simultaneously condemned the film’s fictional

192 elements and warned readers that the movie might provoke African-Americans to protest the impoverished conditions of the cities in which they lived. Together, these messages told audiences that movements against racism in this country may be the result of audiences easily duped by dramatic fiction disguised as history.

Celebrating film as art, not fiction

The majority of the film’s defenders did not disagree that the film was a dramatic fiction; instead, they rebutted critics by suggesting that the film should be valued for its artistic merits.7 Kempley (1995) noted that Van Peebles was as “entitled to his vision -- no matter how selective or factually skewed -- as any other artist” (p. C01). James (1995) wrote, “By their very existence [controversial films such as Panther] can prod viewers to think about movies, to challenge the film makers' theories, to judge them the way they would judge any serious work of art that blends fact and imagination” (sec. 2, p. 1). To protest the film on the basis of historical inaccuracy, she wrote, is to ask filmmakers “to exercise a scary self-censorship and to create less daring art” (sec. 2, p.1). By focusing on the inherent value of artistic creation, reviewers such as Kempley and James suggested that history and art may be separate, but both have an important social function.

By responding to critics on the basis of the topos of art and on its presumed distinction from fact, the film’s defenders privileged the criteria that critics identified as a

means to denounce the film. Reviewers who characterized Panther as an artistic creation expressed support for the film; however, they also discouraged audiences from considering the film’s representation of the BPP as a legitimate portrayal and political analysis of important events in the movement’s history. Several writers emphasized that although fiction should be distinguished from fact, filmmakers are not scholars. Millar (1995) argued that the film succeeds, despite its biased perspective of the Panthers, because “the Van Peebleses are neither journalists nor historians” (p. 12). Howe (1995) 193 suggested that the film’s misrepresentations should be overlooked because “Sorting fact from fiction is a thorny thing -- unless you're something of a social historian” (p. N49). In his coverage of the controversy surrounding Panther, Graham (1995) emphasized that filmmakers “have neither the desire nor the aptitude to portray the truth” (p. 63). He extensively quoted former Panther and scholar Kathleen Cleaver, who told him, "I'm not convinced that dramatic films are the place for historical accuracy, …A movie is a movie; a movie is not history….History is presented by scholars, and I don't think anyone will say Hollywood is a hotbed of scholars” (p. 63).

As they framed the debate about the film’s merits around the role of art and freedom of expression, reviewers who defended the film as a work of art neutralized the critique of Panther as a politically charged film. Several of the films’ defenders further undermined the film’s potential to draw attention to racial injustice in the United States by insisting that individual films have little, if any, consequence for audiences who watch them. Stack (1995) wrote that movies are supposed to be “outlandish.” He concluded, “If the old phrase ‘it's only a movie’ weren't so widely accepted, folks would have torn down the big screen long ago” (p. E1). These reviewers suggested that readers should not be alarmed by the film’s negative representation of the FBI and positive portrayal of the BPP; after all, they suggested, Panther was just a movie. These reviews indicated that the film’s critics were reactionaries; Panther, they argued, was not likely to inspire disaffected youth to engage in political critique and activism. As James (1995) told readers in the title of her review of Panther, controversial films are “not schoolbooks” (sec. 2, p. 1). By supporting the film as a work of art, favorable reviews of Panther suggested that the controversy surrounding the film should not be about whether Panther was agitprop or edutainment, but about whether it deserves to be treated according to the values of freedom of expression. Thus, the film’s role as a

194 legitimate source for understanding the BPP’s struggle for racial justice and empowerment was never fully considered. By guiding the perspectives of people who read or watched these reviews, journalistic coverage of Panther influenced the film’s distribution. Reviewing the film for home video watchers, Sherman (1995) noted that Seale’s public denunciation of the film damaged the film’s reputation; thus, Panther flopped.” (p. 011). If Seale’s denunciation inhibited the film’s marketability, film critics’ overwhelmingly negative reviews of the film may also have hindered distributors’ from keeping the film in theatres. Indeed, Panther showed in theatres for only a few weeks; few video stores currently carry copies of the film.8

CHALLENGES FOR A CRITICAL MEMORY OF SOCIAL PROTEST

Panther’s narrative was not entirely implausible; historians’ and activists’ accounts provide numerous accounts of FBI efforts to suppress the movement, often using illegal tactics to do so (Churchill and Vander Wall, 1990). However, rather than understand the film’s narrative as a plausible account, the film was rejected as an outright “lie.” Journalism reviews did not accord legitimacy to Panther in popular culture because it neither conformed to established ideology nor to mainstream film conventions. It needed to conform to at least one of these expectations to gain a foothold in popular memory. The film was the narrative equivalent to the Black Power Movement’s political critique of the social, economic, and political order. As mainstream civil rights leaders rejected the Black Power Movement’s critique of the political order, mainstream media critics dismissed Panther. Reviewers’ rejection of oppositional discourse as fiction demonstrates that the film was not able to attain a position within the prevailing doxa of popular culture. Journalistic reception to Panther suggests that unfamiliar discourses about the past face a particular challenge; in order to become part of popular memory, 195 they must associate them with what is already known or commonly understood. This film and journalism critiques of it demonstrate how films that don’t appeal to prevailing doxa of liberal capitalism are marginalized in popular culture. Consequently, they don’t prompt the construction of additional memories about the Black Panther Party or about racism in urban neighborhoods during the 1960s. By negating the film’s legitimacy as a source of memory about the Panthers, journalistic reviews and news coverage of the controversy surrounding Panther discouraged audiences from recognizing the film’s accurate representations of racial and economic inequality in the United States. Even Panther’s defenders eschewed the film’s counter-hegemonic potential by conceding critics’ charges that the film portrayed an inaccurate and implausible account of the BPP. Critics very rarely acknowledged the film’s historically accurate portrayals of police repression against the Panthers.9 None of the film’s defenders brought attention to the film’s representation of FBI attacks on the BPP or to the ways in which state police and FBI agents represented in the film had real- life counterparts who infiltrated the BPP to spread distrust and encourage violence from within the party (Churchill, 2001, pp. 89-98). These omissions discouraged audiences from recognizing the coercive powers of state agencies that have repressed minorities and activists who challenged the economic and government institutions that have oppressed them.

Missing from most reviews was any recognition of the economic and social oppression against blacks that has persisted into the 2000s. While these reviews expressed dismay over the film’s portrayal of race relations, they ignored how many African-Americans who were portrayed in the film or who watched the film have struggled to overcome impoverished conditions and have been abused and berated by the predominantly white police force in this country. In 1995, the year Panther was released

196 to theaters, several cities witnessed the deaths of unarmed African-Americans by police

officers.11 State convictions of people arrested on drug-related charges also reflect continued racist practices within United States law enforcement agencies. Although the FBI may not have colluded with the Mafia to bring drugs into urban ghettos, African- Americans are four times more likely than whites to face prison terms for using narcotics (Davidson, 1999, p. 42; Freedman, 1998, p. 35-38; “Study,” 2003, p. 8). Come black audiences might have found a ring of “truth” to the idea that drug-control policies in the United States are a sign of racial discrimination. By projecting images that resonated with the experiences of many subordinated groups, this film might have had a useful solidifying function for counter-publics rarely represented in mainstream media. Counter-memories provided by the film told audiences already critical of prevailing social and economic relations that efforts to win social change might best be won through collective organizing and community activism. For more mainstream audiences, especially those attentive to national news media, newspaper reviews may have discouraged audiences from considering the realities of social injustice depicted by the film that prompted the Black Panther Party to organize for social justice. By forcing borders between “truth” and “fiction” in Panther, these reviews discouraged audiences from recognizing how considerations of truth and justice are shaped by individuals’ social, political, and economic experiences. Thus, these reviewers obscured the reality of oppression against African-Americans as they decried the film for misrepresenting “the facts.”

Although the mainstream press ignored the contributions Panther made to understanding race relations in recent United States history, Panther’s failure to become part of popular memory cannot be laid entirely at the feet of news media critics. The film’s unconventional editing and narrative discouraged mainstream reviewers from

197 understanding the film as a source of historical information. By incorporating a sensational narrative in the midst of a film that purported to educate audiences about a radical social movement organization rarely represented by mainstream media, Panther lost credibility among credulous audience members who had little understanding of or experience with injustice in the United States. Thus, Van Peebles’ enmeshing of fictional narrative with actual events in BPP history ultimately aided critics who sought to discredit either or both the film and the Panthers. Furthermore, the film’s fictional elements disabled the film’s advocates from justifying the film’s merits as a legitimate site for collectively remembering the role of the BPP in American history or for valuing the ideals that the party stood for.

Ultimately, the film’s counter-memories of BPP activism did not generate collective consciousness of systematic repression in the United States because it could not gain a foothold in commercial media. It failed to intervene in our popular memory because the film’s intermingling of documentary and fictional elements in the film and journalistic borders separating fact from fiction delimited the film’s legitimacy as a historical narrative. As Ebert (1995) noted, Van Peebles never provided evidence that the FBI flooded Oakland with drugs (p. 45). Ebert aptly concluded that Panther’s narrative:

does a disservice to young people who want to understand what really happened…At the end of the film, we are informed, ‘Before the Panthers were crushed, they had succeeded in establishing chapters in almost every state.’ There's the real story -- how they did it, who they were, how they were crushed. That's the movie still to be made. (p. 45)

As Ebert implied, counter-memories of the Panthers are still needed to intervene in the prevailing memory of oppression and activism in the United States. There is much that we can learn from the history of the BPP. By studying the emergence of the BPP, we can gain insight into the ways that social movement organizations blossom in the midst of trenchant opposition. Explorations of BPP history can also illuminate the factors that 198 disrupt or destroy activists’ efforts to achieve social change and greater social equality. State repression against the Panthers should be central to that history. The FBI’s orchestrated assault on the BPP attests to the illusory nature of free expression and open dissent in this nation; when the BPP posed a real threat to the established political order in the United States, that order orchestrated a concerted effort to demoralize and disable the movement. For scholars and activists interested in promoting social justice and awareness about political repression, cogent arguments that address social injustices from the past may provide useful topoi for public deliberation. These arguments should raise awareness about those injustices that have yet to be fully understood in America’s national consciousness. But these arguments also face a tough challenge. What is advanced as truth about the past is a struggle between groups in ideological space. In order for memories of the past to foster public deliberation and social critique, publics must be able to determine which of the memories constructed in popular culture are faithful the historical record of events accounted for by activists and scholars, and which are not. Lipsitz (1990) argues that the accumulation of available evidence about the past may make it possible to form judgments about power relations in particular societies. He writes:

Only by recognizing the collective legacy of accumulated human actions and ideas can we judge the claims to truth and justice of any one story. We may never succeed in finding out all that has happened in history, but events matter and describing them as accurately as possible (although never with certain finality) can, at the very least, show us whose foot has been on whose neck. (p. 214)

Multiple perspectives surrounding particular historical moments draw attention to competing claims about the past and may help individuals arrive at a collective understanding about the factors that structure oppressive social conditions. Particular truth claims at the stasis of fact are arguable and compelling arguments for particular 199 claims can be made to help form collective judgments about social injustices from the past. The weight of evidence from government documents, video footage, and activists accounts demonstrating that the FBI shot and killed unarmed Panther party members and used undercover agents to gain illegal access to the Panthers’ homes provides evidence for the FBI’s use of force would have provided a more powerful indictment of the FBI than images of the FBI colluding with the mafia, a narrative for which there is little evidence in the historic record. Arguments about the past in popular culture face an additional challenge because oppositional narratives require more than fidelity to history to become part of popular memory. Malcolm X was able to insert counter-memories into popular culture, whereas Panther was not, by cloaking them within a broader hegemonic framework. To combat tendencies to assume the universality of certain truth claims, counter-memories must incorporate the perspectives of marginalized groups into the doxastic narratives that inform society. These are the narratives most readily embraced by dominant media. Counter-memories of radical social movements may never be wholeheartedly embraced by popular culture, but fragments of those memories may become part of popular culture when they are embedded within formally hegemonic texts.

200 NOTES TO CHAPTER SIX

1In 1982, a federal district court ruled that the police had violated Hampton and Clark’s civil rights (Churchill, 2001, p. 107).

2Van Peebles also told reporters regarding Hollywood produces, "They still want to see the 'New-Jack-in-the-Hood' or something like a 'Bad Boys' where we can poke fun at ourselves. That's sellable. It's abundantly clear to me that if Hollywood makes several Vietnam films that don't make money, no one will say white films aren't making money" (Turner, May 15, 1994, p. 11).

3See “Black Panthers,” 1995, p. O17; Carroll, 1995, p. 31; Graham, 1995, p. 63; James, 1995, sec. 2, p. 1; Howe, 1995, p. N49; Lieby, 1995, p. G01; Sherman, 1995, p. O11; Turner, 1995, p. 11; Vincent, 1995, p. E1. 4See Carroll, 1995, p. 31; Charles, 1995, p. 29, Fine, 1995, p. 1D; Graham, 1995, p. 63; Lieby, 1995, p. G01; Sherman, 1995, p. 011; Turner, 1995, p. 11; Vincent, 1995, p. E1. 5See also Dowell, 1995, Lexis-Nexis transcript; Fine, 1995, p. 1D; and Vincent, 1995, p. E1 for references to Van Peebles remarks on the educational role of the film. 6As Navasky (2002) states, “no sophisticated student of the press believes that objective journalism is possible. The best one can hope for is fairness, balance,

neutrality, detachment” (p. xv). Critical scholars extend the critique of the ideal of objectivity further by arguing that the notion of objectivity itself is ideological insofar as it obscures the way that news coverage predominantly reflects the core interests of national political elites (Gitlin, 1980) and corporations (McChesney, 1999).

7Only one reviewer praised Panther’s representations of African-Americans’ experiences. In her film review for The Washington Post, Gilliam (1995) congratulated

201 the film for representing the perspectives of African-Americans. “It is rare and good to see blacks defining themselves, their histories and identities in feature films. There are too few men like Melvin and Mario Van Peebles telling the historical tales of African Americans today” (p. B01).

8As of 2004, no video rental store in Austin, Texas, carries the film. These stores include the national chains Blockbuster and Hollywood video and five independent video stores. 9A few reviewers did mention violence that the police and the FBI directed at African-Americans during the late 1960s. Ross (1995) notes that police felt “free” to abuse poor blacks (p. 16). Baron (1995) mentions that Hoover’s COINTELPRO tactics were illegal (p. L38). Ebert (1995) tells readers that the Panthers came to an end, in part, because of FBI harassment (p. 45). Kehr (1995) refers to “the wealth of well-documented outrages directed by the government against the Panther” including the assassinations of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark (p. 37).

10In 1991, 33 of the 47 victims of Chicago police shootings were black. Likewise, 152 blacks in Indianapolis were shot by police, compared to 85 white victims (Thomas, 1995, p. A01). 11In 1995, five Pittsburgh police officers pinned Jonny Gammage to the ground and suffocated him to death after they pulled him over on a routine traffic stop (Thomas,

1995, p. A1). That same year, in Lexington, Kentucky and in New York City, unarmed black men Antonio Sullivan and Lawrence Meyers were shot to death while they were being arrested (Walsh, 1995, p. A18; MacFarquhar, 1995, p. B1).

202 SECTION FOUR

REMEMBERING WHITE RADICALS IN DOCUMENTARY FILM

203 Chapter Seven

The rhetoric of objectivity in Berkeley in the Sixties and The Weather Underground

The path of the student movements of the 1960s closely followed the trajectory of the civil rights movement. Indeed, the free speech movement emerged out of white students’ participation in the civil rights struggle. Following their participation in the Freedom Rights and Mississippi Freedom summer, many students began to critique institutions for acts of justice and brutality. Consequently, students throughout the United States began to organize for greater freedom of expression on college campuses and for a voice in the decision-making processes of their universities. As the decade progressed, students’ shifted their efforts to have decision-making authority from university policy toward military escalation in Vietnam. Student-sponsored parade marches mobilized tens of thousands of protesters in 1965. The following year, the draft resistance movement gained momentum across the country. In spite of the anti-war movements’ energies, the war in Vietnam continued to escalate. Continued United States investment in the war fomented many students’ growing feelings of alienation and dissatisfaction with the American political, economic, and social system. Following activists within the Black Power movement, antiwar activists began to challenge the economic and political order in the United States. Toward the end of the decade, the antiwar movement fractured, and more radical strands of the movement that sought dramatic structural change using confrontational or destructive strategies came to the fore of the antiwar movement. Although the movement did not achieve immediate success in putting an end to the war, it is likely that the antiwar movement did drive a wedge into the war effort. 204 The antiwar movement made it increasingly difficult for the Johnson and Nixon administrations to justify further incursions into Vietnam. Public visibility of antiwar activism discouraged President Johnson from sending additional ground troops to Vietnam during the end of his term, and influenced his decision to resign as President. Johnson’s response to ongoing dissent against the war points to what can be accomplished through sustained, organized protest. Indeed, student activists gained a greater voice in the affairs of their universities, and made it difficult for national governments to justify the war on the basis of its popular support at home.

Historians and activists’ memories of dissent indicate that sustained critique and protest may open democratic spaces to individuals with little political power of their own. Thus, recollections of white student activism implications for public life at present; by recalling activism from the past, individuals may be encouraged to seek political change through activism in their own communities. Memories of activism may also teach us that confrontational strategies are outcomes of a political system that is itself violent. These representations of the past may then encourage media audiences to question the justness of the political system that currently maligns and punishes dissent. Between 1990 and 2003, two documentaries provided memories of student activism that had the potential to invite greater criticism and dissent in political and social life. These documentaries recounted events from two of the most visible student activist

groups formed during the 1960s in the United States: the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the Weather Underground. In 1990, director Mark Kitchell made the documentary, Berkeley in the Sixties to recount the history of activism on the Berkeley campus of the California State University. This film told the story of Berkeley activism from the perspectives of activists involved in free speech and antiwar movements. Thirteen years following the release of Berkeley in the Sixties, directors Sam Green and

205 Bill Siegel released the documentary, The Weather Underground. This film remembered the Weather Underground’s evolution following its departure from the more mainstream student organization, Students for a Democratic Society. Mirroring the filmic style of Berkeley in the Sixties, The Weather Underground also recalled the history of the movement from the perspectives of activists within the student left. Berkeley and Weather circulated through independent theatres and film festivals across the country to critical acclaim.1 These films received high praise from the Hollywood film industry, independent film audiences, and mainstream journalism film critics. Berkeley in the Sixties won the Distinguished Documentary Achievement Award (Charles, 1990, p. 12CN), the U.S. Film Festival Audience Award (“Critics’ Picks,” 1990, p. G7) the best documentary award by the National Society of Film Critics, and was nominated for an Academy Award in 1990 (“Berkeley” 1991, July 16). The Academy of Motion Pictures also nominated The Weather Underground for best documentary in 2003. The Weather Underground also received an award for documentary feature at the San Francisco International Film Festival (Guthmann, 2003, p. D2) and tied for Seattle’s First Person Singular Documentary Award (MacDonald, 2003, p. E1).

Film critics writing for mainstream newspapers across the country applauded these films as well. Writing for The Seattle Times, film critic Hartl (1990b) chose

Berkeley in the Sixties as “the year’s best documentary” (p. D8). Reviews of The Weather Underground described this film as “solid journalism” (Levy), “terrifically smart and solid” (Mitchell, 2003, p. 24), and a “fine history lesson” (Ringel-Gillespie, 2003, p. 15E). Thus, these reviews lent legitimacy to films that shined sympathetic spotlights on student activists who had been vilified by the mainstream press when they were active.

206 These films and their reception in mainstream journalism media challenge a set of conclusions established by scholarship in critical media studies. The first conclusion is that successful films predominantly reinforce the ideology of the dominant social order. This conclusion suggests that tight parameters constrict what ideas can be put forth by a successful film. By recalling 1960s activism from the perspective of former activists, both Berkeley in the Sixties (hereafter referred to as Berkeley) and The Weather Underground (hereafter referred to as Underground) advanced positions sympathetic to the cause of activists who sought to restructure that system. Thus, they represented counter-memories that have the potential to intervene in the prevailing doxa about the meanings of citizenship, patriotism, and war in the United States. This study of these films indicates what form films must take to make such interventions, as well as what social conditions must be in place in order for them to do so.

Mainstream journalism broke from typical journalism routines by characterizing these films in positive frames. Berkeley and Underground appeared in theatres on the heels of the first and second Persian Gulf Wars. Over the past two decades, several media scholars have argued that persistent patterns in news frames reaffirm prevailing ideology, particularly during times of war or political upheaval (Gitlin, 1980; Hall et. al, 1978; Reese and Buckalew, 1995; Watkins, 2001). Particularly relevant to my study is Gitlin’s (1980) work that demonstrates that news media coverage of student activism in

1965 disparaged movements and characterized demonstrators as deviant (p. 27-28). More recently, Berlant (1997) has noted that mainstream media have framed protest as both silly and dangerous (p. 186). In the aftermath of September 11, the Bush administration has equated dissent with terrorism. Clearly, the contemporary political climate remains hostile to public protest. Contemporary coverage of warfare and political dissent in the United States has remained remarkably consistent with coverage

207 from previous decades (see Jensen, 1992). While favorable reviews of these films may be a reaction to a political climate hostile to activism and dissent, this reaction does not reflect mainstream media’s tendency to buttress official political positions in times of national crisis and war. Why, then, did mainstream journalists embrace documentary films about left-leaning social movements? In this section, I argue that the formal structure of these films was pivotal to these films’ welcome reception by the mainstream press. Documentary filmmakers constructed popular memories of student and anti-Vietnam War activism using talking- head interviews and archival footage. While talking-head interviews provided the primary verbal explanations for the trajectory activism took from the 1960s through the early 1970s, archival stock footage of activism from the 1960s contributed to the meaning of 1960s activism by providing visual evidence for the interviewees’ accounts. These stylistic devices functioned as objectivity codes that established these films as legitimate representations of the past; multiple talking-head interviews provided a false sense of balance in the film, and stock footage of student antiwar protests from the 1960s signified that events featured in the film bore an indexical relationship to the past. The accumulation of activists’ stories in conjunction with visual footage of activism films framed student activism as an important and legitimate form of political engagement and encouraged arbiters of mainstream media to create a space for counter-memories of radical activism within popular culture. I conclude that formal structure of documentary films plays a central role, perhaps more than the content of the film, in the construction of a film’s legitimacy within popular culture. By procuring credibility to these films, filmmakers may then be able to legitimate radical activism in popular memory.

Alternatively, I also argue in this chapter that the presence of objectivity codes may have limitations for how counter-memories become part of popular memory. In the

208 absence of a stated thesis or central claim, film reviewers of Berkeley and Underground were able to select particular images and interviews from documentary material to derive a conclusion that fits within their previously established ideological framework. Although journalism reviews praised Berkeley and Underground as objective accounts of activism, these reviews featured individuals and images that disparaged protesters as irrationally violent and left activism to the past. These reviews suggest that the counter- hegemonic potential of a documentary is blunted when more popular, mainstream media appropriate documentary material for commercial media. Participatory documentaries about controversial ideas create spaces for popular memories of protest, but they don’t necessarily imbue these spaces with critical potential.

CODES OF OBJECTIVITY IN PARTICIPATORY DOCUMENTARIES

Berkeley and Underground engaged stylistic conventions particular to what Nichols (1991) terms participatory documentary. In a participatory documentary, filmmakers use talking-head interviews and visual footage to construct the film’s meaning. Nichols (2001) writes that through this documentary form, the “voice of the filmmaker emerges from the weave of contributing voices and the material brought in to support what they say” (p. 121). By focusing on interviews with eyewitnesses to events, filmmakers avoid expositional documentary conventions, such as voice-over narration, that make explicit claims on the past. Instead, conventions of the talking-head interview and archival film footage make filmmakers appear entirely removed from the film’s content. Participatory documentary is well suited to documentaries about controversial subjects, such as the history of revolutionary movements in the United States. By obscuring the appearance of partiality, these films encouraged audiences to perceive that they are able to generate objective understanding about 1960s activism for themselves.

209 Newspaper reviews suggest that the film’s participatory conventions constituted Berkeley and Underground as valuable resources for understanding 1960s protests. According to reviewers, interviews and archival footage provided important insights to understand the history of activism from the 1960s. In response to Berkeley in the Sixties, Szilagyi (1990) wrote that the interviews were “invaluable to understanding events shown on the archival footage” (p. F1), and Gilbert (1991) commented that the interviews gave “balance to the craziness to the footage” (p. 66). Reviewing Underground, Salm (2003) noted that the interviews allowed filmmakers to “wring insight” from the confusion of the 1960s (p. 20). These quotes indicated that talking head interviews and archival footage merit additional attention as stylistic devices that attributed meaning and value to these films.

In the following sections of this chapter, I describe each of these documentaries separately to explain how objectivity codes functioned to give meaning to student activism. Dow (2004) argues that “codes of objectivity” in television documentaries give the impression that speaker’s portrayal of events is “a commonsensical description of what the viewer has seen or is about to see” (p. 59-60). As I explain, the appearance of balance and archival footage established the credibility of these films despite the controversial central ideas that these films elicited. Objectivity codes in Berkeley and Underground that presented the film as “balanced” included competing messages that cast activism as both laudable and reproachable. The presentation of “balance” elicited in these documentaries has played a central role in journalistic practice. Hallin (1994) writes that journalists situate most events as either part of legitimate controversy, as deviant, or as consensually agreed upon. Most frequently, journalists situate events within the sphere of legitimate controversy. Within this sphere, “journalists strive to achieve objectivity and balance, and coverage of issues that are easily framed in

210 point/counterpoint terms” (Watkins, 2001, p. 92). The point/counterpoint framework for talking head interviews and images in Berkeley and Underground constructed memories about student and antiwar activism as legitimate controversy. Following this section, I describe mainstream newspaper reviews of each film more fully. In contrast to the film’s construction of events within the sphere of legitimate controversy, reviews framed activism within the sphere of deviance. According to Hallin (1994), the sphere of deviance frames persons and events viewed by journalists as outside the boundaries of normative behavior. Watkins (2001) explains that “in cases like these, individuals or events become newsworthy precisely because they can be portrayed as violating the taken-for-granted values and beliefs of society in some important way” (p. 92). As I argue in the latter section of this chapter, newspaper reviews framed these films selectively to position these documentaries within the prevailing ideology of mainstream politics under liberal capitalism.

PROTEST AND POLITICAL EMPOWERMENT IN BERKELEY

Verbal evidence of activism and repression on campus

In Berkeley in the Sixties, voice-over narration, talking-head interviews, and archival footage collaborated to present student activism as a powerful force for social change that dissolved toward the end of the decade due to repressive power of the state and to poor organization and planning within the movement. The first part of the film, entitled “Confronting the University,” recounted how student movements prompted social and political changes through collective protest when mainstream political institutions did not function democratically themselves. Narrator and former Berkeley activist Susan Griffin frequently spoke over archival images of 1960s protesters. Early in the film, she explained that the civil rights movement was the basis for much of the

211 ensuing activism at Berkeley between 1963 and 1964. Students participated in sit-in demonstrations at the Sheraton Palace Hotel to encourage hotels in the bay area to open jobs for African-Americans. Following the arrests and convictions of several student protesters, the entire hotel industry agreed to hire minority individuals in all levels of employment. Interviewee Jackie Goldberg told filmmakers that protesters won more than they had expected. “It was the first major victory of anything I’d been involved in.” Goldberg added that the victory “really pumped [activists] up to believe that [they] really could have an effect on history.”

After the Sheraton hotel strikes, local businesses put pressure on the university administration at Berkeley to put a halt on political activism on campus. During the fall of 1964, the administration declared that student groups could no longer disseminate political literature on campus. The Free Speech Movement emerged as a result of campus efforts to stifle dissent. Goldberg explained that university restrictions on free speech “united everyone,” including Youth for Goldwater and the Young Socialist Alliance, around the struggle for political expression on campus. Rounds of conflict between students and campus administrators ensued. During one demonstration, students refused to let police officers arrest student Jack Weinberg for continuing to advocate political causes on campus. Fellow students surrounded the police car and used as a speaking platform for two days. Interviewees described this moment as one of the first instances of participatory democracy among students who had previously only theorized democracy in their classes. Months later, students from diverse organizations and backgrounds participated in a sit-in demonstration at Sproul Hall to protest the administration’s expulsion of eight students for initiating civil disobedience. Interviewees attested to the political awakening that these protests inspired. Jentri Anders described the sit-in at Sproul Hall as the first

212 time she was willing to get arrested in defense of students. John Gage noted that the administration’s response to the protesters represented his first experience with people “who would lie to maintain their positions of power.” Professor John Searle echoed Gage’s remarks, noting that the administration at Berkeley aroused students’ ire because the “administration would not tell the truth.” According to the documentary, students’ early victories influenced the beginnings of the antiwar movement. In her voice over commentary, Griffin stated, “Victory in our struggle for civil rights and free speech made us confident that we could change the course of history. Then we learned about Vietnam and stopping the war became our consuming cause.”

The second part of the film, entitled “Confronting America,” recounted events surrounding the emergence of the counter-culture and the antiwar movement at Berkeley. Anders explained that the counter-culture an outgrowth of free speech and anti-war movement that taught students that “the culture was sick.” She then added that she had believed “one way to change it is to life it differently. Instead of trying to change the structure in a confrontational way, you just drop out and live it in the way you think it ought to be lived.” Interviews in this second part of the film demonstrated Berkeley’s equivocation about the movement’s success during its more militant years. Several interviewees argued that poor planning within the movement undermined the movement’s goals; alternatively, other interviewees asserted that the movement’s energies communicated widespread unease about the war to government officials. Interviewees also recounted their efforts to stop the draft in Oakland during 1967. Ruth Rosen described her feelings of optimism generated by early successes in the movement; after the Oakland city council set up barricades to shut off a protest march through the city, greater numbers of people lined up to protest the war. The next week, Oakland conceded and allowed the parade. Rosen asserted that the event taught her that “if enough

213 people went out against the war we could end it.” By featuring Rosen, Berkeley fostered the idea that state repression can be defeated through sustained mass protest. In contrast with Rosen’s interview, other interviewees featured in the film expressed frustration over the war’s escalation in spite of their protests. Suzie Orman concluded that her efforts to influence draftees not to get on the trains to join the war in Oakland didn’t make “one bit of difference”; Frank Bardacke felt “impotent” because “the war was being escalated all the time”; Weinberg stated that activists “didn’t really have the weight in society to stop the war”; and John Gage emphasized that activists “lost the idea” that they could be victorious. According to Gage, the student left disregarded the rest of the political community and sealed its public demise. Following these interviews, voice-over narration from Griffin explained that as the war escalated, protests turned to riots in Oakland, and the Left began to fracture and dissolve. Former activists featured in this sequence of interviews indicated that antiwar movement was largely ineffective; however, the final interview in this sequence suggested otherwise. Jack Weinberg recounted that, “Hoover told LBJ he couldn’t guarantee domestic tranquility if LBJ asked for a million more troops.” Weinberg concluded that the power of the antiwar movement was that it “put limits on America’s ability to wage the war in Vietnam.” Within this section, the film suggested that the movement posed a challenge to a war that they believed was unjust, and that movement began to unravel as a result of its withdrawal from rest of political system.

The third part of Berkeley, entitled “Confronting History” portrayed Berkeley activism toward the end of the decade. Film clips and interviews in this section featured the repressive power of the state to explain the movement’s disillusion and activists’ increasing turn to confrontation as a strategy for undermining the war effort. According to the film, political repression of antiwar activism demonstrations in Chicago during the

214 Democratic National Convention in 1968, of demonstrations at People’s Park in Berkeley in 1969, and of peaceful dissent on the Berkeley campus in 1969 marked the end of the movement. The film suggests that these events put a lie to belief that individuals have control over their lives. John Gage explained that police beatings of activists in Chicago taught him that “there was a side of American politics that was vicious and violent.” According to the film, events in Chicago and in Berkeley during the last years of the 1960s taught activists that the prevailing authorities would not tolerate challenges to the political system. Confrontational dissent would be mowed over.

The bull-dozing of activism occurred most literally at People’s Park. During the spring of 1969, students and members of the counter-culture took over unused land owned by the university and turned it into a park. Ruth Rosen described the park as the embodiment of a utopian vision of communal living. “If we had control over out own lives, this is what it would look like.” By contrast, Professor John Searle argued that people involved in making People’s Park reflected a very “cynical” view of politics. “Students knew that it would erupt in confrontation.” Weeks later, the university administration took the park over, dug up the land, and made preparations to build on the property. Searle added “You can’t beat something with nothing. If you’re going to fight this kind of long cultural battle, you’re going to lose if you don’t have a coherent, articulate well worked out vision of what you’re going to do.” Searle’s interview suggested that students were bound to fail at the end of the 1960s because they never developed a clear articulate vision or conception of how they would achieve their goals. Although Searle held students responsible for the decline of activism within the student Left, the film did not hold students entirely accountable for activism’s downfall. The film’s depiction of events at People’s Park suggested that activism’s demise at Berkeley was principally the consequence of political repression that had become

215 increasingly intense as the decade progressed. The final event described in the film highlighted how state violence against protesters marked the final death knell for dissent on campus. Months after campus officials destroyed People’s Park, students gathered for a peaceful protest of university policies on the Berkeley campus. Campus police responded by refusing to let the congregation disperse from the center of campus until after helicopters dropped teargas into the contained crowd. Jentri Anders remembered telling her friend as they witnessed events on campus that day. “I think it’s all over. I don’t think we can stay here anymore.” Then she told the camera, “And a year later we were all gone.”

Final moments in the film reminded audiences of the legacy of Berkeley activism during the 1970s. Weinberg declared that “American society was profoundly changed by movements in the 1960s.” Voice over commentary from Griffin followed his statement.

We continue to explore the potential for change and as we watch activists for human rights and democracy around the world challenge the powers that be, we know that each generation has the potential to create social change and that no generation can do it alone. These final moments of the film suggested that a commitment of a group of people can alter the course of political events through collective action and dissent. The film’s focus on both activists as empowered agents for social justice and the state as an agent of repression and violence against activists reverberated throughout the film. The film created a memory that established ordinary people as central agents for democracy against a potentially repressive government that served the interests of capital rather than the people they purport to represent. These themes about the power of protest and on the repressive power of the state challenged the prevailing ideology of liberal democracy, for they suggested that ordinary people, not the political system, were the driving force for positive social change in the United States.

216 Visual evidence of activism and the myth of photographic realism

Journalism reviews suggest that the film’s use of archival footage helped audiences make sense of the verbal accounts provided by former activists. Several film critics praised the film’s presentation of archival footage (See Gilbert, 1990; Kempley, 1990; Mahar, 1990; Smith, 1991; Sterritt, 1990a; and Stone, 1990). In his review, Movshovitz (1990) wrote that “the genius” Berkeley in the Sixties was that it was “on film” (p. F). Movshovitz added, “Kitchell combed the film archives and found images that show both the events and the spirit that drove them” (p. 6F). The film’s use of archival footage partially explains the disjuncture between positive journalistic reviews of Berkeley in the Sixties and previously established patterns of negative framings of dissent within journalism coverage. Even during footage of the talking-head interviews, speakers were filmed sitting in front of larger-than-life sized photographs of their younger selves at protest events during the 1960s. By positioning speakers next to images of themselves when they were students at Berkeley, the documentary lent added authority to the interviewees by visually asserting their own role in the movements of the 1960s.

Archival video footage of activism at Berkeley also provided evidence for interviewee’s assertions. This video footage provided two different kinds of proof for activists’ claims. On the one hand, visual images lent credibility activists’ statements as

sources of historical information about the past. Footage of protesters attested to student’s unity and commitment to the causes of civil rights, free speech, and an end to the war in Vietnam. Likewise, footage of confrontations between police and students provided visual proof of state supported repression against peaceful activists and of students’ disdain and, in some cases, desire to clash with state authorities. Clips included images of the Sheraton Palace Hotel sit-in protests, the free speech demonstrations at Berkeley, the sit-in protest in Sproul Hall, Stop the Draft demonstrations in Oakland, 217 clashes between police and demonstrators in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention, and marches commemorating People’s Park after the administration took it over. Images of violence against activists functioned as visual proof for the documentary's central argument about the relationship between systematic power and activists' turn toward confrontation as the decade progressed. The myth of photographic naturalness explains how stock footage of 1960s activism provided “proof” of events described by former activists. The persuasive role of visual imagery in film rests on the assumption that the images are not only representations of events, but actual copies of events that once existed outside filmic construction. Sontag (1973) writes that something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph (p. 17). In her discussion of photographic images of Afghan women in the wake of September 11, Cloud (2004) argues that photographs are rhetorical constructions that mask their framing strategies, such as the photographer’s selection, editing, use of light, arrangement of subjects, by the appearance of having captured reality (p. 289). Documentary films share photography’s appearance of having captured reality, perhaps to a greater extent because footage captures moving images. Rosteck (1994) observes, documentaries are “ceded a measure of assent” because viewers “are potentially disarmed by the documentary’s claim to be a natural representation of fact” (p. 18). Images in Berkeley functioned persuasively by encouraging audiences to read the film as an objective representation of the past. As Dow (2004) notes, objectivity codes themselves are rhetorical stances taken by filmmakers, not evidence of a film’s unmediated correspondence with actuality. By naturalizing the film’s content, objectivity codes obscure a film’s partiality.

Within Berkeley, objectivity codes also provided emotional proof, or pathos within the film. Reviewers suggested that archival footage in the documentary

218 encouraged audiences to experience events as if they had experienced them directly. Kempley (1990) noted that the archival footage connected audiences with “the turbulence that pitted the establishment…against the counterculture” (p. B2); Sterritt (1990) wrote that the movie clips brought the Berkeley activism “convincingly to life” (p. 11); and Mahar (1990) stated that footage brought activism from the 1960s “back to life vividly, exultantly, tragically and ultimately sadly” (p. O1). As these reviews indicated, footage of Berkeley activism presented protest as inspired, comical, and tragic in ways that interviewees did not.

During the first part of the film, black and white footage of hundreds of students surrounding a police car while individuals stood on top of the car to argue for free speech. The film’s final scene also presented black and white footage of an expansive protest rally. A sea of black and white faces glittered in the foreground and background as voices sang, “We shall overcome” in unison. Images of People’s Park invited audiences to celebrate the collective efforts of the park’s creators. In contrast to black and white images that comprised the rest of the film’s archival footage, images of People’s Park were colorful. They included scenes of people laughing and smiling as they passed sod around and rolled it through the park, and stood over a large pot of stew that, presumably, they were about to share together. These scenes of collective action communicated feelings of exuberance that activists such as Rosen described. They also illustrated the magnitude of student activism during the 1960s and depicted students as passionate and committed to a cause greater than themselves. Although archival footage promoted the film’s credibility, it did not always promote activism itself. Archival footage illustrated both interviewees’ assertions that activism promoted social change and other interviewees’ assertions that activists were horribly misguided near the end of the decade. Thus, these images encouraged audiences

219 to hold competing and contradictory perspectives of activists: as laudable and appalling, serious and a joke. During several scenes, the film presented archival footage that illustrated the counter-culture’s rejection of mainstream society. In an extended montage sequence depicting young people dancing at a music festival, the film featured women dancing in jerky movements wearing psychedelic clothing. Other archival footage depicted a reporter in short hair and a suit querying a young man with shoulder length hair who was playing a sweet potato as an instrument. In the next scene, the same reporter asked Alan Ginsburg how his demonstration would stop the war in Vietnam. Ginsburg responded by taking out a little chime and chanting to the camera.

In contrast to verbal messages that praised the role of the counter-culture for living life in healthier ways than the dominant culture, images of the counter-culture encouraged audiences not to take this aspect of the movement very seriously. Thus, these images provided visual refutation of interviewees’ verbal assertions that attested to the importance of the movement. Images of the counter-culture looking ridiculous to mainstream culture converge with mainstream news coverage of activism. In this aspect, archival images functioned hegemonically even as verbal messages challenge established hegemony. Toward the middle of the film, images reflected the verbal equivocation about the causes for the movement’s demise. Many images supported hegemonic understandings of protest as unruly and violent. Footage of riots in Oakland highlighted the belligerence of students frustrated with the city’s refusal to allow parade marches through the town. Archival footage of students throwing rocks at police officers, setting off firehouses, and overturning cars reinforced Gage’s complaint that the students had abandoned the very people they once sought to influence.

220 Alternatively, other images encouraged audiences to question the legitimacy of the political order of the 1960s. Footage of police beatings of demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention in 1968 provided visual evidence for the “arbitrary exercise of authority” that Mayor Daley brought to bear in Chicago. Toward the end of the film, images depicted the National Guard beating students as they struggled to flee campus after helicopters dropped tear gas on them. By illustrating the campus administration’s excessive use of violence to silence protest on campus, these scenes encouraged audiences to feel outraged. Archival footage of confrontations between the college administration at Berkeley and the counter-culture over ownership of People’s Park also called for an emotional response from audiences. Following colorful footage of the park’s creation, black and white footage depicted tillers and bulldozers digging up the grass as the National Guard came onto campus in armored vehicles and full riot gear. These images called upon audiences to share activists’ sadness over the demise of the park and of the movement that created it, and thereby encouraged audience members to identify with activists even as earlier images encouraged audiences to dismiss them.

Competing images of activists elucidate the role of convention of “balance” in nonfiction media. These images of activists met journalistic standards for balance by providing multiple visual perspectives for understanding activism at Berkeley, even if they did not depict a diverse range of images commensurate with the range of activities and perspectives about activism at Berkeley at that time. In her description of objectivity codes in television documentary, Dow (2004) writes that commentary by at least two persons with different points of view provide evidence for the perspective privileged by the film. Thus, objectivity codes give controversial social and political movements some degree of legitimacy in mainstream culture.2

221 I argue that “balance” is an objectivity code in documentary film present not only in the depiction of individuals who disagree with one another, but in the selection of film footage for documentary film as well. Archival footage functioned as codes of objectivity by presenting the film as a “balanced” presentation of views about Berkeley activism. Archival footage of 1960s activism in Berkeley contributed to popular memories of activism that audiences could see and hear; thus, they offered forms of visual and audio proof more vivid than the explanations and descriptions activists offered themselves. The formal presentation of “balance” functioned ideologically in Berkeley by obscuring the partiality of textual reconstructions of antiwar and student activism during the 1960s. In this way, visual images and songs enhanced the film’s credibility and contributed to the memory of activism.

THE LEGITIMACY OF RADICALISM IN THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND

Visual images and talking head interviews functioned to obscure the partiality of the memories constructed in The Weather Underground as well. The structure of The Underground featured similar codes of objectivity that appeared in Berkeley in the Sixties. In Weather, talking-head interviews with former activists provided verbal descriptions of the Weather Underground’s history while archival footage of newscasts about the Vietnam War provided visual evidence of the social context that led to the

organization’s decision to go underground. Filmmakers arranged and selected archival footage in ways that simultaneously lent sympathy to the perspectives of former Weather activists and established the film’s credibility. Interviews and archives functioned together to make The Weather Underground palatable for mainstream audiences.

222 Talking-heads redefine “violence”

The Weather Underground invited audiences to understand radical activism as an understandable response to an unjust war and to state supported repression of activists at home. Film critic Rosen (2003) suggests that this thesis was not lost on reviewers. Rosen wrote, “If Weather Underground has a theme, it is that given the times it was not unreasonable for some impassioned activists to want to 'bring the war home,' according to a militant slogan of the day” (p. F20). Talking-head interviews with seven former Weather activists constituted the primary spoken explanations for what these activists did during the 1960s and why they believed attacks on government buildings were necessary to end the war in Vietnam. Mark Rudd, the first former activist featured in the film, explained that the knowledge that the United States “was murdering millions of people” was more than students could handle. The film pointed to news coverage of death tolls and the United States’ use of Napalm on villagers in Vietnam that shocked and angered activists. Following his remarks, other activists explained that they believed no amount of protest or public argument would put an end to the war. Flanagan exclaimed, “The marches on Washington were up to 500,000 to a million, and those weren’t really slowing down the United States’ effort!” Bill Ayers then stated, “Our sense was that we had to do whatever we had to do to stop the war.” As Weather activists saw it, the United States government and those who identified with it were bound up in an unjust brutal war, and they were responsible for ending it.

Weather activists also saw the war in Vietnam as an outcome of the liberal capitalist system that required the brutal repression of dissent in order to maintain its political hegemony. Providing evidence for the inherent violence of the United States’ political system, former activists pointed to state supported brutality against protesters at the Pentagon and at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. They also 223 highlighted the FBI’s murder of Black Panther Party activist Fred Hampton in 1969. Laura Whitehorn concluded, “He inspired people tremendously and I believe that’s why he had to be killed by the United States. They knew that he was one of those people who could be a leader on a very important and profound and wide level and they set out to kill him and they did it.” Frustrated by the limitations of the current antiwar effort and by repression of pacifist and confrontational protesters alike, The Weather Underground began to doubt the utility of public dissent that had few material consequences. Stock footage of a Weather Underground press conference featured Bernardine Dohrn, who declared, “There’s no way to be committed to nonviolence in the middle of the most violence society that history has ever created.” Naomi Jaffe similarly told filmmakers, “We felt that doing nothing in a period of repressive violence is itself a form of violence.” These activists concluded that the structures of power in the United States had to be overthrown to undo imperialism worldwide.

Former Weather activists also noted that revolutionary movements in countries throughout the world propelled them to seek fundamental economic and political change in the United States. Jaffe explained, “If you look back at it and see a bunch of crazy young people roaming around trying to tell people that the revolution is coming, it seems totally insane, but it fit into a period of revolution in the whole world.” Revolutionary struggles in Japan, Portuguese Angola, China, France, Mexico, Cuba, Vietnam, and the

Congo suggested to activists that a revolution from capitalism was eminent. Ayers noted that toward the end of the decade, Weather activists wanted to put “something more humane than the capitalist system into place.” Thus, they decided to lead the struggle to undo capitalist imperialism in the United States. In the face of continued deaths in Vietnam, the beatings and deaths of activists at home, and knowledge of revolutionary

224 struggles worldwide, Weather activists sought to disrupt the violence inherent to the United States’ political system by engaging in acts of destruction themselves. In an effort to propel revolutionary action, Weather activists made plans to bomb buildings of strategic importance to the United States government. During one effort, a bomb accidentally exploded, killing three activists, Terry Robbins, Ted Gold, and Diana

Oughton in a home on West 11th Street in New York City. After the townhouse explosion in 1970, Weather activists decided to go underground; they concealed their identities, cut ties with friends and family members, and made plans to build a revolutionary movement. One of two non-Weather activists featured in the film, Professor and former SDS activist Todd Gitlin criticized the movement’s strategies:

They were ready to be mass murderers…they came to this conclusion...that was come to by all the great killers, whether Hitler or Stalin or Mao –that they have a grand project for the transformation and purification of the world and in the face of that project ordinary life is dispensable. Former FBI agent Don Strickland noted that the FBI became alarmed by the movement after the townhouse explosion; the bomb told them that clearly, the Weather Underground “intended to kill people.” The rest of the film suggested that the strategies of the movement were more destructive than violent. During the second half of the film, voice-over commentary described the series of bombings that Weather took responsibility for between 1970 and 1977. Contradicting Gitlin and Strickland, former Weather activist David Gilbert emphasized that Weather never sought to kill anyone; instead, they targeted specific buildings and provided warnings in ample time for occupants to evacuate them. According to the film, the Weather Underground took credit for at least 14 bombings across the country. In their first action, Weather bombed government buildings in Sacramento and San Francisco in defense of the shooting death of George Jackson as the

225 San Quentin prison.3 In one high profile action, they helped LSD advocate Timothy Leary escape from a California prison. These clips provided material that highlighted both Weather actions and the human rights abuses that prompted them. Other material also counter-posed Weather tactics with rights violations of the state. Through interviews with Dohrn and Kathleen Cleaver, the film also revealed COINTELPRO’s illegal efforts to undermine and spread distrust within the movements. Thus, rather than focus on the movement as violent, The Weather Underground indicated that Weather acted in response to a whole system of violence that had only escalated during years of passive dissent.

The film’s conclusion provided multi-vocal attitudes from former activists about the role of the movement for advancing social justice. Near the end of the film, filmmakers returned attention to former Weather activists who explained why they decided to reemerge during the early 1980s after spending nearly a decade underground. Several activists articulated regret for Weather’s activities. Flanagan told filmmakers, “If you think you have the moral high ground, you can do some very dreadful things. You can do some things that are completely unconscionable. … I think the Vietnam War made us all a little crazy. That’s the only way I can explain it.” Other former Weather activists told the filmmakers that they continued to believe radical movements for social change are worthwhile and important. In her closing remarks on the film, Naomi Jaffe

explained why she would rejoin the movement if she had the chance to today.

It was a precious, precious opportunity, and I think we came close. I think that the world came close to seeing those major changes and I think that makes a difference in terms of the ability of movements of change to emerge in the future. The fact that there’s a history of resistance, there’s a history of white people’s participation in resistance I think makes a difference to the ability of that kind of resistance to emerge again. I think it already has.

226 For Jaffe, involvement in the movement was part of a much broader history of political activism in which white people have struggled for social justice. Laura Whitehorn echoed Jaffe’s faith that the struggle for justice would continue. “I still have hope….People never stop struggling and never stop waiting for the moment when they can change the things that make their lives unlivable.” Whitehorn’s comments suggest that current struggles for social change represent a continuation of historic efforts of ordinary people to improve the conditions of their lives. Thus, Whitehorn’s remarks contextualized the story of the Weather Underground for contemporary circumstances. For those who want to see themselves as part of history, faith in the continuation of social struggle also invited audiences to become engaged in the struggle themselves.

These interviews played an important role in the film because they positioned activists most vilified in contemporary media in a predominantly positive light. In his review of the film, Strickler (2003b) noted that the former activists interviewed in the film “come off as intelligent people who loved their country and felt that what they were doing was for the greater good.” Strickler then asserted, “Even if you vehemently disagree with their politics of violence, it's hard to come away disliking them” (p. 16E). By depicting activists as reasonable, intelligent, and compassionate, the documentary invited audiences to empathize with activists’ experiences and take activists’ radicalism seriously.

Filmmakers framed Weather’s actions as deliberate strategies for ending the United States’ violence against Vietnam when less destructive alternatives seemed futile. Interviews with activists reframed what it means to act violently within a liberal capitalist democracy. Mark Rudd noted that the movement failed because most people did not understand the social role of violence in the same way that Weather activists did. “Americans are taught again and again from a very early age that the only violence, that

227 all violence which is not sanctioned by the government is either criminal or mentally ill,

so our violence was categorized as that: criminal and mentally ill. Violence didn’t work.” According to Rudd, the movement’s failure was not the direct result of the movement’s strategies, but the consequence of the movement’s failure to break through prevailing doxa. Although testimonial accounts from Weather activists did not wholeheartedly celebrate the movement’s strategies, they consistently condemned the United States political system for waging war and terrorizing dissenters to serve the interests of the capitalist class. As they gave a voice to perspectives of radical activists predominantly shut out of mainstream media, Underground posed a challenge to established doxa and to liberal capitalist ideology.

The filmic construction of false balance

Mainstream media reviews of Underground did not register this challenge. Although the film provided extensive verbal accounts that suggested radical activism itself was an understandable response to political repression and war, many reviewers praised the film for presenting a history of the Weather Underground that did not advocate a particular position about the movement’s mission or actions. Reviewers described the film as “even handed” (Denerstein, 2003, p. 1D; Weiskind, 2004, p. T36); “balanced” (Strauss, 2003, p. 6); and “even-keeled” (Strickler, 2003a, p. 16E).

Reviewers also commended the film for providing both positive and negative aspects of the movement. Burr (2003) noted that Green and Siegel were “sympathetic to the group's ideals and properly critical of the results” (p. C5). Several reviews asserted that the film neither condemned nor romanticized the Weather Underground (Booth & Persall, 2004, p. 16W; Matthews, 2003, p. 42). Others emphasized that the film both revealed the movement’s heroism and foolishness (“Film capsules”, 2004, p. T36; Lundegaard, 2003, p. H21) as well as the movement’s hopes and arrogance (Kennedy, 2003, p. F08). These 228 reviews seem out of step with the film’s implicit support for the cause of radical activism evinced in the film’s interviews and archival footage. Given that the film provided evidence for a claim about the legitimacy of Weather activism, I argue that reviewers’ characterization of the film as balanced, reasonable, and objective is not a product of the film’s content. Instead, I argue that it is a product of the film’s stylistic devices. The presentation of balance functioned as one objectivity code that lent legitimacy to the film. Strickler (2003a) indicated that the perspectives of the interviewees themselves presented objective reflections of the past; he noted that while some interviewees used the film to “rationalize” and “rally” interviewees Bernadette Dohrn, Bill Ayers and Mark Rudd, took an “analytical approach, at times almost assuming a third-person perspective as they look back on the turmoil of their earlier lives” (p. 16 E). Strickler points to the ways in which the contrasting perspectives of the interviewees who themselves were the subjects of the film represented an objectivity code. Thus, he suggests that the presentation of balance or multiple points of view in a film may function to legitimate the film as a legitimate representation of reality.

Although activists themselves did not provide univocal perspectives, they did share several premises about the role of dissent and activism that challenges prevailing liberal ideology. Former SDS activist and Professor Todd Gitlin, the most vocal opponent of the Weather Underground, attributed the dissolution of the student left to the

Weather Underground’s violent actions; as a former activist himself, however, even Gitlin did not dismiss activism and protest as legitimate means of political engagement in a democracy. Only FBI Ted Strickland dismissed protest outright. The dissonance between reviews that characterized the film as a balanced and the film’s perspective indicates that the presentation of contrasting ideas within the rhetorical framework of the

229 film, not within the framework of the prevailing ideology outside of the film, constituted the film as an objective representation of the past among mainstream critics.

Authorizing dissent in public memories of television news

In addition to talking head interviews, archival black and white footage of student protest and war casualties in Vietnam constituted central sources of evidence for the film’s contention that radical activism is an understandable response to the political pressures of the 1960s. Underground’s footage switched back and forth between vintage newsreel footage of war casualties in Vietnam and political protest at home, and contemporary footage of former Weather activists explaining their reaction to these events. More powerful than the interviews of former activists, archival footage from the 1960s and early 1970s lent legitimacy to the film as a credible source of information about the past. Visual images in these films simultaneously established identification with activists and legitimated film as having a direct indexical relationship with the historical world. As was the case for Berkeley, images from stock footage in Underground lent credibility to activists’ verbal messages through the presumption of photographs’ realism. Archival footage in Underground predominantly came from newscasts from the 1960s. Because these newscasts wove recognizable images and figures into the documentary, they gleaned legitimacy for the film from popular memory as much as they did from the authority of the image. Grainy emulsion and blurry images in several segments of the film cued audiences to the film’s adoption of archival broadcast news footage. Pauley (1999) explains that the appearance this film quality, common to WWII films, helped to establish audience expectations with the documentary film genre when it emerged; consequently, American audiences began to recognize blurry, grainy images of direct cinema documentaries for authentic recordings of “real life” events (pp. 124-125). In 230 addition to using blurry, grainy film, Underground also demonstrated that this archival footage represented “news” by providing clips of national recognized television news reporters, including a young Walter Cronkite reporting the number of dead soldiers in Vietnam, and a young Peter Jennings announcing Weather’s bombing of Gulf Oil’s headquarters in protest of Gulf Oil’s actions in Angola. These news archives lent credibility to Underground by evoking memories, not only of the Vietnam War, but also of the broadcast news coverage of the war. Even though the film itself did not conform to the conventions of television broadcast journalism, the memory of the television broadcast news genre legitimized Underground as a depiction of reality. As Nichols (1991) writes, “attaching a particular text to a traditional mode of representation and to the discursive authority of that tradition may well strengthen its claims, lending to these claims the weight of previously established legitimacy” (p. 34). As images of news coverage reminded audiences of the nightly newscasts that brought images of Vietnam atrocities to them, these clips carried with them the legitimacy of the broadcast television news genre. Hammond (1981) suggests that newscasts emerged as a particular programming category because they accorded status to television as a source of truth.

Hammond also suggests that television news networks also made use of the ostensible veracity of images depicted in television news documentaries to improve the credibility of network television following the Van Doren quiz show scandal of 1957.

Truth-telling, via TV documentaries, was used to overcome widespread disgruntlement about question-rigging and quiz participants pretending they were honestly struggling to get correct answers when, all the time, having been previously coached, they knew the answers. In the process, the networks discovered they could make money broadcasting the truth. (Hammond, 1981, p. 14)

231 Collective memory of the emergence of broadcast television following the quiz show scandal helped to attribute salience to the social injustices that riveted Weather Underground activists during the 1960s. Broadcast coverage of current events emerged as sources of legitimacy for television networks at roughly the same time as broadcast coverage drew attention to the examination of topics including civil rights and the Vietnam War. Underground received residual legitimacy as a source of historical information from stock footage of news reports about events related to public dissent of the Vietnam War. Audiences with a memory of coverage, either from watching coverage directly or from watching same archival footage from previous documentaries, were encouraged to view the documentary as an extension of earlier archival work. By attaching images of state led violence in Vietnam and in the United States to popular memories of journalism, Underground framed these images as significant cultural memories. Iconic images in the film include that of a Vietcong soldier shot in the head at point blank range by an American soldier and footage of a young girl accidentally burned by Napalm.

Several film critics recognized these images. Ringel-Gillespie (2003) reminded readers that, “These pictures of anti-war protesters overflowing our cities' streets and the carnage of Vietnam were the stuff the nightly news was made of” (p. 15E). Other reviewers described these images as evidence of the film’s ability to capture the emotional intensity of the Vietnam War experience. Sherman (2003) explained to Boston Herald readers that the film evoked the intensity of the Vietnam War experience by featuring “some of the most famous images of the Vietnam War, including the burned girl running naked from her bombed village” (p. E12). Mitchell (2003), who described the film as “terrifically smart and solid” also recognized that the documentary was “packed with some of the most powerful images of violence of the period, like a bound

232 Vietnamese being shot in the head at point-blank range and the bloody bed of the Black Panther Fred Hampton after he was killed” (p. E7). These reviewers point to the rhetorical effect of iconic images in popular culture. Hariman and Lucaites (2003) argue that images, including the 1972 image of naked Vietnamese girl burned by napalm, become iconic through their appropriation and reproduction in popular culture. As icons, these images represent powerful signifiers for a whole host of memories and meanings about the past, and imbue these memories with ideological significance. As these scholars explain, the meaning of any iconic image shifts according to the new contexts in which it is reproduced. My analysis suggests that iconic images may function rhetorically for the larger texts in which they appear. Underground borrowed from legitimacy iconic images about the Vietnam War, and enfolded them into a broader set of images of Vietnam War atrocities and political repression of dissent in the United States. By appearing in combination with a host of images and narratives about political repression and the Vietnam War, these familiar images imbued Underground with iconic significance.

Other images that looked similar to iconic images of atrocity lent further support to activists’ claims that the United States government committed atrocity for imperialist aims. An early segment in the film featured the image of a Vietnamese woman sitting on the ground with her hands tied behind her back. The film initially focused on the image of the solemn faced woman staring toward the camera. Seconds later, the film replayed the image, but highlighted the image of a soldier standing behind her kicking her in the head with his knee. While this image appeared and reappeared, former Weather activist Naomi Jaffe told audiences that she was outraged by these instances of brutality, and that she believed that, as a wealthy, white citizen of the United States, she was partially responsible for ending these atrocities. As Jaffe suggests, activists experienced the trauma of Vietnam, not just because they had witnessing brutality, but also because they

233 recognized the United States’ responsibility for these traumatic actions. Through the presentation of archival footage of brutality against activists and Vietnamese people, audiences were encouraged to make the same recognition. Archival footage positioned audiences to identify with activists’ experiences by foregrounding gruesome images of violence on the homefront as well. The film’s depiction of Fred Hampton’s death at the hands of Chicago police created a sense of immediacy to the problem of state repression against activism. As the film explained, police shot Fred Hampton and a colleague (Mark Clark) in his home at 4:00 in the morning on December 4, 1969.4 Police reported that Hampton and his colleague were killed in crossfire, but strong evidence indicated that both men were sleeping at the time they were shot. The film provided archival footage of a tour of Hampton’s home on the day after he was shot to death. As the film walked audiences through the house, Bernardine Dohrn described her own experience when she took the tour herself. When Dohrn noted a door ridden with bullets, camera footage foregrounded the bullet holes surrounding the walls and door leading to Newton’s bedroom. Dozens of sticks protruded from the holes marking the trajectory and multitude of bullets directed toward the men in their beds. Following this image, the camera moved to focus on Hampton’s blood soaked bed. As the camera focused on this image, Dohrn described the blood as it ran down the floor. In this moment, audiences were instructed to witness the scene as

Dohrn remembered it. Thus, the film’s archival footage provided visual representation to activists’ recollections. Because icons of documentary journalism urged audiences to experience these images as authentic, or transparent representations of reality, archival news footage also suggested that audiences saw the events in the same way that former activists saw them. As activists’ reflections’ about state brutality overlapped with the film’s footage of the Vietnam War, the film invited audiences to identify with the

234 activists through the shared experiences of witnessing state supported atrocities against marginalized groups. Concomitantly, the film evoked activists’ horror of identification with the United States and invited audiences to share activists’ moral outrage at the system in which audiences and activists alike are ostensibly identified. The final moments of the film powerfully illustrated this point. The film depicted Weather Underground leader, Mark Rudd, who told the camera that he regretted Weather’s destructive approach to end the war. But then he stated, “I think that part of the Weatherman phenomenon that was right was our understanding of what the position of the United States is in the world.” At this moment the film cut away from Rudd to archival footage of bombs falling from United States military planes onto a village in Vietnam. After showing the image of an airplane dropping bombs, the camera positioned the audience from the perspective inside the airplane, watching billows of smoke and fire burst up as the bombs strike village huts below. Rudd’s voice narrated these images thusly: “It was this knowledge that we just couldn’t handle. It was too big. We didn’t know what to do.” By watching these images alongside Rudd’s testimonial, Rudd’s horror of identification became the audience’s horror as well.

Archival footage of the war and atrocities at home encouraged audiences to understand the Weather Underground’s actions as an understandable response to their feelings of rage and frustration. As film critic Hornaday (2003) wrote for The

Washington Post, “Images of the Vietnam War and the violent suppression of protests at home [help] the filmmakers make a case for one activists’ contention that the Weathermen were taking what they saw as the only conscientious action against an immoral society” (p. C05). Writing for the Houston Chronicle, Strauss (2003) concluded that the film was “uniquely reasonable” and stated that the “ghastly archival footage from Vietnam [made] it evident why so many Americans were radicalized against that war” (p.

235 6). Another reviewer wrote, “The filmmakers never slant their powerful documentary one way or the other. They don’t need to. These images (many of which are disturbing shots of Vietnam War carnage and stateside killings) and words of inner perspective do the

persuading for them” (Ratliff, 2003, p. 8H).5 These reviewers suggested that the archival images in the film spoke for themselves. Ostensibly, reviewers gleaned meaning primarily from the images on the screen, leaving the words of activists themselves superfluous. By presenting itself as a self-evident recording of history, and as a sympathetic look at a revolutionary social movement, Underground drew attention to contradictions between American ideology and the lived experiences of political repression in the United States. In this way, Underground established the film’s potential as a source of critical memory about the role of the state in liberal capitalist democracies.

Memories of dissent against the Vietnam War in Underground invited critical reflection about United States foreign policy and prompted reviewers to attend to contemporary United States’ policies toward dissent. Several reviewers noted that the film, appearing in the midst of President George H.W. Bush’s announcements of the United States’ war in Iraq, was especially timely (Hornaday, 2003, p. C05; Kennedy, 2003, p. F08; Meyer et al., 2003, p. D5; Sherman, 2003, p. E12). Other reviewers drew parallels between anti-Vietnam War protest and anti-Iraq War protest. Meyer et al.(2003) wrote that the image of Nixon deriding peace marchers was “eerily similar to President

Bush’s dismissal of anti-war rallies” (p. D5). Levy (2003) remarked that the film has piercing echoes for another time -- ours -- in which young activists find themselves trying to express their outrage at an administration waging war and pursuing policies to which they take strong exception” (p. 24). Reviewing the film when it was released on DVD, Booth and Persall (2004), and Weiskind (2004) suggested that the film also invited criticisms of President Bush’s foreign policy. Booth and Persall wrote, “If the war in Iraq

236 is indeed a quagmire like Vietnam, this Academy Award-nominated documentary may be a preview of what's coming at home.” They concluded that the film offered, “blasts from the past that echo louder with each casualty report from Iraq” (p. 16W). Weiskind wrote that, the “movie's real value comes in considering the issues in today's context, when America is again fighting what many consider a questionable war that engenders vociferous, albeit mostly peaceful, protest (p. C2). By associating Vietnam War protests with contemporary protests, these reviewers suggested that the film’s critique of United States foreign policy can extend to the present. Thus, they framed the film as an analogy for understanding contemporary political injustices, and gave activism a place in the living political and public life.

Although memories of Vietnam War protests in the film prompted reviewers to associate memories of United States intervention in Vietnam with contemporary social injustices, I do not wholeheartedly applaud this film as a resource for present day struggles. This film did not provide a counter-memory adequate to the needs of contemporary public life in the United States. Activists speaking in the film suggest that United States’ imperialism has consequences for more contemporary struggles, but they don’t point to them explicitly. The film’s conclusion invited audiences to quietly reflection and revel in uncertainty. As Rudd explained in the film’s final moments, “In a way, I still don’t know what to do with this knowledge. I don’t know what needs to be done now. It’s still eating away at me just as it did thirty years ago.” Rudd’s quote points to what is most powerful, yet enervating about the counter-memories constructed in The Weather Underground. The film never provided audiences with an understanding of what might be done to achieve social justice and resist imperialism. Although the film offered a powerful critique of economic and political power relations in the United States, this film did not provide a critical memory that would have

237 invited not only reflection but resources for taking action in the present. The film prompted one reviewer to compare events “that capture your imagination” with events like the Vietnam War that “pummel”, “curdle” and “darken” the imagination (Kennedy, 2003, p. F08). This reviewer suggested that the film was less a source of invention or for imagining social change than it was a mode of leaving activism and movements for social change in the past. Rudd’s quote at the end of Underground mirrored the competing verbal and visual messages in Berkeley that were ambivalent about the role of activism for challenging imperialism in the United States. Such equivocation demonstrates how these films’ formal structure functioned hegemonically.

Both films’ presentation of multiple points of view enabled film critics writing for mainstream newspapers to pick and choose elements that most supported prevailing ideology. Competing messages in these films created a space in mainstream press for reviewers to simultaneously applaud these films and dismiss the activists featured within them. Most of the images and statements by former activists encouraged audiences to understand even radical activism as an understandable response to the ongoing war and to political repression at home, but not all images supported this idea. Some images and interviews supported counter-arguments that decried movement activism as ill-conceived and poorly executed.

REFRAMING DISSENT AS DEVIANCE IN JOURNALISM REVIEWS

Film critics writing for mainstream newspapers magnified the messages in these films that characterized activists as deviant. Four common topoi appear in news reviews of both Berkeley and Underground. These topoi emphasized 1: historical actors as absurd or insane; 2: activists as inherently violent or destructive, 3: activists as the foremost agents of activism’s demise, and 4: former activists as presently re-integrated

238 into mainstream culture. Collectively, these topoi dismissed public dissent as a foolish and hazardous vestige of the past.

Newspaper frames of activism as absurd, violent, and inept

Reviewers of Berkeley frequently focused on moments in the film that featured seemingly ridiculous or bizarre features of movement activism and the counter-culture. One reviewer noted “Tim Leary’s ramblings and the absurd arguments between hippies and straight people” about marijuana use (Movshovitz, 1990, p. 6F). Another reviewer cited former activists who described their fellow protesters as delusional (“Berkeley,” 1991, p. 3F). Instances in newspapers focused on the unusual behavior of counter-culture activists outside of the contexts and explanations that former activists provided for them. Thus, they made the emergence of the counter-culture appear more ridiculous than they appeared in the contexts of interviewee’s explanations for them in the films. By decontextualizing the counter-culture, reviewers discredited protesters and framed their interests outside of the problems of political injustice that motivated most activists. Images of comical moments in the history of Berkeley activism most frequently appeared in reviewers’ descriptions of former Black Panther Party leader Bobby Seale and then Governor Reagan. Although Seale appeared briefly in a short interview on the film, five reviewers cited him as a central activist represented in the film. Seale told filmmakers that the Panthers bought the Mao’s “Red Book” in Chinatown shops for 20 cents a pieces and sold them for a dollar on the Berkeley campus (Du Pre, 1990, p. W8; Millar, 1991, p. 1). Two of these reviews framed Seale as devious and criminal. Sachs (1990) referred to the Panther’s selling of the book as a “scheme” (p. 46). Du Pre (1990) noted that Seale “confessed” that the Panthers never read the book themselves, as though not having read it was a criminal act itself (p. W8). Other reviewers suggested that even Seale regarded the student left as naïve. According to critics, Seale was “amused” by the 239 young white radicals’ efforts to embrace the Panthers and their books (“Berkeley, 1991, p. 3F ; Howe, 1990, p. N45). Through their descriptions of Seale’s reflection on the white activist movement, reviewers suggested that even black revolutionary activists did not take white student radicals seriously. Reviews’ descriptions of Seale’s role in the film attests to reviewers’ selectivity and decontextualization of events depicted in the film. By making Seale a focus in the absence of attention to former Berkeley activists, reviews obscured Berkeley’s film’s framing of activists that depicted them as knowledgeable and compassionate

Reviews equally obscured the repressive force against activists exercised by the Berkeley administration and Governor Reagan. In three instances, reviewers pointed to state supported violence of police and university authorities. Sachs (1990) referenced “images of police dragging students down stairs, across concrete, and into vans,” (p. 47); Mahar (1990) noted that Reagan’s “massive retaliation” was a factor in the demise of the movement by the end of the 1960s (p. 01); and Howe (1990) noted that one of the film’s highlights was the image of Governor Reagan’s troops surrounding “a peaceful rally while a helicopter bomb[ed] the crowd with nausea gas (p. N45). In all other reviews, critics ignored Berkeley’s framing of state officials as instigators of repression and violence against activists. Instead, reviews amplified the “1960s-as-ridiculous” theme by depicting administrators and Governor Reagan as comically rigid and stodgy. Stone

(1990) mentioned that Alameda County District Attorney Ed Meese complained about a student dance “‘contrary to our standards of human behavior’” (p. E3); Sachs (1990) noted that Reagan “sneered” at the sinful effects of psychedelia (p. 47); and Howe (1990) wrote that Reagan condemned a student film that displayed “naked torsos” (p. N45). These instances in newspaper coverage framed Reagan as a moralist who was out of touch with the cultural shifts of the youth movement. Images of Reagan’s moralism were

240 trivial compared to the other scenes in the film that demonstrated how Reagan endorsed

the use of repressive violence to silence activism.6 Indeed, much of the film was woven together by recurrent messages about Reagan’s efforts to silence campus dissent throughout the 1960s. Reviewers’ omission of this theme demonstrates how reviewers selected material from the film without identifying or supporting the film’s overriding narrative. Instead of understanding the state’s response to activism as abhorrent, or even troubling, readers were encouraged to remember Reagan with some of the same amusement in which they were encouraged to recall the 1960s counter-culture. While reviews of Berkeley framed both activists and state leaders as comical, reviews of Underground framed activists as insane. Rosen (2003) wrote that Underground “makes one think about the links between political zealotry and mental illness” (p. F20). Other reviewers suggested that the political crisis at home and in Vietnam drove student activists mad. In a tongue in cheek question, Salm (2003) asked, “What cultural eddies so befuddled [Weather Underground activists] that they came to believe that, rather than playing out the paranoid fantasies of a few dozen like-minded souls, they were the vanguard of a nationwide movement?” (p. 20). La Salle (2003) described activists’ efforts to prompt revolutionary movement in the United States as “delusional” (La Salle, 2003, p. D5). Kennedy (2003) and Salm (2003) cited Flanagan, who told filmmakers, “I think the Vietnam War made us all a little crazy. That's the only way I can explain it” (p. F08 in Kennedy; p. 20 in Salm). In contrast to the majority of interviewees in the film who explained recurrent patterns of racial and economic injustice at the hands of the state economic and political system in the United States, these reviews depicted activism as irrational acts outside the bounds of legitimate political action.

Reviewers of both films delegitimized activism further by describing protesters as agents of violence and mayhem. In his description of archival footage of Berkeley, Carey

241 (1990) described students as “increasingly more violent” over the course of the 1960s and noted that students clashed “violently with police” during Stop the Draft Week (p. 10). Another critic of Berkeley, Mahar (1990) framed activists as aggressors and police as defensive respondents: “Anti-war protests turned to anti-draft riots, and police responses escalated….The violence of confrontation grew.…The Panthers armed themselves, and then California Gov. Ronald Reagan expanded control measures” (p. 01). Reviews of Underground frequently framed activists as violent aggressors as well. Levy (2003) noted that the movement set off bombs in banks and military installations (p. 24); and Salm (2003) described Weather activists as “outlaws dedicated to violent revolution” (p. 20).

Levy and Salm were not entirely off base. Weather Underground activists attested to their use of bombs to destroy government buildings, and they advocated violence publicly as a means to overthrow capitalism. However, these reviews make no distinction between acts of destruction against government property and violence against human beings. La Salle (2003) conflated the two in his article when he wrote that Weather Underground activists “believed, for a time, that they had the right to commit acts of violence against innocent American citizens” (p. D5). Other reviews featured statements by former SDS member Todd Gitlin who was interviewed as the central critic of the Weathermen in the film. As film critics noted, Gitlin described Weather’s plans as

“essentially mass murder” (Ebert, 2003, p. 36; Levy, 2003, p. 24), and likened movement activists to Hitler, Stalin, and Mao (Howe, 2003, p. T33). No reviews mentioned that activists made efforts to ensure that no people were ever harmed in their attacks. Nor do these reviews mention that Weather actions never seriously injured or killed anyone outside of the movement itself. By characterizing activists as violent and ignoring these films’ depictions of violent police and state authorities, these reviews framed activists as

242 catalysts for conflict and advocates of genocide. The topos of protester violence encouraged newspaper readers to not only disregard the movement’s strategies, but reject it outright. Reviews of Berkeley and Underground also framed activists as ultimately responsible for the decline in social movement protests 1968 and 1980. Mahar (1990) and Smith (1991) indicated that protesters’ lack of vision ultimately ended social movement activism. Mahar (1990) explained the movement’s decline thusly: “At the end [of the decade] there were conflicting agendas. There was no coherent goal or method of accomplishing things. The movements opposed things they couldn't affect but had no reasonable system to replace the one they protested” (p. 01). Smith (1991) wrote, “The film maker remains fairly honest in assessing what went wrong -- namely, the movement's own lack of direction, a fatal shortcoming that allowed things to spin out of control” ( p. 5C).

In other newspaper reviews, quotes of interviewees in Berkeley and Weather critical of activists appeared advances the narrative of the movement’s self-inflicted demise. Two reviewers, Szilagyi (1990) and Sachs (1990), referenced interviewees featured in the film to bolster assertions that confrontational strategies destroyed the movement. Szilagyi (1990) wrote that the interviews were “quite candid in discussing the failures of the movement. Participants relate how it fell apart because it evolved from an idealistic effort to change society to a pure protest movement, which needed constant confrontation to survive” (p. F1). Sachs (1990) twice quoted Professor John Searle, the interviewee most critical of confrontational protest strategies at Berkeley. First, he identified Searle as “one of the witnesses” who viewed the creation of People’s Park as “a cynical act in forcing a confrontation with authorities.” Later, he identified Searle by name. “Berkeley professor John Searle comments on the ‘kooks and nuts’ attracted by the

243 promise of drugs, sex and maybe a little harmless violence on the side.” Sachs concluded with his own commentary. “Anyone who went to college during the '60s, or has followed the career of Jerry Rubin, knows the protest ranks included people who were aboard for little more than self-gratification” (p. 47). Reviews such as Sach’s and Szilagyi’s prompt the conclusion that activists were incapable of effective leadership and organization. Thus, they distorted the film’s framing of the Berkeley movement by amplifying the movement’s critics and minimizing the movement’s conclusions. Indeed, Sachs cloaked his frequent use of Berkeley’s most prominent critic by not identifying him one of his references to him. Such distortions fit within the larger patterns by which journalism reviewers framed these films. Recurrent topoi that characterized activists as comical or insane, violent, or as agents of their own destruction magnified activists’ shortcomings and ignored the state’s abuses of power. Certainly, movement leaders’ poor planning and lack of foresight contributed to the movement’s decline; however, state supported repression against protesters also weakened movement activism. By ignoring state supported violence against mostly non-confrontational activists, journalism reviews provided a partial representation of the history of events surrounding new left activism presented in these films.

Leaving activism to the children of the past

Characterizations of activists as comical, insane, violent, and destructive diverged from the films’ talking-head interviews that depicted activists as reasonable. Several newspaper reviews made these themes made commensurable with films’ depiction of interviewees through a fourth theme that appeared across reviews of these films that described dissent in terms of youthful indiscretion. Reviewers of Berkeley and Underground frequently characterized the rise in student and antiwar activism as the consequence of youthful naiveté gone sour. Kempley (1990) described Berkeley as a 244 film about “a nonviolent army of youth” with “a halcyon vision” and characterized activists as “the kids who grew up on Tinker Bell and believed that they could change the world, that any dream -- desegregation, an end to war -- could come true if they only marched on Washington” (p. B2). Critics similarly characterized Weather activists as idealistic and tempermental adolescents. Howe described the student left as “youths” who experienced both “terrible follies” and “short lived glories” (p. T33); Levy (2003) noted that “the idealism of youth…evolved into impassioned anger” (p. 24); and Ringel- Gillespie (2003) told readers that the nation was so “confused,” and “flooded with curdled idealism” that “a generation of college students” became convinced that “taking protests to the streets was somehow credible” (p. 15E). Ringel-Gillespie portrayed activists as vulnerable victims of the era. Reviews that characterized activists as adolescents implied that activists were too inexperienced to know better, and responded with emotion rather than intellect. Through this theme, reviewers contained activism in the 1960s without dismissing activists interviewed in the film.

Depictions of interviewees as older as and smarter than their former activist selves corresponded to descriptions of activists as youths. Several articles described interviewees as “middle-aged” (Booth & Pearsall, 2004, p. 16W; Carter, 2003, p. 15E; Ringel-Gillespie, 2003, p. 15E). Many suggested that, with age, interviewees had also become more thoughtful than they had been when they were activists (Kempley, 1990, p.

B2; Weiskind, 2004, p. C2). For instance, Jacobs (1990) wrote that former activists reflected on the movement at Berkeley with “considerably more self-awareness than they possessed a quarter-century ago” (p. L24). In another example, Howe (2003) wrote that Weathermen and other contemporaries interviewed in the film could “appreciate the bittersweet vision of hindsight” (p. T33). Critics’ framings of activists indicated that with age, former activists abandoned public protest.

245 Other reviewers took the topos of former-activists-as-beyond-protest as step further by characterizing them as part of the political and social order. Reviewing Berkeley, Movshovitz (1990) contrasted the “self-indulgent” shots of hippies in People’s Park with the “conventional” image of Barry Melton” (p. 6F). A review for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (1991) noted that one former activism “is now president of the Los Angeles School Board,” and that Melton “is now a lawyer” (“A forceful look”, 1991, p. 3F). Writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, critics Meyer, LaSalle, and Guthman (2003) asserted that “Dohrn …could be mistaken for a congresswoman” (p. D5). These reviews suggested that activists have been reintegrated into the political system that they once struggled against. Carey (1991) emphasized this point in his review of Berkeley when he wrote that “most of Kitchell's subjects are white, admittedly privileged and curiously closed off from the myriad of problems of today” (p. 10). Pearson (2004) made the point most bluntly when she described former activists as “part of the so-called establishment today” (p. 32D). These reviews encouraged readers to disregard public protests as youthful antics; ostensibly, activists grew up and gave up childish politics for careers that don’t challenge the predominant political and economic system. Other instances in newspaper reviews characterized activists as “white children of privilege” (Weiskind, 2004, p. C2); as “upper-class white kids” (Howe, 2003, p. T33) and as children with “bourgeois roots” (Meyer, LaSalle & Guthmann, 2003, p. D5); these instances further delegitimized protest by suggesting that, indeed, young activists never did pose a threat to the established order.

Many reviews of Underground also suggested that former activists interviewed in the film deeply regretted their involvement in radical protest movements. Only two newspaper reviews mentioned former activists who expressed pride in the movement’s goals (See Howe, 2003, p. T33; Mitchell, 2003, p. E77). By contrast, nine reviews

246 suggested that former activists disparaged their involvement in the movement (Burr, 2003, p. C5; Hornaday, 2003, p. C05; Matthews, 2003, p. 42; Mitchell, 2003, p. E7; Sherman, 2003, p. E12). Quotes from activists who critiqued the Underground’s perspectives and strategies bolstered the claim that activists had reevaluated movement activities in their adulthood. Matthews’ (2003) review featured Rudd, who told filmmakers, “it is dangerous…to act out violently from a sense of moral superiority” (p. 42). Other reviewers quoted Brian Flanagan, who had stated, “When you feel you have right on your side, you can do some pretty horrific things,” (Rosen, 2003, p. F20; Weiskind, 2004, p. C2), and who had concluded that “the moral high ground is a dangerous position to take” (Burr, 2003, p C5). By suggesting that former activists have abandoned protest for more conventional political practices, these reviews implied that

activism no longer holds value or relevance for those who protested during the 1960s.8 These reviews overlooked narratives about how collective activism furthered causes for civil rights and social justice. They also ignored the ways in which political authorities disrupted and silenced student protest, and often used coercive and illegal measures to do so. This narrative is not limited to the 1960s. As Zinn’s (1995) A People’s History of the United States demonstrates, collective protest and dissent has been a democratizing force in this nation since its inception. With almost equal force, the state has sought to quell efforts to equalize the distribution of wealth and power in this country. By minimizing instances of state-sponsored violence and repression in the history of 1960s activism, these reviews discouraged readers from understanding that political leaders, as representatives of economic elites also go outside bounds of norms of what constitutes legitimate political action in a liberal democracy and engage in horrific acts themselves.

247 Stylistic devices within Berkeley and Underground legitimated memories of radical activism and left-wing social movements for mainstream media audiences by creating false representations of balance. Paradoxically, journalistic reviews of these films praised the “balance” constructed in these films, and then destabilized the film’s construction by framing activists as crazy, violent, inept, and adolescent. In his analysis of newspaper coverage of the Million Man March in 1995, Watkins (2001) observed that the creators of protest movements may “behave in ways that demand the media spotlight,” but “they have very little power over how intense the spotlight will shine or what it will selectively illuminate (p. 99; see also Gitlin, 1980). The same can be said of filmmakers who have depicted protest movements.

Codes of objectivity allowed critics to read the films selectively and thereby enabled critics to emphasize frameworks more acceptable to mainstream audiences. Through this routine framing of activism in journalism reviews of Berkeley and Underground, newspaper critics pushed radical activism outside of the sphere of legitimate controversy, and repositioned new left social movements within the sphere of deviance typical of predominant news patterns about activism. Although films conferred legitimacy on activists, reviewers selectively illuminated features of the film that made them look crazy, violent, and self-destructive. In this way, critics repositioned activists with in the sphere of deviance and returned the state to the sphere of consensus. What looked at first like a break in the patterns of news framings of dissent actually reiterated of framings typical of mainstream journalism.

STRUGGLES FOR POPULAR MEMORY AND DISSENT AFTER 1980

The contrasting meanings and values attributed to student New Left activism in Berkeley in the Sixties and The Weather Underground and their reviews attest to the struggles for hegemony that take place within the terrain of popular memory. These 248 documentaries posed challenges to common understandings about the role of antiwar protest. Berkeley and Weather activists’ critiques of imperialism, war, and state repression of dissent invited critique of the United States’ role in the Middle-East during Persian Gulf Wars I and II and challenged political discourses about the role of protest during the invasions of Iraq. By lending credibility to activists’ critiques of imperialism and the state, these activists also challenged the moral authority of current political administrations and the interests that they served. In the months following the first United States attack on Iraq, President George H. Bush Sr. declared the end of “the Vietnam Syndrome” and of dissent. Likewise, during the second attack, President George H. W. Bush equated dissent with terrorism. Berkeley and Underground provided counter-memories that restored legitimacy to public protest, and suggested that activism, although bruised and bloodied, was not completely out of breath.

For audiences who observed the films’ resonance with contemporary political discourses and problems, these films might have served to raise consciousness about the role of activism and of the state’s repression of dissent during times of war and political crisis. Thus, these films might have helped promulgate antiwar dissent in the early 1990s and 2003, when these films appeared in theatres and on public television. [See Bowers, Ochs, and Jensen (1993) for a discussion of the role of promulgation in social movements.] For audiences already critical of United States’ foreign policy and the state’s use of force to repress dissent, these films might also have served a role in the solidification of the antiwar movement. That is, these films might have encouraged wary activists to continue organizing and demonstrating against the war by placing contemporary activism within a broader history of anti-war activism in which ordinary people have challenged and delimited United States’ aggression overseas. Newspaper critics also served a counter-hegemonic function by giving these films positive reviews.

249 By giving strong reviews to these films, newspaper critics expanded these films’ circulation and gave them a place, albeit marginal given independent films’ market, within the terrain of popular memories of white student activism during the 1960s. Conversely, reviews of these films blunted these films’ critical potential for mainstream newspaper audiences by relegating activism to the past. Newspaper reviews placed these films within dominant popular memories that reaffirmed prevailing hegemony. For readers who watched the films, reviews guided them toward a particular reading of the films out of balance with the films’ central arguments. By focusing on activists in typical journalistic frame of deviance, reviews resolved the contradiction between the films’ positive reception by the industry and in film festivals and political discourses that dismissed 1960s activism. For readers who did not see the film, these reviews discouraged audiences from considering activism as an empowering form of political participation, and encouraged people to share prevailing political understandings of dissent as inherently anti-democratic. Since newspapers circulate more broadly than independent films, these reviews placed a dark pall over activism into the new millennium.

In this chapter, I suggest that the struggle for memory is also a struggle for legitimacy. To be understood within the terrain of popular memory, texts must be recognized as historically relevant. This analysis of documentary constructions of student and antiwar activists explains how this understanding is established rhetorically. My commentary regarding news reviews of these films also demonstrates how a film’s construction of its own historical credibility is essential, but it does not guarantee its role in popular memory. The weight of previous memory in popular culture carries with it its own rhetorical force, and has strength to frame counter-memories in ways that reaffirm hegemonic political and economic relations.

250 The question that remains now is how counter-memories might be able to shift the rhetorical weight of prevailing popular memory. In a foreward to a collection of essays written by former 1960s activists from Texas, Jesse Jackson (1992) asserts that the “The mainstream press wants us to remember those for whom the issues of the ‘60s were little more than to act out their youthful rebellion....It is axiomatic that the power structure’s first line of defense is to keep issues from becoming part of the public agenda” (p. x). Jackson adds that “to keep issues from the consciousness of the public is to win the battle before it’s been fought” (p. x). As Jackson and this essay attest, the struggle for artists and activists today is to construct counter-memories that can resist hegemonic narratives that frame activism as mere memory that might best be forgotten.

Such narratives must recall the state’s capacity for repression. These narratives must also focus on activists who have continued to struggle in response to, and in spite of, the terror visited upon activism. Jackson concludes that “Those who would challenge that power structure must first force issues on the table of public debate. To that extent, the ‘60s were a rousing success” (p. x). It is the memory of these successes that must integrated into public consciousness. By focusing on the promises of the movement, we may disabuse memories of activism’s self-inflicted demise and create ground for counter- memories. In order to establish new memories, activists and filmmakers must find ways to incorporate these memories into a form that is accessible to popular media audiences and journalists. Although the ideas of objectivity and truth are powerful rhetorical devices to establish the legitimacy of particular memories about activism, codes that establish the legitimacy of memories as “objective” sources might not be the most effective for circulating counter-memories into popular culture. Objectivity itself is not a reflection of the real world, but a rhetorical stance taken by filmmakers and journalists; thus, the

251 appearance of objectivity in any text does not guarantee that a full range of images and messages about the past will be included. Rather than rely upon codes of objectivity and balance, I suggest that the future of activism in popular culture might depend upon the ways that counter-hegemonic messages respond to the formal and ideological expectations of popular culture.

252 NOTES TO CHAPTER SEVEN

1Between 1990 and 1991, independent movie theatres and college campuses showed Berkeley in the Sixties film in over 70 cities (Klein, 1990, p. 12LI). Months after its release, the film also aired on the PBS program “Point of View” (“Berkeley” 1991, July 18, p. 12). Although estimated numbers are not available for theatres that showed The Weather Underground, Rosen (2003) writes that the film earned some $500,000 in theatrical release (p. F20). The Weather Underground also aired on April 2004 on the PBS series, “Independent Lens” (Walker, 2004, p. 1).

2Dow (2004) argues that the voice of God narration style is most conventional code of realism and objectivity that gives the impression that speaker’s portrayal of events is a commonsensical description of what the viewer has seen or is about to see” (p. 59). I argue that, the voice of God narration style no longer constitutes an objectivity code persuasive for integrating controversial ideas into popular culture. Instead, commentary by two persons as evidence for claims that remain implicit within the film itself more persuasive to legitimate film as objective. 3Other bombings mentioned in the film included the National Guard headquarters in May of 1970 in response to the Kent State killings; New York City police headquarters in June 9, 1970 in response to police repression; the Presidio Army Base in San Francisco in July 16, 1970 to mark the 11th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution; the Queens Courthouse in October 8 1970 in solidarity with New York prison revolts; the Harvard Center for International Affairs in October 8, 1970 to protest the war in Vietnam; the New York Department of Corrections on September 17, 1971 to protest the killing of 29 inmates at Attica State Penitentiary; the United States Capitol in February 28, 1971 to protest the invasion of Laos; the 103rd Police Precinct on May 18, 1973 in response to

253 the police killing of a 10-year-old black youth; ITT headquarters on September 28, 1973 in response to a United States-backed coup in Chile; the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in San Francisco on March 6, 1974 to protest the forced sterilization of poor women; the Office of the California Attorney General on May 31, 1974 in response to the killing of 6 members of the Symbionese Liberation Army; Gulf Oil’s Pittsburgh headquarters on June 17, 1974 to protest its policies in Angola; the State Department on January 28, 1975 in response to military escalation in Vietnam; and Banco de Ponce in New York on June 16, 1975 in solidarity with striking Puerto Rican cement workers.

4The film does not mention the name of the other Panther member, Mark Clark, who was shot with Hampton. 5Other reviewers made similar, but less eloquent statements about the role of stock footage in the film. Carter (2003) noted that the clips of footage from the 1960s “help viewers unfamiliar with the period understand how the Weathermen received as much consideration as they did. (p. 3E). 6In one scene not mentioned by any reviewers, Reagan berated university faculty at Berkeley for encouraging students to believe that they deserved decision-making authority on campus. During another scene, voice-over narrator Griffin explained that Reagan won reelection as governor on an anti-activism platform. Later, the film noted

that Reagan was instrumental in bringing the National Guard onto campus to silence dissent. Throughout the film, messages pointed to Reagan as a key force of political repression of dissent. Reviewers’ omission of this theme that weaved the narrative of the trajectory of the Berkeley movement together demonstrates how reviewers selected material from the film without identifying or supporting the film’s overriding narrative.

254 7Mitchell (2003) noted that women in the movement were “still full of hope” (p. E7). In an extended description on Jaffe’s position on activism, Mitchell wrote, “Ms. Jaffe admits that she'd do it again if she could be smarter about it. That mixture of optimism and toughness was what started the Weathermen, and it still has a place in Ms. Jaffe's heart. It's also the spirit of The Weather Underground (Mitchell, 2003, p. E7). Howe (2003) noted that activists including Bernardine Dohrn, Josh Ayers, David Gilbert, and Naomi Jaffe are “still passionate and unapologetic” about their years in the Weather Underground (p. T33).

8Newspaper film critic Carey (1991) explicitly stated that former activists are no longer interested in dissent when he wrote that most former activists interviews for Berkeley “feel they've done their good deed, not just for the day but for a lifetime (p. 10). Burr (2003) also suggested that activism is irrelevant w hen he noted that most people had forgotten The Weather Underground. He described such forgetting as “testimony to the way history swallows idealism, digests it, and moves on” (Burr, 2003, p.C5).

255 Conclusion: Activism and memory in the new millennium

Paul Loeb (1994) writes that the students who went to college between 1987 and 1993 came of age “under the sway of political, cultural, and economic currents that convinced citizens in general to seek personal well-being over a common social good” (p. 3). Thus, Loeb explains student withdrawal from political participation and social activism as “the fruit of a cultural climate in which students learned to mistrust peers who take on causes that go on their personal lives” (p. 3). Loeb’s observations accord with my own experiences as a child of 1960s-era protesters and as a college student during the mid-1990s. Although I participated in protest events that took place on the campus where I attended school, I felt continually frustrated by the myriad of students who approached me with suspicion for questioning university politics and corporate practices. I also felt frustrated that those incredulous students seemed to greatly outnumber my activist colleagues. To be honest, I didn’t behave as the great activist I thought I would be when I entered college. “Why,” I asked myself, “should I take time away from my own scholarship, dedicate myself to a cause that only a handful of my friends seemed to believe in, and make myself the object of criticism among my peers?” And even now sometimes, I am somewhat resigned to activism’s demise. As I have theorized the role that contemporary film and journalism have played in creating meaning about activism, I have sought rekindle activists’ voices, including my own. It is my hope, that by contributing memories of activism to the study of rhetoric, I might also provide counter-memories that remind readers of the possibilities and limitations of collective protest and participatory democracy. Under the current political climate, we can ill afford to accept the death of activism without a fight.

256 At present, United States’ political culture is witnessing unprecedented threats to civil liberties and political dissent. Consider the following cases: 1. In response to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, the Federal Government passed the Patriot Act. Section 215 of this act expands the FBI’s ability to search booksellers’ and librarians’ records with out a reasonable belief that the target of investigation may have committed a crime. Nor do investigators need to inform individuals whose records are being searched (McPhee, 2004).

2. In July of 2003, a federal prosecutor invoked an 1872 law to file charges against Greenpeace activists who boarded a container ship and unfurled a banner

that criticized President Bush. This 19th century law was initially enacted to prohibit bar owners from soliciting sailors at sea, and hasn’t been invoked for the past one hundred years. If the federal prosecutors win the case against the activists, federal officials will gain the rights to review all of the activist organizations’ records (“Protesters wary,” 2003). 3. On February 9, 2004, a federal judge ordered Drake University officials to relinquish records about a gathering of antiwar activists. This was the first time any university had been subpoenaed for records of student protesters. Although activists broke no laws, the court demanded that the university provide the names

of students who participated in protest activities (Foley, 2004). These incursions into civil liberties show signs of an increasingly chilly climate for contentious collective activism. Indeed, these are precarious times for activists and citizens seeking to hold public officials accountable to the publics they purportedly represent. Other instances of activism over the past five years mirror state-sanctioned brutality against protesters that 1960s activists’ often witnessed. During the November

257 30, 1999 protests against the International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization in Seattle, Washington, police beat back protesters with pepper spray, ballistic batons, and rubber-coated bullets. Although a handful of protesters engaged in destructive actions against local businesses, most of the individuals harmed by police were nonviolent activists or bystanders (Redden, 2001, p. 140). Likewise, thousands of nonviolent demonstrators protesting the meeting of the International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C., on April 16, 2000, were tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, and/or beaten with police batons (Ehrenreich, 2001/2000, p. 99). More recently, police used rubber bullets, tear gas, and beatings to corral and prepress activists protesting the Free Trade Area of the Americas in Miami, Florida, in November of 2003. If contemporary student attitudes and popular media aren’t repressing activism, prevailing political authorities are. And with activism goes our ability to hold these leaders accountable to us.

Popular memories of activism have particular salience to contemporary civic life given these current threats to civil liberties and social movements. As Benjamin (1968) writes, “to articulate the past historically…means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” (p. 255). Memories of protest may alert us to the dangers that publics are facing today. Furthermore, how we are encouraged to remember 1960s activism may guide how we respond to the current onslaught against civil liberties and social protest. Recently, critics of government surveillance of activists’ records have recalled memories of the past to highlight the threats that civil liberties are facing today. Mark Smith, a lobbyist for the Washington-based American Association of University Professors, told the Associated Press that the federal subpoena handed to Drake University brought “back fears of the ‘red squads’ of the 1950s and campus clampdowns on Vietnam War protesters” (Foley, 2004). Smith’s memory reminds us of the role that violence and repression has played in the history of social movement activism and

258 recognizes the state’s role in fomenting conflict in the Sixties. But Smith’s memory is one that few contemporary college students share. Loeb (1994) notes that students today have “a distorted image of Vietnam-era protest movements,” whose legacy, he adds, “continues to overshadow American campus politics” (p. 2). As Loeb suggests, our cultural memory has played a significant role in shaping how students today think of their own political role. Popular memories of activism matter, then, because they convey lessons about the role of activism in public life. Representations of the past that teach students how ordinary citizens have been able to change their societies also teach them how they too may be able to improve social conditions in their own lives. As one student told Loeb during an interview, “I want to be active, but I don’t see stuff in the media that gives me any idea what to do. Because I don’t , this adds to my feeling of powerlessness…I feel concerned and I know people can do things, but nobody’s ever taught me how to get involved” (p. 73). I believe that this dissertation is important because recent films about 1960s activism and journalistic attention to them provide contradictory messages that make it difficult for audiences such as Loeb’s students to understand what they should do.

COMMEMORATING THE DEATH OF ACTIVISM IN POPULAR FILM

On the one hand, popular memories of activism in these films invited audiences to celebrate public protest as an important force for challenging social injustices. In Chapters Three through Seven, I explain how recent films about 1960s activism shined a sympathetic spotlight on activism and social movement protest. These films provided models of heroic self-sacrifice. Even in Mississippi Burning and Ghosts of Mississippi, the films least attentive to the memories of activists, main protagonists privileged the political positions held by moderate civil rights activists during the 1960s. More radical 259 films Malcolm X and Panther depicted radical activists committed to improving their communities and to establishing self-sufficiency to break from an oppressive social system that marginalized them. Berkeley in the Sixties and The Weather Underground provided critical memories about the history of activism by presenting activism from the voices of some of the decade’s most radical white activists. By presenting audiences with reasons for many activists’ increasing radicalism toward the end of the decade, these films encouraged audiences to sympathize with dissenters who have been predominantly disparaged in mainstream journalism. These films gave dignity to activists and encourage audiences to understand radical activists, not as instigators of violence, but as victims of violence who found the strength to fight back.

On the other hand, the memories about activism constructed in these films did not encourage audiences to believe activism might be an effective strategy for responding to contemporary social problems. While these films invited audiences to develop a deeper and more sympathetic understanding of radical activism, they also told audiences that such activism is doomed. All of the narratives of 1960s activism examined for this dissertation told a story of activism’s demise. In some ways, this pattern is a consequence of framings of activism in terms of a particular decade. The characterization of a movement in terms of a decade complements the narrative form itself which calls for an introduction, building climax, and conclusion. Seeking to

represent or understand any aspect of history in terms of the decade in which it took place calls for understanding movement history in terms of its beginning, middle, and end. This narrative framework belies the ways in which most movements in the United States have evolved and continued to respond to different exigencies and goals across decades. Indeed, current activist efforts indicate that activism itself has not died completely even though it has received far less media attention than it had during the 1960s. The narrative

260 framing of activism within a particular decade also sets movements up for failure because few organizations that challenge the status quo achieve demarcated points of victory. After all, movements that succeed become part of the prevailing political and economic order and dissolve. Although the narrative framings of these films set the movements up for failure, the message of activism’s decline was also established directly in scenes within each of these films that depicted activism in the throes of death, both literally and figuratively. Dramatic scenes pivotal to the plot development of each docudrama about black protest presented activists getting shot to death by members of the white political establishment. The opening scene in Mississippi Burning depicted a local police officer shooting Mississippi Freedom Summer activists on an otherwise deserted country road; Ghosts of Mississippi depicted Byron de la Beckwith’s shooting of Medgar Evers at Evers’ home; Malcolm X depicted three mysterious black men shooting Malcolm X at the National Audobon ballroom; and Panther depicted several police officers shooting Bobby Hutton, and (at the end of the film) shooting fictitious character Tyrone at a warehouse. These scenes were central to establishing these films’ emotional appeal, but they did not lend their appeal to social movement protest.

Notably, images of activists in films about early civil rights memory, Mississippi Burning and Ghosts of Mississippi, only appeared in the moments of their shooting deaths as background for events that followed. In Mississippi Burning, the deaths of three activists at the hands of local whites in Neshoba County provided the motivation for FBI agents Ward and Anderson to pursue local police vehemently. In Ghosts of Mississippi, the memory of Medgar Evers’ death in front of his children motivated De Laugher to pursue Beckwith’s prosecution with equal passion. By featuring white authority figures as the central figures in the movement for civil rights, these films suggested that getting

261 killed was ordinary activists’ greatest contribution to the project of civil rights. Thus, these films did not present the role of living activism in the history of the civil rights movement, nor did they indicate that activism lived after the 1960s. While films about the early civil rights movement began by depicting the deaths of civil rights activists, films about the Black Power Movement concluded with images of the shooting deaths of black activists. The story about the rise of Black Nationalism in Malcolm X concluded with the tragic shooting death of Malcolm X at the behest of Nation of Islam leadership and (in some likelihood) the FBI. As I explain in Chapter Five, the conclusion to Malcolm X indicated that movements for the empowerment of black people in the United States ended with Malcolm. Likewise, the narrative of Panther suggested that FBI agents effectively killed the Black Panther Party when they brought drugs into the inner cities. The image of Tyrone’s body being riddled with gunfire as he stood in front of the burning warehouse metaphorically stood in for the martyrdom of the Black Panther Party. Judge’s closing remarks that described the infusion of drugs into black culture indicated that the party made this sacrifice for nothing. Although the construction of Panther discouraged mainstream critics from accepting this narrative as a “true” historical representation, Panther’s resonance with other films that featured activists’ demise further relegated activism to the past.

When films did not depict activists in their deaths, they frequently featured images of activists as demoralized and defeated by the end of the decade. These films provided stories in which heroic leaders suffer extraordinary physical and material consequences for protesting segregation, violence against blacks, economic injustice, and the Vietnam War. In Berkeley in the Sixties, student activists demonstrated tirelessly for days in an effort to win free speech rights on campus. According to Malcolm X and The Weather Underground, protesters who sought fundamental political and economic

262 change in the United States suffered the consequences of activism most acutely. Malcolm X highlighted how Malcolm’s devotion to the Nation of Islam kept him away from his family for long periods of time, and left the family destitute at the time of his death. By title alone, The Weather Underground positioned radical activism in an unseen realm, beneath the world of mainstream civilization. As the documentary suggested, Weather activists cut ties with all friends and family members who were not committed to the goals of fundamental political and economic change in the United States. Members of the Weather Underground sacrificed their families, their identities, and material comforts to challenge injustice. Patterns across these films indicate that activism requires tremendous self-sacrifice, tireless effort, and isolation from loved ones.

Other patterns also suggest that rewards for such sacrifices are few and far between, if they exist at all. Docudramas about activism rarely depicted activism as a pleasurable activity. They gave little or no representation to the feelings of joy that many activists have attributed to collective protest and to building solidarity with others in a movement for social change. Documentaries about the student left presented activists in a somewhat more positive light. Former activists interviewed for Berkeley in the Sixties and The Weather Underground expressed greater optimism about the future of activism and explained their feelings of euphoria when they realized that, through collective protest, they had the potential to effect changes in their campuses and their communities.

But these films equally projected images of activists who felt defeated by continued state violence against them and against people in Vietnam. Images of the My Lai Massacre, of police beating activists in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention, and of the National Guard tearing up People’s Park attested to the state’s defeat of activism toward the end of the decade. These documentaries shared with Panther depictions of FBI-led suppression against Black Panther Party activists. Although the films remained

263 sympathetic to activists’ goals, messages of state supported violence against activists in films about late 1960s social movements suggested that movements gained little by collectively agitating for an end to the war and greater autonomy for black and counter- culture movements. Indeed, they indicated that they never really posed a threat to the prevailing political and economic system. These films framed activism as a futile and tragic endeavor. Thus, the predominant message constructed across these films is that social movements earn respect, even if they win few rewards, only after participants in those movements experience suffer pain and loss. Collectively, these films also indicated that while activists’ causes might be noble, they have little power create fundamental changes in the structure of the United States. Thus, they leave the question of how ordinary people may attain political agency unanswered. Such films aren’t likely to inspire audiences to engage in social movement activism even if they are convinced that the cause of activism itself is just. Earlier in this dissertation I describe films as sites of popular memory. My discussion here characterizes films as graveyards of activism; they function as sites where audience members are called upon to mourn activism’s death.

A truly democratic society needs living memories of activism to break through prevailing doxa that, as one reviewer of The Weather Underground puts it, “curdles” and “darkens” the imagination (Kennedy, 2003, p. F08). Such memories should embrace the ideals of collective participation in the decision-making processes of society and expose the contradictions of liberalism that deny this opportunity to ordinary people. Memories of activists, living, breathing, in solidarity with large numbers of people, with a vision for the future, and with an understanding of how that future might be attained might inspire hope and generate enthusiasm for what people can do collectively in the face of challenging obstacles.

264 THE DEATH OF ACTIVISM IN THE ACADEMY (AND HOW TO RESUSCITATE IT)

More than memories of living activists, the cause of a democratic and just society needs living activists who exist outside of popular memory and off screen. Coinciding with the filmic construction of activism’s demise over the past two decades, scholarly literature on New Social Movement theory has increasingly turned to sites of popular culture as spaces for social movement activism in the present. Preeminent New Social Movement scholar Melucci (1996) argues that creative, cultural work to establish group identities is a preeminent form of collective action in the information age because it challenges the codes upon which people and institutions operate. In the discipline of rhetoric, De Luca (1999) writes that subaltern counterpublics prominently participate in public opinion formation by engaging the televisual public sphere. For DeLuca, staging spectacles and challenging and transforming discourses of modern society constitutes the primary work of contemporary social movements. DeLuca’s model of contemporary social organization parallel’s Warner’s (2002) model of contemporary publics as constituted through the circulation of discourse. New Social Movements theory offers a perspective that heralds the production and circulation of discourses about activism, as do I. Unlike New Social Movement theorists, my interest in activism does not stop at the representation of images of dissent. As I argue in my introduction to this dissertation, images of activism in popular media provide important resources for ordinary people to derive meaning about the role of activism in a democracy, but they are inadequate substitutes for the work of real bodies that is required for social movements to effect substantive political changes and achieve social justice in contemporary political life. Images of activism in popular memory are only one aspect of social movement organizing necessary to bring about social change. Memories of protest may serve to promulgate the ideas and mission of emerging 265 counterpublics, but additional work to solidify movement support, to mobilize activists, and confront institutional leaders must be done in spheres outside of popular culture. Tarrow (1998) points to the imperatives of instrumental collective action for the process of social change. He insists that the struggle for resources between people with unequal resources of power should remain a central issue in understanding the formation and success of social movement activism (p. 3). Because it is one of few ways that people with few resources of their own can effect democratic political change, movements must keep the process of disrupting the everyday workings of power through contentious dissent in the forefront of their activities (p. 3-7). In the discipline of rhetorical studies, Cloud (2001) reinforces this point. For Cloud, the politics of recognition emphasized in New Social Movements theory denies possibilities for economic redistribution of power in the contemporary era and is resigned to the construction of identities as the best that can be achieved in the current historical moment (pp. 243-246). I worry that the emphasis on media images of dissent in the place of organized collective efforts outside of popular culture will diminish people’s capacity to mobilize against structural and material inequities. The lessons that I take from instrumental approaches to the study of social movements, and from the history of social movement activism itself, is that the popular should not be mistaken for the public or publics; nor should films be mistaken for social movements.

THE COUNTER-HEGEMONIC POTENTIAL OF POPULAR MEMORY

Films should be recognized instead for how they cultivate meaning about the role that contentious collective action may play in the process of social change. Patterns across films resonate with prevailing critical scholarship that suggests that films themselves may not ever be good sources for advancing ideas that challenge the political order. The most popular films are usually those films that resonate with prevailing 266 ideologies. Films that circulate less broadly, including documentaries and independent film, often provide ideas that challenge prevailing ideology but aren’t popularized more broadly in popular culture. My analysis of these films and their journalism reviews indicates that, although popular Hollywood films do not pose challenges to prevailing ideology themselves, some of them do prompt debate and deliberation within journalism media. This is where I think films’ greatest counter-hegemonic potential lies. The contradictory messages across films and journalism reviews of them elucidate popular culture’s position as site of struggle over cultural meaning. Some rhetorical strategies incorporate counter-memories into popular culture while others shut down spaces for counter-memory. My observations of Ghosts of Mississippi, Berkeley in the Sixties, and The Weather Underground and journalism reviews of these films indicate that films that establish themselves as “truths,” have limited counter-hegemonic potential. These films mask their partiality by appealing to prevailing doxa, by appealing to stylistic convention, or both. The conventional docudrama Ghosts of Mississippi attained status as history by being faithful to events from the past and by constructing a narrative that resonated with mainstream ideology. The documentaries Berkeley in the Sixties and The Weather Underground attained status as legitimate representations of the past even though they advanced arguments that indicted liberal capitalism, by using codes of objectivity that created the impression that the films were balanced representations of “real-life” events. Because these films had achieved status as “true” representations of the past, they didn’t provoke the kind of controversy that the films Mississippi Burning and Malcolm X received. Nor did they encourage journalists to reiterate or expand upon the memories of activism constructed in the films.

Conversely, my observations of the film Panther and the journalism coverage it received suggest that oppositional films that offer a strong challenge to prevailing

267 ideology may also close down potential for debate and deliberation in popular culture. Even though both Mississippi Burning and Panther provided representations of the past that either contradicted the historic record or could not be verified by that record, only Panther received negative press as a “false” representation of the past. Mainstream journalism responses to Panther indicate counter-hegemonic texts caught in lies provoke backlash, and cast all of the film’s messages (including those that have fidelity to the historic record) as false. This contradiction indicates that reviewers hold ideologically challenging films to standards which films that conform to prevailing doxa are never held. When a film challenges prevailing ideology, filmic conventions, and commonsense distinctions between truth and fiction, it loses credibility; consequently, the film’s claims to history are denied.

I conclude that films that seek to incorporate counter-memories into popular culture must meet mainstream expectations for film but must also carry contradictory messages that prompt debate and deliberation from secondary sources. Films such as Missisippi Burning and Malcolm X gained legitimacy by conforming to prevailing doxa. Thus, I argue that they were more likely to become part of popular memory because they cued less suspicion from mainstream film critics. While they appealed to conventional understandings about film and to prevailing ideologies about race and class mobility, they also offered contradictions, both stylistically and ideologically. Mississippi Burning blended cues of cop action drama and documentary realism to tell an untrue story about civil rights while Malcolm X incorporated radical events from the history of black activism into an ideologically conservative narrative frame. Critics’ favorable reviews of Malcolm X suggest that texts outside the bounds of convention must establish themselves as true to have critical potential. Counter- memories are tough cuts of meat that are hard to swallow for audiences who are

268 immersed in ideologically dominant messages. Because events in the historical record of the Black Power movement fundamentally challenge prevailing doxa, this history itself is likely to promote debate and deliberation. Consequently, this history must be framed within conventional understanding; counter-memories are easier to digest when they are covered in a familiar sauce. The contradictory rhetorical messages in both of these films created opportunities for mainstream journalism sources (that have traditionally marginalized movement activism to spheres of deviance) to introduce counter-memories of activism to popular culture. Based on these observations, I conclude that films’ relationship to historical truth plays an important role in their ability to intervene in contemporary doxa of social protest. Films with messages that have already gained some ground in popular culture may prompt the circulation of more controversial counter-memories by telling lies. Films with messages that fundamentally challenge dominant ideology and narrative convention may do so by telling truths.

Mississippi Burning and Malcolm X provided a catalyst for critical memories to circulate in popular culture. News media coverage responding to Mississippi Burning and Malcolm X noted the similarities between events that propelled activism in the past and contemporary circumstances and fused memories of 1960s activism with contemporary people’s struggles for political empowerment and social justice. Although they did not breathe life into social movements today, they did remind critics and reviewers that movements still have a pulse. As scholars who are invested in the possibilities for deliberating and dissenting publics, these are the films we should love to hate.

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305 Vita

Kristen Elizabeth Hoerl was born in Denver, Colorado, on August 21, 1975, the

daughter of Lesley Ann McCollom and Donald Martin Hoerl. After completing her work

at Skyline High School, Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1993, she completed one year of study at

the University of Oregon in Eugene. She received two Bachelor of Arts degrees at the

Pennsylvania State University in University Park in December 1997. In August 2000,

she received her Master of Arts degree at The University of Texas at Austin, and entered the doctoral program at the same institution.

During her work in the doctoral program, the author taught several courses in the

Department of Communication Studies and the Division of Rhetoric and Composition at

The University of Texas at Austin. Her scholarship appears in an article in the Southern

Communication Journal and in proceedings from the 2004 Conference of the Rhetoric

Society of America. In August of 2005, the author will join faculty at Auburn University, in Auburn, Alabama, in the Department of Communication and Journalism.

Permanent Address: 1200 Barton Hills Dr., #348 Austin, Texas 78704

This dissertation was typed by the author.

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