What Can and Can't Be Said

What Can and Can’t Be Said This page intentionally left blank What Can and Can’t Be Said RACE, UPLIFT, AND MONUMENT BUILDING IN THE { CONTEMPORARY SOUTH Dell Upton NEW HAVEN AND LONDON Copyright © 2015 by Dell Upton. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the US Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e- mail sales. [email protected] (US offi ce) or [email protected] (UK offi ce). Set in The Serif B2 and The Sans Roman type by IDS Infotech, Ltd. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Control Number: 2015945014 ISBN 978- 0- 300- 21175- 7 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 {CONTENTS Preface vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction: What Can and Can’t Be Said 1 1 Dual Heritage 25 2 Accentuate the Positive 66 3 A Stern- Faced, Twenty- Eight- Foot- Tall Black Man 96 4 A Place of Revolution and Reconciliation 134 5 What Can and Can’t Be Said: Beyond Civil Rights 172 6 What Might Be Said 200 Appendix: Caroline County, Virginia, Multicultural Monument Inscriptions 213 List of Abbreviations 217 Notes 219 Index 255 This page intentionally left blank {PREFACE Images of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s made deep impressions on me when I was growing up in New York State. I remember seeing television coverage of the integration of Little Rock Central High School, which interrupted my mother’s daily appointment with American Bandstand. The Birmingham demonstrations, the March on Washington, the bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the murders of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, and the Selma- Montgomery March were all lodged in my mind, often through photographs that appeared in Life magazine. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated while I was in college. Thirty years later, as I traveled across the South for research, I visited the sites of the events that I recalled so vividly from my childhood. What I usually discovered, particularly at urban sites, was that the landscapes in which the dramatic scenes took place had been eradicated by urban renewal and re- placed by monuments that recorded, in an abstract and context- free manner, those historic moments. The civil rights movement of the mid- twentieth century was a campaign to erase the legal and social structures that created the New South sixty to seventy years earlier, and they took place in a New South landscape that had itself been erased by the end of the twentieth century. This absence prompted me to think about the monuments and their role in creating a New New South. That, not the civil rights movement itself, is the subject of this book. Simply put, I argue that the monuments are less about remembering the movement than they are about asserting the presence of black Americans in contemporary Southern society and politics. Despite claims that the South has transcended racial differences, they remain open sores. The construction of monuments to the civil rights movement and to African American history more generally frequently exposes those sores to view. Monument builders must contend not only with varied interpretations of African American history but with the continuing dominance of white vii supremacy, both in its traditional forms and in the subtler, more modern assumption that such monuments must meet white approval and that whites are neutral arbiters of what is fair and truthful in such memorials. What Can and Can’t Be Said explores the contentious origins of a number of these Southern memorials, as well as of the national memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington, DC, as well as examining their context— memorials to white supremacists of the past that are still cherished by many Southern whites. viii PREFACE {ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Among the compensations of the scholar’s solitary life are the advice and as- sistance of friends old and new. That is one of the pleasures of research. My gratitude belongs fi rst to Catherine W. Bishir, all- knowing scholar of North Carolina architecture. When I was working on another project, Catherine pointed out that it was really the monuments that interested me. It was a simple observation that quickly turned me around. Second, I am indebted to Karen Kevorkian and Betsy Cromley, who read the manuscript in an earlier form. Over the years I have benefi ted from discussions of this material with Craig Barton, Michele Bogart, Erika Doss, Owen Dwyer, Dianne Harris, Bill Littmann, Maurie McInnis, Louis Nelson, Daves Rossell, Kirk Savage, Abby Van Slyck, and my colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Virginia; and the University of California, Los Angeles, as well as the many audiences before which I have presented aspects of the project. I also owe more than I can describe to my longtime friends and scholarly interlocutors the late Barbara Carson, Cary Carson, Tom Carter, Paul Groth, Fraser Neiman, the late Orlando Ridout V, and Stephen Tobriner. The staffs of the Alabama Division of Archives and History, the Birming- ham Civil Rights Institute, and the Selma Public Library in Alabama; the Savannah- Chatham County Public Library; the New Orleans Public Library; the New Hanover County Public Library and the Rocky Mount Public Library in North Carolina; the South Carolina Division of Archives and History; the South Carolina State Library; the Richland County, South Carolina, Public Library; and the Bowling Green, Virginia, City Manager’s Offi ce were all gen- erous with advice and guidance. Rebecca A. Baugnon, Special Collections Librarian of the Library at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington; Jim Baggett, Archivist at the Birmingham Public Library; Beckie Gunter of the South Carolina Lieutenant Governor’s Offi ce; Marsha Mullin, The Hermitage; Charles Reid, Clerk of the South Carolina Senate; Glenda Anderson, former ix Archivist of the City of Savannah Research Library and Municipal Archives; and Michael B. Brown, former Savannah City Manager were especially help- ful, as were Derek Alderman, Mayor Richard Arrington, Aaron Lee Benson, Robert M. Craig, Michael A. Dobbins, Walter Edgar, Pat Godwin, Robbie Jones, Abigail Jordan, Edward Lamonte Jr., Bruce Lightner, Faya Rose Touré, Ellen Weiss, and Perdita Welch. Last, this project could not have been completed without the support of an NEH Fellowship and of research monies and sabbatical leaves from the University of Virginia and the University of California, Los Angeles, and a sub- vention for the publication of the photographs kindly granted by David Scha- berg, UCLA Dean of Humanities. And, as always, Karen. x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS What Can and Can’t Be Said xi This page intentionally left blank INTRODUCTION What Can and { Can’t Be Said [Southerners] want the New South, but the old Negro. —RAY STANNARD BAKER, FOLLOWING THE COLOR LINE, 1908 In the spring of 1999 twenty members of Congress traveled to Alabama to visit sites and monuments associated with the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Georgia representative John Lewis, a renowned veteran of the movement, had asked members of Congress of both parties to join him on the pilgrimage to inspire them with the “spirit of the movement that transformed the law and to start them talking together about race and reconciliation.”1 Lewis’s tour belonged to a remarkable process of rethinking and reinter- preting the cataclysmic events of the 1950s and 1960s and their implications for the present- day United States, a process that shows little sign of slowing since it began in the late 1970s. One fi nds counterparts of the congressional visit in tours offered to high schoolers, university alumnae, academics, and fraternal organizations. A more somber manifestation of the process can be seen in the trials of men accused of complicity in the Southern racial murders of the 1950s and 1960s. In 2006, the Federal Bureau of Investigation began its Civil Rights Cold Case Initiative, undertaken to investigate nearly one hun- dred cold- case killings in the knowledge that, as with the perpetrators of the Holocaust, the time for personal accountability is rapidly passing.2 As trial after trial has resulted in the convictions of aged white men, public commentators have used the occasion to emphasize that the South and the nation have changed, that a sordid chapter in American history has been closed with the imprisonment of those with blood on their hands. The corol- lary, sometimes explicitly stated but more often implied, is that race is no lon- ger a signifi cant element of American life. In the face of strong evidence to the contrary, the conservative majority of the United States Supreme Court 1 endorsed this rosy view in its 2013 decision striking down a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. To invoke racial injustice now is to demand special rights, to play the race card, to “go back and bring up the old problems,” and to stir up “a simmering pot of hate,” in the words of James McIntyre, an attorney who defended Ku Klux Klansman Edgar Ray Killen in his 1967 and 2005 trials for the murder of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi, in 1964.3 The Lewis tour, the FBI cold case trials, and the Supreme Court’s decision mark a new stage in a struggle to defi ne the civil rights movement’s legacy.

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