Between memory and history: Autobiographies of the civil rights movement and the writing of civil rights history

Journal of Southern History

Volumn 74, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 325-364

  Nasstrom, Kathryn L ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SAN FRANCISCO   (United States)

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EID: 67649519187     PISSN: 00224642     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (140)

1. Constance Curry et al., Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement (Athens, Ga., 2000), xiv-xv
2. Peter Jan Honigsberg, Crossing Border Street: A Civil Rights Memoir (Berkeley, 2000), xiii
3. Ralph David Abernathy, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: An Autobiography (New York, 1989), xii
4. McAdam, Freedom Summer (New York, 1988)
5. For a wide-ranging review of the ways that historians have been suspicious of memory, along with a rebuttal to many of their arguments, see Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History (3rd ed.; Oxford, Eng., 2000), chaps. 1-5
6. Abernathy, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, xv
7. and Mary King, Freedom Song: A Personal Story of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement (New York, 1987), 15, 24-25
8. For a study of a different self-conscious form of writing, that of female fiction writers of the late 1960s and 1970s who positioned their writing in relationship to literary tradition, see Gayle Greene, Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition (Bloomington, 1991)
9. See also Jill Ker Conway, When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography (New York, 1998), 3-6
10. William L. Andrews, "Secular Autobiography," in William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Tradier Harris, eds., The Oxford Companion to African American Literature (New York, 1997), 35
11. and Joanne M. Braxton, Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition Within a Tradition (Philadelphia, 1989)
12. Fred Hobson, Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to Explain (Baton Rouge, 1983)
13. Hobson, But Now I See: The White Southern Racial Conversion Narrative (Baton Rouge, 1999)
14. For critical commentary on southern autobiography generally, see J. Bill Berry, ed., Located Lives: Place and Idea in Southern Autobiography (Athens, Ga., 1990), esp. 66-77
15. I employ the phrase grand narrative rather than master narrative for two reasons: I am seeking to avoid the gendered and racialized connotations of the word master, and I am seeking to signal the reverential place accorded to the history of the civil rights movement in twentieth-century U.S. history. For discussions of what I call the grand narrative of the civil rights movement in popular discourse and historical writing, see Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past," Journal of American History, 91 (March 2005), 1233-63
16. Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), 1-14
17. Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, 2003), 10-11
18. Brian Ward, "Forgotten Wails and Master Narratives: Media, Culture, and Memories of the Modern African American Freedom Struggle," in Ward, ed., Media, Culture, and the Modern African American Freedom Struggle (Gainesville, 2001), 8-10
19. Charles M. Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley, 1995), 3, 391-405, 413-41
20. and Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein, "Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement," Journal of American History, 75 (December 1988), 786-811, esp. 786-87, 811
21. Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63 (New York, 1988)
22. Hall, "Long Civil Rights Movement," 1235-37
23. Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom, 391-405, 413-41
24. Ward, "Forgotten Wails and Master Narratives," 8-11. For case studies of this framing process, see Kathryn L. Nasstrom, "Down to Now: Memory, Narrative, and Women's Leadership in the Civil Rights Movement in Atlanta, Georgia," Gender and History, 11 (April 1999), 113-44
25. and Jenny Walker, "The 'Gun-Toting' Gloria Richardson: Black Violence in Cambridge, Maryland," in Peter J. Ling and Sharon Monteith, eds., Gender and the Civil Rights Movement (new ed.; New Brunswick, N.J., 2004), 169-85
26. Vincent Gordon Harding, "Beyond Amnesia: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Future of America," Journal of American History, 74 (September 1987), 468-76
27. Thomas F. Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice (Philadelphia, 2007)
28. William L. Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975 (Chicago, 1992)
29. Akinyele Umoja, "Eye for an Eye: The Role of Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement" (Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University, 1996)
30. Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill, 1999)
31. Self, American Babylon; Lance Hill, The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill, 2004)
32. Christopher B. Strain, Pure Fire: Self-Defense as Activism in the Civil Rights Era (Athens, Ga., 2005)
33. Emilye Crosby, A Little Taste of Freedom: The Black Freedom Struggle in Claiborne County, Mississippi (Chapel Hill, 2005)
34. Charles Payne, "Ella Baker and Models of Social Change," Signs, 14 (Summer 1989), 885-99, esp. 897-99
35. Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom
36. Bernice McNair Barnett, "Invisible Southern Black Women Leaders in the Civil Rights Movement: The Triple Constraints of Gender, Race, and Class," Gender and Society, 7 (June 1993), 162-82
37. Nasstrom, "Down to Now"; Belinda Robnett, How Long? How Long? African-American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York, 1997)
38. Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, 2005)
39. Jason Sokol, There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975 (New York, 2006)
40. Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, 2006)
41. Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton, 2007)
42. For nonsouthern cases see Self, American Babylon
43. and Matthew J. Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 2006)
44. This literature is large and growing. For notable recently published examples, see John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana, 1994)
45. Glenn T. Eskew, But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle (Chapel Hill, 1997)
46. Cynthia Griggs Fleming, Soon We Will Not Cry: The Liberation of Ruby Doris Smith Robinson (Lanham, Md., 1998)
47. Catherine Fosl, Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South (New York, 2002)
48. Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom's Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Urbana, 1999)
49. Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (New York, 2001)
50. Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill, 2003)
51. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie
52. Crosby, Little Taste of Freedom
53. and J. Todd Moye, Let the People Decide: Black Freedom and White Resistance Movements in Sunflower County, Mississippi, 1945-1986 (Chapel Hill, 2004)
54. Peter A. Kuryla, "A Politics of Self-Defense? Rethinking Civil Rights as 'Pure Fire,'" review of Christopher B. Strain, Pure Fire: Self-Defense as Activism in the Civil Rights Era, H-South, H-Net Reviews, April 2006, http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path = 144881149692907 (accessed February 5, 2008)
55. Albert E. Stone, "Modern American Autobiography: Texts and Transactions," in Paul John Eakin, ed., American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect (Madison, 1991), 95-120, esp. 96-111 (quotation on pp. 110-11)
56. Key works in a vast literature on this topic include Frederic C. Bartlett, Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (1932; reprint, Cambridge, Eng., 1954)
57. Edmund Blair Bolles, Remembering and Forgetting: An Inquiry into the Nature of Memory (New York, 1988)
58. and Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge, Mass., 1989)
59. For summaries of the state of memory studies of particular relevance for U.S. and southern historians, see David Thelen, "Memory and American History," Journal of American History, 75 (March 1989), 1117-29
60. Robert O'Meally and Geneviève Fabre, "Introduction," in Fabre and O'Meally, eds., History and Memory in African-American Culture, 3-17
61. and W. Fitzhugh Brundage, "No Deed but Memory," in Brundage, ed., Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity (Chapel Hill, 2000), 1-28
62. For a subtle use of autobiography as a source and an argument for the need of historians to seek "a middle ground between a convenient but potentially uncritical reading of autobiography as fact, on the one hand, and a debilitating skepticism about autobiography's truthfulness, on the other," see Jennifer Ritterhouse, Growing Up Jim Crow: How Black and White Southern Children Learned Race (Chapel Hill, 2006), 112
63. Frederick C. Corey, "The Personal: Against the Master Narrative," in Sheron J. Dailey, ed., The Future of Performance Studies: Visions and Revisions (Annandale, Va., 1998), 250
64. Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes: A Memoir (New York, 1996)
65. Katharine Graham, Personal History (New York, 1997)
66. Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss (New York, 1997)
67. All three of these have been subject to a great deal of critical scrutiny. See, for example, Conway, When Memory Speaks, 152-55, 158-60, 181-82
68. Rebecca Walker, Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self (New York, 2001)
69. Charles Marsh, The Last Days: A Son's Story of Sin and Segregation at the Dawn of a New South (New York, 2001)
70. Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story (New York, 2004)
71. Angela Y. Davis, Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974; new ed., New York, 2000), 77-105
72. David Hilliard and Lewis Cole, This Side of Glory: The Autobiography of David Hilliard and the Story of the Black Panther Party (Boston, 1993), 67-68
73. Melba Pattillo Beals, Warriors Don't Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock's Central High (New York, 1994)
74. Kathryn L. Nasstrom, Everybody's Grandmother and Nobody's Fool: Frances Freeborn Pauley and the Struggle for Social Justice (Ithaca, 2000)
75. David J. Garrow, ed., The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson (Knoxville, 1987)
76. Douglas L. Conner with John F. Marszalek, A Black Physician's Story: Bringing Hope in Mississippi (Jackson, Miss., 1985)
77. and Kenneth Mostern, Autobiography and Black Identity Politics: Racialization in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, Eng., 1999), 28-53
78. John Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (Chapel Hill, 1994)
79. and Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill, 1996)
80. Honigsberg, Crossing Border Street, 3
81. Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (New York, 1962), 259
82. Beals, Warriors Don't Cry, 10-11. Ellipses appear here as they do in the original
83. Hampl, "Memory and Imagination," 33. For the observation that stories make us care about their subjects, see William Cronon, "A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative," Journal of American History, 78 (March 1992), 1374
84. Belinda Robnett, "African American Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Spontaneity and Emotion in Social Movement Theory," in Kathleen M. Blee, ed., No Middle Ground: Women and Radical Protest (New York, 1998), 65-95
85. Beth Roy, "Goody Two-Shoes and the Hell-Raisers: Women's Activism, Women's Reputations in Little Rock," ibid., 96-132
86. I am indebted to Ron Grele for this connection between the Mary King and Tom Hayden memoirs. See Grele, "Second Reading of Experience," 162
87. King, Freedom Song
88. and Tom Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir (New York, 1988)
89. Brian Ward makes much the same claim for fiction that I make for autobiography. See Ward, "Forgotten Wails and Master Narratives," 11
90. See also Richard H. King, "Politics and Fictional Representation: The Case of the Civil Rights Movement," in Brian Ward and Tony Badger, eds., The Making of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement (New York, 1996), 162-78
91. and Sharon Monteith, "Revisiting the 1960s in Contemporary Fiction: 'Where do we go from here?'" in Ling and Monteith, eds., Gender and the Civil Rights Movement, 215-38
92. The similarities between fiction and autobiography make it likely that both genres can function in this way. See Popkin, History, Historians, and Autobiography, 43, 49
93. Curry et al., Deep in Our Hearts, 371-72 (first quotation), 368-69 (second quotation), 168 (third quotation)
94. Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (Boston, 1982)
95. Vernon E. Jordan Jr. and Annette Gordon-Reed, Vernon Can Read! A Memoir (New York, 2001), 12
96. The book note in Black Issues Book Review called attention to "major promotions surrounding Jordan's memoirs." Black Issues Book Review, 3 (November-December 2001), 10
97. James Forman Jr., "Vernon Jordan's Justice," Washington Post, November 19, 2001, C2
98. "American Odyssey," Newsweek, October 29, 2001, pp. 69-73
99. and "American Journey," New Crisis, 108 (November-December 2001), 40-45
100. Fred D. Gray, Bus Ride to Justice: Changing the System by the System: The Life and Works of Fred D. Gray (Montgomery, Ala., 1994)
101. Gray et al., eds., The Children Coming On: A Retrospective of the Montgomery Bus Boycott (Montgomery, Ala., 1999)
102. Gray, The Tuskegee Syphilis Study: The Real Story and Beyond (Montgomery, Ala., 1998)
103. Vera Pigee, The Struggle of Struggles: Part One (Detroit, 1975)
104. and Garrow, ed., Montgomery Bus Boycott, xi
105. Davis, Angela Davis
106. Anne Braden, The Wall Between, with a foreword by Julian Bond (1958; new ed., Knoxville, 1999), xii, 339 (quotation)
107. See also Sarah Patton Boyle, The Desegregated Heart: A Virginian's Stand in Time of Transition, with an introduction by Jennifer Ritterhouse (1962; new ed., Charlottesville, 2000)
108. and Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream, with a new introduction by Margaret Rose Gladney (1949; new ed., New York, 1994)
109. See, for example, chapter 23, in which the majority of the text is composed of quotations from interviews. Hilliard, This Side of Glory, 277-94
110. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (1987; new ed., New York, 1993), 4
111. Curry et al., Deep in Our Hearts, 379. Collaborative forms of writing have been central to the development of women's autobiography
112. See Goozé, "Definitions of Self and Form in Feminist Autobiography Theory," 415-16
113. Likewise, there is a tradition of collective writing in African American autobiography. See Albert E. Stone, "After Black Boy and Dusk of Dawn," in Andrews, ed., African American Autobiography, 184
114. and Winson Hudson and Constance Curry, Mississippi Harmony: Memoirs of a Freedom Fighter (New York, 2002)
115. Oral historians have explored this issue with sophistication. See Samuel Schrager, "What Is Social in Oral History?" International Journal of Oral History, 4 (June 1983), 76-98
116. and Barbara Allen, "Story in Oral History: Clues to Historical Consciousness," Journal of American History, 79 (September 1992), 606-11
117. For related developments in autobiographical studies, see Goozé, "Definitions of Self and Form in Feminist Autobiography Theory." 70 King, Freedom Song, 453 (quotation)
118. James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries: A Personal Account (New York, 1972)
119. Cleaver, quoted in Margo V. Perkins, Autobiography as Activism: Three Black Women of the Sixties (Jackson, Miss., 2000), 93
120. Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story (New York, 1992)
121. and Carmichael, Ready for Revolution, 221-22, 315
122. See also ibid., 325, 328, 330
123. Nasstrom, Everybody's Grandmother and Nobody's Fool, 65-66 (quotation), 88
124. Greenberg, ed., Circle of Trust, 181-82
125. Our strength was often defined as our ability not to allow the death of someone we loved to set us back." Quoted in Perkins, Autobiography as Activism, 14
126. Bret Eynon, "Cast upon the Shore: Oral History and New Scholarship on the Movements of the 1960s," Journal of American History, 83 (September 1996), 560-70
127. Dittmer, Local People
128. Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom. Both books won several awards, including the Bancroft Prize in American History for Local People. See http:// www.press.uillinois.edu/f95/dittmer.html (accessed February 7, 2008); and http:// www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/6343.html (accessed February 7, 2008)
129. Henry, Aaron Henry
130. Hudson and Curry, Mississippi Harmony
131. Moye, Let the People Decide
132. On the events in Albany, see Lewis, Walking with the Wind, 182, 186-87, 191, 195
133. Cornel West, quoted on the book jacket of Lewis, Walking with the Wind
134. Garrow, ed., Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It, 3
135. Steven F. Lawson, "Freedom Then, Freedom Now: The Historiography of the Civil Rights Movement," American Historical Review, 96 (April 1991), 456-71, esp. 457
136. Adam Fairclough, in his study of the movement in Louisiana, devotes some attention to each of these leaders of the Bogalusa movement. Fairclough, Race and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915-1972 (Athens, Ga., 1995)
137. James Olney, "Autobiography and the Cultural Moment: A Thematic, Historical, and Bibliographical Introduction," in Olney, ed., Autobiography, 3-27, esp. 25
138. Thelen, "Memory and American History," 1119-21
139. J. Hillis Miller, "Narrative," in Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, eds., Critical Terms for Literary Study (2nd ed.; Chicago, 1995), 70
140. Charles W. Eagles, "Toward New Histories of the Civil Rights Era," Journal of Southern History, 66 (November 2000), 815-48, esp. 816