Recalling a Difficult Past: Whites’ Memories of Birmingham*

Abstract

This article examines the intersection between collective memory and autobiographical memory through in-depth interviews with twenty whites who came of age in the midst of key events in the Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham, Alabama. Most interviewees report few autobiographical memories of the events of the Civil Rights Movement and the racial conflict surrounding these events. Instead, many center their recollections on the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. The forgetting of autobiographical memories has been aided by a coalition of silence among whites about the era of integration and by reiterated media images that shaped recollections of the past. These white southerners have been able to renarrativize their pasts to forget memories that link them with the ideology of segregation and to reconstruct the self to be usable in the present. The article demonstrates ways that autobiographical memory is a social construction rather than an act of retrieval.

Under Siege in Any Era

“…There is a dearth of research on White memory, considering that millions of people who are still living witnessed the racial justice movements and policy changes of the 1960s–70s. Surprisingly little qualitative research investigates how White Southerners remember the segregation or civil rights eras (Gill 2012; Lavelle 2014; Roy 1999; Smith et al, 2001), although some studies have analyzed non-southern Whites (e.g., Blee 1991; Hartigan 1999; Kefalas 2003), and historians have outlined how Whites experienced twentieth-century racial transitions (e.g., Hale 1999; Ritterhouse 2006; Sokol 2006).…”

The Universal King? Memory, Globalization, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

“…Some carrier groups want societies to forget the past (Vinitzky‐Seroussi and Teeger ). Others want to distance themselves from it (Gill ). Some representations are intentionally given low local resonance.…”

“…Although this commemoration often overlooks or downplays King's more radical ideas (Morgan ), it has nonetheless transformed the U.S.'s discourse on race, democracy, and justice (Eyerman ; Griffin and Bollen ; Polletta ). King is a classic example of collective memory: He is a figure from the past represented by competing carrier groups in the present who wish to use him to understand, reproduce, or transform their society (Connerton ; Fine ; Gill ; Olick ).…”

Social Movements and Collective Memory

“…Some micro‐level studies conduct oral history interviews with activists; studies of Freedom Summer (McAdam ) and members of the Women's Ku Klux Klan (Blee ) show that activists sometimes construct ideal collective memories. Similarly, oral histories with segregationist southerners show they forgot their racist past and identified with “the new racial tolerance” (Gill ). More commonly, micro‐level studies involve public opinion polls; the analyst statistically analyzes patterns in individual beliefs and uncovers the rise and fall of the reputation of movement leaders or movement images.…”