Representations and Remembrance: Tracing Civil Rights Meanings in the Narratives of Civil Rights Activists and Hollywood Filmmakers

Abstract

In this article, we examine the narratives of the Civil Rights Movement as presented in cinematic narratives and in accounts of civil rights leaders. We conduct a comparative analysis focusing on the comparison of the Civil Rights narratives of the Hollywood films The Long Walk Home (1989) and Driving Miss Daisy (1989), to the 1997 audio series Will the Circle Be Unbroken? In the analysis, we identify a Hollywood and a black consensus narrative, but there are important differences in the representational politics of black activists who participated during the Civil Rights Movement and that of Hollywood filmmakers. In particular, our findings reveal that the two Hollywood films downplay black agency, deploy the white heroin character, privilege sentimental aspects over historical references, limit the historical scope of the movement, and use a language of intimacy and optimism about race relations. These depictions sharply differ from the black consensus narrative in which life under Jim Crow, black activism, unity, struggle, and group resilience are emphasized.

Hollywood’s Social Construction of Innocence: Entertainment Media’s Deviant Portrayal of Black Children

“…For this reason, the media, in its various forms, has an unquestionable impact on viewing and listening audiences. One of the primary impacts the media is likely to have is the perpetuation of collective meanings (Liberato & Foster, 2011;Kivel & Johnson, 2009). As the media are capable of influencing how mass numbers of people perceive and think about specific groups, issues, and events, the media can, and has, expertly manipulated how we respond to illustrations and visual representations ultimately controlling the meanings society attaches to symbols and images (Adoni & Mane, 1984;Hill-Collins, 2000).…”

Book Review: Media Review

“…Such Hollywood depictions of race relations during or post-Civil Rights Movement inaccurately depict both the movement and the status of race relations decades later (Brown, Brown, & Ward, 2017). Such films “privilege sentimental aspects” over history, “limit the scope of racism,” and present Black-White relations as overly intimate (Liberato & Foster, 2011). It is from this viewpoint towards historical feature films that we have identified key scenes to discuss, strengths of the film, and areas of concern.…”