What Do These Memories Do? Civil Rights Remembrance and Racial Attitudes

Abstract

Scholarly inquiry into collective memory has fostered a host of innovative questions, perspectives, and interpretations about how individuals and communities are both constituted by the past and mobilize it for present-day projects. Race is one of the more important current issues demonstrating how the presence of the past is both potent and sorrowful in the United States. It is therefore critical to examine how memories of racial oppression, conflict, and reconstruction shape race relations. Studies of race relations, however, generally ignore collective memory's role in shaping racial norms and attitudes. This article uses the 1993 General Social Survey to address the silences in the collective memory and race relations literatures by examining how Americans' recollections of the civil rights movement influence their racial attitudes and racial policy preferences. Although we find that Americans' opinions about government programs targeting African Americans are unrelated to civil rights memory, respondents who spontaneously recalled the civil rights struggle and its victories as an especially important historical event generally expressed more racially liberal opinions than did those with different memories. Our findings both support the basic presupposition of collective memory studies—memory matters—and point to a fruitful innovation in the study of racial attitudes.

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

“…Over the next forty‐five years, carrier groups transformed King into a “haloed, consensual figure […] deployed to endorse the idea that the United States is now in a post‐racial era” (Bruyneel :75). On the 25th anniversary of King's death, civil rights activist Julian Bond said “Today […] we honor an antiseptic hero… and celebrate only half of a man” (quoted in Griffin and Bollen :601).…”

Agonistic Homegoing: Frederick Douglass, Joseph Lowery, and the Democratic Value of African American Public Mourning

“…Embracing the tragic led the nation to engage with some of her most pressing political problems; rejecting it led her to suppress them at the expense of her most vulnerable citizens. For, as the work of Francesca Polletta (1998) and Jacquelyn Dowd Hall (2005) demonstrates, the manner in which we choose to remember Martin Luther King profoundly affects our attitudes toward contemporary racial politics (see also Griffin and Bollen 2009). Yet, its absence from the public sphere in postbellum America helped deprive them of their constitutional freedoms.…”

Movement of Movements: Culture Moves in the Long Civil Rights Struggle

“…Employing GSS data, Larry Griffin (2005) presents important evidence that: respondents who recalled civil rights struggles and victories as "especially important" historical events held clearer, firmer opinions about race and generally expressed more racially liberal views on some issues than those who held different movement memories. Net of a host of other influences, memory of the movement's importance has a long-term liberalizing effect on race-related views that is selective but nonetheless important.…”

“…Both the Polletta (1998) and the Griffin (2005) studies address movement memory impact long after the mass wave of insurgent actions. But there is also some reason to believe that memory of movement-relevant events may stimulate political activism during movement ascendancy.…”