Laying Claim: African American Cultural Memory and Southern Identity

LAYING CLAIM

RHETORIC, CULTURE, AND SOCIAL CRITIQUE

Series Editor

JOHN LOUIS LUCAITES

Editorial Board

JEFFREY A. BENNETT

BARBARA BIESECKER

CAROLE BLAIR

JOSHUA GUNN

ROBERT HARIMAN

DEBRA HAWHEE

CLAIRE SISCO KING

STEVEN MAILLOUX

RAYMIE E. MCKERROW

TOBY MILLER

PHAEDRA C. PEZZULLO

AUSTIN SARAT

JANET STAIGER

BARBIE ZELIZER

LAYING CLAIM

African American Cultural Memory and Southern Identity

Patricia G. Davis

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2016 by Patricia G. Davis

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Bembo

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cover photograph: Reenactors from the Third Regiment, United States Colored Troops marching into battle at Fort Pocahontas, Charles City County, Virginia, May 2008; photo by Patricia G. Davis

Cover design: Gary Gore

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-1921-2

E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-8999-4

Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Cultural Memory and African American Southern Identity: An Introduction

1. Ghosts of Nat Turner: African American Civil War Reenactment and the Performance of Historical Agency, Citizenship, and Masculinity

2. So That the Dead May Finally Speak: Space, Place, and the Transformational Rhetoric of Black History Museums

3. From Old South to New Media: Museum Informatics, Narrative, and the Production of Critical History

Conclusion: Southern Identities in the Twenty-First Century

Notes

References

Index

Figures

1. Prayer circle at the Fort Pocahontas reenactment, Charles City County, Virginia

2. Ritual performances of exemplary masculinity and citizenship at the Forks Road reenactment, Wilmington, North Carolina

3. Enjoying downtime in the encampment area before the battle at Camp Nelson, Nicholasville, Kentucky

4. Engaging in battle at the Forks Road reenactment, Wilmington, North Carolina

5. Lynching noose in the Ancient Africa, Slavery, and Civil War Museum in Selma

6. Social space outside the African American Civil War Museum and Freedom Foundation in Washington, DC

7. Social space inside the African American Civil War Museum and Freedom Foundation in Washington, DC

8. The remains of the old Tredegar Ironworks on the grounds of the American Civil War Museum in Richmond

9. Visitors lined up before embarking on the transatlantic voyage at the Ancient Africa, Slavery, and Civil War Museum in Selma

Acknowledgments

What began as a sense of bewilderment at the continuing cultural and political power of the Confederate battle flag and subsequently evolved into a series of intellectual questions centered on the intersection of race, memory, and identity has now crystallized in the form of this book. As memories do not occur in a vacuum, neither do the books that detail their functioning. Laying Claim is the result of numerous conversations, conferences, symposia, workshops, and lectures over many years. These interactions have deepened my understanding of memory, culture, and identity.

I would like to thank Bob Hall and Luis Falcon at Northeastern University for providing me with intellectual and financial support for the research that went into this book. I would also like to thank Pat Aron for opening her home to me during my stay in Boston and for being a wonderful friend.

A fellowship in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill enabled me to conduct additional research and further refine my ideas. The productive mix of being in an intellectually stimulating environment that was actually located in the South proved invaluable to the development of the book. I am especially thankful to Eric King Watts, Carole Blair, Dennis Mumford, Della Pollock, and Bill Balthrop for their mentorship and discussions.

My time at Georgia State University has been instrumental in seeing this project to fruition. I am particularly grateful to the Communication Department and the College of Arts and Sciences, as the financial support and research leave I received in 2013 and 2014 were invaluable in enabling me to travel to both old and new research sites to gather additional data, to complete the analysis of this data, and to write and revise the final product. I am very thankful to my graduate student assistants, Aron Christian, Geoffrey Henry, John Russell, and Kristen Everett, for all the work they have done to help me see the book through. I am especially appreciative of Michael Bruner, Natalie Tindall, and Mary Stuckey for reading all or portions of this work and offering me the feedback necessary in its final stages.

I am also thankful to those who, as my reenactor friends would say, did what they did not have to do. In particular, I thank George Lipsitz for his astute and timely feedback, and Stephen Small for generously sharing the insights gleaned from many years of work studying plantation museums; I am also grateful to Alex Orailoglu for his keen editorial eye. I owe my deepest gratitude to Beth Ferholt and Rachel Kahn for their friendship, as well as for their emotional support and generosity with their time, and to Gayle Aruta for making my life manageable. Laying Claim would not have come to fruition without you.

I also owe a huge debt of gratitude to the many reenactors, museum professionals, online posters, and National Park Service historians, as well as the visitors to the museums I studied. It is your experiences, observations, and conversations that have provided the backbone for this book. Laying Claim would not be possible without your contributions.

I offer my thanks to Dan Waterman of the University of Alabama Press for his belief in the book, his patience, and his unerring support. I would also like to offer my sincere gratitude to Mark Lawrence McPhail and an anonymous reviewer for feedback that improved my analysis significantly. I am also sincerely grateful to Michael Schudson, Val Hartouni, Robert Horwitz, Michael Hanson, Stefan Tanaka, and Esra Ozyurek for their insights.

Much of the historical research for this book was conducted at a number of archives and libraries. In particular, the Virginia Historical Society, the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University, the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina Wilson Library, the Geisel Library at UC-San Diego, the Snell Library at Northeastern, and the Pullen Library at Georgia State were valuable resources whose collections complemented my human research.

Portions of this material have been presented at numerous conferences over the years. These included meetings of: the National Communication Association, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the American Studies Association, the Southern American Studies Association, the Southern States Communication Association, the International Association for Media and Communications Research, the Popular Culture/American Culture Association, and the Cultural Studies Association. Additionally, the Public Memory and Ethnicity Conference at Lewis & Clark College in 2007, the annual meeting of the Center for the Study of Citizenship held at Wayne State University in 2007, and the Symposium on New Interpretations of the American Civil War sponsored by the Center for the Study of the Civil War Era at Kennesaw State University in 2010 provided smaller, more focused venues for me to hone my ideas about African American memory, citizenship, and historical agency.

Finally, I wish to express my thanks to my daughter, Joelle Davis, who traveled with me to many of the Civil War sites I visited and absorbed this aspect of history and its reconstruction the only way a child, tween, and teenager can: with alternating fascination, bewilderment, and nonchalance. I also give thanks to my parents Simon C. and Ollie F. Spencer, whose emotional support and guidance made all of this possible.

Cultural Memory and African American Southern Identity

An Introduction

Over the last century and a half, it has been declared—in numerous venues and by various interlocutors—that the South will rise again. This is an assertion reliant upon a vision of the past replete with images of a beautiful bygone southern civilization, supported by narratives foregrounding principled rebellion against the threatened loss of that civilization and, ultimately, defeat in the hard-fought war that transformed it. Once a powerful rallying cry, the avowal of a southern renaissance invokes memories that have formed the contemporary basis for a regional heritage and identity initially constructed decades before the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter. These memories have functioned rhetorically as a potent binding agent, securing a sense of collective consciousness across class and gender lines. Though they have served as the dominant memories of the era, they offer stories that are partial, racially exclusionary, and dismissive of alternative experiences.

When I was a young child growing up in a small town in southern Virginia, the inevitability of that oft-quoted prediction appeared fairly certain to me. The region’s most vaunted and recognizable symbol, the Confederate battle flag, maintained a steady and ubiquitous presence in my hometown, being displayed in windows and on vehicles and emblazoned on T-shirts, lunchboxes, and other artifacts. In the popular cultural arena, the television program The Dukes of Hazzard was wildly popular with the general public, as well as with many of my elementary school classmates; its underlying theme of youthful defiance animated many breathless playground synopses of the previous Friday night’s episode. Likewise, the southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd was also a favorite among both my peers and the wider community, with its album covers worn proudly on clothing and exhibited on posters. Both the show and the group prominently featured the Confederate flag, equating its symbolism with an innocuous spirit of rebelliousness that was part and parcel of their popular appeal. Meanwhile, many of my history textbooks spun narratives of southern courage and resilience in the midst of defeat in what was occasionally referred to as the War Between the States, while painting the Reconstruction era as a period of tyranny that the southern people had heroically endured and overcome. In my mind, all of these phenomena were testaments to the ability of the region to reinvent and reassert itself in multiple arenas.

What also appeared obvious to me was that I was not included in the version of the South that would ostensibly rise from the symbolic ashes of Appomattox to claim its rightful place as the cultural, social, and political center of the United States. My Virginia birth and upbringing notwithstanding, as an African American, I had effectively been written out of the identity of southerner symbolized by the flag, the official history, entertainment representations, and other various texts implicated in the dominant narratives constitutive of belonging within the region. The conception of southern heritage encouraged by my history textbooks’ nostalgic focus on the grandeur and innocence of the antebellum South—and invariably invoked by bearers of the Confederate flag—served to advance a very selective, predominately white version of that heritage. This perception was reinforced every time my family drove past the Confederate monument on the grounds of the old courthouse in the middle of our town’s main square. The memorial, guarded by two restored Civil War-era cannons and engraved with the names of the local area’s Confederate war dead, advanced a material, though markedly one-sided, assertion of the entire town’s recognized historical identity.

My perception of the dominant meaning of southern heritage was further reinforced on a family trip to Thomas Jefferson’s home at Monticello in the early 1980s. The guided tour of the stately neoclassical mansion celebrated Jefferson’s achievements and painted a very pleasant portrait of his family life there, emphasizing the ornate contents of the house and its storied architecture. It was a visual history designed to advance a romanticized, tourist-friendly narrative emphasizing the legendary gentility of the Old South. Keenly aware of the history of slavery even as a preteen, I could sense that there were significant aspects of daily life on Jefferson’s plantation that were missing from the narrative. This tour—and, I would find out later, similar tours at other plantation museums represented a narrow reproduction of the past characterized as much by its exclusions as its inclusions. All of these experiences collectively painted a clear picture: whether the content and implications of dominant ideas of southernness took the form of the celebrated elegance and splendor of the Old South aristocracy or of the proudly defiant, so-called redneck culture epitomized by The Dukes of Hazzard, they invoked cultural memories and, by extension, a sense of belonging, to which I could never lay claim.

Many years later, while living in Atlanta, I followed with great interest the very public battle that erupted when Georgia’s then-governor Roy Barnes persuaded the state legislature to remove the Confederate symbol from the state flag. As I watched the battle unfold, I was particularly intrigued by the ways in which the public debate over the flag hinged on the question of heritage and did so in a way that evoked my earlier experiences with the racially exclusionary version of history I had encountered. While white proponents situated the flag as a proud symbol of their heritage as southerners, African Americans and their allies perceived the flag to be a negative icon of that same heritage: the symbol of slavery, Jim Crow, and other institutions of white supremacy. Both sides viewed Georgia’s display of the flag as implying state legitimation of one interpretation of southern heritage over others. What this and similar battles in other southern states made clear was that competing Civil War memories were central to the divergent readings of the flag’s symbolism. One set of memories invoked the version of the past presented in textbooks, at Monticello, and other venues of traditional historical representation; the other demanded a more critical interpretation of that same history.

The most striking aspect of Georgia’s flag war was that the state’s African Americans—who had had no public voice when the flag was raised in 1956—were able to use the battle to question not only the dominant meaning of the flag and the official memory for which it stood but also to interrogate the very meaning of southern heritage itself. Their vocal opposition to the status quo symbolized by the flag and the act of its display was a means of asserting their own sense of belonging to the South and its historically significant places and institutions. Thus my observations began to crystallize into broader research questions about the intersections between Civil War memory, collective identity, and relations of power. I was most concerned with an African American southern identity, which, as an identity centered on resistant readings of dominant, culturally powerful historical narratives, necessitated a focus on the practices involved in its construction and articulation. I was particularly interested in the ways in which marginalized groups historically denied access to the more traditional structures of historical knowledge production and representation mobilize the forms available to them as means of producing and expressing identity. This led to the following questions: What is African American southern identity? Where does it fit into normalized conceptions of southern heritage? What is the role of Civil War memory in its constitution? What is the nature and form of its practices of representation? What cultural work do these practices perform?

This book takes up these questions. My analysis reveals that there is a form of African American identification with the South centered on Civil War memory, and that this sense of belonging to the region is most productively constructed and articulated through a variety of vernacular cultural practices.¹ It does so amid a rapidly changing South that is experiencing demographic shifts that have not only contributed to the modernization of the region but have also afforded it increasing influence over national politics and culture. According to the United States Census Bureau, the South has experienced the greatest population growth in the country, with urban centers such as Houston, Charlotte, Atlanta, San Antonio, and Raleigh among the areas showing the most dramatic increases.² A substantial portion of this demographic trend involves African American return migration to the region, which began in the post-civil rights movement 1970s and includes northern-born blacks as well as those originally from the South. As the Bureau’s report notes for 2010, that year the region’s share of the African American population was the highest it had been since 1960.³ Most interestingly, this return has been motivated not only by the aspiration to exploit greater economic opportunities but also by the desire to (re)connect with deeply held notions of the South as a historically significant homeplace.⁴ Historian C. Vann Woodward has noted that the attractions for those returning were mainly old cultural constants . . . the values of place and past, the symbols of traditions of region rather than race, while literary scholar Thadious M. Davis has suggested that African American return migration represents laying claim to a culture and a region that, though fraught with pain and difficulty, provides a major grounding for identity.⁵

So perhaps the South will indeed rise again, though not in the manner that (in)famous declaration was meant to convey. The demographic trends that have transformed Dixie have also included a substantial migration of Latinos and northern whites and have contributed to an ongoing shift in political and economic power away from the industrial North to the region. These shifts have helped precipitate a more critical orientation toward dominant southern memory, broadening the contours of southernness to encompass multiple identities. It is within this context that African Americans have engaged in a variety of communicative practices designed to construct an identification with the South via the recovery of memories commonly perceived as a source of trauma and shame. These practices are constitutive of what Toni Morrison has referred to as ripping the veil, a concept describing the discursive acts implicated in the recovery of proceedings too terrible to relate—memories of slavery.⁶ The transformations they reflect have served to construct what I refer to as the new New South. In contrast to the old New South, which entailed a post-Reconstruction region focused on modernization and industrialization yet remaining steeped in the Old South values of black subjugation and white supremacy, the new New South describes a twenty-first-century region in which inclusion is the default value for all things southern, particularly its defining memories. This transition, along with the changes it has wrought, has served to complicate references to the region’s anticipated resurgence by enabling the following question: if and when the South does rise again, what form will this new New South take?

Civil War Memory and African American Southern Identity

Group identity is constructed from the stories a group tells about itself, prioritizing the inherited values, symbols and discourses garnered from collective memory. The role of memory in the construction of group identity has been the subject of much scholarship, beginning with the Durkheimian notion of collective consciousness and most famously articulated by Maurice Halbwachs, who advanced a theory of collective memory as group-centered and interactive. According to these formulations, memory is constructed and reconstructed through various discursive practices, while group solidarity is solidified through commemorative rituals.⁷ The increasing attention contemporary scholarship has accorded to the study of memory has foregrounded its various forms, including collective, social, popular, cultural, and public. Of particular concern here is the assumed distinction between collective memory as theorized by Halbwachs and cultural and public memory. My goal is to advance an analysis of black collective consciousness that mobilizes the key features of all three. This book offers a focus on African American group solidarity produced through collective memory while emphasizing the commemorative rituals at the center of Marita Sturken’s distinction between cultural and collective memory. Sturken defines cultural memory as that which is shared outside the avenues of formal historical discourse yet is entangled with cultural products and imbued with cultural meaning.⁸ Meanwhile, the importance assigned to the processes of recovering silenced historical narratives from the dustbin of history and destabilizing dominant memory prioritizes their reliance on the very public nature of the memories they produce.

Hegemonic memories of slavery and the Civil War have been advanced for more than a century via centralized master narratives constructed through a variety of dominant systems of representation. These systems fall into two major categories: those advanced by and through the state, its agents, and institutions, and those propagated through the private cultural arena. Primary among the first category are American archival institutions, which are far from neutral repositories of objects and data. The documents, photographs, and other records that archives hold are important sources of historical scholarship, collective memory, and national identity and are therefore active sites where social power is negotiated, contested, and confirmed.⁹ The values and actions that determine which artifacts these institutions choose to include in their collections and therefore valorize (as well as the ones they discard and therefore marginalize) are organized around the dictates of—and reproduce—the same structures of power that have privileged white-centered memories. Additionally, archives draw much of their authority from the fact that the social relations embedded in their creation and maintenance are largely invisible and rarely questioned.¹⁰

Other meaningful ways in which state institutions construct dominant memory occur in the political arena. Political rituals generally have among their uses the construction of collective identity. Those that have served as conduits for southern identity have historically used the Lost Cause as a powerful binding agent for a white collective consciousness heavily invested in Civil War memory.¹¹ In addition to state-sanctioned displays of the Confederate battle flag, the Lost Cause paradigm that characterized the oratory of many southern politicians in the early- to mid-twentieth century has found its legacy in contemporary celebrations of Confederate History Month, Confederate Flag Day, and other festivities.¹² Moreover, the states’ rights rhetoric that provided the paradigm’s foundation has retained its salience in conservative political discourse in the twenty-first century. While most—though not all—Civil War historians have long ago abandoned the tendency to give the era romantic treatment, periodic political controversies erupt over campaigns to separate the war from slavery in school textbooks. These conflicts are infused with important meaning and therefore have contributed to the construction of southern identity in both the past and the present.

At the same time, the cultural arena remains the primary means through which dominant memories of the Civil War have been advanced, as individuals and groups invested in the Lost Cause version of Civil War memory and its legacy have enjoyed preponderant access to the means of production of historical narratives. The early-twentieth century memorialization campaigns of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which resulted in hundreds of monuments dedicated to the Confederate dead, rendered the region’s memorial landscape both a symbolic and material paean to southern whiteness. The tourist discourses constructed at these and other sites—such as plantation museums and battlefields—advance official versions of history packaged neatly and unproblematically for mass consumption. Filmic depictions of slavery and Civil War history have privileged the experiences of the antebellum aristocracy while relegating black people to at best supporting roles and at worst dehumanized caricatures in the very time period that defines their identity as African Americans. Contemporary cultural productions of the era have been marked generally not by hostile or paternalistic and stereotypical depictions of Civil-War-era blackness—though these do indeed exist—but by symbolic annihilation, or the lack of representation, of African American experiences.¹³ In contrast to the overt distortion of stereotypes, symbolic annihilation is manifested in more subtle practices, ensuring that the hegemony advanced through the resulting narratives is masked and therefore more powerful. For example, the steadfast devotion to authenticity and battle minutiae enables traditional Civil War reenactors to shift the discursive focus away from the causes and consequences of the war, while an emphasis on the grandeur and ornateness of the main house allows plantation museum tour guides to avoid discussing the slaves who performed the labor there and elsewhere on the grounds, and whose bondage provided the backbone of the social and economic systems that gave rise to such opulence. These cultural practices have had the cumulative effect of constructing and representing a southern identity characterized by very narrow and exclusionary parameters.

While the critical memories constructed in response to this trend invoke the collective and cultural aspects of memory practices, they rely heavily on the discursive resources available in the very public nature of their expression. Public memories, according to Blair, Dickinson, and Ott, build collective consciousness through the cultivation of shared memory in constituted audiences, positioned in some kind of relationship of mutuality that implicates their common interests, investments, or destinies, with profound political implications.¹⁴ This connection between a group’s shared memories and the representation of those memories in the public sphere prompts the observation that stories about the past are really focused on the needs and power relations of the present. It informs, for example, the civic processes involved in the production of history museums, as well as the rhetorical strategies deployed in the cultivation of these institutions’ various publics. Similarly, it engages the variety of ways in which different practices of memory—from participating in a battle reenactment to sharing a museum experience with others—create meaning. It also underlines the very public nature of battles over Confederate artifacts and sites, where competing discourses pointing to the presumption of a communal heritage are often at the core of the conflict. In essence, practices of representing memory in the public sphere acknowledge and respond to the pluralistic character of the publics from which they issue. It is at this intersection of group consciousness that collective, cultural, and public memories intervene in the formation of southern identity, as museums, monuments, battle reenactments, films and other cultural institutions and practices work to strengthen sectional consciousness.

The Civil War has always been more than a definite, singular event in American history. It has traditionally served as a collective script upon which multiple discourses of race and gender have played out. These discourses were and are represented in the romanticized images of the Old South that emerged during the post-Reconstruction period and remain resonant in the contemporary era: gallant and heroic white gentlemen, passive and ultra-feminine white belles, and loyal and contented black slaves. In this vision, the Civil War was a white man’s war: a conflict between northern and southern brothers that was fought not over slavery but rather for the preservation of hearth and home. Propagated and assiduously maintained by white political and economic elites, this interpretation prevailed throughout the twentieth century as a means of ordering society by containing any fissures among southern whites while ensuring the subservience of African Americans and women. Southern society thus drew its identity from a history that privileged the domination of white men.¹⁵

Though the idea of