Gendered Geographies of Memory: Place, Violence, and Exigency at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute

GENDERED GEOGRAPHIES OF MEMORY: PLACE,VIOLENCE, AND EXIGENCY AT THE BIRMINGHAM

CIVIL RIGHTS INSTITUTE

KRISTAN POIROT

Although scholars recognize the importance of recovery projects that aim torecenter women’s roles in black freedom struggles, when it comes to thesememory practices, the “woman problem” of civil rights memory is moreacknowledged than understood. This essay argues that memories of civilrights movements are mapped spatially and rhetorically to depict correlationsamong Jim Crow contexts and acts of black resistance. The relationshipamong these spatial and rhetorical confıgurations is termed the “rhetoricalgeography of memory.” Through an account of the rhetorical geography ofmemory of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, this essay posits that place,violence, and masculinity animate a relationship between exigency and re-sponse, producing a gendered landscape of memory that limits at the outsetthe conditions and possibilities for women’s emergence.

Over the last couple of decades historical and rhetorical scholarshave called more and more attention to the essential roles thatwomen played in black freedom movements of the 1950s and

1960s.1 Through this work we learn that Rosa Parks was more radical than

KRISTAN POIROT is a jointly appointed Associate Professor of Communication and Women andGender Studies at Texas A&M University in College Station. She wishes to thank Jennifer JonesBarbour, Tasha Dubriwny, Nathan Crick, the anonymous reviewers, and Martin Medhurst for theirhelp with this essay. She would also like to acknowledge the Glasscock Center for the Humanities andthe Program to Enhance Scholarly and Creative Activities at Texas A&M University, both of whichfunded travel to the BCRI and numerous other civil rights museums in the South.

© 2015 Michigan State University. All rights reserved. Rhetoric & Public Affairs Vol. 18, No. 4, 2015, pp. 621–648. ISSN 1094-8392.

621

This work originally appeared in Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 18.4, Winter 2015, published by Michigan State University Press.

demure, and we celebrate, among others, Ella Baker’s organizational genius,Fannie Lou Hamer’s Southern black vernacular, and Septima Clark’s trans-formative citizenship schools to recover women’s pivotal roles in nationaland local movements.2 Despite these efforts, the Great Man perspective—aportrait that frames black freedom activism nearly exclusively in terms of anational civil rights movement headed and organized by men, includingDr. Martin Luther King Jr.— dominates the consensus memory of blackresistance since (the old) Jim Crow.3 As Davis W. Houck and David E.Dixon aptly state, “the most egregious crime of American public memoryhas been committed against the women: their voice and their struggle tohave a voice [in civil rights movements] . . . have been all but effaced.”4

The consensus memory of civil rights/black freedom movements, inshort, has a “woman problem.” This problem, however, does not begin andend with representations of acts of protest and resistance. In addition tocalling attention to women’s contributions to movement organizations,rhetoric, and acts of dissent, recovery projects have also focused on theoftentimes ignored sex-specifıc violence that constituted the Southern cul-tural landscape, including the lynching, state-funded sterilization, and ram-pant sexual assault of black women. In her book Gender and Lynching,Evelyn M. Simien pointedly argues, “to date, African American womenhave suffered racial-sexual violence without explosively emerging as themost gripping examples of hate crimes.”5 According to Simien, the “rapeand torture [of African American women] were ideologically sanctioned toenforce white supremacy,” and forgetting this systematic use of violencelimits our understanding of an extraordinary “era of terror” in Americanhistory—terrorism that exigenced a variety of black freedom movements.6

Danielle L. McGuire offers a new history of the civil rights movement thatsutures these acts of violence to how we understand black resistance of thetime. In her words, “the stories of black women who fought for bodilyintegrity and personal dignity hold profound truths about the sexualizedviolence that marked racial politics and African American lives during themodern civil rights movement.”7 Arguably, then, scholars ought not onlyfocus on the problem of women’s exclusion from popular movement nar-ratives; a thickened account of consensus memory practices requires a focuson the gendered rhetorical landscape of women’s erasure—an account thatattends carefully to not only what (and who) is remembered about freedommovements but also to what is forgotten about the contexts through which

622 RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS


those movements emerged. Such an account requires an examination ofwhat I term the rhetorical geography of civil rights memory.

Owen J. Dwyer and Derek H. Alderman use the phrase “geography ofmemory” to direct attention to the ways location and place function in builtmemory environments.8 In their extensive look at the civil rights commem-orative landscape, they argue that the relative placement of museums andmemorials, as well as the ways these sites locate movements themselves,shape the meaning and possibilities of consensus memory narratives. Sucha lesson attends to place in a way that is intimately familiar to rhetoricians asit works to understand spatial relationships as rhetorical forces in publicmemory practices.9 Understanding the rhetorical geography of memorydeepens considerations of the rhetoricity of place through a look at theconcomitant ways spatial relationships work with confıgurations of exi-gency and response to produce narratives that resonate with visiting pub-lics. Memories of civil rights movements, in other words, are not onlymapped spatially, they are also mapped rhetorically to depict correlationsamong Jim Crow contexts and acts of black resistance. The relationshipbetween these spatial and rhetorical confıgurations, I argue, prefıgures acommemorative site whereby, when it comes to black women, sex andviolence are displaced through acts of rhetorical production.

Although communication scholars recognize the importance of recoveryprojects that aim to recenter women’s roles in black freedom struggles,when it comes to consensus memory practices, the woman problem of civilrights memory is more acknowledged than understood.10 In what follows Iseek to supplement the acknowledgment of women’s absence in civil rightsmemory environments with a closer look at the conditions of their erasure,and I do so through an examination of the Birmingham Civil Rights Insti-tute (BCRI). In terms of size and audience, the BCRI is one of the mostsignifıcant civil rights museums in the United States, hosting over twomillion visitors since its opening in 1992.11 It exemplifıes the importance ofrhetorical geographies in a number of ways, including its relative location,its unique mapping of movements as both local and national, its incorpo-ration of a few pivotal women in its representation of civil rights struggles,and its use of built environments to envelop visitors in the places of JimCrow as well as the sites of racial pride and resistance. Through a closer lookat the BCRI, I argue that the woman problem of civil rights memory oughtnot be described simply as one that forgets women as movement actors.

GENDERED GEOGRAPHIES OF MEMORY 623


Rather, I hold that consensus memory practices are grounded in a muchdeeper displacement of sex/gender as constitutive dynamics of white su-premacy, black resistance, and the places and bodies through which racial(and sexual) hierarchies endured. The narrative that emerges in the BCRI,in other words, is one that relies on place, violence, and masculinity toanimate a relationship between exigency and response, and in so doing, theBCRI produces a gendered landscape of memory that limits at the outset theconditions and possibilities for women’s emergence.

MAPPING CIVIL RIGHTS MEMORY

Black freedom struggles of the 1950s and 1960s are a central feature ofAmerican public memory.12 Although the most celebrated versions of thesemovements circulate in a wide variety of venues—from mainstream andindependent fılm, popular music, ads, and art exhibits—the emergence ofnumerous civil rights museums and memorials in the South marked anotable shift in American commemorative practices. More specifıcally,public commemoration of the civil rights movement, according to Dwyerand Alderman, “expanded during the last quarter of the twentieth century,propelled in part by the designation of King’s birthday as a national holidayin 1983.”13 Until this time, most of the South’s memorials commemoratedthe Confederacy to remember the region’s so-called “Lost Cause,” and thesesites supported a heritage tourist market that attracted a devout but decid-edly limited audience.14 In contrast, the proliferation of civil rights move-ment memorials and museums inserted an attractive “Won Cause”narrative in Southern commemorative landscapes. Won Cause narrativesare eminently more saleable than their Lost Cause counterpart, and theyenable Southern communities to expand their heritage tourist markets toattract a much broader audience.15 As Marie Tyler-McGraw notes, “thegenerally conservative white business progressives of most southern citiescould fınd common cause with predominantly black city councils andbusinessmen in an effort to create public memorials and a new city narrativethat signaled an era of racial harmony.”16 However mixed the motivationalforces that enabled a revamping of the South’s memorial tradition may be,the effects of the proliferation of civil rights museums and memorials is hardto deny. In Dwyer’s terms, these sites reflect “a turning of the tide away from



a version of history that underwrote white supremacy toward one thatcelebrates its downfall.”17

Although these museums and memorials signify an important shift inthe Southern (and American) commemorative landscape, they also inheritmany of the traditions and features that have dominated academic andpublic histories for some time. Reverberating trends in public and academichistoriography to promote men as the agents of history, consensus memorypractices reiterate a Great Man perspective, and they reaffırm patrioticsentiments and the promise of American democratic institutions.18 AsLeigh Raiford and Renee C. Romano write, the civil rights movement inpublic memory becomes “proof of the vitality of America’s legal and polit-ical institutions, and evidence of the nation’s ongoing quest to live up to itsfounding ideals of egalitarianism and justice.”19 In her analysis of the BCRI,for example, Victoria J. Gallagher fınds that the institute promotes nonvio-lent resistance and silences and softens individuals who fall outside thedemocratic norm, including wives of male civil rights leaders, the BlackPanthers, and Malcolm X.20 These narrative features work with visual andarchitectural design elements to create a “largely unnoticed but silentlypowerful institutional discourse . . . entrenched in a highly Americanizedtheme, a ‘tradition of progress.’”21

As a region often remembered for, and sometimes even defıned by, itsracist past, the South offers a unique opportunity to promote the Americandemocratic system (and its citizens) to overcome bias and discrimination.Dwyer and Alderman make clear, “place and memory [are] inextricablylinked,” and the establishment of civil rights museums and memorials was“not only a struggle over history, but also a matter of geography.”22 Wherecivil rights movements are commemorated and remembered, in otherwords, matters a great deal, as locations of museums and memorials are notmerely bounded containers of historical narratives—site and locale areconstitutive features of public memory practices, and these practices canwork to defıne a locale’s public identity in turn. Not surprisingly then, theproliferation of the civil rights museums and memorials in the South wasunmatched in other regions of the United States, working not only toredefıne the Southern communities in terms of the “triumph of racialtolerance” but also to remember black freedom struggles, and perhaps evenracism itself, as an exclusively Southern phenomenon.23



The geography of civil rights memory, however, ought not be exclusivelydescribed in terms of the regional placement of many museums and memo-rials. Understanding geographies of memory requires attention to aconfluence of spatial and cultural relationships that come to bear in com-memorative sites and rhetorics. Such attention accentuates the intricacies of“site and situation” to direct notice to the placement of built memoryenvironments, and the ways these places map the particular histories andmemories that circulate within their boundaries.24 For example, criticsmight consider the relative placement of a museum and/or memorial interms of national, regional, and local scales, as they also contemplate thesociocultural dimensions and the struggles that emerge over the location ofcommemorative sites. The historical representations within these sites arealso of concern, as geographies of memory offer insight into the waysnarratives, images, and architectures map a remembered era and/or event interms of place and matrices of the sociocultural power dynamics, includingthose related to race, class, and gender.

A look at the geography of civil rights memory specifıcally reveals at leastfour trends. First, museums and memorials are often located in localesremembered for movement activities, in historically black neighborhoods,away from municipal centers (the traditional home of civic commemora-tion), and often at or near sites of remembered violence.25 Memorials andmuseums are in locations like Orangeburg, South Carolina, where threeblack protesters were killed by South Carolina Highway Patrol offıcers, andGreensboro, North Carolina, the home of the sit-in campaign that spawnedsimilar youth actions across the South. The National Civil Rights Museum(NCRM) in Memphis is at the Lorraine Motel, the site of King’s assassina-tion, which itself is located in a now-gentrifıed neighborhood that was oncedecidedly industrial, marked by extraordinary poverty, and largely occu-pied by black residents. And similarly, the National Voting Rights Museumin Selma is away from downtown Selma, yet still adjacent to the EdmundPettus Bridge where marchers were gassed, beaten, and trampled on“Bloody Sunday.” In these placements, museums and memorials offervisitors a seemingly authentic and oftentimes emotional experience, invit-ing them to places where history was made.26

Second, the affective and authentic experience of these sites is furtherenabled through a second shared place dynamic of the civil rights memoriallandscape—the use of built environments to recreate pivotal moments in



civil rights history. These spaces use architectural and spatial design toembolden narratives and create distinct experiences for visitors. At theChildren’s Wing of Troy University’s Rosa Parks Library and Museum(RPLM), for example, visitors are placed on a bus as a narrator tells the storyof slavery, Jim Crow, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott while images areprojected on screens. Here, as one sits inside probably one of the mosticonized spaces of civil rights movement memory, the segregated bus, one isalso enveloped within the sights and sounds of discrimination. Addition-ally, the NCRM allows visitors to gaze and/or walk through at a number ofrecreated and preserved spaces, including King’s motel room, the balconywhere he was shot, and the alleged room and window used by James EarlRay to murder the civil rights hero. And, in Birmingham, Kelly Ingram Parkhouses a number of statuary that line its paths in such a way that visitorswalk through depictions of state-sponsored violence that protesters metduring the Project C campaign. In this park, one can walk past a jail fılledwith children, amidst water cannons pointed at protestors, and through anumber of vicious dogs lurching to attack.

Third, just as museums and memorials are placed in specifıc areas, andwork to place visitors in constructed spaces, they also locate and map civilrights movements in distinct ways. In these spaces, black freedom move-ments are largely constructed in terms of a national civil rights campaigncomprised of a number of regional and/or local direct actions.27 Thiscampaign is constituted by networked public organizations, like the Na-tional Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), theSouthern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Congress ofRacial Equality (CORE), and these organizations work exclusively in publicdomains toward reform. As a result, nationally recognized leaders morethan local community organizers are more likely to be featured, just asacknowledgments of reform-minded efforts supplant sustained recognitionof more radical approaches. Indeed, just as these sites are much more likelyto feature King’s efforts to organize a public march from Selma to Mont-gomery than to even mention the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Com-mittee’s behind-the-scenes work in Lowndes County to recruit and trainactivists at that time, they are also more likely to center movement activitiesin terms of “leaders” and not the thousands of “foot soldiers” that composedand organized local initiatives.28



Fourth, it is the focus on aggrandized leaders, national organizations,and public acts of resistance of Won Cause narratives that map blackfreedom struggles in ways that necessarily obscure women’s contribu-tions.29 As Dwyer explains, “there is a distinct privileging of the public overthe private as the spaces generative of civil rights—a situation that mapsclosely onto the traditionally gendered division between public and privatespace.”30 Consider, for example, that the Martin Luther King Jr. NationalHistoric Site (KNHS) all but erases women’s contributions to the move-ment, neglecting, for example, even to mention Ella Baker as an advisor toKing and community organizer for the SCLC. On the rare occasion thatwomen’s roles are attended to, they are framed in very gendered terms—Rosa Parks and “Mama” King (Martin Luther King Jr.’s beloved grand-mother) are both described and revered as “gentle,” Coretta Scott King isimaged with her husband and/or children, and Fannie Lou Hamer is praisedfor her public confrontation with the Democratic National Committee withno mention of the violence she survived behind closed doors nor of herlifelong work as a local community organizer. In short, the mapping of civilrights memory through public memorials is far from gender neutral, asthese geographies simultaneously erase women’s contributions as activistsand organizers and reinforce masculinized notions of citizenship andactivism.

Although much has been written about the aforementioned geographicalfeatures of civil rights memory, a closer look at the spatial and temporalorganization of civil rights museums reveals another kind of mapping thathas been largely missed by those who discuss memory practices. In additionto locating and mapping movements spatially, these sites also organizemovements as strategic and situated responses to a set of exigencies thatemerged in particular Southern contexts. At the KNHS, for example, thefırst section of portraits and videos are those of segregated schoolhouses,lynching, and black poverty. Similarly, a tour of the NCRM begins with afılm that describes the Jim Crow South, and the guided tour of the RPLMstarts with descriptions of the segregated South and the organizationalstructures of black resistance before leading guests into a gallery that detailsthe Montgomery Bus Boycott. These depictions of segregation and JimCrow are framed as the conditions to and through which movementsresponded, narrating and imaging the cultural scene of black resistance as arhetorical situation. The structure and placement of civil rights memorial



environments can also be described in terms of a rhetorical geography ofmemory where both spatial and situation-response relationships work inmemory environments to contour and vivify memorialized narratives. De-pictions of and represented locales within the post-emancipation South, inother words, are as important as the material and symbolic placement ofmemories of the movements themselves, for these narratives rely on partic-ular understandings of Jim Crow contexts to underscore the trials andtribulations faced by cherished movement heroes.

Importantly, historical recovery projects indicate that understandings ofJim Crow contexts have a rather direct influence on how we understandblack resistance of the time. According to Hannah Rosen, for example, therecognition of the rape and torture of black women is essential to recoveringtheir role in black freedom movements. Her book Terror in the Heart ofFreedom persuasively demonstrates the importance of bringing togetherhistories of rape with histories of citizenship in understanding of blackresistance since the Civil War. She argues that “sexual violence and racistrhetoric worked together to produce a climate of terror in which black menand women were forced to maneuver as they sought to claim their rights ascitizens.”31 And while Rosen highlights rape activism in the years immedi-ately following the Civil War, McGuire’s book At the Dark End of the Streetdemonstrates the importance of rape histories and activism to the mid-century movements.

More specifıcally, McGuire begins her history of civil rights movementswith an account of the brutal assault of Recy Taylor. Taylor was abducted asshe was leaving church on September 3, 1944 in Abbeville, Alabama. Herwhite male kidnappers took her to a pecan grove outside of town, and six ofthem raped and beat her. The NAACP branch offıce in Montgomery senttheir best investigator, Rosa Parks, to Abbeville to help bring Taylor’sassaulters to justice. According to McGuire, the resulting campaign forequal justice for Taylor was one among many coalitions formed “on behalfof black women’s right to bodily integrity.”32 In fact, when one considersthese efforts alongside the Women’s Political Council’s organized resis-tance to bus segregation and the verbal and physical abuse endured by blackwomen riders, the Montgomery Bus Boycott was not the beginning of amovement, McGuire argues, but the culmination of a decade-long struggleto fıght the rape and degradation of black women. She writes,



The Montgomery bus boycott was not a prairie fıre, or a rising tide, or a gearthat tumbled in the cosmos. It was another in a series of campaigns that beganwhen Rosa Parks rode up to Abbeville in 1944 to gather the facts in the RecyTaylor case, so that black women could tell their stories. . . . Because of thecampaign for equal justice for Recy Taylor, sexual violence and interracialrape became the battleground upon which African Americans sought todestroy white supremacy and gain personal and political autonomy.33

Perhaps then, while it is the case that mapping movements in terms ofnationally recognized leaders and public organizations obscures women’sroles, framing black resistance as a response to a set of exigencies thatignores the racial/sexual violence directed at black women further miresefforts to recover women in consensus memory narratives.

To be clear, a rhetorical geography of civil rights memory directs attention tothe situatedness of museums and memorials as necessarily layered. Greg Dick-inson, Brian L. Ott, and Eric Aoki posit the rhetoricity of museums as diffuse“experiential landscapes” where material and symbolic resources converge to“invite visitors to assume (to occupy) particular subject positions.”34 A rhetor-ical geography of memory begins with these assumptions, adding to them arecognition that places of public memory such as museums might also mapevents in terms of rhetorical interactions among scenes and actors. Indeed,as the following analysis of the BCRI demonstrates, invisible representa-tions of place, violence, and exigency work to constitute an experientialjourney of civil rights history that necessarily occludes black women’s placein black freedom struggles. The location of a site, the use of built environ-ments to contour remembered narratives, the mapping of movements onnational, regional, and local scales in these narratives, as well as the contex-tualization of movement action within particular cultural exigencies andconditions, work together to animate and shape public memories of mid-century black resistance. Importantly, these rhetorical geographies are alsogendered ones, as the mapping trends in civil rights movement memorial-ization promote the exclusive emergence of men as agents of change.

GENDER, VIOLENCE, AND RESISTANCE AT THE BCRI

The BCRI is an exemplar of the geographical trends of the Southern civilrights memorial landscape. The Institute stands at the corner of Sixth Ave.



South and 19th Street North in downtown Birmingham, a part of the cityonce known as the Fourth Avenue business district—a booming area forblack-owned businesses that arose at the end of the nineteenth century andflourished through Jim Crow. Also at this corner survives the 16th StreetBaptist Church, the site of a 1963 bombing that killed four black children,and across the street from the institute is Kelly Ingram Park, a once segre-gated park turned commemorative space for the 1963 Project C campaignwhere nonviolent protestors were met with police attacks. On an Alabamatravel website, Lee Sentell describes the area in this way:

You may have read in history books about how Birmingham police usedmenacing dogs and fıre hoses on civil rights marchers a half-century ago, andthat racists bombed an African-American church, killing four little girls. Youmay have also heard of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, a world-classmuseum on human rights, but chances are you’ll be surprised that they aretogether, side by side. Visiting Alabama’s Civil Rights District, where some ofAmerica’s most painful events took place, is a powerful and emotionalexperience you should not miss.35

As Sentell’s description makes clear, the BCRI works in conjunction withKelly Ingram Park and 16th Street Baptist Church to transform downtownBirmingham into the state’s premier commemorative Civil Rights District.

This highly touted Civil Rights District did not emerge without contro-versy, however, as community members debated the merits of calling atten-tion to the city’s well-known history of racism, violence, and segregation.36

More specifıcally, Birmingham was widely known as the most segregatedcity in the South, where white supremacists used extraordinary violence intheir efforts to subvert black resistance. Living up to its nickname, “Bomb-ingham,” members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) bombed numerous homesand churches in the 1950s and 1960s, for example, and photographs of BullConnor’s tactics to sabotage nonviolent protests—including the use oftanks, water cannons, and police dogs—remain some of the more recog-nized images of the time.37 Some community members feared that thememorial space would call unneeded attention to Birmingham’s moresordid racial past, and others worried that the Fourth Avenue businessdistrict’s then-current reputation for being a “dangerous” part of townwould deter visitors.38 Despite some people’s trepidation of the institute’s



placement, proponents of locating the institute in close proximity to bothKelly Ingram Park and 16th Street Baptist Church won out, arguing thatthese spaces could help revitalize the historic neighborhood. After a 13-yearcampaign, the BCRI opened its doors in 1992, a statuary garden was built inKelly Ingram Park that same year, and 16th Street Baptist Church wasrestored in 1997.

Perhaps the violence-infused placement of the BCRI, as well as thecontroversy that surrounds it, evidences all too clearly the ways that vio-lence permeates place to constitute memories of the post-emancipationSouth and civil rights activism. Indeed, violence is not only a feature of theinstitute’s physical location—its place in Birmingham—but is also a char-acteristic of the ways the BCRI invites visitors to remember black freedomstruggles inside its doors. The institute’s version of the Won Cause beginswith a lengthy description of Jim Crow Birmingham’s physical and culturallandscape. Positioned in such a way that makes clear that this is the contextto which black freedom movements respond and through which nonviolentand violent confrontations emerge, this mapping of civil rights memorybegins not with a national campaign of civil rights actors but with represen-tations of local exigencies for civic action. After an extended engagementwith this scene, the institute takes visitors on a journey through a chrono-logical narration of various national, regional, and local actions. This map-ping of the movement is one that fırst and foremost locates black freedomstruggles as situated, strategic, and instrumental movements to the violentpolicies and cultural norms of the post-Reconstruction South. Within thisrhetorical geography of civil rights memory, violence and/or its repudiationemerges as a constitutive component of the rhetorical scene, a thematicthread that unites the institute’s constructed spaces.

REMEMBERING SEGREGATION AND THE VIOLENCE OF WHITE SUPREMACY

Guests enter the institute at doors under its most noticeable architecturalfeature, a large dome, and are quickly directed to a theater to watch aneight-minute fılm, Going Up to Birmingham: 1871–1921. This fılm describesthe city as a booming industrial center of the post-emancipation South—one that was segregated by race, governed through threats of white suprem-acist violence, forged by the “backbreaking labor” of its black citizens, and



representative of the ways black communities flourished in the seeminglyoverdetermined conditions of Jim Crow. The fılm uses descriptions andimages of the ways segregation was “backed up by brutality” combined withexplicit celebrations of the ways black citizens of Birmingham defıned theirown “self-contained” community to offer a multidimensional view of blackcultural life. As the fılm comes to a close, the camera zooms in on ablack-and-white still photograph of a black child drinking at a “colored”drinking fountain that stands adjacent to a noticeably nicer “white” foun-tain. With the still shot in view, the fılm’s screen rises to reveal what appearsto be those same fountains set against a beige wall. “Birmingham was a cityof two worlds,” reads a sign over the fountains, “Black and White.” Asvisitors walk past this scene they are symbolically transported to a Birming-ham of yesteryear—a place and time that has already been framed throughimages of segregation, violence, labor, and Birmingham’s vibrant blackcommunity.

It is here in the opening gallery of the BCRI that the mapping of civilrights movements begins, inviting visitors into an “experiential landscape”of memory.39 In this section, guests travel among and through constructedspaces that locate segregation and black agency in a number of placesthroughout the city: a mine, a soda shop, a bus, a theater, a school, a home,a church, a barbershop, and a courtroom. These places are not mock-ups ofsingular places in Birmingham; they are a series of synecdoches for thesociocultural dimensions of racially segregated space. For example, at thesoda shop, guests view a scene where a white high school couple flirts atthe counter while a young black girl stands outside of the space, longinglyand sadly looking in. Similarly, at the bus, one sees signs that point to the“colored” section of the bus, and images along the walls tell the story ofsegregated interstate and local travel throughout the South. Most notable,however, is the church that stands at the center of the room as the mostimposing structure of the gallery. It mimics the architecture of churches inBirmingham (including 16th Street Baptist Church) in a general way butdoes not replicate any one particular church. Once inside, guests learn thatthe churches were at the center of religious, economic, social, and civic lifein Birmingham’s black community, and it is here that the museum fırstintroduces the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights and the 60churches that were its constituent parts. Guests can gaze at black-and-whiteimages of these churches, portraits of ministers and choirs, and a stained



glass window from 32nd Street Baptist Church. They can stand at a pulpitfrom Bethel Baptist Church that displays Fred Shuttlesworth’s Bible and/orsit in pews, while the sounds of sermons, prayers, and song surround them.From the social dimensions of segregated businesses to the possibilitiesenshrined in and through the black church, these built environments arestrategic uses of place; ones that not only situate the visitor in the past butalso communicate the context of black life in the South.

Although this opening gallery appears to offer an impressive span ofsegregation’s places—public and private, white and black controlled—acloser look reveals that the choice of places themselves emphasizes thecentrality and importance of men in Southern communities. As illustratedby the placement of the church with the literal and fıgurative emphasis onthe black pulpit, places in Jim Crow Birmingham are masculinized spaces.Guests walk past a mine car and view images of mine workers (all of whomare male) to learn of black labor, and they walk inside a barbershop (not abeauty salon) to reflect on the importance of black-owned and -run busi-nesses. In a particularly poignant example of masculinized space, visitorscan stand at the edge of a courtroom scene where a black member of theCatholic men’s group, the Knights of Columbus, stands trial. Words fromThomas Jefferson form an inscribed banner over the witness stand, andimages and textual descriptions of the unfair targeting of black men throughthe convict labor system, the harrowing efforts by Thurgood Marshall andFred Shuttlesworth to integrate schools through the courts, and the variousways fathers sued on behalf of their daughters to challenge segregationdominate this space.

Additionally, even in the places that one might expect to fınd women’semergence, men’s roles, especially as workers, dominate the narrative. Ascaled-down home stands adjacent to the church and school and forms oneof two transitions to the courtroom. The use of a house could be a con-structed space to communicate a number of narratives about women’s rolesin segregated Birmingham, including black women’s work as domesticlaborers and the complex web of familial bonds, sexual abuse, and exploi-tation that women endured in homes throughout the South. At the house inthe BCRI, however, visitors are not asked to consider the unique hardshipsfaced by women but instead to contemplate the ways in which city housingwas segregated and related to black male employment. Emphasizing theconstitutive importance of black male labor, a textual description of the



house reads, “Neighborhoods often developed around coal companies andmines,” and in these neighborhoods “the black family was the central social,economic, and cultural unit. . . . Leisure time was fılled by church, school,social clubs, fraternities, sororities, and civic leagues.” And although thishome does contain an image and description of black women’s clubs, theshared emphasis on men’s roles and its connection to black men’s employ-ment places these clubs as just one among many features of male-defınedblack community life.

Although one perspective of the choice of places reveals diversity, andanother shows the nearly uniform emphasis of men in these places, it isimportant to understand the diversity and uniformity as working concom-itantly to locate black male agency, leadership, and labor throughout thecultural landscape, simultaneously erasing women’s diverse experiences.According to visual, textual, and spatial representations of the scene, blackmen span a number of classes and are employed as blue-collar laborers andwhite-collar professionals. They are entertainers, ministers, lawyers, con-victs, husbands, fathers, sharecroppers, students, community leaders, activ-ists, and protectors of children and their interests. Black women, on theother hand, are rarely imaged or referenced outside of the middle class.They are imaged as teachers, beauticians, students, wives, and daughtersand featured as entertainers, choral singers, and social club members. Andwhile black men work in and occupy a number of places, women, asrepresented in these places, rarely labor at all.

Most striking, however, is the juxtaposition of representations of blackwomen in relatively safe environments and networks against the numerousreminders of the grave dangers and hardships faced by black men. Anumber of images and texts, for example, reference the problematic andstrategic construction of the black male rapist to justify lynching. Visitorslearn of profound white fears of sexual and romantic relationships betweenblack men and white women, and they are asked to view a disturbing imageof two young black male lynching victims hanging from a tree. They readabout the murder of Father Coyle, who was gunned down because heoffıciated the marriage of a dark-skinned Puerto Rican man and a whitewoman. And when they arrive at the encased remains of a burned cross andKKK hood and robe, they learn that the cross was burned at the home of aninterracial couple. Additionally, there are a number of references to thephysically harsh conditions of the mines (a place imaged as being exclu-



sively occupied by men), and the description of the convict labor systemmakes it clear that it was used specifıcally to incarcerate black men. Incontrast, the sexual violence and exploitation of black women is nevermentioned, and neither are the degrading threats they faced on publictransportation, the forced sterilization they endured in state-sponsoredprograms, nor the unique abuse and hardships they faced as domesticlaborers. Indeed, although one can surmise that black women too faced theills of a segregated society, the images of them as social club members,beauticians, teachers, and entertainers in the absence of references to theirhardships, and in juxtaposition to the violence endured by black men, workto belie any strong sense of women’s oppression in the white supremacistSouth. It appears that white supremacists exclusively targeted black men,and black men alone suffered and labored in this environment.

Consider, for example, that after leaving the courtroom, institute gueststravel through a hall that transitions them from the “Barriers” section to the“Confrontation” gallery. In this comparatively narrow space, one is surroundedby images and artifacts of common stereotypes of black Southerners—“mammy,” “sambo,” and “pickaninny.” A sign states, “Black images in theWhite mind,” and textual description near it reads:

White supremacist literature portrayed Black men as razor toting, violent,and sex crazed, always on the prowl for defenseless White women. Blackwomen were pictured as over-sexed and immoral with no maternal instincts.These images were used to justify racism and violence against African Amer-icans.

Recalling that one has already passed images and descriptions of the unfairtargeting of black men by the Southern legal system, and the use of lynchingto terrorize the community, the referenced violence as perpetrated againstblack men in this description is clear. In contrast (and despite its mention ofthe sexualization of black women), not one image or description of “Je-zebel” appears, nor is there any mention of the sexual violence that blackwomen endured. In fact, in this hall, there is only one image of a violentattack, a blown-up scene from The Birth of a Nation where KKK mem-bers are dragging a black man through the street in preparation for hismurder. This image stands in sharp contrast to the largest portrait thatstands adjacent to the still fılm shot—a black-and-white photo of Aunt



Jemima happily smiling at the camera. Here, visitors are surrounded byimages of happy and jovial black women, and guests are left to wonderabout the material effects of these images on the lives of actual blackwomen; yet, it is very clear that the stereotypes circulated about blackmen placed them in mortal danger.

Clearly then, in the case of the BCRI, gender becomes fully imbricatedwith place in its representation of the segregated South. The constructedspaces—used to locate white supremacy and black agency in a diverse arrayof places—highlight black men’s labor, leadership, and entrepreneurship,and oftentimes theirs and theirs alone. In light of their centrality, andperhaps even because of it, it is not too surprising that within this portrait,black men are (often) the exclusive victims of white supremacist violenceand exploitation. Not only is there no space committed to remembering thesex-targeted hardships and triumphs of black women, the choice of placesalone makes sustained attention to black women nearly impossible. Guestsare not asked to occupy the places of sex-based violence and exploitationoften faced by black women—homes of domestic employers, doctor’s of-fıces, backwoods roads, dark alleys—nor are they invited to view places thatsignify women’s labor and role as community organizers. As an aspect of therhetorical geography of civil rights memory, these modes of rememberingthe segregated South illustrate a gendered understanding of Jim Crow. It isnot simply that men are seen as the agents of history (although it is that too),it is that male agency and lack thereof exclusively constitutes the exigency ofaction and the very possibility of response. Not surprisingly, the interactionbetween situation and response is mapped equally exclusively as a transac-tion among men.

MEMORIES OF NONVIOLENT BLACK RESISTANCE AND VIOLENT WHITE RESPONSE

If the “Barriers” gallery is a suspension of time, allowing guests to traversephysical and cultural boundaries to visit places of segregation and blackcommunity life, the series of galleries that follow—what is loosely labeled asthe “Movement” section of the institute—removes this suspension andredirects the visitor to travel through time and space. Here, place continuesto be used as a narrative strategy, but the mapping of the movement relies onan explicit sequencing of events to prompt a progressive journey through



history. Gallagher aptly describes the relationship between these gallerieswhen she writes:

The physical layout, lighting, and thematic progression of the museum evokea move from darkness into light, from the oppression of segregation to theaccomplishments of citizens, from the specifıc circumstances of Birminghamto a global sensibility and kinship. Thus Birmingham is transformed from“Bombingham” to an “All American City” that remembers its past . . . andhas learned and continues to learn from it. What is hidden by this “traditionof progress” theme are current demographics showing that Birmingham, likeso many other American cities, continues to be segregated.40

Gallagher’s point is well taken. The move itself—from the ambiguoussuspension of time and place in the “Barriers” section to the fast-pacedjourney through representations of national, regional, and local move-ments—offers a sense of progress and accomplishment that perhaps beliesaspects of contemporary materialized racial divisions.

The relationship between the two areas of the museum and among themultiple movement galleries ought not be described exclusively in terms ofprogress, however. In the intermediary space between the “Barriers” and“Movement” galleries, in a room marked as “Confrontation” at its entrance,guests enter a soundscape of emotive voices that express a variety of atti-tudes and beliefs about race, including statements that would easily bedescribed as hate speech. These voices become ambiguously embodiedthrough a number of life-sized clear and reflective glass panes that imagemembers of a community—a nurse, a mother with child, a police offıcer, abusinessman, for example. At the far end of the room, muted photographsof Klansmen cover one wall, along with an encased Klan cape and hood,remains of a burned cross, dirt, and shovel. It is here that one is surroundedby vile racist speech and images of the most notorious perpetrators ofrace-based violence, likely provoking an uncomfortable and emotionalresponse among visitors. This attempt to provoke an emotional reactionworks alongside the term “Confrontation” to frame the transition betweenthe two major sections as an interactive one. Indeed, although the “Con-frontation” gallery helps direct an inevitably progressive narrative, it alsofunctions to structure the journey rhetorically, relating “Barriers” and“Movement” as exigency and response.



The fırst responses are presented in a long hallway. Here guests areintroduced to a detailed chronology, “1955–1959,” which frames the expe-rience in terms of the passage of time. The opening sequencing of labeledevents maps the movement and designated time frame in terms of “Na-tional” and “Alabama” happenings, but the hall itself is almost entirelycommitted to the Montgomery Bus Boycott as guests visit three scenes thatdepict local citizens deciding to engage in nonviolent resistance. These threescenes are signifıed by three distinct places—a home, a funeral parlor, and acafé— each of which is represented by a large wall-mounted facade with anaccompanying soundtrack. The facades are backlit and attention is drawn torecordings of dramatized conversations between two or more people, andunlike the places in Jim Crow Birmingham, most of these places are domi-nated and led by women.

At the fırst stop, for example, a home is represented by a large kitchenwindow. Next to the window, guests push a button to hear a mother talk toher child about Rosa Parks and the importance of standing up for one’srights. A few steps later, and on the opposite side of the hall, a funeral parloris marked by a large glass-paneled sign, and with a button one can listen toa woman and her husband (the owner of the parlor) discuss her work withthe Women’s Political Council and the bus boycott. The man is concernedthat her actions will hurt business, but she stands her ground and insists thatit is time to act. At the third stop, the Corner Café, one listens to a conver-sation among a number of men. Although one of the men, the owner of thecafé, decides by the end of the conversation to support the boycott, most ofthe conversation reveals reluctance by the men to join the effort. In this hall,not only are women featured in more signifıcant ways than men, they areconstructed as the motivating agents for change—the women, not the men,are the ones ready and willing to fıght. By the time one reaches the end of thehall, one sees a rather large dedication to many women of the MontgomeryBus Boycott and a statue of Rosa Parks sitting on a bus.

Despite this section’s opening salvo of women as the motivators of themovement, women’s pivotal role in local and national movements drasti-cally dissipates as guests continue through the “Movement” galleries. Just asone passes Parks sitting on a bus seat, one is surrounded by the voice of Kingwith a transcript of his words projected on a wall. King and other maleleaders of national and local movements quickly eclipse the promotion ofwomen as central organizers of the bus boycott. Consider, for example, that



although women are proclaimed to be the “bedrock” of the boycott, as soonas one exits this hall, one literally and fıguratively turns the corner awayfrom an explicit recognition of women’s efforts. A quotation from DianeNash does appear over one chronology, but one has to wait until an exhibitof the 16th Street bombing to read a woman’s words featured so promi-nently again. In fact, Nash is not once referenced in the institute’s descrip-tion of the Nashville movement, nor is she mentioned as a pivotal organizerof the continuation of the Freedom Rides. James Lawson, on the other hand,is mentioned frequently as an important grassroots organizer and practitio-ner of nonviolent resistance. Nash fares better than other women, however,for well-known women such as Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, and SeptimaClark are never mentioned, cited, or quoted at all.

On its face, the quick and sudden eclipse of women’s efforts is surprisingnot only because they are featured so prominently in the opening hall of the“Movement” galleries but also because in these galleries the BCRI spatiallymaps the movement in ways that ought to promote women’s roles as itoffers a version of the Won Cause that ostensibly attends to local andregional movements in more consistent and substantial ways than some ofits other Southern memorial cousins. The large wall-mounted chronologies,for example, map the events as either “Alabama” or “National,” callingattention to various national, regional, state, and local movements. Theinstitute also offers four small stations that feature local movements inNashville, Tennessee; Greenwood, Mississippi; Rock Hill, South Carolina;and Albany, Georgia. And, indeed with its use of Birmingham as a synec-doche for other Southern communities in the opening gallery, the institutegoes to great lengths to impart the importance of local community organiz-ing for understanding black resistance.

Despite the attention to the local, a typical Great Man–Won Cause narrativeemerges. For example, three of the four featured local movements are readilyused by historians as ones that point to women’s pivotal roles in the organiza-tion, strategizing, and implementation of direct actions—Nashville, Green-wood, and Albany. At these featured stations, however, women are only rarelymentioned and/or imaged, and in many cases black women are absent alto-gether. Moreover, whether it be in the “National” or “Alabama” sections of thechronologies, the usual suspects, people such as Dr. King, President Kennedy,President Johnson, and Reverend Shuttlesworth, are featured over and overagain. And although every chronology displays multiple images of men, many



fail to visually represent women at all. The physical and cultural mapping of themovement, in other words, is only partially responsible for women’s erasurebecause, as the BCRI demonstrates, even attention to local movements func-tions to reiterate the Great Man perspective.

Perhaps then the issue of exclusion is not one that largely and exclusivelyrelies on the physical and cultural geography of memory but rather is madepossible by the museum’s rhetorical mapping of context and the movement.Like the “Barriers” section, men are the clear targets and victims of violentattacks in the “Movement” galleries. Among other descriptions and por-traits of violence, guests are asked to view images of Shuttlesworth beingbeaten by an angry mob and a portrait of Emmett Till and a short descrip-tion of his murder; they read of the castration of a federal judge who ruled infavor of black litigants and the assassination of Medgar Evers; and they areasked to remember the tragic deaths of James Earl Chaney, Andrew Good-man, and Michael Schwerner. In these representations, the targets of bombsare the explicitly identifıed homes of male leaders, and it appears that onlymale students were physically harmed during the sit-ins and FreedomRides. These descriptions of the violence perpetrated against black menfunction to offer narrative fıdelity to the Won Cause depiction. Since it wasmen who were the targets of the brutality designed to ensure white suprem-acy and segregation, it is also men who become the recipients of violenceaimed at subverting nonviolent resistance.

Indeed, it is the representation of the movement’s rhetorical geography thatstifles women’s emergence from the outset. The various galleries situate themovement’s rhetorical actions as responsive to and emergent from a narrowlydefıned context. In this context, not only are black men the targets and recipi-ents of violence, but through the masculinized spaces of Jim Crow, they are alsothe cultural, spiritual, laboring, and organizing agents of the South. They are, inother words, the likely locus of response, the agents of change. Not surprisinglythen, the narrative that emerges about black resistance is one that overwhelm-ingly relies on depictions of networks of male national leaders and communityorganizers, male-led organizations, explicitly identifıed male “foot soldiers, andthe violence these men faced as a result of their heroic acts of resistance. In short,the rhetorical geography of civil rights memory in the BCRI is one that mapsblack freedom struggles as a transaction among men because of the threats andhardships perpetrated against them.



GENDERED GEOGRAPHIES OF CIVIL RIGHTS MEMORY

Although scholars across the humanities have offered numerous and note-worthy attempts to insert women in to black freedom movement narratives,this analysis of the BCRI demonstrates that academic recovery projects,however noteworthy, have yet to redirect the ideological and genderedcurrents that undergird and animate consensus memory practices. Thesuccesses and failures of ongoing recovery projects are quite evident in theSouthern memorial landscape as places like the KNHS all but ignore womenaltogether, while other sites have at least one feature that commemoratespivotal women in black freedom struggles. Importantly, however, evenwhen particular women activists are integrated into the representation offreedom movements in museums and memorials like the BCRI, the result issomething best described as an “add women and stir” representation ofblack resistance. Such a depiction simply sprinkles women into dominantnarratives, doing very little to upset the gendered landscapes that necessar-ily promote masculine achievement and agency.

This hegemonic logic has implications beyond the exclusion of women.Although the BCRI (and perhaps others) confront visitors with the historyof the “ black male rapist” myth and its ties to white supremacy, it does notchallenge some of the very hegemonic masculine ideologies that worked notonly to justify the murder of black men but also undergirded the extraordi-nary and mundane acts of violence and abuse committed against blackwomen. White hegemonic masculinity places white men as entitled heads oftheir homes and communities, as well as so-called protectors of (white)women. Not surprisingly, the rampant sexual violence that emerges as aresult is oftentimes masked to preserve the idea that white hegemonicmasculinity is also inherently benevolent. By forgetting the systematicsexual abuse, exploitation, and assault of black women at the hands of whitemen, the BCRI remembers white male violence but fails to account for thereality of the white male rapist. Genteel Southern white masculinity ispreserved to a certain extent, and the efforts of white men to protect theirwomen and their communities, albeit in devastatingly violent ways, is farfrom challenged. Although certain white men are vilifıed for their actionsagainst black men, the cultural logics of white hegemonic masculinity andits sexual manifestations remain intact.



Beyond the recognition of its ideological shortcomings, the simple addi-tion of exceptional women to consensus civil rights memory silences thediversity of women’s activism, as it also relies on a productive forgetting ofthe sex and gender dynamics of the Jim Crow contexts that demanded suchsteadfast resistance. If we are to take seriously the much-needed recoveryefforts to include women in black freedom/civil rights movement histori-ography and the relationship of such efforts to public memory practices, weought not limit our view to the ways women are or are not added as heroicindividuals. Because representations of the post-emancipation South mat-ter to how one comes to understand the movements of the time, we ought toattend to a relationship in memorial contexts that is particularly familiarand relevant to rhetorical scholars—the relationship between context andresponse. And we ought to do so because it is precisely through efforts tounderstand this relationship, or what I term the rhetorical geography ofmemory, that the multidimensional gendered landscape of consensus mem-ory emerges.

Finally, perhaps there is an even broader lesson to be learned from thefailures of the BCRI to adequately recover women’s labor in blackfreedom struggles. Although feminist recovery efforts have called atten-tion to the race/gender violence of Jim Crow, and tied an understandingof such violence to ways we come to understand black freedom move-ments and their heroes, recovery efforts remain largely focused onhighlighting movement heroes. This analysis indicates, however, thatchanging the faces of what Christina Greene describes as the “sanitized”version of civil rights movement history and memory requires a rethink-ing of how we understand and describe the contexts through whichblack freedom movements emerged.41 The task before rhetorical scholarsthen is to thicken analyses and recovery efforts through more sustainedengagements with the imbrication of sex, race, and violence in these rhetor-ical scenes. In so doing, we will participate in recovering black womenas agents of history, challenging the Great Man perspective by rememberingin our own work the complex matrices and mechanisms of socialhierarchies.

NOTES

1. I prefer to use the term “black freedom movements,” over “civil rights movement” to

describe the wide variety of activism aimed at bettering the lives of African Americans



since Reconstruction. In this essay, I will use the terms interchangeably in order to best

represent the rhetoric of public memory practices and remind readers of the diversity

of movements that comprised American black citizens’ attempts to subvert white

supremacy in the United States.

2. In October 1988, Georgia State University joined with the King Center for Nonviolent

Change to bring together scholars and activists of civil rights movements in order to

“identify, acknowledge, and celebrate” women activists, “challenging previously held

assumptions about the civil rights movement” (Vicki L. Crawford, Jacqueline Anne

Rouse, and Barbara Woods, eds., Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers

and Torchbearers, 1941–1965 [Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing, 1990], xix, xx). Since

that conference there have been a number of academic edited collections, biographies,

memoirs, and articles that continue this recovery work, and in this body of scholarship

one quickly learns that the popularized narrative of a civil rights movement led and

held together by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. belies the importance of local networks,

community organizers, and women in the variety of movements that composed

mid-century black resistance. See Maegan Parker Brooks, “Oppositional Ethos: Fannie

Lou Hamer and the Vernacular Persona,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 14 (2011): 511–48;

Gail S. Murray, ed., Throwing Off the Cloak of Privilege: White Southern Women

Activists in the Civil Rights Era (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004);

Crawford, Rouse, and Woods, Women in the Civil Rights Movement; Marilyn Bordwell

DeLaure, “Planting Seeds of Change: Ella Baker’s Radical Rhetoric,” Women’s Studies

in Communication 31 (2008): 1–28; Christina Greene, Our Separate Ways: Women and

the Black Freedom Movement in Durham, North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of

North Carolina Press, 2005); Christina Greene, “What’s Sex Got to Do with It: Gender

and the New Black Freedom Movement Scholarship,” Feminist Studies 32

(2006):163–83; Davis W. Houck and David E. Dixon, eds., Women and the Civil Rights

Movement, 1954–1965 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009); Jordynn Jack

and Lucy Massagee, “Ladies and Lynching: Southern Women, Civil Rights, and the

Rhetoric of Interracial Cooperation,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 14 (2011): 493–510;

Peter J. Ling and Sharon Monteith, eds., Gender and the Civil Rights Movement (New

Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999); Lynne Olson, Freedom’s Daughters:

The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970 (New York:

Scribner, 2001); Maegan Parker Brooks and Davis W. Houck, eds., The Speeches of

Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011);

Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and

Resistance—a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of

Black Power (New York: Vintage Books, 2010); Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the



Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of

North Carolina Press, 2003); Jacqueline Jones Royster and Molly Cochran, “Human

Rights and Civil Rights: The Advocacy and Activism of African-American Women

Writers,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 41 (2011): 213–30; Lee Sartain, Invisible Activists:

Women of the Louisiana NAACP and the Struggle for Civil Rights, 1915–1945 (Baton

Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007); and Kirt H. Wilson, “Interpreting the

Discursive Field of the Montgomery Bus Boycott: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Holt Street

Address,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8 (2005): 299–326.

3. Consensus memory is a term used by Leigh Raiford and Renee C. Romano to describe

the “dominant narrative of the movement’s goals, practices, victories, and . . . legacies.”

See Leigh Raiford and Renee C. Romano, introduction to The Civil Rights Movement in

American Memory, ed. Renee C. Romano and Leigh Raiford (Athens: University of

Georgia Press, 2006), xiv.

4. Davis W. Houck and David E. Dixon, “Introduction: Recovering Women’s Voices

from the Civil Rights Movement,” in Women and the Civil Rights Movement,

1954–1965, xi. See also Greene, “What’s Sex Got to Do with It.”

5. Evelyn M. Simien, introduction to Gender and Lynching: The Politics of Memory, ed.

Evelyn M. Simien (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 2.

6. Simien, introduction, 2, 5. See also Hannah Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom:

Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

7. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street, xx.

8. Owen J. Dwyer and Derek H. Alderman, Civil Rights Memorials and the Geography of

Memory (Chicago, IL: Center for American Places at Columbia College Chicago, 2008).

9. See, for example, Carole Blair and Neil Michel, “Designing Memories . . . of What?

Reading the Landscape of the Astronauts Memorial,” in Places of Commemoration: The

Search for Identity and Landscape Architecture, ed. Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn

(Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Studies in Landscape Architecture, 2001); Greg

Dickinson, Carole Blair, and Brian L. Ott, eds., Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric

of Museums and Memorials (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010); Greg

Dickinson, Brian L. Ott, and Eric Aoki, “Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting: The

Reverent Eye/I at the Plains Indian Museum,” Communication and Critical/Cultural

Studies 3 (2006): 27–47; Victoria J. Gallagher, “Memory and Reconciliation in the

Birmingham Civil Rights Institute,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 2 (1999): 303–20; and

Jessie Stewart and Greg Dickinson, “Enunciating Locality in the Postmodern Suburb:

FlatIron Crossing and the Colorado Lifestyle,” Western Journal of Communication 72

(2008): 280–307.



10. Assuredly, there have been exemplary efforts to recover women’s contributions to the

modern civil rights movement, but this work tells us more about gender and rhetorical

history than it does about gender and public memory. And, although public memory

rhetorical scholars have offered astute analyses of civil rights museums and memorials,

their insights have been taken as the fınal word with very little attention being paid to

the gendered dynamics of exclusion in these formal consensus memory sites. See

Carole Blair and Neil Michel, “Reproducing Civil Rights Tactics: The Rhetorical

Performances of the Civil Rights Memorial,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 30 (2000):

31–55; Bernard J. Armada, “Memory’s Execution: (Dis)placing the Dissident Body,” in

Places of Public Memory; Bernard J. Armada, “Memorial Agon: An Interpretive Tour of

the National Civil Rights Museum,” Southern Communication Journal 63 (1998):

235–43; Gallagher, “Memory and Reconciliation in the Birmingham Civil Rights

Institute.”

11. Owen J. Dwyer, “Location, Politics, and the Production of Civil Rights Memorial

Landscapes,” Urban Geography 23 (2002): 33.

12. Raiford and Romano, eds., The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory, xii.

13. Dwyer and Alderman, Civil Rights Memorials and the Geography of Memory, 8.

14. Dwyer and Alderman, Civil Rights Memorials and the Geography of Memory, 38–43;

Glenn Eskew, “The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and the New Ideology of

Tolerance,” in The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory, 29; Mark T. Vail,

“Reconstructing the Lost Cause in the Memphis City Parks Renaming Controversy,”

Western Journal of Communication 76 (2012): 417–37.

15. Marie Tyler-McGraw, “Southern Comfort Levels: Race, Heritage Tourism, and the

Civil War in Richmond,” in Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American

Memory, ed. James Oliver Horton and Louis E. Horton (Chapel Hill: University of

North Carolina Press, 2006), 156–60; and Dwyer and Alderman, Civil Rights Memorials

and the Geography of Memory, 38–40,74–76.

16. Tyler-McGraw, “Southern Comfort Levels,” 157–58.

17. Owen J. Dwyer, “Interpreting the Civil Rights Movement: Contradiction,

Confırmation, and the Cultural Landscape,” in The Civil Rights Movement in American

Memory, 6. See also Dwyer and Alderman, Civil Rights Memorials and the Geography of

Memory, 25–27; and Eskew, “The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and the New

Ideology of Tolerance,” 28.

18. Dwyer and Alderman, Civil Rights Memorials and the Geography of Memory, 25–36.

19. Raiford and Romano, introduction, xvii.

20. Gallagher, “Memory and Reconciliation in the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute,” 311–17.



21. Gallagher, “Memory and Reconciliation in the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute,” 304;

and Eskew, “The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and the New Ideology of

Tolerance,” 60.

22. Dwyer and Alderman, Civil Rights Memorials and the Geography of Memory, 16.

23. Eskew, “The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and the New Ideology of Tolerance,”

28. See also Dwyer, “Location, Politics, and the Production of Civil Rights Memorial

Landscapes.”


25. Dwyer and Alderman, Civil Rights Memorials and the Geography of Memory, 78–88; and

Dwyer, “Location, Politics, and the Production of Civil Rights Memorial Landscapes.”

26. Dwyer, “Location, Politics, and the Production of Civil Rights Memorial Landscapes.”



29. Dwyer and Alderman, Civil Rights Memorials and the Geography of Memory, 27–31, 36–38.

30. Dwyer, “Interpreting the Civil Rights Movement,” 12.

31. Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom, 6.

32. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street, 47.

33. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street, 46–47.

34. Dickinson, Ott, and Aoki, “Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting,” 30.

35. Lee Sentell, “Commemorating Birmingham ’63 in the Alabama Civil Rights District,”

http://alabama.travel/road-trips/commemorating-birmingham-63-in-the-alabama-civil-

rights-district (accessed November 15, 2014).

36. Dwyer, “Location, Politics, and the Production of Civil Rights Memorial Landscapes,”

36–39; and Eskew, “The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and the New Ideology of

Tolerance,” 28–48.

37. Davi Johnson, “Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 Birmingham Campaign as Image Event,”

Rhetoric & Public Affairs 10 (2007): 1–25.

38. Dwyer, “Location, Politics, and the Production of Civil Rights Memorial Landscapes,” 37.

39. Dickinson, Ott, and Aoki, “Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting.”

40. Gallagher, “Memory and Reconciliation in the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute,” 315.

41. Greene, “What’s Sex Got to Do with It.”



http://alabama.travel/road-trips/commemorating-birmingham-63-in-the-alabama-civil-rights-district

http://alabama.travel/road-trips/commemorating-birmingham-63-in-the-alabama-civil-rights-district

648


Documents

Gendered Geographies of Memory: Place, Violence, and Exigency at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute