Autobiographies in The 21st Century

Southern Historical Association
Between Memory and History: Autobiographies of the Civil Rights Movement and the Writing of Civil Rights History Author(s): Kathryn L. Nasstrom Source: The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 74, No. 2 (May, 2008), pp. 325-364 Published by: Southern Historical Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27650145 . Accessed: 06/03/2014 04:42
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Southern Historical Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Southern History.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 202.57.58.233 on Thu, 6 Mar 2014 04:42:15 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Movement
Autobiographies of the Civil Rights

and theWriting
L. Nasstrom
Between Memory
and History:
of Civil
Rights History
By Kathryn In 1988, AT A REUNION OF THE STUDENT NONVIOLENT COORDINATING Committee (SNCC), Joyce Ladner had this to say about scholarship on "It was not until a decade after leaving the civil rights movement: SNCC that I began to read some of theworks on themovement, maybe even a little longer than a decade. Sara Evans's Personal Politics was
would
put at an even lower scale when she talks about Black Macho waited for this chance [to say and theMyth of the Superwoman?I've ten Martha Prescod Norman made much the for about this] years." same point more succinctly and more poignantly: "When all is said and done, it shouldn't be left to history to give our children a sense of us, because we're still here." Casey Hay den concurred, "Don't ever be lieve what you read in the history books. At best it's a pale approxi to these remarks, historian Allen Matusow wryly Responding have clearly
totally rubbish. I mean, it's revisionist to the core. She didn't even interview the right people, the people she should have talked to who I could have told her what really happened. Michelle [sic] Wallace,
mation."
observed, "the veterans of this movement enemies: sheriffs and historians."1
identified two
1 Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, ed., A Circle of Trust: Remembering SNCC (New Brunswick, N.J., 1998), 144 (firstquotation), 188 (second quotation), 135 (third quotation), 193 (fourth quotation). The volume contains a lightly edited record of presentations made at a SNCC reunion and inHartford, Connecticut. The remembrances spoken conference held in 1988 at Trinity College there and collected inwritten form in the volume are not in any strict sense autobiographies, but they are autobiographical in nature, both because of the first-person rendering and because many participants in the conference had prepared their remarks in advance, lending a literary quality to their oral presentation. Allen Matusow correctly noted that "what we heard here was an exercise in collective and individual autobiography." Ibid., 193. For their helpful comments and sugges
Ms. Nasstrom
Francisco.
is an associate professor of history at theUniversity of San
The Journal of Southern History Volume LXXIV, No. 2, May 2008
326 This way
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERNHISTORY

its critique of histories of the movement subsequently made into print, as former activists took up the pen to write their auto
inOur Hearts: biographies and memoirs.2 In the introduction toDeep a collection of essay in the Freedom Movement, Nine White Women
length memoirs by nine white women of the student generation of activists, the authors reveal that they began by "examining what has been written by others about our lives" and "arriving at the clear perception that no one could tell our stories but we ourselves."3 Peter Jan Honigsberg Rights Memoir, I encourage witness. stories, prefaces his memoir, with "A Memory":
Crossing Border Street: A Civil "This memoir is my personal movement to tell their others in the Louisiana
An Autobiography, pays historians this decidedly backhanded compli ment: "Historians do an excellent job of re-creating the past, but for the most part they do so by superimposing their own abstractions on the For Abernathy, those "concrete particulars of experience." an particulars" amounted to autobiography of 612 pages.5 Scholars themselves have picked up the refrain; sociologist Doug McAdam, Freedom author of the well-received Summer, praised Honigsberg's addition to the literature of the civil rights memoir as "a welcome struggle, serving to leaven as other memoirs have a literature too often dominated by dry, scholarly studies."6 History is under assault from autobiography, and, at least as some former activists have it,memoir trumps history at nearly every turn.Autobiography is more accurate, concrete
left is history."4 Ralph David too, before all we have to And theWalls Came Tumbling Down: in his introduction Abernathy,
tions on this article, I thank Tony Fels, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Tracy K'Meyer, Michael Lasher, Grey Osterud, Johanna Schoen, Tim Tyson, and the anonymous readers for the Journal of Southern History. 2 In this article, I use both autobiography and memoir to describe this body of writing. Memoir is themore proper designation for the texts thatmost former activists produce, as it connotes an
to Literature (6th autobiography. See C. Hugh Holman and William Harmon, eds., A Handbook ed.; New York, 1992), 41, 285. 3 Constance Curry et al., Deep inOur Hearts: Nine White Women in theFreedom Movement (Athens, Ga., 2000), xiv-xv. 4 Peter JanHonigsberg, Crossing Border Street: A Civil Rights Memoir (Berkeley, 2000), xiii. 5 (New Ralph David Abernathy, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: An Autobiography York, 1989), xii. 6 quoted on the book jacket of Honigsberg, Crossing Border Street; Doug McAdam, Freedom Summer (New York, 1988). McAdam,
autobiographical piece inwhich the author's involvement in public events ismost centrally under discussion, with other parts of her or his life history detailed less fully. Some activists, however, have written full autobiographies, and others label theirworks autobiographies even though they more properly fit the definition of a memoir. Therefore, I use autobiography, the more generic and encompassing term, inmy title and inmy designation of a specialized subgenre, civil rights
AUTOBIOGRAPHIES more concrete, more
AND CIVIL RIGHTS HISTORY and truer to the "experience"
327 of the
compelling,
movement.7
Upon closer examination, however, the issue does not resolve itself so neatly, certainly not for historians?who approach autobiography see more are to and memoirs, likely warily particularly those of a as even not and nature, partial, partisan, political self-justifying?but even for the autobiographers of themselves.8 For all the vehemence that she reads scholarly assertion, she acknowledges Joyce Ladner's works and they shape what she has to say about the movement. The inOur Hearts reveal that theirmethod was to read contributors toDeep write memoir second. Ralph Abernathy admits to a and first history
helping other historians research theirworks, I have been preparing to write my own account. After all, each time I told a story I remembered more about what had happened, thereby filling in the details of what may have been on the first telling a sketchy and incomplete narrative." The build his memories came to Abernathy with their questions helped and shape his narrative. Then, when he actually sat down towrite And theWalls Came Tumbling Down, he relied on books published by historians, chiefly David Garrow and Taylor Branch, "to historians who criticized
close working relationship with historians. Of the numerous interviews he granted to scholars over the years, he writes, "I now realize that in
reinforce my own memory."9 Other autobiographers, even those who historians, nonetheless used scholarly works to provide a it research base for writing memoirs.10 Civil rights autobiography,
7
For examples of other historical events and eras that have engaged participants in debates II veterans, Edward T. with scholars over the interpretation of history, see, forWorld War Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt, eds., History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past (New York, 1996); and for theNew Left, Rick Perlstein, "Who Owns the Sixties? The Opening of a Scholarly Generation Gap," Lingua Franca, 6 (May-June 1996), 30-37. 8 For a review of the changing assessments of historians about the value of autobiography as a source and as a literary-historical genre, see Jeremy D. Popkin, History, Historians, and (Chicago, 2005), 11-32. For a wide-ranging review of the ways that historians Autobiography have been suspicious of memory, along with a rebuttal to many of their arguments, see Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History (3rd ed.; Oxford, Eng., 2000), chaps. 1-5. As title suggests, he ismost concerned with memory in oral form, but his discussion Thompson's ranges over the nature of memory generally. For a brief defense of memory and thememoir that casts many of the supposed shortcomings of memory in a positive light, see Patricia Hampl, Memory "Memory and Imagination," inHampl, /Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in theLand of (New York, 1999), 21-37. Historians who have themselves written in an autobiographical mode are more likely to note the unique capacities of autobiography for historical understanding. See Paul A. Cimbala and Robert E. Himmelberg, eds., Historians and Race: Autobiography and the Writing of History (Bloomington, 1996), xi-xii. 9 Abernathy, And theWalls Came Tumbling Down, xv. 10 Autobiographers who cite or thank historians in their acknowledgments and notes include Honigsberg, Crossing Border Street, 165-70; and Mary King, Freedom Song: A Personal Story (New York, 1987), 15, 24-25. of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement
328
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN
HISTORY
turns out, is indebted to the histories it disputes, and the relationship between memoir and history is fundamentally more dialogic than
adversarial.11
context when a number of developments converged to create what is now a particularly autobiographical moment in civil rights studies.12 First, we are living in "the age of thememoir" when "everyone has a story to tell, and everyone is telling it."13 Recent civil rights autobi ography constitutes a portion of this broad trend, and the proliferation
1' My most immediate debt inmy conceptualizing civil rights autobiography as a dialogue between memory and history is to Pierre Nora's essay, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de M?moire," but I owe even more to the essays inGenevi?ve Fabre and Robert O'Meally, eds., inAfrican-American Culture (New York, 1994) that use Nora's complex History and Memory understanding of the relationship between memory and history as a starting point for analyzing case studies in African American history. Nora's essay is reprinted as the final chapter in the volume (pp. 284-300); the essay appeared earlier in Representations, 26 (Spring 1989), 7-25. I have drawn inspiration and insights from two other sources. On the intertwining of memory and history in autobiography and the related matter of its relationship to historical writing, see Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, '"You Must Remember This': Autobiography as Social Critique," Journal of American History, 85 (September 1998), 439-65, esp. 439-43, 462-65. For a study of a different self-conscious form of writing, that of female fiction writers of the late 1960s and 1970s who positioned theirwriting in relationship to literary tradition, see Gayle Greene, Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition (Bloomington, 1991). 12 While this article confines itself to those autobiographies produced during the last twenty years, it is part of a larger work in progress inwhich I take up autobiographical production from the time the civil rightsmovement was clearly identified and widely recognized as a movement (i.e., in the late 1950s) to the present. An early example of this dialogue between autobiography and history can be found in the reception accorded toMartin Luther King Jr.'s prizewinning treatment of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Stride Toward Freedom: The autobiographical Montgomery Story (New York, 1958), which framed the boycott in ways that would hold for decades. One reviewer presciently observed, "this firsthand account of theMontgomery devel opments constitutes a document of far-reaching importance for present and future chroniclings of the struggle for civil rights in this country." See Abel Plenn, "The Cradle Was Rocked," New York Times, October 12, 1958, BR24. This article is confined to books that fall squarely within the genre of autobiography and memoir and that were produced by committed activists who devoted themselves to the movement, rather than by those who can more properly be described as merely participants or even observers, as well as by those who identified as opponents of the movement. People from all these categories, however, have written about themovement from an autobiographical vantage point. Thus the full scope of autobiographical writing on the civil rights movement is large and diverse in its content and form, and it continues to grow. For the larger project I have compiled a database of autobiographical writing that contains entries on more than two hundred works published since 1958. Approximately sixty of these works were published since 1985 and thus fall within the scope of this article. 13 For a brief review of the contemporary "age of the memoir," see William Zinsser, ed., Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft ofMemoir (Boston, 1998), 1-21 (quotations on p. 3). See also JillKer Conway, When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography (New York, 1998), 3-6. In the late 1980s Ronald Grele identified a surge in autobiographical writing by sixties activists, which included but was not limited to civil rights activists. See Grele, "A Second Reading 159-66. of Experience: Memoirs of the 1960s," Radical History Review, no. 44 (Spring 1989),
of the movement have been in dialogue with his Autobiographies tory since the time the movement was still in full swing, but those produced in the last twenty years took shape in a particular cultural
AUTOBIOGRAPHIES
AND CIVIL RIGHTS HISTORY
329
of autobiographical works pulls civil rights studies in new directions. this general urge toward thememoir are trends particu Compounding lar to southern and African American literary and historical studies. In is one of the the African American literary tradition, autobiography and collective richest modes of individual expression, dating back to the slave era and continuing today. One of its salient characteristics is its "persistent engagement with transpersonal social, economic, and political issues."14 Southern autobiography, for its part, has been de fined by what Fred Hobson regional literature flourished calls a "southern afterWorld War rage to explain." This II as white autobiogra
phers wrote, in part, to come to terms with what was required of them by the searing upheaval of the civil rights era.15 Their memoir writing, too, continues unabated. Thus civil rights autobiography, were it sub ject to the same critical attention that has so rightly been devoted to the understand slave narratives and the times that produced them, promises to help us a later epochal time when many blacks and some whites sought once again to topple white tions and effects. supremacy in itsmyriad manifesta
these autobiographers write about the civil rights move Moreover, ment at a time when a grand narrative of themovement has taken hold in popular
discourse, and that narrative grounds much of civil rights autobiography.16 At its core the grand narrative sounds the themes of
14 inWilliam L. Andrews, Frances Smith William L. Andrews, "Secular Autobiography," to African American Literature (New Foster, and Trudier Harris, eds., The Oxford Companion York, 1997), 35. For critical commentary on this tradition see William L. Andrews, ed., African American Autobiography: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1993), esp. 1-7, 171-72; and Joanne M. Braxton, Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition Within a Tradition (Philadelphia, 1989). 15 Fred Hobson, Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to Explain (Baton Rouge, 1983); Hobson, But Now I See: The White Southern Racial Conversion Narrative (Baton Rouge, 1999). For critical commentary on southern autobiography generally, see J. Bill Berry, ed., Located
Lives: Place and Idea in Southern Autobiography (Athens, Ga., 1990), esp. 66-77; and Berry, ed., Home Ground: Southern Autobiography 1991). (Columbia, Mo., 16 I employ the phrase grand narrative rather than master narrative for two reasons: I am seeking to avoid the gendered and racialized connotations of theword master, and I am seeking to signal the reverential place accorded to the history of the civil rightsmovement in twentieth century U.S. history. For discussions of what I call the grand narrative of the civil rightsmove ment in popular discourse and historical writing, see Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "The Long Civil and the Political Uses of the Past," Journal of American History, 91 (March Rights Movement 1233-63; Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for 2005), Democracy (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), 1-14; Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the and 10-11; Brian Ward, "Forgotten Wails (Princeton, 2003), Struggle for Postwar Oakland of theModern African American Freedom Master Narratives: Media, Culture, and Memories Struggle," inWard, ed., Media, Culture, and theModern African American Freedom Struggle (Gainesville, 2001), 8-10; Charles M. Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing and Freedom Struggle (Berkeley, 1995), 3, 391^105, 413^-1; Tradition and theMississippi Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein, "Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the
330 American movement

idealism, progress, and racial reconciliation. The civil rights its origins marked by the U.S. began in the mid-1950s,
Supreme Court's landmark 1954 ruling against racial segregation and Bus Boycott of 1955-1956, when fifty thousand by theMontgomery black citizens refused to ride the city's buses and eventually brought an end to segregated transport. The events inMontgomery inaugurated a decade Martin
of collective action, inspired by the charismatic leadership of Luther King Jr. and sustained by the heroism, dignity, and themovement was a pow sacrifice of African Americans. Animating nonviolent erful moral vision of direct action and the goal of an inter From Montgomery racial democracy. the grand narrative moves forward by a series of dramatic episodes, chief among them the de segregation of Central High School in Little Rock, the lunch counter
sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, the Birmingham campaign, theMarch on and King's "I have a dream" speech, and the voting rights Washington march from Selma toMontgomery. Key legislative victories were se cured during thiswave of protest, notably the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and theVoting Rights Act of 1965. Taken together, black activism and the governmental response succeeded in abolishing legal segregation
and granting full citizenship Black rights to African Americans. Americans and the nation as a whole took a decided step forward. In the mid-1960s, movement movement Black
message
are closely tied to the iconic figure ofMartin Luther King, not his life trajectory but also the drama and heroism of what simply in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Branch Taylor biography-cum-history called "America in the King Years."18 While it is impossible to pin
of Martin Luther King. The the tragic assassination era serves as a "tragic epilogue" to the grand narrative, the movement the moral of earlier and without its ef clarity lacking ficacy.17 Both the chronology of the grand narrative and its moral Power
however, according to this prevailing narrative, the began to unravel, and 1968 brought the symbolic end of the with
is the point when the grand narrative crystallized, one rough measure establishment of King's birthday as a federal holiday, observed nation wide for the first time in 1986. What preceded thiswas several decades of filtering and framing of the movement, beginning with contempo
Early Civil Rights Movement," Journal ofAmerican History, 75 (December 1988), 786-811, esp. 786-87,811. 17 The phrase tragic epilogue is Brian Ward's. Ward, "Forgotten Wails and Master Narra tives," 9. 18 in the King Years, 1954-63 (New York, Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America 1988). Branch subsequently published Pillar of Fire: America in theKing Years, 1963-65 (New York, 1998) and Ai Canaan's Edge: America in theKing Years, 1965-68 (New York, 2006).
A UTOBIOGRAPHIES raneous media
331
representations, compounded by scholars who subse on media relied and followed by replication accounts, heavily quently core in culture its elements of myriad popular representations.19 Like any master narrative, this civil rights story is heatedly contested, but the contestation power. constitutes "Reductive
with no direct experience of the movement "remember" it in ways to who lived it. In similar those its through remarkably grandeur and idealism, it remains available as a call to further action toward racial justice, but like any master narrative, it legitimizes some actions, out comes, and interpretations over others.20 Among those who are under its sway, even as they object to it, are civil rights autobiographers.
but also to its speaks not only to its inadequacies and brittle" as it is, the grand narrative nonetheless a "deep" memory, so much so that younger generations
parallel and diverge from civil rights autobiography. Martin Luther King himself has come to be viewed not solely as the apostle of nonviolence and orator of "I have a dream" fame but also as a social democrat who inequality.21 nationalism and armed spoke Scholars increasingly against militarism and economic have recovered a sustained tradition of black
Recent civil rights autobiographies appeared at a time when profes sional historians have produced a substantial body of specialized lit erature that challenges this particular master narrative inways that both
self-defense that began before and extended after the heyday of Black Power in the late 1960s, and that tradition must now be weighed against the tradition of nonviolent action in and moral visions the political philosophies assessing black activism.22 Women's historians have undertaken embedded a far-ranging
in
in the Civil Rights Movement in Atlanta, Georgia," Gender and History, 11 (April Leadership "The 'Gun-Toting' Gloria Richardson: Black Violence in 1999), 113-44; and JennyWalker, in Peter J.Ling and Sharon Monteith, eds., Gender and the Civil Rights Cambridge, Maryland," Movement (new ed.; New Brunswick, N.J., 2004), 169-85. 20 "Reductive and brittle" is Brian Ward's and apt characterization; see "Forgotten Wails Master Narratives," 8. For the notion of a "deep" memory and the argument that thememory of the civil rightsmovement remains available as a call to further action, even as thatmemory also suggests limits on the parameters of that potential action, see Larry J.Griffin, "What Do These Memories Do? Civil Rights Remembrance and Racial Attitudes" (paper delivered at the UNC Duke Southern Studies Seminar, Chapel Hill, N.C., October 7, 2005; in author's possession). 21 Vincent Gordon Harding, "Beyond Amnesia: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Future of America," Journal ofAmerican History, 74 (September 1987), 468-76; Thomas F. Jackson, From Civil Rights toHuman Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice 2007). (Philadelphia, 22 William L. Van Deburg, New Day inBabylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975 (Chicago, 1992); Akinyele Umoja, "Eye for an Eye: The Role of Armed
19 Hall, "Long Civil Rights Movement," 1235-37; Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom, ; 391-405, 413^41 Ward, "Forgotten Wails and Master Narratives," 8-11. For case studies of this framing process, see Kathryn L. Nasstrom, "Down to Now: Memory, Narrative, and Women's
332
and one of themost salient contri study of gender in themovement, butions of this body of work is an expanded conception of what con stitutes leadership.23 The newest body of work details themovement's
ment
mass move how moving to the suburbs and into private schools?a of a different sort?shaped the civil rights era and limited the to the the most significant challenge movement's gains.24 Perhaps grand narrative has come from a host of state and local studies, along with biographies of lesser-known activists, that underscore the scale of a mass movement made up of hundreds of thousands of citizens with
it opposition and assesses "white flight" and the political mobilization more racial and entailed against black empowerment. This integration and conservatives reveals searching interpretation of white moderates
a diversity of goals, tactics, and results, both successes and failures? all of which make it difficult to speak, inmuch the same way that the accumulation of autobiographies has, of the civil rightsmovement as a single movement peopled by known figures and with a clear trajectory and well-established measures of its significance.25 It is not too much
in the (Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University, 1996); Mississippi Freedom Movement" Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and theRoots of Black Power (Chapel Hill, 1999); Self, American Babylon; Lance Hill, The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill, 2004); Christopher B. Strain, Pure Fire: Self Defense as Activism in the Civil Rights Era (Athens, Ga., 2005); Emilye Crosby, A Little Taste of Freedom: The Black Freedom Struggle in Claiborne County, Mississippi (Chapel Hill, 2005). 23 Charles Payne, "Ella Baker and Models of Social Change," Signs, 14 (Summer 1989), 885-99, esp. 897-99; Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom; Bernice McNair Barnett, "Invisible Southern Black Women Leaders in theCivil Rights Movement: The Triple Constraints of Gender, Race, and Class," Gender and Society, 7 (June 1993), 162-82; Nasstrom, "Down to Now"; Resistance
Belinda Robnett, How Long? How Long? African-American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York, 1997). 24 Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making ofModern Conservatism (Princeton, 2005); Jason Sokol, There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in theAge of Civil Rights, 1945-1975 (New York, 2006); Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, 2006); Joseph Crespino, In Search ofAnother Country: Mississippi and theConservative Counterrevolution (Princeton, 2007). For nonsouthern cases see Self, American Babylon; and Matthew J.Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 2006). 25 This literature is large and growing. For notable recently published examples, see John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in (Urbana, 1994); Glenn T. Mississippi in the Civil Rights Struggle Eskew, But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements (Chapel Hill, 1997); Cynthia Griggs Fleming, Soon We Will Not Cry: The Liberation of Ruby Doris Smith Robinson (Lanham, Md., 1998); Catherine Fosl, Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in theCold War South (New York, 2002); Chana Kai Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer Lee, For Freedom's (Urbana, 1999); Diane McWhorter, The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: (New York, 2001); Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom; Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill, 2003); Tyson, Radio Free Dixie; Crosby, Little Taste of Freedom; and J.Todd Moye, Let thePeople Decide: Black Freedom in Sunflower County, Mississippi, and White Resistance Movements 1945-1986 (Chapel Hill, 2004).
A UTOBIOGRAPHIES
333
to say, as one reviewer concluded recently, that the civil rights move ment threatens to become "indefinable."26 Most recently, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall framed recent scholarship and the master
civil rights narrative in even broader terms, finding that its among principal architects, especially after the pivotal decade of the were thememory of "color-blind conservatives" who mobilized 1960s, more to forestall fundamental change. They the civil rights movement defined the civil rights story as being chiefly, even exclusively, about establishing formal equality through the law, and they cast its more remedies, such as affirmative action and far-reaching race-conscious aggressive efforts to end poverty, as beyond the pale of the legitimate cialized
movement.27
Yet very little of the substance and import of this spe literature and scholarly critique has made itsway into popular understandings of themovement. The question of whether and how the grand narrative can be revised and what role autobiography might play in that revision remains vital. This
bring to light. While of the this detailed literary analysis article, I consider scope autobiography as a distinctive form of historical writing on themove ment, able to do work that scholarly writing has not done. I then turn information about the movement that memoirs is beyond to autobiography's conversation with history about the form, content, civil of and scope rights history. By demonstrating that civil rights autobiography takes shape in a dialogue between memory and history, to revise I suggest that the potential of civil rights autobiography and from less differences derives narratives autobiography's existing of historical than the forms from from other pro writing departures
histories for the writing of civil rights history. My analysis proceeds in two main parts. First, I provide an overview of recent autobiographical production, highlighting the new implications of these personal
its article explores the nature of civil rights autobiography, the the narratives of and to historical other movement, relationship
that body of work. This that autobiography engages civil engagement gives rights autobiography a unique ability to reveal some narratives, especially the grand narrative, are so durable, why while also contributing to the project of revising them. In the dialogue ductive ways that civil rights autobiography undertakes with history,
the grand
26 Peter A. Kuryla, "A Politics of Self-Defense? Rethinking Civil Rights as 'Pure Fire,'" review of Christopher B. Strain, Pure Fire: Self-Defense as Activism in the Civil Rights H-Net Reviews, Era, H-South, April 2006, http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev 144881149692907 (accessed February 5, 2008). .cgi?path= 27 1237-39. Hall, "Long Civil Rights Movement,"
334
HISTORY
narrative is simultaneously the story to be overturned and the story that is necessary to that overturning. Finally, in this article's conclusion, I suggest how the proliferation of new stories that autobiographies bring to light can go forward with the search for a shared, yet significantly revised history of the civil rights movement. In the analysis that follows, I comment on the relationship of con in these texts, but I consider autobiography tent, form, and meaning "social
centrally as what literary critic Albert E. Stone calls a transaction."28 My concern lies with the production of autobi ography and the cultural context that called forth the text. Recent civil constitutes a distinctive and highly specialized rights autobiography even more engagement with subgenre, defined in large part by a self-conscious the work of history (that is, the writing and evaluating of historical studies narratives). The "social transaction" strain in autobiographical dovetails with
memory
to plumb the depths of personal prompt autobiographers to put forward alternative views. The impulse to respond to existing narratives shapes and limits, in turn,what is recovered from memory and constructs the people and events recounted. Thus while autobiography remains valuable as a source that,when used with care, allows scholars to recover for the historical record neglected aspects of equacies history, I regard it less as a source and more centrally as an act of interpretation that is, in that key sense, like all history writing.30 To
tive reconstructions informed by present-day circumstances.29 For my purposes, these circumstances include the existing scholarly and popu lar histories of the movement. These narratives act as a foil, or the touchstone, against which memory is drawn, and their perceived inad
the most central and productive insight of recent theo on nature of memory, namely, that memories the (and by ex rizing tension memoirs) do not contain simple and faithful retrievals of the events, experiences, and emotions of the past. They are instead selec
28 Albert E. Stone, "Modern American Autobiography: Texts and Transactions," in Paul John Eakin, ed., American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect (Madison, 1991), 95-120, esp. on pp. 110-11). 96-111 29 (quotation Key works in a vast literature on this topic include Frederic C. Bartlett, Remembering: A Study inExperimental and Social Psychology (1932; reprint, Cambridge, Eng., 1954); Edmund Blair Bolles, Remembering and Forgetting: An Inquiry into theNature ofMemory (New York, 1988); and Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge, Mass., 1989). For summaries of the state of memory studies of particular relevance forU.S. and southern historians, see David Thelen, "Memory and American History," Journal of American History, 75 (March 1989), and Genevi?ve Fabre, "Introduction," in Fabre and O'Meally, 1117-29; Robert O'Meally eds., History and Memory inAfrican-American Culture, 3-17; and W. Fitzhugh Brundage, "No Deed in Brundage, ed., Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern but Memory," Identity (Chapel Hill, 2000), 1-28. 30 The question of accuracy in autobiography involves thornymatters on which much critical
AUTOBIOGRAPHIES
335
to engage existing histories focus on the felt need of autobiographers of themovement is to invite autobiography into the fold of history and
champion partisan positions and settle old scores. On occasion, I touch on these aspects of individual works, but I approach this body of writing with the conviction that something more substantive than the narrowly personal is at stake. All activists and activists-turned autobiographers?whatever to a mass movement now?contributed their human faults and failings, then and for social justice. In writing
act. to recognize it as a historiographical One final point about my approach to autobiography is worth mak together with reviews of ing explicit. Civil rights autobiographies, other have often been a place to those autobiographies activists, by
their autobiographies they seek to produce a "little narrative" that "transcends self-indulgence when placed against the backdrop of the master narrative."31 More pointedly, they turn their life stories toward the political end of shaping a public understanding of the movement the expansive movement that encompasses they remember and whose themovement remembrance remains vital precisely because is unfin
ished to them, its most deeply challenging goals yet to be realized. This, then, is a generous, if critical, reading of civil rights autobiog raphy, as I follow these writers in their effort to tell their individual stories and at the same time contribute to a more progressive rights story. The simultaneous
civil
attack on and use of history in civil rights auto is biographies taking place in the wider context of an outpouring of autobiography, not just in civil rights studies but in our times more
ink has been spilled. Autobiography criticism of the last three decades, deeply informed by postmodernism, has fairly thoroughly demolished the ground on which earlier critics drew an easy correlation between the life as lived (history) and the life as represented in the text (literature). Many critics, however, stillmaintain a distinction between fact and fiction, history and literature, as itpertains to autobiography. The events and facts presented in autobiography can be subjected to the usual standards of verification, and due analytical weight can be given to theways that the passage of time reshapes memories. Moreover, autobiography offers distinct advantages, as it shares with other first-person accounts, such as oral history, an especial ability to reveal identity and consciousness. For a recent insightful commentary on autobiography as a hybrid genre of history and fiction, see Popkin, History, Historians, and Autobiography, 33-56. For a subtle use of autobiography as a source and an argument for the need of historians to seek "a middle ground between a convenient but potentially uncritical reading of autobiography as fact, on the one hand, and a debilitating skepticism about autobiography's truthfulness, on the other," see Jennifer Ritterhouse, Growing Up Jim Crow: How Black and White Southern Children Learned Race 112. I am also indebted to Joan W. Scott's discursive understanding of (Chapel Hill, 2006), in Judith Butler and JoanW. Scott, eds., Feminists Theorize the experience; see '"Experience,"' Political (New York, 1992), 22-40, esp. 34-35. 31 Master Narrative," in Sheron J.Dailey, Frederick C. Corey, "The Personal: Against the The Future of Performance Studies: Visions and Revisions (Annandale, Va., 1998), 250. ed.,
336 generally. Among Angela childhood A
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY

craze for memoir gripped the publishing world. of these recent works are Frank McCourt's has
the best known
a Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir of his impoverished in Ireland; Katharine Graham's Personal also History, Pulitzer winning, which details her and her family's history at the helm s Ashes, of theWashington Post; and Kathryn Harrison's much criticized tell all rendering of her incestuous relationship with her father, titled sim
some forty years after the heyday of themovement, view it as the defining experience of their lives. The continuing relevance of the movement lends a notable variety and vitality to the autobiographical who, are form as it is being produced by former activists. Autobiographers a able to challenge history in part because sizable they have created own. work of their of body
ply The Kiss.32 Books on the civil rightsmovement are a subset of this larger trend. They are more specifically the reflections of individuals
The variety within civil rights autobiography reflects both the large number of texts coming out and the wide range of writers: young and old, black and white, women and men, themilitant and themainstream, recognized figures in the civil rightsmovement and the rank and file.33
For
ment, whether as participants themselves or through the involvement of family members, are writing about the movement, now from the vantage point of adulthood.34 For historians of the South, civil rights
some of these authors, activism was confined to the 1960s; for the move others, it spans a lifetime. Even children who experienced
Birmingham, Alabama. David Hilliard of the Black Panther Party trav eled back and forth between his native Mobile, Alabama, and Oakland,
autobiography is especially rich, as most memoirists are southerners or spent theirmovement years in the South. Angela Y. Davis, best known for her activism on theWest Coast, details her years growing up in
that reminded him of a California, and found much about Oakland southern city.35 One of the virtues of civil rights autobiographies is that
32 Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes: A Memoir (New York, 1996); Katharine Graham, Per sonal History (New York, 1997); Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss (New York, 1997). All three of these have been subject to a great deal of critical scrutiny. See, for example, Conway, When Memory Speaks, 152-55, 158-60, 181-82. 33 For a brief discussion of the scope of civil rights autobiography, see note 12. 34 and Rachel West Nelson as told to Frank Sikora, Selma, Lord, Selma: Sheyann Webb Girlhood Memories of the Civil-Rights Days (University, Ala., 1980); Rebecca Walker, Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Se//(New York, 2001); Charles Marsh, The Last Days: A Son's Story of Sin and Segregation at theDawn of a New South (New York, 2001); Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story (New York, 2004). 35 (1974; new ed., New York, 2000), Angela Y. Davis, Angela Davis: An Autobiography 77-105; David Hilliard and Lewis Cole, This Side of Glory: The Autobiography ofDavid Hilliard and the Story of the Black Panther Party (Boston, 1993), 67-68.
AUTOBIOGRAPHIES
337
of the Black Power movement.36 ber of autobiographies A great deal of new information on the civil rights movement emerging
and they encourage us to see connections differences and separation. The category of civil rights autobiography, as defined in this piece, is eclectic and capacious and includes a num
the life stories they track resist easy categorization?the the rest of the nation or civil rights versus Black Power,
South versus
for example? and continuity, as well as
is
from this body of work, rooted in personal memory and expressed through the conventions of autobiographical writing. Civil new introduces characters, places, and subjects, rights autobiography as well as a distinctive mode of historical explanation. Much of what is new in these accounts derives from the most basic premise of au
tobiographical writing, namely, that the author and protagonist are at the center of the story, determining the all-important point of view. What follows is a host of central actors who have figured only mar ginally, if at all, in existing renderings of themovement. We now have Melba Pattillo Beals, one of the Little Rock Nine who desegregated Central High School, a main character who is young, black, and fe male; Jo Ann Gibson
an African American Robinson, educator, who the Bus Boycott; Frances Montgomery helped launch and sustain Freeborn Pauley, a middle-aged white woman who traveled the state of in the 1960s, organizing interracial councils, advancing de facing down mobs of angry segregation segregation, and occasionally ists;
Georgia
a black physician L. Conner, in Starkville, and Douglas who maintained a thriving medical practice while engag Mississippi, in the ing struggle for school desegregation, economic advancement, and black
within the experience The world that each
political empowerment.37 Civil rights autobiography not in themovement, as much of only documents thatmany participated the recent scholarship has done, but also presents the movement from and consciousness of each of those individuals. is coequal autobiography creates to the others,
Little Rock's Central High (New York, 1994); Kathryn L. Nasstrom, Everybody's Grandmother and Nobody's Fool: Frances Freeborn Pauley and the Struggle for Social Justice (Ithaca, 2000); David J.Garrow, ed., The Montgomery Bus Boycott and theWomen Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson (Knoxville, 1987); Douglas L. Conner with John F. Marszalek, A in Black Physician's (Jackson, Miss., 1985). Mississippi Story: Bringing Hope
36 The danger in subsuming Black Power autobiographies into this category is that it suggests a conflation of two movements whose differences (if also whose similarities) need to be recog nized. I have chosen this usage because it facilitates my comparison of "civil rights autobiogra phy" with the "grand narrative of the civil rightsmovement." In the larger project fromwhich this piece37 is drawn, I consider Black Power autobiographies as a distinct body of work. Melba Pattillo Beals, Warriors Don't Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate
338 because
HISTORY
by its nature an autobiography importance of its author and subject.38 Civil
insists on the centrality and
ment. Melba
rights autobiography realms of human experience, Pattillo Beals
into the many integrates the movement not simply activity related to the move worried about her hair, her clothes, her
while taking part in a world-historic weight, and her boyfriend?all event. Frances Pauley, who logged some seventeen thousand miles in her first year organizing for the movement in Georgia, often rushed home to Atlanta in order to care for her husband and elderly father. Peter Honigsberg began his mornings with a breakfast of three beignets and chocolate milk, ordered from Caf? Du Monde in New Orleans. "Those hot, humid, grittymornings," he writes, "were surreal, sensual, and brilliant with color."39 Narrative theorists observe that "[e]ven extraneous to detail" adds the seemingly "genuineness and fullness" of a story, thus increasing its believability to readers.40 Readers often that first-person narratives make the civil rights movement "come alive," because (or, for thatmatter, any historical phenomenon) of the richness of the account of life around themovement as well as in this light, autobiography, usually taken to be a narrow because it turns on a single life, can from within that individual genre life offer a fuller rendering of themovement as lived by participants. Civil rights autobiography, following another convention of auto in it. Seen comment
This manner that begin
in family, biographical writing, begins the history of the movement and the of formative and themem childhood, experiences growing up, us oirs help comprehend the origins of activism on the individual level. of documentation contrasts with most historical Court accounts or on in the chambers of the U.S. the Supreme Parks sat.While these histories tell us
Montgomery about institutional forces and catalytic events, they do little to help us
38 One
bus on which Rosa
the power of civil rights autobiography derives from the richness and variety inherent in the genre. 39 Crossing Border Street, 69. 40Honigsberg, For George Steinmetz, "Reflections on the Role of Social Narratives inWorking-Class mation: Narrative Theory in the Social Sciences," Social Science History, 16 (Fall 1992), 489 516 (quotations on p. 499).
of the foremost critics of autobiography describes the autobiographical self as "an unrepeated and unrepeatable being." James Olney, Metaphors of Self : The Meaning of Autobi ography (Princeton, 1972), 21. Criticism of autobiography in the 1980s and 1990s moved away from the view propounded by Olney and others of the autobiographical subject as a unique individual and toward a more collective and relational view of the self. For commentary on this shift see Marjanne E. Gooz?, "The Definitions of Self and Form in Feminist Autobiography Theory," Women's Studies, 21 (September 1992), 411-29; and Kenneth Mostern, Autobiography and Black Identity Politics: Racialization in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, Eng., 1999), 28-53. In later sections of this article, I take up thematter of the collective nature and production of civil rights autobiography. However, I remain convinced, pace Olney, that some of
AUTOBIOGRAPHIES
339
understand, for example, how Rosa Parks got to the point of refusing tomove to the back of the bus. Autobiographical writing also contrasts with more recent scholarship that emphasizes the battlefields and home II and the turmoil of the immediate postwar period the of activists who subse they shaped political consciousness newer the This movement.41 quently galvanized scholarship moves well beyond institutional history, yet the repeated questions that activ front ofWorld War as
ists get about their lives?Why you} Why did you do this??indicate a perceived lack of explanatory power in the existing literature when it comes to individual experience and motivation. is to detail how people By contrast, the strength of autobiography come to activism and to register the impact of themovement on per sonal development. Autobiography shares with other individual narra
to be the person you are?42 This is not to say that autobi themselves. ographers necessarily have an easy task of explaining as a young man, states Peter Honigsberg, who joined the movement matter-of-factly, "I cannot with any assurance explain what itwas that motivated me Doris to go South."43 Many activists experience what novelist Lessing describes as "the thinning of language against the den a language of causation and explana our of sity experience."44 While tion escapes many memoirists, they are able to narrate the feelings and
tives, such as oral history and biography, the ability to probe identity The central concern of autobiography is the eter and consciousness. are you, and how did nally fascinating question of selfhood: Who you come
actions that led them to and through the movement. Melba Pattillo Beals, who won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award for Warriors Dont Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock's Central High, recounts this scene:
For as long as I can remember, I spent late afternoons with Grandma India stand beside her holding plants. I would garden, tending her four o'clock 41
in her on to
For one of many accounts emphasizing the importance of the Brown decision and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, see Harvard Sitkoff, The Struggle for Black Equality, 1954-1980 (New York, 1981). A revised edition titled The Struggle for Black Equality, 1954-1992 appeared in 1993, without changing the emphasis on Brown and Montgomery. For examples of recent scholarship that emphasizes theWorld War II era, see Robert Rodgers Korstad, Civil Rights in theMid-Twentieth-Century Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy South (Chapel Hill, 2003); JohnEgerton, Speak Now Against theDay: The Generation Before the in the South (Chapel Hill, 1994); and Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope: Civil Rights Movement in theNew Deal Era (Chapel Hill, 1996). Race and Democracy 42 As Albert E. Stone puts it, "An autobiography, after all, is but an extended reply to one of the simplest and profoundest of questions: who are you and how did you come to be thatway?" 115. Stone, "Modern American Autobiography," 43 Honigsberg, Crossing Border Street, 3. 44 Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (New York,
1962), 259.
340
OF SOUTHERNHISTORY THE JOURNAL

her skirt as she pulled the weeds was private talks. Once when I human or held the water hose. That's when we had our each six or so, I explained to her that I believed
You
a spirit?made by God, and that our bodies were being was really only be able in the closet. I said I thought that one day I would like clothes hanging to exchange my body for a white body, and then I could be in charge. we are are not these bodies, "Some of your thinking is right, child. We ideas. But you must strive to be the best of what God made you. spirits, God's don't want to be white, . ." what you really want is to be free, and freedom
is
a state of mind." but. "Yes, ma'am, "I hope you haven't hand.
my
She squeezed told anyone else about spirits and bodies." "Well, have you?" "No, ma'am." a diary so's you can write down these It's time you started keeping "Good. but mostly keep them to yourself thoughts and share them with me sometimes, and tell God." The next time she went to town she brought me a pink diary that I could lock before sleeping, I looked forward to going tomy
with a little key. Most evenings to write to God.45 bedroom
As Beals's Beals's
story unfolds, Grandma India emerges as a central figure in India teaches important lessons of development. Grandma nurtures in Beals the self-reliance that she she identity and history, and needed to become one of the Little Rock Nine. (And in Grandma injunction to "keep them to yourself" lies some portion of the decision to wait nearly forty years to publish explanation for Beals's her memoir.46) India's
Civil rights autobiography is filled with such stories, and they point to the explanatory power of storytelling in contrast to the logic of historical analysis. Stories explain by evoking a time, a place, and a personality that together make us understand why individuals come to take the actions continue they do and why those experiences mattered then and tomatter over a lifetime. At its best, civil rights autobiogra to one of the most don't tell"?and basic rules of successful fiction writ as a genre autobiography is filled with readers care about their subjects.47 Or more
phy adheres
ing?"show, vivid stories that make
evocatively, as literary critic Ernest Renan puts it, "What one says of oneself is always poetry."48 Even the most plodding of autobiogra
45 Beals, Warriors Don't Cry, 10-11. Ellipses appear here as they do in the original. 46 silence. See ibid., xvii-xviii. Beals's subsequent mem Ensuing events also explain Beals's oir, inwhich she revisits theLittle Rock years and carries her life story forward, also offers insight into thismatter. Melba Pattillo Beals, White Is a State ofMind: A Memoir (New York, 1999). 47 Hampl, "Memory and Imagination," 33. For the observation that stories make us care about their subjects, seeWilliam Cronon, "A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative," Journal of American History, 78 (March 1992), 1374. 48 in Ernest Renan, quoted inGeorges Gusdorf, "Conditions and Limits of Autobiography," James Olney, ed., Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton, 1980), 42.
AUTOBIOGRAPHIES
341
phers has this advantage as a writer, as the popularity of autobiography derives in large measure from the immediacy and power of the first
person voice.
the political philosophy most nonviolence, movement, required overcoming emotion, of potential physical harm and later the urge civil rights autobiography presents a range
shaped the course of the movement and to probe the identity of activ ists.49 Inmost histories, whether scholarly or popular, the heroism and are the keynotes, and the commitment to dignity of African Americans often associated with first the fear of the real to fight back. By contrast, of emotions. We learn of
also recovers an emotional world that has been lost Autobiography to us in much of the writing on the movement. Scholars have only to to suggest how it both emotion begun study carefully, recently
the
the anger and humiliation of living under segregation. We learn of the terror experienced by many of the students who first desegregated schools, as they were verbally and physically abused by white class mates, a practice thatwhite teachers and administrators often allowed to go unchecked. We learn of the loss experienced by some whites of the student generation when they became estranged from family mem bers and when they left themovement and the South in the aftermath of the black-white
split in SNCC. At the same time, autobiography registers more positive emotions. Both Mary King and Tom Hay den, two figures in the civil rightsmovement and theNew Left, reveal their in memoirs written years after their abiding love for Casey Hayden lives went separate ways.50 These emotions, which suggest human rather than themore abstract and rational interactions and motivations
reasons
for activism, are usually bled from the heroic narrative, but they reemerge with force in autobiography. As a body of writing, civil rights autobiography highlights a void in scholarly and popular rendi tions of themovement: a social movement and profoundly changed America that inspired many to action can be rendered curiously flat and
emotionless.51 49 Chana Kai Lee, "Anger, Memory, and Personal Power: Fannie Lou Hamer and Civil Rights and V. P. Franklin, eds., Sisters in the Struggle: African in Bettye Collier-Thomas Leadership," American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement 139-70; (New York, 2001), in the Civil Rights Movement: Belinda Robnett, "African American Women Spontaneity and Emotion in Social Movement Theory," inKathleen M. Blee, ed., No Middle Ground: Women and Radical Protest (New York, 1998), 65-95; Beth Roy, "Goody Two-Shoes and theHell-Raisers: Women's Activism, Women's Reputations in Little Rock," ibid., 96-132. 50 I am indebted to Ron Grele for this connection between theMary King and Tom Hayden memoirs. See Grele, "Second Reading of Experience," 162; King, Freedom Song; and Tom (New York, 1988). Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir 51 Brian Ward makes much the same claim for fiction that I make for autobiography. See
342
on the movement to be riveting, and many are. expect the passages What is surprising is that the greater emotional weight and the most concern the descriptions of present-day lives and moving passages lost everything," writes Casey us to had of that loss alone. Even now when "Each go through Hayden. I weep, sometimes breaking down I give talks about the movement tears are for that loss and the innocent girl I was." completely. My feelings about until 1988 at the Trinity College Penny Patch writes, "It wasn't . . . that I found real SNCC people, black and white, again. Conference An enormous healing took place for me there. I was overwhelmed when Michael Thelwell the movement. "I
avoid personally painful topics, and autobiography offers a place to break public silence on matters that had only been confided to friends inOur Hearts offers a case in point, and its title hints and family. Deep at the revelations it contains. Readers picking up the book are likely to
The neglect of scholars is only one dimension of the problem of the absence of emotion in civil rights studies. Activists themselves often
sat on the bed, put my head inmy hands, and began to my family?I I howled."52 The sense that present lives are still unsettled by cry. events four decades ago lends an air of unfinished business to some memoirs. The evidence of emotion comes laden with a cumulative weight, the import of events in the past compounded by the strain of captures this beautifully, ensuing silence. Essayist Richard Rodriguez in the title of his own autobiography, as the "hunger of memory."53 If a wide
said from onstage during the Black Power panel that the expulsion of whites from SNCC was the single most ... On traumatic moment in the life of the organization. Saturday night at midnight, after itwas all over, I went back to our hotel room with
The present autobiographical moment in civil rights studies is de fined first and foremost by writers who are able to present the move ment in new ways, but it also relies on receptive publishers. In this
there is some good in the recent trend to "tell all" inmemoir, it is that range of emotions has found a place in civil rights writing.
and Master Narratives," 11. See also Richard H. King, "Politics and Ward, "Forgotten Wails in Brian Ward and Tony Fictional Representation: The Case of the Civil Rights Movement," (New York, Badger, eds., The Making of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement 1996), 162-78; and Sharon Monteith, "Revisiting the 1960s inContemporary Fiction: 'Where do we go from here?'" in Ling and Monteith, eds., Gender and the Civil Rights Movement, 215-38. The similarities between fiction and autobiography make it likely that both genres can function in this way. See Popkin, History, Historians, and Autobiography, 43, 49. 52 Curry et al., Deep inOur Hearts, 371-72 (firstquotation), 368-69 (second quotation), 168 (third quotation). 53 Richard Rodriguez, 1982). Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (Boston,
AUTOBIOGRAPHIES
343
regard as well, there is great variety. As would be expected, famous and controversial figures gain access to major publishing houses that their stories widely. To cite one enable the authors to disseminate example: Memoir, Vernon in 2001. Jordan published his memoir, Vernon Can Read! A Vernon Can Read! details Jordan's life from his
programs to discuss it, and an audio version was released.55 There is a Madison Avenue quality to some of this work and its reception that in the league of literary block places a few civil rights autobiographies
buster memoirs.
These matters, he writes, are still "too close."54 Reviewers, however, did not hesitate to trade on that notoriety. Jordan's memoir was extensively reviewed in the popular press, he appeared on radio scandal.
growing-up years in segregated Atlanta, through his civil rights legal in the practice, and into his tenure with the National Urban League 1980s. He stops short of describing recent issues, including his friend ship with Bill Clinton and his intervention in theMonica Lewinsky
a press founded by Bus Boycott, used theBlack Belt Press of Alabama, to publish civil rights activist and former journalist Randall Williams, to Justice: Changing his autobiography, Bus Ride the System by the System: The Life and Works on the movement.56 Vera of Fred D. Gray, as well as other books stalwart in Pigee, longtime been has her life story, County, Mississippi, self-publishing The Struggle of Struggles, in stages since 1975.57 Her books have no
54 Vernon E. Jordan Jr. and Annette Gordon-Reed, Vernon Can Read! A Memoir (New York,
Most, however, are produced and received quite far from the centers of publishing and marketing clout. Less well known activists are put presses or even ting out their life stories with small or specialized D. the for them. Fred the attorney Gray, self-publishing Montgomery
NAACP
Coahoma
2001), 12. 55 The book note in Black Issues Book Review called attention to "major promotions sur 10. 2001), rounding Jordan's memoirs." Black Issues Book Review, 3 (November-December Substantial reviews include Jonathan Karl, "Championing Civil Rights, Building a Bridge to Corporate America," Wall Street Journal, November 21, 2001, A12; James Forman Jr., "Vernon Jordan's Justice," Washington Post, November 19, 2001, C2; "American Odyssey," Newsweek, October 29, 2001, pp. 69-73; and "American Journey," New Crisis, 108 (November-December 2001), 40-45. 56 Fred D. Gray, Bus Ride to Justice: Changing the System by the System: The Life and Works Fred D. Gray (Montgomery, Ala., 1994); Gray et al., eds., The Children Coming On: A of 1999); Gray, The Tuskegee Retrospective of theMontgomery Bus Boycott (Montgomery, Ala., Syphilis Study: The Real Story and Beyond (Montgomery, Ala., 1998). 57 Vera Pigee, The Struggle of Struggles: Part One (Detroit, 1975); Pigee, The Struggle of Struggles: Part Two (Detroit, 1979). For information on Pigee's intent to publish a third volume, I relied on Fran?oise N. Hamlin, "The (In)visible Woman: Vera Pigee and the Civil Rights in Coahoma County, Mississippi" (paper delivered at the annual meeting of the Oral St. Louis, October 20, 2001; in author's possession), 3-5.
Movement
History Association,
344
of ISBN numbers, they do not appear in published bibliographies African American or civil rights history, and they do not get reviewed. evolving personal history, may be un Pigee, with her multivolume, enterprise, but she is not usually committed to the autobiographical alone mounts Whether historical desire in her desire of rank-and-file
opment of texts from the 1960s and 1970s, some out of print for several decades, being reissued by their original publishers or by university presses. For example, Angela Davis's autobiography, firstpublished in
and literary record of the civil rights movement, but even the towrite is testament to the scope of this autobiographical moment. to this recent surge in autobiography is the related devel Adding
to get her story into print. Anecdotal evidence activists who are writing their memoirs.58 these works make their way into print is important for the
write
1974, was reissued in 1988 (with a new introduction) and again in 2000.59 Often the authors write a new preface or introduction, or the press commissions a scholar or a recognized figure in themovement to an interpretive introduction. These works contain commentary them on the older texts and thereby become themselves part of recent this the authors or scholars contribute surge, not only because
within
new material, but also because the texts reappear in the present his torical moment, intended by their authors to be read in light of this more recent production and of more recent developments in the his toriography of themovement. Thus Julian Bond notes in his introduc tion toAnne Braden's The Wall Between (originally published in 1958 and reissued in 1999) that the memoir remains one of the few auto
accounts by a woman of Braden's race, region, and gen biographical eration. For her part, Braden writes in her new epilogue, inwhich she traces her lifetime of activism from the late 1950s to the present, "I
58 On October 20, 2001, at the annual meeting of the Oral History Association in St. Louis, I offered the commentary on a session titled "Gender and Sexuality in the Civil Rights Move ment." The panel was not organized around autobiography, but all four panelists found theirway to the subject: one, a woman who was herself involved in themovement, is publishing hermemoir with a university press; two provided information on elderly African American women who are working on their autobiographies; and the fourth commented on the relationship between oral
in discussing her research on history and autobiography. On another occasion, Tracy E. K'Meyer, the civil rights movement in Louisville, indicated tome that in the course of doing oral history interviews for her project, she encountered several former activists who were at work on auto conversation with author, May 19, 2002. biographies or intended to write them. Telephone Minnijean Brown Trickey, one of the Little Rock Nine, discussed her as-yet-unpublished auto biography on October 28, 2006, at the annual meeting of the Oral History Association held in Little Rock, Arkansas. For authors who mention other autobiographical works, whether intended or already written, see Honigsberg, Crossing Border Street, 40; and Garrow, ed., Montgomery Bus Boycott, xi. 59 Davis, Angela Davis.
AUTOBIOGRAPHIES have come to the conclusion
AND CIVIL RIGHTS HISTORY that southern whites of my
345
generation perhaps have something to say that the rest of this country needs to hear and heed. This is really why I wanted this book republished."60 Taken together, all these works?whether produced or reproduced, in
that for the immediate production or thus far only imagined?suggest future civil rights autobiography promises to remain a lively undertak ing. There will be an end to civil rights autobiography at some point in the future, when all who experienced themovement directly will have passed from the scene, but that time is still some decades away. What makes recent civil rights autobiography such a vital practice is not only the large number of texts that are appearing and reappearing, nor simply the new information they contain, but also the manner of their production, which is at once collaborative and contentious. For all the vehemence with which
the implications of their life stories. What results is a of and verification dense thicket argumentation that these autobiogra one with historians, and ultimately with in with another, engage phers civil rights history in its broadest popular renderings. Moreover, the others about broadly dialogic nature of recent civil rights autobiography constitutes the terms on which these writers undertake their revision of civil rights history. The dialogue begins close
some activists assert that only they can tell their stories, civil rights autobiographers reveal a deeply felt need to corroborate their personal accounts and engage in a conversation with
to home, within the community of former activists. Civil rights autobiographers address and incorporate one an other in their texts in direct, self-conscious ways. Some returned to the sites of activism to meet interviewed fellow activists old friends and relive past experiences.61 to prompt and confirm memories.
Others David
Hilliard, who undertook a substantial oral history project on the Black Panther Party prior to writing his autobiography, includes in from interviews the in the his others text, lengthy passages allowing to their life stories the tell of and party portions group's history and even to comment on Hilliard's
60 Anne
significance.62 Still others write that the
Braden, The Wall Between, with a foreword by Julian Bond (1958; new ed., 1999), xii, 339 (quotation). See also Sarah Patton Boyle, The Desegregated Heart: A Virginian's Stand in Time of Transition, with an introduction by JenniferRitterhouse (1962; new ed., Charlottesville, 2000); and Lillian Smith, Killers of theDream, with a new introduction by Margaret Rose Gladney (1949; new ed., New York, 1994). 61 John Lewis with Michael D'Orso, Walking with theWind: A Memoir of theMovement Knoxville, (New York, 1998), 5. 62 See, for example, chapter 23, inwhich themajority of the text is composed from interviews. Hilliard, This Side of Glory, 277-94. of quotations
346
HISTORY
project was a reunion of impetus for undertaking an autobiographical or the funeral of a comrade.63 event, activists, a commemorative In some cases, the process of writing itself became explicitly col laborative, and these works, some quite experimental in form, reflect the search for an appropriate collective voice with which to remember
and write about a social movement, as well as individual experience in in Our Hearts, a collection of memoirs for a single volume, it.64Deep is an unusual undertaking in the genre of autobiography, which more on several typically narrates an individual life history. The authors met to the work as to discuss their pieces individually and occasions shape a whole.65 What they produced is a book rich in individual experience
yet harnessed to a consistent template. Each essay begins with the in the move author's formative years, follows with her experiences on a A the time since. reflection ment, and closes with forthcoming collaborative remembrances
comparative other activists in telling their life stories, and in the process they create innovative forms that cross literary and historical genres. Ekwueme Michael in assisting in the publication of Ready for Revolu Thelwell, tion: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), posthumous autobiography, edited a large body Stokely Carmichael's into a text, added documen of Carmichael's tape-recorded memories
on the Freedom Plow, will feature the effort, Hands of both black and white women, and it promises a view of these same matters.66 Activists are also assisting
these tary evidence and the remembrances of others, and compounded with his own commentary, so much so that Carmichael's autobiogra a phy shades toward biography.67 Constance Curry's Silver Rights is blend of family history and autobiography. The family history is not her own but that of the Carter family of Sunflower County, Mississippi,
63
Ibid., v-vi; Beals, Warriors Don't Cry, xvii-xxiii; Honigsberg, Crossing Border Street, 39; Garrow, ed., Montgomery Bus Boycott, 2; Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years ofHope, Days of Rage (1987; new ed., New York, 1993), 4. 64 This development in civil rights autobiography follows a more general expansion in and on this experimentation with a variety of forms of autobiographical expression. For commentary development, see Sidonie Smith and JuliaWatson, eds., Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Au 1996); and Marlene Kadar, ed., Essays on Life Writing: From Genre tobiography (Minneapolis, to Critical Practice (Toronto, 1992). 65 inOur Hearts, 379. Collaborative forms of writing have been central to Curry et al., Deep the development of women's autobiography. See Gooz?, "Definitions of Self and Form in Femi there is a tradition of collective writing in nist Autobiography Theory," 415-16. Likewise, in African American autobiography. See Albert E. Stone, "After Black Boy and Dusk of Dawn," 184. Andrews, ed., African American Autobiography, 66 Martha P. Noonan to author, e-mail, June 20, 2003 (in author's possession). 67 Stokely Carmichael with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, Ready for Revolution: (Kwame Ture) (New York, 2003). Struggles of Stokely Carmichael
The Life and
AUTOBIOGRAPHIES whose
347
the county's schools in children were the first to desegregate 1965. But Silver Rights is also part autobiography. Curry supported the family's efforts when she worked for the American Friends Service Committee in the 1960s. She relies on her own memories and personal
papers, along with extensive oral history interviews with the Carters, to tell the family's story, and she emerges as a supporting character in the book, just as she was in the actual events.68 The question of how an autobiographical work is crafted is always significant, but all themore into a larger collective consciousness and purpose.69 The present vitality in the form of civil is a case of literary form following activist rights autobiography function. The collective so for civil rights activists who participated individual identity and action merged in a mass movement
in
which
that these writers
to argue with one another on everything from points of autobiographies and they do so in a fact to broad interpretations of the movement, manner that ranges from friendly to fierce. Mary King corrects James Forman, a close SNCC colleague, about a particular demonstration in In her own autobiography, Freedom Song: she quotes from A Personal Story of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, A Black Revolutionaries: The Forman's Making of autobiography, the SNCC office inAtlanta. Personal
nature of this production does not mean, however, share the same point of view. Many have used their
their punches for reviews, as when Kathleen Cleaver accused fellow Panther Elaine Brown of a "reckless disregard for truth" in her likewise dismissive of Ralph Mary King was autobiography.71 not much about learn what we autobiography: "You will Abernathy's Black simply called 'themovement' from this account. You will not discover or Birmingham were chosen, why Albany, St. Augustine, or what
Account, and then adds, "It is not true, however, that Jim invited this demonstration. Itwas certainly not his idea."70 Some save
68 Constance Curry, Silver Rights (Chapel Hill, 1995). Curry's collaborative efforts continue; see Aaron Henry with Constance Curry, Aaron Henry: The Fire Ever Burning (Jackson, Miss., 2000); andWinson Hudson and Constance Curry, Mississippi Harmony: Memoirs of a Freedom Fighter (New York, 2002). 69 Oral historians have explored this issue with sophistication. See Samuel Schr?ger, "What Is Social in Oral History?" International Journal of Oral History, 4 (June 1983), 76-98; and Journal of American Barbara Allen, "Story inOral History: Clues toHistorical Consciousness," History, 79 (September 1992), 606-11. For related developments in autobiographical studies, see Gooz?, "Definitions of Self and Form in Feminist Autobiography Theory." 70 King, Freedom Song, 453 (quotation); James Forman, The Making of Black Revolution
aries: A Personal Account (New York, 1972). 71 Cleaver, quoted inMargo V. Perkins, Autobiography as Activism: Three Black Women of the Sixties (Jackson, Miss., 2000), 93; Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story (New York, 1992).
348
OF SOUTHERNHISTORY THE JOURNAL

in between. You will not even read about or how the
sustained momentum
it formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference . . . Abernathy was a great man's friend. If he was not going operated. to write about the movement with coherence, he should simply have in their companionship that revealed written a slender volume at the less-than-flattering por depth."72 King may have been smarting account, but her reference to trayal that SNCC receives inAbernathy's of the movement the "momentum" suggests a deeper philosophical difference between the two over the nature of social thatmost
change and the fostered change. effectively type of civil rights organization Historians have debated the same questions, and both Abernathy's and
King's memoirs engage that debate, as well as other contested issues in the history of the civil rightsmovement. Thus the pointed criticism that some autobiographers level at historians is only one part of a larger pattern of contestation that characterizes this autobiographical
moment.
to bolster his own interpretation. He quotes Garrow, who is quoting . . .But Imust come Martin Luther King, "T want out of St. Augustine. out of St. Augustine with honor. ... I must come out of here with a victory'"; and then Abernathy continues in his own voice, "What we were worried
for their part, also serve a productive role in autobiog Historians, as and even generate memory. Ralph they authenticate raphy Abernathy incorporates David Garrow seamlessly into his text in order
study of praises Charles M. Payne's in great because he "looks at the post-1964 era of SNCC Mississippi, of that detail and with a subtle understanding of the complexities time."74 Some autobiographers go so far as to cite author, title, and battle."73 Theresa Del Pozzo even page number directly in their texts. Emmie Schrader Adams goes a step further when she uses historians' interpretations to clarify her own position: "When I read the history books I deduce that I was considered part of a faction at Waveland [site of a SNCC planning retreat in 1964], the 'antistructure' people. That's interesting. I thought
about, of course, was another Albany. Birmingham was still too fragile a victory to risk another obvious retreat. For the sake of and our people, we had to make some progress in the the movement
72 Mary King, "Judging Joshua," review of And theWalls Came Tumbling Down, by Ralph David Abernathy, Los Angeles Times Book Review, November 12, 1989, pp. 4, 13 (quotation). 73 Abernathy, And theWalls Came Tumbling Down, 292. Ellipses appear here as they are in text. For a similar use of the scholarship of history, see King, Freedom Song, Abernathy's 295-96, 452, 459, 507-8, 529; and Carmichael, Ready for Revolution, 221-22, 315. 74 in Our Hearts, 196. See also ibid., 325, 328, 330; and King, Freedom Curry et al., Deep Song, 499, 502, 507-8, 529.
AUTOBIOGRAPHIES we
349
we were Waveland
on structure after reading various position had a big discussion papers on the subject. We divided up into groups and were supposed to come up with suggestions for new structures. The point wasn't whether pro- or antistructure, but rather what kind of structure we needed."75 We can never know how Adams would have written about her clarify many the prompt of the "history books," but they helped years later the "point" of what transpired there. An interpretation put forward by a scholar not only was significant enough towarrant a response but also influenced the formation of her memory without
and
statements and the narratives of history. These personal memories are some measure for in about "structure" and the need "victory"
as for Abernathy and others who are its import. For Adams, equally aware of civil rights historiography, there is a densely dialec as they tack back and forth between tical quality to their memoirs
self-justifying, but these autobiographers are also probing key turning and suggesting ways historians have yet to points in the movement their understand significance. fully Of
what
to say. Instead, they are more likely to position to history as represented in the broader cultural narrative that is the grand narrative of the civil rightsmovement. Civil to it. Concerning raise a host of objections rights autobiographers scholars have themselves relative
course, relatively few civil rights autobiographers read, much are uninterested in less parse, the scholarship with such care. Many
leadership and participation in themovement, Frances Pauley asserts, "The one thing that I think is so important about themovement is that
it was a movement. ... a grassroots movement that was
over theUnited
States, and particularly all over the South. Now, certain leaders emerged, like James Farmer and Martin Luther King and so forth, but there were a tremendous number of heroes and heroines on a local
coming
up
all
inherent qualities of leadership."77 What brought change to the South, Martha Prescod Norman similarly maintains, was "the consistent, relentless activism of southern black communities."78 Ad widespread, a related dressing point of emphasis in the grand narrative, Norman
75 in Our Hearts, 325. See also ibid., 40. Curry et al., Deep 76 Nasstrom, Everybody's Grandmother and Nobody's Fool, 65-66 77 Davis, Angela Davis, viii. 78Greenberg, ed., Circle of Trust, 181-82.
level that really were the movement."76 Many have echoed on this point. Angela Davis uses the introduction to a recent Pauley reissuing of her autobiography to argue for the need to "demystify the usual notion that history is the product of unique individuals possessing
(quotation),
88.
350
questions the significance of national legislation as themeasure of the of legislation as movement's significance. Some "use the passage the . . . standard. The March on Washington was followed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964; the Selma toMontgomery march by the Voting Rights Act of 1965; therefore, they're both successes and events of
great historical importance." But, she counters, the civil rights move ment should be judged "by the degree and amount of social change that is accomplished," taking account of the "unenforced local agreement" piece of national legislation" as well. We have cause for celebration, Norman maintains, but "given our past, we have every reason to keep struggling to make a more just and humane world."79 Former Black Power activists, for their part, take on themost and the "unenforced
misunderstood
phase of themovement. David Hilliard set out to write a combined autobiography and history, because "the story of the Black Panther Party has been distorted, forgotten, and repressed." Its "true and practice" were a "collective tale of daunting personal to The sacrifice and still be recognized historic accomplishment."80 defense of the party launched by many autobiographers is, however, a concerns
Black
painfully honest one, for they reveal the extent of drug use, violence, that tore the party apart as it faced unprec and internal dissension edented governmental harassment. Yet they write about the late 1960s and early 1970s as a time of energy and hope that belies the image of
writ small in the quotidian acts of casting a vote or going to school or work each day, when such actions constituted not normal affairs but
to the civil rights movement. Power as a "tragic epilogue" For its autobiographers themovement remains a grand one, but they conceive of its grandeur in terms grounded in the individual and col lective lives of autobiography. Theirs is a grand movement that is often
acts of resistance. Such an accounting falls not toward the facile point thatmany contributed to themovement, but toward an appreciation of a truly mass movement that developed its leadership on local, regional, and national levels; that effected change by countless actions rather than dramatic and that was hard-won against deeply en episodes; trenched individual and institutional racism. Theirs is also an account
ing that takes the long view, in which implementation and the impact on individuals, and institutions?or lack thereof? communities, to gener contrast In become themeasures of themovement's import. alizations of success based on a single or limited measure, the analysis
79 Ibid., 181 (first, second, third, and fourth quotations), 80 Hilliard, This Side of Glory, vi.
188 (fifthquotation).
AUTOBIOGRAPHIES
351
reminds us of the human toll, as well as the political loss, that involve ment in the movement exacted. A mournful posture is appropriate,
"George [Jackson] was dead, and the deeply personal pain I feltwould have strangled me had I not turned it into a proper and properly placed these accounts is often hard going, as autobiography rage."81 Reading
gives way to a more nuanced assessment of uneven progress and frequent setbacks as they varied from one place to the next. Civil rights are also willing tomourn losses, something that was autobiographers not often possible at the time. Angela Davis writes in her memoir,
however, not only because it is respectful of those who left themove ment or paid for their activism with their lives, but also because to remember those who paid such a price is to remember those who often offered themost
which has become something of a cottage indus study of Mississippi, over the last decade, offers a case in point. John Dittmer and try Charles Payne, both of whom in themid-1990s published prizewinning inMississippi, relied on oral history inter to inform their historical judgments about a movement of "local people" whose activism embodied "the organizing tradition."83 These two scholars formed their views on theMississippi movement by lis studies of the movement views
of the best heavily on the first-person accounts of activists. Many recent studies, those that have most influenced our understanding of themovement, have been informed if not by autobiographies per se, of then by the related autobiographical oral practice history.82 The
rights autobiography and recent scholarship often pose similar critiques is not surprising when we consider thatmuch of this scholarship draws
racism and injus far-reaching critiques of American tice. They have not survived to tell their own stories. In raising these objections, civil rights autobiographers are often in step with recent scholarship, as the grand narrative has undergone substantial scholarly revision during the last two decades. That civil
tening intently to activists, some of whom subsequently published memoirs.84 A decade after Payne and Dittmer published their works,
and 7, 2008); (accessed February www.press.uillinois.edu/f95/dittmer.html (accessed February 7, 2008). www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/6343.html 84 Henry, Aaron Henry; Hudson and Curry, Mississippi Harmony; Curry et al., Deep Hearts.
81 1996 commentary: "One of the things Davis, Angela Davis, 319. Also see Angela Davis's thatwe didn't do then was mourn. Our strengthwas often defined as our ability not to allow the death of someone we loved to set us back." Quoted in Perkins, Autobiography as Activism, 14. 82 Bret Eynon, "Cast upon the Shore: Oral History and New Scholarship on the Movements of the 1960s," Journal of American History, 83 (September 1996), 560-70. 83 Dittmer, Local People; Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom. Both books won several See http:// awards, including the Bancroft Prize in American History for Local People. http:// in Our
352

continue to inform a rich vein ofMississippi local and J.Todd Moye interviewed white and black
activists' memories
studies. Emilye Crosby for their studies of Claiborne Mississippians
and Sunflower Counties, as so to histories of civil rights activism and interweave respectively, resistance to it.85Crosby's account is particularly bracing, as she docu ments a decidedly self-interested strain of black activism in the figure of Charles Evers, brother toMedgar Evers, and assesses the impact of and his John Dewey College, Boyd, the president of Alcorn A&M of activism and students. among faculty repression thoroughgoing ties to influential whites. reactions
Both men had close white
to the movement, the response as one of "shock and sur characterizes Past," Crosby movement made undeniable whites' errone the civil for rights prise," ous measure of African American anger and resolve. In her epilogue Crosby reveals that decades later many of the county's whites contin
In a chapter devoted to titled "Clinging to Power and the
whites who
goals, the impulse to cast that period as one of pion the movement's chaos signifies a different sort of oppositional memory to the move ment's legacy. The current of discontent over the grand narrative runs
ued to view the civil rights era chiefly as a time of disruption.86 While resisted or resented the advances of the civil rights era seldom write autobiographies, leaving the field to activists who cham
deep, in conservative as well as progressive directions. Scholars and autobiographers agree on the inadequacy of the grand to that narrative, but the issue of the relationship of autobiography narrative, like the issue of the relationship of scholarship and autobi not resolve itself so neatly. The grand narrative, how does ography, ever much maligned, nonetheless constitutes the story of many activists'
lives, or at least a portion of their lives. Many have been civil rights figures, some even civil rights legends, since a relatively young age, telling themselves and having been told by others that their ac tivism constitutes themeasure of their lives. Their lives unfolded
in the
movement
and its aftermath, and no easy separation exists between the the civil rightsmovement and the story of their lives. More of history to preserve and often valorize key elements of the seek over, many even as they challenge others. There is a dialectical grand narrative, quality to civil rights autobiography in relation to the grand narrative and scholarly the dialectic between autobiography that compounds offer evidence of a dense civil and narratives, rights autobiographies
85 Crosby, Little Taste of Freedom; Moye, Let the People Decide. 86 148-68 (quotation on p. 148), 269-72. Crosby, Little Taste of Freedom,
AUTOBIOGRAPHIES
353
intertwining of individual and collective narratives in formation over time. Three memoirs, each with a different relationship to the grand narrative, illustrate civil rights autobiographers' complex relationship
are also able to deploy the grand narrative to revisionist ends. as a young man. Consider John Lewis, who joined the movement s chairman in themid-1960s, and since 1986 he Lewis served as SNCC has represented the state of Georgia Walking with the Wind: A Memoir in theU.S.
to that narrative. It both shaped their experiences of themovement at the time and limits what they have to say in retrospect about it, yet they
Schuster in 1998. Lewis's personal narrative of the civil rights movement. There is certainly new material here, as there is in all autobiography. We learn, for example, of Lewis's childhood as the son of Alabama sharecroppers and of the shy and somewhat awkward young man who rose to prominence in SNCC, surrounded by many who were more self-assured and erudite. The freshest material in his memoir concerns the aftermath of SNCC. The
Congress. He published of theMovement with Simon & story hews closely to the grand
demise was painful for Lewis, which he details less by organization's to dwell on his emotions?this his willingness is not a particularly in that his memoir revealing regard?than by poignant descriptions of several years of estrangement as he worked South, the only home he had known. But concerns and traveled outside the the heart of the memoir
of that narrative, and its action turns on some of the most the Freedom Rides, the readily recognized events of the movement: on Washington, and "Bloody Sunday" during the Selma to March quality growing-up years, those prior to his Montgomery march. Even Lewis's involvement in themovement, are keyed to this formula. He recounts the inspiration he drew from hearing Martin Luther King speak, the impact on his thinking of theMontgomery at the lynching of Emmett Till. Lewis Bus Boycott, and his horror
the 1960s, and here it reads as a familiar tale, limited by its replication of key elements of the grand narrative. It has the episodic
tells a personal history that is tightly linked to the episodes and themes of the grand narrative because he indeed participated in many of them to an extent that few others can claim. Even events he did not experience personally became in a substantial way a portion of his life story. For example, Lewis devotes several pages of his memoir to the direct action campaign inAlbany, Georgia, although he was not there.87 In the aftermath of the Albany
87 On the events inAlbany,
campaign,
SNCC
182, 186-87,
undertook
191, 195.
see Lewis, Walking with theWind,
354 extensive
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
much
discussions of themeaning of what had transpired there, so so that Albany became not just a place or an event but also a history. The experience of Albany turning point in the organization's became something of a common property within SNCC, which was for its endless over, as dissections of its strategies and actions. More for Lewis was asked to comment on SNCC, spokesman as well as other campaigns in which he did not participate.
known
unfolded, he was already an interpreter of it, a at once a story of his life, the story of the that became story shaping of SNCC, and a portion of the story of themove pivotal organization as a ment whole. There is a familiar quality to his narrative, because Lewis memoir, a product of the movement that when he turned to he was writing a well-known in the story first-person form of on a He offers variation theme, rather than a new autobiography. theme. The side Martin connection was one that Lewis's of the photographs is so much
Albany, Even as the movement
make. One cludes
Luther King, and the "advance praise" for the book in this commentary by Cornel West: "No other elected official in America embodies the grand legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.more Lewis's invocation of "legacy" also points to as an autobiographer, which is to sound a ringing call for the unfinished goals of themovement. Lewis remains at heart an activist, and he ends his memoir with a brief chapter that is than John Lewis."88 chief innovation to continue Yet West's
publisher was eager to on the book jacket shows Lewis along
both an overview
career and a call to the present of his congressional the America has yet to live up to the struggle. generation ideal of a truly interracial democracy embedded in the grand narrative, but Lewis believes in that promise and especially in the power of that ideal to inspire action toward its fulfillment. He grafts a life story of continuity onto the otherwise episodic and finished grand narrative, extending it into the present as an unrealized dream. While Lewis's
story remains largely a familiar one, Jo Ann Gibson recounts a familiar story in significantly new ways. Her Robinson Montgomery Bus Boycott, and she renders autobiography concerns the
its history from the vantage point of a middle-aged African American State College. In 1987 theUniversity of woman, a teacher at Alabama Tennessee Press published her memoir, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It. Robinson a wide revises
the story of of activists range Montgomery largely by documenting beyond those most commonly associated with the boycott. The firstwords of
88 Cornel West, quoted on the book jacket of Lewis, Walking with theWind.
AUTOBIOGRAPHIES Robinson's
355
memoir are this dedication: "Boycotting taught me cour The age. memory of the thousands of boycotters, walking in hot and cold weather, in rain, sleet, and sunshine, for thirteen long months, makes me feel ever so humble. . . . Justice in the end was the coveted goal that helped and inspired me and fifty thousand others to become . . .Thus, this book secondarily does she mention involved. is dedicated to them?the peopled Only that group of leaders from which Martin
Luther King rose to prominence. Her dedication continues: "This book must also recognize the key role of the black ministers ofMontgomery.
The memory of their leadership will last forever."89 Throughout her the contributions of many individuals memoir Robinson acknowledges to convey and organizations, but she always returns to "the people"
critical at the time of her memoir's first nationwide observance
enshrinement in that narrative, which had been reinforced by King's pantheon of figures honored by national holidays. Jo Ann Gibson Robinson was very much in step with the histori ography of the movement at that time. In the 1980s, historians turned from a King-centered, national story of themovement to detailed stud ies of communities as
publication, the year following the of Martin Luther King's birthday. Al though Robinson has nothing but praise for King, her repeated refer ences to the necessity of recognizing others and especially "the people" read as a dissent from King's presence in the grand overshadowing
that theMontgomery Bus Boycott was a citizens' movement, rather than a leader-centered movement. Her contribution was especially
move,
president in 1955, launched the boycott and only sub sequently passed control of it to theministers. The first chapter of her memoir details the groundwork laid by the council, a story that, until Robinson Robinson recorded it,was
like Montgomery.90 Indeed, she prefigured this she penned her autobiography largely in advance of this Robinson also later prefigured scholarship. scholarly work inwomen's The Her Bus title, Montgomery Boycott and theWomen Who history. Political Council, of which Started It, is especially apt. The Women's was
lost to scholars and the public alike.91 In the
89 Garrow, ed., Montgomery Bus Boycott and theWomen Who Started It, 3. 90 Steven F. Lawson, "Freedom Then, Freedom Now: The Historiography of the Civil Rights Movement," American Historical Review, 96 (April 1991), 456-71, esp. 457. 91 David J. Garrow, who edited Robinson's memoir for publication, firstmet Robinson in 1984, at which point she asked him to review thememoir she had previously written. Garrow, ed., Mills Thornton III published an article in 1980 that detailed, more Montgomery Bus Boycott, xi. J. Response 163-235. Women's Political Council. See Thornton, "Challenge and than earlier studies had, the role of the in theMontgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-1956," Alabama Review, 33 (July 1980),
356

Robinson weaves a story of her own activi She does not claim much of a
remainder of her memoir,
make
clear her central role in the boycott. account resonates with the In other ways, however, Robinson's In she narrative. preserves and reinforces the sense of grand particular, a stoic people engaged in a heroic struggle. When Montgomery's black citizens board the buses formed: "There was
ties into that of the boycott as a whole. leadership role for herself, but her careful explication of the legal case, the negotiations with city officials and the transportation company, and of which she took part in? the community organizing campaign?all
low, theirmanner stately."92 The boycotters exhibit a remark able degree of empathy for their opponents: "Suddenly there was no more bitterness toward those bus drivers, toward the police, toward the system. In fact, there was even pity for the white people who had been voices
after the yearlong boycott, they are trans a quiet dignity among the black riders, for they had attained a sophistication while boycotting the buses, and they boarded them again with poise and dignity, their heads held high, their
were
taking the court's decision with such difficulty."93 In this regard, Robinson amplifies the grand narrative as she portrays Montgomery's black citizens as uniformly capable of admirable and compassion
restraint.
so bitterly opposed to integration of the buses. We knew that their was great, no matter the cause, and many at moment that suffering a prayer for those white people who black citizens breathed religious
Then,
in the memoir's
among them, citing the "mental strain" of faculty resigned, Robinson the extended period of "intimidation."94 Robinson leftMontgomery, a to first Louisiana for moving university teaching job and later to Los Angeles, where she taught in the public school system for fifteen years. Of
College, faculty who had worked on the boycott were "investigated by a special state committee" and "began having evaluators from the state's In 1960 a number of the education department visit our classrooms."
dramatically, aftermath of the boycott. White Montgomery's initial acceptance of was soon followed State by reprisals. At Alabama desegregation
concluding and her themes become
tone shifts chapter, Robinson's loss and pain as she recounts the
the impact of these events Robinson writes, "I realized that the boycott had robbed me of something! It had taken its toll on my ability
92 Garrow, ed., Montgomery 93 Ibid., 164. 94 Ibid., 168-69.
Bus Boycott,
167.
AUTOBIOGRAPHIES
357
to adapt to new environments, new situations, new people. I began to feel lonely."95 Hinting at bouts of depression, she connects her story to that of others who faced similar reprisals: "Some left the state of new a environment where scars of Alabama, seeking peace of mind in
the boycott would heal, where new faces and new opportunities would eradicate the bitter experience of the past few years of boycotting."96 "Bitter" is a jarring characterization, given Robinson's previous nar ration of the boycott. Very late in her memoir Robinson suggests a still Bus Boycott, one that she largely untold story of the Montgomery seems compelled to sketch but saves for the end, unwilling or unable to let it disrupt the heroic narrative of the boycott itself. She is not
in this regard, as a body of historical literature on what followed on the heels of key movement episodes is only now emerging.97 Until as success has the stood quite recently Montgomery quintessential alone
story of the civil rights movement, whether as the time and place that launched Martin Luther King on a career around which a narrative of in the King Years" could be built or, more recently, as a "America a mass movement of fifty thousand of story differently compelling citizens, "the movement [that]made Martin."98 An aftermath of indi vidual and collective trauma sits uneasily alongside either version of this success story. The loss and pain of a later time need not necessarily diminish
inMontgomery the significance of what was accomplished to it is much follow the how easier the grand during boycott, yet to the youthful idealism of students sitting at narrative as itmoves in 1960 than to follow Jo Ann Gibson lunch counters in Greensboro and her colleagues as theywere forced to leave Montgomery for our understanding the that same year. Such are the consequences civil rights movement of the contrast between an episodic grand nar rative and a continuous
Robinson
life story and community history. Robinson's led her to reconfigure the of the rendering Montgomery movement matter of leadership and participation in a mass movement in an assured voice, while she only tentatively suggests the costs and
95 Ibid., 171. 96 Ibid., 172-73. 97 J.Mills Thornton has recently explored the question forMontgomery, and he details a worsening racial situation: "During the years from 1957 to 1961, the city slipped into a surreal dimension in which only extremist views were publicly voiced among whites, and any hint of deviation from white supremacist orthodoxy would incur both active harassment and social ostracism." Thornton, Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma (Tuscaloosa, 2002), 96-140 (quotation on p. 96). 98 Ella Baker, quoted in Stewart Burns, ed., Daybreak of Freedom: The Montgomery Bus Boycott (Chapel Hill, 1997), 5. Burns believes theMontgomery case is an unusually successful one; see ibid., 4.
358
of activism, theways that subsequent events changed the consequences of the meaning boycott. In her memoir she both breaks from the grand narrative and is limited by it. activists make up the majority of civil rights as they did movement participants. But the num autobiographers, just ber of whites taking up the pen grows, and they write from a different African racial vantage point and thus a different purchase on the narratives of history, including the grand narrative of the civil rights movement. Peter Honigsberg's memoir, Crossing Border Street, was published by the University of California Press in 2000. In 1966 and 1967, while a law student at New York and Louisiana American
New
York University, Honigsberg commuted between as part of a team of lawyers who provided legal research and representation to southern civil rights campaigns. In recounts those two years of his life and their this memoir Honigsberg impact on his subsequent life and career in legal education. is acutely aware of recent trends in the scholarly litera Honigsberg
ture on themovement, and he uses his memoir to engage some of those issues directly. He has written his own story in part to document the Deacons little-known aspects of the movement's history. He details the role of for Defense, whose armed defense of black communities
deterred the violence not only of and civil rights workers in Louisiana outlaw groups, notably the Ku Klux Klan, but also of the local police. memoir have the Deacons Only since the publication of Honigsberg's received about
sustained scholarly attention.99 Honigsberg also writes exten in three local leaders Z. Young, black sively Bogalusa?A. to Robert their and Hicks?and varied Jenkins, Gayle approaches or her autobiography leadership. None has yet written his (although one intends to), and Honigsberg felt compelled of their legacy, as well as his own.100 To memoir for his life was to preserve a something large extent, Peter in this it is autobio
Honigsberg's
is about others, but even graphical, shaped by those people and their influence on him. He writes, however, from his own vantage point and thus about them, not for them.
activism began in 1966 when the civil rights move Honigsberg's ment was already understood as a struggle of heroic and historic pro
99 Honigsberg, Crossing Border Street, 26-33; Peter Honigsberg, conversation with author, August 21, 2001; Hill, Deacons for Defense. 100 Honigsberg, Crossing Border Street, 41. Adam Fairclough, in his study of themovement in Louisiana, devotes some attention to each of these leaders of the Bogalusa movement. The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915-1972 (Athens, Fairclough, Race and Democracy: Ga., 1995).
AUTOBIOGRAPHIES
359
For him the movement
portion. Like other white college students, he was drawn south by the desire to contribute to an interracial movement for freedom and justice. was "symbolized by the circular pin I reli white and black hands giously wore, depicting clasped together over a dovetailing black and white background."101 But by 1966 that inter racial movement of black and white was unraveling, as Black
we were no longer here in the South because we wanted to be here. We were here because the Black Power movement granted us permis sion."102 These
Power challenged the ideal recalls together. Honigsberg hearing H. Rap Brown of SNCC speak at an orientation session for the law students: "Wearing his not-yet-fashionable tight-Afro hairstyle and shades, he told us that
theymust be assessed and reaffirmed. Honigsberg makes this affirma tion in very similar wording at the start and toward the close of his memoir: "When those of us who took part in themovement look back, we can't help wondering whether we really made a difference. Unde niably, the civil rights movement made a difference. Our collective
about?and, shaped his experience, and his entire memoir resonates with this ques tion. He could not then, and he cannot now, take the ideal of black and white together and the efficacy of white activism for granted. Rather,
conflicting narratives of what the freedom struggle was especially, what role interracial action might play?
to the brutality of presence helped raise the nation's consciousness racism and succeeded in eliminating the most blatant and humiliating forms of discrimination. But... the real differences we made were not . . . [0]ur to others but to ourselves. experiences in the South have been instrumental in our formation into adults and as contributors to soci still contemplates the questions set inmo ety."103 Today Honigsberg tion during his youthful activism. "Thirty years later, I am still caught and he writes of his hope up in the complexities of race in America," for a "renewed partnership in pursuit of social justice."104 The form of his autobiography reflects this orientation, as he continually tacks back and forth between his days of activism nance. Honigsberg's
than one that engages memoir
Lewis's reserves
in a meditation on key questions. Whereas John has a settled quality and Jo Ann Gibson Robinson's for the end, Peter Honigsberg's takes a its ambivalence
the past and the present, recalling a memory from and then commenting on its contemporary reso is less an autobiography that declares and asserts
101 Honigsberg, Crossing Border Street, 6. W2Ibid., 128. 103 Ibid., 130. See also ibid., 7-8. 104 Ibid., 7 (first quotation), 8 (second quotation).
360

of
questioning stance throughout, even as he affirms the significance themovement in his own life.
Ultimately, Honigsberg's story resides in neither the past nor the but in the present relationship between the two. Both the form and the substance of his memoir suggest a narrative of continuity, since the distinctions between past and present are less salient than the similari ties. In contrast to the grand narrative, which emphasizes change, high lights key victories, and ends in the mid-1960s, Honigsberg suggests that the movement is far from over and itsmeaning is not fixed. For
Honigsberg and whites
the key issue is interracialism. The terms on which blacks can work together must be continually negotiated; there is no sense in his autobiography that interracial work came easily or were only tenuously together back to Black and him. white naturally then, and the racial divide continues today, although in a different
memoir, but the same is true of all civil rights autobi Honigsberg's because the autobiographical form presents us with a retro ography, the view. tells is never Moreover, story autobiography spective for author to is still the retell alive and potentially revise it.105 finished, The of the story is particularly salient formany civil rights autobiographers who are writing inmiddle age rather than their elder years. Even John Lewis's memoir, with its otherwise finished air, admits of this. Lewis tells us that his current legislative career is the incompleteness
movement form. Much of Honigsberg's remains as an ideal yet to be realized, not an ideal thatwas realized in the past and might be recap tured in the present but always, then and now, in an imagined future. The reach of the past into the present is especially pronounced in
later than the years we think of as comprising the movement become part of its continuing history. It is for this reason that Jo Ann Gibson Robinson's concluding chapter is so unsettling. occurred much Published some thirty years after the events it narrates, reader to take the Montgomery Bus Boycott from one a new evaluate it in wholly light. In this, autobiography the nature of memory is origins in memory, because it forces the context and
and the continuing outgrowth of his involvement in the movement, career of that shifts in his memory, inter may trajectory precipitate and In evaluation. civil pretation, rights autobiography, events that
is true to its
to synthesize to and into reformulate memories of the past in patterns experience on of later dwells the light developments. Memory meaning of events,
105 James Olney, "Autobiography and the Cultural Moment: A Thematic, Historical, Introduction," in Olney, ed., Autobiography, 3-27, esp. 25. and
Bibliographical
AUTOBIOGRAPHIES
361
rather than the events themselves, and especially on themeaning of the past in the present.106 Civil rights autobiography holds out many un racial justice and fulfilled, even seemingly contradictory, dreams?of a and black white interracial democracy, together, Black truly equality,
in the present historical The promise of civil rights autobiography a moment is to resist closure and make the history of the movement narrative renewed by memory. Honigsberg and Peter Robinson, suggest in different ways how recent civil rights autobiography takes form in a dialogue between memory and history. That dialogic nature, which they share with many other autobiogra is the basis on which these activists-turned phers of the movement, each The memoirs of John Lewis, Jo Ann Gibson
Power, the community and unity experienced in collective action?that activists were then, and many are now, trying to reconcile and realize.
are making their contribution to civil rights studies. autobiographers so most do They simply and directly by presenting us with so much new content?new characters, places, subjects, and emotions. From its with dialogue history, autobiography emerges as a particularly com
models
plex and renewable source, as a changing set of present-day concerns to plumb the depths of memory for new reso allows autobiographers nances. What civil rights autobiography puts in place is not one story but an overlapping set of stories, a layering of narratives rather than the eclipsing of all other stories by one story. Civil rights autobiography
many stories as the story. That historians have unearthed much of the same plurality with their recent proliferation of local studies and bi this effect and marks ographies of lesser-known activists compounds
a history of the movement that is built on accretion and the to tell the that is to hold the way recognition history of themovement
The virtue of the current practice of civil rights autobiography, however, lies not simply in a growing body of new stories, for an of stories does not in and of itself lead to revision. accumulation Revision
another parallel between autobiography and recent scholarship, as well as the distance they both maintain from the grand narrative and its implicit claim that there is and should be one story.
requires an engagement with existing narratives and an un derstanding of how the telling ofmany stories can transform our sense It of that singular experience we call "the civil rights movement." requires a view of themovement as simultaneously many movements, rich in individual specificity, yet also a collective movement that drew
106Thelen, "Memory and American History," 1119-21.
362
many into common purpose and action. Civil rights autobiography, with all its particularity and partiality, will always tell us more about individual experiences, but it also opens a window on collective ex perience
the ways autobi of history, as each writer acknowledges even limited other histories of themove is in, by, implicated ography ment. The weight of the existing narratives acts as a stay on what might the weight be recovered from memory, As but it also establishes a common for discussion.
and meaning through its dialogue with history. Civil rights new autobiography, as each memoirist puts with each history expands and interpretations, but it also contracts with forward new memories
ground each autobiography circles back over that ground, what results is both recapitulation and revision, a telling of new stories civil rights and in them a revised telling of familiar stories. When their indebtedness to existing narratives, autobiographers acknowledge a they remain anchored in dialogue about what the civil rights move then and what itmeans now.
ment was
by those who
The dialogue that civil rights autobiography undertakes with history is also the key to its potential to revise the grand narrative, as these reveal that the grand narrative can be rewritten, even autobiographies autobiography rative of themovement, true to autobiographers'
lived parts of it and helped put it in place. Civil rights connects its new and different stories to the grand nar
a recognizable ment as most
over and over."107 Stories and the repetitive act of telling stories serve to consolidate and remind us of important cultural ideas and values. Telling the same story over and over, without changing it, is a con servative move, but telling a familiar story in different ways can be part of a revisionist enterprise. As civil rights autobiographers use portions of the grand narrative to frame their life stories, they do so as a means
stories to that story, even at the expense of seeming to reify some parts of it. In this, civil rights autobiographers recognize the central role of narratives in our lives and our abiding need to hear "the same story
not only because portions of that narrative are life stories, but also because they seek to tell story, a story that is clearly about the civil rightsmove readers understand it. To do so, they relate their life
of transforming it. If civil rights autobiography is, in its proliferation of stories and perspectives, a centrifugal force, reminding us of all that still needs to be accounted for in civil rights history, then its grounding in a dialogue with the grand narrative is its centripetal hold, acknowl
and Thomas McLaughlin,
107 J.Hillis Miller, "Narrative," in Frank Lentricchia Terms for Literary Study (2nd ed.; Chicago, 1995), 70.
eds., Critical
AUTOBIOGRAPHIES
363
edging the complex relationship civil rights autobiographers have to that narrative and expressing their commitment to the search for a Most
ized, both as they existed in the past and as theymight in the future. In place of the existing grand narrative, civil rights autobiography calls us to an emergent history, indeed for the foreseeable future an ever
shared yet considerably revised history of the civil rights movement. significantly, this shared story is an unfinished one, with its expansive and progressive goals of equality and justice yet to be real
to changing times, as present-day concerns expand our sense of the history and import of thatmovement. And the chief virtue of a search for a shared history, rather than its attainment, is that it does not allow (or even uncomfortably) behind us. on involves us in themovement's Instead, civil rights autobiography our its and in its in establishing meaning realizing goals going present, the movement to be comfortably
own times.
in emergent one, as long as memory and history remain in dialogue civil rights autobiography. In this we are well served. The chief virtue of an emergent story is that itkeeps the civil rightsmovement relevant
thetic to the justice claims of the movement; they have written spe studies that run parallel to and draw on first-person accounts; commitment to breaking the hold of and they share autobiographers' cialized
The goal of an emergent, expansive, and progressive history is one share. Most are broadly sympa thatmost historians of themovement
there is such variety, depth, and strength because to overwhelm us interpre to because it threatens richness it;weakness the risk of adding to our interpretive load, however, tively. Whatever we need these untold stories to understand the full spectrum of action, and its weakness:
perspectives we have not yet heard from.We should do so because the revisionist potential of autobiographies and specialized studies remains so high. Indeed, the growing abundance of thiswork is both its strength
the grand narrative.108 What, then, is the role of historians in this revisionist enterprise? First, we should continue to cultivate more sto ries and especially different stories from those people, places, and
inaction, and reaction that constituted themovement and determined its outcomes. Second, and more important at this juncture, we need to develop a better understanding of the nature of civil rights stories? their production, circulation, and their content, form, and meaning; most the work and theymight do in theworld. We critically, reception;
108 Charles W. Eagles, "Toward New Histories 66 (November 2000), 815-48, esp. 816.
of the Civil Rights Era," Journal of Southern
History,
364 need,
in short, a more searching criticism of stories. The analysis presented here is a beginning on this large interpretive agenda, cen tered on the lessons civil rights autobiography can teach us. The recent
has provided us with a proliferation of civil rights autobiographies are able to contribute to an emergent, body of "little narratives" that expansive, and progressive history of the movement because of their nature as activist narratives, written by those who devoted themselves to the struggle for justice; autobiographical narratives, which use the present to view consciously
better understanding of all civil rights stories and their relationships to each other. The task may be daunting, but the material for such an undertaking lies all around us in the proliferation of stories and the contested nature of this storytelling. This production and its inherent the scope and understanding dialogue signal a search for meaning; significance of this ongoing narrative project is our opportunity and our challenge.
engaging and critiquing existing narratives. We need now to under stand the same for all civil rights narratives?personal, scholarly, and we have of revising the grand narrative lies in a public. What hope
the past in new ways; and dialogic narratives, self positioned relative to other narratives and committed to

Autobiographies in The 21st Century

Diunggah oleh

Informasi Dokumen

Judul Asli

Hak Cipta

Format Tersedia

Bagikan dokumen Ini

Bagikan atau Tanam Dokumen

Opsi Berbagi

Apakah menurut Anda dokumen ini bermanfaat?

Apakah konten ini tidak pantas?

Hak Cipta:

Format Tersedia

Autobiographies in The 21st Century

Diunggah oleh

Hak Cipta:

Format Tersedia

Southern Historical Association

Autobiographies of the Civil Rights

observed, "the veterans of this movement enemies: sheriffs and historians."1

is an associate professor of history at theUniversity of San

The Journal of Southern History Volume LXXIV, No. 2, May 2008

326 This way

THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERNHISTORY

AUTOBIOGRAPHIES more concrete, more

AND CIVIL RIGHTS HISTORY and truer to the "experience"

THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN

AND CIVIL RIGHTS HISTORY

330 American movement

THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERNHISTORY

A UTOBIOGRAPHIES raneous media

AND CIVIL RIGHTS HISTORY

THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERNHISTORY

AND CIVIL RIGHTS HISTORY

THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN

AND CIVIL RIGHTS HISTORY

336 generally. Among Angela childhood A

THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY

the best known

AND CIVIL RIGHTS HISTORY

for example? and continuity, as well as

within the experience The world that each

THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN

by its nature an autobiography importance of its author and subject.38 Civil

insists on the centrality and

rights autobiography realms of human experience, Pattillo Beals

This manner that begin

bus on which Rosa

AND CIVIL RIGHTS HISTORY

OF SOUTHERNHISTORY THE JOURNAL

with a little key. Most evenings to write to God.45 bedroom

ing?"show, vivid stories that make

AND CIVIL RIGHTS HISTORY

THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERNHISTORY

AND CIVIL RIGHTS HISTORY

THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERNHISTORY

AUTOBIOGRAPHIES have come to the conclusion

AND CIVIL RIGHTS HISTORY that southern whites of my

significance.62 Still others write that the

THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN

The Life and

AND CIVIL RIGHTS HISTORY

that these writers

OF SOUTHERNHISTORY THE JOURNAL

AND CIVIL RIGHTS HISTORY

THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERNHISTORY

AND CIVIL RIGHTS HISTORY

THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERNHISTORY

studies. Emilye Crosby for their studies of Claiborne Mississippians

Both men had close white

In a chapter devoted to titled "Clinging to Power and the

AND CIVIL RIGHTS HISTORY

see Lewis, Walking with theWind,

THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY

Albany, Even as the movement

make. One cludes

publisher was eager to on the book jacket shows Lewis along

AND CIVIL RIGHTS HISTORY

critical at the time of her memoir's first nationwide observance

lost to scholars and the public alike.91 In the