Between Remembrance and Repair: Commemorating Racial Violence in Philadelphia, Mississippi

By Claire Whitlinger

Few places are more notorious for civil rights–era violence than Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the 1964 "Mississippi Burning" murders. Yet in a striking turn of events, Philadelphia has become a beacon in Mississippi's racial reckoning in the decades since. Claire Whitlinger investigates how this community came to acknowledge its past, offering significant insight into the social impacts of commemoration. Examining two commemorations around key anniversaries of the murders held in 1989 and 2004, Whitlinger shows the differences in how those events unfolded. She also charts how the 2004 commemoration offered a springboard for the trial of former Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen for his role in the 1964 murders, the 2006 passage of Mississippi's Civil Rights/Human Rights education bill, and the initiation of the Mississippi Truth Project. In doing so, Whitlinger provides the first comprehensive account of these high profile events and expands our understanding of how commemorations both emerge out of and catalyze associated memory movements.

Threading a compelling story with theoretical insights, Whitlinger delivers a study that will help scholars, students, and activists alike better understand the dynamics of commemorating difficult pasts, commemorative practices in general, and the links between memory, race, and social change.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Apr 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781469656342

Claire Whitlinger

Claire Whitlinger is assistant professor of sociology at Furman University.

Book preview

Between Remembrance and Repair

Between Remembrance and Repair

Commemorating Racial Violence in Philadelphia, Mississippi

CLAIRE WHITLINGER

The University of North Carolina Press   Chapel Hill

This book was published with the assistance of the John Hope Franklin Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

© 2020 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Set in Charis by Westchester Publishing Services

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Whitlinger, Claire, author.

Title: Between remembrance and repair : commemorating racial violence in Philadelphia, Mississippi / Claire Whitlinger.

Description: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019046687 | ISBN 9781469656328 (cloth) | ISBN 9781469656335 (paperback) | ISBN 9781469656342 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Memorialization—Mississippi—Philadelphia. | Civil rights movements—Mississippi—Philadelphia. | Philadelphia (Miss.)—History—20th century. | Philadelphia (Miss.)—History—21st century.

Classification: LCC F349.P47 W47 2020 | DDC 976.2/685—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019046687

Cover illustration: June 21, 1965, marchers memorialize the deaths of three civil rights workers near Philadelphia, Mississippi. Memorial March © 1976 Matt Herron/Take Stock.

Portions of this book are derived from previously published material in Sociological Forum 30, no. SI (2015), © Wiley Online, DOI: 10.1111/socf.12182; Race and Justice 5, no. 2 (2015), © Sage Publications, DOI: 10.1177/2153368715573366; and Mobilization: An International Quarterly 24, no. 4 (2019), © Mobilization: An International Quarterly, doi: 10.17813/1086-671X-24-4-455.

For Jamila

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1   A Philadelphia (Mississippi) Story

Remembering in Black and White

2   From Countermemory to Collective Memory

3   Prosecuting Edgar Ray Killen

4   Legislating Civil and Human Rights Education

5   Commissioning Truth and Reconciliation

6   The Transformative Capacity of Commemorating Racial Violence

Comparing the 1989 and 2004 Commemorations

7   Commemorating Racial Violence as Intergroup Contact

8   Commemoration Is a Constant Struggle

Epilogue

Fifty Years Forward

Appendix A. On Methods

Appendix B. Archival Collections

Appendix C. List of Interviews

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figure, Graphs, and Tables

Figure

G.1     FBI missing poster for Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner, 99

G.2     Martin Luther King Jr., August 1964, 100

G.3     Mt. Zion United Methodist Church, 101

G.4     Early memory marker for the 1964 murders, 102

G.5     Mayor Rayburn Waddell and the Philadelphia Coalition, May 26, 2004, 103

G.6     Governor Haley Barbour, Congressman John Lewis, and the mother of Andrew Goodman, June 20, 2004, 104

G.7     Stanley Dearman and Rita Bender, June 15, 2015, 105

G.8     Children at fiftieth anniversary commemoration program, June 15, 2014, 105

G.9     Local residents and civil rights movements veterans, June 21, 2014, 106

G.10   Memorial march, June 21, 2014, 107

G.11   Susan Glisson and Summer Institute students, June 2014, 108

A.1     Example of event structure (the 2004 commemoration), 200

Graphs

2.1     Articles mentioning the murders in the New York Times, 1964–2009, 42

2.2     Articles mentioning the murders in the New York Times, 1989, 43

Tables

4.1     Mississippi state senators who sponsored the education bill (SB 2718), 93

6.1     Comparing the 1989 and 2004 commemorations, 136

6.2     Leadership in Philadelphia, by race and year, 141

A.1       Chronology of the 2004 commemoration, 199

Preface

People often ask if I’m from Mississippi. I’m not. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, where—like many places in the United States—racial inequality was ever present and rarely discussed. Attending a majority-minority public high school investigated by the Washington Post in the early 2000s as an example of modern segregation reinforced my interest in race, but it was the location of my childhood home that first sparked my sociological imagination.¹ Adjacent to Highway 101, one of California’s major thoroughfares, the modest home where I grew up was situated on a sociocultural fault line, one that separated the vast (mostly white dominated) wealth of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to the west from communities of color with startling rates of poverty and crime to the east. A desire to understand how such separate spheres were created and maintained led me on a journey around the globe—to South Africa, the Netherlands, and ultimately Mississippi.

In the mid-2000s, I moved to South Africa, where the recent conclusion of the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission inspired passionate debates about the utility of such commissions—conversations that remain unsettled in both South Africa and the scholarly literature on truth commissions.² I later moved to the Netherlands, where the International Criminal Court in The Hague presented an entirely different model for addressing historic patterns of violence, adopting a legal approach. The juxtaposition of these two models challenged me to think more deeply about how various collectivities—governments, schools, businesses, and local communities—confront histories of group-based violence. Moreover, I wanted to better understand the consequences of this memory work and the conditions that enabled these collective efforts to transform their social surroundings. These are the concerns that motivated me as I entered the doctoral program in sociology at the University of Michigan—several thousand miles away from my hometown, where I first became aware of racial inequality and its many ramifications, including those in the realm of memory.

When I returned to the Bay Area for a workshop on transitional justice at the Stanford Law School in 2009, a brief conversation with Lisa Magarrell, then head of the U.S. Accountability Project at the International Center for Transitional Justice, drew my attention to Mississippi. In Mississippi, Magarrell explained, a civil society organization was planning a statewide truth commission, which would be the first of its kind in the United States.³ Eager to learn more about efforts to address histories of racial violence in the United States following my international travels, I thought that Mississippi was an opportune place to visit. That summer, with the support of a generous research grant, I drove from Michigan to Mississippi. I crisscrossed the state, attending regional truth commission meetings and speaking with Mississippians about racial reconciliation, a term that I would quickly abandon after learning that it provoked strong, sometimes negative, reactions among those Mississippians who equated reconciliation with pacification. Thus, as my research developed, so did the language I used to describe it—shifting from reconciliation to reckoning, a term that appeared to be less politically, culturally, and emotionally laden.

While this initial research proved to be an important primer, it was my visit to Philadelphia, in Neshoba County, that left the most lasting impression. Days before I headed south from Michigan, a colleague had forwarded an H-Net listserve announcement of the forty-fourth annual commemoration service at the Mississippi Martyrs Memorial in Philadelphia, serendipitously scheduled for the day I was set to arrive in the state.⁴ I was eager (and a bit apprehensive) to visit the place I knew only from the film Mississippi Burning, which a faculty advisor had encouraged me to watch in preparation for my trip. When I look back, the recommendation to watch a fictionalized depiction of an iconic civil rights story seems peculiar given the robust historical literature on the case. Yet on further consideration, it also suggests the significance of the film to a generation of Americans, many of whom learned, or were reminded, of this chapter of the civil rights movement from Alan Parker’s fictional telling in his 1988 Oscar-winning film.

Undoubtedly, the film influenced my initial experience of Neshoba County, when I arrived after nightfall the evening before the commemoration service. Driving into the city, I could not help but think of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, who had traveled those same dark, winding roads. The next morning, I grabbed a copy of the local newspaper, the Neshoba Democrat, from the hotel’s front desk, wrongly assuming that the local newspaper would advertise the service. When I did not see the event featured, I panicked. Had I somehow gotten the month wrong? Was the commemoration service being held in July, not June—as I had originally thought? An advertisement for a memorial service being held the following day added to my confusion. Had I gotten the day wrong, or was this an entirely different memorial service that also commemorated the 1964 murders?

The latter turned out to be true. I had stumbled upon a fragmented commemoration before I knew the term or the sociological literature on collective memory that supported such theoretical formulations.⁵ A participant at the Mississippi Martyrs Memorial event would later explain to me in a hushed tone that the fortieth anniversary commemoration in 2004 had resulted in two commemoration services organized by different groups and targeting different (albeit somewhat overlapping) audiences—one considered more moderate in its approach to racial reckoning and the other considered more radical. Four years later, the animosity between the two groups was still apparent. Despite this local tension, it appeared that the fortieth anniversary event had improved the reputation of the city that some described as Mississippi’s Mississippi, the most maligned city in the most maligned state. As I traveled throughout the state in the summer of 2009, Philadelphia and its fortieth anniversary commemoration kept emerging in conversations. Over and over again, people I interacted with described the event as the beginning of hopeful, enduring change to the state’s racial status quo. It seemed, then, that the commemoration in 2004 had been deeply meaningful, and that what had generated a rift among local agents of memory had also reverberated across Mississippi in ways that seemed significant if not yet fully determined.

Over the coming months, a more concrete project emerged from these initial inductive inquiries, one that focused more explicitly on the causes and consequences of commemorating racial violence and Philadelphia’s fifty-year journey—a process that appeared to transform Neshoba County’s reputation from the worst of the worst in racial hatred to a model of racial reconciliation, as one historian described it.⁶ The following pages synthesize what I learned over nearly ten years of research, a time during which I have come to appreciate Mississippi’s complex history and to admire the dynamic, witty, generous, and courageous Mississippians I have had the pleasure of meeting along the way.

Acknowledgments

As I reflect on the many people who made this book possible, I am filled with gratitude. During the years I have worked on this project, my life has been touched by many generous, kind-spirited individuals without whom this book would not have been possible. My first and deepest thanks goes to the sixty-two men and women I interviewed for this study who related their experiences to me with incredible candor, and sometimes with painful pauses. I am honored that you shared your stories with me. Countless others welcomed me into their lives, especially the parishioners at Holy Cross and the Payne family. You made Mississippi a home away from home.

For those at the University of Michigan who helped shape this project from the beginning, thank you for believing in it—and me. Peggy Somers spent many, many hours working with me on this research, from its early conceptualization to its final chapters. She has read countless drafts of articles, fellowship proposals, and chapters, always providing feedback that is thorough, direct, and constructive. It was on a long walk with Peggy in Palo Alto, California, that this project was first conceived. As we rounded the Stanford foothills, Peggy helped direct me through one of those challenging moments in one’s professional life when there are more questions than answers. She reminded me why I wanted to be a sociologist and redirected me on a path that would lead to years of fulfilling research. Peggy consistently challenged me to be a better researcher, writer, and scholar. Thank you, Peggy, for your mentorship and your friendship.

Kiyo Tsutsui provided me with an amazing example of professional citizenship. Between organizing international conferences, presenting his work across the globe, and collaborating with researchers at foreign universities, Kiyo has shown me that one can be both rooted and expansive. He continuously challenged me to be more precise in my research methods and my theorization and provided me with invaluable opportunities to grow as a scholar, including a summer at the Max Plank Institute for Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, Germany, where my life expanded in immeasurable ways.

Al Young’s interest in this project was an unexpected gift. He was a first-rate sounding board, always making time to meet with me despite a chaotic schedule as department chair and offering encouraging words during moments of uncertainty. Moreover, his work has continued to be a constant touchstone throughout this research by providing insights on race in the United States and qualitative methods more generally. His writing on interviewing and identity was especially helpful as I entered the field.

Rob Jansen’s keen insights and practical disposition made him an incredible asset to this research. Whether I was pained by an analytical conundrum or befuddled by professional norms, Rob provided thoughtful guidance. I admire his always sharp analysis, even when outside his direct area of expertise. Perhaps one of Rob’s greatest gifts was his ability to uncover relevant insights from my initial, jumbled thoughts. I have been tremendously fortunate to have worked with him.

Stephen Berrey was an invaluable resource regarding Mississippi history and introduced me to authors and arguments I might have otherwise overlooked. He coached me through my first presentation at a history conference (never had I felt more like a sociologist!) and offered frequent words of encouragement throughout the project’s development. The book is far richer for his involvement.

Along the way, many others at the University of Michigan served as important mentors who gave me the tools and guidance to complete this project. Barbara Anderson was one of the first to support me and my academic interests; John Romani broadened my thinking on civil society during an independent study early in my graduate studies; Howard Kimeldorf provided invaluable guidance on comparative historical methods; Rob Mickey and Pam Brandwein expanded my thinking beyond sociology; and Michael Kennedy nurtured my interest in transitional justice. Futhermore, Elizabeth Armstrong, Müge Göçek, Greta Krippner, Karyn Lacy, Sandy Levistky, Mark Chesler, and Geneviève Zubrzycki have provided helpful feedback and encouragement during my time at Michigan.

None of this would have been possible without fantastic teachers and mentors at George Washington University. Ivy Ken, Daina Stukuls Eglitis, Andrew Zimmerman, Mike Wenger, and Samantha Friedman, you introduced me to a discipline and a career that continues to bring me more joy than I could have hoped for. As I continue my life as a professor, I draw great inspiration from my interactions with you.

While my mentors at George Washington and Michigan provided the foundation of support for this project, I am equally grateful to my colleagues at Furman University who have continued to support me as I further developed this work. Thanks especially to Laura Morris, who offered encouragement and shared commiseration at weekly writing sessions during the final stages of crafting this manuscript. Thanks also to Sally Morris Cote, Ken Kolb, and Amy Jonason, who read proposals and chapters at various stages, and to Kyle Longest, Kristy Maher, Joe Merry, Paul Kooistra, Jason Hansen, Brandon Inabinet, Steve O’Neil, Deborah Allen, Neil Jamerson, Stephanie Hesbacher, Erik Anderson, and Michelle Horhota, with whom I had conversations that enriched my thinking on issues related to history, memory, and methods.

Other friends, family members, and colleagues played key supporting roles in this journey. In no particular order, thanks to Jim Campbell, David Cunningham, Geoff Ward, Raj Ghoshal, Christina Simko, Nicole Fox, Hollie Nyseth Brehm, Kerri Nicoll, Chris Leyda, Emily Bosk, Ethan Schoolman, Alex Jakle, Alex Von Hagen Jamar, Betsy Bringewatt, John Bringewatt, Tova Walsh, Allison Dale-Riddle, Molly Reynolds, Joel Rhuter, Ariana Orozco, Kyra Mangrum, Ashley Jardina, Dave Cottrell, Alton Worthington, Atef Said, Erica Morrell, Dan Hirschman, Nicole High-Steskal, Mathieu Desan, David Smith, Charity Hoffman, Elizabeth Young, Kelly Russell, Jeff Swindle, Austin McCoy, Charles Behling, Susan Glisson, Charles Tucker, April Grayson, Von Gordon, Portia Espy, Neddie Winters, Richard Feit, Brian Habig, and Bill Moore.

Working with the University of North Carolina Press has been a delight. I’m grateful to Joe Parsons, who first approached me about publishing this work, and to Lucas Church, who shepherded this manuscript through the publication process. To others at the University of North Carolina Press who have supported this project’s journey from manuscript to print, thank you. I could not ask for a better editorial team.

Social science research can be an expensive endeavor, and the work presented in these pages would not have been possible without generous financial support. The Rackham Graduate School and Department of Sociology at the University of Michigan funded several early research trips to Mississippi. Research trips to South Africa and Switzerland were made possible by the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies and the Norm Bodine Fellowship Fund. I am also thankful to have received funding from the Max Planck Institute for Religious and Ethnic Diversity and Furman University’s Research and Professional Growth Program, which provided additional resources to continue this work.

My family has remained a source of unwavering support. From early on, they nurtured my sociological imagination by allowing me to explore people, places, and cultures, even when it took me far away from them. They were my biggest cheerleaders, even though there were no sidelines to sit on and academic victories sounded like jibberish (That’s fantastic! But what’s an R&R?). Mom, thanks for all the after-work calls and for being my most dependable proofreader. Dad, thank you for driving me to City Teens in East Menlo Park all those years ago and for never questioning how long this book was taking. J. J., Kat, Trey, and Rhys, I still can’t believe we all ended up in Greenville!

To my crazy love, Jean-Baptiste, what forces of the universe brought a blues- and barbeque-loving French-German storyteller into my life, I will never know—but I am forever grateful. In Mississippi, you challenged me to take risks I might not have taken on my own; in Germany, you nursed me back to health; and in South Carolina, you have made our home a refuge. When my turn comes to support you through an all-consuming, multiyear project (and it will soon, I expect), I look forward to showering you with the same love, respect, and enthusiasm.

Finally, to Jules Henry who grew alongside this manuscript, may the social world in all its complexity continue to be a source of wonder and joy.

Between Remembrance and Repair

Introduction

On June 21, 2004, a thousand onlookers gathered for what would be a remarkable event at the Neshoba County Coliseum in Philadelphia, Mississippi.¹ Normally the site of rodeos, car shows, and concerts, the coliseum on this early summer day was set for an event of more serious consequence. It had been exactly forty years since three young civil rights workers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—were murdered outside of town, their bodies hidden in a makeshift grave, and in commemoration of that tragedy, a thirty-member multiracial task force of local citizens had organized a formal, community-wide gathering to honor their lives and loss.

In the packed coliseum, members of the task force—known now as the Philadelphia Coalition—gathered on stage. Among them were members of Philadelphia’s Community Development Partnership, the city council, and the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, all organizations whose representatives had signed resolutions calling on legal authorities to use every available resource to seek justice in the case. The coalition was united in its call for action: after forty years of impunity, those responsible for the 1964 murders must at last be held to account.

Although the commemoration and its call for justice were striking departures from the community’s prior resistance to public discussions about this discomforting past, for many observers, the event recounted a story they knew all too well. Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner’s fateful ride into Ku Klux Klan territory on June 21, 1964, has been described as the most depressingly familiar story of the Mississippi movement, having been recounted in numerous books and immortalized in the Oscar-winning film Mississippi Burning.² Furthermore, the crime had been thoroughly investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice, revealing in excruciating detail (the former had amassed some 144,000 pages of documentation in the case) how eighteen Klansmen, including local law enforcement officers, had conspired to kill Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner when the trio returned to Neshoba County to investigate the firebombing of a local church.

The disappearance of the three men had generated global media speculation, and while the national press had adopted and reinforced civil rights organizations’ initial suspicions that Philadelphia’s sheriff and deputy were somehow involved, most white Philadelphians had believed the disappearances were a hoax or a northern conspiracy.³ By the time the bodies of the three civil rights workers were discovered six weeks after their disappearance, Philadelphia and surrounding Neshoba County had garnered a national reputation as a strange, tight little town due to its citizens’ evasive—and sometimes hostile—treatment of federal agents and media representatives throughout the investigation.⁴ Two years later, after leading a memorial march in Philadelphia, Martin Luther King Jr. famously described the city as a terrible town … the worst I’ve seen, calling it one of the two places where he had feared for his life.⁵ King’s assessment further solidified Neshoba County’s enduring reputation as a dangerous, hate-filled place, and for decades travelers avoided the county, fearful that they too might face violence, harassment, or worse.

Yet today, to the surprise of many, Philadelphia’s efforts to confront the city’s history of racial violence has been commended by academics and racial-reconciliation practitioners as a model for other cities hoping to do the same, having precipitated meaningful change in Philadelphia’s race relations and catalyzing broader transformations within Mississippi’s legal, educational, and civil spheres,⁶ including a Neshoba County jury’s conviction in 2005 of Edgar Ray Killen for orchestrating the killings; the 2006 enactment by the Mississippi legislature of a groundbreaking education bill that mandated civil and human rights education at every grade level; and the 2009 initiation by Mississippi citizens of the Mississippi Truth Project, initially modeled after South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

How do we explain such a striking turnaround? And what role have local commemorations of the 1964 murders played in this process? The national and local press praised the fortieth anniversary commemoration in 2004 as a remarkable racial reconciliation, great for the community, and a turning point, but these early assertions, made in the immediate aftermath of the commemoration, require further investigation. Whether—and, if so, how—the fortieth anniversary commemoration marked a turning point in Philadelphia’s race relations, facilitating subsequent institutional transformations, remains an open question, one that needs to be assessed empirically and retrospectively. This is the task ahead: to explore how commemorations of racial violence work and whether they can transform the often contested and tragic conditions from which they emerge.

Although Philadelphia may be unique, given its distinct role in the history of the civil rights movement, many local communities are now confronting their racial and ethnic violence in the past and the present, altering their city’s commemorative practices, enacting new rituals of remembrance, and removing monuments and memorials that represent painful pasts. But these commemorative activities are not merely about the past; they are also about transforming the future. In this sense, the process by which the people of Neshoba County have come to terms with their past over the course of fifty years offers insights into the perils and possibilities of local commemorative projects and raises larger questions about whether and how commemorations have consequences.

Remembering Difficult Pasts: Conflict and Cohesion

The events that have unfolded in Neshoba County and across the state of Mississippi since 2004 must be situated within a broader political and cultural landscape, most notably the memory boom—a phenomenon ignited after World War II and accelerated by the end of the Cold War—and the accompanying memory industry of museums, monuments, memorials, heritage tourism, and legal battles over violence long past that together have come to characterize the second half of the twentieth century.⁷ And while scholars have speculated on the multiple origins of this recent passion for memory, many have suggested that the collective trauma of the Holocaust contributed to memory’s newfound prominence by cultivating a new ethics of remembrance that values the collective recollection of traumatic pasts as an urgent necessity, best encapsulated by George Santayana’s oft-quoted assertion, Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.⁸ In this way, as a new relationship between memory and justice began to emerge in the mid-nineteenth century, one that associates public acknowledgment and atonement with moral righteousness and legitimate political action—a new set of feeling rules on a macro scale.⁹ Consequently, nonacknowledgment has come to seem like a nonoption for many institutional actors, and as a result, the political and cultural landscape is now bedecked with performances of political regret.¹⁰

One need only scan the current political landscape to observe this seismic normative shift. In the United States alone, cities and states have begun to reckon with decades-old—sometimes centuries-old—racial violence in the form of truth commissions, legislative inquiries, political apologies, and community remembrance projects.¹¹ In the educational sector, over forty universities have initiated ad hoc committees to investigate the institutions’ historic ties to slavery and its legacies.¹² The Equal Justice Initiative’s newly erected National Memorial for Peace and Justice has heightened national discussions about historic lynching, raising the stakes for communities unwilling to claim their roles in that history.¹³ And since 2015, when Dylann Roof killed churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, public battles about the meaning of Confederate iconography have intensified, resulting in the removal of Confederate flags and monuments from—or their contextualization in—a number of southern cities, sometimes with fatal consequences.¹⁴ Although rooted in distinct institutional histories, these developments all share a common thread: in their efforts to address and atone for historic harms, they represent a politics of regret.¹⁵

Scholars attuned to the cultural fascia underlying social interactions have long observed such memory work. Whether as objects (monuments, memorials, and museums) or rituals (naming practices, holiday celebrations, and annual observances), commemorations—the tangible representations of collective memory—are symbols that reflect current cultural and political concerns and a community’s deepest and most cherished values. Commemoration can therefore be understood as a point on a community’s moral compass that both designates the current location and points the way forward.¹⁶

It is not surprising, then, that scholars of collective memory have been interested in what a group collectively considers worthy of remembering from essentially unmarked stretches of history.¹⁷ In this way, commemoration is a product of social construction: families, neighborhoods, organizations, nations, and other collectivities identify the people and events deserving of distinct recognition, a process that can become self-reinforcing once commemorative activities are institutionalized. Moreover, as Emile Durkheim and his student Maurice Halbwachs observed long ago, enacting such ritual remembrance reinforces membership in the group, or a sense of collective belonging.¹⁸ Thus, scholars across a wide array of disciplines have found that commemorative practices offer rich insights into the deep structures with which a society is built.

This classical understanding of commemoration’s social function, however, was cultivated before trauma and atrocity … supplanted heroism and triumph as the linchpins of collective identity—a development that challenged prevailing understandings of what commemorations are and what they do.¹⁹ After all, the commemorations of triumphant wars and beloved political leaders are quite different from the commemorations of military defeats, contested public figures, and widespread systematic violence. Commemorations of disconcerting, divisive, or otherwise difficult pasts complicate the traditional relationship between ritual remembrance and collective solidarity, often highlighting a culture’s sociocultural fault lines. Of course, as recent conflicts over Confederate iconography suggest, commemorations can have multiple meanings, connoting positive values for one social group and negative values for another.

Despite this proliferation of memory projects and practices illuminating difficult pasts, the social role of such collective remembrance remains hotly debated. Does the remembering of difficult pasts facilitate social cohesion and stability or perpetuate social conflict? Proponents of the never forget or never again position highlight memory’s preventive capacity as well as its ethical and social psychological imperatives.²⁰ In Paul Ricoeur’s estimation, remembering violent pasts is not only a moral duty but also a powerful form of redress. We owe a debt to the victims, Ricoeur insists. By remembering and telling, we … prevent forgetfulness from killing the victims twice.²¹ Others, drawing on Freudian psychology, highlight how sites of remembrance enable societies to work through collective trauma in productive ways, restoring dignity to survivors and laying the foundation for reconciliation.²² Still others note collective remembrance’s relationship to political practicalities in the context of political transitions: as authoritarian regimes gave way to third-wave democracies in the late 1980s and early 1990s, states enacted memory practices such as truth commissions, trials, and reparations in hope of acknowledging the past, restoring trust in civic institutions, and legitimizing ascendant political regimes.²³

In recent years, however, arguments in favor of forgetting have gained new resilience. In his highly publicized book In Praise of Forgetting, David Rieff takes on the prevailing pro-memory zeitgeist, arguing forcefully in defense of collective forgetting. Drawing on such intractable conflicts as those in the Balkans and Palestine, Rieff highlights how centuries-old resentments continue to foment rancor and revenge, perpetuating social conflict and division in the present. In this way, Rieff and others suggest, remembrance may contribute to the pursuit of justice but at the expense of peace.²⁴ Furthermore, proponents of this position note the paradoxical relationship between collective memory and collective identity. While collective memory has long been understood as the cornerstone of collective identity, collective memory also fosters in-group loyalties, often to the detriment of intergroup relations.²⁵ In this way, those who criticize the contemporary surfeit of memory bemoan a culture of victimhood and the tyranny of guilt whereby political energies congeal around cultural rather than civic identity, potentially sowing the seeds of future identity-based conflicts.²⁶ Indeed, philosophers have long noted the social significance of collective amnesia as the starting point from which to build a new society.²⁷ Undergirded by this logic, societies emerging from violent conflict have adopted public forgetting as state policy. This practice goes back to ancient Greece and occurred more recently in Spain, where some people view the pacto del olvido (pact of oblivion) of the era after the regime of General Francisco Franco as a critical agreement between political factions that made way for democracy immediately following the military dictator’s death.²⁸

It appears, then, that we are in a bind. The very memory practices that may enable justice, recognition, and conflict prevention may also intensify group-based division, foster conflict, and inhibit peace. But this binary debate—whether to remember or to forget—is too simplistic. As Michael Schudson reminds us, memory is a distortion since memory is invariable and inevitably selective. A way of seeing is a way of not seeing, a way of remembering is a way of forgetting too.²⁹ What is at stake are multiple ways of remembering, battles over which memories come to be privileged in the public spheres as part of a collective narrative and which fade into oblivion. So rather than presenting commemorations of violent pasts as entirely beneficial or detrimental to social life, as popular and scholarly texts often do, this study sheds light on the complexity of commemorating racial violence, highlighting the conditions under which commemorations of racial violence facilitate social change. After all, we know little about what memory practices do in the communities where they take place, an empirical question that social scientific research is particularly well suited to investigate.

Memory Movements and Social Change

When most people think of social movements, large-scale movements come to mind—such as the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the environmental movement, and so on. But social movements—defined as sustained collective challenges to political and cultural authority—are not only global or national in scope. Social movements also take place on the local level, organized around grievances that are particular to a county, city, or neighborhood. These are exemplified by NIMBY (not in my back yard) movements, in which local actors seek to prevent changes to their immediate surroundings. Likewise, memory movements, as sustained efforts to change or preserve particular representations of the past, occur on different scales, from efforts to honor Martin Luther King Jr. with a national holiday to designating historic preservation districts or erecting plaques to highlight the significance of a street corner.³⁰ Memory movements, large or small, resemble what some