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Memory attaches itself to sites, whereas history attaches itself to events.

—Pierre Nora, Les Lieux de Mémoire

 

Race, the oppressive yoke of the South’s past and the delicate dividing line of its present, could become the tourist attraction of its future.

—The Dispatch, 27 November 1992

People want to walk in the footsteps, they want to sit in the pews, and we promote it, yes. It changed the course of American history.

— Frances Smiley, Alabama Bureau of Tourism and Travel

In the last three decades, commemoration of the Civil Rights Movement, along with

the development and promotion of historic civil rights sites across the South, have led to a so-

called “civil rights tourism”. Former sites of civil rights agitation have been “sanctified” and

transformed into attractions suitable for pilgrimages. Inextricably linked to this recent

phenomenon are the issues of commercialization and economic exploitation. Indeed, the

demarcation of boundaries between the commemorative and educational messages of civil

rights sites and their commercialization have become increasingly blurred. The study of civil

rights tourism constitutes part of a wider and emerging scholarship on the Civil Rights

Movement and its legacy. As scholar Jacquelyn Dowd Hall points out, “in contrast to the vast

literature on what the movement was and did, the scholarship on how it is remembered is

thin.”1 Increasingly, historians have begun to examine Americans’ struggles to make sense of

                                                                                                                         1 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” in The Journal of American History 91:4 (2005): 1233-1263.

Civil Rights Tourism in Alabama and Mississippi: Commemoration, Commercialization and the Distortion of Memory

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the cataclysmic changes brought about during the civil rights era, and are asking pertinent

questions about who remembers the civil rights struggle and the myriad ways in which they

do so.

In the last decade, pioneering scholarly contributions from Glenn T. Eskew have

examined how the development of civil rights memorials and museums in the South has

shaped remembrance of the Movement.2 In particular, Eskew has focused on civil rights

hertiage tourism in Alabama—the first state in the United States to promote black heritage.

However, several historiograpial gaps remain, especially within the scholarship of other

states in the South. This paper will examine comparatively the development of civil rights

tourism in Alabama and Mississippi—both former bastions of civil rights violence and

activism in the Deep South—whose development of civil rights tourism has radically differed.

In particular, the paper aims to explore the imperatives of commemoration and

commerialisation evident in the development of civil rights tourism and how these have led to

a distortion in the memory of the Movement.

The theoretical basis for understanding the development of civil rights tourism can be

traced to the study of memory. In 1925, French sociologist Maurice Halbwacks developed his

theory of “collective memory”.3 Individual memory, Halbwacks argued, is a social construct;

people apply social frames to locate their memories. Accordingly, one can only remember an

event of the past by finding its specific location within the frame of the collective memory.

                                                                                                                         2 See: Graham M.S. Dann and A.V. Seaton, eds. Slavery, Contested Heritage and Thanatourism (New York: Haworth Hospitality Press, 2001), Winfred B. Moore, Kyle S. Sinisi and David H. White Jr, eds. Warm Ashes: Issues in Southern History at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), Renee C. Romano and Leigh Raiford, eds. The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2006), Anthony J. Stanonis, Dixie Emporium: Tourism, Foodways and Consumer Culture in the American South (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2008) and David L. Sjoquist, ed. Past Trends and Future Prospects of the American City: The Dynamics of Atlanta (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009). 3 Maurice Halbwachs and Lewis A. Coser, On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992)

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By the 1980s, memory studies set off in new directions with the dissemination of French

historian Pierre Nora’s Les lieux de mémoire. Nora’s paradigm sought to discover how

history and memory could creatively interact and he articulated that there are lieux de

mémoire (sites of memory), because there are no longer milieux de mémoire, (real

environments).

Compared to Halbwachs, who considered memory to be maintained through the

recollections of collective groups, Nora theorized that in the face of rapid sociological change,

lieux de mémoire are maintained by celebrations, emblems, monuments, commemorations,

museums and commemorative vigilance.4 In Alabama and Mississippi, former sites of civil

rights protest, violence and death, have become the foci of history and memory, infused with

symbolic and political significance, constantly reworked in the ever-changing socio-political

climate, both by whites and African Americans.

Indeed, shrouded in the midst of a world economic crisis in the early 1980s, and faced

with reduced federal support, declining tax bases, and increasingly fluid national and

international markets, southern cities and states began to recognize heritage tourism as a

strategy for economic development. Moreover, southern officials recognized the growing

affluence of middle-class African Americans who were eager to explore their southern

heritage. Nowhere was this change more apparent than Alabama, where economics proved a

decisive factor. In his prize winning travelogue of the South, Confederates in the Attic:

Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (1998), journalist and author Tony Horowitz asked

seven-term Mayor of Selma, Joe Smitherman, about Selma’s decision to market its civil

rights heritage. Speaking candidly, Smitherman declared; “The idea was, what happened at

the bridge [Edmund Pettus Bridge], we’ve been stigmatized because of it for so long, why

                                                                                                                         4 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire,” in Representations 26 (1989): 7-24.    

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don’t we sell it, too?”5 Will Tankersly, former chair of the Montgomery Chamber of

Commerce, echoed Smitherman’s sentiments. He stated that Alabama “is overflowing with

resources…I want to bring jobs here. But we’ve still got an image problem. When you’re

sitting in a boardroom in New York and hear about Fruit Loops waving rebel flags down here,

it’s bad for business.”6

Ironically, it was Alabama’s previously staunch segregationist governor, George C.

Wallace, who initiated the sea change. Beginning his fourth term in January 1983, elected

largely by appearing as a racial liberal and winning the black vote, Wallace charged Frances

Smiley, project manager of Alabama’s Department of Tourism to recast Alabama’s image

and attract tourists.7 As Smiley notes, an initial tourist brochure, Alabama’s Black Heritage:

A Tour of Historic Sites was developed in 1983 “to target the minority market, polish the

image and bring southerners back home.”8 The brochure listed several civil rights sites

including the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Brown Chapel African

Methodist Episcopal Church in Selma and the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham.

In doing so, Alabama became the first state in U.S. history to produce a black heritage trail.

Henceforth, in Alabama and elsewhere, markers to the Civil Rights Movement began

to crowd out the old racist and supremacist symbols of the Lost Cause—in Alabama,

glorifying the Old South no longer paid the bills. The result, historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage

observes, is “a symbiotic relationship between the remembered past of dominant groups and                                                                                                                          5 Tony Horowitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (New York: Random House, 1998), 365. 6 Ibid, 359.    7 George C.Wallace was elected governor the first time in Alabama in 1962, with what was the largest popular vote in state history and with the declaration; “I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say, segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” By the late 1970s, Wallace had turned to religion, become a born-again Christian and renounced segregation. 8 The Telegraph, 10 August 1986

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the counter memories of the marginalized” in the South.9 As the New York Times reported on

12 September 1990;

ever since the wounds began to heal after the Civil War, the south has portrayed itself to potential visitors in mist-shrouded images of cotton barons and hoop skirts, mint juleps and white-columned antebellum mansions. Now…states that three decades ago were bastions of segregation are building monuments to the civil rights movement and producing brochures designed for black tourists.10

Efforts in Alabama to market its civil rights legacy coalesced with attempts by local

and national groups to memorialize significant events of the Movement including the 1955-

56 Montgomery Bus Boycott and violence on Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma in March 1965.

As part of a regional trend, scholar Glen T. Eskew notes, “the memorialization of the

Movement brought together veterans of the peaceful struggle, scholars, white racial liberals,

black politicians and urban reformers who shared a commitment to constructing civil rights

museums.”11 This trend, first inaugurated by Coretta Scott King in 1968 with the dedication

of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Centre in Atlanta, Georgia, and endorsed by state officials as a

means of accommodating the tens-of-thousands of visitors each year to civil rights sites,

announced a decade of civil rights memorialization in Alabama. In 1989, a moving Civil

Rights memorial was unveiled in Montgomery and was followed by the Birmingham Civil

Rights Institute in 1992, the Rosa Parks Library and Museum in 2000 and dozens of historical

markers to the Movement.12

                                                                                                                         9 W. Fitzhugh Brundage, “No Deed But Memory,” in Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 22. 10 New York Times, 30 September 1990 11 Glen T. Eskew, “From Civil War to Civil Rights: Selling Alabama as Heritage Tourism,” in Slavery, Contested Heritage and Thanatourism, eds. Graham M.S. Dann and A.V. Seaton (New York: Haworth Hospitality Press, 2001), 208. 12 See appendix i.

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In addition, memorialization of the Movement coincided with a period of increased

African American cultural production. Indeed, in his book Representing Black Culture:

Racial Conflict and Cultural Politics in the United States (1995), political scientist Richard

Merelman proposes a cultural projection model he called “syncretism”. Syncretism is a form

of “mutual projection” that occurs when “dominants accept some of the subordinate cultural

projection, and subordinates accept some of the dominate projection.” Because it incorporates

subordinate (as well as dominant) cultural imagery, syncretism may work to “weaken the

cultural foundations of political domination in a society.”13 The cultural projection model is

significant as it illuminates the extent to which power struggles among dominant white and

subordinate non-white racial groups, especially blacks, have taken on a cultural dimension, as

opposed to traditional forms of economic, social and political struggles. Until recently,

according to Merelman, African American cultural production has typically been restricted to

entertainment media, sports and music. However, the number and types of images of blacks

that “invite respect, commendation, debate and engagement” rather than negative

stereotyping is increasing. Indeed, the proliferation over the last two decades of civil rights

museums and memorials is evidence of increased African American cultural engagement.

By the turn of the twenty-first century, economic and commemorative imperatives

saw Montgomery officials expand the city’s old slogan “Cradle of the Confederacy” to add

“and Birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement.” As Alabama’s State Tourism director Lee

Sentell explained, “to me, the Civil War and civil rights are not separate stories. They are

book ends of the same conflict.”14 Moreover, in 2013, thirty years after Alabama’s first

                                                                                                                         13 Richard M. Merelman, Representing Black Culture: Racial Conflict and Cultural Politics in the United States (New York: Routledge, 1995), 3-25.  14 “Civil Rights Tourists Head to Alabama”, accessed April 24, 2014, http://abcnews.go.com/Travel/story?id=119105&page=2

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heritage trail, a new and expanded edition was released which celebrated the struggle for

African American freedom throughout the course of the twentieth century.15

Memorialization in Alabama has often centered on milestone anniversaries of

significant events and figures of the Civil Rights Movement, with the state simultaneously

benefiting from tourism expenditure. On the eve of Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2006,

Alabama’s Democrat-Reporter urged its readers to “take some time to not only reflect on Dr.

King’s incredible accomplishments, but also to take advantage of where we live and visit

some of the places and monuments dedicated to the Civil Rights Movement.” Moreover, it

continued;

Civil rights tourism has become a big business for our state…with the 50th anniversary of Rosa Parks [sic] courageous stand and the Montgomery bus boycott as major events, 2005 proved to be quite successful. Last year the industry generated over $100 million in economic impact for the state and shows no signs of slowing anytime soon…more tourism means a better Alabama.16

In Mississippi, two decades after Alabama started to market its civil rights heritage;

anniversaries of the Movement forced the state to begin to confront its legacy of racial hatred.

To many in Mississippi, the murder of civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, Andrew

Goodman and James Chaney in Philadelphia, Mississippi, during Freedom Summer in June

1964 was a painful reminder of the state’s bitter past. The three men had been campaigning to

register black voters in Mississippi when they were shot dead by the Ku Klux Klan. Seven

Klansmen were convicted on federal charges of violating civil rights. However, none served

more than six years and no one was tried for murder.

In 2004, a consortium of business, civic and political organizations, including the

                                                                                                                         15 See appendix ii.    16 Democrat-Reporter, 12 January 2006

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local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

and the Chamber of Commerce, formed the Philadelphia Coalition. The organization pursued

a multi-faceted approach to commemorate the victims, pressure the state’s attorney to retry

some of those suspected in the killings and to attract tourism to the area. For the first time,

one resident noted, there were “public conversations about what had happened.”17 The

Augusta Chronicle reported on 19 June 2004 that the state’s tourism officials were

documenting the slayings in the hope “of retelling history and drawing visitors to the

town…people realize that unless they out the truth out in the light, they can never move into a

future where Philadelphia can be proud of its cultural heritage.”18

Indeed, in their 1991 study of the three slain civil rights activists, historians Philip

Dray and Seth Cagin quoted one long-time resident of the town as saying; “to many…it will

always be June 21 1964, in Philadelphia.”19 The spotlight cast by the fortieth anniversary of

the killings led to the eventual conviction of Edgar Ray Killen in 2005. The 11 July 2005

edition of The Nation quoted Jim Prince, editor of the Philadelphia’s Neshoba Democrat as

saying; “if there cannot be redemption, there can at least be remuneration.”20 Indeed, such

civil rights tourism would be a difficult sell as long as the perpetrators went unpunished. Thus,

Killen’s trial and subsequent conviction were in part a bid to capitalize on the town’s ugly

past in order to make money, or at least to illustrate how it had improved.

Philadelphia’s desire to move forward was emblematic of Mississippi; a state often

portrayed in indelible, sepia-toned images of burning crosses, lynchings and racial violence.

Indeed, Mississippi represented the latest example of the ubiquitous southern economic and

                                                                                                                         17 The Washington Post, 16 January 2005 18 The Augusta Chronicle, 19 June 2004 19 Seth Cagin and Philip Dray, We are not afraid: the story of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, and the civil rights campaign for Mississippi (New York: Bantam books, 1991), 454. 20 “Racism Rebooted.” The Nation, 11 July 2005

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commemorative sentiments that had begun in Alabama two decades earlier. In April 2006,

Alabama’s Times-Daily reported that Mississippi had been “on the sideline as other civil

rights battlegrounds embraced the past with museums and interpretive centres, which officials

say also double as tourism and healing tools.”21

In the aftermath of the 2004 commemorations, the Community Development

Partnership in Philadelphia, Mississippi, produced an African-American Heritage Driving

Tour, which contained a map and a description of nine points of interest related to Freedom

Summer and the murders of the civil rights activists.22 Moreover, in 2011, the Mississippi

Development Authority’s Tourism Division launched the Mississippi Freedom Trail that

documents twenty-five sites associated with the Civil Rights Movement. These include

among others, the Bryant store in Money, Mississippi, where Emmett Till was murdered in

1955, the home of Medgar Evers, the NAACP field secretary killed in front of his home in

1963, and the Greyhound bus station in Jackson, where the freedom riders disembarked and

were promptly arrested for attempting to desegregate the terminal’s all-white bathrooms, with

historical markers paving the route.23

In his 2011 State of the State address, Mississippi’s white governor Haley Barbour

noted that; “tourism is and will remain a large employer in Mississippi and a big piece of our

economy. Further, tourism helps our image. While Mississippi has suffered from a negative

image all my life, people who actually visit here almost always go home with a better

impression and a positive experience.”24 During his governorship, Barbour was a crucial

advocate in the development of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, due to open in Jackson

                                                                                                                         21 Times-Daily, 17 April 2006 22 See appendix iii.    23 See appendix iv. 24 Mississippi State of the State Address 2011, accessed April 4, 2014, http://www.pewstates.org/projects/stateline/headlines/mississippi-state-of-the-state-address-2011-85899399739

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in 2017. Unlike other Civil Rights museums in Birmingham, Memphis, Greensboro and

Atlanta, the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson constitutes the first state-operated

civil rights facility in the United States. It has drawn virulent criticism from those who

experienced state directed racial segregation and violence. Indeed, as historians John Lennon

and Malcolm Foley articulate, “rarely does any state commemorate its crimes; it is primarily

enacted by surviving former victims or their relatives.”25 The distortion of history and

conflicted memories in museums, scholar Susan A. Crane argues, is “not so much of facts or

interpretations, but rather a distortion from the lack of congruity between personal experience

and expectation, on the one hand, and the institutional representation of the past on the

other.”26

However, museums and memorials of the Movement present an opportunity for the

education of those who are a generation or two removed from the tumultuous events of the

civil rights era. In an interview with New York Times on 28 June 1998, civil rights veteran

and NAACP chairman Julian Bond stated that “not one of the 500 students he surveyed

between 1989 and 1993 in classes at five prominent universities could correctly identify

George C. Wallace, the defiantly segregationist former Governor of Alabama.”27 Similarly, in

2004, thirty-year-old director of the Mississippi Development Authority’s Tourism Division,

Alex Thomas remarked; “When I was in high school, history textbooks didn’t discuss

Medgar Evers’ murder or the church bombings and the killings in Philadelphia. The three

men killed in Philadelphia were heroes who made life better for all Americans. That’s history

that I would like my daughter to know.”28

                                                                                                                         25 Malcolm Foley and John Lennon, Dark Tourism: The attraction of death and disaster (New York: Continuum, 2002), 158. 26 Susan A. Crane, “Memory, Distortion, and History in the Museum,” in History and Theory 36:4 (1997): 44-63. 27 New York Times, 28 June 1998 28 Star-News, 19 July 2004

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Moreover, education can be a form of reconciliation and tolerance, not just for the

young, but for older generations too. Indeed, civil rights tourism—with its array of sites and

museums—presents opportunities for both African Americans and whites, Southern and

Northern, as they engage with and confront a contested past. Georgette Norman, director of

the Rosa Parks Library and Museum in Montgomery noted in 2008 that; “Ten years ago in

Alabama, blacks and whites had just started to socialize together. Now we’re beginning to do

the hard work of talking about the way things were back then and why they were that

way…this museum was designed to promote that kind of dialogue.” 29 As German

philosopher Jürgen Habermas observed; “Democracy can’t function without vibrant public

spaces, spaces that do not serve primarily as sites of buying and selling, but as places for

thinking and talking.”30

In 2002, photographer Wayne Sides’ exhibition of photos on the Ku Klux Klan were

put on display at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, just a stone’s throw away from the

Sixteenth St Baptist Church where a Klansmen bombing killed four young girls in September

1963. Photos taken during a four year period in the late 1960s and early 1970s entitled

“Images of the Klan” were displayed in conjunction with Chris McNair’s “Through His Eye:

Photographs from the Civil Rights Movement”. Ahmad Ward, the institute’s education

director, stressed that the exhibitions shared an important connection. “The freedom fighters

of the civil rights movement are a stark contrast to the images of burning crosses and white

hoods. However, they both reflect this country’s history of race relations.”31 As Jim Carrier,

author of A Traveler’s Guide to the Civil Rights Movement (2004) noted in The Washington

Post on 27 August 2011; “Chiseling new narratives into southern stone is a difficult task. The                                                                                                                          29 Ala. Seeks Civil Rights Tourism, Racial Accord, accessed April 21, 2014, http://www.pewstates.org/projects/stateline/headlines/ala-seeks-civil-rights-tourism-racial-accord-85899387026 30 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989) 31 The Tuscaloosa News, 1 December 2002

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South is shadowed by the Civil War, arguments over who owns history and cynicism at

turning human rights tales into tourist trails. But such hewing has led to reconciliation, the

airing of centuries-old grievances and an integration of history that, until recently, was as

‘Jim Crowed’ as water fountains were in the 1960s.”32

However, notions of education, tolerance and reconciliation also possess some

inherent pitfalls. As scholar Jacquelyn Dowd Hall reminds us, “remembrance is always a

form of forgetting, and the dominant narrative of the civil rights movement—distilled from

history and memory, twisted by ideology and contestation, and embedded in heritage tours,

museums, public rituals, textbooks, and various artifacts of mass culture—distorts and

suppresses as much as it reveals.”33 In the South, diverse parties have tended to coalesce

around an understanding of the Movement as a finished process. However, this is hindered, in

the South and elsewhere, when the conversation broadens to include an unfinished,

contemporary agenda of de facto racial discrimination. Indeed, geographer Owen J. Dwyer

argues that “there are significant elisions and exclusions in the cultural landscape’s treatment

of the civil rights era.”34 Among them, Dwyer notes how museums and memorials focus on

charismatic leaders and dramatic events. They push to the side the history of women in the

Movement, working-class contributions and local histories. Moreover, memorials recount the

most blatant forms of racism, such as that of the Ku Klux Klan. In the process, they ignore

how white privilege is protected in more subtle forms and are silent about the connections

with contemporary racism and racial politics.

                                                                                                                         32 The Washington Post, 27 August 2011 33 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” in The Journal of American Studies 91:4 (2005): 1233-1263. 34 Owen J. Dwyer, “Interpreting the Civil Rights Movement: Contradiction, Confirmation and the Cultural Landscape,” in The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory, eds. Renee C. Romano and Leigh Raiford (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 7.

13    

Indeed, while discussing Mississippi’s recasting of its image through heritage tourism,

civil rights activist Diane Nash stated that; “There appears to be a strategy of convincing

people who are not in Mississippi that Mississippi is past racism…that things are fine now; it

was just a few bad apples in the day.”35 Curtis Muhammad, a former member of the Student

Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and who along with Nash, is a member of the

Mississippi Civil Rights Martyrs Annual Memorial Service and Conference Committee,

shares this view. In an article in the New York Times on 10 August 2004, Muhammad stated

that Mississippi officials were using African American history to “cover up their sins. Not

just their past sins, but their present ones.”36 Moreover, in a letter to Mississippi Governor

Haley Barbour on 7 July 2005, Rita Schwerner Bender, widow of murdered activist Michael

Schwerner, commented that;

Recently, after the verdict and sentencing in the Edgar Ray Killen trial in Neshoba County, you indicated your belief that this closed the books on the crimes of the civil rights years, and that we all should now have “closure”… People in positions of public trust, such as you, must take the lead in opening the window upon the many years of criminal conduct in which the state, and its officials, engaged… So please do not assume that the book is closed. There is yet much work to be done. Please don’t squander the moment by proclaiming that the past does not inform the present.37

As scholars Leigh Raiford and Renee C. Romano note, “the struggles over the

memory of the civil rights movement are not a diversion from the real political work of

fighting for racial equality and equal rights in the United States; they are key sites of that

struggle. The contests over the meanings of movement must be understood as a crucial part of

the continuing fight against racism and inequality.”38 Indeed, the figures are stark. Today, in

                                                                                                                         35 “Selling History Short in Mississippi.” The Nation, 7 March 2011 36 New York Times, 10 August 2004. 37 It's Time Mississippi Established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, accessed April 24, 2014, http://hnn.us/article/29718 38 Renee C. Romano and Leigh Raiford, The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2006), xxi.

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Tuscaloosa, Alabama, nearly one in three black students attend a school that looks as if

Brown v. Board of Education never happened.39 Meanwhile in Mississippi, Black workers’

wages in the state are 70.1 percent of white workers’; black kids are four times more likely to

live in poverty; and while blacks are 38 percent of the state’s population, they are 67 percent

of its prison population.40 As Hall further argues; “the lack of accounting opens the way to a

colour-blind conservatism that is breathtakingly ahistorical and blind to social facts. It

impoverishes public discourse, discourages investment in public institutions, and undermines

our will to address the inequalities and injustices that surround us now.”41

The development of civil rights tourism in Alabama and Mississippi cannot be

understood as the result of commemoration or commercialization, but rather as an ambiguous

and kaleidoscopic combination of Movement veterans and their allies who seek to preserve

and commemorate the Movement and political and corporate interests who see civil rights

tourism as a lucrative way to attract state and federal resources and tourism dollars. With

heritage tourism having grown exponentially in the last 25 years, and with tourists engaging

in historical and cultural activities staying longer and spending more than other types of U.S.

travellers, the lure of tourism dollars “complicates the work for those individuals who

manage these sites and want to make them historically nuanced and educational.”42

Finally, with commemoration of the Movement, the creators of civil rights memorials

and museums have sought to define the nature of Southern society at the end of the twentieth

century and its place in the twenty-first. These sites of civil rights agitation, set in landscapes

devastated by urban renewal, depict a South purged of troubled racial past and ready to                                                                                                                          39 “Segregation Now.” The Atlantic, 16 April 2014 40 “Selling History Short in Mississippi.” The Nation, 7 March 2011 41 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” in The Journal of American Studies 91:4 (2005): 1233-1263.  42 Jonathan Scott Holloway, Jim Crow Wisdom: Memory and identity in Black American since 1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 200.

15    

compete in a new globalized economy. By attempting to draw a line under the past and

placing civil rights history inside museum walls, providing carefully crafted narratives, many

officials distort the memory of the Movement while ignoring contemporary discrimination.

Pierre Nora’s paradigm suggested lieux de mémoire exist due to a conscious break with the

past. However, in the South, as William Faulkner, one of its most famous sons once noted,

“the past is never dead. It’s not even past.”43

                                                                                                                         43 William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (New York: Knopf DoubleDay, 1959), 53.    

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Newspapers and Periodicals

Augusta Chronicle Democrat-Reporter New York Times Times-Daily The Atlantic The Nation The Star News The Telegraph The Tuscaloosa News The Washington Post Secondary Sources

Alderman, Derek H. and Owen J. Dwyer. Civil Rights Memorials and the Geography of Memory (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008).

Brundage, W. Fitzhugh. “No Deed But Memory.” Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity, edited by W. Fitzhugh Brundage, 1-29. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Cagin, Seth, and Philip Dray. We are not afraid: the story of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, and the civil rights campaign for Mississippi (New York: Bantam books, 1991).

Carrier, Jim. A Traveler’s Guide to the Civil Rights Movement. Orlando: Harcourt, 2004.

Crane, Susan A. “Memory, Distortion, and History in the Museum.” History and Theory 36:4 (1997): 44-63.

Dwyer, Owen J. “Interpreting the Civil Rights Movement: Contradiction, Confirmation and the Cultural Landscape” The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory, edited by Renee C. Romano and Leigh Raiford, 5-27. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006. Eskew, Glen T. “From Civil War to Civil Rights: Selling Alabama as Heritage Tourism” Slavery, Contested Heritage and Thanatourism, edited by Graham M.S. Dann and A.V. Seaton, 201-214. New York: Haworth Hospitality Press, 2001.

Eskew, Glenn T. “Selling the Civil Rights Movement” Dixie Emporium: Tourism, Foodways and Consumer Culture in the American South, edited by Anthony J. Stanonis, 175–204. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008.

Faulkner, William. Requiem for a Nun. New York: Knopf DoubleDay, 1959.

Foley, Malcolm, and John Lennon, Dark Tourism: The attraction of death and disaster (New York: Continuum, 2002).

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Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989.

Halbwachs, Maurice, and Lewis A. Coser. On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd. “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past.” The Journal of American History 91:4 (2005): 1233-1263.

Holloway, Jonathan Scott. Jim Crow Wisdom: Memory and identity in Black American since 1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013.

Horowitz, Tony. Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War. New York: Random House, 1998.

Merelman, Richard M. Representing Black Culture: Racial Conflict and Cultural Politics in the United States. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Moore, Winfred B., Kyle S. Sinisi and David H. White Jr, eds. Warm Ashes: Issues in Southern History at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003).

Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire.” Representations 26 (1989): 7-24.

Romano Renee C., and Leigh Raiford, eds. The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2006).

Sjoquist, David L, ed. Past Trends and Future Prospects of the American City: The Dynamics of Atlanta. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009.

Electronic Sources

Ala. Seeks Civil Rights Tourism, Racial Accord. Accessed April 21, 2014. http://www.pewstates.org/projects/stateline/headlines/ala-seeks-civil-rights-tourism-racial-accord-85899387026

“Civil Rights Tourists Head to Alabama.” Accessed April 24, 2014, http://abcnews.go.com/Travel/story?id=119105&page=2 It's Time Mississippi Established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Accessed April 24, 2014. http://hnn.us/article/29718 Mississippi State of the State Address 2011. Accessed April 4, 2014. http://www.pewstates.org/projects/stateline/headlines/mississippi-state-of-the-state-address-2011-85899399739

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Unpublished thesis

Jansen, Holly. “From Selma To Montgomery: Remembering Alabama’s Civil Rights Movement Through Museums”. Ph.D. diss, Florida State University, 2012.

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APPENDIX

Appendix i.

Appendix ii.

Appendix iii.

   

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Appendix iv.