Memorializing National Narratives

Jeanne Theoharis’s objective for this book is to highlight the ways in which the civil rights movement has been memorialized as a national American narrative in order to subvert that narrative and challenge readers to think about how it is damaging to the ongoing fight for racial equality. She subverts the national narrative by demonstrating its limited scope and inaccurate representations of the civil rights movement; she also does so by presenting a fuller and more accurate history that has been left out of that national narrative.

Theoharis argues that the process of memorialization itself is dangerous because it creates a disconnect between past and present. She quotes former Birmingham mayor David Vann on the subject: “The best way to put your bad images to rest is to declare them history and put them in a museum” (2). Theoharis expands this quote to argue that the...