Media ContactMimi Cunningham910/962-3171 [email protected]
WILMINGTON, NC - Racial healing is proceeding at a faster pace in the South today now that cracks in white southerners' mythical view of history are allowing history as remembered by African Americans a place in the region's shared collective past.
Racial reconciliation has begun in Wilmington, N.C., following a 1998 community-wide commemoration of the racial violence that occurred in 1898 whose memories had festered in the black community for a hundred years. The Wilmington experience is the latest in a series of developments that signal a clear "shift in perceptions of the collective, public past."
Debates over changing the Georgia flag and removing the Confederate battle flag from the South Carolina state capitol grab all the headlines. However "this shift, which represents a paradigm change, is a far more significant story and is illustrated by any number of incidents or events within the past five years."
So writes Dr. Melton A. McLaurin, professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, in the Journal of Southern Cultures, Winter 2000 published January 2001 by the University of North Carolina Press for the UNC Center for the Study of the American South. Specializing in Southern history and race relations, McLaurin is the author of Separate Pasts: Growing Up White in the Segregated South and Celia: A Slave.
In the Southern Cultures article, "Commemorating Wilmington's Racial Violence of 1898: From Individual to Collective Memory," McLaurin explains how white Southerners' view of history was purposefully manipulated to glorify the Lost Cause and justify slavery, Jim Crow laws, and segregation. Because whites held all the power, they ignored the history as descendants of slavery and the targets of segregation remembered it. Monuments and Memorial Day honored Confederate heroes.
After the 1970s, the Civil Rights Revolution led to inclusion of the African-American experience in public school curricula and popular cultural media. However, "generations of whites schooled in the mythologized past continued to determine how the past was celebrated at the community level," he writes. The lack of public monuments commemorating black historical events and achievements illustrates the community's unwillingness to accept the black view of history.
"This creation of segregated pasts contributed substantially to the racial violence which accompanied the desegregation of Wilmington's public schools in the 1970-71 academic year, racial violence which once again focused national attention on the city," he writes.
In addition to the Wilmington 1898 commemoration, he cites three other examples that signal a change in how black history is being incorporated into collective memory: the 1994 Florida legislature's delayed apology and reparations for the 1923 Rosewood murder of six black men and destruction of every black home in the town; the Tulsa, Okla., commemoration and monument marking the 1921 violence; and the 1995 apology by the Southern Baptist Convention for its racist roots and past defense of slavery.
"White Southerners are finally much more willing to include an unpleasant past into their collective view of history, and cities are more willing to incorporate it into the environment," McLaurin said. "We are starting to see monuments and museums that reflect the African-American past that have been at odds with the white view of the past.
"The extent to which the African-American experience, and especially the history of the Civil Rights Movement, has been incorporated in the region's public past within the last decade is truly astonishing." This is especially true of heritage tourism.
The Southern Cultures article deals with how Wilmington fits into the model of the paradigm shift, from the planning and implementation of 1898 commemoration events to the unveiling of plans this January for a major monument to the racial violence. It also includes a report of some compelling personal encounters between descendants of prominent whites who supported the violence and the blacks whose lives and economic well being were disrupted by it for generations.
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The article can be viewed in its entirety by going to www.uncwil.edu/news and click on the Southern Cultures cover. A photo of the author suitable for printing is also available at the site.
McLaurin can be reached at 910/962-3137. Subscriptions to Southern Cultures are available for $28 by calling at 919-966-3561, ext. 256, or by faxing credit card information to 800-272-6817, or emailing [email protected].
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