African American Memory Documentary Reader
Building on the calls to action following Ferguson, Charleston Massacre and the death of Sandra Bland, scholars responded with the creation of crowd-source syllabi and contextual introductory essays in order to bring a rigor and critical perspective on contemporary events. Moreover, several projects, such as The Charleston Syllabus, have expanded to both electronic and print documentary readers in order to reach broader audiences consisting of K-12 students, collegiate students, graduate students, educators and non-academics.
In the Fall 2019 semester, graduate students enrolled in my Memory, Politics and Identity researched and developed documentary reader chapters exploring African American memory, politics and identity through one of the three course themes--(1) Slavery, (2) Civil War and Reconstruction, and (3) Jim Crow Remembrances. With guidance from Dr. Green, students drew from W. S. Hoole Special Collections, UA digital collections and several DH projects for their respective chapters. Each chapter consists of a 750-word introductory essay that provides the historical context related to the research topic, guiding discussion questions, eight primary source documents with brief contextualization per selection, and a suggested readings list for future research.
This documentary reader is neither a comprehensive nor a finished product. It is a digital public history project produced during a single semester by a small group of students. While students have spent a semester exploring the diversity of African American memory, collective memory and forgetting, these chapters represent African American counter-memory and the difficult task of memory recovery. Future graduate students will add to this resource and contribute to the longstanding conversations regarding the modes of memory, power and identity in the United States.
In the Fall 2019 semester, graduate students enrolled in my Memory, Politics and Identity researched and developed documentary reader chapters exploring African American memory, politics and identity through one of the three course themes--(1) Slavery, (2) Civil War and Reconstruction, and (3) Jim Crow Remembrances. With guidance from Dr. Green, students drew from W. S. Hoole Special Collections, UA digital collections and several DH projects for their respective chapters. Each chapter consists of a 750-word introductory essay that provides the historical context related to the research topic, guiding discussion questions, eight primary source documents with brief contextualization per selection, and a suggested readings list for future research.
This documentary reader is neither a comprehensive nor a finished product. It is a digital public history project produced during a single semester by a small group of students. While students have spent a semester exploring the diversity of African American memory, collective memory and forgetting, these chapters represent African American counter-memory and the difficult task of memory recovery. Future graduate students will add to this resource and contribute to the longstanding conversations regarding the modes of memory, power and identity in the United States.
Fall 2019 Chapters
The first four chapters explore the complicated memory of slavery, emancipation and the long Reconstruction era. Maddie Loos examines the collective memories of the former enslaved UA campus laborers who worked under the enslavers who currently have buildings and historical markers. The next two chapters explore Reconstruction-era black education form the people (students, teachers, and founders) to the spatial geography and memory defined by the African American schoolhouse. Brie Smiley's chapter sheds light on how early African American educational opportunities shaped the memories of the formative years and institutions of the generation "born free" in Alabama. Rebecca Griesbach explores the role of educational spaces and its limits in shaping African American memory of the Reconstruction-era schools in Tuscaloosa. La-Kisha Emmanuel's chapter rounds up this section. She offers a window onto the Tuskegee Clubwomen Movement's efforts for reclaiming slave spirituals and its place in community activism and pride.
The remaining chapters explore the various legacies of lynching and other aspects of the Jim Crow era. Katherine E. Stovall's chapter explores the lynching of two World War I veterans. By recovering their pre-lynching lives, she reclaims the humanity of the men erased in the original coverage and how their loved ones remembered the men and event before the placement of the EJI memorial marker. Brittany Groves's chapter delves into the role of The Alabama Citizen, a black Tuscaloosa newspaper, for constructing a collective memory of lynching that challenged white supremacist narratives who rendered their memories and counter-memories invisible. Isabelle Beauregard explores the history of the UDC memorials at the University of Alabama and the post-desegregation resistance by a diverse student body. This resistance has prompted an interesting culture wars that continues in the present. Reem Abu-Baker delves into the complex memories of the African American asylum located on a former plantation in Northport, AL. Lastly, Cierra S. Roberson's chapter examines the archival practices of Jennie C. Lee, a Tuskegee choir director from 1903 to 1928, in preserving the history of the long African American experiences from slavery to black hope and love in the Jim Crow era to activism through her scrapbooking practices.
Memories of Slavery, Emancipation and the Long Reconstruction Era
Maddie Loos - Slavery in Tuscaloosa: Building Names and Beyond
Brie Smiley - A Kind of Twoness: Memories and Schools in Reconstruction Era Alabama
Rebecca Griesbach - Place Matters: Mapping Memory in Tuscaloosa's Early Black Schools
La-Kisha Emmanuel - Recovering the Negro Spiritual
Memories of Lynching and Jim Crow
Katherine E. Stovall - White Mob Violence and the Terror Killings of Two African-American Veterans of WWI
Brittany Grove - The Alabama Citizen and Countering Lynching Narratives of African Americans
Isabelle Beauregard - The United Daughters of the Confederacy, the University of Alabama, the Lost Cause and African American Counter-Memory
Reem Abu-Baker - African American Patients in Tuscaloosa's Mental Hospitals
Cierra S. Roberson - How Jennie C. Lee's Scrapbook Captured New Negro Womanhood in the South
The remaining chapters explore the various legacies of lynching and other aspects of the Jim Crow era. Katherine E. Stovall's chapter explores the lynching of two World War I veterans. By recovering their pre-lynching lives, she reclaims the humanity of the men erased in the original coverage and how their loved ones remembered the men and event before the placement of the EJI memorial marker. Brittany Groves's chapter delves into the role of The Alabama Citizen, a black Tuscaloosa newspaper, for constructing a collective memory of lynching that challenged white supremacist narratives who rendered their memories and counter-memories invisible. Isabelle Beauregard explores the history of the UDC memorials at the University of Alabama and the post-desegregation resistance by a diverse student body. This resistance has prompted an interesting culture wars that continues in the present. Reem Abu-Baker delves into the complex memories of the African American asylum located on a former plantation in Northport, AL. Lastly, Cierra S. Roberson's chapter examines the archival practices of Jennie C. Lee, a Tuskegee choir director from 1903 to 1928, in preserving the history of the long African American experiences from slavery to black hope and love in the Jim Crow era to activism through her scrapbooking practices.
Memories of Slavery, Emancipation and the Long Reconstruction Era
Maddie Loos - Slavery in Tuscaloosa: Building Names and Beyond
Brie Smiley - A Kind of Twoness: Memories and Schools in Reconstruction Era Alabama
Rebecca Griesbach - Place Matters: Mapping Memory in Tuscaloosa's Early Black Schools
La-Kisha Emmanuel - Recovering the Negro Spiritual
Memories of Lynching and Jim Crow
Katherine E. Stovall - White Mob Violence and the Terror Killings of Two African-American Veterans of WWI
Brittany Grove - The Alabama Citizen and Countering Lynching Narratives of African Americans
Isabelle Beauregard - The United Daughters of the Confederacy, the University of Alabama, the Lost Cause and African American Counter-Memory
Reem Abu-Baker - African American Patients in Tuscaloosa's Mental Hospitals
Cierra S. Roberson - How Jennie C. Lee's Scrapbook Captured New Negro Womanhood in the South
Course Readings
- Bailey, Anne C. The Weeping Time: Memory and the Largest Slave Auction in American History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
- Blight, David W. "Epilogue: Southerners Don't Lie; They Just Remember Big." In Where the Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity, edited by W. Fitzhugh Brundage, 347-353. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
- Brundage, W Fitzhugh. The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005.
- Confino, Alon. "Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problem of Method," American Historical Review 102 (December 1997): 1386-1403.
- Cox, Karen L. Dixie's Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (With New Preface By Author). Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019.
- ______. Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011, 34-57.
- ______. "The Confederacy's Living Monuments." New York Times, October 6, 2017.
- ______. "What Changed in Charlottesville." New York Times, August 11, 2019.
- Domby, Adam H. "Captives of Memory: The Contested Legacy of Race at Andersonville National Historic Site," Civil War History 63 (September 2017): 253-294.
- Edge, John T. "Supper in the Stacks: Reading the Lupton African American Cookbook Collection," Southern Cultures 14 (Winter 2009): 103-105.
- Emberton, Carole and Bruce E. Baker. Remembering Reconstruction: Struggles Over the Meaning of America's Most Turbulent Era. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017.
- Gannon, Barbara. The Won Cause: Black and White Comradeship in the Grand Army of the Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.
- Green, Hilary N. "Destination Navy Hill: Tourism and African American Education in Post-Emancipation Richmond, Virginia," Journal of the North Carolina Association of Historians 26 (September 2018): 67-96.
- ______. "Persistence of Memory: African Americans and Transitional Justice Efforts in Franklin County, Pennsylvania." In Reconciliation after Civil Wars: Global Perspectives, edited by Paul Quigley and Jim Hawdown, 131-149. New York: Routledge: 2019.
- Johnson, Jessica Marie. "Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads." Social Text 137 (December 2018): 57-79.
- Kansteiner, Wulf. "Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies." History and Theory 41 (May 2002): 179-197.
- Kytle, Ethan and Blain Roberts. Denmark Vesey's Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy. New York: The New Press, 2018.
- Lawrence-Sanders, Ashleigh. "History, Memory, and the Power of Black Radio." Black Perspectives, March 16, 2018.
- Miles, Tiya. Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.
- Nora, Pierre. "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memorie." Representations 26, Special History: Memory and Counter-Memory (Spring 1989): 7-25.
- Novick, Peter. The Holocaust in American Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999.
- Perry, Imani. May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
- Silber, Nina. This War Ain't Over: Fighting the Civil War in New Deal America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
- Snyder, Jeffrey Aaron. Making Black History: The Color Line, Culture , and Race in the Age of Jim Crow. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018.
- Sturken, Marita. Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
- Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. With a New Forward by Hazel V. Carby. Boston: Beacon Press, 2017.
- Twitty, Michael W. The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South. New York: Amistad, 2017.