| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Defining Moments: African American Commemoration and Political Culture in the South, 1863–1913. By Kathleen Ann Clark. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. x, 302 pp. Cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-8078-2957-9. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-5622-3.)

In this ambitious monograph, Kathleen Ann Clark illuminates the gender- and class-conscious ideologies of race leaders and community spokespersons who sought to define for African Americans a new civic identity—free of slavery's racial stigma—in the public spaces of the post-emancipation urban South. Clark takes as her focus Emancipation Day parades and other broadly integrationist commemorative activities that celebrated the transformation of slaves to citizens and held out the promise of a fundamentally reconstructed social order. She argues for a multidimensional interpretation of these activities, citing textual evidence of ideological tensions and open conflict among organizers, participants, and critics at large. These "struggles over public self-representation," she maintains, "were critical to black southerners' evolving debates over how best to define, achieve and defend their freedom" (p. 2).

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