| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory. Ed. by Renee C. Romano and Leigh Raiford. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006. xxiv, 382 pp. Cloth, $59.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-2538-5. Paper, $22.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-2814-0.)

The thirteen essays assembled in Renee C. Romano and Leigh Raiford's collection, The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory, convincingly demonstrate that many contemporary conflicts in the black freedom struggle "revolve around how the civil rights movement should be remembered" (p. xii). As the editors point out in the introduction, a "consensus memory" of the movement has emerged, despite the efforts of various constituencies to complicate that dominant trope (p. xiv). The modern civil rights movement began, so this version goes, with the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and ended with the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 and with the rise of the black power movement. That version holds that "charismatic and eloquent leaders led a nonviolent movement of African Americans and supportive whites in a struggle that sought to change legal and social, rather than economic, barriers to equality" (pp. xiv–xv). Romano and Raiford acknowledge "the many powerful scholarly histories" that counter this consensus history (p. xv). Nonetheless, the popular version persists, propped up by a veritable cottage industry of memorials, television shows, popular films, art and museum exhibitions, community celebrations, and advertisements dedicated to its maintenance. This collection analyzes the production of that dominant narrative, asks how it is challenged or perpetuated, and by whom, and sketches out the far-reaching implications of remembering a particular version of the movement.

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