Civil War Centennial Commemoration and the Rhetoric of the Civil Rights Movement

Download or read book Civil War Centennial Commemoration and the Rhetoric of the Civil Rights Movement written by Anne Kretsinger-Harries and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation examines rhetorical tensions between commemorations of the U.S. Civil War centennial and discourses of the "short" civil rights movement from 1961 to 1965. Using theories of public memory, I interpret public arguments, speeches, correspondence, administrative memos, commemorative rituals, and acts of resistance across Civil War commemorations and the civil rights movement. My primary argument is that civil rights activists mobilized a rhetorical strategy of co-opting the centennial moment, repurposing Civil War memories to advance their cause. Prior to the early 1960s, "public memories" of the war typically ignored the issue of slavery and the war's impact on black communities. During the early 1960s, however, civil rights activists spoke directly about the Civil War, inserting racial politics into the processes of commemoration. This action transformed the centennial from an epideictic moment into a deliberative event that forced Americans to reckon with the ugly truths of the nation's racial history and to view commemoration as an opportunity not only for celebration, but also for political action.