Kenneth Andrews Raj Ghoshal University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
The dissertation project studies why social movements aimed at commemoration and redress have recently arisen around some instances of long-buried American white-on-black racial violence, while other incidents that appear very similar have not yet yielded such movements. To understand the development and trajectories of these memory movements the co-PI will complete three types of analyses. First, they will a analyze data set of incidents of fatal white-on-black racial violence that occurred between1877-1954 and garnered national news coverage. These data will be used to examine the factors that lead to memory-resurrection of historical racial violence. Second, the investigator will complete a formal qualitative comparative analysis to explain the divergent trajectories that those projects that have emerged have taken. Third, the co-PI will complete interviews and archival work in several Southern states in other to better understand the national rise of interest in segregation-era violence that underlies the emergence of specific projects. This project offers several broad theoretical payoffs. To date, research on the development of collective memory has been dominated by small-sample studies that have identified many potentially important causal forces, but have not investigated the relative importance of, generalizability of, or relationships between these factors more broadly. The project brings a comparative approach to this field, facilitating a more systematic understanding of the factors shaping collective memory. Further, this project helps to fill a notable research gap as one of the few studies to address local variation in the shaping of national collective memory.
Broader Impacts. This research will contribute to our understanding of how commemoration movements develop and the different trajectories they take. Further, knowledge of such movements? development will be useful in understanding the potential payoffs and drawbacks of the use of memory as a strategy in promoting civil rights. The project will benefit society by contributing systematic new knowledge about the development and effects of an array of responses to historic mass racial violence.
This research investigated local variations in national commemoration, through a study of projects designed to mark past racial violence in the United States. Prior research has studied why some historic events, including traumatic events, are memorialized and etched into a society’s collective memory (in the form of holidays, annual rituals, parades, the building of monuments and statues, and the like), while others are forgotten. This study extended this line of investigation by considering local and regional variation in recent (1970s to present) efforts by African Americans and allies to mark racial violence (lynchings and race riots) that occurred between 1877 and 1954. It asked why there are efforts now to mark this past violence, why these efforts have occurred around some incidents and in some locations but not others, and why some memorial projects are more successful than others in bringing attention to the pasts they memorialize. I carried out this research through several methods, including (a) collecting extensive quantitative data on more than two dozen incidents that have seen recent commemorative projects, along with 50 incidents that appear similar but have not been commemorated, and (b) qualitative research, including traveling to commemorative projects and conducting nearly 100 interviews with people involved in commemorative efforts. Funding helped support travel and transcription of interviews. I found that a combination of factors related to the past and the present explain local variation in present-day marking of lynching and race riots. The destructiveness of an incident explains between one-third and half of the variation in where memorial efforts emerge. Present-day city characteristics also matter: local levels of educational attainment and the local scope of hate group activity affect whether commemorative efforts emerge. Nearby efforts to mark old racial violence also help promote commemoration, while a host of other factors that were considered had insignificant impacts. In terms of the success of these projects, I found that an incident’s "mnemonic opportunity structure" (meaning an incident’s actual characteristics, its construction as significant or not immediately after it occurred, the present-day local contexts for commemoration, and the occurrence of a centennial anniversary) matter greatly, swamping the effects of differing local strategies by memorializers in most cases. This research contributes to scholarship on commemoration, collective memory, and social movements by testing an array of theories around commemoration and developing support for an explanation of commemoration that foregrounds mnemonic opportunity structure and is rooted in existing scholarship on social movements. It helps advance efforts to systematize scholarship on commemoration, which has been criticized even by the field’s "insiders" for being characterized by dozens of competing theories with little systemic testing or synthesis. Finally, it provides guidance to those interested in efforts to improve understanding of America’s racially violent past, as it advances knowledge about what contexts are most likely to provide fertile ground for educational and memorial projects around such incidents.
