August 10, 2004
By SHAILA K. DEWAN
New York Times
TLANTA, Aug. 9 - One of the great peculiarities of the South is the
exhaustive celebration of its own defeat. Equestrian statues, battle flags
and stolid historical markers commemorate seemingly every shot fired in the
Civil War.
Now, the victories of another war - against white supremacy, Jim Crow and
lynchings - are starting to get equal billing.
A surge of interest in the civil rights movement has dislodged lingering
discomfort with the past, bringing new attention to the lunch counters, bus
terminals and churches that were the movement's battlegrounds. Suddenly,
events both major and minor are being memorialized; the projects under way
range from full-blown tourist attractions to an attempt to name a Georgia
highway for a black G.I. killed by Klansmen.
In Greensboro, N.C., the Woolworth where the sit-in movement began will
become a museum. In Mississippi, Neshoba County published a civil rights
tour guide this summer showing the site where three civil rights workers
were killed 40 years ago. In Alabama, the National Park Service will break
ground in March on the first of three visitor centers along the route of the
Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march.
It has not been easy for communities to embrace a past laced with shame and
violence. "Tourism has been forced on these places," said Jim Carrier, a
writer from Montgomery, Ala., whose "Traveler's Guide to the Civil Rights
Movement" was published by Harcourt in January. "It's not like they put out
a sign one day and said, 'Come on down and see our civil rights history.'
It's in response to people coming down here, lugging big history books,
looking for these places."
The lure of tourism money has helped overcome the shame. More urgently, the
approach of benchmark anniversaries, like the 40th birthday of the voting
rights march next spring, has guaranteed a re-examination of the past,
whether locals like it or not. Furthermore, economic development officials
have begun to preach that acknowledging the past is necessary to show the
world that things have changed.
Still, the response has been gradual. Until 1993, there was not so much as a
sign marking the bus stop in Montgomery where Rosa Parks was arrested. The
organizers of the new memorials and museums say that they are the fruit of a
shift in attitude, as the first generation of people raised in an integrated
society has matured, and resistance to the changes wrought in the 60's has
eroded. At the same time, black political power has grown, influencing how
history is publicly recounted.
In Alabama, even towns with no more than a tenuous connection to the
movement have asked to be included on a new state civil rights trail, said
Lee Sentell, the state tourism director. "People want to have their
contribution to civil rights progress connected with their hometown," Mr.
Sentell said. "That's a change. People are seeing this as more mainstream
than people have in the past."
Part of that, he said, is because of the success of the first major civil
rights museums, in Birmingham and Memphis, each about a dozen years old.
Each attracts about 150,000 people a year. The Martin Luther King Jr.
National Historic Site in Atlanta is one of the South's most popular tourist
attractions, with more than 650,000 visitors last year.
Their popularity has shown that the history of the 50's and 60's is a
valuable commodity. "There are so many desperately poor communities and a
lot of what they have going for them is their civil rights history," said
Susan Glisson, director of the William Winter Institute for Racial
Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi in Oxford.
Yet resistance persists, particularly among whites who see no reason to
dredge up the painful past or who fear that the motive is to assign blame.
In Greensboro, the Woolworth where four black college freshmen dared to sit
at the whites-only lunch counter on Feb. 1, 1960, was to be replaced by a
parking garage before it was bought by two local black politicians, Earl
Young and Skip Alston, a decade ago. They announced plans to turn it into a
museum.
In 1999, a bond referendum that would have given the project $3 million
failed by a narrow margin. The vote split on racial lines, said McArthur
Davis, a stockbroker who until recently was the project's executive
director, with 85 percent of blacks in favor and 75 percent of whites
against. That year a headless skunk was hung on the Woolworth's door.
But the project gained momentum. At presentations to white audiences, Mr.
Davis would tell the story of three white women who took seats, then told
the waitress to serve the blacks first. "When you told that story, and the
only story they've ever heard was about the four black guys, they said,
'Hey, we did something too,' " Mr. Davis said. Then he added, "I would also
tell blacks that, because many of them didn't know either."
The students' former school, the North Carolina A&T State University,
embraced the project in 2001, lending its vice chancellor for development to
help raise money. American Express gave $500,000. And Action Greensboro, the
city's downtown development group, pledged $4 million. The museum expects to
attract at least 100,000 visitors to Greensboro yearly and create more than
300 jobs. Last month, the legislature allotted $1.5 million for the project.
Inside the Woolworth, the terrazzo floor is finally emerging from layers of
grime. The stainless steel behind the lunch counter gleams as if the last
hot dog was sold yesterday. Called the International Civil Rights Center and
Museum, it is scheduled to open in 2005, the 45th anniversary of the sit-in.
Franklin McCain, one of the four students who began the sit-in, thought
people had forgotten what happened until the museum plan emerged. All the
hurdles over the years were a bit painful, said Mr. McCain, who is 63 and
lives in Charlotte, N.C. "I saw it as a just kind of growing pain, or a
situation where no one actually knew the way, and they were plowing new
ground,'' Mr. McCain said.
In other places, examinations of the not-so-distant past have occasioned
long bouts of municipal soul-searching. Many residents of Neshoba County,
Miss., believe justice was never served in the case of the three civil
rights workers who were killed and buried with a bulldozer.
The state did not prosecute anyone for the deaths, yet it was the state
Development Authority that first suggested to the predominantly white
tourism board that the event warranted public acknowledgement; for years,
inquiring tourists received only a handmade flier with directions to the
Mount Zion Church, which holds an annual memorial service for the three men.
Some blacks were initially skeptical of the county's motives, but eventually
a multiracial group was formed to research the history and create a tour
guide, wrestling with such delicate matters as whether to name the sheriff
who arrested the three workers. He is dead, but his son still lives in the
community. In the end, the sheriff was not named. "You have to balance being
honest and being respectful of someone whose fault it wasn't," said Dr.
Glisson, who was called in to mediate.
David Vowell, the president of the Community Development Partnership, said
he was nervous when the process began. "I wasn't apprehensive about whether
or not we were doing the right thing," he said. "We just supposed that there
were people out there that wouldn't be receptive to it."
In the end, he said, the guide was a big success. But things did not end
there; its publication was accompanied by a "call for justice" on the 40th
anniversary of the deaths. The state has since asked the federal government
for help investigating the killings.
In some communities, history is in danger of disappearing altogether. In
Madison County, Ga., a white woman named Dena Chandler was haunted by a
story she remembered from childhood, of a black veteran and Army reservist
named Lemuel Penn who was killed by Klansmen on his way home from Fort
Benning on July 11, 1964. The suspects were acquitted by an all-white jury.
When Ms. Chandler looked for more information, she found that a book about
the case had been repeatedly stolen from local libraries. "A lot of people
had forgotten about Lemuel Penn," she said. "And a lot of the younger
people - and this is what really disturbed me - had never heard of him. That
death shaped their world in ways that they don't know and don't understand
unless they know about it."
Together with a black preacher and his wife, Ms. Chandler organized a gospel
concert that raised enough money for a historical marker. The group is also
trying to have Highway 172 renamed in Colonel Penn's honor.
Although many preservation efforts have been led by multiracial groups, some
blacks fear that whites will reap most of the profits. Neatly packaging the
past can give the false impression that racism is over, some say of the
efforts.
Mississippi officials "are trying to use our history to cover up their
sins," said Curtis Muhammad, a former member of the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee. "Not just their past sins, but their present sins."
Some say the interest in civil rights is simply an outgrowth of the
burgeoning heritage tourism industry. Frances Smiley, who put together the
first black heritage guide to Alabama more than two decades ago and still
works for the state tourism bureau, sees some truth in that.
"I've had people want to do Civil War and civil rights together," Ms. Smiley
said. "And I never imagined that happening."