Telling Forgotten Stories of Slavery in the Postmodern South

Central to those debates, first of all, is the issue of breaking the long silence of official histories on slavery, a silence imposed first by the antebellum white Souths systematic blockade of abolitionist literature, then by charges of fraud and imposture by proslavery apologists, and finally by what art historian Kirk Savage calls "the erasure of slavery" in public history-in Confederate monuments, museums, and sites of historic preservation (129). For if all of our current debates on slavety reparations, Confederate flags, and historical monuments tell us anything, it is that the white South and white America, for that matter, have been suffering a crisis of authority and legitimacy ever since the civil rights revolution, a crisis that has seen the demise of master narratives that justified and acquiesced to slavery, segregation, and white supremacy and rendered African Americans virtually silent and invisible.