You Must Remember This: Obituaries and the Civil Rights Movement

This study demonstrates how reporter-written obituaries of Black civil rights movement leaders reinforce a limited, facile view of the African American freedom struggle that haunts even today's race relations. The obituaries remember a movement that Julian Bond characterized as "a morality play" of "Balck saints" against "southern White sinners." What these articles remember—and in some cases forget—is critical because collective memory research shows that obituaries reflect what the present thinks of the past. Five nostalgic, racialized frames emerge from these obituaries: (a) the importance of violence inflicted on Blacks, (b) the importance of the dutiful suffering endured by Blacks, (c) news media's documentation of White southern oppression, (d) the salience and valence of the early-1960s Martin Luther King Jr., and (e) the idealism of integration over Black nationalist goals.