In The Southern Pace: A Clash of Race and Memory, W. Fitzhugh Brundage chronicles the ways in which the Civil War was remembered in the South, and how this has affected interpretations of Southern history by women, blacks, white southerners and, to some extent, northerners. Brundage’s argument is fairly simple, and is best evidenced by the style in which the book is written: to date, memory of the Civil War, slavery and race-relations in the South have been the projects of fragmented groups within the South, but never the entire community as a whole.
Brundage highlights the various groups that have, over the course of the past 150 years, played a role in memorializing the Civil War. Unsurprisingly, women took a lead in this type of commemoration, particularly through the construction of monuments and southern heritage groups, something we have already discussed in the other works we’ve read. Brundage also touched on two points brought up in previous readings: Blight’s discussion of how black people in the post-Civil War era sought to commemorate slavery as a necessary evil (92) and Neff’s brief mention of how the Spanish-American war helped to reunite Americans, a point which Brundage too, sadly left unexplored. (101)
A persistent theme throughout what we have read, beginning with Trouillot, is that those with the power are those who get to write the story of how history is remembered. While Brundage shows that whites were able to dominate much of the post-Civil War narrative through monuments, education, the burgeoning field of professional history, museums and historical sites, Brundage is the first to show that this may not always be the case. While white people were busy writing their narrative that was, admittedly, seen by a greater portion of the public, blacks enjoyed relatively large amounts of freedom to create their own narratives that they shared among their community. As Brundage says:
“In one of the most profound ironies of the Jim Crow era, blacks used state and private resources to turn schools into essential sites of collective memory that performed a role comparable to that of museums, archives and other memory theaters in the white community.” (140)
Although schools were segregated and had minimal resources, black teachers were uniquely celebrated in their communities, and also gave younger black children successful role models to which they could aspire—something Brundage says is actually lost in the Civil Rights movement. Furthermore, black teachers were able to pursue unique educational initiatives such as Negro History Week, a week that became very popular among some segregated schools, and also something that was adopted across the board in many schools following the success of the Civil Rights movement.
While blacks were taking on these initiatives in their own private spheres, whites were creating their own narrative, whose purpose is perhaps best summed up by Brundage’s quote:
“The larger message of the public history movement in the South was unmistakable: while the black past had no relevance for public life, white history was fundamental to it.” (137)
White southerners began commemorating the war first with monuments and Confederate heritage groups and, after the car popularized tourism to the South, with reenactments of the antebellum era. My personal favorite is Brundage’s anecdote about the Society for the Preservation of Spirituels, where white members would dress “in hoop skirts and in tuxedos with antebellum-era bow ties” and sing “spirituels in the low-country black dialect of Gullah.” (217) On a more serious note, of course, Southern whites were attempting to present a version of the antebellum and post-war era that best suited and served their needs, but the ways in which they did so were frequently quite amusing.
Without a doubt, the most important thing Brundage’s book does is complicate our understanding of events both before and after the Civil War which we frequently try to simply understand in terms of being basically good or essentially evil. As Brundage says
“Slavery was an inhumane institution and yet both slave masters and slaves found ways to retain their humanity….[and] the oppressiveness of the Jim Crow South was unquestionably soul-numbing , and yet blacks were never reduced … to ‘the sum of their brutalization.’” (343)
The only way to rectify this situation, according to Brundage, is to do something that even this book did not do: create a collective narrative among all Southerners that acknowledges all of these complexities to arrive at a truth. While I agree that this is probably the only way to have a completely accurate and genuine understanding of the post-Civil War South, I also find myself asking, is that even possible?