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Primary Sources
 Posted
6/13/2009 8:57:00 PM
To get to the National Archives today, I drove down a long stretch of Moreland Avenue, past the Starlight Six drive-in, a huge landfill, Fort Gillem, the U.S. prison, and lots and lots of vacant lots – all overgrown with kudzu. Then I turned onto Jonesboro Road, and after the all-you-can-eat country buffets and tire shops, encountered a stretch of strip malls with multi-ethnic signage that rivals anything up on Buford Highway.
The Archives themselves are housed in a wondrous complex of modern architecture (almost no windows, to keep all those documents safe) and pristine grounds.
The event today had a tri-fold agenda: a daylong symposium on the legacy of the civil rights movement, the opening of a new exhibit, and the official re-naming of the facility from National Archives, Southeast Region, to the National Archives at Atlanta. The name change is intended to reflect, in part, the significance of the civil-rights-related holdings at the facility and Atlanta’s central role in the movement.
The symposium topics were: civil rights and the courts, new scholarship of the civil rights movement, access and use of historic records, and sites of the civil rights movement. At the end of the day there was a “town hall meeting” with an open question and answer session.
There were plenty of worthy presentations (you can see the full agenda here). Three points raised during the sessions struck me as particularly salient.
In the session on “new scholarship,” Emory professor of history Joe Crespino discussed his work on white protagonists of the civil rights era. He suggested that, in addition to studying the crusaders, a “more complex view of the opponents,” would allow for an understanding of the social and cultural mores that bred Southern racism. Not every opponent of the civil rights movement was a raging Bull Connor or George Wallace, he reminded the audience. He’s got a good point there. I’ve always believed that the passive denial of discrimination by the white majority was – and is – as dangerous as overt hatred. Bull Connor would not have been able to get away with his actions without the tacit but silent support of white middle class.
In the session covering civil rights sites, featured speakers represented the National Civil Rights Museum housed in the Lorraine Motel in Memphis and five National Parks sites: the King Historic Site in Atlanta, the Brown v. Board of Education site in Topeka, and Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute, Tuskegee Airfield, and Selma-to-Montgomery Trail. They all reported that they have seen increased interest among visitors – both from the U.S. and overseas – since the election of Barack Obama. The challenge, they agreed, was helping visitors, especially young ones, connect the dots from the election of the first black president to the myriad individual acts of courage chronicled at their museums.
The most profound – and moving – question of the symposium was raised by attendee Charles Person in the “town hall meeting” at the end of the day. Person, who took part in the 1961 Freedom Rides when he was just 18, asked the room at large: “What does it take for an adult to beat up on a teenager? Sometimes I still have flashbacks. It almost brings me to tears.”
There were attempts by other attendees to explain how inexplicable hatred can be. But no one could provide a neat explanation. How could they?
Because the root of the answer to Person’s question – or at least one root in a tangled web – is revealed in the exhibit “Documented Rights,” the opening of which marked the finale of the symposium. Drawing on the resources of National Archives units around the country, the exhibit displays documents and photographs that trace the history of racial discrimination in this country, from chilling slave-ship manifests to records of internment camps for Japanese-Americans, and from Harriet Tubman’s petition for pension payments to the 1944 arrest record for Lt. Jackie Robinson (yes, that Jackie Robinson, when he was in the military, not Major League Baseball) after he refused to move to the back of a bus.
There is an online version of the exhibit, but it is worth the drive to Morrow to see the artifacts in person. We need to remind ourselves of the centuries of our collective history to understand our present. As the panelists repeated in one form or another all day: We have come a long way in the past half-century, but we have further still to go.
National Archives at Atlanta, 5780 Jonesboro Road Morrow
770-968-2100
archives.gov/southeast
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Rebecca Burns
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This is the true Atlanta story, more than any other. Get it out of the archives and into the textbooks.
Daemon Baizan, photographer, ASMP, EP
2555 Fairoaks Road
Decatur, GA 30033
404.634.6151
http://DAEMONpictures.com
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Posted By
Daemon Baizan
On
6/15/2009 5:48:50 PM
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