Two Civil Wars in the United States?

Professor Dell Upton

The title of Professor Dell Upton's lecture, "Memorials to the Second Civil War," might cause surprise: two civil wars in the United States?

In the penultimate lecture in the annual CASAR lecture series, held in West Hall on May 22, the professor of architectural history at the University of California, Los Angeles, referred to the Civil Rights Movement of the early sixties in the United States and pointed to the chronological coincidence: the American Civil War took place from 1860 to 1865 and the Civil Rights Movement covered the same period one hundred years later.

Upton showed photographs of many different memorials to the struggle of black Americans to achieve their place in American society-in schools and universities and in the voting booth. The monuments of the Civil Rights Movement, Upton said, "resonate through the politics of the South." He showed photos emphasizing the numerous realistic memorials-depiction of school children walking to school through groups of hecklers, police dogs poised for vicious attack, policemen wielding clubs above helpless victims.

Upton classified the civil rights memorials as those of leaders, such as Martin Luther King, and those of rank and file participants, naming the Little Rock nine, the black children who first integrated schools in Birmingham, Alabama, and noting the monuments to African American history in general. A possible fourth category embraced the political leaders, such as the controversial white supremacist Strom Thurmond, whose four children after his death discovered that their parent had fathered a black child in his youth and insisted on changing the writing on his monument to include the fifth child.

Upton highlighted the controversial monuments in relation to the role of memorials in society. They speak, he concluded, far more about the time they are erected than the historical time they seek to memorialize-reflecting the day to day politics of the present.

Upton began and ended his talk with reference to ceremonies held in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in June 2004 to commemorate the murders by Ku Klux Klan members of three young voters' rights workers in 1964. The continuing attribution of this brutal murder to "the evil and ignorance" of a "few crazy people" suggests to Upton that things haven't changed much since 1964.