Civil Rights Tourism

I have a book called Mapping Tourism that looks at how tourism maps shape, and are shaped by, places for tourism and those places’ identities. Included in this book is the essay “Memory on the Margins: Alabama’s Civil Rights Journey as a Memorial Text” by Owen Dwyer, in which Dwyer discusses an Alabama tourism map that was designed to be a guide to the state’s role as a battleground in the Civil Rights Movement. In this essay Dwyer makes several interesting points about public memory and how a state’s efforts at promoting heritage tourism can enforce master narratives.

One issue Dwyer addresses is whether or not memorials represent an overly static view of history, or if they can in some way “displace the responsibility of remembering from the living onto a totem-like structure" (Dwyer, 32). Dwyer includes a quote from a former mayor of Birmingham, Alabama, David Vann; “I’ve always said the best way to put your bad images to rest is to declare them history and put them in a museum" (Dwyer, 44). This sentiment is particularly relevant to Memphis because, like Birmingham, Memphis’ reputation of racial violence, exemplified in being the city where Dr. King was assassinated, has given the city a particularly bad image, and makes it difficult for the city to attract tourists.

In terms of Memphis, the clear example of Civil Rights tourism is the National Civil Rights Museum. According to a 2012 article in the Memphis Business Journal, this museum is working to fight some of the issues that Dwyer sees with Civil Rights tourism by focusing not just on the well-known figures, but also on the unrecognized masses of people who were necessary for the successes of the Movement. 

One thing Dwyer found while researching this topic was that African Americans visiting Civil Rights memorials tended to do so with their families, and especially with children. Dwyer argues that this is a sign of these sights greater importance when compared to other cultural attractions for African Americans. The relative importance of these sights may seem obvious, but it is important to note because these types of cultural institutions are the ones that those same families would have been unable to visit mere decades before. This reminds us that the very fact of having museums and tourism dedicated to African American history works against past narrow understandings of history that focused solely on the stories of white men.

What do you think of the Civil Rights Movement as part of the tourism industry? Does this situate the Movement too much in the past or appear insensitive? Or does the importance of telling the story to as wide an audience as possible override those concerns?

Owen J. Dwyer, “Memory on the Margins: Alabama’s Civil Rights Journey as a Memorial Text,” in Mapping Tourism,                    ed. Stephen P. Hanna and Vincent J. Del Casino Jr., (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2003)

http://www.bizjournals.com/memphis/print-edition/2012/03/02/fighting-for-civil-rights-tourism.html?page=all