The Jangling Discords of Lynching Memorialization in Jackson, Tennessee: Dreaming the Rhetoric of the South

Abstract

ABSTRACT Current debates about the appropriateness of Civil War symbolism and toppling Confederate statues raise important questions about how to communicate the history of race relations in the South, and by extension the entire United States. As we confront our painful past and debate who and what to commemorate, we are (re)writing history and (re)creating realities in small towns and big cities through the Southern United States. This narrative ethnography traces the development and placement of a monument to lynching victims in a mid-size Southern city, revealing complex connections and divisions across geographic, temporal, and racial borders.