Abstract
This chapter considers why white Southern interviewees seem to have lost autobiographical recollections of many events of the Civil Rights Movement. Gill shows that most interviewees have only vague memories of Virgil Ware’s shooting. Even though Virgil was killed by a respected classmate, he is not central to memories. Whites in Birmingham maintain a ‘coalition of silence’ about the Civil Rights Movement that allows forgetting. They also claim new collective identities. Gill argues that Alabama whites who came of age in the 1960s, began to change sides. Inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, influential whites allied with black youth organizations to seek their own freedoms. The student movement at the University of Alabama demonstrates a new identity that emerged in this generation.
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Notes
- 1.
The Birmingham News (1963:A3) reports that Sims and Farley were arrested in their homes.
- 2.
Like Birmingham, Greensboro was a site where the Movement encountered resistance and made important innovations in strategy. It was in Greensboro that four black college men started the sit–in movement that swept the USA in 1960.
- 3.
Scholars distinguish between the ‘long Civil Rights Movement’ and the ‘short Civil Rights Movement,’ and place the origins of the short Civil Rights Movement in the Montgomery Bus Boycott that began in 1955.
- 4.
By 1960 busses, schools, and the police force in Nashville were integrated; black students, with some white support, organized sit-ins at lunch counters in 1960–1961. In fall 1963, over 100 white students conducted months of picking which finally resulted in the desegregation of the ‘Campus Grill.’
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Gill, S.K. (2017). Silence, Youth, and Change. In: Whites Recall the Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham. Cultural Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47136-5_6
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