SHA Plenary

I just returned from the opening night of the Southern Historical Association convention here in Atlanta. Our congressman, John Lewis, was to have spoken at our opening session. But the six-and-a-half hour funeral for Rosa Parks (and that's all before they even went out to the cemetery for graveside services) kept Congressman Lewis in Detroit all day. Two days before the convention opened, SHA officials learned they had to come up with an alternative. So, we had a panel chaired by Dan Carter of the University of South Carolina. It included Bob Zellner, an organizer for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), C. T. Vivian, a long-time staffer of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Doris Crenshaw, who had participated in the Montgomery Bus Boycott and later civil rights movement activities, and Sheldon Hackney of the University of Pennsylvania. Hackney is interesting because he is both a distinguished historian/administrator and the son-in-law of two of the few local white supporters of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955/56. That was followed by a concert by Georgia's Sea Island Singers from the southeast Atlantic coastal region.

If there was coherence in the panel discussion, it was on the legacy of Rosa Parks to our generation. All of the panelists knew her, some better than others. Hackney recalled that, as an accomplished seamstress, Mrs. Parks had modified his wife's wedding dress but she balked when authorities at the white church insisted that she could attend the ceremony only if she either sat in the balcony or sat with the family of the bride and wore a white uniform as a sign of being a servant. That story reminded us that refusing to give up her seat on a bus in December 1955 wasn't the first time that Mrs. Parks had refused to acquiesce in systematic racial discrimination.

The combination of the panel discussion and concert lingered on too long, allowing no time for questions to the panelists or full appreciation of the concert because it was followed immediately by a reception. There, a few senior warhorses like Berkeley's Leon Litwack and Duke's Ann Scott kept us mindful of continuity with the SHA's past history -- a history that included its own racial discrimination and its own challenges to that discrimination. But each year there are fewer of them there. The generation of my teachers is passing. In September, my dissertation advisor was buried in Chapel Hill. All too quickly, memory is passing into the hands of my generation, just as we are beginning to lose it.

NB: Don't miss the History Carnival at (a)musings of a grad student or fail to offer nominations for the Cliopatria Awards. If you have recommendations for , send them to: carnivalesque*at*hotmail*dot*co*dot*uk. It goes up at Early Modern Notes on 6 November.