Representations and Remembrance: Tracing Civil Rights Meanings in the Narratives of Civil Rights Activists and Hollywood Filmmakers

In this article, we examine the narratives of the Civil Rights Movement as presented in cinematic narratives and in accounts of civil rights leaders. We conduct a comparative analysis focusing on the comparison of the Civil Rights narratives of the Hollywood films The Long Walk Home (1989) and Driving Miss Daisy (1989), to the 1997 audio series Will the Circle Be Unbroken? In the analysis, we identify a Hollywood and a black consensus narrative, but there are important differences in the representational politics of black activists who participated during the Civil Rights Movement and that of Hollywood filmmakers. In particular, our findings reveal that the two Hollywood films downplay black agency, deploy the white heroin character, privilege sentimental aspects over historical references, limit the historical scope of the movement, and use a language of intimacy and optimism about race relations. These depictions sharply differ from the black consensus narrative in which life under Jim Crow, black activism, unity, struggle, and group resilience are emphasized.