![Sample our Communication Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, 2013 & 2014 volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5927/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Information-Science2.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Based on a decade of work at my home campus, I argue that a counter-memory campus tour answers Ersula Ore and Matthew Houdek’s call for rhetorical storytelling of experiences and places related to race, violence, and white supremacy. I recount ways that counter-memory campus tours can “breathe life into memory” of first Black students and resuscitate their lived experience in profound ways for contemporary audiences. Amid campus landscapes marked by “white memorial time,” I argue that counter-memory tours resist that linearity, attend to the spatio-temporal politics of race and trauma, and honor our Black pioneers in higher education.
Notes
1 In my tour and counter-memory work, I refer to Dr. Foster as “Lucy” intentionally, to bring us into the moment of her 1956 enrollment when she was a young, unmarried single adult in segregated Alabama. When speaking of her contemporary achievements, and now in memorializing her life, I use her full name and doctorate titles.
2 For more on this event, see https://news.ua.edu/2010/10/malone-hood-plaza-autherine-lucy-clock-tower-at-uas-foster-auditorium-to-be-dedicated-nov-3/
3 For a different accounting of this work, see https://www.tourismreset.com/news/2023/2/3/honoring-black-pioneers-in-higher-education-campus-tours-as-memory-work
4 Ore, E. & Houdek, M. (2020). Spatiotemporal politics of breathing. Women’s Studies in Communication 43, no. 4, 443–458
5 Ore & Houdek, 2020, p. 452.
6 Ore & Houdek, 2020, p. 444.
7 Ore & Houdek, 2020, p. 447.
8 For a thorough discussion of UA’s enrollment percentages, see Mauer, Jack. (October 21, 2021). “As UA grows, minority enrollment lags.” Crimson White. Accessed at https://thecrimsonwhite.com/83324/news/as-ua-grows-black-enrollment-lags/# . Mauer calculates that, in fall 2021, “The proportion of degree-seeking undergraduates [at UA] who are Black is 61% lower than the corresponding proportion of the state’s population.”
9 In the twelve months following the Foster re-dedication and clocktower unveiling, UA’s campus saw two instances of anti-Black symbolic violence: a Black graduate student was verbally assaulted, and racist phrases were drawn in chalk on campus sidewalks in February 2011, then in October 2011, nearly one year to the day of the celebratory moment at the clocktower, a noose was drawn in chalk on a very prominent building of the UA campus. The image of the noose was accompanied by the words “I’m an Alabama nigger and I want to be free,” song lyrics from a white country singer known as Johnny Rebel. This type of ongoing anti-Black violence shapes Black student, staff, and faculty experiences on our campus despite the claims of central administration or the proclamation of progress etched on clocktowers. See Dethrage, Stephen N. (October 21, 2011). “Moody Arch chalked with racist slurs.” Crimson White. Accessed at https://thecrimsonwhite.com/8143/news/moody-arch-chalked-with-racial-slurs/. In the years since, UA has seen additional anti-Black acts of symbolic or material violence: in August 2013 student journalists exposed systemic racism in sorority rush decisions (see Matt Ford and Abby Crain (Sept 11, 2013) “The Final Barrier: 50 Years Later Discrimination Still Exists,” Crimson White.). The Alpha Phi chapter has repeatedly demonstrated racist values, from a 2015 all-white recruitment video to a 2018 member being expelled for racist messages shared on MLK Jr. Day to a 2021 group text thread complaining of “black girl” smell in a local bar (see Maria Carrasco (December 15, 2021) “U of Alabama Sorority Expels Member for Racist Text,” Inside Higher Education.
10 These works are: Culpepper Clark, The Schoolhouse Door: Segregation’s Last Stand at the University of Alabama. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993; B. J. Hollars, Opening the Doors: The Desegregation of the University of Alabama and the Fight for Civil Rights in Tuscaloosa. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press (2013).
11 There are other forms of interventionist campus tours: Naputi and Dionne recount their excellent University of Colorado self-guided tour to unveil settler colonialist ideologies on their campus: Tiara R. Na’puti, & T. Jake Dionne. Settler colonialism on display: Touring on-campus places of public memory to teach ideological rhetorical criticism, Communication Teacher 35:2, 114–121 (2021). I was fortunate to take up the mantle from a prior Communication Studies faculty, Dr. Jason E. Black, who initiated a broader African American Heritage tour at UA, and to overlap for 9 years with Dr. Hilary Green, faculty in Gender & Race Studies, who developed a blockbuster tour on the “hallowed grounds” created by enslaved and formerly enslaved persons on our campus. See Hilary Green, Burden of The University of Alabama’s Hallowed Grounds. Public Historian 42 (4), 28–40..I am also aware of several other Black history or counter-memory tours (University of Arkansas, University of Texas, Westchester University, University of Missouri, Furman University, Barnard/Columbia, William & Mary, Clemson University, Elon College, Georgetown, University of North Carolina, University of Georgia, and University of Virginia), and I celebrate them. Doing this work in community and solidarity is always better.
12 Downing, J. L. & Carter, J. S. (2022). Budapest’s Living Memorial and the Reperformance of Countermemory. Western Journal of Communication, 86 (1), 103–127.
13 Downing & Carter, 2022, p. 104.
14 Downing & Carter, 2022, p. 116.
15 As of winter 2022, the tour information on my faculty webpage looks like this: https://express.adobe.com/page/xzMP5VNNf3rUt/
16 Downing & Carter, 2022, p. 117.
17 Stephen M. Monroe, Heritage and Hate: Old South Rhetoric at Southern Universities. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press (2021).
18 Due to COVID-19 pandemic conditions, I did not hold tours in spring 2020 or fall 2021. When we resumed tours in spring 2022 we wore masks (whether UA was requiring them or not on the date of a tour).
19 After removing the boulder and plaques from the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the working group un-named Nott Hall (a racist polygenic medical doctor) to Honors Hall, un-named Morgan Hall (a slave owning and trading plantation owner who advocated for legal slavery as the basis of Southern economy) to English Hall, re-named Moore Hall (a racist graduate dean) to Wade Hall (our first tenure-track Black faculty member) and un-named the Ferguson Student Center, or “The Ferg,” to Student Center. I use the phrase “un-named” for the three building that have received what Brasher, Alderman, & Inwood (2017) call “generic” naming to point out the way campus administrations can take smaller or larger steps in addressing racial naming imbalances on their campuses. For more on campus building naming politics, see Jordan P. Brasher, Derek H. Alderman, and Joshua F. Inwood, Applying Critical Race and Memory Studies to University Place Naming Controversies: Toward a Responsible Landscape Policy. Papers in Applied Geography 3, no. 3–4, 292–307 (2017); Maureen A. Flint, “Racialized retellings: (Un)ma(r)king space and place on college campuses.” Critical Studies in Education 62, no. 5, 559–574 (2021); or Joshua F. Inwood & Deborah G. Martin. Whitewash: white privilege and racialized landscapes at the University of Georgia. Social & Cultural Geography 9, no. 4, 373–395 (2008). DOI: 10.1080/14649360802033882.
20 UA had begun writing the all-campus email list on February 3 to honor Autherine, telling the core history of her lawsuit, contested arrival, short enrollment, and successful return. The building “amended name” email was sent on this same date, adding to the cognitive dissonance of the shared name proposal.
21 We later learned that Autherine and her family requested that the building feature her maiden name, her name at her initial enrollment, rather than her married name of Foster. This married name has caused confusion in past tours and discussions since it has no connection to the UA faculty member/president honored by Foster Auditorium where Governor Wallace attempted to block Hood and Malone in 1963.
22 Downing & Carter, 2022, p. 116.
23 Downing & Carter, 2022, pp. 116–17.
24 Ore & Houdek, 2020, p. 456.