Monumental Discord: Savannah's Remembering (and Forgetting) of Its Enslaved

Abstract

A primary port in the slave trade, the city of Savannah, Georgia, has but one public monument to slavery. As a text, therefore, Savannah's cityscape lacks a chapter on enslavement. The lone slavery monument's placement, content, and poetic inscription are the products of what was a bitter, decade-long fight over what to include and exclude, an editing process that activated competing interpretations about how and even whether to commemorate the city's participation in the trans-Atlantic slave economy. This article presents a case study on the ethics of remembering and how dominant authorities and marginalized groups, including Savannah's black community, negotiate even among themselves, for the social construction of local history, collective memory, and its visual representations.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Diane Land, Allie Crain, Stan Deaton, Paul Pressly, Jamal Toure, Vaughnette Goode-Walker, and Johnnie Brown for their help with this study.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Brian Carroll

Dr. Brian Carroll is professor of Communication and chair of the Department of Communication at Berry College in Mount Berry, Georgia. He is author of When to Stop the Cheering? The Black Press, the Black Community, and the Integration of Professional Baseball; A Devil's Bargain: The Black Press and Black Baseball, 1915–1960; and Writing and Editing for Digital Media, now in its third edition. He earned his PhD from UNC Chapel Hill in 2003. E-mail: [email protected]