From Rumblings to Roar: Racial Violence, Historical Justice and the Changing Public History of Slavery in the United States
Abstract
Renee C. Romano, in Chapter 4, examines the evolution and challenge of representing the violence of slavery in the United States in public history. Drawing on a variety of sources, she explores both the current state of the public history of slavery in the United States and the challenges of telling the truth about slavery and its legacies. In doing so, she joins the conversation as to why recent racial violence has sparked change in the way public history sites deal with slavery. To adequately answer that question, Romano relates the need to contextualize debates about slavery within a politics of historical justice that predates 2015, the year when a white supremacist murdered several Blacks in a church in Charleston, South Carolina. She also explores the contemporary political movement through the lens of historical justice. Romano argues that current interventions fall into three categories: battles to dismantle pro-slavery narratives and monuments; efforts to recuperate and mark erased or obliterated sites of slavery; and, what she terms the most challenging of all, imaginative work to construct and communicate new narratives of American history that acknowledge the centrality of slavery and its legacies to the American story.
Repository Citation
Romano, Renee. "From Rumblings to Roar: Racial Violence, Historical Justice and the Changing Public History of Slavery in the United States." In Violence and Public Memory, edited by Martin Henry Blatt. London: Routledge, 2023.
Publisher
Routledge
Publication Date
6-22-2023
Department
History
Document Type
Book Chapter
DOI
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003217848
Notes
Chapter 4
ISBN
9781003217848
Language
English
Format
text
