Movements and Monuments: Remembering Native American Removal in the Civil Rights-Era South

This paper examines public commemoration of Cherokee removal in the Civil Rights-Era South, identifying in the removal memory a point of intersection between Native and African American histories. It documents a substantial wave of "Trail of Tears" commemoration in middle twentieth century and suggests that the concurrence of this commemoration with the rise of the modern Civil Rights Movement represented something more than an interesting coincidence. The Movement, it argues, helped to make removal a desirable subject of public memory, while the acknowledgment of Native dispossession granted some white southerners a politically safe way to contemplate their region's heritage of racial oppression. White southerners' willingness to remember removal, in turn, became a resource for Cherokee communities as they waged their own modern political struggles.