ABSTRACT
In this post-civil rights moment, the nation needs this positivist retelling of the past-similar to the Reagan funeral-to evoke the power of remarkable individuals (so as to erase a history of collective action) and to affirm the distant reality of racial terror in the past to obscure the truth of racial injustice in the present. These memorials promote a children’s story of social change so improbable (one woman sat down and the country was galvanized) as to diminish our ability to envision a movement today. And they consign Parks’ and King’s critique of American society to distant history when both women had continued to speak out and work for racial injustice in our own time.
