“Tomorrow’s Great Meeting Place”

This chapter considers how collective autobiography reimagines the narrative form of the civil rights movement through its exchange of the third-person, biographical, "he"/"she" narrative of civil rights as a hero-driven movement for first-person, "I" and "we" narratives that insist on the contingencies. The culminating statement of the dialogue, the "last and loudest voice", is the one who uses individual difference as a path to recognition of shared oppression. This recognition, Martinez claims, is "tomorrow's great meeting place". Collective civil rights autobiography stages a continual, and productive, contestation of the right to speak in the first-person plural. Literary critics have begun to look for the harder narrative of the long civil rights movement in the formal innovations of post-1960s African American literature and in autobiographies of movement activists. The narrative form of movement representation is epistemologically consequential: it affects not just the analysis of US history but also the understanding of present-day political organizing around racial and economic justice.