Making Ephemeral Space Permanent: Tent/Freedom City on Exhibit
Topics:
Keywords: Civil Rights, Black Geographies, historic preservation, fugitive infrastructures, museum
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract
Authors:
Katrina Stack, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Derek Alderman, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
Abstract
In late 1965, Black activist communities in Lowndes County, Alabama and their SNCC allies built a “Tent City,” also known as Freedom City, on Black-owned land to provide housing to sharecroppers and tenant farmers evicted by landowners in retaliation for marching, attending mass mobilization meetings, and registering to vote. Intended to be impermanent in nature and disbanded two years after its creation, the Tent City existed to ensure Black registered voters remained in the majority Black county. Situated intentionally on Highway 80 between Selma and Montgomery, “where the world could see what’s going on,” according to SNCC leader Stokely Charmichael, Tent City became an example of crucial alternative, fugitive infrastructures that characterized many aspects of the Civil Rights Movement. Yet, Tent City has largely been absent from the popular remembrance of the struggle for the right to vote, often eclipsed by the more commemorated Edmund Pettus Bridge. Part of this neglect is due the politically selective way the Movement has been narrated and the difficulty of preserving and interpreting more ephemeral spaces.
An exhibit in the Lowndes County Interpretive Center, a National Parks Service site, depicts Tent City, creating a more permanent display but perhaps also altering the impression and understanding of the daily struggles endured by those who called Tent City “home.” Emphasizing the importance of re-centering occluded places and people in the public history discourse, we also consider how the exhibits and structures create more permanent representations of impermanent spatial and social practices, while complicating prevailing memory narratives.
Making Ephemeral Space Permanent: Tent/Freedom City on Exhibit
Category
Paper Abstract