Memory of the Movement: Representing Jim Crow and Civil Rights in Film

This course invites students to wrestle with some of the most fraught questions of American political and cultural life: how does our society remember Jim Crow and the civil rights movement? How ought it? As scholars of public memory have long argued, historical memory is a cultural battleground marked by competing interpretations, exercises of power, acts of pedagogy, and visions of politics. This is especially so of historical film, which, perhaps more than textbooks or even monuments, often provide the common grammar through which a mass public imagines its histories. Films introduce archetypal heroes and villains, construct narrative arcs of triumph and tragedy, and condense the jagged complexity of social struggle into recognizable tropes or genres. But what gets lost or remade in this translation into the medium of film? Whose voices are silenced, which forms of violence rendered invisible or unavoidable, which imaginative possibilities opened or foreclosed? The task of this course is not simply to evaluate historical accuracy—though that matters—but to understand the visions of politics and history that films enact. How do they configure the meaning of struggle? How do they teach popular audiences to feel about democracy, dignity, and racial justice? And what metaphors, absences, or distortions shape our collective political imagination? Through the interdisciplinary study of film, history, political theory, and cultural criticism, students sharpen their capacity to read cultural texts not as entertainment alone but as interventions into American memory and national identity. Through sustained engagement with both film and scholarship, students reckon with how stories of the past scaffold certain possibilities of the present.