Architecture expert gives talk on memorials

John Palmer Features Editor

Dell Upton, the Harrison Professor of Anthropology and Architecture at the University of Virginia, spoke about commemorating the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s on March 22. The focus ranged from specific monuments constructed to general themes of monuments, and approximately 30 students, faculty, and guests attended the lecture. Upton provided a slide show of monuments as he traced monument building from its early stages to recent times. Upton asked the audience to reorient the discussion of monuments back to specifics, and he suggested that monuments can address their builders as much as they can address the past.

Upton explained that monuments speak more to the age they were constructed than the age they commemorate. He claimed America is entering a “second” great age of monuments, which began in 1982 with Maya Linn’s Vietnam War Memorial, in Washington, DC. Since that time, numerous monuments have been constructed to commemorate wars and movements. “We seem to live in an age of monument building,” he said.

The speech began with a historical summary that told the tale of three civil rights activists that were murdered by white supremacists while in Neshoba County, Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964. From this starting point, Upton asked the questions of what monuments are able to say, and what monuments are permitted to say.

At the same time, according to Upton, monuments must satisfy current appetites and inclinations. Upton suggested that monuments were “not about memory…but about contemporary political legitimization.” The way monuments are used today reflects their currency as a contemporary medium.

The change in the way monuments represent the past, according to Upton, suggest a change in the historiography of the past. To help support this point, Upton defined contemporary memorial building in three discrete stages. The first, begun in 1970, tended to commemorate leaders of the Civil Rights movement. Many statues of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were erected during this time. At the end of the 1980s, another type of monument hoped to shift the conversation from leaders of the movement to individual participants. Linn’s monument to the Civil Rights movement contains the names of many participants, not just the leaders of the movement. The final stage of memorial building focuses on African American history in general. These are often symbolic sculptures, like “Triumph of the Human Spirit” in New York’s Foley Square.

After his formal lecture, members from the audience had the opportunity to ask him questions. Many of these focused on memorial building in general.