The Politics of Memorials
Thinking Allowed
BBC
4.4 • 997 Ratings
🗓️ 26 August 2020
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Politics of Memorials: Remembering Emmet Till – in 1955, a young African-American was lynched in Mississippi at the age of 14, after being accused of offending a white woman in her family's grocery store. Driving through the Mississippi Delta today, you’ll find a landscape dotted with memorials to major figures and moments from the civil rights movement, none more tragic than this murder. The ways in which his death is remembered have been fraught from the beginning, revealing the political controversies which lurk behind the placid facades of historical markers. Dave Tell, Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas, analyses the various ways that this landmark event in the civil rights movement has been commemorated. Also, Margaret O’Callaghan, Reader in History, Queen’s University Belfast, discusses commemoration in the context of Irish history. How has the marking of the Easter Rising shifted over time? What roles are played by memorials in any society? And what forces dictate what gets remembered and what is forgotten? Revised repeat.
Producer: Jayne Egerton
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Take some time for yourself with soothing classical music from the mindful mix, the Science of |
| 0:07.0 | Happiness Podcast. |
| 0:08.0 | For the last 20 years I've dedicated my career to exploring the science of living a happier more meaningful life and I want |
| 0:14.4 | to share that science with you. |
| 0:16.1 | And just one thing, deep calm with Michael Mosley. |
| 0:19.4 | I want to help you tap in to your hidden relaxation response system and open the door to that |
| 0:25.4 | calmer place within. Listen on BBC Sounds. Yes, John Lee Hooker, the Blue Singer from the Mississippi Delta who throughout his life |
| 0:43.4 | sang so many bittersweet songs about loneliness and confusion. |
| 0:48.4 | All your feet |
| 0:49.8 | If you're home with me in my house. |
| 0:57.0 | Boom boom boom boom. |
| 1:00.0 | John Lee Hooker died in 2001, but he was born in this very week back in 1917. |
| 1:07.6 | The birth date he shares with us other significant musicians as Claude Debucy and Leonard Bernstein. But otherwise this |
| 1:16.3 | is not such a happy week. It was not so good in Pompeii where on August the |
| 1:21.1 | 24th 79 a.d. the eruption of the zuvius obliterated the entire population. |
| 1:28.0 | Neither was there any reason for Catholics in France to celebrate. |
| 1:31.0 | In this week, back in 1572, thousands were slaughtered in what became |
| 1:36.1 | known as the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre. Well such facts were often a boon to local radio deges ever eager to make an ordinary day a bit more interesting, |
| 1:47.0 | but they're mere nods to history compared to other acts of memorialization, to the manner in which activists use a mere date as a rallying crime. |
| 1:58.0 | Armoured cars and tanks and guns aim to take away our sons but every man must stand behind |
| 2:09.3 | the men behind the wire. The men behind the wire by the wolf tones, the song first recorded in 1972 |
| 2:19.1 | which was used in many subsequent years as a powerful reminder of the Republicans in turned without charge in |
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