The Contested Public Memory of Race in Montreat, North Carolina
Creators: name: Boyd, Mary Page
Publisher: name: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University Libraries
Year: 2016

description: In August 2015, the Montreat Conference Center hosted a conference called Dr. King’s Unfinished Agenda: A Teach-In for Rededicating Ourselves to the Dream.  Lecturers and pastors, including Leonard Pitts, stood on the same stage and behind the same pulpit that had been occupied by Dr. King fifty years earlier.  The conference was held with the intent of looking back on how far both the Presbyterian Church (USA) and the nation have come while also recognizing the work that is still undone in social justice and civil rights. As conference promoters described, “Celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Dr. King’s address to the Christian Action Conference in Montreat is the occasion for a look toward the future.”  The conference was also used as a tool to reorient, or change, the memory of the Civil Rights Movement in Montreat as completed process and reframe a vision for the future of the town. “In a nation still struggling to build bridges between races and heal divisions generations old, how can the church of today answer the challenges posed in Anderson Auditorium in 1965?”  In the reorientation of memory, the Church in Montreat largely dismissed their own involvement in the segregation of the 20th century; the Church separated itself from the “nation still struggling to build bridges.” This idealization of the past to define the present and look to the future characterizes historical narratives of Montreat. 
This thesis uses two landmark moments—King’s visit in 1965 and the 2015 conference in commemoration of his visit—to examine the ways that Montreat’s residents and institutions have participated in orienting and reorienting the process of remembering segregation in the town. The following pages explore the critical and entangled histories of Montreat and its segregationist policies to understand how they emerge in relation to different sources of memory. The intersection of these variables make plain that history is never objective; it is contentious and often contested. The history of race in Montreat is complex and exists in several different formats and versions. Because of the contentious nature of history, and particularly the history of race, this thesis will use the memories and narratives of institutions and individuals in Montreat to demonstrate how differing institutional and individual memories compete for authority in the way King’s visit is remembered. This thesis argues that memories curated by institutions in Montreat have orienting power over the memories of individual residents. While these individuals maintain power to undermine institutional outputs, the combined resources of Montreat institutions allows them to script the memory of race in Montreat and disseminate that script into the memory of the town. Moreover, this thesis ultimately suggests that many of Montreat’s residents are—perhaps counterintuitively—amenable to the simplified scripts that institutions supply since the scripts typically build community esteem at the expense of a more troubling, complicated engagement with the past.