Clark, Kathleen Ann (Kathleen Clark)

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Clark, Kathleen Ann (Kathleen Clark)

PERSONAL:

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of History, Rm. 310 LaConte Hall, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602. E-mail—katclark@uga.edu.

CAREER:

Historian, educator, and writer. University of Georgia, Athens, associate professor of history. Also taught at Yale University, New Haven, CT.

WRITINGS:

Defining Moments: African American Commemoration & Political Culture in the South, 1863-1913, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 2005.

SIDELIGHTS:

Kathleen Ann Clark is a historian whose primary focus is on U.S. history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, women's history, and the American South. In her first book, Defining Moments: African American Commemoration & Political Culture in the South, 1863-1913, the author examines how African Americans reacted to and interpreted the Civil War and Reconstruction via various commemorative traditions, such as the celebration of Emancipation Day.

Writing in the book's introduction, the author notes: "African American public commemorations proliferated during the postwar years; the largest ceremonies occupied the public squares of southern towns and cities, drawing hundreds of men, women, and children from the surrounding countryside." The author goes on to write: "In addition to communitywide ceremonies, numerous commemorative events transpired under the auspices of individual churches, schools and associations. While the immediate postwar years witnessed some of the most intensive commemorative activity, African American celebrations did not end with Reconstruction. Instead, black southerners sustained—and in some instances emboldened—commemorative traditions well into the twentieth century." The author adds: "Commemorative celebrations were one facet of a vital and dynamic African American public culture that developed in post-Civil War southern communities."

According to the author, various commemorative events in U.S. history, including the Fourth of July, gave African Americans an opportunity to declare how they saw slavery and seminal events such as the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation made by Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863. In particular, these also enabled African Americans to voice their concepts of freedom and citizenship. In the process of exploring African American attitudes and viewpoints on these issues, the author examines the southern black community's struggle for self-representation, focusing on the major events and people involved in this struggle. In the process of looking at African American commemorations and involvement in nationwide commemorations, Clark discusses topics such as gendered reconstruction, the end of reconstruction and questions concerning the success of emancipation, the post-reconstruction south, and the Jim Crow era, which saw further segregation through various laws and codes passed by white politicians and government leaders in the American south.

"Clark's well-researched study is a great addition to the growing literature on the black experience in America," wrote Patience Essah in the Historian. Journal of Southern History contributor Elizabeth Hayes Turner wrote that the book "does not shy away from the conflicts created by generational differences, nor is it afraid to explore the central question regarding the promise of freedom and the reality of southern oppression."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Clark, Kathleen Ann, Defining Moments: African American Commemoration & Political Culture in the South, 1863-1913, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 2005.