Toward Truth and Reconciliation: Public Memory, Philosophical Pairs, and the Edmund Pettus Bridge

Abstract

This thesis connects the rhetoric of Bryan Stevenson which advances truth and reconciliation for racial healing in the United States to a case study of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. I examine common cultural invocations of the bridge that support the persistence of a blurry public memory that occludes visibility of its original memorial dedication to a known white supremacist and instead celebrates it as a landmark of the civil rights movement. I also analyze arguments for both changing and keeping the name of the bridge that occurred between 2015-2020, illustrating ways in which Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s philosophical pairs manifest through and across these arguments. Instantiating the bridge in duality as both a monument to the confederacy and the civil rights movement, I contemplate what lessons the bridge makes available to a public that desires to engage in conversations that approach the truth-telling and reconciliation Stevenson has advocated.