"What was this Negro's crime that he should be hung, without trial, in a dark forest filled with fog? Was he a thief? Was he a killer? Or just a Negro? Was he a sharecropper? A preacher? Were his children waiting up for him? And who are we to just lie there and do nothing? No matter what he did, the mob was the criminal. But the law did nothing, just left us wondering why. My opponent says nothing that erodes the rule of law can be moral. But there is not rule of law in the Jim Crow South, not when Negroes are denied housing, turned away from schools, hospitals and not when we are lynched. Saint Augustine said, "An unjust law is no law at all," which means I have a right, even a duty, to resist with violence or civil disobedience. You should pray I choose the latter."
Atonement (2007)
”Had I been allowed to visit you, had they let me, every day, I would have been there every day.”
”Yes, but… If all we have rests on a few moments in a library three and a half years ago then I am not sure, I don't know if...”
“Robbie, look at me. Look at me. Come back. Come back to me.”
Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory (2003)
Edited by Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone
Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone
Introduction: Contested Pasts
What makes a film a memory text, then, may be not so much a matter of its explicit content as of its form: it may enact mnemonic processes as well as, or instead of, being about memories. But this is perhaps equally true of every medium for memory. The form, the physical and conceptual structure, of the museum, it has already been suggested, is as significant in its representation of memory as the actual objects it contains; the choice and location of a war memorial is as revealing as its explicit injunction of remembrance. And the range of memorial materials and practices represented in this volume are a reminder of the complexity of defining a memory work. School projects, advertising campaigns, television, local traditions, graffiti, journalism; all these contribute to the formation of both individual and cultural memories.
If the past is contested, it is not for simple reasons. Institutions, governments, cultures, individuals, are all engaged in the work of making memory and in its repeated transformations. Contradictory accounts, or memories in direct contradiction to the historical record, are not always the sign of a repressive authority attempting to cover something up. Memory itself covers up: it reshapes, attempts to comfort, addresses changing needs. The tension between memory as a safeguard against attempts to silence dissenting voices, and memory’s own implication in that silencing, runs throughout the book; but that tension is precisely what gives memory the complex resonance it has in intellectual and political life.