“The Past is Never Dead”: U.S. Perspectives on History, Memory, and Current Challenges With Kama Pierce, Desiree Cormier Smith, Margaret Huang and Jim R. Grossman

As the American novelist William Faulkner famously wrote in 1951: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Just like Germany, the United States has tried to come to terms with a difficult past – a legacy of slavery and segregation, inequality, discrimination, and violence. There are many controversies about how to teach, narrate, and remember history, about what has been remembered, forgotten, or distorted and what impact that still has today. In the past few decades, new museums and memorial sites have been opened that offer a much more critical and inclusive history.  Nevertheless many Confederate monuments still have not been taken down and places still have not been renamed. And there has been a backlash against building a critical memory and transitioning from denial to collective responsibility. With the new Trump administration, some institutions are even under attack.

The event is part of a comparative project titled Building a Critical Memory: Transitioning from Denial to Collective Responsibility in Germany and the United States. A group of about 50 scholars and teachers, curators and educators from museums and memorial sites, other public historians, people working in foundations and NGOs as well as journalists from both countries is currently on a joint tour in Germany and will – later this year – be in the United States. 

Moderator: Dr. Andreas Etges, Amerika-Institut at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
 

About the Speakers

Kama Pierce is Chief Program Officer for the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, where she oversees the educational program, exhibitions, the LGBTQ+ programs, the Truth and Transformation program, and Public Engagement programming. She also co-curated the new Reconstruction gallery.

Margaret Huang is President and CEO of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in Montgomery, Alabama. The SPLC tracks and exposes hate groups, fights white supremacy, advocates for racial justice, hosts a Civil Rights Memorial with an interpretive center, and has created databases on Confederate symbols.

Jim R. Grossman has been executive director of the American Historical Association for 15 years and has made the organization a major public advocate and defender of history and historians in the public. He was previously vice president for research and education at the Newberry Library, and has taught at the University of Chicago and the University of California, San Diego. 

Desiree Cormier Smith was the first Special Representative for Racial Equity and Justice for the United States State Department. Her job was to advance the human rights of members of marginalized racial, ethnic, and Indigenous communities, including people of African descent, and build global partnerships to combat systemic racism, discrimination, and xenophobia globally. She left the State Department on January 20, 2025.