The two narrative frames developed through cultural trauma and transmitted across generations in a discursive process of symbolic representation were reformed in the 1960s through the cognitive praxis of the black nationalist and the civil rights movements. As part of the same process of remembering and forgetting, inherited models of emancipation were transformed and revitalized by a new generation of intellectuals. Through their form and content these interconnected, yet distinctive, social movements reflected the changes that American society and black Americans had undergone since the end of the Second World War. At the same time as these movements were structured by the inherited narrative frameworks, the frameworks were refigured as movement intellectuals articulated collective identity in an altered historical context. In one sense, these movements competed with each other in the struggle to determine how the collective would understand itself and the meaning of its collective past. In another sense, they complemented each other through the necessity of coming to terms with slavery as the primal scene upon which the collective was grounded.

Confrontation occurred at the level of action and cognition, effecting change in both.