Justice and Transition in Mississippi: Opening the Books on the American South

Abstract

Mississippi's contemporary revisiting of racial violence that marred the state's transition from a white supremacist political order, colloquially known as Jim Crow, to a post-Jim Crow polity constitutes a valuable case study for transitional justice scholarship and practice. It is within the context of an often overlooked yet violently contested transition that transitional justice discourses have increasingly permeated debates on how, and even whether or not, to confront Mississippi's violent past. Mississippi's recent attempts to confront past abuses through criminal prosecutions and non-state community-based initiatives provides an important insight into the limits of criminal prosecutions and a growing turn towards the establishment of a truth commission to confront past human rights abuses perpetrated within the state.