Terror and Truth

Abstract

Terror and Truth: Civil Rights Tourism and the Mississippi Movement examines how Mississippi confronts its history of racial violence and injustice through the mechanism of civil rights tourism. Mississippi’s civil rights memorial landscape comprises a vast constellation of sites and experiences—from the humble Fannie Lou Hamer Museum in Ruleville to the expansive Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson—where the state’s collective memories of the movement are enshrined and contested. Rather than chronicle the history of the activists who drove the Mississippi Movement, this book explores the museums, monuments, memorials, homes, and historical markers marketed to heritage tourists in the Magnolia State. Terror and Truth is the first book to critically examine Mississippi’s civil rights tourism industry. Combining rhetorical analysis, onsite fieldwork, and oral history interviews with museum directors, local civil rights entrepreneurs, historians, and movement veterans, Terror and Truth addresses important questions of memory and the Mississippi Movement. How is Mississippi, an impoverished and racially divided state with a long history of systemic racial oppression and white supremacy, actively packaging its civil rights history for tourists? Whose stories are told? And what perspectives are marginalized in the telling of those stories? The ascendency of civil rights memorialization in Mississippi comes at a time when the nation is reckoning with its racial past, as evidenced by the Black Lives Matter movement, Mississippi’s adoption of a new state flag, and the removal of Confederate monuments throughout the South. Terror and Truth directly engages issues relevant to this national conversation.