Terror and Truth
Terror and Truth
Civil Rights Tourism and the Mississippi Movement
Stephen A. King and Roger Davis Gatchet examine how Mississippi confronts its history of racial violence and injustice through civil rights tourism. Mississippi’s civil rights memorials include 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, constructed, and contested. Rather than chronicle the history of the Mississippi Movement, the authors explore the museums, monuments, memorials, interpretive centers, homes, and historical markers marketed to heritage tourists in the state.
Terror and Truth: Civil Rights Tourism and the Mississippi Movement is the first book to examine critically and unflinchingly Mississippi’s civil rights tourism industry. Combining rhetorical analysis, onsite fieldwork, and interviews with museum directors, local civil rights entrepreneurs, historians, and movement veterans, the authors address important questions of memory and the Mississippi Movement. How is Mississippi, a poor, 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 telling 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, the conviction of former members of the Ku Klux Klan, and the removal of Confederate monuments throughout the South. Terror and Truth directly engages this national conversation.
Terror and Truth: Civil Rights Tourism and the Mississippi Movement offers a detailed look at civil rights tourism and how state actors remember the movement in Mississippi.
King and Gatchet explore how the people and events of the Civil Rights Movement are remembered in Mississippi through historical markers, preserved heritage sites, and museums. The authors provide detailed descriptions of various places and exhibits, including the privately run Fannie Lou Hamer Civil Rights Museum in Belzoni, the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument in Jackson, the Emmett Till Historic Intrepid Center in Glendora, and the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson, among many others, examining how location, funding, access, and marketing to tourists affect each site’s mission. Whose perspective is considered in public memory? What is the goal of ‘dark tourism’? Who benefits from such tourism? In asking these questions and recording these sites, King and Gatchet document how Mississippi confronts its brutal past, abandoning a whitewashed version of history in favor of truth-telling and social justice. . . . Recommended.
Terror and Truth forces Mississippians and Americans alike to embrace tourism surrounding the African American experience. This well-researched book encompasses the very essence of publicly engaged scholarship with copious oral interviews and a focus on the community’s response to saving their valued history. Mississippi presents perhaps the best example of a state wrestling with an inharmonious racial past that engulfs its identity today, and the book’s many vignettes show how public history continually challenges these thwarted narratives. The recentered focus on the power and importance of cultural heritage tourism of African American history that is found within this book is a refreshing discourse.
Terror and Truth is thorough, creative, and insightful.
Beautifully written and thoroughly researched, Terror and Truth goes far beyond the story of civil rights tourism in Mississippi. Authors King and Gatchet focus on the Mississippi Movement’s history, asking ‘how that movement continues, or can continue to achieve social justice in the present.’ Their concluding chapter on the stunning Mississippi Civil Rights Museum is worth the price of admission itself.
Stephen A. King is chairperson and professor of communication at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas. He has written extensively about rhetoric, public memory, and cultural tourism and is author of Reggae, Rastafari, and the Rhetoric of Social Control and I’m Feeling the Blues Right Now: Blues Tourism and the Mississippi Delta, both published by University Press of Mississippi. Roger Davis Gatchet is associate professor in the Department of Communication and Media at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the rhetoric of public memory and popular culture, as well as oral history.
