Terror and Truth : Civil Rights Tourism and the Mississippi Movement

King, Stephen A.; Gatchet, Roger Davis

ISBN 10: 1496846540 / ISBN 13: 9781496846549

Published by University Press of Mississippi, 2023

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 45987164-n

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Terror and Truth : Civil Rights Tourism and the Mississippi Movement
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Publication Date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1496846540
• ISBN 13: 9781496846549
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Authors

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 and coauthor (with Roger Davis Gatchet) of Terror and Truth: Civil Rights Tourism and the Mississippi Movement, all 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.