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.