Terror and Truth: Civil Rights Tourism and the Mississippi Movement

by Stephen A. King, Roger Davis Gatchet

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 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.

294 pages, Paperback

First published August 16, 2023

About the author

Stephen A. King earned his Ph.D. in speech communication at Indiana University-Bloomington in 1997. He is currently chairperson and professor of communication at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas. He also taught at Eastern Illinois University and Delta State University (Mississippi). He has written extensively about rhetoric, public memory, and cultural tourism. He is the author of I'm Feeling the Blues Right Now: Blues Tourism and the Mississippi Delta (2011) and Reggae, Rastafari, and the Rhetoric of Social Control (2002).

Reviews

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Recommend for anyone working in a museum, public history, tourism, interested in Civil Rights, rhetoric or American history or who has just flat out looked at a historical marker. Extremely well written, very thought provoking, and guaranteed to make you ask yourself 'Can I do this a different way?'

Although this is very specific to Mississippi, this is a fascinating book for anyone who travels. As someone who has been to their fair share of vernacular and under resourced museums, I found the context provided very helpful.

[Matt Sautman · Rating 4 out of 5]

A solid read that explores how museums convey truth, specifically in regard to the Mississippi Heritage Trail. While aspects of the book touch on Dark Tourism, readers who approach this book with that subject in mind (like I did) may leave less satisfied. Nonetheless, this book is incredibly important when considering the relationship space plays with histories of oppression and the individuals invested in revising (or preserving) that history.