Terror & 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. The book is organized in six chapters: civil rights tourism’s historical context (Chapter 1); vernacular or “folk” tourism (Chapter 2), facilitated by ordinary citizens commemorating extraordinary heroes; and “dark” tourism (Chapter 3) which is what the authors describe as “a cottage industry unto itself,” and in this case is largely concerned with the lynching of Emmett Till (xv). The book then shifts to historic house museums, focusing on Amzie Moore and the death of Medgar Evers (Chapter 4). Chapters 5 and 6 explore heritage tourism devices authorized by the state through Mississippi Freedom Trail Markers (MFT) and the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum (MCRM). The book mainly focuses on the Mississippi Delta and Jackson regions, where the Mississippi Movement was largely based, and the area with the highest concentration of designated sites. The book is distinct, yet reminiscent of books centered on the Civil Rights Movement and memory, such as Owen Dwyer and Derek Alderman’s Civil Rights Memorials and the Geography of Memory (2008) and Dave Tell’s Remembering Emmett Till (2021), as well as an intersecting body of scholarship on heritage tourism in Mississippi, rhetoric, and public memory.
This book is coauthored by scholars of rhetoric, evident in its focus on the sites and signs presented by museum professionals and other historic preservationists as “texts” to interpret the Mississippi Movement to the state’s burgeoning heritage tourism audience. The authors explore what they see as an 80/20 split of white/Black visitors, without interrogating “the why” behind that phenomenon. Their ability to name themselves as the targeted tourism demographic of “white, college-educated, middle to upper-middle class, [and] socially conscious” seemed like a potential point of entry to such a discussion (28).
The book’s clear organization and meticulous detail is accessible to readers with little to no knowledge of Mississippi civil rights tourism. Although the section “A Synoptic History of the Mississippi Movement, 1945-1970” in chapter 1 is helpful, some familiarity with Mississippi Movement leaders and events would be useful for grasping the depth of the book. The authors rightly consider it “the first critical examination of Mississippi’s civil rights tourism industry,” and “the first comprehensive rhetorical assessment of the MCRM” (165). This exceptionality should attract public history, tourism, and museum scholars as well as cultural geographers and communication studies scholars. The book’s concise and holistic examination, all in one text, make it a prime candidate for an assigned reading in graduate courses, with each chapter able to stand on its own.
Chapter 1 covers the history of Mississippi civil rights tourism; its goals, audience demographics; and the authors’ fieldwork methods during a six-year period (2016–22). Their methods include archival research, participant observation, and oral history interviews with local and state-level historic preservation professionals, whose personal perspectives are less visible in other scholarly examinations of Mississippi civil right tourism. Readers hear the perspectives of tourism professionals in their own words.
Chapter 2 focuses on vernacular tourist sites, such as the Canton Freedom House Civil Rights Museum and the Fannie Lou Hamer Museum and Memorial Garden in Ruleville. Such sites are generally inaccessible, and “characterized by hyperbolic statements, local ‘heroes’ exhibited in quasipublic spaces, the reappropriation of land for museum and other memory places, rural museums, historical markers that remember past events and people, as well as folk art” (59). It’s grassroots tourism, run on local goodwill, with no tourism infrastructure, and with little expectation of state funding.
Chapter 3 remembers the lynching of Emmett Till. Although this chapter cannot capture the nuance of a book like Dave Tell’s which is completely dedicated to the topic, the authors’ analysis of the language in brochures and other forms of advertisement is key to understanding how Till’s memory fits into the marketing strategies of the local Greenwood Convention and Visitors Bureau (CVB). Their skillful analysis in this chapter is reflective of their communication studies training. The authors also do not shy away from the inherent politics, disparate motives, and conflicting narratives underlying the interpretations of Till’s murder at sites such as the Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Sumner and the Emmett Till Historic Intrepid Center in Glendora.
Chapter 4 investigates “the rhetorical dynamics” of the Amzie Moore House Museum and Interpretive Center in Cleveland and the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument in Jackson (115). Although they are not the only historic houses discussed in the book, they are grouped together in this chapter due to their professional curation, funding grants, “and other government appropriations” (121). These sites, as others explored in the book, cannot be disentangled from local economic tourism goals, or what the exhibitors want the visitors to experience. King and Gatchet frame the latter through the concept of metonymy, “reducing complex, difficult to understand elements of a community’s history to a more manageable signifier” (123). In their summation, the Moore House signifies five elements: a “refuge and sanctuary” for activists; a symbol of movement success and leadership at the local level; an exemplar for the relationships “between the grassroots and the local movement”; the threats of economic terrorism against Black businessowners; and violence, still evident in the architecture of the house, which includes a bedroom with high windows, so that potential attackers would not be able to see inside (124, 129). The Evers’ house has similar alterations but, unlike the Moore House, a safe house, the authors discuss its interpretation as a house of death, a witness to an assassination.
Chapter 5 analyzes the text and images on MFT markers, which the authors note as more prone to holding individual perpetrators accountable than “the systemic racialized violence in Mississippi” (150). The MFT similarly overlooks the Black Power Movement in Mississippi. The authors critique the trail’s specific focus on the mainstream Civil Rights Movement and its failure to leave room for social movements as continuous and ongoing, without, however, acknowledging that their critique aligns with the well-known Long Civil Rights Movement framework, associated with Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s essay of that title.1 It is likely the reason that Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s state marker is on the Mississippi Writers Trail, and not the MFT, as Wells’s activist work predated the classical civil rights period by decades. Institutions such as the MCRM, discussed in Chapter 6, do a much better job of contextualizing the Civil Rights Movement as part of an ongoing struggle, from slavery to the present-day, with social justice as a civil rights tourism goal. The book argues that social justice is innately tied to contemporary conversations around memorialization (that is, whose lives are remembered, how, and why) and K–12 education in states that are politically antagonistic to facing difficult histories. The authors conclude the book by covering the latter, an extraordinary accomplishment against the backdrop of fast-paced political developments, happening as the authors did their research.
Note
Jacqueline Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (March 2005): 1233–63.