The Transformative Capacity of Commemorating Racial Violence

This chapter examines the differences between the 1989 and 2004 commemorations to identify the factors that were pre-sent in 2004—but not in 1989— that enabled the 2004 commemoration to have transformative commemorative outcomes. Most notably, the chapter suggests that the environment’s capacity to commemorate was more developed in 2004 than in 1989, as a number of historic, educational, and civil society organizations had developed in the succeeding years. This structural context enhanced the mnemonic capacity of locals to organize a commemoration and to pursue additional reparative efforts related to the state’s racial history. Beyond these structural factors, this chapter suggests that the 2004 commemoration resonated more deeply with target audiences and generated a collective identity and commitment to mnemonic activism among local organizers.

Commissioning Truth and Reconciliation

This chapter explores the relationship between the 2004 commemoration in Philadelphia, Mississippi and the Mississippi Truth Project, a state-wide project initially modelled after South Africa’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission. After reviewing the history of transitional justice efforts in the United States and the social scientific literature on how civil society-based truth commissions emerge, the chapter demonstrates how the 2004 commemoration and subsequent trial of Edgar Ray Killen precipitated the formation of a state-wide truth commission when previous efforts had failed. In short, this research finds that the commemoration mobilized mnemonic activists; concentrated local, state, and global resources; broadened political opportunity; and shifted the political culture of the state. Despite these developments—and years of project planning—the Mississippi Truth Project changed course in 2009, abandoning a South African-style truth commission in favour of grassroots memory projects and oral history collection. The chapter thus sheds lights on the possibilities and perils of pursuing non-state truth commissions.

Legislating Civil and Human Rights Education

This chapter investigates the causal connection between the 2004 commemoration and another racially significant transformation: Mississippi Senate Bill 2718, an education bill mandating civil rights and human rights education in Mississippi schools. Providing historical perspective on the legislation—the first of its kind in the country—the chapter traces its origins to the fortieth anniversary commemoration in Philadelphia, Mississippi in 2004. After providing a brief history of school desegregation in Mississippi and previous efforts to mandate Holocaust education in the state, the chapter demonstrates how the 2004 commemoration and subsequent civil rights trial mobilized a new generation of local memory activists. When joined with institutional resources at the state-level, these developments generated the commemorative capacity for local organizers to institutionalize civil rights memory through curricular change. Thus, in contrast to other multicultural or human rights education mandates, which have typically been outgrowths of large-scale progressive social movements or the diffusion of global norms, Mississippi’s civil and human rights education bill emerged out of local commemorative efforts.

A Philadelphia (Mississippi) Story

Previous research on Philadelphia, Mississippi and Neshoba County focuses overwhelmingly on the 1964 murders and subsequent legal trials (in 1967 and 2005), providing relatively little insight into the area’s commemorative practices. Furthermore, such research often depicts the twenty-five years following the murders as “the long silence,” a description that is not entirely accurate. It overlooks the annual commemoration services hosted by Mt. Zion United Methodist Church, the African American church that the three civil rights movement workers visited just before their deaths. This chapter recognizes and reconstructs the commemorative activities of Philadelphia’s African American community, including Martin Luther King Jr.’s visit to Neshoba County in 1966 and other resistance to the local Ku Klux Klan. Doing so uncovers two distinct communities of memory: one characterized by Philadelphia’s dominant white public sphere, the official, government-sanctioned memory; the other representing a powerful and persistent countermemory embedded in Philadelphia’s African American community. In doing so, this chapter positions the twenty-fifth and fortieth anniversary commemorations within historical context, uncovering the mnemonic landscape that preceded the emergence of these two community-wide commemoration services.

Commemorating Racial Violence as Intergroup Contact

This chapter explains how the fortieth anniversary commemoration was able to generate a collective identity and commitment to memory activism across a diverse group of citizens. Drawing insights from the social psychology of intergroup contact and work of Gordon Allport, this chapter suggests that commemorating racial violence is most effective when certain conditions are met: the commemoration organizers collaborate on a common goal; the status of racial groups is equal within the commemorative planning process; the project has the support of relevant political and cultural authorities; and the commemoration planning process provides opportunities for informal interactions, often through storytelling. This last condition enables participants to challenge pre-existing stereotypes and to develop new understandings of their own racialized experiences. More broadly, this chapter suggests that interracial efforts to commemorate racial violence should be conceptualized as instances of inter-group contact. This highlights the often-overlooked interactional dynamics of the commemorative planning process and extends arguments about the relationship between storytelling and social change.

From Countermemory to Collective Memory

Chapter 2 considers how Philadelphia, Mississippi’s long-silenced countermemory becomes “official” collective memory, transforming cultural representation in the public sphere. By comparing two instances of silence breaking, the twenty-fifth and fortieth anniversary commemorations—both interracial community-wide events unique for having punctuated Philadelphia’s prevailing conspiracy of silence on the murders—this chapter argues that commemorability and mnemonic capacity are necessary but insufficient factors for silence breaking commemorations to emerge. The analysis then reveals two additional criteria—external pressure and interest convergence—suggesting that commemorating silenced pasts is arguably more challenging than commemorating merely difficult pasts.

Commemoration Is a Constant Struggle

Readers may be familiar with Civil Rights Movement adage: “freedom is a constant struggle.” This concluding chapter demonstrates how commemoration is a constant struggle, highlighting the decades-long efforts to institutionalize the collective memory of racial violence in the United States. Thus, this chapter argues that attention to commemorative outcomes should be a critical concern of collective memory research, concerns that have remained largely unexplored. The chapter further suggests that it is most advantageous to conceptualize commemorations and memory movements as iterative, a feedback loop in which movements produce commemorations and commemorations produce movements. It then highlights the process of commemorating difficult pasts, arguing that the meso-level interactional dynamics such as intergroup contact shape possibilities for commemorative outcomes. In this way, the social psychology of racial identity and intergroup contact provide important insights for local memory activists and racial reconciliation practitioners more broadly.

Epilogue

The epilogue provides updates on the three commemorative outcomes explored in earlier chapters—the prosecution of Edgar Ray Killen, the civil and human rights education bill, and the Mississippi Truth Project—discussing challenges to implementation in each case. The chapter then turns its attention to another outcome of the fortieth anniversary commemoration in Philadelphia, Mississippi: fragmented commemoration. The planning process in 2004 revealed significant ideological differences among organizers who were divided over whether to uphold the traditional yearly observance at a local black church or to broaden the audience of the commemoration by hosting it at a larger venue typically associated with the county’s white residents. A year following the tumultuous 40th anniversary commemoration, the conviction of Edgar Ray Killen for his role as the mastermind behind the 1964 Mississippi Burning murders further exacerbated the divide with critics pushing for further prosecutions. Every year since, the two groups have held two separate, nearly simultaneous commemoration services, highlighting important questions about how best to represent this painful past and who has the right to do so.

Introduction

For decades, Philadelphia, Mississippi epitomized Southern racism as the site of the 1964 “Mississippi Burning” murders of civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. Yet in a striking turn of events, the community’s efforts to confront its history of racial violence is now commended by academics and racial reconciliation practitioners as a model for other cities hoping to do the same. This introductory chapter situates this local transformation within a global political and cultural landscape, highlighting the “memory boom” ignited by WWII, which constructed acknowledgment and atonement with moral righteousness and legitimate democracy. Then, after reviewing scholarly debates on the social utility of commemorating violent pasts, the chapter argues that such commemorations are neither entirely beneficial nor detrimental to social life, as popular and scholarly texts often suggest. Rather, scholars should identify the conditions that enable commemorations of violent pasts to transform the often tragic conditions out of which they emerge. In this way, commemorations must be understood as both the cause and consequence of related memory movements. Studying commemorative outcomes therefore requires a detailed historical and counterfactual analysis, a methodological approach discussed in the chapter’s final section.

Prosecuting Edgar Ray Killen

Despite the growing number of civil rights cold cases brought to trial decades after the crimes were committed, few social scientific studies explore the conditions that allow for such cases to emerge. Engaging this question through an in-depth case study of the 2005 prosecution of Edgar Ray Killen for the 1964 “Mississippi Burning” murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, this chapter extends current understandings of cold case trials. More specifically, the chapter investigates whether and how the case can be understood as an outcome of the 40th anniversary commemoration in Philadelphia, Mississippi, finding that the commemoration catalysed mnemonic entrepreneurship and cultivated the organizational structures and resources necessary to achieve a positive legal outcome. In doing so, the commemoration empowered local organizers to perform the roles typically undertaken by victims’ relatives and investigative journalists, thus offering an alternative pathway to legal redress. In addition, this commemorative outcome was shaped by favourable political opportunities a juror pool that had been primed through the ‘‘memory of commemoration.’’