The Sum of Its Parts

Over the last three decades, a number of countries previously controlled by authoritarian regimes have overthrown those governments. In efforts to rebuild their societies, many of these countries transitioning from dictatorships or repressive governments to democracies have come to use a truth and reconciliation process to aid in the transition. Over 30 countries have created truth commissions (TRCs) to investigate human rights abuses and to make recommendations about addressing those abuses. Transitional justice expert Priscilla Hayner’s Unspeakable Truths: Transitional Justice and the Challenge of Truth Commissions (2011) offers the definitive description of a TRC: it focuses on the past; it focuses on patterns of abuse rather than single events; it is a temporary body that produces a report; and it is officially sanctioned by the state. There are larger hopes that such processes will prod additional consequences, among them legitimation of the new government, recommendations for new policies that are just, and retributive and restorative justice efforts to address the crimes of the previous regime. The most well-known, of course, is South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Scholars and activists continue to debate the efficacy of the South African process, but it has nevertheless shaped the parameters of discussion by which other commissions are often judged. Much has been written on TRC strategies and structures around the world but the discussion has largely eluded the U.S. public, as our nation has not yet embarked on an officially sanctioned TR process (Chapman & Murwe, 2008; Gready, 2011; Rotberg & Thompson, 2001; Shaw, 2005). When activists in Greensboro, North Carolina, undertook a truth process around the murders and shootings of civil rights and labor activists in that city in 1979, they violated all of the rules of conventional, if early, understandings of TRCs (Magarell, Wesley, & Finka, 2010). However, it was their groundbreaking work, amid great hurdles, to unearth patterns of injustice in an American setting that gave us a template for a similar effort in the state of Mississippi.

This article addresses attempts to create a truth and reconciliation commission in the state of Mississippi and the lessons learned for establishing a TRC within a democratic, Western context. I argue that, for the particular historical context of the United States, TRCs must be deconstructed to their component parts and implemented as complementary tools used simultaneously in a truth process tool kit. This article proposes engaging in specific and related or complementary efforts that bring about truth, justice, and reconciliation that are sensitive to the context and resources of a particular place, in order to accomplish the larger goals of a TRC process. In short, truth processes must be defined for each country’s sociopolitical context and may make use of a number of activities and initiatives. In Mississippi, these have included prosecutions against racist violence; public ceremonies that I term “rituals of atonement,” historical tours and markers that change the geography of memory, the creation and implementation of school curricula on human rights, healing work among previously segregated groups through community building to alter public collective narratives of communities known for racial violence, academic investigations and scholarship on patterns and legacies of abuse, and partnerships of advocacy and policy groups that seek new institutional reforms that undo the structures of oppression and replace them with equitable ones.

The Mississippi Truth Project began in June 2005, at the conclusion of the first state prosecution of one of the murderers of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, killed in 1964 in Neshoba County. At a press conference upon the rendering of a guilty verdict for Edgar Ray Killen, the multiracial group of the Philadelphia Coalition, whose work had prompted the new trial and conviction, declared that:

These three brave young men were not murdered by a lone individual. While a vigilante group may have fired the gun, the State of Mississippi loaded and aimed the weapon. The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission monitored and intimidated civil rights activists to prevent black voter registration. The White Citizens’ Councils enforced white supremacy through economic oppression. And decent people remained silent while evil was done in their name. These shameful actions have been little understood by Mississippi citizens. We must now seek the truth. We call on the State of Mississippi, all of its citizens in every county, to begin an honest investigation into our history. (2005)

Within a week of the trial, then Governor Haley Barbour declared “closure” for Mississippi’s racial past and his stance solicited a forthright letter by Rita Schwerner Bender, the widow of Mickey Schwerner. She asserted that:

Restorative justice can only come with recognition of the past, acknowledgement of wrong doing, and acceptance of responsibility in the present by government and individuals to ameliorate the harm done. People in positions of public trust, such as you, must take the lead in opening the window upon the many years of criminal conduct in which the State, and its officials, engaged. Only with such acknowledgement will the present generation understand how these many terrible crimes occurred, and the responsibility which present officials, voters, and indeed, all citizens, have to each other to move forward. (2005)

Emboldened by her letter and by the courageous plea from the Philadelphia Coalition, and on the heels of the tremendously positive press received by the Neshoba conviction, which had even country music stations in the state calling for honest investigations into the past, former Mississippi Governor William Winter and I convened a group of civil rights veterans, progressive activists, and religious leaders in Jackson, MS, to discuss and began planning a statewide truth and reconciliation process to understand and redeem Mississippi’s racist past in order to create a more inclusive and equitable future. The ad hoc group met for several weeks, pondering what Mississippi might look like if it were a social justice state, and we imagined the mechanisms by which we might transform it in that way. However, on August 29th, our momentum was cut short by Hurricane Katrina.

For the group, the debacle of the response in the aftermath of the storm underscored the need to understand the history of structural racism in our country. To take just one example, funding from Community Development Block Grants that was to be used for housing for low-income survivors of the storm was quickly rerouted by Barbour's office to expand the Gulf of Mexico port for business interests. Despite these kinds of maneuvers that left recovery uneven and disproportionately in favor of those with more resources, Haley Barbour, most assuredly planning his marketing campaign to run for president, quickly moved to craft a narrative of storm recovery in Mississippi that hinged on resiliency and triumph of the human spirit and on proving how far Mississippi had come, especially cast as a “White” story of success as opposed to the “Black” story of failure in New Orleans. It was clear to us that a process of truth and reconciliation would not be sanctioned or supported by Mississippi officials, and so we began to look for other models. In the spring of 2006, we were able to exploit the momentum of the Killen verdict in one important way; the Winter Institute, which I direct, spearheaded the successful passage of a bill mandating teaching civil and human rights history in all Mississippi classrooms.

Over the course of 2006, the ad hoc group reached out to youth leaders to engage in a process with us and continued discussions as to what steps forward might be possible. We learned that far too many of our young people did not know the racial history of our state, making the curriculum bill all the more necessary. In 2007, the group decided to initiate a yearlong, statewide conversation called “The Welcome Table” inspired by a well-known civil rights anthem, which would promote open and honest dialogue on race. Over three hundred citizens gathered on the steps of the capitol on June 21st, the 43rd anniversary of the Neshoba murders, to launch a pilot year meant to test the waters of the readiness for such dialogue throughout the state so that a more comprehensive initiative might be engaged. The Methodist Conference of Mississippi led the most wide-ranging effort for that Welcome Table year, with a focus on race in the 2008 Lenton publication by the conference and Bishop Hope Morgan Ward insisting that every church engage in racial discussions. What they learned was crucial to our steps forward; on the whole, Blacks and White were receptive to engaging in open dialogue on race but unsure and often anxious about how to proceed and so avoided such discussions for fear of failure. In particular, Whites expressed a fear of being demonized, while Blacks were skeptical that any good would come from the effort. Because many saw the need for tools to engage in ways that moved beyond those anxieties to create trusting and respectful relationships as a basis for positive social change, we sought out colleagues at the Fetzer Institute’s Generosity of Spirit initiative to provide training to us.

Simultaneously in 2007, we came together with a number of civil rights veterans, including Rita Bender, Margaret Burnham, Dave Dennis, Hollis Watkins, Owen Brooks, and others, as well as scholars engaged in examining Mississippi’s past, including David Cunningham, Dan Kryder, Geoff Ward, and John Dittmer, to explore the creation of a truth and reconciliation commission. With funding provided by a New York–based foundation, the Andrus Family Fund, which had also supported the truth process in Greensboro, NC, the Winter Institute hired a part-time coordinator to hold exploratory meetings around the state over the course of 2007 and 2008 to gauge the interest of Mississippians in such an effort. By April 2008, we were able to host several statewide meetings. With support and advice from colleagues with Greensboro’s TRC and from the International Center for Transitional Justice, we organized two committees, one to secure funding for more organizers to continue building momentum in the state for a TRC and a second one to craft a “declaration of intent.” Without official sanction from the state of Mississippi, we had learned from the Greensboro model that collective community will could potentially create the authority to call for a commission. By outlining our intentions and then inviting Mississippians to endorse the document, we could try to legitimize ourselves through grassroots endorsement.

By January 2009, we were able to convene a signing ceremony, where hundreds of Mississippians came forward to endorse the declaration of intent. The ceremony signaled our first public announcements about the work, and in planning meetings after the ceremony, signees organized a five-region structure for the state, with three elected representatives, including at least one young person, from each region to serve on a steering committee to direct the next phase of writing a mandate for a commission. As community leaders worked, our academic partners began securing funding for an intensive research project in Mississippi that would place scholars and students in four communities to digitize existing records related to the racial history of Mississippi so that patterns of abuse in education and criminal justice might be discerned. Bill and Rita Bender joined the Winter Institute that fall as visiting professors for two semesters and focused their work on the deliberate denial of education to African Americans in Mississippi as one way to proscribe the opportunities of citizenship and economic opportunity. Truly in that moment we felt invincible.

And then a few of us were able to attend a conference, “Beyond Reconciliation,” hosted in Cape Town in December 2009. Friends introduced us to Reverend Peter Storey, one of the architects of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. We spent several hours with Rev. Storey, learning from his assessment of South Africa’s TRC, which provided a cautionary tale for our work in Mississippi. Storey shared with us that while many have charged his country’s TRC with failure, he believed instead that, “the country failed the TRC” (December 2009). He advised us to drill down as deeply into communities as possible, to think about the ordinary, the quotidian. Too often, he asserted, practitioners of truth and healing work have been distracted by the super event, the massacre by police of hundreds or murders of well-known resistors to the status quo, for example. But such a narrow focus misses the microaggressions, the bystanderism, and the activities of everyday people to create the lived experience of a society organized around the oppression of others. Thus, the focus on super events fails to hold everyone accountable on a day-to-day basis for activities that cumulatively escalate to the super event and prevents an understanding of the ways in which ordinary people can be a part of changing the social order. This advice lingered with us as we returned to Mississippi in 2010, especially as the work of the Mississippi Truth Project, as it had become known by then, began to stall.

The steering committee charged with writing a mandate could not seem to agree on the substantive issues around a mandate. Would we provide oral histories to police investigations? In one meeting, the group wanted to do so, asking me to reach out to the newly created Department of Justice civil rights cold cases effort to seek partnership. With that partnership secured, the group decided it did not want to share information with investigators, for fear that those with incriminating information would refuse to come forward to share their stories. And so the tension between truth and justice thwarted forward movement. At the same time, the country was reeling from two forces, namely, a deep recession that made many in the state feel that trying to tell stories of the past had no place in the real-world efforts to just get by economically, and the election of Barack Obama in 2008, which had many declaring our entrance into a “post-racial society,” where discussing civil rights history was seen as rude, no longer necessary, or downright un-American in the midst of our new progress. And yet, a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2009, affirmed by later FBI reports, revealed the increase in the creation of anti-Black hate groups in the wake of Obama’s election, and we continued to live in a state where 35% of our children live in poverty, so we were not quite ready to declare victory over White supremacy (Chen, 2009).

And so we went back to the stakeholders on the steering committee and asked, “what should we do?” The members of the steering committee advised the Winter Institute, “collect our stories, because no one seems to remember the history enough to understand how it shapes us today” (Glisson, 2010). With continued funding support from the Andrus Family Fund, we provided oral history training throughout the state and supported Welcome Table dialogue training over the course of 2010 and 2011. We were ever mindful of Rev. Storey’s admonition to get as local as possible reinforced by Legal Scholar Sherrilyn Ifill’s (2007) advice that—as our racial discussions in America try to include the Middle Passage, slavery, and Jim Crow and Trayvon Martin all in one discussion—we never get beyond blaming and shaming to how racism plays out in our own neighborhoods. By recovering these local memories and stories, we began learning more about the microaggressions that have mortared the edifice of structural inequities in our state, by creating a constant cultural loop that reinforces racial hierarchy (Essed, 1991; Sue, 2010).

In 2010, a second decisive conversation occurred, this time with Program Officer George Vickers at the Open Society Foundation (OSF). Vickers had been involved in the Guatemalan TRC process and a mutual friend connected us as we sought our way forward. Vickers’ advice was initial shocking but came to hold sway, “Stop working for a truth commission,” he said. “Most, if not all commissions produce reports that sit on shelves and collect dust” (Glisson, 2010). He went on to suggest that they very rarely change policies and they do not necessarily create a framework for progressive activism that changes structures. “Spend your energy instead,” he said, “on creating a coalition of progressive groups who can work together for policy change in the state.” It was in this exchange, and with OSF’s support that the idea of deconstructing the elements of a truth and reconciliation process began to emerge for us. While we understood that official commissions and hearings have more far-ranging effects on communities than Vickers’ comments suggested, we began to see the possibility of securing those effects through means other than public hearings, since that mechanism remained beyond our grasp.

Thus, where Human Rights Scholar and Activist Michael Ignatieff has argued that the main contribution of TRCs has been to “narrow the range of permissible lies,” we offer as an alternative complement the deconstructed and perhaps more multifaceted truth process approach which, as our colleague Charles Tucker has described, “increases the range of voices of those who are deemed credible enough to tell the truth” (Ignatieff, 1998, p. 174). Rather than creating a TRC and report, we now work to create a culture of truth-telling in Mississippi. And we have looked back now in reflection on our work and see that we have been doing that work all along. And so, the University of Mississippi’s (UM) 2002 observance of its desegregation, in which the Chancellor apologized for the exclusion of African Americans to the university drew a crowd of 2,500. It was a “public ritual of atonement,” which, coming from the Chancellor of the flagship university of the state, created at least a rhetorical space for acknowledging the wrongs of the past and offering some leadership to go further. In short, UM's leadership then sanctioned and encouraged other such conversations, even if UM had not fully embraced all that such leadership meant for itself. As a part of those commemorations, we collected over 50 oral histories with those who had protected James Meredith, and we honored as heroes those who had advocated integration at the time but who had been rejected by the society at large.

This UM effort, in turn, encouraged a UM alumnus, William May from Newton, MS, to organize a ceremony of atonement in 2003, coordinated by a local biracial group, to apologize to the Evers family for the violent response to Medgar and Charles Evers’ attempts to register to vote just after World War II in Decatur, MS. The community lobbied the Mississippi Department of Archives and History to #place an official historic marker at the courthouse where the melee occurred, in effect rewriting publicly the previous narrative of silence and denial. At the time of the Winter Institute's work supporting this effort, a local participant shared his happiness at the developments and issued a challenge of sorts, surrounding his skepticism that such conversations could ever take place just up the road, in Neshoba County, infamous site of the 1964 Mississippi Burning murders. And yet, within 6 months, in February 2004, a multiracial group of citizens invited the Winter Institute to their community to support a process of acknowledging their community's painful history. Modeling their approach partly on UM's earlier effort, the Philadelphia Coalition, as it became known, issued a call for justice in the Neshoba murders, in a public ceremony on the 40th anniversary of the murders in an event attended by Mississippi's governor, 4 congressmen, and 1,500 citizens. That call led to the conviction of Edgar Ray Killen in 2005, 1 of over 20 successful civil rights prosecutions in the region, with Mississippi leading in those numbers, with over 21 convictions.

In the aftermath of the conviction, the community went on to erect an historic marker at the murder site as well as to rename the county highway from which they were kidnapped in honor of the three victims. In 2008, with new-found multiracial cooperation, local Black citizens and a White-dominated Parks Commission worked together to reorder the way public funds were spent, canceling a proposed community center in a Black neighborhood next to the local jail and instead restoring a different and historic community center and expanding its services according to the preferences of the Black residents who would use it. And in 2009, James Young, a Black member of the Coalition, became the first African American mayor of Philadelphia, winning the support of the majority White community. He was subsequently re-elected.

Two other community efforts worthy of note: In 2006, the city and school district of McComb, MS, held a public ceremony to honor the Black students who had been expelled from school in 1961 for a civil rights protest. Coupled with a civil rights education summit for teachers, their work paved the way for the state's most innovative and sustained commitment to civil and human rights education. And in 2007, the Winter Institute supported a biracial commission of citizens in Tallahatchie County as it offered an apology to the family of Emmett Till for the miscarriage of justice in 1955, when his murderers were found not guilty in the Sumner courthouse. In a public ceremony, the Emmett Till Memorial Commission unveiled an historic marker at the courthouse and began a fund-raising campaign to restore the courthouse to its 1955 footprint and to include a civil rights museum. Both communities modeled their work on the efforts in Philadelphia.

In Philadelphia, McComb and Tallahatchie County, where silence previously held sway over painful civil rights violence, there are now historic markers and civil rights driving tours so that residents and visitors alike can engage with history. This new “geography of memory” is reinforced by civil and human rights curriculum in schools, wherein local stories are often gathered by students and incorporated into the curriculum, as is the case in the McComb school system. While the implementation has been uneven across the state, the sporadic nature of the curriculum is a testament to the importance of community support to apply pressure to local school districts to offer the curriculum. It is clear that the curriculum is executed better in schools that have community support and interest in improving race relations. In further support of this work, the Winter Institute now offers a community-building process, the evolved “The Welcome Table,” which creates civil and respectful spaces to consider the “everydayness” of oppression and healing, which is then infused with collective community action and structural reforms to ensure more effectively that oppressive histories do not repeat themselves. It supported recent efforts in Oxford in which the First Baptist Church there, an historically White Southern Baptist church that enacted a closed door policy in 1968 to exclude Blacks, undertook a self-examination of that policy and its implementation over decades and then decided to condemn itself and offer apologies this past summer to their Black neighbors. Now they are all working together to repair the community harms that resulted from that policy. With support from OSF, we created a coalition of progressive organizations in the state called Mississippi Actively Reaching Communities (ARC), which centers its work on three areas, namely, juvenile justice and child welfare, educational equity and the student achievement gap, and public health.

On the campus of the University of Mississippi, which helped prod these developments with is 2002 leadership, change has come more slowly. Experts and advocates on campus struggled to gain traction in the wake of the 2002 events but a new Chancellor, appointed in 2009, brought a new energy and urgency to campus transformation. The Winter Institute now trains all new freshmen as well as the instructors of the freshman introductory course, plus all new staff hires to the campus, in the history of the university and its special obligation to celebrate diversity. In particular, a textbook that is required reading for all freshmen now includes a forthright chapter on race and the history of the University, written by two Winter Institute staff. In addition, we help our campus understand how microaggressions operate to maintain a culture of hierarchy and offer instead a model of “micro-progressions,” as our colleague Jennifer Stollman has called them, or the everyday actions the collectively create a more just and inclusive society. We believe this approach more effectively enables ordinary people to understand and act on their roles as change agents in their own communities.

Colleagues in the human rights field also call this development “active bystanderism,” which is meant to encourage ordinary citizens to resist and challenge the often everyday verbal assaults to human dignity especially of groups deemed marginal or “other.” In short, as in the concept of “prefigurative politics,” the Winter Institute’s community building, youth engagement, and campus-based work seek to encourage the creation of subenvironments or circles of trust that attempt to inculcate and model the characteristics of cooperation, respect, self-determination, justice, and compassion that are missing from the larger culture. As Scholar Wini Breines has noted, the focus of such work, “is to create and sustain within the lived practice of the movement relationships and political forms that ‘prefigured’ and embodied the desired society” (1982, p. 6).

Sociologist Raj Andrew Ghoshal (2013, pp. 331–332), a fellow contributor to this issue, asserts that “we can productively understand interventions to challenge dominant collective memory as memory movements; that is, sustained collective efforts to bring increased attention to past incidents or individuals, or to transform the way such pasts are understood.” But he argues that such movements, of which the effort in Mississippi is one, are not concerned with policy. However, I submit that in this day and age, of vitriolic, myth-driven attacks, of “know nothings” who do great damage, animating the civic conversation with historical truth is a political act. We have come to understand that White supremacy is not just a lie, it is a belief, a mind-set. Our memory movement in Mississippi is trying to change beliefs so that attitudes can change. We believe that changed attitudes enable inequitable conditions to be recognized and transformed. The writer James Baldwin suggested that, “If I am not who you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.” Mnemonic movements can change attitudes, which create opportunities for social justice precisely because they interrupt who we think “the enemy” is and what our roles might be if we are not who we think we are.

Journalist Richard Rubin identified the failure that occurs when we do not engage in this hard work. He wrote of a juror considering the guilt or innocence of Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam in the murder of Emmett Till who actually attempted initially to declare the men guilty. But in just over an hour, his fellow jurors were able to sway him to free the two murderers. Rubin suggests that:

[W]e tend to think of racism and racists … in binary terms. Someone is either a racist or he isn’t.… But of course it’s much more complicated than that, and in the Mississippi of 1955 it was more complicated still. [For] him to buck the established order like that would have actually required him to make at least four courageous decisions. First, he would have had to decide that the established order, the system in which he had lived his entire life, was wrong. Second, he would have had to decide that it should change. Third, he would have had to decide that it could change. And finally, he would have had to decide that he himself should do something to change it. (2005)

The Mississippi Truth Project and, the work of the Winter Institute more broadly, rests in facilitating the individual and local transformations necessary to challenge an entire belief system, an inherently monumental task. But it need not be viewed as an all-encompassing task. We now understand that prosecutions, public ceremonies, curriculum development, community building, advocacy, and public policy are all elements in our growing tool kit for ending White supremacy by interrogating its underpinnings in behaviors, attitudes, and conditions. While we might have moved at a quicker pace if we had been able to take advantage of the political moment offered by public hearings hosted by an official commission, in the end, we hope that the various interrelated strategies are building a solid and sustainable grassroots foundation for substantive, positive social change. The value and effectiveness of deconstructing the ingredients of a truth process helps to reduce a seemingly impossible goal to more manageable pieces, like building genuinely democratic institutions and addressing structural violence in ways that also encourage collaboration and coalition. The historian Howard Zinn has described it this way:

When you have models of how people can come together, even for a brief period, it suggests that it could happen for a longer period. When you think of it, that’s the way things operate in the scientific world, so why not socially? As soon as the Wright brothers could keep a plane aloft for 27 seconds, everyone knew from that point on that a plane might be kept aloft for hours. It’s the same socially and culturally.… We’ve had countless incidents in history where people have joined together in social movements and created a spirit of camaraderie or a spirit of sharing and togetherness which have absented them, even momentarily, from the world of greed and domination. If true community can stay aloft for 27 seconds, it is only a matter of time before such a community can last for hours. Only a matter of time before a beloved community, as Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of, can come into being.

In 1839, Mississippi Governor Alexander McNutt, a slaveholder, gave an address to the legislature concerning the creation of a new, flagship university for the state. He noted that “Patriotism, no less than economy, urges upon us the duty of educating our children at home. Those opposed to us in principle cannot be safely entrusted with the education of our sons and daughters” (Mayes, 1899, p. 122). Thus, the University of Mississippi grew from a desire to protect and promulgate the White supremacist ideology of slaveholders. It is incumbent upon those of us committed to social justice and inclusion to understand what White supremacists have always known, that is, whoever gets to tell the story shapes the world.