Terror & Truth: Civil Rights Tourism and the Mississippi Movement. By Stephen A.King and Roger DavisGatchet, Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2023. 276 pp. ISBN: 978‐1‐49‐684654‐9

Terror & Truth: Civil Rights Tourism and the Mississippi Movement would appear to have a narrow focus. And, to a certain extent, it does. It concentrates on Mississippi, a state with a population of under 3 million and a #48 position on the 2025 “Best States Rankings” by U.S. News and World Report. Yet Mississippi has been pivotal in the American civil rights movement. As activist Victoria J. Gray said in 1967, “Mississippi cannot change America by itself, but America cannot change without Mississippi” (31). The state has made much progress with civil rights since the 1950s, but, as authors Stephen King and Roger Gatchet point out, the state still faces problems with segregation, voters' rights, systematic racism, healthcare, and more. Terror & Truth studies Mississippi's civil rights memorial landscape, “a vast constellation of sites and experiences where the state's—and, by extension, the nation's—public and collective memories of the movement and its legacy are enshrined, constructed, and contested” (6). King and Gatchet attempt to unpack how the past, and which past, is preserved. The authors take two extensive fieldtrips to study museums, trail markers, and promotional materials, conduct informal interviews, and consult scholarship to determine if Mississippi has reached its goals with civil rights tourism. Along the way, significant activists are profiled, particularly those who are neglected in national histories and commemorations. Amzie Moore and Aaron Henry, for instance, were two World War II veterans who undertook leadership roles in the movement and “faced violent white backlash … arrest and imprisonment, economic sanctions, and death threats” (52). Chapter 1, “From Movement to Memory,” provides a brief history of the Mississippi civil rights movement before charting the development of the state's civil rights tourist industry. Initially, a toxic mix of “defiance, denial, shame, and fear” (183) stalled tourism efforts with the result that Mississippi lagged “decades behind Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee” (29). Chapter 2, “Breaking Ground: Vernacular Efforts in Mississippi Civil Rights Tourism,” explores grassroots DIY efforts. The Canton Freedom House, the former headquarters of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), features “framed paintings hung askew” and newspaper clippings tacked to the walls, yet its “quaint, homey” effect “feels right” (64, 65). At the Mississippi Heritage Consortium, a makeshift museum, Helen Sims poses as Lula the Old Storyteller for a “powerful,” “unorthodox,” and “surreal” 2-h performance in which she traces the Black experience in the South (68). At both the Hamer Museum and the Hamer Memorial Garden, Fannie Lou Hamer is celebrated as “a powerful symbol of resistance” (72). Hamer, who spoke at the Democratic National Convention in 1964, was fired from her job and unjustly imprisoned, where two inmates were forced to brutally beat her. She never fully recovered from the physical and emotional scars. In Chapter 3, “Remembering the Lynching of Emmett Till: From Experiential to ‘Dark’ Tourism,” the authors sort through Till's presence in the Mississippi tourist landscape, noting that his story was largely absent until the 2000s. Two museums dedicated to Till now exist. The Emmett Till Interpretative Center in Sumner, across the street from the courthouse where Ron Bryant and J. W. Milam were acquitted of Till's murder, purports to give the “definitive account” of his trial (105). However, it fails to exhibit the jarring photograph of the deformed Till in his coffin. In the impoverished town of Glendora, the Emmett Till Historic Intrepid Center features a timeline and several exhibits, including replicas of his open casket and of the Bryant grocery storefront, where the teen's tragedy began. Till's experience looms large in Mississippi's consciousness and in Terror & Truth. While Chapter 3 occupies the center of the book (pages 87–115 of 202 pages of text), the introduction opens with the authors at the ruins of Bryant's store, where a passing bicyclist tells them that Till's story “should be kept in the history books where it belongs” (5). We later learn that the Freedom Trail markers at the site have been stolen, shot at, and used in a propaganda video for the Ku Klux Klan. In the conclusion, the authors speculate that the “wound from Till's lynching may never fully close” (201). In Chapter 4, “Private Spaces, Public Memories: Mississippi's Civil Rights Historic House Museums,” the authors focus on Amzie Moore's house, a local “civil rights' command center,” and Medgar Evers's home. Both homes, “unique and important” (138), assert a counternarrative to the often sanitized telling of Mississippi's history in the numerous antebellum mansions and Confederate monuments. Chapter 5, “Marking the Past,” explores the rhetoric of the Freedom Trail markers, which deemphasize the role of women in the movement (only 2 of the 28 markers reference women) and emphasize peaceful protest over more aggressive forms of resistance, never, for example, referencing the Black Power movement. In Chapter 6, “‘This Little Light of Mine’: Truth Telling at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum,” the authors commend the MCRM for its commitment to the truth. The MCRM Gallery 2 depicts lynchings and white extremism in all its brutality and ugliness, leaving visitors “psychologically exhausted” (175, 176). Truth & Terror is a poignant study that especially resonates in the Trump era during which museum exhibits have been questioned and schools' truth-telling compromised. As the authors assert, “there is still a deep desire by many in this country to forget anything from the past that might bring shame to those in the present” (201). With clarity, perception, and authority, King and Gatchet argue that for America to achieve its seemingly endless quest for racial reconciliation and social injustice, it must acknowledge America's dark past. The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.