“Mississippi Learning: Commemorating Racial Violence in Public Spaces” will be a roundtable discussion featuring people working in Mississippi to preserve and interpret the history of racial violence in the state. Mississippi has the dubious distinction of having the most lynchings of any state, while its resistance to integration and voting rights was the most violent and extreme in the country. For a long time, these events were often downplayed or omitted from state history textbooks and museum exhibits. Over the past few decades, a growing effort to rewrite Mississippi’s history in public spaces (defined as museums, historic structures, and civic spaces) to give a more honest account of its past have gained traction. Accounting for this history of racial violence has been a central part of this effort. In recent years, we have seen the creation of new national park sites related to Emmett Till and Medgar Evers, efforts to highlight the Reconstruction era, including its Black elected officials and the white racial violence that helped end it, community-based efforts to reckon with the state’s history of lynching, and perhaps most significantly, the creation of the state-run Mississippi Civil Rights Museum.

In the current climate of retrenchment and whitewashing the darker aspects of our national history, public historians and knowledge bearers across the state have remained committed to telling the truth about Mississippi’s past. This roundtable discussion will feature frontline practitioners who will explore the challenges of doing this work and the strategies they have used to build community support.

The panel will include representatives from the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, Mississippi, the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Home National Monument, the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, the Lafayette County Remembrance Project, and the Mississippi State University Library. Stuart Rockoff, director of the Mississippi Humanities Council, will moderate the panel.