Transformative Memory and the Mississippi Burning Murders

Realms of Memory

In 1989 and 2004 something unusual happened in the town of Philadelphia in Neshoba County, Mississippi. After decades of silence whites finally joined their black neighbors in commemorating the 1964 murders of three young civil rights workers. What was different about 2004, however, was that the commemoration was just the beginning. The organizers forged an identity, as the Philadelphia Coalition, and went on to achieve several transformative goals. They helped bring justice to the Klan leader responsible for the murders, they helped make civil rights education mandatory across the state, and they helped establish a South African-style Truth and Reconciliation Commission to look at racially motivated crimes in the state’s past. How commemorations can become something larger, something transformative, is the focus of Furman University sociologist Claire Whitlinger’s book, Between Remembrance and Repair: Commemorating Racial Violence in Philadelphia, Mississippi.