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Hi everyone. Welcome to the New Books Podcast. I'm Michael Rossino, assistant professor of Sociology at Malloy University and author of the book Democracy Is Grappling with Racism Inside Grassroots Political Organizing. Today I'm joined by Professor Claire Witlinger, associate Professor of Sociology and co director of the Intergroup Dialogue Program at Furman University. We're going to talk about her book between remembrance and Commemorating Racial Violence in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Published by University of North Carolina Press. The book brings together the study of cultural memory, collective action coalitions and racial justice in a critical case study that looks over a wide period of time. So I'm so excited to dig into this conversation. Thanks so much for joining us today.
B
Thanks so much for having me.
C
Could you please tell us a bit about yourself and what you do?
B
Sure. I think you covered the basics in terms of, you know, associate professor, I work in the Intergroup Dialogue program, but I think by way of giving sort of a broader sense of my interests, I've, I've long been interested in how interested in how communities, what communities remember and how that changes over time. But in particular I'm really interested in how communities commemorate racial violence and what that commemoration does in the communities where it's enacted.
C
Excellent. So tell us A little bit about what led you to write this book. I always kind of love to get the backstory, what motivates authors.
B
Yeah, I'm happy to chat about this. And it's sort of. There's a long way of telling this story. And for that, I would direct people to the preface of the book. I felt like I needed, when I was writing the book, to give the readers a little bit of a sense of where I come from. But the very short version of this is that I grew up in the San Francisco Bay area, and so ending up writing a book about Philadelphia, Mississippi, was not something I sort of envisioned. And so it was a winding path, but skipping ahead a little bit. I studied at the University of Cape Town in the early 2000s, and this was a time when, not long after, the end of apartheid and the conclusion of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. And so when I came back to the United States, I was really intrigued by the amount of mentions of the South African Truth Commission that I was hearing and efforts, sort of more local efforts to engage truth and reconciliation processes in the United States. And so ultimately, I started grad school thinking I was going to study US Based truth commissions. And so I happened to be at a workshop at Stanford Law School run by the International center for Transitional justice, and was speaking with Lisa Magarell, who was. Who was working at the ictj, who told me that there was a truth commission being developed, sort of a grassroots truth commission being developed in Mississippi. And so I hopped in my car and, you know, drove down to Mississippi to learn more about what was going on. And I got there sort of right as the project was starting to transition, which I end up sort of writing a chapter in the book about. But that's all to say, when I was in Mississippi, traveling all across the state, you know, to these Truth Commission meetings, everyone kept talking about Philadelphia, Mississippi, and this thing that had happened in 2004 that seemed to change how people understood that community, but also seemed to be sort of reverberating outwards in really meaningful ways across the state. And so I just became fascinated and sort of took that as the beginning of an empirical question, which is, you know, what happened in 2004 in Philadelphia, Mississippi? How did they get there? And is this moment actually transformative in the way that people seem to be theorizing?
C
Excellent. So for those not familiar with the events in Philadelphia, Mississippi in 1964, can you give us a little context?
B
Yeah, absolutely. So 1964 is the height of the civil rights movement and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, also known as sncc, was devising a plan, a project that is later referred to as Freedom Summer. And, and in this, in this project, they were. The idea was to sort of train and equip college students, mostly white, mostly northern, from elite colleges and universities to go to Mississippi for the summer to run Freedom Schools and to register local Mississippians to vote. The idea, the strategy, from a movement perspective, was really to draw attention to the state by, you know, leveraging the sort of white college students. And the first, really, day of the summer project started. Three of its volunteers went missing. After a long and very highly publicized search, it was discovered that those three individuals, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schorner, had been shot and buried in very shallow graves. And it would later come out that it was. That those who had killed them was a local lynch mob of members of the Ku Klux Klan, including local law enforcement officers.
C
So a big theme of the book is how commemoration as a result of collective struggles and coalitions to just kind of give a broad sense. What insights do you think we can gain for thinking about social change from this case study?
B
Yeah. Ooh, that's such a big question. And there's so many ways to answer that. So let me get started and you direct me. I think one of the things that is important about thinking about social change emerged from me in just studying the history of commemoration in this community. Right. So I really. I started with 2004, which was the 40th anniversary commemoration of these 1964 murders. This sort of seeming, you know, hypothesized turning point in this community. And so, as a comparative historical sociologist, I wanted to understand the broader commemorative landscape. Right. Was this a one off event? Had the community commemorated this before, and if so, who and when and where and how, and all of those, you know, really exciting questions. And one thing that I discovered that I thought was really fascinating and important is that this event in 2004 was just. This is where the history gets a little complicated. Okay. So there had been one major large scale community commemoration prior to 2004, and that was the 25th. The 25th anniversary commemoration in 1989. And in a lot of the historical literature, these are the only two events that are really mentioned as commemorations of this past. And in fact, Philadelphia, Mississippi and Neshoba county more broadly, in which Philadelphia is situated, were described as. As sort of the worst of the worst in terms of racial hatred of the time, but also sort of doubly problematic in the way that the communities seemingly had refused to remember this history. Right. So that is a long way of. That's a way of saying there was a lot of silence and denial and sort of active and structural forgetting. Okay. But what I discovered when I was doing this research is that that wasn't exactly true. Right. So, in fact, the community had been commemorating this event every year beginning and, you know, beginning in 1965 at the first, you know, anniversary and the second anniversary, Martin Luther King came to town. I mean, it was every year, but it was commemorations that were situated in local black churches. Okay. And so that really gets removed from the sort of historical historiography or understanding of this community. And so what I discovered is that the 2004 commemoration was a moment that wasn't sort of. It wasn't just about how commemoration emerged in this community. It was really about understanding how counter memory became collective memory and sort of central to this community's telling of its own narrative. Okay, so what does that mean for social change? This probably goes without saying, but sometimes social change happens really fast. Right. It's just sort of. There's a rupture and there's a radical transformation, and sometimes it happens really slow. And so one of the things I started to think about is the sort of preconditions for this 2004 moment. And one of the preconditions was that this memory was kept alive. Right. And I draw a lot on the concept of carrier groups, and I even sort of adapt Alden Morris's ideas of movement centers. Right. So he writes about how different institutions, including black churches, were these movement centers that sort of sustained and nurtured the civil rights movement over time. And I see black churches in this community is operating as sort of memory centers. Right. Or memory movement centers, very much sort of keeping the spark alive until political opportunities were more advantageous. There's a lot more to say, but I'll pause there.
C
Okay. No, that's really great. I think there's a lot to pull from that. One of the things, and I think you're already starting to kind of get to this is like one of the things you discuss in the book is kind of how different environments, different coalitions of actors can create different capacities for commemoration. So specifically for your case study, what were some of the factors that you feel like really shaped that commemoration of racist violence in Philadelphia? And I know you've already talked about this a little bit.
B
Yeah, yeah. So to bring in some other information about this case, I'll say that there were sort of two major factors happening in the state of Mississippi and also much more locally. And when I say local, I mean not just in Philadelphia, but within the sort of group of people that was doing the commemorating that I think really shaped possibilities for social change. So one is that. And this is sort of a more structural argument, the state of Mississippi in the early 2000s, for lack of a better phrasing, you know, really jumped on the civil rights tourism bandwagon, right? So in comparison to other states that had, you know, major museums or sort of monuments and memorials that brought in a lot of tourists, Mississippi had nothing comparable at the time. And so there was an effort to think about sort of black heritage tourism. Okay, so that's sort of one. One thing that's happening at the time. Another thing that's happening at the time is the. The University of Mississippi had an organization called the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation that was in its sort of very nascent years. This organization was at the University of Mississippi, but not really of the University of Mississippi. And it was always a complicated relationship. But what that organization ended up doing is providing a really critical organizational infrastructure to support local memory movements. And by this, I mean, in particular, the work of Susan Glisson, who was the director of the William Winter Institute at the time, was an incredible source of information and guidance and resources. And anyone that's ever done commemorative work or done any movement organizing knows how many technical things are actually required to bring these events to fruition. And so she, in particular. But also the organization, again, provided this really critical infrastructure. Okay, so that's sort of the big picture piece of this. But I think what was surprising to me as a researcher, what I really didn't expect to find, and given my orientation as a comparative historical sociologist, wasn't really equipped to even look for, was how significant the interactional dynamics were among the organizers themselves. And when I'm saying organizers, they would not have used that language. They would not have described themselves as memory activists. What it was was an interracial coalition of local citizens in a small town in East Central Mississipp who cared about their community and felt that the story needed to be different. And so they came together to think about how they could host a commemorative event to honor this thing that had happened 40 years ago and that had stigmatized their community. But what I discovered is that this coalition, without even trying to, had actually sort of fulfilled all of the prerequisites for, quote, unquote, positive intergroup contacts. And so I began to start really thinking about commemorating racial violence, especially when white folks get involved, which is happening with increasing regularity, I began to understand these, these moments as from a more interactional lens and understand them as instances of intergroup contact. And that led me into a whole different sort of literature and way of understanding collective action and social change than I had initially set out to do.
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C
Excellent. One thing that I really was fascinated by as I read the book was just how you delved so deeply into this case study, especially given that it spans kind of a wide time period. You're really kind of talking about historical events, more recent events, different organizations. So can you walk us a little bit through the research methods you used for your book, how you found data, how you analyzed it, all that kind of stuff?
B
Yeah, that's a great question. Yeah, I mean, the research really started like uncovering a puzzle, right? So I had heard about this, this 2004 moment, the 40th anniversary. And so I knew I needed, and I was interested, right, in whether or not this commemoration had actually led to structural change. And so first I went backwards, right? And so I, I felt like I needed to understand, as I referenced before, the sort of 40, 50 year sort of history of commemoration, right? And that was the time scope, right? Cause we had the initial event in 1964, the killings of Chaney, Turner and Goodman. Then we had this 2004 event. And so I could really do deep comparative historical research. And by that I mean sitting in a very dusty library in Philadelphia, Mississippi, going through the microfilm of the weeks around this annual commemoration every year. And I also discovered that because a lot of this commemorative work had been happening outside of dominant official channels, that also wasn't going to cut it. And so then I had to pivot into oral histories and really getting to know people who were involved in these early commemorations and just trying to sort of piece together what was going on, in addition to working at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History and doing some sort of broader historical work. Okay, so that's sort of constructing the back end up to 2004. Thinking about how to empirically assess whether and if so, how the commemoration in 2004 led to institutional change across the state was a much more challenging enterprise. And that's something that I think anyone who studies movement outcomes can appreciate, because to use the sort of technical term here for a second, but the dependent variable, the outcome, right. It can be so many things. And so what I decided to do was to look at sort of three. Well, we can get into the nuances here. What I ultimately ended up doing was looking at three cases of institutional change that I had heard locals hypothesizing or sort of theorizing or just believing. Right. Were connected to this 2004 moment. And so then I had to do counterfactual analysis. And to do that, I ended up using a technique called event structure analysis that is really technical. So I won't get into too many of the details here, but essentially what it does is it starts with the outcome. In my case, I was looking at the prosecution of Edgar Ray Killen for the murders. So he was the only person indicted by the state of Mississippi for the murders of Chani, schwarner and goodman 41 years after the fact. So a year after the 40th anniversary commemoration. So I looked at that, I looked at this. Truth Project, Truth Commission turned Truth Project. And then I looked at the passage of an education bill mandating civil and human rights education in the state of Mississippi. On its face, maybe the prosecution of Edgar A. Killen seems closely tethered. The other two cases seem like they were sort of broader state events happening. And they were. But I had reason to believe that they could be traced back to this community based commemoration in 2004. And so I sort of started at the end with those three events and had to do very deep historical work again, informed by oral histories and interviews with key informants, and sort of trace the historical tethers or see if I could. And for what it's worth, I did and I could, and I think I make a compelling case. But there were other things happening as well that don't make it into the book. So one is that right after the 40th anniversary commemoration, Philadelphia, Mississippi elected its first black mayor. Remarkable. It's remarkable given the history and legacy of this community. But I wasn't able to empirically sort of find the ties in quite the same way. And then the other thing that happened is that the state of Mississippi and Haley Barbour, Governor Barber in particular, supported and ultimately pushed through the development of a civil rights history history museum. That was a huge undertaking. I also suspect that that was connected back to the 2004 moment. But nonetheless, that didn't make it into the book.
C
Thank you. That's really fascinating. I always love to kind of nerd out about research methods. That's always one of my favorite things to talk about. But kind of going back to some of the more conceptual themes in the book, obviously this is in the title of the book, but remembrance and Repair are both pretty prominent themes. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about kind of the distinction between those two goals, how they played out in this case, and if you feel like they have any broader implications for social practices of trying to commemorate racial violence.
B
Yeah, yeah. So maybe it might be helpful for me to be. Yeah. To be clear about how I understood these two concepts. And in fact, sort of. This is really. So the title of the book between remembrance and Repair is. I think sometimes people will take it as a sort of an either or, you know, is it remembrance or repair? And I think often in debates around racial justice, especially around histories of racial violence, there is some tension between the remembrance piece, which is sort of telling the history, knowing the history, erecting sort of monuments and markers to make sure that that's preserved. And I think, understandably so, there is frustration that that's not enough. Right. That the sort of cultural shifts or transformations feels insufficient to some, and again, rightfully so. So that's remembrance. Right. Repair, in my thinking, was related to these broader structural transformations. So thinking about institutionalizing changes to education. Right. And education policy, thinking about sort of large scale truth telling efforts that would, you know, potentially really lead to even additional recommendations for reparative measures. Thinking about the actual sort of legal outcomes of finally holding someone accountable in the case. Right. So trying to think about those sort of additional sort of transformative social change oriented outcomes. So for me, the title is actually meant to also represent what I was trying to do methodologically, trying to sort of understand the relationship, sort of space in between acts of remembrance and then its possibilities for additional social transformation. Right. So between remembrance and repair. So I think to your question about sort of what this might offer in terms of people thinking about social change more generally, if I can be really frank, I think I'm sometimes, again, I think I sometimes do get frustrated by the way that remembrance and these broader structural reparative efforts get presented as sort of like a zero sum or somehow separate, or again, even this notion that the sort of commemorative work on its own is insufficient. I'm sympathetic to that position, but I see the remembrative piece as a necessary precondition for the broader reparative work. And one thing that might be worth mentioning for those who are familiar with the Equal Justice Initiative and their Memorial to Peace and justice, which is a memorial about lynching across the United States, large scale. I think it's really interesting that Bryan Stevenson trained as a lawyer and who leads the Equal Justice Initiative and whose primary focus, including the organization's focus, has historically been on criminal justice reform that within the last 10 years felt the need to expand their focus to commemorative work. Because my understanding is that they, and I sort of agree, I'm sympathetic to this position. Right. That unless the narrative changes, unless we sort of understand the history more broadly and really sort of more robustly, then attitudes about and support for policy change isn't going to come. Right. So we need both. And so I am very much an advocate for the commemorative work. The remembrance work as a necessary precondition for the reparative work. Excellent.
C
Well, along those lines, I think your book is really sitting in kind of a very prominent moment where obviously these kinds of questions and discussions are really front and center. We're in a current moment where the history of racial oppression and violence and kind of the question of who tells that story and what the story is, particularly when that story is being told and legitimated by institutions, is a huge site of contestation and suppression right now. And you've shared a lot of really good insights already. But I was curious if there's anything else that you wanted to share that you feel like might be relevant to activists, historians, social scientists, educators, or anyone else in this particular moment where it seems like this is Bubbling up once again as a struggle. The combating the silence and commemorating and telling history.
B
Yeah, the first thing that comes to mind is a often cited phrase from the civil rights movement, which is that freedom is a constant struggle. And somewhere in my book, I don't remember where I write, commemoration is a constant struggle, and the two are tethered together. So I mentioned before about black churches in particular, in the case that I study being carrier groups, sort of sites of keeping memory alive as memory, memory centers, movement centers. I'm reminded of Verda Taylor's work on abeyance. And so for those who aren't as nerds of social movement scholarship, this theory of abeyance really looks at how it is that movement organizations and activists in times of high levels of repression.
A
Do.
B
Go underground, more or less. Right. So they're quieter, but they're not silent. And so I think that is something that I think a lot about in this moment is to sort of stay steady and stay connected and keep. Keep doing the work, but know that this is going to be a harder time to make the bigger transformative changes. So I hope that that is a. Is a. It doesn't feel hopeful, but I'm hoping that might give some kernel of hope. The other thing I want to mention is that, and this is something I have sort of increasing conviction around, the more that I'm involved in local memory movements or the more I'm around them, process matters immensely. And I still remember when it sort of occurred to me and it seems so simple and so obvious, and yet I think so often gets overlooked, that this notion that sort of how. How commemorative work and the people who do it come together, matters for its outcomes. And so I was really struck, and still am struck again, by how often, because I often get pulled into these types of projects in my professional life. How often, despite this knowing and despite best intentions, groups of people doing this commemorative work, whether it's erecting a statue or hosting some type of ceremony or event to remember something in the past, are so focused on event organizing. You know, who's going to be the speaker, how many chairs do we need? Where's the mic? And that those are real concerns. Right. And they are needed to be, you know, we need to address them. But if I can offer any insight to the folks doing this work, it would be to slow down. And the first thing you should do, I think, is connect with one another. Right? So I think probably the most important thing people can do, a very important thing people who are doing this work can do is start the process and start their meetings by asking each other what brings you here? Right. Because. And there's a lot in the social movement literature to support that. This sort of the interpersonal connection, storytelling, feeling, a sense of solidarity matters for sustaining commitment to movements big and small. And that certainly matters again in situations where there are high levels of repression. So that's my insight. Slow down. I went into other and know that when you're commemorating racial violence, the process itself is racialized, including the very interactions between those that are doing the work together. And so I think bringing that to the forefront and knowing and sort of acknowledging that we're all bringing sort of our racial socialization into our interactions with each other as we do this commemorative work is just really important.
C
Excellent. Well, thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciated this conversation. I'm excited to get it out there and I definitely want to recommend to our audience to pick up the book. Very timely, very important work. Thank you so much again for joining us.
B
Thank you.
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New Books Network
Episode: Claire Whitlinger, "Between Remembrance and Repair: Commemorating Racial Violence in Philadelphia, Mississippi" (UNC Press, 2020)
Date: October 10, 2025
Host: Michael Rossino
Guest: Claire Whitlinger, Associate Professor of Sociology, Furman University
This episode features a conversation with Claire Whitlinger about her book Between Remembrance and Repair: Commemorating Racial Violence in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Through an in-depth case study of the 1964 murder of three civil rights workers and its commemoration, Professor Whitlinger explores how communities remember racial violence, the role of collective action in that process, and whether acts of public remembrance pave the way for deeper, structural forms of repair and justice. The discussion delves into the history, sociology, and current challenges of confronting racial histories in the U.S.
"Everyone kept talking about Philadelphia, Mississippi, and this thing that had happened in 2004 that seemed to change how people understood that community, but also seemed to be sort of reverberating outwards..." (03:12)
"Those who had killed them was a local lynch mob of members of the Ku Klux Klan, including local law enforcement officers." (07:00)
"The 2004 commemoration was a moment that wasn't just about how commemoration emerged in this community. It was really about understanding how counter memory became collective memory..." (10:37)
"What I discovered is that this coalition, without even trying to, had actually sort of fulfilled all of the prerequisites for, quote, unquote, positive intergroup contacts." (15:19)
"What I ultimately ended up doing was looking at three cases of institutional change that I had heard locals hypothesizing...were connected to this 2004 moment." (21:13)
"I see the remembrative piece as a necessary precondition for the broader reparative work." (28:22)
"Commemoration is a constant struggle, and the two [freedom and commemoration] are tethered together." (31:20)
"If I can offer any insight to the folks doing this work, it would be to slow down... The first thing you should do, I think, is connect with one another." (34:01)
On the transformative power of sustained memory:
“...the 2004 commemoration was a moment that wasn’t just about how commemoration emerged in this community. It was really about understanding how counter memory became collective memory and sort of central to this community’s telling of its own narrative.” (10:37)
On the importance of process and interpersonal connection:
"Process matters immensely... groups of people doing this commemorative work... are so focused on event organizing... But if I can offer any insight... slow down. And the first thing you should do, I think, is connect with one another. Right?" (34:01)
| Time | Segment | |---------|-----------------------------------------------| | 01:33 | Host introduction and episode framing | | 02:27 | Whitlinger background and motivation | | 06:00 | Historical overview: 1964 murders | | 08:00 | Mechanisms and meanings of commemoration | | 12:54 | Factors shaping local commemoration | | 19:05 | Deep dive into research methods | | 25:27 | Remembrance vs. Repair – conceptualization | | 29:45 | Challenges & urgency in contemporary context | | 30:46 | Lessons for current and future activists | | 34:01 | Advice: The importance of slowing down & process |
Recommended Action:
Whitlinger’s book is recommended reading for those interested in racial justice, social movements, and the sociology of memory. The conversation points to the importance of both public memory and strategic coalition-building in the pursuit of transformational change.