The Transformative Capacity of Commemorating Violent Pasts: Exploring Local Commemoration of the ìMississippi Burningî Murders.

[摘要] Philadelphia, Mississippi—the city notorious for the violence, denial, and collective obstruction of justice surrounding the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers—is now hailed as a beacon of racial reconciliation. How and why this unexpected transformation took place is the question motivating this dissertation. My central hypothesis is that the public commemoration in Philadelphia in 2004 holds the key to understanding this phenomenon. To explore this hypothesis, I identify three racially significant institutional outcomes of the 2004 commemorations in Philadelphia—the trial of Edgar Ray Killen, a statewide truth commission, and a bill mandating civil rights education—and evaluate whether and how these outcomes can be causally attributed to the 2004 commemoration. Drawing on archival, interview, and observational data, I employ event structure analysis to reconstruct the causal pathways leading to each outcome. After finding sufficient evidence to suggest that each transformation can be causally related to the 2004 commemoration, I then compare the 2004 commemoration to a similar commemoration that took place in Philadelphia in 1989. Through this comparison, I examine which factors present in 2004, but not in 1989, that enabled the 2004 commemoration to facilitate these transformative outcomes.This dissertation suggests that the 2004 commemoration helped catalyze the Killen trial, truth commission, and education bill by mobilizing a new generation of mnemonic entrepreneurs, strengthening the community’s mnemonic capacity, shifting local and state-level opportunity structures, and transforming the local political culture. This study also suggests that the way a commemoration is put together matters for it’s outcomes. Compared to the 1989 commemoration, the 2004 commemoration more deeply engaged Philadelphia’s African American counterpublic and created a more inclusive planning process that enabled organizers to develop social solidarity, and later, a distinct organizational identity and infrastructure. This study thus engages larger questions of theoretical concern regarding how commemorations of violent pasts actually work and whether they can transform the often contested and tragic conditions from which they emerge. Furthermore, this study provides a unique lens through which to explore the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement and continuing efforts for racial justice.

[发布机构] University of Michigan

[效力级别] Mississippi

[关键词] commemoration;Mississippi;race;violence;Sociology;Social Sciences;Sociology