Abstract: Jackson, Mississippi, is emerging as a civil rights memory landscape of national and international importance. As the United States debates whether to remove Confederate statues and insurrectionists carry Confederate flags into the U.S. Capitol, African American women have been working diligently to create public counternarratives by preserving the legacy of the grassroots Mississippi civil rights movement. This research locates three case studies of Jackson's African American women civil rights memory workers within African American women's traditions of community-based and civically engaged work. This analysis of Jackson's civil rights memoryscape examines their preservation, caregiving, and interpretation work at the Medgar and Myrlie Evers house, the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, and the Mississippi Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement. Their unique contribution is working in ways consistent with civil rights movement values of grassroots leadership and community accountability. They have faced limited resources and neglect, traumatized veterans' reticence, white political resistance, and complex relationships with the state of Mississippi. Yet these women are resilient, creating a living legacy that speaks to current debates about the racial past, the racial backlash of the present, and the need to advance the incomplete civil rights revolution for the future.
Debra L. Schultz (Fri,) studied this question.