“We Were All Prisoners of the System”: William Winter, Susan Glisson, and the Founding of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation

Governor William Winter prior to the William Winter Institute 15th Anniversary Celebration. September 26, 2014. Photo by Nathan Latil/© Ole Miss Communications. Used with permission.

Over the last two decades the state of Mississippi has become a regional, national, and even international leader in working toward and creating processes for racial reconciliation. The state that possesses perhaps one of the worst historical records on racial violence, discord, and division in the history of the United States has become one of the greatest examples of places working through that history in an attempt to pursue racial harmony, unity, and reconciliation. Noting this, former Governor of Mississippi William F. Winter often mentions to audiences, “Mississippi has come farther than just about any other state on issues of race.” He then smiles his famous smile and in a deep, north-central Mississippi drawl quips, “Perhaps that’s because we had farther to go” (W. Winter, Symposium).¹ He would know. Over his long life and public career, Winter has overseen and helped implement sweeping changes in educational reform as well as race relations in his beloved home state of Mississippi (Mullins, Measure; Bolton). In an interview with the author, the ninety-three year old joked that racial reconciliation is a “goal that I have had as a lifelong Mississippian … and that is a long time.”

Indeed, one of the biggest reasons why Mississippi has become a laboratory for studying and creating processes for reconciliation is because of the long work and perseverance of former Governor William F. Winter, the commitment and drive of Dr. Susan M. Glisson, the former director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation (WWIRR), and the work of board members, staff, interns, students, community partners, and citizens of Mississippi affiliated with the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation, which is housed at the University of Mississippi.

The institute was officially established in August 1999, and named for Winter in February of 2003, in honor of his eightieth birthday. The mission of the institute is “to foster reconciliation and civic renewal wherever people suffer as a result of racial discrimination or other effects of trafficking in human differences, and to promote scholarly research and teaching on race and the impact of race and racism” (Winter Institute, “Genesis”). Through the work of the institute, many who are passionate about reconciliation have been able to maneuver “the closed society” (Silver) throughout the twentieth century and bring about racial progress. The formula for the institute’s success is complex. Through the combination of a long-term political vision imbued with the notion of Southern progress, along with a protective advocacy, within a paternalistic framework (dominated by a ruling white hierarchal structure), along with a steady, grassroots-oriented activism committed to giving a voice to local people of the state of Mississippi, the WWIRR has been incredibly effective. To be sure, the success of the WWIRR was dependent on both a top-down and bottom-up structure, which combined a protective advocacy along with a grassroots movement, bringing together old and young, black and white, Republican and Democrat, rich and poor, in order to create a stronger society.

Given the difficult and troubling history of race in Mississippi from the late 1790s through slavery in the antebellum era, to Reconstruction and Redemption, through the Jim Crow era into the civil rights movement and even to the present day, it is remarkable that a state fraught with a history of racial violence and injustice would become an example of how those injustices could be reconciled by its citizens. Indeed, Mississippi was the architect of the Mississippi Plan, which displayed to other states how to remove African Americans from the political process during, and in the decades following, Reconstruction. It taught the South, through its constitution of 1890, how to discriminate against African American citizens and remove them from voting processes. In the landmark Supreme Court case Williams v. Mississippi, the court found that the wording...