Southern Living: New Heroes of Civil Rights: Susan Glisson

OXFORD, Miss. – Through the tumult of the Civil Rights Movement, Mississippi acquired a reputation as the nation’s least progressive state—violent, brutal, racist. Dr. Susan Glisson doesn’t shy away from that painful past. Instead, she looks that history squarely in the eye and insists that others do the same.

“I believe the truth is the foundation for the future,” she says. Truth-telling [underscores] the whole approach for what we do.”

As executive director of The University of Mississippi’s William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation, Glisson, 45, has spent years bringing together black, white, and brown Mississippians, the powerful and the powerless, the descendants of Ku Klux Klan members with descendants of their victims. Her efforts have helped make Mississippi a leader in healing old wounds. Read the entire story.