Bozzie and Judy Edwards live in the hilly North Mississippi countryside, in a home that fills with grandchildren on Sundays after church. He’s an Iraq War veteran who retired after 29 years with the Army National Guard. She works full-time as her husband’s caregiver.
The Calhoun County of their childhood was quieter than much of Mississippi, where bombings and assassinations pricked the nation’s conscience during the civil-rights movement. White supremacy, nonetheless, was rigidly enforced. In 1961 the school superintendent reassured a state investigator that no African-American teachers belonged to the NAACP and that any “agitator” among the faculty would be fired. Two years later, county officials insisted that “Negros simply took no interest in paying their poll taxes”—and that’s why, out of roughly 1,700 African-American adults, only six or seven had qualified to vote. The earliest steps toward legal equality—token school desegregation and black voter-registration efforts—were met with cross-burnings and death threats. One of the first black teens to attend a previously all-white high school transferred out after 10 shots were fired into his home.
The Edwardses, themselves African American, carry searing memories from their youths. Bozzie, who is 66, recalls long waits at a dairy-bar takeout window—he wasn’t allowed inside—while the white kids got served first at their tables. He recalls walking home from town with his brother when a white driver swerved in their direction; they tumbled into a ditch as the gravel flew over their heads. He recalls his father—“so mean and so respected”—sleeping with a loaded rifle after offending a white man inside a store. “Back in those days, when they got you, they’d come at night,” he says.
Judy, at 58, is young enough to remember desegregation, and the all-white private academy that sprung up in its wake. One morning, after a TV show aired about slavery, some white classmates came in imitating the slavemasters, flinging the N-word like a blade. “I’m not going to lie to you—we took care of them,” she says. “We took a few in the bathroom.”
Twenty miles away and across the color line, Dudley Davis lives with his own hurtful memories. The retired teacher and farmer, now 77, grew up with a father who wasn’t a hardcore racist but “feared what other people would do to him” if he departed from Mississippi’s racial norms. When Davis was in his 30s, he warmly greeted an African-American friend with a handshake. His father later scolded him for touching the man’s skin. “I don’t want to see you doing that again,” Davis remembers him saying. “Somebody will burn our house down.”
Stories like these often stay buried in the bearers’ hearts. Maybe they get shared within the confines of a household, or within a tight-knit single-race community. In a place like Calhoun County, where social—if not legal—segregation persists, they certainly don’t get told to strangers of other races. That is, not until now.
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In 2013, a group of black, white, and Latino Calhoun County residents—originally convened by a local nun—invited the University of Mississippi’s William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation to help facilitate an ongoing dialogue about race.
The Winter Institute—named for a former governor known as a progressive reformer—runs a program called The Welcome Table, which it brings to communities with histories of distrust. At the program’s core are monthly meetings where trained facilitators help participants tell and listen to personal stories. One goal of these conversations is to foster relationships across race lines—ties that later translate into civic activities aimed at promoting racial justice.
Storytelling, say those who study and work in race relations, has a particular power to help bridge longstanding fault lines. “People take action to dismantle racism when they care about the people whom they see as being disadvantaged by those systems,” says psychologist Beverly Daniel Tatum, president emerita of Atlanta’s Spelman College. “In my experience, this is most likely to happen when people have ongoing connections to one another, so that there’s an opportunity for relationships to deepen.”
That deepening has slowly begun in Calhoun County, a near-rectangle of cattle and sweet-potato fields and tin-roofed houses with bottle trees in their yards. At monthly meetings, Winter Institute facilitators offer prompts for the group to discuss either collectively or in pairs and trios. Nine guidelines—maintain confidentiality and respect silence among them—help members feel comfortable opening up and ensure that no one dominates the conversation.
The friendships and epiphanies that emerge are not the end goals. But they’re foundational steps. Over the months Dudley Davis listened to his African-American neighbors, he developed a more palpable sense of how racism harms people he had grown to care about. Davis also realized he had inherited a bit of his father’s reticence about antagonizing other whites. “I served on a lot of boards and committees, and so many of the members were such racists that I didn’t like to take up racial issues. I just sort of let it go,” he says. Listening to candid and painful stories—from people who have treated him with kindness—has recalibrated Davis’ priorities. Over time, he has vowed to call out offensive remarks from his white neighbors. “I was trying to please everyone and get along,” he says. “Eventually you have to become a little more committed.”
Judy Edwards, for her part, has found herself drawn to Davis’ vulnerability as he’s talked about his upbringing. “It touched me because he broke the barrier,” she says. “He really didn’t know how we, as black citizens, were going to take what he was trying to say.” Edwards says she has offered reassurance to whites like Davis who have come clean about ugly family histories. “I can’t hate you because of what your ancestors did,” she says. “I can’t go to heaven hating you.”
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The Welcome Table can loosely trace its origins to 2004, four decades after the landmark voter-registration drive called Mississippi Freedom Summer. In June 1964, outside the lumber town of Philadelphia, three civil-rights workers—one black Mississippian and two Northern white students—were arrested, then murdered, after visiting a church destroyed by arson. The charred bodies of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were found later that summer, and their slaying remains an enduring symbol of white-supremacist terror. No one had yet been prosecuted by the state.