In 2013, Southern Living and Time Magazine called Dr. Susan M. Glisson a “hero of the new South in civil rights,” for pioneering a community-based model of truth-telling and reconciliation. In recognition of this designation, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Cynthia Tucker wrote of Glisson,
“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.
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.”
As the founding executive director of the Winter Institute, an internationally recognized civil rights and social justice non-profit based in Mississippi, Susan created an innovative framework for the transformation of biased mindsets and inequitable systems that weds building community trust to healing and to advocacy for equitable policy development. The Welcome Table™ makes use of the power of stories to illuminate complex issues and liberate the human spirit. Using that approach, Susan facilitated community-driven dialogue and informed action in sites in Mississippi with the most notorious histories of racial violence.
Together, Susan and the communities she serves created profound community change including the first state conviction in the infamous “Mississippi Burning” case in 2005 and the first public apology for the miscarriage of justice in the Emmett Till case in 2007. Those retributive and restorative justice efforts led to reordering of how public monies are spent, a statewide mandate to teach civil and human rights history in all Mississippi classrooms, and a cadre of trained young social change agents of over 300 Mississippians and growing. The Welcome Table™framework has now become a model for mediating between law enforcement and over-policed communities, to find ways to reallocate resources to self-determining communities. In 2020, Susan’ s decades of community-based work in Mississippi helped lead to the removal of Mississippi’s racist state flag.
As an organizer with deep community building roots, Susan has been able to amplify voices far too often ignored by decision-makers. She has used her positionality as a white Southerner to ground other whites in the truth of our nation’s founding white supremacy in ways that enable them to join in solidarity with their BIPOC neighbors. Her depth of experience in healing and equity in the U.S. South in particular and in the U.S. at large is enhanced by her connections to scholars and reconciliation practitioners in international sites of conflict.
After retiring from the Winter Institute, Susan co-founded Sustainable Equity, LLC, a consulting firm that cultivates healing and fosters fairness related to racism and difference. With that firm, she worked with a variety of clients including: the National Park Service, NextDoor, the Colorado School of Mines, the Emmett Till Memorial Commission, Vungle, Graystone (a subsidiary of Merrill-Lynch), Facebook, The Public Theater, the Birmingham Police Department, National Network for Safe Communities at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and others.
She now leads The Glisson Group, a healing and equity boutique consulting firm. In that capacity, she is leading reconciliation dialogues between enslaved and free descendants of prominent antebellum forced labor camps.
She is a trained historian of social movements, a skilled educator, and an accomplished facilitator with a gifted capacity for community engagement and youth mentorship.
A native of Evans, GA, Glisson holds two bachelor’s degrees, in religion and in history, a master’s degree in Southern Studies, and a Ph.D. in American Studies from the College of William and Mary. She has numerous publications, has produced three documentary films, and is often called upon by journalists and academics as a public intellectual in matters of race and reconciliation. She presents nationally and internationally frequently on anti-racism and on how to move to interdependence.
She has been widely recognized for her leadership, including being named a “Boundbreaker: People Who Make a Difference” by NPR in 2016 and a Champion of Justice by the Mississippi Center for Justice as one of "The Courageous Thirteen," who challenged Mississippi's discriminatory HB1523 bill against the LGBTQIA community in Barber v. Bryant in 2016. In 2022, she was named the Pamela Krasney Fellow in Moral Courage at Mesa Refuge. In April 2023, she will join the Square One Roundtable at Columbia University, a three-year initiative to examine the role of healing and reckoning in imagining a new criminal justice system
