HISTORY AND BACKGROUND:
The Welcome Table community building process began to emerge within a particular historical and cultural context in the late 1990s and early 2000s in the United States. The election of a southerner, Bill Clinton, as president, the first since Jimmy Carter’s one-term presidency, seemed to suggest new opportunities for conversations on race. In 1997, Clinton launched what no other sitting president had ever done: a national conversation on race, an idea suggested to him by a former Mississippi governor, William Winter, who’d received the idea from Michael Wenger, a policy maker with whom Winter had worked on Appalachian Regional Council when he was governor. Within a period of relative calm, “One America in the 21st Century: The President’s Initiative on Race” meant to encourage inclusive dialogue on tough issues like residential segregation, health disparities, economic inequities, and other challenges shaped by the racial divide.
In the fall of 1997, as an employee at the University of Mississippi (UM), I’d been tasked by UM’s Black History Month Committee to invite Dr. John Hope Franklin to UM to speaks during 1998’s Black History Month activities. Learning of William Winter’s role on the Advisory Committee to One America, I reached out to him for assistance and we began a two month-long conversation, with him and then with Michael Wenger, now deputy director of One America in the White House, about the possibility of bringing the entire board to campus, not just Dr. Franklin.
I didn’t know it at the time, but the typical procedure for visits was for the One America team to reach out to the mayor’s office of the location the board hoped to visit. Each mayor’s office would then suggest residents to interact with the Advisory Board. But I proposed a grassroots approach, encouraged by my doctoral dissertation work at the time on Ella Baker and especially her role as an advisor to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). By January of 1998, I was coordinating a planning and facilitation committee of UM faculty, staff, and students who gathered ten different dialogue groups by sector (the arts, the business community, community-based organizations, education, the environment, healthcare, housing, labor, religion, and the University (represented by students). While UM’s administration initially resisted this grassroots approach, Winter, a deeply respected UM alum, persuaded UM to let me lead the effort.
At the beginning of that planning, I’d asked UM if they too would engage in a year of dialogue on race, to mirror the national conversation. A UM administrator laughed and said, “that is never going to happen.” So, I focused on the event for One America, recruiting over 160 participants to join the sector-themed dialogue groups, which met for at least six weeks before the Advisory Board visit; we hoped that such foundational work would mean that the conversation would continue long after the one-time event, with impacts that lasted within the community.
Our March 1998 forum, held on campus on a messy and stormy night was attended by a mixed, standing room only crowd of over 1000 Black and white citizens. Representatives elected by each group, shared recommendations, most of which were honored after the event. One highlight included two UM students, one Black and one white, imploring the audience to leave their Rebel flags at home when attending football games, for which they received a standing ovation. The event earned accolades from the Advisory board as a “frank but civil” conversation on race and, for the first time, the New York Times mentioned UM positively related to race relations. The success of the event enabled Gov. Winter and I to encourage UM to create an institute to foster such dialogue on a permanent basis. Then Chancellor Robert Khayat appointed an exploratory committee to research, reflect, and make recommendations for such an institute, which he then established in August, 1999. I was its founding director.
The early work of what became the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation was what a colleague and social psychologist termed “a politics of opposition.” In addition to trying to nudge UM to engage in a more formal acknowledgement of its own troubling racial history, organizers from a small village in the Mississippi Delta called Rome invited me to join their efforts to secure a sewerage system for their community. They’d asked for support from the majority-white Sunflower County Board of Supervisors and had been denied. They sought out support from their congressional representative, whose office sent a staffer to lectured the community about taking care of themselves. Undaunted by the lack of interest or assistance from their elected officials, they sent a community leader to Delta State University for a grant-writing course. She was successful in using that guidance to secure a USDA grant for the community to get a new system. But they were stymied. The first idea, to connect to an existing system in a nearby community still meant the need for help from elected officials because it was in another county. A Plan B necessitated having right-of-way access for pipes within Rome, but the white residents refused such permissions. The community effort was at a standstill. So, with the local group’s authority, I shared the story with the Atlanta Journal Constitution which lifted up the complicated story. That negative attention finally unstuck the local officials and the sewerage system was installed.
By the spring of 2002, as the fortieth anniversary of UM’s desegregation approached, we’d finally been able to convince the administration to acknowledge publicly the exclusion of African Americans since UM’s founding in 1848 and the violence that erupted when James Meredith desegregated it in October, 1962. But UM’s chancellor balked at offering an apology. In early meetings, white staffers resisted as well. I expressed my concern that UM’s black leadership should have the opportunity to weigh in; a new meeting invited a number of those leaders, all of whom insisted that without an authentic apology, it would be meaningless to have any acknowledgment of UM’s exclusion of Black students.
The Chancellor finally agreed and his apology and the ceremony that accompanied the 40th anniversary on October 1, 2002, is considered an important turning point for UM and for the state of Mississippi. As its flagship university, its leadership on this issue inspired and encouraged others to engage in reconciliation efforts. And it launched a year of dialogue on race at UM that enabled a number of initiatives to begin that continue to this day.
It's important to note that this “politics of opposition” targeted the institution, not specific people. But specific people held the positions within the university who would have to act. So, it was easy to see that the more disruptive approach felt, for those who experienced it as representatives of the institution, personal and unwelcome. The resistance we overcame in Rome finally achieved a sewerage system, and then a community center and affordable housing, but it did not win us friends in the white community. Within UM, it was clear that some also resented being prodded forcefully into a new day.
Mindful of these observations, I began to look for another way to cultivate positive change that might be more effective at a community level, where we would need all the friends that we could get. That opportunity came in 2004, when community leaders from Philadelphia, MS, reached out and asked for the Winter Institute’s support as it approached the 40th anniversary of the 1964 civil rights-related murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. Initial group meetings began by focusing on action that could be undertaken. But there was no consensus on the action in the multiracial group and there wasn’t enough trust among the Black, white, and Choctaw community members to have an honest conversation about the disagreements. The two key leaders of the group, (which named itself the Philadelphia Coalition) who had a prior friendship, were able to speak about the tension in the room, and the three of us decided to postpone any action discussions and instead to take the time to build trust in the group, through storytelling.
That decision and its resulting work changed the trajectory of Philadelphia, MS, and Neshoba Country and the state. Over the next several months, the group cultivated trust in themselves and each other, had challenging conversations, and decided to issue a call for justice in the case. They did so in a March press conference and then on June 20 in a public event attended by 1500 guests. That call, supplemented by private meetings with the local district attorney and the state attorney general, let to a grand jury convening by January, 2005, followed by a trial and the first state conviction in the case (the ring-leader of the posse of Klansmen and local police, Edgar Ray Killen, was sentenced to 60 years in jail). Both national and international press covered the trial and upon the conviction, the Philadelphia Coalition, joined by Rita Schwerner Bender, the widow of Michael Schwerner, called upon the state to launch a truth and reconciliation process for the entire state. Community leaders in McComb, MS, known as the bombing capital of the world in 1964, as well as leaders in Tallahatchie County, MS, where the trial and acquittal of the murderers of 14-year-old Emmett Till had taken place, both reached out to the Winter Institute to help begin a process of reconciliation.
The momentum that had been generated by the trial, sadly, was stalled somewhat in August, 2005, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the Gulf Coast region. But the inequities evident in recovery efforts, especially through distribution of funding for repair, in the wake of the storm cemented our commitment to finding a way to beyond policies and into the hearts and minds of people who lived in Mississippi to nurture healing, reckoning, and repair at both the individual and community levels and within systems. Encouraged by leaders and teachers in the communities we’d been serving, we were able to get a bill passed in the Mississippi legislature, with Republican majorities in both houses, and signed a Republican governor, to teach civil and human rights history in all Mississippi classrooms. In 2006, we supported McComb in offering a ceremonial graduation for the seniors who had walked out of school in 1961 over civil rights violations and in the fall of 2006, the school system began implementing the bill we’d passed earlier in the year.
In 2007, bolstered by the power of storytelling in communities in Mississippi with notorious histories of racial violence to be transformed, we decided to launch a statewide initiative at the state capital, calling on residents in the state to engage in relationship-building, education, and action across race. We called it “The Welcome Table: A Year of Dialogue.”
We created a website, with lots of resources for each phase, and we traveled the state supporting conversations. We learned that there was much interest in engaging, but also trepidation in beginning new conversations without knowing how to guide them. We reached out to the Fetzer Institute, which had been hosting circles for relation-building for the Mississippi Center for Justice. I invited them to hold circles for us, to provide training and they indicated an interest in a long-term partnership, with the Kellogg Foundation, to support such work. In a meeting with the funders in Battle Creek, the executive director of Kellogg encouraged us to think of our initiative as “an era of dialogue on race.” We welcomed that suggestion and expansive thinking and were grateful for the financial support, which enabled us to bring in facilitators to help us spread across the state. But we quickly realized that we needed to create a process for training and empowering local leaders in fostering important dialogue that leads to meaningful action that didn’t rely on external facilitators to accomplish our goals. As an educator, I especially wanted a pedagogically sound methodology that would be transformative.
Thus began the process of discerning and creating a scaffolded, sequenced process, an educational intervention, if you will, that could encourage and foster communities that can disagree well and work together for problem solving and positive change for everyone. Over time, we created of the manual before you to capture what we’d been learning. Its first iteration was complete in 2016 and it has since been field tested in twenty-seven states, across a variety of sectors including education, health care, technology, criminal justice, and religion and in intergenerational groups.
It is important to note that we initially focused on work in race relations for several reasons: chief among them that race and racism are issues that continue to bedevil American life. That has been most especially true for the state of Mississippi, where the Welcome Table process was born. Beyond that, we take seriously what SNCC believed in the 1960s: if you could change Mississippi’s racial caste system, you can change the nation. We began to understand that if you can have a positive interpersonal and systemic effect in a state most known for its intractability on issues of race, then not only could you have an impact in other geographies, but you could also use the Welcome Table process to address and dismantle other seemingly insoluble issues. And finally, just as we began to create the manual, a sea change occurred in the U.S., namely, the election of the first Black president in 2008. We noted both the celebration of that achievement as well as complicated aftermath of that election. There was an immediate and growing backlash to that election among those who opposed it and a curious apathy on the part of those who championed the election results, as if the election of one person to the U.S. presidency could fix all that ails the country. To us, that backlash nor the apathy weren’t new; rather, both were symptoms of issues that had too long been ignored, like inequity, and there had been too much of a reliance on the idea that progress is linear and inevitable.
We understood, as Ella Baker did, that the health of a community or a country depends on careful attention to the conditions and relationships that ensure shared prosperity and communal health as well as the acknowledgement and transformation of the ingredients that undermine what SNCC called “Beloved Community.”
It is 2025, almost fifteen years since we began to codify this process. Suffice it to say, the world is in a different place than when we first began to look for ways to encourage community building across perceived differences. Polarization in the U.S. has intensified so much so that research indicates that parents can imagine their children marrying a person of another race more than they can imagine a union with a different political party than they are, a fact that would have shocked most activists in the nineteen sixties. The U.S. Surgeon General has declared “loneliness” as an epidemic and that social isolation has been exacerbated by a global pandemic and its aftermath, as well as by the loss of “third spaces” to gather outside of home and work. And in the midst of it all looms a climate crisis and a growing reliance on technology like Artificial Intelligence and a surveillance system that grabs all of us through tools that are controlled by a small group of people seemingly accountable to no one but themselves.
It is easy to be in despair about the future of humanity and the only planet we know. Across the country, trust in each other—and in the institutions meant to unite us—is unraveling. Shared stories that once connected us feel distant. We lack the practices, spaces, and interpersonal and civic muscles needed to authentic and purposeful dialogue—especially across difference. Eighty-percent of voters say political divides ae about core values. Ninety-percent of the country fear the “other side’s winning” would cause lasting harm to the country. Polarization has surged over the last forty years—driven by racial division, partisan media, and shifting political identities. Eighty-six percent of Americans are exhausted by partisan gridlock and the neglect of meaningful issues.
And yet, a majority of the country wishes for something better, even as they may not know what a path forward looks like. Research reflects that it’s not enough just to address polarization. There must be structure and purpose added to connectivity. The Welcome Table addresses this need squarely by inviting people back into relationship—with each other, with place, and with the possibility of healing and repair. In brave circles of storytelling and listening, neighbors are able to cross divides once thought unbridgeable. Held in containers of care, they speak and hear what has too long been silenced.
Most especially, this work has unfolded for over twenty-five years in deep South towns scarred by violence, as well as in cities frayed by disconnection, because this process sows trust, softens fear, and rekindles civic life. Where it has worked before, it can work again—anywhere hearts are willing. And where it works, it restores social cohesion and fortifies democracy, enabling people across a spectrum of identities and geographies to identify shared values and goals in order to solve problems together.
This is why we need each other now more than ever, to be human with each other, and to relearn together how to build resilient communities that care for each other, that cultivate all of the gifts each of us has for our own personal fulfilment and for the benefit of the whole. Nelson Mandela understood keenly the kind of anguish that can develop in circumstances that seem unthinkable to change. In his great hope and vision, which helped he and other men incarcerated in Robben Island write one of the most advanced constitutions for a country yet in the midst of violence and apartheid, he left us with a challenge: “It is always seems impossible until it is done.”