Susan Glisson’s achievements reflect a rare combination of scholarship on the history of social justice movements with deep knowledge and experience serving communities haunted by racial violence and trauma as they seek healing, reckoning, and repair. Together, Susan and the communities she serves have created profound community change.  In a five-year span from 2002 to 2007, Susan guided multi-racial groups in some of Mississippi's most notorious sites of racial violence to engage in transformative community dialogues that led to unprecedented public acts of atonement and repair:​

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• the first public apology from “Ole Miss,” for the exclusion of Black citizens for over one hundred years, held on the fortieth anniversary of the riot meant to prevent its desegregation;

• the first public acknowledgement and apology to the family of civil rights martyr Medgar Evers from the town that first arrested him for trying to register to vote;

• an eighteen-month process with a multiracial group of citizens in Neshoba County, which led to the first state prosecution in the “Mississippi Burning” murders of three civil rights workers in 1964;

• a year-long healing and reckoning effort that led to a public apology and honorary high school graduation to the Black students at McComb High School who had been kicked out of school for civil rights activity;

• and, in an astonishing community-led act of contrition resulting from over two years of work, Glisson supported the creation of and formal apology by the Emmett Till Memorial Commission to the family of Till for the miscarriage of justice in his brutal torture and murder​

 

She did it all before the age of forty.

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​Over the fifteen years since that period, influenced by the marriage of academics and community building, Glisson created innovative framework for the transformation of biased mindsets and inequitable systems that weds building community trust to advocacy and equitable policy development. Born in Mississippi, Susan has now shared The Welcome Table™ in over twenty-five states, from Oregon to Iowa, and New York to California with communities, educational institutions, businesses, police departments and municipalities, as well as faith-based groups, across a range of ages from youth to elders to spur courageous conversations that lead to meaningful local change.

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​Her approach has become a model for mediating between law enforcement and marginalized community members, an area continues to be part of her firm’s current work. Most recently, Susan’s decades of community-based work in Mississippi helped lead to the removal of Mississippi’s racist state flag in 2020. She co-founded and co-led Sustainable Equity, LLC, a consulting firm that cultivates healing and fosters fairness related to racism and difference from 2016 to 2022 and now leads the Glisson Group, a consulting firm on healing, reckoning and repair, and the Welcome Table Collaborative, a network of committed bridge-builders devoted to creating welcoming, equitable, and prosperous communities. For the last two years, Glisson has facilitated the first reconciliation conversations between all the descendants of Arlington House, both those whose ancestors were enslaved and those who were free. In April, 2023, that family circle, in their first in-person gathering, will issue a call to dialogue and action to the nation to join them in this necessary work.

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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. A trained historian of social movements, a skilled educator, and an accomplished facilitator with a gifted capacity for community engagement and youth mentorship. 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.  She has twice been a Salzburg Fellow and was named the Pamela Krasney Moral Courage Fellow at The Mesa Refuge in 2022. She was a 2023-2024 fellow with the Square One Project's Collaborative on Reckoning and Justice at Columbia University.  In 2024, she was named an Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow (ALI) at Harvard University.

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