The struggle against post-truth politics has always been about white supremacy: Lessons from the informational praxis of SNCC

Introduction

The Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), an umbrella association that incorporated civil rights groups in Mississippi, produced a report: Case Studies of Intimidation. The document was an effort to collect and account for the “continual intimidation of Mississippi’s Negros [sic] and of those who came to help them” (COFO 1964:1). Working through statements and documentary evidence COFO produced Case Studies to challenge the “[p]lantation economy” which exercised near “total economic power over the Negro [sic]” in Mississippi and the broader deep southeastern United States region (COFO 1964: 1). COFO was composed of local civil rights organizations as well as national organizations including the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Waging a broad-based struggle to expand the right to vote in Mississippi and organize Black communities, COFO took on white supremacy within the state and region (Andrews 1997).

Case Studies of Intimidation is an impressive document that includes on-the-record statements from men and women who risked their lives to report on acts of white supremacist violence. The report notes:

The statements concern three areas of the state involving different forms of physical, political, and economic intimidation […]As a result, the Negro [sic] population is still generally cowed, and civil rights work has proceeded slowly. Around the beginning of the year, the Klu Klux Klan revived in the southwest. Since then, there have been countless cross-burnings, at least two bombings, and at least five killings. Many Negroes [sic] have been forced to leave counties in the extreme southwest because they were suspected of involvement in voter registration or other civil rights activities. (COFO 1964: 1)

In 14 single-spaced pages, COFO laid out eight incidents in which civil rights workers were harassed, beaten, faced economic intimidation, or witnessed acts of brutality carried out by state police forces or local white citizens. COFO notes, “intimidation comes mainly from the large, well-armed, extremely efficient police force” and that state policy “seems to be to beat every such [civil rights] worker who comes” to organize the state (COFO 1964: 2).

Case Studies of Intimidation is impressive for other reasons aligned with present political realities. In explaining the rationale for the document, COFO notes that the success and failure of civil rights work is quite literally dependent on overcoming these “acts of intimidation” and are central to the efforts to organize Mississippi (1964: 1). The document also explains, “almost no press reports of these incidents have appeared in Northern papers, and no major Federal investigation has been run on any of the cases mentioned in this report” (COFO 1964: 1). Case Studies concludes its introduction by noting:

It is difficult to understand why the incidents in this report have not been mentioned in the Northern Press or investigated by the Federal Government. Few factors have as much influence on the life of Mississippi’s Negroes [sic] and on efforts to organize for civil rights as the ever-present and brutal system of intimidation. Nevertheless, for some reason, these incidents have not been considered important enough to be brought to the attention of the nation. (COFO 1964: 2)

The significance of this document is how it represents an effort by US-based civil rights organizations to engage US society in discussions about the power-laden flow of information in the US media ecosystem (Greenberg 2008). Throughout the modern civil rights movement, civil rights groups employed research departments and media relations departments to fight a discursive battle over the meaning and significance of the Movement for African American freedom (Hogan 2013; Inwood and Alderman 2020; Murphree 2004; Perlstein 1990). These organizations challenged the “epistemic injustices” undergirding white supremacy and sought to redefine what was represented as true and knowable. They resisted the control of information and media to deny knowledge of how racism worked against and harmed oppressed communities (Inwood and Alderman 2021). They took on what we now refer to as fake news, post-truth politics, or the broader effort to spread conspiracy theories about civil rights groups, which now dominate discussions around US democracy and democratic governance.

Exacerbated but by no means invented by President Donald Trump (Warf 2020, 2021), post-truth politics are defined by Lockie (2017: 1) as an increasingly militant disregard for facts in political discourse and policymaking. Harambam et al. (2022) note that “conspiracy theories” in general have become central to “post-truth discussions” and contribute to a broad distrust of facts and erode trust in democratic institutions (784). The crucial point is that the post-truth era is dominated by two forms of informational praxis: misinformation and disinformation (Lewandowsky and Van Der Linden 2021; Stahl 2006). We distinguish misinformation, which is either incomplete information or information used in ways that distort meaning from disinformation, which are outright lies and mistruths used to confuse the broader public and often inform broad conspiracy theories (Stahl 2006).

Suiter (2016) argues the post-truth era is creating new political coalitions and is fueling the rise of right-wing populism, representing a threat to the existing democratic order. While post-truth politics is ambiguous, Rietdijk (2021) argues it is central to understanding an erosion of trust that impairs the essential functions of self-governance in Western liberal democracies. Jones (2012) notes that conspiracy theories are commonplace in mainstream political discourse, and their prevalence means it is imperative for geographers to engage with conspiracy theories broadly and understand the various ways actors might counter them. Taken as a whole, it appears that we have entered an era of post-truth politics, and the political reality of the post-truth era does threaten democratic governance (Warf 2021). Perhaps most important is how post-truth politics fuels the rise of populism and radical right politics and the role post-truth discourse has played in varied political movements like Brexit, vaccine denialism, the rise of Trump, extreme conspiracy theories like Q-Anon, and the 6 January Capital Insurrection as well as an insurgent white nationalism and even fascism (see: Sismondo 2017; Farkas and Schou 2018; Harsin 2020; Warf 2021; Bonds and Inwood 2020).

Through the archival record of civil rights organizations like SNCC and COFO, we argue that we should not see the present era of post-truth politics as new but instead see it as part of a much more prolonged and more sustained struggle over white supremacy and the broader effort to contain challenges to the US economic and racial order. When examining the history and archival records of organizations like SNCC, grassroots civil rights work was not only about a material struggle against inequity but also a larger and more diffuse struggle over the free flow of information and countering misconceptions and misrepresentations about race and racism within the US.

This struggle occurred in rural Mississippi but also in newsrooms, college campuses, and federal government conference rooms as civil rights organizations fought a life-and-death battle to bring public attention and accountability to the violence and structural inequality that defined life in the Deep South for generations. A robust informational praxis or activism characterized the Movement and has not always received full acknowledgment from scholars and the public.

We argue the insurgent information infrastructure employed by civil rights organizations contributes to a significant and geographically important period in the US and expands our understanding of civil rights geographies. We use the word infrastructure purposely to refer not just to the content or message of that information but to the full range of actors, institutions, places, practices, and discourses undergirding information as socially actionable public knowledge-making. The kinds of strategies and resources that groups like SNCC developed and deployed in combating ‘fake news’ have potential intellectual purchase and significance in this broader, ongoing era of disinformation and the misinformation campaign being carried out by the right-wing political manipulation of curriculum and media.

By contextualizing the broader geography of post-truth politics, the strategies and tactics civil rights groups use to counter white supremacist lies are important to understand, especially in an era where social media can spread lies and disinformation at lightning-quick speed. Thus, we also explore how civil rights organizations challenged disinformation and the control and suppression of information perpetuated by those in power and created their own counter-narratives to galvanize support for their antiracist work—all while developing a system of surveillance, record-keeping, and communication to assist them in tracking and understanding how the existing plantation blocs (Woods 1998) connected to white supremacy throughout the region.

The contested information landscapes of the historical civil rights movement

In The Most Southern Place on Earth, James Cobb (1994) explains that Mississippi and the Delta region were shaped by the white power structure’s “pursuit of wealth, pleasure, and power,” and this came to “overwhelm the ideals of equality, justice, and compassion and reduces the American dream to self-indulgent fantasy” (326). This insight is crucial to understanding the oppressive landscapes in which civil rights groups were working to change and their broader struggle against what Clyde Woods (1998) describes as the plantation bloc. Mississippi, and especially the Delta region where cotton production was centered, was steeped in “daily terror and violence” (Woods 1998: 7). Its brutality is captured in the COFO report when they note, “Because the plantation economy has almost total economic power” and the region is impoverished, the resulting plantation bloc will retaliate against civil rights workers through the loss of jobs. The result is that the “loss of a job often means immediate destitution. To add further pressure, some county authorities have on occasion ended Federal welfare programs, denying displaced [persons] unemployment relief” (COFO 1964: 1).

Crucial to this passage is the near-total monopoly on resources that the white power structure had and how that monopoly kept Black people in poverty (Couch et al., 2023). The white power structure also controlled state police forces; law enforcement and other security apparatuses were used to intimidate and brutalize civil rights workers within a plantation economy that routinely denied Black agency (Andrews 2018). The plantation bloc exercised its control over the region and used governmental power in repressive and regressive ways through the establishment of Mississippi’s Sovereignty Commission (MSC). Formed in 1956, the Sovereignty Commission was a state-run intelligence agency that actively worked to gather information on civil rights workers and sought to produce an insidious form of racist storytelling that undermined civil rights organizations and community development organizations trying to improve the lives of the state’s underemployed and oppressed populations (Woods 1998: 10).

Michael Butler (2002) explains that the Sovereignty Commission was formed as a direct response to the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case that ended school segregation. Butler explains that the agency had broad, if vague, power to preserve and protect segregation in the state. The Commission had “extensive investigative and subpoena powers,” including the legal authority to impose “fines and imprisonment to enforce obedience” to state segregation policies (109). The Commission also had a public relations department tasked with promoting the views of the white plantation bloc and countering freedom discourses about race and rights increasingly circulating around Mississippi’s plantation landscapes (ibid).

Charged with collecting stories and news reports that portrayed Mississippi negatively, the public relations department was tasked with countering negative stories about Mississippi and providing “true” information about race relations in the state (Irons 2010). There were two intended audiences for this campaign. The first were whites in the state sympathetic to civil rights but who had remained mainly on the sidelines in the struggle to desegregate Southern society. The MSC wanted these people on the sidelines in the coming civil rights battles, giving whites ambivalence about the struggle information that would justify inaction. This included misinformation—presenting false or misleading figures that portrayed Mississippi’s black population as supporting segregation or in a better financial position than they were in. This also included conspiracy theories tying civil rights workers with communists or pushing theories that civil rights activists were outside agitators paid by foreign governments or communist governments.

The second were audiences outside the state who would pressure northern politicians to stay out of what the Commission described as the race question. Jenny Irons (2010) explains in the first year of being established, the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission mailed over 200,000 informational packets outside of the South in an effort to impact coverage of Mississippi by targeting radio and television stations and also lobbying legislators (Irons 2010: 64). One especially nefarious tactic used African Americans who “supported segregation” but were often paid by the Commission to provide testimonials about life in Mississippi and who the commission thought would give voice to the ‘true feelings’ of Black people in the region. One notorious example included paying the editor of the Jackson Advocate, an African-American newspaper, to write editorials supporting Mississippi’s segregationist policies and promoting white supremacy within the region (Irons 2010: 66).

Crucial to understanding the Sovereignty Commission and its role in the power structure of Mississippi is how it draws attention to the context of affective politics at work in the structural realities of white supremacy (Boeler and Davis 2020). Scholarship on white supremacy tends to focus on the material realities of racism and how the grounded and geographically contingent effects of racism impact the life outcomes of different groups (e.g., Berg 2012; Bonds 2020; Bonds and Inwood 2020; Hamilton 2020; Inwood 2018; Pulido 2015); what Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes as racism death-dealing displacements (Gilmore 2007). While the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission was important to maintaining these materially grounded conditions, the MSC draws our attention to the affective politics of racism and a battle for the hearts and minds of white and Black people who were central to upholding the structures of that oppression. This battle over the information landscape was crucial, and it helps us to understand how the intersections between the discursive and material were used to maintain power (Schmidt 2008). It reveals how powerful business and government interests use information to frame debates and influence public opinion and how this impacts the material and geographically grounded ways racism occurs.

Returning to the contemporary literature on conspiracy theories and post-truth politics, the MSC highlights how conspiracy theories and post-truth politics are used to sway public opinion and are often central to the functioning of state power (Jones 2012). Perhaps more ominously, the geography of the civil rights era also highlights the danger of conspiracy theories and post-truth politics and how, once they are introduced into the political mainstream, they can spiral, lead to violent confrontations, and contribute to the erosion of trust in myriad political communities.

SNCC organizers were aware of this and how disinformation and social material inequalities were connected (Walmsley 2014). In response to the MSC and other organizational structures opposed to freedom, SNCC deployed an array of insurgent informational practices and events to counter what they described as the “void created by the omissions and distortions of the local press, radio, and television, which effectively keep the Negro [sic] in ignorance of the problems which most directly confront him” (Free Southern Theater Proposal, n.d.). While the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee struggled to organize the region and effect change, it worked to create greater political consciousness among the region’s Black communities (Carson 1995).

An especially impressive tool in SNCC’s campaign was its creation in 1963 of a Free Southern Theater program. The theater hosted accessible productions that “used storytelling and bodily performance to materialize and make credible Black expression and knowledge production and push back against the discursive violence of racist, anti-Black tropes perpetuated by the Deep South’s white plantation bloc” (Inwood and Alderman 2021: 3721). SNCC had other weapons in its struggle to counter negative images of Black life. It published photographs, brochures, posters, and newspapers that told a visual story. It provided clear evidence of the brutality of racist violence facing the Movement while simultaneously giving the American public images of ordinary Black people’s lives, resilience, dignity, and agency (Raiford 2011). SNCC’s network of Freedom Schools held in the summer of 1964 transformed Mississippi’s churches, backyards, and community centers into classrooms for interrogating the ideologies and effects of racism and providing a curriculum that, unlike what was taught in state-funded schools, stressed knowing and being accountable to the life situations of oppressed Black peoples (Alderman et al., 2023).

The establishment of a Free Southern Theater, Freedom Schools, and other SNCC informational infrastructure is instructive when placed within the broader context of how these resources were meant to destabilize the flow of information that was weaponized to keep Black people in poverty. While white supremacy required the production of knowledge that denied Black suffering, resistance, and ways of seeing and making place, SNCC sought to redefine, epistemically, what and who we come to know and how we come to know and justify what was true. SNCC and other civil rights groups realized how the spread and use of information was a central pillar of the white power structure and how the flow of information was used to uphold power in the region. The fight over information and its use is part of a broader “informational praxis” that was a central front in battling for the rights, freedoms, and life-affirming material conditions that would break the power structures held in the region (Inwood and Alderman 2020: 716).

The dissemination of information refers to an array of images, stories, and representational practices related to the exercise of power (D’Ignazio and Klein 2020). Governmental manipulation of information could be oppressive and used to destroy the momentum for equality. Perhaps the most salient example is the COINTEL program used by the federal government to spy on and undermine ‘subversive’ elements in US society. This included placing wiretaps and other listening devices in strategic locations of civil rights leaders and the use of that information to try to destroy movement leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Eig 2023). It also included the strategic use of information to discredit organizations by planting news stories about violence in local and national newspapers and the active discrediting of groups like the Black Panther Party. In Congressional hearings in 1976, the FBI was found to have waged an informational war against Black Nationalist groups in a “campaign in which the bureau used a legion of informers, sometimes as provocateurs, and close cooperation with local police antiradical squads to sow confusion, fear, and dissension […] stories were planted with newspaper and television outlets to put the [Black] Panthers and their supporters in a bad light” (Kifner, 1976: 1).

In the 1950s and 1960s, an era dominated by ant-Communist witch hunts and threats to the existing racial order, there was widespread state oppression of information and an ever-unfolding battle for public opinion and feeling in the US. Federal, state, and local officials, large business interests, and others vested in the existing power structure leveraged their power and resources to create a broad informational landscape where everyday people could understand and place unfolding events in a context that inaccurately and unfairly pitted civil rights struggles against the ideas of American democracy. How this informational landscape unfolded is crucial because it relies on existing racialized and gendered stereotypes about how the world is organized. It also reinforces the existing power structure, hindering activist work and making vulnerable communities more vulnerable.

These events and revelations speak to the broad struggle over information and the role that information has long played in the battle for social justice. From the role of the Federal Government and its efforts to discredit and destroy civil rights groups and leaders like Dr King to the efforts of Mississippi and other southern states to counter what they viewed as negative press accounts of the region, the civil rights struggle was about more than a set of public protests, federal legislation, or Supreme Court cases. The Movement for African American freedom also presented facts and narratives that could counter the broad-based disinformation campaigns against civil rights groups and provide supporters and the public with a more accurate and truthful accounting of life for Black people. We use the term “life” purposely because at the heart of the disinformation campaigns against civil rights organizations and workers were stories that denied Black agency and also presented African Americans within a two-dimensional context that denied what McKittrick (2020) calls “Black livingness.” These efforts were fundamental to upholding visions of Black people as outside the scope of justice, fair treatment, and the right to life. In supporting a system of racial apartheid, these efforts were central to racialized processes and fundamental to forestalling Black life in the region and nation. SNCC, COFO, and other civil rights groups documented the struggles of Black peoples and presented a more multidimensional and life-affirming reality that invited a reappraisal of race and racism and was an opening to create new and varied political connections and coalitions within the state and region.

Understanding the modern information landscape

The revelations about the role the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, the FBI, other agencies, and even individuals played in spreading false narratives about the civil rights movement are important in a 21^st-century context where the battle over information connects to struggles over democratic governance. The spread of conspiracy theories and information designed to undermine democratic authority is central to this political moment (e.g., Grodzicka and Harambam, 2021; Jones, 2012; Rosenblum and Muirhead, 2019; Sturm and Albrecht; Harambam et al., 2021). Perhaps no more salient example exists than the US Capitol Insurrection, in which groups and individuals whose anger was stoked by the “Big Lie” stormed the US Capitol and tried to stop the certification of Biden’s election as President of the United States. In the immediate aftermath of the struggle, mainstream commentators and the media noted the struggle was unprecedented; the reality is that the storming of the seat of government harkened back to the nadir of American democracy (Bonds and Inwood 2020).

The aftermath of the US Civil War saw the federal government take seriously the expansion of democratic governance and the protection of basic civil liberties for Black people. This ended in the 1870s as terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, northern industrialists, and the Southern planter class worked together to roll back hard-won civil rights gains (Du Bois, 1935). In addition to these more well-known efforts, the strategic use of information to spread lies and misinformation was central to this era. No better example exists than the Wilmington, North Carolina Insurrection.

In 1898, white supremacists in North Carolina led a violent overthrow of a democratically elected multi-racial government in Wilmington, North Carolina. It was a coups-d'état that signaled the end of democracy in the US South. On 10 November 1898, several thousand white supremacists ran riot in the streets of Wilmington, burning out Black businesses and murdering African Americans. This included using the local armory and weapons, including at least one Gatling gun, an early precursor to the modern machine gun, to quite literally shoot down Black men and women on the streets of Wilmington. The insurrection destroyed the multi-racial government in the city and effectively ended African Americans’ ability to participate in the electoral process in the state (Zucchino 2020). Key to understanding how the Wilmington Insurrection played out was the role of the press in spreading false and misleading stories about Black men within the state and region. Zucchino (2020: 65) recounts how the state’s most powerful newspaper publisher, Josephus Daniels, an ardent white supremacist, met with leading politicians and other powerful interests in North Carolina to undermine what Daniels described as North Carolina’s “Negroized East” (as quoted in Zucchino 2020: 65). As part of this effort Daniels raised money and distributed hundreds of thousands of free copies of his newspaper to allies and white voters. The articles strongly reinforced prevailing racist stereotypes of the era and carried stories about Black men raping white women and the threat Black men represented to the state and nation (Zucchino 2020: 79).

In Wilmington, the efforts of Daniels and his allies created discriminatory public knowledge through disinformation and the perpetuation of conspiracy theories that inflamed the state. It was this effort that created a context in which violence escalated and was legitimized. This included the use of misinformation but also spreading conspiracy theories rooted in broader racist stereotypes. Richard Hofstadter, 1971 notes that American politics have long been characterized by paranoia and anger, and conspiratorial politics have long dominated national political culture. More recently, Pasek and colleagues (2015) document how post-truth politics and a belief in conspiracy theories are related to a broad set of beliefs, including anti-Black racism. The stories Josephus Daniels and his white supremacist allies pushed were central to galvanizing the white public to not only engage in “righteous violence” but also to engage in anti-democratic politics meant to cement the power of white elites. We use the term righteous violence here to demonstrate that despite the prominent false and misleading stories, these narratives wickedly worked to justify the use of violence and the extreme response of white citizens to multi-racial governance.

In November of 1898, Daniels and his conspirators urged white citizens to take matters into their own hands and overthrow the democratically elected multi-racial government. What is important to remember is that the Wilmington Uprising was not a spontaneous event but was the culmination of a months-long campaign of disinformation and lies that led to the outbreak of violence. The Wilmington Insurrection ensured white supremacist rule in North Carolina for several decades, and that was enacted through an informational landscape that was designed to create broad contexts for violence to take place. It relied on atmospheres of fear and misunderstanding and eroded support for multi-racial democracy. It is also an example in which the role of conspiracy theories and lies that led to the outbreak of violence was created and pushed by some of the most powerful men in the state. While we often associate conspiracy theories as outside of mainstream political discourse, as the case of Wilmington effectively shows, they are often created and pushed by powerful actors in society. This reality speaks directly to the Big Lie that saw thousands of people descend on the US Capital. These lies were created by some of the most powerful people in the United States, and the Big Lie served (and continues to serve) powerful interests in the US political and economic landscape.

When placed within a broader context outlined above, it is crucial to understand how the battle over information has long played a central role in understanding how power is exercised and how information is used to attack or undermine various groups struggling for justice. Today, we live in an era when large media conglomerates and wealthy donors can create content that drives an emotional response by voters—similar to the efforts of white supremacists in previous eras to create a broad context to uphold the white power structure—and which has long structured the nature of American politics (Waters, 1997). Critically, this modern informational landscape captures our attention, mines emotions, and turns them into emotional data that can be further exploited. For example, Albright notes:

From their public Facebook content and videos [related to the election] and its incredibly racist, inflammatory, fearmongering—untrue posts, which were scaring people. Fear is one of their key strategies. Apparently, it worked […]It was incredible to see just how much data and how much insight could be extracted from looking at people's likes […] Facebook was a vehicle to extract and mine emotional data through their platform […]Facebook had created a vehicle—an entire system—built for the purpose of emotional mining or sentiment data. (As quoted in Boler and Davis 2020: 334)

Two critical points emerge and connect to this paper’s broad arguments. First, post-truth politics is defined by appeals to emotion disconnected from policy, and facts are no longer central to political decision-making. Jonathan Rose (2017) describes post-truth politics as “a world in which truth is less important than public attitudes and where everyone has their own (often incompatible) “facts” (556). Sapnierman and Cabrera (2014) note that emotion is central to the way race is understood and how racism operates, especially as it relates to white supremacy. They document how fear and anxiety of “others” is a dominant emotional response by whites and is central to reinforcing the white supremacist power structure.

Within this informational landscape, fear of others motivates white attitudes and actions and political action (Pasek et al., 2015; Wates, 1997). Recognizing how emotional appeals in the broader media ecosystem undergird racial exploitation is crucial to the contemporary era of “fake news” and part of a much longer racialized geography. Second, Jane Sutier (2016) explains that a dominant theme in Western democracies is the threat posed by post-truth politics to the political coalitions forged in a post-World War II environment. Connected to the danger of authoritarian regimes, the growth of social media platforms has given rise to a poisonous politics in which even the most widely accepted realities are up for debate. Driven by the changes in how people consume information, the development of social media platforms, where individuals largely self-segregate and consume media and news stories that conform to their worldviews, is a critical aspect of this change. With the click of a button or driven by bots on social media sites, ‘media stories’ can rocket worldwide in seconds and garner thousands of reactions and re-postings a minute. We use the term media stories to highlight how the spread of information is more closely connected to previous eras where men like 19^th-century newspaper editor Josephus Daniels could control the media ecosystem and target supporters with disinformation capable of driving politics and public hate. What is new is the diversity of news sites and media platforms where “citizen journalists” can generate stories, spread information through their sites, and create broad followings with various media platforms.

The inability of fact-checkers or others to counter broad untruths within the political sphere, coupled with media consolidation and the outsized influence of big-pocketed donors, has given rise to a sense that the terrain of lying in politics has shifted (Stolberg, 2017). The Economist designated 2016 as the year of the ‘Big Lie.’ Examining both the move for Great Britain to leave the European Union and Trump’s quest to become President of the United States, The Economist noted that there was a new political technique at work in each case, what they described as the “Big Lie Technique.” Defined as a constant stream of untruths that “are never acknowledged, simply repeated,” it appeared to be a concerted strategy that would so overwhelm the news media and the broader public as to make Trump’s racism, lack of preparation, sexism, misogyny, failed business record, and other liabilities, or the complicated realities of Brexit, free from critical public scrutiny. By flooding the media ecosystem with a steady stream of untruths, lies, false information, and coded language, purveyors of the Big Lie Technique create such an overwhelming avalanche of misinformation that it becomes impossible for most people to sift through the information to determine what is actually true and what is false. The Big Lie is widely compared to gaslighting and other abuse techniques to destabilize reality by muddying the waters or lying with extreme regularity.

Arendt explains that lying is more plausible than reason because lies are designed to appeal to the audience, what the consumer of information wants to hear, or the presentation of information that resonates with or seeks to affect the audience’s political-emotional state. The lie is constructed with a “careful eye to making it credible” or connecting the lie with preconceived understandings of how society is supposed to work (Arendt 1972: 7). Lies within the realm of politics operate through common-sense understandings of how the world works and for whom it works, so the Big Lie’s appeal is directed towards a set of common-sense views about society. Partially, following Arendt, this reality emerges because “the nature of the political realm is to be at war with the truth” (Bufacchi 2021: 354) because political consent in a democracy is built through the consent of the governed and consensus building.

To better understand how post-truth operates socially, it is necessary to acknowledge different kinds of truth. To this point, Arendt (1972) differentiates between “factual truths” and “rational truths.” Factual truths are facts and events. As Merenda (2020) explains, “Factual truths are just factual statements which describe factual events: with reasonable approximation” (22). According to Arendt, these truths are beyond dispute and are necessary for “the exercise of democratic power.” The potency of post-truth politics is how it denies these empirically verifiable factual truths as “fake news,” conspiracies, or lies. Rational truths are different from factual truths in that they are often expressed in terms of statements that require a general agreement amongst the population; according to Merenda (2020), rational truth conflicts with political debate and “does not allow for the plurality of opinions which is the essential nourishment for democracy” (22).

Merenda (2020) uses two examples to illustrate this distinction. A factual truth would be that it is raining today. You can look out the window or go outside and state without equivocation that rain is falling and you are wet. A rational truth is expressed as “God exists” (22). In a democracy, rational truths “can only be admitted to the public sphere in the form of opinion among other opinions” (ibid) In other words, a politician or political party can organize itself along lines of religion and promote a set of religious values, but in the public arena, it must compete with other political parties and other politicians who view the world differently and have different values. As Merenda, through Arendt, explains, “[s]uch religious values can enter the political arena just as opinions” (23). Because politics is focused on opinions and the building of consensus, which relies on certain factual truths:

[w]hen facts are not universally recognized, and their truthfulness is put into question when the question “Is it true that it’s raining?” is asked, deliberate lying can make its appearance in the public discourse and the ground on which is political discourse is built upon, “the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us starts shaking. (Merenda 2020: 23)

This passage points to a contradiction in democratic governance in those factual truths; when they enter the political arena, they can become distorted, or politicians can turn those factual truths into rational truths and then work to deny their existence. When this happens, the foundations of democratic governance are threatened, and it creates a context for politicians to deny empirically verifiable facts or conditions or to shift the debate from specific policy proposals to address an agreed-upon condition to a debate over the facts themselves.

A key facet in shaping how factual truth is transformed into biased opinions and assertions and thus dismissed is the identity of the messenger or asserter of factual truth. A historical hallmark of white supremacist efforts to disregard the realities and effects of racism is to call into question the character and veracity of communities of color who have worked for many years, and often against steep obstacles, to establish the factual truths of their oppression and to convince a democratic state to honor its foundational values of fair treatment. Upon reflecting on America’s racial reckoning in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Andre Johnson (2024) questioned why Black people are not “believed” when they make claims of abuse and discrimination, even when the facts of that violence are verifiable—not just in the current post-truth era but also historically. His answer reveals how factual truth claim-making has long been racialized and often stymies a just and democratic response to white supremacy. He explains:

America has had a hard time believing Black people. Black truth has always been problematic. Black truth has always been questioned and viewed as inaccurate. It is almost as if truth and Blackness cannot coincide—that Black truth is somehow tainted because of the conditions in which Black folks find themselves. For a long period in this country, courts would not receive Black testimony, and Black people could not testify against a white person. Black people could not serve on many juries, and many times, the only way that Black people found themselves in courtrooms was as defendants. (Johnson 2024, xiv)

Let’s return to the COFO report discussed in the paper’s introduction, Case Studies of Intimidation, as well as the example of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission (MSC). The MSC was actively denying and discrediting factual truths about rampant racism, often made by Black-led civil rights groups, and attempting to shift the debate from policies that would undermine segregation to a debate about whether segregation was bad or even occurring in Mississippi. The MSC denied that Black people in the state were being murdered by the Klan or intimidated by the police. The MSC created conditions in which people began to doubt what their own eyes and experiences were telling them, pushing factual truths into the realm of rational truths. COFO, through Case Studies of Intimidation, as we demonstrate in the following sections, was documenting a series of events that the broader white power structure was denying and, in so doing, was pushing back against the denial of Black humanity and the direct and lived experiences that white supremacists and the white power structure were denying. This is what makes the COFO document and the efforts of civil rights organizations so important for this present era of Big Lie politics and the era of Fake News and conspiratorial politics. It is fixing factual truths about racism and other inequalities in ways that are hard to deny and which present a reality of life in Mississippi that forced politicians to address actually existing conditions. These lessons are crucial for us as the politics of Post-Truth governance take hold.

The creation of the era of post-truth politics is a crucial inflection point for democratic governance and the broader public’s ability to make informed decisions. The media ecosystem is shifting, and as a result, we—the public, elected officials, activists, social scientists, political geographers, and broader communities—need to build capacities to push against this shift or, more precisely, create a context in which the deploying of factual truth and information against oppression still has intellectual and political purchase. A critical step that should take place is an understanding of the way this era is not altogether dissimilar from previous eras when the use of information and the spread of ‘fake news’ was used to crush progressive movements and to reinscribe white supremacy. These efforts have echoes in our present age when large-pocketed donors and media consolidation create a context in which a few wealthy and well-connected politicians and groups can use social media and the local news ecosystem to spread information or push political agendas into the broader population. Because this reality is not new but a longstanding and well-thought-out set of political strategies within US democracy, it is imperative to understand how previous groups pushed back against these realities and countered misinformation with a broad-based and well-thought-out agenda that could present alternative narratives. In the next section, we focus on the possible lessons from examining how civil rights activists and organizations took on previous eras characterized by disinformation and the insurgent informational infrastructures and landscapes they sought to create.

Countering the affective realities of racism in the US south

While contemporary political commentators and even some academics locate the era of fake news or post-truth politics as a modern phenomenon, the reality is that post-truth politics have long dominated in the US, and this connects to the existing power structures of racial capital and white supremacy. The totality of the racial hierarchy is built through a series of post-truths, including everything from pseudoscientific efforts to identify biological markers of racial difference to the idea of white superiority and the foundations of white supremacism to fake news stories that supposedly justified innumerable racial terror lynchings or the Wilmington Massacre. Essential for the exercise of power in the United States, when threatened by various racial justice movements or the perceived loss of political power by multi-racial coalitions, the broader power structure employs a variety of ways to discredit and delegitimize these efforts and movements that reinforce, rearticulate, and recalibrate the system through misinformation. Countering the reality of fake news or post-truth politics has always been central to the African-American freedom struggle and countless other efforts to secure basic rights and freedoms. Sometimes, these efforts were formalized, including the use of opposition research departments, artistic practices, museum exhibits, speaking tours, cartography and data activism, and freedom and citizenship schools (e.g., Alderman et al., 2021; Inwood and Alderman, 2021), while at other times, the effort to counter misinformation was coded and subversive. As the African American freedom experience teaches us, the long development of the United States is a story about the battle over how information is disseminated and internalized by the public and how that information creates perceptions of truth or reality crucial to justice struggles.

The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee understood these realities, and the effort to counter discriminatory and harmful information meant actively resisting the broad ways that informational falsities intertwine with structural social inequalities to perpetuate segregation and violence directed toward Black communities. The strategy was multi-pronged and included the creation of a research department dedicated to providing information to activists in the field as well as politicians, congressional committees, and the press to galvanize support for the struggle and to plan protest movements that could take advantage of contradictions in the system of racial oppression that dominated the region and nation. By focusing on the way SNCC and other groups like COFO used information and created accessible documents that told narrative stories about the struggles in the Deep South, these groups were creating a systematic and multilayered approach to galvanize the region and nation and expose the power structure to critical scrutiny and to affect political change.

Returning to the document Case Studies of Intimidation, what jumps out about the report is the careful attention the authors paid to geography and how specific geographies connect to conditions of violence and intimidation. For example, the document begins by outlining where the statements were collected and how those statements reflect the realities of different regions in Mississippi. The authors note:

The statements concern three areas of the state, involving differing forms of physical, political, and economic intimidation. The first statement is from a man in Natchez in the southwest. In this area of the state, intimidation tends to take the form of open violence […] Around the beginning of the year, the Ku Klux Klan revived in the southwest. Since then, there have been countless cross-burnings, at least two bombings, and at least five killings. (COFO 1964, np)

The document goes on to state that “reasons for the high degree of violence in the southwest are not certain […] it has been suggested that the lack of a clear economic distinction between the [African Americans] and white communities has forced the whites to resort to open violence (ibid).

The document continues that in the Delta region, the politics and efforts at intimidation are different, creating a different set of realities for civil rights workers in that region. Case Studies of Intimidation Notes:

The second set of statements comes from Ruleville in Sunflower County and Greenwood in LeFlore County in the northwest. This is the Mississippi Delta, an area of extensive cotton plantations and heavy Negro [sic] majorities in many counties. Though there has been a considerable amount of open violence in the Delta, it has not been sufficient to prevent effective voter registration activities […] large numbers of [African American] workers have been fired from jobs on the plantations and in the towns because of involvement with the civil rights movement. (ibid)

From there, the document describes in detail the role of the plantation economy in the region and how the local power structure has focused attention on ending federal welfare programs that have made difficult lives even more precarious. This reflects the unique political power that the Delta region had in the state, specifically Sunflower County. Within this region, large plantations dominated the economy, and perhaps no person was more powerful within the state than Mississippi Senator James Eastland, who also owned a large plantation in the county. Eastland, known as the “Voice of the White South,” was among the country’s most powerful US senators. He used his position in the Senate to punish Black people and other civil rights activists who challenged the white power structure. Using economic intimidation and hindering the rights of people to partake in federal welfare programs, as well as cutting funding for those programs, was central to Eastland’s efforts to destroy the civil rights movement. Because of this reality, the report’s author notes that in the region, SNCC has focused on shipping “tons of food and clothing from friends in the North to try to meet the basic needs of hundreds of families in the Greenwood and Ruleville areas” (ibid).

Finally, the introduction concludes with a discussion of the third region covered by the report, which is centered in Jackson, Mississippi. The author notes:

In Jackson, the capital, intimidation comes mainly from the large, well-armed, extremely efficient police force. Acts of open violence are generally avoided, but beneath the surface, Jackson is a ‘hard’ town. Because of recent demonstrations by the large number of [African American] college students in the area, city authorities seem wary of openly provoking the [Negro] population. Instead, police are focusing their efforts on the intimidation of white workers in the civil rights movement. (ibid)

This geography of violence was created through a set of unique parameters for the state and, specifically, the capital city. Recall from the previous section that to counter negative stories about Mississippi and the efforts of civil rights activists; the state created its own intelligence service. Critical to the Sovereignty Commission were efforts to control the narrative around civil rights and how negative stories about the region and the treatment of Black people in the region generated broader political sympathy for the Movement. Many regional and even national news organizations focused on cities and urban areas in the South, and those battles (the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Birmingham, and the efforts to desegregate the region, etc.) are often thought about as the most important in the civil rights era. This is partially because they were so well covered, and national news organizations tended to spend more time in urban areas, which were also seen as safer than the rural South, characterized by endemic corruption and violence. In attempting to control and demean the narrative of civil rights mobilization, the police in Jackson were more focused on ‘outside agitators’ and others who did not have as deep a connection to the region and also did not have a strong a base of support, and who were seen as less sympathetic than the scores of young Black men and woman who were marching in the life-risking protests that also were occurring in the region.

Thus, and importantly, Case Studies of Intimidation is not only an important document because of what it tells us about the regional politics and dynamics and how the efforts to counter disinformation took shape, but it also reveals the deeper and more pronounced geographies that lie at the center of the effort to exercise power and protect the power structure within Mississippi and the various regions of the state. This lesson is critical in a twenty-first-century context where the growth and spread of disinformation threaten the existing democratic fabric in the US. What is crucial for those interested in countering disinformation is the fundamental question about whose interests are served through a campaign of mistrust or disinformation and how this information is put into service of broad economic and political interests? Just as Case Studies of Intimidation, a document that reflected the existing power structure of the region, the efforts to engineer lies about the election that gave rise to the Capital Insurrection, or efforts to undermine the science of climate change or to discredit those asking fundamental questions about policing in the US, reflects an existing power structure that is threatened by the kind of changes or shifts in political power that would empower people to take on government corruption or to advance a more progressive agenda. This reality is why it is important to understand past efforts at countering misinformation and disinformation and the broader African-American freedom struggles and efforts to take on inequality in the US. It speaks to the Black experience in the US. It provides us with the tools and strategies necessary to leverage in this contemporary political moment to understand how misinformation and disinformation are utilized in this present context. Understanding whose interests are being served through the use and employment of misinformation and how that connects to a broad network of powerful corporations or individuals is paramount to ultimately confronting those efforts.

Another fundamental way the document operates is through humanizing people, which is long seen as disposable, and by documenting places long seen as forgotten or unnoticed. Through the eight stories in this document, what emerges is a group of people struggling to resist injustice and who want to move forward with equality and freedom in profound ways. By humanizing these events, a key piece is breaking down the scale and scope of the broad civil rights struggle. By individualizing those stories and struggles, Case Studies of Intimidation draws a tight spotlight on how racial violence operates in and through the actual lives of people. This is perhaps seen most clearly in the first story, related by Mr. Archie Curtis, who owned a funeral home in Natchez along the Mississippi River. Mr Curtis related a story where the Klan had tried to intimidate him into giving them the names and registration cards of local members of the NAACP. He states:

On 16 February, 1964 […] I got a call to pick up the wife of a man named Joe Gooden. The caller said she had a heart attack. He said he was the foreman of Joe Gooden […] not suspecting anything; I got dressed and drove to the designated spot in my ambulance. I took my helper, William Jackson [after going to the designated pickup site], and a car came. Some people got out with white hoods over their heads and shoulders. They had guns. They ordered me out of the ambulance […] one of them struck me […] with a pistol. We were blindfolded and taken about two miles away. They demanded that I give them my NAACP card and tell \them who else had one […] They beat us and roughed us up severely. One of them said they ought to kill us […] This was especially hard on me because I am recuperating from a stroke. (COFO 1964, np)

Important from this passage is how the statements connect to the broad geography laid out previously and how violence and intimidation take place within the region. Recall from the previous section that this part of Mississippi was characterized by Klan and other racist groups intimidating and murdering civil rights activists. The area’s rural nature also meant that these violent acts were often not investigated, but more often than not, corrupt local and regional government and police organizations quite literally meant that they participated in the violence as well.

Throughout the document and through the eight stories presented, the regional variations of how violence takes place and how the violence is documented highlight the fundamental geographic realities of Mississippi and how the power structure uses the threat and infliction of violence to hinder the civil rights movement. One of the more evocative stories details the assault of a US Army soldier by white police officers in Jackson, MS police officers. The account documents the events that led up to the assault and the way the police attacked the Army officer while he was in jail. Two things stand out about this incident. First, the Army officer was white, and, in his account, he is repeatedly accused of being “married to a [African American woman]” (COFO 1964 np). The document notes that the officer was picked up for making an illegal U-turn. In addition, the officer was also traveling with an African-American woman, and as a result, the officer was sent to the local jail. As the officer left the jail, he was followed by a local police officer who confronted the man, and as he describes, the officer ended the conversation “with the man hitting me across the face with a full-swinging, open-handed smack” and that two other police officers came over to confront him as well (COFO, 1964; np).

Apart from being an officer in the Army, what stands out about this incident is how it relates to the realities of police brutality and the lack of accountability from the police in Jackson. As the civil rights movement expanded and pushed further into the deep southeastern United States, civil rights workers and the Black communities they tried to help mobilize were confronting a system of justice that was far removed from the ideals of justice as most US citizens would have understood it then. The plantation system that developed in Mississippi relied on the state police forces to enforce a brutal system that relied on poverty, violence, and misinformation to keep people in their place within a segregated and unequal society. The system, when challenged, also created, or attempted to create, a false set of narratives that created doubt and mistrust within the broader media ecosystem. Critically, for disinformation to work, it does not necessarily have to convince people of a specific narrative; instead, all the flow of information needs to do is create enough confusion that ordinary people either do not know what to believe or they find the situation so sown with confusion and alternative narratives that they suffer from information overload and simply tune out or stop paying attention because the situation is so confusing. This is the critical piece of how the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission worked. While cultivating allies, the Commission also wanted to sow enough confusion in the system that it was impossible for average men and women, busy with jobs and lives, to understand the situation's complexity.

By creating a set of narratives, COFO and SNCC were working to counter white supremacist informational praxis by humanizing both the people living within a system that dehumanized them and by relating details and images of their lives so that everyday people could see themselves within this system. This informational praxis is grounded in achieving a greater epistemic justice that speaks progressively to what and who we are allowed to know and verify as true about society. As SNCC found, an effort to counter white supremacist information control cannot solely rely on fact-checking or statistical charts that document the inhumanity of the system of Jim Crow Segregation; rather, it relies upon a set of stories that help people place themselves within narratives so that they identify with actual people and their struggles to survive. When discussing the rise of authoritarianism in Europe, Hanna Arendt notes that facts alone are never enough to confront lies because lies fit people's preconceived notions of how the world works and for whom it works. Lies are tailored for an audience so they can connect to people because they are created narratives, and through creating that narrative, you can connect to specific understandings and emotions. Lies, in this sense, are more potent than the truth because lies speak to what people think and want to believe. The only way to counter this kind of informational praxis is by creating a narrative in which cold facts are transformed into social truths that invariably inspire and demand just action by making truth speak to how individuals and communities are affected through and by the realities of inequality and inequity.

Concluding remarks

Timothy Melley (2022) notes that we are living through the “age of conspiracy theory” (757). Arguing that it is important not to dismiss the idea of conspiracy as fringe thinking, Melley goes on to note that conspiracy in the post-World War II era has transformed citizenship through the circulation of “cynical allegations and revelations” that undermine trust in institutions and create narratives that stymie the ability of citizens in a democracy to police the institutions they are ostensibly in charge of regulating (2022: 758-759). When placed within the broader framework of post-truth politics tac, knowing the realities of Fake News or conspiratorial thinking is a pressing social imperative. As Ibram Kendi (2019) notes, denials of climate change and denials of racism rest on the very same foundation. Both are an attack on observable reality felt and experienced by many, and the denial of both realities seriously compromises the ability of scholars, officials, and citizens to prescribe and realize meaningful solutions to difficult problems. The effects of our inability to formulate sufficient solutions in a post-truth era are not felt evenly or fairly across the country or the globe; rather, it disproportionately harms those already historically and geographically marginalized— further illustrating the social justice implications of information.

Melley (2002, 2022) argues while it is easy to dismiss conspiracy as a fringe or even a symptom of a deep psychosis, the reality is that conspiracy theories, as well as fake news or post-truth politics, serve the interests of corporations and influential individuals. This aligns with the much longer work of Arendt and others, who focused on the way the denial of “factual truths” creates a context where we end up arguing over facts instead of building consensus to address government overreach, corruption, or the rise of totalitarianism, amongst other examples. As we have demonstrated in this paper, the era of post-truth politics is rooted in a much longer geography and connects to longer histories of racism and white supremacism. As a result, there is also a tradition of insurgent informational social actors, practices, and places that have worked to counter this informational landscape.

Focusing on the work of COFO and other civil rights groups who worked in an era of intense political intimidation and pressures outlines the ways that groups of activists worked to shape the broader informational landscape and counter lies and distortions that were used to keep people in their place. These efforts highlight how the more comprehensive information landscape is shaped by powerful special interests and individuals and governmental organizations recognizing how information is central to the broader power structure and how it operates. Contemporary US society is confronted by a crisis of democracy in which the use and distortion of information are central to this political moment.

The reality of this moment also demands a research agenda and outlook that recognizes the full weight of geography and how this moment is defined by a much longer historical struggle that is located within the broader geography of white supremacy and racism which has long dominated the socio-spatial realities of the broader US democratic landscape. In many ways, the efforts to undermine democracy and instill doubt in the minds of voters and the broader public are lessons that were learned during the US civil rights struggle when white supremacists and their political leadership understood that a battle for the hearts and minds of the broader public was central to the exercise of their power. We see this battle echo in today’s efforts by wealthy individuals to suppress the free flow of information, media conglomerates, or even wealthy individuals that seek to control the flow of information, as well as a public that is skeptical of government power and the role of large corporations in their lives. Lessons that galvanized supporters of civil rights organizations to create a media landscape composed of research departments, significant cultural programming, and the creation of narratives that would challenge the exercise of power within the US are essential tools that can help meet the challenges of this moment. The lessons learned in these struggles should be at the forefront of the broader academic understanding of post-truth politics and the role of post-truth discourse in the twenty-first century.