Dr. Susan Glisson is a thinker and a doer, and a valued member of our inner circle.

Susan is an academic with incredible street smarts. Those street smarts go a long way in Mississippi, where her ideas, drive and track record of success help empower voters of all description, young or old, black, brown, white, any racial or cultural background, male or female, LGBTQ, straight, rich or poor.

Susan was founding director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation, a globally recognized civil rights and social justice center located at the University of Mississippi. Susan, through her research and work at the Winter Institute and her related projects, developed effective and innovated ways to bring people together.

Susan is credited with an acute understanding that, in order to achieve results, we must begin the conversation with common ground, shared ideas and opinions that bring people together. It is a powerful tool in a time when too often a dialogue starts with what parties don’t agree on. Over more than two decades, she has made a name for herself as a true champion for people by listening, processing and sharing ideas that work.

We obviously admire her for many reasons, but most of all because, while the saying goes “talk is cheap,” Susan’s actions “speak louder than words” (as another saying goes). Specifically, Susan plays a lead role in the ongoing southern and rural strategy for registering and moving voters to the polls and protecting voters from Jim Crow and other discriminatory practices.

When others tell us, “This state or that state (and we hear Mississippi a lot) is a lost cause for our candidates or party,” we say, “Well, you haven’t met Susan Glisson yet. But we would be happy to introduce you to her.”

Like Susan, Left of Center recognizes a strategy based on the recognition that every voter is an individual with unique needs and interests. The trick, as Susan has demonstrated, is to identify and amplify the intersections where individual needs and interests become shared community concerns. Political pros like to call this messaging, but for Susan it is simply living up to her values and ideals.

We are extremely fortunate that Susan agreed to write a three-part series for Left of Center. In a three part series, Susan taps into her expertise and understanding of the shifting collective thought about racial justice and cultural insensitivity in Mississippi. While she uses one state’s actions as an example to make the case that things are changing in a good way, for us her series serves a case study in “how to do it everywhere.” The first installment of Susan’s series will appear here on our blog page beginning Monday, July 13, 2020.

You won’t want to miss a word of it!

Written by guest contributor Ken Bazinet. Ken is a respected, longtime national reporter and freelance writer based in rural Maryland.