Tom Beck
The Mississippi Civil Rights Museum’s black empowerment gallery.
Six years in the making, the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum aims to make visitors uncomfortable. It succeeds, and you should definitely go see it.
Emmitt Till. James Meredith and Ole Miss. Neshoba County 1964. Freedom Riders 1961. Fannie Lou Hamer and “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Medgar Evers, killed outside his Jackson home in 1963. The famous and the notorious are here, in eight dramatically lit multimedia galleries along with, as the entrance mural says, “local people — men, women, and children from every corner of the state” who risked and sometimes lost their lives for civil rights.
The focus is on the years 1945-1970 but engraved columns bear the names of 600 lynching victims dating back to the nineteenth century for “crimes” including bystander, race prejudice, incendiarism, well poisoning, conjuring, and talking back to a white person. Recorded voices bark, “What you lookin’ at!” and “Your kind don’t come in here!” A few of the displays are so graphic that young children are discouraged from entering them.
The museum opened in December as part of the Mississippi Bicentennial. President Trump came and black elected officials stayed away in protest of the president. Frankly, the museum needs the publicity. Located a few blocks from the Capitol, it is state-funded and looks like a state building you could easily overlook. There are no signs or banners, at least not yet. The formal name is “Two Mississippi Museums,” the other one being the adjoining Mississippi State History Museum.
As a Memphian, I found myself comparing it to the National Civil Rights Museum with its iconic location and look on Mulberry Street at the old Lorraine Motel. Martin Luther King is not a central figure in the Mississippi museum, but he is featured in a timeline that gives context.
“Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks [the Montgomery bus boycott] were not from Mississippi and this is the Mississippi museum,” explained Joyce Lawson, an employee who walked through the galleries with me. She grew up in Vardaman, Mississippi, in a shack with an outhouse, kerosene lamps, and diapers made from sheets. When she was 11 she moved to Jackson, and was living there when Jackson State University student protesters were shot in 1970. The museum gets a lot of visitors who lived through the events on display, including Meredith and Charles Evers, brother of Medgar. Some of them are fact-checkers. If a date is off by so much as one day it gets changed.
Like good journalism, the museum believes in “show, don’t tell.” The school desegregation gallery starts with the well-known U.S. Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education ruling that “separate facilities are inherently unequal” and drives it home with side-by-side pictures of segregated classrooms in 1954. The black kids sit on crowded benches or stand against the wall. I stopped counting when I got to 40. Freedom Riders in 1961 got hauled to Parchman prison if they were arrested. They were fed soft white bread. One of them chewed it into a glob and made a complete set of chess figures that is on display. The “black” pieces were stained in blood.
My wife is from Mississippi. In the museum memorabilia, I had the uneasy feeling we might come across the name of some old family acquaintance. We lived in Jackson from 1979 to 1982 while I was a reporter covering the state for United Press International. Some of the old heroes and villains were still around then, and I had a cup of coffee with Meredith’s nemesis, former Gov. Ross Barnett, and watched Ronald Reagan speak at the Neshoba County Fair in 1980 with the notorious deputy Cecil Price. The years, I wrote then, had softened them. They weren’t so bad. How little I knew.
Driving through Jackson on Interstate 55 is sort of like driving through Memphis on Poplar Avenue. You see a lot of the wealth — the medical center, the capitol building and the skyline, the new office buildings, the Belhaven neighborhood — and not so much of the poverty. Jackson’s population of 173,000 is down from 184,000 in 2000 due largely to white flight to the suburbs in neighboring counties. In February, 60 Minutes featured Jackson in a story about the ease of gun ownership and the high murder rate.
Troubling times, but things have been worse.
