Saturday I toured the “Two Mississippi Museums,” as the new facilities chronicling the state’s overall history and civil rights are called.
They’re located in the same building in downtown Jackson, and it should be a required visit for all Mississippians. It’s your past, told in a way that helps us all better understand the dynamics that created the state we call home.
The Mississippi Civil Rights Museum is a focused, unblinking look at the era that most defines the state to outsiders: The battle for equal treatment for black citizens in the 1960s.
After an introduction, the main exhibits are built around a central rotunda that includes the names of people murdered during the civil rights era; that sets the tone of how dangerous it was to challenge the status quo of segregation and white supremacy.
Around that hub are different areas devoted to key events and movements: the beginning of the challenges to Mississippi’s closed society following World War II, Freedom Riders, Freedom Summer and the aftermath of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
The museum includes a level of detail often missed in overviews of the era, and visitors are sure to come across facts involving communities they’re familiar with that they didn’t know before.
I left with a greater appreciation for the black Mississippians who bravely stepped up to ensure that our state gave them the respect and rights that all Americans are promised in our Constitution. That’s not a partisan message, and it’s not an anti-white one either. It’s something we all need to embrace.
On the other side of the building is the Museum of Mississippi History. It seems to me to have been a concession to get conservative lawmakers to approve a civil rights museum. Hey, I don’t have a problem with that; it’s a political compromise needed to get the job done. We need more of that from our lawmakers rather than rigid stands.
The attendance at it was much lower, at least when I was there, and I noticed some sloppy mistakes. For example, saying B.B. King was born in Indianola — he wasn’t; the bluesman didn’t move there until he was a teenager — and a lot of exhibits where it was hard to match up the text and the artifact it described.
Those quibbles aside, I walked away with a better understanding for how the state’s unique culture developed. Mississippi’s population exploded from 1800 to 1850 after primarily being a rugged frontier before that. The reason? A cotton boom fueled by Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin in 1793, England’s need for fiber for its sewing factories and Mississippi’s ideal climate and soil. The result was one of the great land rushes and most profitable enterprises in world history — and least for the landowners. They made even more money, of course, because of slavery and then after the Civil War the almost-equally-cheap labor from both black and white sharecroppers.
Thus was born the battle for power that we still see played out in the state every day between country-club whites, blue-collar whites and blacks. The museum explained the history of that era well, as it also did the years before statehood, from the Choctaws and Chickasaws to Spanish, French and English influence.
It also had a fascinating collection of Confederate flags, which featured many different designs between units. I would have liked to have seen more of those sort of historic artifacts.
Overall, I’d encourage everyone to go see both museums — and leave time for at least half a day if not more.
Reach Editor and Publisher Charlie Smith at csmith@columbianprogress.com or (601) 736-2611.
