JACKSON, Miss. – Mississippi bred some of the worst violence of the civil rights era, yet nearly a half-century after a barrage of atrocities pricked the conscience of America, it’s one of the few civil rights battleground states with no museum to commemorate the era.
Emmitt Till, a 14-year-old Black boy, was bludgeoned to death for “sassing” a White woman and his body dumped in the Tallahatchie River in 1955. The Mississippi field secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Medgar Evers, was gunned down outside his home by White sniper in 1963. And three young voter registration activists were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan during the Freedom Summer of 1964.
Such events forced America’s eyes on the upheaval in the segregated South and were pivotal in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The absence of a state museum to acknowledge and commemorate these events leads some to question whether Mississippi is ready to embrace its role in history.
“It comes to a point that I don’t think Mississippi wants her history clearly told,” said State Sen. David Jordan, a Black Democrat from Greenwood in Leflore County.
A strong push for a museum didn’t come until 2006, when State Sen. Hillman Frazier, a Democrat from Jackson, sponsored a resolution to create a museum study commission. Republican Gov. Haley Barbour took the reins on the project, which appeared to have his support.
A commission that Barbour appointed chose the private Tougaloo College in north Jackson as the museum site in 2008 and gave the project an estimated price tag of $73 million. Tougaloo was a hub of civil rights activity during the 1960s and ’70s.
