The New Mississippi Civil Rights Museum Refuses to Sugarcoat History
The New Mississippi Civil Rights Museum Refuses to Sugarcoat History
At the same time, an exhibition often startling in its political candor — I can’t imagine anything like it at the Metropolitan Museum — isn’t afraid to dwell on the region’s very real beauties, embodied by an
1823 Mississippi landscape painting by John James Audubon, or in a 1934 photograph of three chicly dressed African-American women on a Saturday stroll in Grenada, a city about 100 miles northeast of Jackson.
Its time frame — roughly 30 years between World War II and the mid-1970s — is narrow compared with
that of the Mississippi history museum, or the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington.
A reconstituted Museum of Mississippi History — the original was lost to Hurricane Katrina — simultaneously
made its debut in the same new $90 million building occupied by the Civil Rights Museum.
Three months after the second hung jury, in June 1964, three civil rights activists — James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman
and Michael Henry Schwerner — were murdered in Philadelphia, Miss.
And I heard them loud and clear when I returned to Jackson to see the new Mississippi Civil Rights Museum that recently opened here.
At the same time, an exhibition often startling in its political candor — I can’t imagine anything like it at the Metropolitan Museum — isn’t afraid to dwell on the region’s very real beauties, embodied by an
1823 Mississippi landscape painting by John James Audubon, or in a 1934 photograph of three chicly dressed African-American women on a Saturday stroll in Grenada, a city about 100 miles northeast of Jackson.
Its time frame — roughly 30 years between World War II and the mid-1970s — is narrow compared with
that of the Mississippi history museum, or the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington.
A reconstituted Museum of Mississippi History — the original was lost to Hurricane Katrina — simultaneously
made its debut in the same new $90 million building occupied by the Civil Rights Museum.
Three months after the second hung jury, in June 1964, three civil rights activists — James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman
and Michael Henry Schwerner — were murdered in Philadelphia, Miss.
And I heard them loud and clear when I returned to Jackson to see the new Mississippi Civil Rights Museum that recently opened here.