The Mississippi Department of Archives and History opened two museums side by side on North Street in downtown Jackson on December 9, 2017, for the state's bicentennial. The Museum of Mississippi History takes the long view under the theme "One Mississippi, Many Stories." The Mississippi Civil Rights Museum next door narrows to 1945 through 1970, and State Senator John Horhn has called it the first state-sponsored civil rights museum in the country.
The galleries carry titles such as "A Closed Society," "A Tremor in the Iceberg," "I Question America" and "Where Do We Go From Here?", and the museum keeps returning to ordinary people it calls Points of Light. Clarie Collins Harvey is one: she founded Womanpower Unlimited, the Jackson women's network that sent food, clothing and books to jailed Freedom Riders and hosted them after their release. Reuben Anderson is another, the first Black graduate of the University of Mississippi School of Law in 1967, who carried his diploma into courtrooms to prove he was a lawyer. Medgar Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer and Vernon Dahmer anchor the larger story.
The museum took years to win. Bills for it died from 2000 to 2006, and when a study commission formed, some Black Mississippians, long shut out of museum planning, worried the state would tell a sanitized version. The legislature approved $20 million in 2011 and ground broke in 2013. Treat the building as a starting point: its own page sends visitors on to Tougaloo College, the Ida B. Wells Museum in Holly Springs and the Forks of the Road slave market in Natchez.
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