JACKSON MS SOTH OPEN ROADS EXHIBIT SERIES

A series of tall, signboardlike plaques in the galleries list the names of thousands of black lynching victims. The record of that violence was already long, and now growing. White privilege, sensing a threat, took violent preventive action. Black soldiers returned from abroad with eyes newly open to the extent of racism at home, and itching to push for change.

But an hour after starting I was still only halfway through my preliminary tour.įrom there, the museum’s timeline speeds ahead through the Civil War, Reconstruction and the birth of Jim Crow, then settles into a steady chronological groove after World War II. I had intended to make an initial fast sweep, then double back for a closer look. So does the fact that, to a startling degree, and despite being a state-sponsored institution, the museum refuses to sugarcoat history.Īnd, finally, Jackson, a primary scene of that history, is the right place, karma-wise, for the telling of the history to unfold, as it does through a series of tight, lowlighted galleries packed floor to ceiling with photographs, texts, films and recordings. It makes the Jackson museum’s energy feel combustive. 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. But it’s the Civil Rights Museum that rivets attention. But when I couldn’t find her in the phone book, and no one I asked knew her name, I caught another bus and moved on.Īll three presentations are visually strong, critically sharp, and thematically intertwined. I hoped a meeting with Welty might be reassuring. I’d also heard rumors that three civil rights workers had mysteriously disappeared. I’d seen “colored entrance” signs on public buildings and falling-down sharecropper shacks along the road.

But by the time I reached Jackson, I was feeling uneasy. Welty’s writing, wry and linguistically zany, was the only version of “South” I knew, and it made me eager to go there. My plan was to call from a pay phone, then drop by her house to say hi. I wanted to meet Eudora Welty, who I knew lived there and whose early, playful stories I loved. A high school sophomore, AWOL from home, I was on a cross-country bus trip from Boston, and Jackson was one of the stops. The last time I visited this Southern city was in June 1964, Mississippi Freedom summer, when Northern college kids were traveling south to register voters, though that wasn’t why I was here.

Jackson ms soth open roads exhibit