12/16/2023 0 Comments Black history moments in timeAccused of flirting with a white grocery store clerk, the clerk’s husband and his half-brother dragged the teenager from bed a few nights later, shot him in the head, tied his body with barbed wire to a 75lb cotton gin fan and threw him in the Tallahatchie River. Mississippi native Oprah Winfrey narrates a presentation on the 1955 death of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy from Chicago who was visiting family in Mississippi. Throughout the galleries, small immersive theatres cover key moments from the modern civil rights era, which gained a foothold as African-American soldiers stationed overseas during the Second World War returned to find discrimination and segregation back home. But until now Mississippi, a key battleground in the fight against segregation, had largely ignored its troubled past. Other states like Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee have for decades preserved and commemorated their civil rights history in museums, monuments and historic sites like Memphis’ Lorraine Motel, the site of Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination. “We’ve waited a long time for it,” said Reuben Anderson, Mississippi's first African-American Supreme Court Justice, explaining that it has been a 40-year effort to get the political support and funding to open the nation’s only state-run civil rights museum. And it immediately makes Mississippi’s sleepy capital an important stop for anyone interested in the US’ struggle for racial equality. It uses multimedia theatres showing archival footage of trials, protests and funerals, and artefacts like hooded Ku Klux Klan robes, a burned cross and the Enfield rifle that took Evers’ life. It recounts the history of the civil rights movement beginning with the introduction of slavery in North America to the upheaval of the 1950s and ‘60s that eventually overturned segregation. The $90 million museum complex, located in the city of Jackson, presents a comprehensive and unflinching look at the US state of Mississippi’s darkest moments.
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