Jackson, Miss. The glass panels of lynching victims are simple, engraved with the names of more than 600 victims of documented racist killings in Mississippi, along with the motives of their attackers.
One man, Malcolm Wright, was beaten to death in front of his family in 1949. What was his crime? “”””””””””””””””””” Further research revealed that, according to his killers, his mule-drawn cart was moving very slowly.
The paintings are among thousands of Exhibits and artifacts Inside the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum and the adjacent Mississippi History Museum. Called the Mississippi Museum, this massive complex is within sight of the state Capitol and is a key part of the state’s America 250 celebration.
“These are the only people we know,” Kiama Johnson, visiting from Monroe, Louisiana, said of the paintings of the victims as she sat behind the screen, holding back tears. “Just imagine the ones we don’t know. Imagine the ones that will never be written in the history books.”
Mississippi’s comprehensive approach to reflecting its history as part of the state’s official commemoration 250th anniversary of the nation It is a stark contrast to what has happened at the national level since then President Donald Trump He returned to the White House in January 2025.
Alleviating discomfort caused by America’s sometimes brutal history has been a major theme of the Trump administration. He fell Executive order His first day back in office is spent Diversity, equity and inclusion efforts In the federal government. This, in addition to the Executive Order issued in March 2025, “Restoring truth and rationality to American history” It led to signs Changed in federal parksexhibits are changed or removed in some cases, and Renaming military bases.
Part of the Republican administration’s preparations To celebrate its 250th anniversary Mode has been included Pressure on federal institutionsincluded SmithsonianTo tell a version of history less focused on discrimination and episodes of racial violence.
And in Mississippi, a temporary exhibit created specifically to commemorate the anniversary — “Made in Mississippi” — fills a space that is routinely transformed to entice visitors back. But it sits in a place where achievement is intertwined with the nation’s dark past that includes Native Americans, slaves, and the civil rights era.
Nan Prince, Director of Collections at the Mississippi Department of Archives & History, he said, were simple instructions from scholars, politicians, civil servants, civil rights and civil rights groups when museums were designed and built.
“Don’t clean anything, don’t bleach anything,” she said. “Just tell the absolute truth.”
Jackson Mayor John Horne was a state senator when he began pushing for a civil rights museum in 1999. His efforts were finally boosted when former Republican National Committee chair Haley Barbour became governor.
Plans for the museum were eventually combined with a parallel effort to move the State History Museum from the Capitol grounds, with the complex opening in 2017.
The approach to creating the State History Museum was the same: telling the whole story, starting with how Native Americans were removed from the land.
“We said at the beginning that we would not hide anything,” Barbour said in an interview, noting that he grew up in the era of apartheid. “We weren’t trying to justify what happened. That’s what people wanted – to say: ‘Look, we’re not proud of this, but we’re not going to deny it.'”
Other states were keen to highlight their diversity in their 250th anniversary presentations. America’s 250th description of neighboring Alabama includes landmarks in the civil rights movement.
Mississippi State takes its history head on. that it “America 250 MS” The platform says the state’s history reflects the American story, with the removal of Native Americans giving way to slavery and slavery leading to the Civil War, followed by Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era.
Horn praised the willingness of Mississippi leaders to use museums to tell the state’s full story.
He added: “We still have problems, and we still have a lot of challenges.” “But it is evidence that progress has been made.”
The History Museum opens with an exhibit exploring Mississippi’s first inhabitants, the Native Americans. The entrance is dominated by a 500-year-old canoe, a living reminder that Native Americans were here thousands of years before settlers arrived, forced them out, and took the land to begin growing cotton, which was raised by slaves.
The Civil Rights Museum is located across the lobby. The first audio presentation was a surprise: “We don’t serve people like you,” says a menacing voice to visitors, ringing out as they cross the museum’s threshold.
It’s one of many phrases popular in the nation’s segregated past that bombard visitors at the exhibition’s opening.
The museum also isn’t shy about presenting one of the state’s most notorious racial killings, the Racist Murder. Emmett Till. The 14-year-old was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered in 1955 after being accused of whistling at a white woman in a rural grocery store in Mississippi.
Till’s murder was a pivotal moment in the civil rights movement. Thousands attended his funeral in Chicago, and his mother, Mamie Till Mobley, insisted that the casket be opened so the country could see the horrific state of her son’s body.
At the end of the story written by Oprah Winfrey, visitors can see 45 caliber pistol Used to kill a teenager.
Lindsay Ward, 49, cried in the lobby after touring the Civil Rights Museum. She grew up in what she described as the sheltered world of Salt Lake City, and said she was never exposed to the topics she encountered during her visit — “this heaviness,” she said.
Ward, who now lives in Denver, said she was disturbed by how recent some of the events were.
“We’re not talking about hundreds and hundreds of years ago. We’re talking about 60 years. It made me want to cry,” she said. “It doesn’t look great, but it’s important to understand what happened in the past.”
Deciding how to tell history has always been a struggle, said Connor Lynch, a history teacher and social justice advocate from Chicago.
“All we have is the human narrative,” he said, and that comes with bias. “I believe that no matter what kind of erasure the country may do, we know the stories. We know the truth.”
In celebration of America 250, the museums created a “Made in Mississippi” plaque that highlights the state’s products and accomplishments.
There’s the popular household cleaner Pine-Sol, the Nissan Frontier, and the Toyota Corolla, a section that notes the state’s involvement in the U.S. space program and medical advances like the first human lung transplant.
There’s one more thing – a showcase for a famous Mississippi quilt maker Hystercine Rankine. that it A quilt telling her father’s story He was killed in 1939.
Jessica Walzer, the exhibit’s curator, said she included it because it is one of the few quilts in the museum’s collection and because it tells a piece of Mississippi history.
“I think it’s important to have something as amazing as this to remind us that Mississippi also has this very difficult history that a lot of people have gone through,” she said.
This fact has long been denied, said Prince, the state’s collections director. For example, visitors to antebellum homes heard about the families who lived there, but they “would never tell you about the people who lived behind the house or the people who built the house or the people who worked in the fields.”
“For a long time, we just tried to ignore it because it was uncomfortable,” she said.