Mississippi reveals its full history for America’s anniversary year, a contrast to federal efforts

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — The glass panels of the Lynching Victims Monolith are simple, etched with the names of more than 600 victims of documented racial killings in Mississippi, along with the attackers’ motives.

One man, Malcolm Wright, was beaten to death in front of his family in 1949. His offense? “Hogging the road.” Further research revealed that his mule-drawn wagon was, to his killers, moving too slowly.

The panels are among thousands of exhibits and artifacts inside the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum and the adjoining Museum of Mississippi History. Called the Two Mississippi Museums, the massive complex in sight of the state Capitol is a central part of the state’s America 250 celebration.

“That’s just the people that we know about,” Kiama Johnson, who was visiting from Monroe, Louisiana, said of the victim panels as she sat beyond the display and fought back tears. “Just imagine the ones that we don’t. Imagine the ones that’s never going to be written in history books.”

Mississippi’s warts-and-all approach to reflecting its history as part of the state’s official commemoration of the nation’s 250th anniversary is a stark contrast with what has taken place at the national level since President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025.

Easing the discomfort of a sometimes brutal American history has been a central theme of Trump’s administration. He signed an executive order his first day back in office eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the federal government. That, along with a March 2025 executive order, ” Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” have led to signs being changed at federal parks, exhibits being altered or in some cases removed, and military bases being renamed.

Part of the Republican administration’s preparations to celebrate the 250th anniversary have included putting pressure on federal institutions, including the Smithsonian, to tell a version of history that is less focused on discrimination and episodes of racial violence.

In Mississippi, a temporary exhibit created specifically for the commemoration — Mississippi Made — fills a space that is routinely changed to entice visitors to return. But it is housed in a space where achievement is intertwined with the state’s dark past involving Native Americans, enslaved people and the Civil Rights era.

Nan Prince, director of collections for the Mississippi Department of Archives & History, said the instructions were simple from scholars, politicians, staff members, and civic and civil rights groups when the museums were being conceived and built.

“Don’t brush over anything, don’t whitewash anything,” she said. “Just tell the absolute truth.”

‘We weren’t going to hide anything’

Jackson Mayor John Horhn was a state senator when he began pushing for the Civil Rights Museum in 1999. His efforts finally got a boost when Haley Barbour, a former Republican National Committee chairman, became governor.

Plans for the museum eventually were 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 a state history museum was the same — tell the full story, beginning with how Native Americans were removed from the land.

“We said at the beginning we weren’t going to hide anything,” Barbour said in an interview, noting that he grew up in an era of segregation. “We weren’t gonna try to justify what was done. That’s what the people wanted — to say, ‘Look, we’re not proud of this, but we’re not going to deny it.’”

Other states have made sure to highlight their diversity in their presentations for the 250th anniversary. The America 250 description for neighboring Alabama includes milestones in the Civil Rights Movement.

Mississippi takes its history head-on. Its “America 250 MS” platform says the state’s history mirrors the American story, with the removal of Native Americans making way for slavery and slavery leading to the Civil War, followed by Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era.

Horhn praised the willingness of Mississippi leaders to use the museums to tell the state’s full story.

“We still have issues, we still have a lot of challenges,” he said. “But it’s a demonstration that progress has been made.”

‘It just made me want to weep’

The History Museum opens into a gallery that explores Mississippi’s first people, the Native Americans. The entrance is dominated by a 500-year-old canoe, a vivid reminder that Native Americans were here thousands of years before settlers arrived and forced them out, taking the land to begin growing cotton, which was tended by enslaved people.

Across the lobby sits the Civil Rights Museum. The first audio exhibit is abrupt: “We don’t serve your kind,” a menacing voice tells visitors, triggered when they cross the museum threshold.

It is one of several phrases once commonplace in the nation’s segregated past that bombard visitors at the opening to the gallery.

The museum also does not shy away from presenting one of the state’s most infamous racial killings, that of Emmett Till. The 14-year-old was kidnapped, tortured and killed in 1955 after being accused of whistling at a white woman in a rural Mississippi grocery store.

Till’s murder was a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights Movement. Thousands came to his funeral in Chicago, and his mother, Mamie Till Mobley, insisted on an open casket so the country could see the gruesome state of her son’s body.

At the end of the narrative, by Oprah Winfrey, visitors can see the .45-caliber pistol used to kill the teenager.

Lindsay Ward, 49, cried in the lobby after touring the Civil Rights Museum. Raised in what she described as a sheltered world in Salt Lake City, she said she had not had any exposure to the topics she encountered during her visit — “this heaviness,” as she put it.

Ward, now living in Denver, said she was troubled by how recent some events were.

“We’re not talking about hundreds and hundreds of years ago. We’re talking 60 years. It just made me want to weep,” she said. “It doesn’t feel great, but it’s important we understand what happened in the past.”

Connor Lynch, a history teacher and social justice advocate from Chicago, said deciding how history will be told has always been a struggle.

“All we have is human narrative” and that comes with bias, he said. “I do believe that no matter what sort of erasure the country might be doing, we know the stories. We know the truth.”

‘A very difficult history,’ on full display

For the America 250 celebration, the museums created ”Mississippi Made,” which highlights the state’s products and achievements.

There is the common household cleaner Pine-Sol, a Nissan Frontier and a Toyota Corolla, a section citing the state’s involvement in the U.S. space program and medical advances such as the first human lung transplant.

There is something else — a display by renowned Mississippi quilter Hystercine Rankin. It is a quilt telling the story of her father being killed in 1939.

Jessica Walzer, the exhibit curator, said she included it because it is one of the few story quilts in the museums’ collection and because it tells part of Mississippi’s history.

“I think it’s important to have something kind of striking like that to kind of remind us that Mississippi also has this very difficult history that a lot of people have been through,” she said.

Prince, the state director of collections, said such truth had long been denied. Visitors to antebellum homes, for instance, heard about the families who lived there, but “they would never once tell you about the people that lived behind the house or the people that built the house or the people that worked the fields,” she said.

“For so long,” she said, “we just tried to gloss over that because it was uncomfortable.”