Mississippi Civil Rights Museum

The Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, which opened in 2017 to mark the state's bicentennial, tells the story of the freedom struggle in Mississippi from 1945 to 1976. The state was the most violent and intransigent battleground of the movement, and the museum does not flinch from any of it: the lynchings, Emmett Till, the Freedom Riders, the murders of Medgar Evers and Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman, the long campaigns to register Black voters.

Eight galleries lead chronologically through that history, with film footage, photographs, the actual rifle used to kill Medgar Evers, and the doors of the Hinds County jail cells. It is harrowing and necessary, and you should give it at least two hours. The ticket includes the Museum of Mississippi History next door.

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A story
The museum's centrepiece is a circular gallery called This Little Light of Mine, which lights up and plays the song louder as more visitors gather inside it. It is genuinely moving — and it sits a few hundred metres from the spot where, in 1961, Freedom Riders were arrested at the Greyhound bus station for entering the whites-only waiting room.

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