Thursday, July 6, and I was on the road from Newbern, Alabama to Jackson, Mississippi. Along the way, I stopped for lunch in Meridian, Mississippi, where I felt very Southern eating collard greens, summer squash, fried green tomatoes, cornbread, and the best macaroni and cheese I have ever tasted. The restaurant staff and clientele, like almost everywhere I went in the South, were far more racially integrated than anywhere I can think of in Massachusetts.

In Jackson, I spent most of the afternoon at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. Like the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, this museum is less than a decade old, opening on December 9, 2017, after years of stalling by the Mississippi government (you can read the tortured history here). The $15.00 admission ticket gets you into both this museum and the adjacent Museum of Mississippi History, but even I have a limited museum capacity and decided that one was enough for me. I spent about two hours learning about Medgar Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer, Emmett Till, and a host of other Mississippi people and events that shaped the civil rights movement.

I spent the night in Jackson then drove to the Museum of the Mississippi Delta in Greenwood, which was quite different from the other museums I’d been visiting. With a mission to “to collect, preserve, interpret and exhibit tangible artifacts which enable the Museum to educate the public about the art, history and natural history of the Mississippi Delta and its surrounding regions,” there was much less focus on civil rights.

Another family was visiting at the same time, two young white boys and their grandparents, and I overheard them in the military history room, the grandparents telling them about their ancestors who fought in the Civil War. There was a children’s area next door where kids could dress up as Confederate soldiers and pretend to be aboard the Star of the West, a Union-turned-Confederate ship that ultimately sank in the Tallahatchie River near Greenwood.

Over 600,000 people died in the Civil War, approximately 2% of the population, which would translate to roughly six million Americans today.  We’re taught in history that wars have winners and losers, but who in America “won” in the Civil War?  I thought about this as I listened to the family in the Mississippi Delta museum talk about their ancestors who fought in a war for a cause that now seems abhorrent and inhumane to many of us.

I was reading a book on my trip called How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning of the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith (Little, Brown, and Company, 2021).  Smith writes about his visits to historic sites around the country and his observations about how the history of slavery is told. Here’s a quote that captures some of my thoughts that day in the museum (page 142).

What would it take–what does it take–for you to confront a false history even if it means shattering the stories you have been told throughout your life?  Even if it means having to fundamentally reexamine who you are and who your family has been?  Just because something is difficult to accept doesn’t mean you should refuse to accept it.  Just because someone tells you a story doesn’t make that story true.

It was a short trip from Greenwood to Money, the town where Emmett Till was brutally beaten and lynched by two white men in August of 1955, his body dumped in the same Tallahatchie River I read about earlier that day. His mother, Mamie Till, was another one of the unsung heroines of the civil rights movement, insisting that her son’s body be returned to Chicago, where his open casket funeral allowed people all over the world to bear witness to his savage murder. Overcoming unimaginable grief, she went on to graduate from college and worked for civil rights for the rest of her life, something I didn’t know until I read about it last year in the book Choosing Brave by Angela Joy.

Emmett was murdered for “flirting” with Carolyn Bryant, the 21-year-old white woman working in her family’s grocery store, an accusation Carolyn would deny later in life. I went looking for the ruins of the Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market, which supposedly is still standing, but I couldn’t find them, although I did find the sign commemorating the event. Before I went on my trip, I read about another sign, marking the spot where Emmett’s body was found, that’s on its fourth version, the other three having been thrown into the river or shot full of bullet holes.

I felt a bit spooked when I turned off the highway in search of the store, and it felt like the landscape hadn’t changed much since 1955. There were acres of crops in all directions, and I realized from the puffy white stuff blowing around the sides of the road that these were cotton fields. The road turned to a mix of gravel and red dirt shortly before I spotted the sign, and I got out to take pictures and walk around a bit in my fruitless attempt to find the store. Like so many times during the week, it seemed almost unreal that I was standing in a place where history had been made–the Freedom Riders stepping off a bus at the Montgomery Greyhound Station where the Freedom Rides Museum now stands, people being put up for sale at slave markets on the same land the Legacy Museum is built on, and 14-year-old Emmett Till walking up the dirt path to buy candy at Bryant’s Grocery Store in the spot where I now stood across from endless cotton fields.

Books about Mississippi

Greenwood

That Flag by Tameka Fryer Brown (HarperCollins, 2023)

Midnight Without a Moon by Linda Williams Jackson (Clarion Books, 2017)

Choosing Brave: How Mamie Till-Mobley and Emmett Till Sparked the Civil Rights Movement by Angela Joy (Roaring Brook Press, 2022)

Ghost Boys by Jewell Parker Rhodes (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2018)

Revolution by Deborah Wiles (Scholastic, 2014)

Jackson

Midnight Teacher: Lilly Ann Granderson and Her Secret School by Janet Halfmann (Lee and Low, 2018)

The Lucky Ones by Linda Williams Jackson (Candlewick, 2022)

Freedom School, Yes! by Amy Littlesugar (Philomel Books, 2001)

Loretta Little Looks Back: Three Voices Go Tell It by Andrea Davis Pinkney (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2020)

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor (Dial, 1976)

Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer: Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement by Carole Boston Weatherford (Candlewick, 2015)