Myrlie Evers
Myrlie Evers stared out over the Mississippi Fairgrounds Thursday, and memories from a half century ago flashed through her mind.
She saw the people — young and old, black and white — housed like cattle because they had dared to protest segregation laws in downtown Jackson. They passed the time singing and praying, and those who delivered their food spit on it first.
“Think how far we have come since,” said the 80-year-old widow of Medgar Evers, who was assassinated June 12, 1963, in the wake of that protest.
She praised the building of the new Museum of Mississippi History and the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, which overlook the fairgrounds. Both are slated to be finished in time for Mississippi’s 200th birthday.
The museums will show the world “who we are and where we are going,” Evers said. ”Now I can say, ‘I am a Mississippian,’ and be proud of it.”
Gov. Phil Bryant quoted Medgar Evers as saying that he looked forward to the day that when Mississippi is mentioned, “We will not hang our heads in shame, but we will be anticipating the best.”
Evers joined Bryant and others in groundbreaking for the nation’s only state-run civil rights museum — just four miles from where she cradled her dying husband a half century earlier.
The Mississippi Development Authority estimates the two museums will bring in 180,000 visitors a year, creating a $17.1 million impact and adding 92 indirect jobs.
Archives officials announced Thursday that $5 million of the $10 million needed in private money for the exhibits has already been raised. The state is paying the other half. Another $4 million is being raised for endowments.
The state is spending $40 million to construct the outside of the buildings. Another $40 million is needed to complete them.
“We should not pick and choose which parts of our story to tell, and which parts to leave untold,” Speaker Pro Tem Greg Snowden said. “All Mississippi history belongs to all Mississippians, even those parts — maybe especially those parts — we wish had turned out differently than they did.”
When the Ku Klux Klan killed three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner, “on that terrible night in 1964, one of the men in the murder party was a Snowden,” he said. “Not a close relative, mind you. I never met the man. But my blood kin, nevertheless. That story, too, will be told here. It must be told here.”
