Jackson: Mississippi Civil Rights Museum
The Mississippi Civil Rights Museum is a museum in Jackson, Mississippi. Its mission is to document, exhibit the history of, and educate the public about the American Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. state of Mississippi between 1945 and 1970. The museum secured $20 million in funding from the Mississippi Legislature in April 2011 after Governor Haley Barbour testified in favor of its funding. Ground was broken in 2013, and the museum opened on December 9, 2017.
According to Mississippi state senator John Horhn, it is the first state-sponsored civil rights museum in the United States.
The Mississippi State Historical Museum (located in the Old Mississippi State Capitol) opened a civil rights exhibit in the mid-1980s. But by 2001, with only two memorials to the civil rights movement in Mississippi, civil rights activists, historians, and tourism officials began planning for a civil rights museum.
The Mississippi Civil Rights Museum opened with a dedication ceremony on December 9, 2017. It is the first museum about the U.S. civil rights movement to be sponsored by a U.S. state.
The Mississippi Civil Rights Museum is adjacent to the new Museum of Mississippi History. The buildings share a common entrance and lobby. The civil rights museum has several sections. Visitors first move through an exhibit on the slave trade, then through a section on how the Emancipation Proclamation and Reconstruction created African American communities that began to thrive. Visitors then enter a large room dominated by a tree. The tree represents lynching, and on the leaves are images of lynchings and the types of discrimination permitted and encouraged by Jim Crow laws. The names of more than 600 African Americans lynched in Mississippi are etched onto five large memorial stones. These first three sections are cramped, a physical environment intended to give the patron a sense of the constraint of slavery. The remaining segments of the museum are more spacious, and focus on a 30-year period during which Mississippi was in the forefront of the civil rights struggle. Included in these sections are an exhibit on individuals murdered for their civil rights activism.
The Mississippi Civil Rights Museum drew praise from civil rights activists who attended the dedication as an honest depiction of Mississippi's past. The media noted that the Museum of Mississippi History, which covers the state's history from the Paleozoic to the present, offers little coverage of the civil rights era, leaving that to the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. Holland Cotter, reviewing the museum for The New York Times, wrote that the museum rivets attention. Concentrating on a relatively narrow time frame and location, he said, makes the museum's energy feel combustive. So does the fact that, to a startling degree, and despite being a state-sponsored institution, the museum refuses to sugarcoat history. He singled out the exhibits for special praise, calling them magnetic.
As Trump toured the museums, protests took place outside. Some held signs saying Make America Civil Again and Lock Him Up. Some protesters chanted NoTrump, no hate, no KKK in the USA, while others stood by mute, their mouths covered by stickers featuring the Confederate battle flag.
Officials estimated that 180,000 people would visit the two museums in their first year. By February 22, 2018, more than 80,000 people had patronized the museums, and museum officials believed that attendance could make it the second-most visited civil rights museum in the South (after the National Civil Rights Museum in Tennessee).
The Mississippi River Basin Model - FULL VIDEO TOUR (Jackson, MS)
Just WOW! Probably the BEST hidden gem I have ever seen!! and it's totally hidden in a forest! We were strugglign to find things to see and do while driving through Jackson, MS.... but this secret Mississippi River Basin Model hidden in an engulfing forest was probably the pinnacle of our trip!
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The Mississippi River Basin Model
Built by prisoners of war, the largest small-scale model ever built includes eight miles of tiny streams that now sit abandoned.
In the 1940s, before computers were up to the task, when engineers needed to model a complex system, they would do just that, literally “modeling it,” by building amazingly elaborate scale models.
While the Army Corps of Engineers built many such models over the last century, none were on the scale of the Mississippi River Basin Model. It is the largest small-scale model ever built, representing 41% of the US in miniature, and the more than 15,000 miles of rivers that make up the Mississippi river basin laid out in eight miles worth of tiny, winding streams on 200 acres of park land. Today it sits abandoned and overgrown.
In 1927, half-a-million people had been displaced, thousands of homes were destroyed, multiple levees had failed, and millions of acres across seven states had flooded. The financial damage caused by the great Mississippi flood of 1927 was equivalent to a third of the entire federal budget at the time, some 1.3 trillion dollars in modern currency, and Herbert Hoover called it “the greatest peace-time calamity in the history of the country.” The outcry was enormous and Congress and the Army Corps of Engineers sprung into action. Levees were built, laws were passed, and the great Mississippi was tamed. All the same, ten years later it happened again.
Clearly there was a problem. What measures had succeeded in one place simply created a new flood in another. The problem was that the complexity of the Mississippi river was huge and the problem was being approached place-by-place in individual localities, but never looked at as a whole. What was needed was a way to see what would happen to the Mississippi given a certain set of inputs, to have some way to model the entire river system in total. That is exactly what the Army Corps built.
Begun in 1943 during World War II, the US was understandably short on manpower, so the Army Corps used the manpower that was available, and which happened to be free - captured Italian and German prisoners of war. Many of the laborers were German engineers handpicked for the project, among them the “Afrika Korps,” the German soldiers sent to fight in northern Africa.
The Army Corps began building the most ambitious research project they had ever undertaken. Aimed to be completed by 1948, the model took a bit longer to be finished. Though elements of the model were in use as early as 1949, the model wasn’t truly finished until 1966, a full 26 years after it was started. Six years later it was used for the last time.
The model, built at a skewed ratio, with a horizontal scale of 1:2000, but vertical scale of 1:100 (meaning the Rocky Mountains would be a towering 50-feet tall) did get good usage over its operating years. It saw 79 simulations run, with each simulation taking anywhere from weeks to months. In 1952, information gathered using the model prevented major flooding in Omaha, avoiding as much as 65 million in flood damages. The site also became a tourist destination for a time, drawing over 5,000 people a year to stride like giants along walkways above the banks of the tiny Mississippi.
However by the early 1970s the push towards computer modeling had begun, and by the 1980s, the model simply became a burden for the Army Corps. In 1990, they left. The site was transferred to the city of Jackson, but was too expensive for them to maintain, so the city simply abandoned it.
Listed on the Mississippi Heritage Trusts’ 10 Most Endangered List in 2000, today the model sits surrounded and hidden by overgrown woods in the Buddy Butts Park. It is open to the public to visit, but the tiny concrete banks of the rivers are now overgrown with life-size foliage.
Know Before You Go
Enter Buddy Butts park and drive straight through, past the golf. Enter through the gate (if it is open) and follow road a short way (less than 1/4 mile) to park alongside derelict building. Explore carefully; there are many open holes and old sump pumps.
Video Title: The Mississippi River Basin Model - FULL VIDEO TOUR (Jackson, MS)
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Christmas Parade 1948 or 49 Jackson Ms
A clip of a Christmas parade in Jackson Mississippi from home movies made by Clyde Maxwell. The parade was probably in 1949 but it could have been 1948. Initially shot across the street from Hemphill Drugs and Gandys Steaks at the corner of North State St and Capitol Street. Other footage is looking northeast from in front of Hemphill Drugs showing the War Memorial Building and the Old Capitol. Note the building down the street with a bay window on the second floor is still there today.
History Is Lunch: Jeff Giambrone, Mississippi in World War I
On November 7, 2018, Jeff Giambrone presented “Mississippi in World War I” as part of the History Is Lunch series.
Known as the war to end all wars, World War I officially ended on November 11, 1918. “I want to explore the effects of the conflict on Mississippians,” said Giambrone. “I’ll discuss the experiences of men who were on the front lines but also explore life for civilians on the home front.”
The entry of the United States into World War I had a huge impact on Mississippi. Local draft boards were organized in the state on May 18, 1917, and men between the ages of 21 and 45 were required to register for conscription. A total of 344,724 Mississippians registered for service during World War I, and of that number 56,740 actually fought.
“There were many noteworthy Mississippians who served during WWI,” said Giambrone. “For instance, Fox Conner was chief of operations for General John J. Pershing and Hank Stovall, Mississippi’s only ace of the war, shot down six enemy planes.”
Jeff T. Giambrone is a native of Bolton. He earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Mississippi State University and a master’s in history from Mississippi College. Giambrone works as a reference librarian in the state archives. He is the author of four books: Beneath Torn and Tattered Flags: A Regimental History of the 38th Mississippi Infantry, C.S.A.; An Illustrated Guide to the Vicksburg Campaign and National Military Park; Remembering Mississippi's Confederates; and Vicksburg and the War, co-authored with Gordon Cotton. His articles have appeared in North South Civil War Magazine, Military Images Magazine, Civil War Monitor, and North South Trader's Civil War Magazine.
History Is Lunch is a weekly lecture series of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History that explores different aspects of the state's past. The hour-long programs are held in the Craig H. Neilsen Auditorium of the Museum of Mississippi History and Mississippi Civil Rights Museum building in Jackson. MDAH livestreams videos of the program at noon on Wednesdays on their Facebook page,
Places You Didn't Know Were in Mississippi | Mississippi Roads | MPB
Places You Didn’t Know Were in Mississippi
Strange and unique places in Mississippi that you didn’t know where there are the subject of this episode. We feature an airplane recovery yard in a very unique place, The International Museum of Muslim Cultures in Jackson and Artist, Johnny Knight’s Treehouse in Mendenhall.
Learn more at
History Is Lunch: Shelby Harriel, Behind the Rifle: Women Soldiers in Civil War Mississippi.
On April 3, 2019, Shelby Harriel presented Behind the Rifle: Women Soldiers in Civil War Mississippi as part of the History Is Lunch series.
During the Civil War, Mississippi’s strategic location on the Mississippi River and the state's system of railroads drew the attention of opposing forces who clashed in major battles for control over these resources. The names of these engagements--Vicksburg, Jackson, Port Gibson, Corinth, Iuka, Tupelo, and Brice’s Crossroads--along with the narratives of the men who fought there resonate in Civil War literature. However, there were also a number of female soldiers disguised as males who stood shoulder to shoulder with them on the firing lines.
Harriel’s groundbreaking study discusses those women soldiers with a connection to Mississippi--either by birth or battle.
I’ve uncovered new information about formerly recorded female fighters, debunked a few others, and introduced more than twenty previously undocumented ones,” Harriel said. “I’m interested in why they chose to fight at a time when military service for women was banned, and the horrors they experienced.”
“The old argument that there is nothing new to write about the Civil War is obviously wrong, as illustrated by Shelby Harriel’s Behind the Rifle: Women Soldiers in Civil War Mississippi,” said Timothy B. Smith, author of Mississippi in the Civil War: The Homefront. “Full of new research and insightful analysis, Behind the Rifle provides a wonderful overview of the important role of fighting women in Mississippi’s Civil War history.”
Shelby Harriel is an instructor of mathematics at Pearl River Community College. Her research on women soldiers of the Civil War has been published in various newspapers, magazines, websites, blogs, and brochures for the National Park Service and state historic sites. She has given numerous presentations about women soldiers in over ten states.
History Is Lunch is a weekly lecture series of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History that explores different aspects of the state's past. The hour-long programs are held in the Craig H. Neilsen Auditorium of the Museum of Mississippi History and Mississippi Civil Rights Museum building in Jackson. MDAH livestreams videos of the program at noon on Wednesdays on their Facebook page,
Mississippi's Capital River Region
Erik Hastings tours Jackson, Vicksburg, and Natchez, Mississippi. Jackson, the cultural center of the state, is known for metropolitan sophistication, culinary surprises, museums, and family-oriented recreation. Vicksburg's National Military Park and museum chronicle the 47-day Civil War siege of this famous antebellum town. Natchez has preserved much of its pre Civil War aura, and carriage tours make it easy to see historic homes built by some of the wealthiest families in the nation. Fun family vacation.
Please like and share this video and subscribe to my YouTube Channel. More videos and travel resources can be found at
History Is Lunch: W. Scott Bell, The Camel Regiment: A History of the 43rd Mississippi Infantry
On June 5, 2019, W. Scott Bell presented The Camel Regiment: A History of the Bloody 43rd Mississippi Volunteer Infantry, CSA, 1862-65 as part of the History Is Lunch series.
“The 43rd Mississippi Infantry was one of the state’s finest regiments, fighting in 14 major battles including Corinth, Vicksburg, and Jackson,” Bell said. “They were also the only regiment east of the Mississippi River to use a camel--an African dromedary known as Old Douglas.”
The camel hauled equipment and instruments for the soldiers and musicians. He was so beloved that the soldiers adopted him as their mascot, and the 43rd became known as the Camel Regiment.
W. Scott Bell is a descendant of a member of the 43rd regiment, Corporal John K. Bell. He is a life member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the recipient of several awards from the organization, including membership in the Bonnie Blue Society for his scholarly research and published literature. Bell is retired from the United States Postal Service.
History Is Lunch is a weekly lecture series of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History that explores different aspects of the state's past. The hour-long programs are held in the Craig H. Neilsen Auditorium of the Museum of Mississippi History and Mississippi Civil Rights Museum building in Jackson. MDAH livestreams videos of the program at noon on Wednesdays on their Facebook page,
Vietnam Veterans | @ISSUE | MPB
THOUSANDS OF MISSISSIPPIANS IN THE ARMED FORCES WENT TO VIETNAM.
MANY PAID THE ULTIMATE PRICE.
HEAR STORIES FROM THOSE WHO RETURNED, AND HOW THEY’RE GETTING HELP.
Learn more at
Old Atmos Building Fire: Jackson, MS
April 22, 2014
Veterans Home Residents Receives Early Memorial Day Honor
The residents of the MS State Veterans Home received a early Memorial Day Honor. On Friday the Mississippi State Veterans Home was buzzing with activity. Workers from Gulf State Manufacturers, a manufacturing company of custom made constructed buildings located in Starkville, MS., were in town putting one of the finishing touches to the new Veterans Memorial Monument located in the front of the Home. Gulf States began producing projects over forty years ago. To date, they have supplied over 41,700 buildings to all fifty states and in over thirty foreign countries. There craftsmanship goes far beyond making constructed buildings. Danny Coggins, plant manager, tells KOL in 2009 this company made a statue of a Minute Man cut from steel. After word of the display got out all of the National Guard Armory's in the state requested one. The company did not hesitate to fill this order showing their patriotism. Today GS works with Gold Star Moms, Family of Our Fallen Heroes, to bring these special one of a kind memorials such as the one placed today throughout the South.
200 Years of Mississippi | Mississippi Roads | MPB
Mississippi celebrates its bicentennial in 2017 and Mississippi Roads takes a look at Mississippi’s history. From a vast area populated by Native Americans and shaped by the European Colonial Era to statehood, we take a look at what and who we are today and a hint of who we are becoming. We also feature a story on the first capital building Texada, located in Natchez and the Key Brother’s historical flight over Meridian which resonates even to this day.
Learn more at
Vicksburg Run Through History | Mississippi Roads | MPB
On this edition of Mississippi Roads, it's all about speed. We stop by Vicksburg to visit one of the largest 10k road races in the state, then get hands-on with some amazing technology at NASA Infinity Space Center. Plus, it's pedal-to-the-metal with Go Cart races in Jackson, and this little piggy goes weee! - all the way around the track at some exciting pig races.
Farmweek Goes on the Road to Jackson, Mississippi | March 16, 2017
Farmweek travels to Jackson, MS. | Getting to Know MS Farm Bureau | Farmweek Goes On a Field Trip to the Mississippi Agriculture and Forestry Museum | Where Politics & Agriculture Meet |
Mississippi Roads | 1402 | All About the Dead: Historic Cemeteries | MPB
From Cedar Hill Cemetery in Vicksburg.
Featuring Friendship Cemetery in Columbus, Natchez City Cemetery and the Chapel of the Cross Cemetery in Madison County.
Cemeteries around the state are hallowed places that tell us a lot about our history, like Cedar Hill Cemetery in Vicksburg, one of the country’s oldest and largest cemeteries that’s still in use today. Then we head up to Friendship Cemetery in Columbus where our national Memorial Day holiday has its roots. Down Highway 61 in Natchez, many of the state’s first settlers found their resting places. Finally, the haunting story of Henry Vick at Chapel of the Cross in Madison County plays a central role in that area’s history.
Learn more at
VHS MS Jackson Old Museum 1998
State History Museum at the Old State Capitol Building at Jackson, Mississippi as seen in January 1998.
My visit included views of the building interior and a variety of historic exhibits. The Civil War and Civil Rights are both well covered.
Photographed on my VHS-C video camera.
History Is Lunch: Katie McKee, Mississippi in the Work of Sherwood Bonner
On July 10, 2019, Katie McKee presented “Mississippi in the Work of Sherwood Bonner as part of the History Is Lunch series.
Katherine Sherwood Bonner was born to a wealthy and aristocratic family in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on February 26, 1849. Publishing under the pen name Sherwood Bonner, she was an astute cultural observer whose work questioned what it meant to be a writer in the post-Civil War South. McKee examines Bonner’s life in her new book Reading Reconstruction: Sherwood Bonner and the Literature of the Post-Civil War South.
Bonner challenged the conventions of region, gender, and literature by transgressing the limits customarily imposed on all three. “She moved out of the South to pursue her writerly ambitions in New England and then Europe, but never really left Mississippi behind,” McKee said. “Bonner’s home state consistently shapes her imaginative landscapes, even as she experiments with using literature to reshape the southern world she knew, sometimes through surprising—and unladylike—humor.”
“Like unto Like, the single novel Bonner published in her lifetime, directly engages with Mississippi’s postbellum political life, especially its racial violence and the rise of Lost Cause ideology,” said McKee. “Her two short story collections, Dialect Tales and Suwanee River Tales, indicate her consistent absorption in the debates of her time, as she ponders shifting definitions of citizenship, questions the evolving rhetoric of postwar reconciliation, and readily employs humor to disrupt conventional domestic scenarios and gender roles.”
Katie McKee is director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and McMullan Professor of Southern Studies and Professor of English at the University of Mississippi. She earned her BA from Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, and an MA and PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the co-editor with Deborah Barker of American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary.
History Is Lunch is a weekly lecture series of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History that explores different aspects of the state's past. The hour-long programs are held in the Craig H. Neilsen Auditorium of the Museum of Mississippi History and Mississippi Civil Rights Museum building in Jackson. MDAH livestreams videos of the program at noon on Wednesdays on their Facebook page,
History Is Lunch: Max Grivno, The Last Slave: Sylvester Magee in History and Memory”
On February 21, 2018, Max Grivno presented The Last Slave: Sylvester Magee in History and Memory as part of the History Is Lunch lecture series.
“As Mississippians commemorated the centennial of the Civil War and struggled through the most intense and violent years of the Civil Rights Movement, an aged man from south Mississippi captured the nation’s attention when a handful of local historians and journalists claimed that he was the last Union veteran, one of the last surviving ex-slaves, and the oldest living American,” Grivno said. “From 1964 until his death in 1971 at the remarkable—if undocumented—age of 131 years, Sylvester Magee of Hattiesburg became something of a celebrity. His story was splashed across newspapers throughout the country. He received birthday letters from presidents Johnson and Nixon, appeared on nationally televised programs, and once had his birthday declared Sylvester Magee Day by the Mississippi Legislature. But was any of it true?”
Based on the papers of historians who attempted to reconstruct his life in the 1960s, along with records of the planters who may have held the Magee family in bondage, Grivno examines what we can know about Sylvester Magee.
“While the evidence suggests that Mr. Magee was born sometime in the 1890s, the stories that swirled around him and the historians who investigated his case are, nevertheless, important,” Grivno said. “Regardless of his actual age, Mr. Magee opens a window onto how Mississippians—both black and white—remembered slavery a century after emancipation, how they attempted to situation stories of slavery within the Freedom Struggle of the 1960s, and how conversations about slavery shape our present.
Max Grivno is associate professor of history at the University of Southern Mississippi. He was named the 2016 Humanities Scholar of the Year by the Mississippi Humanities Council. His book Gleanings of Freedom: Free Labor and Slavery along the Mason-Dixon Line, 1790-1860, was published in 2011 by the University of Illinois Press. Grivno is currently writing From Bondage to Freedom: Slavery in Mississippi, 1690-1865, which is under contract with the University Press of Mississippi as part of the Heritage of Mississippi Series and is researching a third book, tentatively titled Bandits, Klansmen, Rioters, and Strikers: Violence in the Alabama-Mississippi Black Belt,1830-1917.
History Is Lunch is a weekly lecture series of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History that explores different aspects of the state's past. The hour-long programs are held in the Craig H. Neilsen Auditorium of the Museum of Mississippi History and Mississippi Civil Rights Museum building in Jackson. MDAH livestreams videos of the program at noon on Wednesdays on their Facebook page.
Not Forgotten; FBI Building Sign Dedication Jackson, MS DOCUMENTARY
I had the distinct honor and pleasure, along with Mr. Ellsworth Best, to produce, write and narrate this mini documentary which celebrates the lives of four courageous men. Men who loved their families, their communities and their country! On June 21, 2011, we dedicated the newest symbol of justice in Mississippi; the FBI Feild Office Building in Jackson, Mississippi, to three civilians and one Special Agent. This was indeed historic, for this type of recognition had never been done before! The date was also quite significant inasmuch as it was the exact date that these three young civil right workers were found buried in a farm pond dam or levee based on a tip. The FBI Special Agent who sought justice in their wrongful deaths was a dedicated and reliable agent named Roy K. Moore, whose case was portrayed in the movie Mississippi Burning starring Wilam Defoe. Therefore in eternal remembrance, we proudly dedicate this FBI building, the James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michal Schwerner and FBI Special Agent Roy K. Moore building for all time!
An Asylum in Vicksberg Mississippi | Ghost Asylum
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TWC heads south to Vicksburg, Mississippi to investigate the massive Kuhn State Hospital.
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