The New Mississippi Civil Rights Museum Refuses to Sugarcoat History<br />At the same time, an exhibition often startling in its political candor — I can’t imagine anything like it at the Metropolitan Museum — isn’t afraid to dwell on the region’s very real beauties, embodied by an<br />1823 Mississippi landscape painting by John James Audubon, or in a 1934 photograph of three chicly dressed African-American women on a Saturday stroll in Grenada, a city about 100 miles northeast of Jackson.<br />Its time frame — roughly 30 years between World War II and the mid-1970s — is narrow compared with<br />that of the Mississippi history museum, or the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington.<br />A reconstituted Museum of Mississippi History — the original was lost to Hurricane Katrina — simultaneously<br />made its debut in the same new $90 million building occupied by the Civil Rights Museum.<br />Three months after the second hung jury, in June 1964, three civil rights activists — James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman<br />and Michael Henry Schwerner — were murdered in Philadelphia, Miss.<br />And I heard them loud and clear when I returned to Jackson to see the new Mississippi Civil Rights Museum that recently opened here.
