Miss. civil rights history embraced

JACKSON, Miss. — For all the talk about America being a multiethnic melting pot of cultures, the complex history of race relations in Mississippi is written primarily in two colors.

Black and white.

Now, with the advent of successful civil rights museums in Memphis, Tenn. and Birmingham, Ala., some folks in Mississippi are starting to see a new color.

Green. As in the color of tourist dollars.

Several public officials — from Republican Gov. Haley Barbour, who is white, to Democratic state Sen. Hillman Frazier of Jackson, who is black — are promoting the idea of building a museum dedicated to telling the history of the civil rights movement in Mississippi.

“The irony is that we have the executive branch and the legislative branch in Mississippi talking about a civil rights museum. I never thought that I would live to see the day when this would happen,” said political scientist Leslie B. McLemore, who serves on the Jackson City Council and is director of the Fannie Lou Hamer National Institute on Citizenship and Democracy at Jackson State University.

Mississippi’s civil rights history includes slavery, lynchings and systematic suppression of voting rights. The prospect of putting that brutal narrative on display comes during an election year, no less. Barbour and most lawmakers are expected to seek new terms in 2007.

For decades, many Mississippians have cringed at the mere mention of the state’s civil rights record.

Then-Gov. Kirk Fordice, running for re-election in 1995, roared at the Neshoba County Fair that the state should not look back.

“I don’t believe we need to keep running this state by ‘Mississippi Burning’ and apologizing for 30 years ago,” the Republican Fordice said, eliciting a rowdy cheer from his sweating supporters in the mostly white crowd.

The opponent Fordice defeated that year was Secretary of State Dick Molpus, a Democrat who was a native of Neshoba County. At a memorial service in 1989, Molpus publicly apologized to the families of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman — the three civil rights workers slain by Klansmen in the county 25 years earlier. Although Molpus was only a child when the infamous killings took place, he said someone needed to express remorse.

The 1988 movie “Mississippi Burning” was a fictionalized account of the investigation into the slayings.

On June 21, 2005 — 41 years to the day after the three young men were shot execution-style and buried in a red clay dam — a Neshoba County jury convicted one-time Klan leader Edgar Ray “Preacher” Killen of three counts of manslaughter in the crimes.

Bills to create a Mississippi civil rights museum will be considered during the 2007 legislative session, which started Tuesday. Barbour proposes $500,000 for planning; some lawmakers are eyeing a $50 million bond bill to construct and equip the museum.

Frazier — who co-chaired a museum study group with Rep. John Reeves, R-Jackson — said he believes lawmakers have overcome a “fear factor” in dealing with the potentially sensitive topic.

Frazier is a frequent traveler and says he has seen how a Holocaust museum in Israel serves both the high-minded purpose of educating the public and the more practical purpose of boosting the economy. After all, both historians and tourists need hotel rooms, meals and gasoline.

Reeves said there’s a sense of urgency to act before memories fade and artifacts disappear.

“That struggle benefited not only black Americans, but white Americans as well,” Reeves said.

(Associated Press)