March 9-11 -  Jackson, Mississippi

We arrived in Jackson on Saturday night and enjoyed a real Southern dinner at the iconic Mayflower Restaurant in downtown with my brother Josh and sister-in-law Judy.  You really can't beat their soft shelled crabs.  So wonderful to be visiting my family with my friends.

my sister in law Judy Wiener in front of the Eudora Welty home

We started Sunday morning with a walk around their neighborhood - Belhaven.  Walking by Eudora Welty's home, Belhaven College and many beautiful homes.  This neighborhood is close to downtown and many of the residents joined with my family to try to preserve white students' participation in the Jackson Public Schools after white flight in the 70's created a number of "seg academies" in Jackson.  Josh and Judy worked through the organization Parents for Public Schools.  to educate folks about the strengths of the public schools, to bolster support for the schools and to add volunteers on parent-teacher organizations.  In our tour around Jackson we visited the magnet schools their kids attended for elementary and middle school as well as Murrah High School where they also attended.  Sadly the percentage of white students in these schools has dropped a lot since their children attended.

We moved on to the new Mississippi Civil Rights Museum which recently opened.  This museum is PACKED with information and exhibits and of course focuses strongly on the movement in Mississippi.  In the middle of the museum there is a gigantic soft sculpture that looks like a flame. As you move through the exhibits you can view the sculpture and see it change color.  There were a number of black church groups there on the day we visited with lots of young children and watching them experience this museum was so interesting. i was actually concerned that some of the films could have been traumatizing for the young ones. There was also a sound track of the music of the Movement spirituals emanating from the light sculpture. There was almost too much information for us to absorb and luckily Judy told us we couldn't possibly read everything if we wanted to experience all eight galleries.

The next morning we were lucky to be included in a Smith College Civil Right tour that had an appointment to visit the Medgar Evers home in Jackson.  There had been a lot of info at the museum on Medgar Evers' leadership in the movement as well as his assassination in his driveway.  From the archivist of Tougaloo College we learned more about Evers and his wife Myrlie.  Evers was the first field secretary of the NAACP. The details about how they had built their modest home without a front door so that no one could come in that way to hurt them was chilling.  And their daily routine of all exiting the car through the passenger side and never having the porch light on as they entered through the side door from the carport was emblematic of their ever-present danger.

Our tour continued to the Smith Robertson School - the first school for black students.  Their graduates included Richard Wright who was valedictorian in 1925.. This is a little gem of a museum. The black and white photos were fabulous.

The museum had a section devoted to Medgar Evans as well as a dramatic corner: