Jackson, Mississippi has become a focal point for how the United States is marking its 250th anniversary through public history—particularly when that history includes violence, slavery and segregation.
At the Two Mississippi Museums complex on the grounds of the state Capitol, the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum and the adjoining Museum of Mississippi History are presenting exhibits that officials and visitors say avoid sanitizing the past. The framing is visible in the display of the Lynching Victims Monolith, whose glass panels are etched with more than 600 victims of documented racial killings in Mississippi, along with what the exhibit describes as the attackers’ motives.
Nan Prince, director of collections for the Mississippi Department of Archives & History, said the museum-building instructions were designed to confront uncomfortable history rather than soften it. In remarks included in the reporting, she said, “Don’t brush over anything, don’t whitewash anything,” and added, “Just tell the absolute truth.”
One visitor, Kiama Johnson of Monroe, Louisiana, described the monolith’s scope and the limits of what history records in exhibit form. She said, “That’s just the people that we know about,” referring to the victim panels, and she added, “Imagine the ones that we don’t. Imagine the ones that’s never going to be written in history books.”
The museums’ contrast with federal changes is part of the story of how commemoration is unfolding nationwide since President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025. The Associated Press report said the administration’s agenda has included an executive order issued on Trump’s first day eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the federal government, along with a March 2025 executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The reporting described how those actions have been followed by changing signs at federal parks, altering or removing some exhibits, and renaming military bases, while the administration has also put pressure on federal institutions, including the Smithsonian, to tell a version of history less focused on discrimination and episodes of racial violence.
In Mississippi, the America 250 effort includes not only the two permanent museums but also a temporary exhibit created specifically for the commemoration called “Mississippi Made.” The report described the exhibit as highlighting the state’s products and achievements, including recognizable consumer and automotive brands such as Pine-Sol and vehicles like a Nissan Frontier and a Toyota Corolla. It also said the exhibit includes references to Mississippi’s involvement in the U.S. space program and medical advances such as the first human lung transplant.
But the same commemoration space is also described as keeping the state’s darker chapters intertwined with its story of progress—beginning with Native American removal and continuing through slavery and the Civil Rights era. According to the reporting, the state’s “America 250 MS” platform describes a narrative arc that links the removal of Native Americans making way for slavery to the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Jim Crow era.
The civil-rights centerpiece contains more direct and unsettling portrayals. The report described the museum entrance as introducing phrases associated with the nation’s segregated past; in one audio exhibit at the threshold, a voice says, “We don’t serve your kind.” The museum also includes depictions tied to Emmett Till, including an account of his 1955 kidnapping, torture and killing after being accused of whistling at a white woman in a rural Mississippi grocery store. The Associated Press report said Till’s case is presented as a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights Movement, with thousands coming to his funeral in Chicago and his mother, Mamie Till Mobley, insisting on an open casket; it also said visitors can see a .45-caliber pistol used to kill Till at the end of that narrative, with narration by Oprah Winfrey.
The state’s approach is also rooted, according to the reporting, in efforts that began years earlier. The Associated Press report said Jackson Mayor John Horhn was a state senator when he began pushing for the Civil Rights Museum in 1999, and that the museum’s development received a boost when Haley Barbour became governor. The report also said the museum complex opened in 2017 after plans were combined with efforts to move the state history museum from the Capitol grounds.
Horhn and Barbour framed the goal as telling the full story. In an interview described in the report, Barbour said, “We said at the beginning we weren’t going to hide anything,” and added, “We weren’t gonna try to justify what was done,” saying that people wanted an approach that acknowledges wrongdoing without denial. Horhn, in comments included in the reporting, said there are still “issues” and “a lot of challenges,” but he described the museums as showing that “progress has been made.”
As visitors toured the displays, the reporting included reactions that highlighted both discomfort and the perceived importance of remembering. Lindsay Ward, 49, said she cried in the lobby after touring the Civil Rights Museum and described encountering what she called “this heaviness,” adding, “We’re not talking about hundreds and hundreds of years ago. We’re talking 60 years. It just made me want to weep.” Connor Lynch, a history teacher and social justice advocate from Chicago, said deciding how history is told has long been difficult and argued that narrative always carries bias, while saying, “I do believe that no matter what sort of erasure the country might be doing, we know the stories. We know the truth.”
The museums’ temporary America 250 programming also includes objects that connect achievements to individual histories of violence and loss, including a quilt by Hystercine Rankin that tells the story of her father being killed in 1939. Jessica Walzer, the exhibit curator, said she included the quilt because it is one of the few story quilts in the museums’ collection and because it tells part of Mississippi’s history.
Prince said such omissions had long been the norm in the state’s historical storytelling, particularly in how antebellum homes and other settings were presented. In comments carried in the report, she said visitors to those homes might hear about families who lived there, but “they would never once tell you about the people that lived behind the house or the people that built the house or the people that worked the fields.” She said, “For so long,” museums and historic sites “just tried to gloss over that because it was uncomfortable.”