Mississippi, Monday,
along the highway south toward downtown Jackson, white pear trees bloom. They stand out against the still bare branches of other trees around. The more famous white flower here in Magnolia State does not bloom until later. When I arrive at my destination – the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, it’s humid in the air and hot. But it is cool in the museum with just enough visitors to be able to keep your distance.
Here is the southern state and the whole the country’s shameful history of oppression against blacks. Through slavery, segregation, racism, violence, and poverty. But of course also the story of the resistance. The courage, creativity and perseverance of the civil rights movement. I am often struck by how skilled American museums are at bringing history to life. At the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, Martin Luther King’s hometown, you can, for example, see what civil rights activists were exposed to when they sat on the white side in segregated restaurants. You are invited to sit at a lunch table and put on headphones where offensive accusations are played. Here at the museum in Jackson, angry voices suddenly begin to be shouted out from loudspeakers, voices asking why you are looking at that white woman. And in the National Museum of African American History in Washington DC is Emmett Till’s coffin. Emmett Till was a 14-year-old black boy who was brutally murdered by two white men in Mississippi in 1955, after being accused of whistling at a white woman.
Here in Jackson, there are pictures of Till’s scarred face and body that were published in Jet Magazine. Emmett Till’s mother wanted the whole world to see what the men had done to her son and his open coffin was visited by thousands of mourners. The boy’s fate, and the images of his body, aroused anger and sadness among blacks across the country and ignited the spark for the civil rights movement here in the United States. Some of the activists of the 60’s call themselves the Emmett Till generation. And Rosa Parks must have had Emmett Till in mind when she refused to move on that bus trip three months after Till’s murder.
May is a year ago The film about George Floyd’s death under the lap of a police officer started a new wave of civil rights struggles here in the United States. And recently, demonstrations against racism have picked up again. The same day I visit the museum in Jackson, a memorial march is being held in Louisville, Kentucky, on the anniversary of Breonna Taylor’s death, she was shot dead by police in her home on March 13 last year. And in Minneapolis, demonstrations are taking place before the trial against the police who are accused of George Floyd’s death.
On Friday, the news came that Floyd’s family will receive a record amount of damages, close to SEK 230 million from the city of Minneapolis. On the way from the museum in Jackson, the state flag of the Mississippi waves in its places. Until this summer, there was a Confederate emblem on the flag, the symbol of slavery. Now the new flag is adorned with the Magnolia flower.
Source: ICELAND NEWS