PHOTO: Courtesy, W.K. Kellogg Foundation
JACKSON, Miss.–One of two museums going up right now on the north side of the Old Capitol in Jackson is the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. It’s being paid for, in part, by private money. Tuesday the W.K. Kellogg Foundation announced a $2.3 million endowment.
The endowment will fund a partnership between MDAH, the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation and the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Institute.
The money is expected to help fund some initiatives that include digitizing important historical documents from the Evers collection, supporting the Medgar Wiley Evers Lecture Series throughout the state to engage communities in the museum’s programs, and helping train teachers to better teach a Civil Rights curriculum.
“The Mississippi Civil Rights Museum will help us all take an honest look at the past in a state that was, in so many ways, the epicenter of this struggle in our county. It’s important to heal the wounds of the past, so that we can move forward together and put racism behind us for good,” said Foundation Pres. La June Montgomery Tabron.
The Civil Rights Museum, along with the Mississippi History Museum, is expected to open in 2017, just in time for the state’s bicentennial.
It is expected to be a state-of-the-art facility, with multimedia presentations, and will have places for meetings and classes to educate people from all over the country about Mississippi’s role in the Civil Rights era and the continuing struggle.
Construction is on-going at the site, with the framework taking shape.
