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Like conjoined twins, the Two Mississippi Museums share one life but, as in a William Faulkner novel, experience it differently. This is evident upon approaching the bifurcated building perched on LeFleur’s Bluff above downtown Jackson, with the Greek Revival–like Museum of Mississippi History marrying in at a right angle with the postmodern Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, so that at the juncture, one entrance, with an open-air plaza and grand lobby, serves both. Determined to tell the state’s “stories in all their complexity,” the Mississippi Department of Archives and History certainly accomplishes its objectives with what it calls “the first state-operated civil rights museum in the country” (Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Telling Our Stories [2017], ix), although many visitors will find the state history museum lacking. Born of political compromise, the Two Mississippi Museums began as separate projects. Anticipating the 2017 bicentennial of statehood, the archives proposed in the 1990s a new state museum to replace the exhibits in the nearby Old State Capitol, while shortly thereafter advocates recommended building a museum to the movement across town at historically black Tougaloo College. Years of legislative studies and debates followed. Controversy swirled around the proposals, as conservative white politicians resisted a museum to the black freedom struggle, while African Americans feared the state’s telling would temper the truth. Expressing presidential ambitions, Republican governor Haley Barbour pushed the project along, ultimately using the fiftieth anniversary of the Freedom Rides as the impetus to settle the site selection, although his involvement earned the ire of movement veterans. Under the leadership of former Mississippi governor William F. Winter, the two museum ideas merged into one facility in 2010, and in 2011, Barbour’s political skills secured from the state legislature the initial thirty-eight million dollars in bond revenues necessary to start the project that culminated in the ninety-million-dollar building, opened with great fanfare by widow Myrlie Evers just in time to celebrate the state’s bicentennial on December 9, 2017 (Ward Schaefer, “Civil Rights Museum Stirs Controversy, Again,” Jackson Free Press, January 17, 2011; Campbell Robertson, “Civil Rights Sins, Curated by One of the Sinners,” New York Times, April 5, 2014; “Mississippi to Break Ground on State History and Civil Rights Museums,” Marketwired, September 30, 2013).
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