The Public History Program at Ouachita Baptist University took a field trip to Mississippi March 4th through the 6th. I had the privilege of going on this trip!

The first stop on the trip was at the Two Mississippi Museums. The Two Mississippi Museums are the Mississippi Museum of History and the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. Chris DiGiovanni, a 2018 graduate of the Ouachita public history program who works at the museums, guided us during our visit.

We all found the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum particularly insightful. The museum showcases the story from slavery to freedom for people of color in the state.

It is the responsibility of a good museum to portray its message to visitor honestly and invoke a response. The response we felt after visiting the museum was one of awe. Not awe in a positive way, awe as in shock. We were all shocked at the amount of suffering endured by the participants in the Civil Rights movement and how strong and brave they were to endure it for the greater purpose.

One of the most profound features of the museum combined art and music into a space that provided visitors an opportunity for reflection (pictured at the top of this page). The sculpture in the “This Little Light of Mine” gallery has branches that extend into the museum’s seven other chronologically arranged galleries representing the unity of all who came before and will come after.

The above audio is the introduction Chris gave us as we came into the gallery for the first time, followed by a small portion of the song that played after (a longer portion of the song will be included at the bottom of this post). The circular gallery is centered around the sculpture and the walls feature the faces of heroes of the Civil Rights movement. You’ll hear Chris mention some of their names.

The experience of sitting in that space and hearing the voices sing the freedom songs while looking at the faces of those who lost their lives due to racially motivated reasons was humbling. It provided a reminder of how fresh these injustices are.

We tend to think of the civil rights movement as something that was a long time ago, but the last lynching in the state of Mississippi was just in 1973. This was less than 50 years ago.

I appreciated the message of the museums as a whole, but I really valued that they made a space for reflection in the “This Little Light of Mine” gallery. This space allows visitors to have the same experience we did, one of realization that the Civil Rights movement is still playing out today and that the results of it affect our daily lives.