Hooooooookay, this is gonna be heavy, and topical.

I got the chance to visit Mississippi recently, and that just so happened to be on the weekend of Juneteenth, 2021. Mississippi is not a place that tends to be high on anybody’s travel bucket list—least of all mine—but the opportunity presented itself, so I went for it! Honestly, I have always been curious. And some of my favorite travel shows (Bourdain, Phil) have done super interesting episodes where they have gotten out into the Mississippi Delta for some BBQ & blues! We’ll get to that in the next article (get your hopes up!), but today we’re going to talk about the elephant in the room: race in the Deep South.

And just like with any other article I write, I don’t claim to be an expert. I’m just a white dude trying his best to understand the world around him and become a better person along the way. And I am, like the rest of us, a work in progress.

So let’s jump right in.

Civil Rights Museum

Most people in the US don’t know much about Mississippi beyond, perhaps, some watered-down snippets of events they read about in the “Civil Rights Movement” section of their high school history class. It doesn’t paint a pretty picture. And today Mississippi is most notable—it would seem—for being one of the poorest, most backward states in the US. It’s an easy place to look down on. And I am definitely going to need to say some negative things about what life has been like here, but let me tell you right off the bat that I will also say a lot of positive things about this place before the end of this two-part series. Stay tuned.

Anyway, I think the Jackson Civil Rights Museum is a good place to start our journey. I have been to enough museums now that I can tell a good one from a lame one. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is definitely one of the good ones. Here’s the scene on the way in.

The museum itself is arranged circularly around a sort of atrium area, with exhibits progressing through time as you make your way around the circumference of the space. The exhibits themselves are quite dense, with insane amounts of information packed into small spaces. And these spaces are so packed with stuff that they feel like an antique store at times, but with a lot more information and context given to its aged contents.

Although I have been known to go DEEP into history, I’m not going to give you the whole history of race in America in this post. What I will do is share some pictures of the museum and a few pieces of information that stuck with me. I think perhaps the most powerful piece was a display cataloging lynchings in Mississippi by year. There were a LOT. And they stretched up to the 1950s. That is WAYYYY later than I would have guessed. And if that wasn’t enough, they also listed the reasons associated with each lynching. It was apparently normal for fabricated charges of sexual assault against a white woman and murder to be drummed up as rationale. But sometimes these lynch mobs couldn’t even be bothered to come up with a decent excuse, and the charges associated with these acts of terror were pretty ridiculous. Here are a few that stuck out to me:

Feb. 22 1889 - D.H. Smith - Artesia, Lowndes Co. - Colonizing Negros
June 1 1889 - Robert Herron - Eureka Springs, Panola Co. - Race Hatred
July 14, 1891 - Sam Gillespie - DeSoto, Clarke Co. - Race Prejudice
Aug. 24, 1891 - Lucious Andrews - Magnolia, Pike Co. - Bad Reputation
April 21, 1921 - Rachel Moore - Rankin Co. - Inciting Race Trouble (very ironic)
Aug. 15, 1930 - George Robinson - Raymond, Hinds Co. - Resisting Officer of the Law
July 22, 1933 - Unknown - Caledonia, Lowndes Co. - Insulting White Woman
July 16, 1934 - James Sanders - Bolton, Hinds Co. - Writing Insulting Letter
July 25, 1934 - Henry Bedford - Brandon, Rankin Co. - Talking Disrespectfully
Mar. 28, 1935 - T.A. Allen - Hernando, DeSoto Co. - Organizing Sharecroppers

Walking through this museum, seeing the chronology of events laid out from the slave ships to the founding of the KKK to the Civil Rights Movement, the parallels with the present day were undeniable. This isn’t over. This story is still very much in progress. Black Lives Matter is the Civil Rights Movement reincarnated, and we all have a part to play in what comes next. Here are some interesting snaps from this museum…

Visiting A Confederate Cemetery

Museums aren’t all that remains of Mississippi’s (slash America’s) dark past. I was very interested to learn that Jackson has a cemetery that plays host to the remains of more than 100 Confederate soldiers, as well as 5 Confederate generals. There are also a few Governors of Mississippi and Mayors of Jackson that are buried here. And the dates on these tombstones go back a LONG way. There are people in here that were born before America became a country. The cemetery itself was established in 1821 and it was known simply as “The Graveyard” until its current name—Greenwood Cemetery—was adopted in 1899.

Honestly, this place reminded me a lot of Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah (sans the Spanish moss), but with one key difference: the upkeep. Savannah is widely agreed upon to be one of the most beautiful and historically significant cities in the US. And the State of Georgia has the money to keep this place in decent condition. That is not the case in Jackson, Mississippi. Nobody is doing bachelorette party weekends TO Jackson. As a result, much of this graveyard is in a state of disrepair. Inside the public structure on the cemetery grounds we saw feet poking out from around the corner—which we assumed belonged to (hopefully still living) homeless people. The neighborhood surrounding this cemetery is just a stone’s throw from terrifying. This place is really getting buried in the sands of time.

All of that creates a really interesting and powerful aura. We came here on kind of a whim, and it was better than I ever could have hoped. The vibes were strong here. Ya’ll know I love a good graveyard! Reykjavik’s Hólavallagarður Cemetery and Havana’s Cementario de Cristóbal Colón were other great ones. Walking through these graves, I couldn’t help but reflect on how disappointed the distinguished residents of this place would be to see their place in history being forgotten. These Confederate soldiers who rest here are not veterans of the US Military. They are (or were) enemy combatants. And that doesn’t typically win you a plot at Arlington.

Afro-American Sons and Daughters Hospital

Last up, I’m going to share a few pictures from a little-known site in rural Mississippi called the Afro-American Sons & Daughters Hospital. This is not close to Jackson, but it was an easy detour from our route out into the Delta (spoiler alert for the next article!) so we pulled off and decided to see it for ourselves.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start with what this place actually is. Constructed in 1928, located in the city of Yazoo, the Afro-American Sons & Daughters Hospital (or AASDH) was Mississippi’s first hospital for black Americans. And, for a long time, it was the ONLY hospital that would treat black Americans in the region. This facility provided free healthcare to anybody in need, and also trained future nurses, enabling them to receive their state licenses and serve other parts of the state. It actually performed some non-minor surgeries and had a very low death rate compared to other hospitals in The South that serviced black Americans.

Between 1966 and 1972, after years of struggling with competition from larger health systems, increasingly burdensome regulations from the state authorities, and the migration of many of its due-paying members to the North, it closed its doors. And the Afro-American Sons and Daughters organization disbanded during the same period. It was the end of an era.

The AASDH was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2006, so you’d think that somebody would be taking care of it, right? WRONG. When we rolled up, this place was in ruins. Like Angkor Wat or some old-world historical site. It was being swallowed up by ravenous vines and had clearly been the victim of all sorts of vandalism. Today’s it’s looking more like a crack house than just an abandoned building. It was added to the Mississippi Heritage Trust’s 2007 10 Most Endangered Places list. And in 2009, there were local efforts to raise the funds necessary to salvage this place and turn it into a community center, but their fund-raising goal of 1.3 million didn’t even get as far as $30k. And I am getting that information second-hand because the fund-raising link is dead now. So it looks like, for now, this hospital will be reclaimed by the vines and plants that surround it. This whole thing feels pretty emblematic of the value we place on black history. Here are some pictures:

One other thing that I feel compelled to mention—and I hope this doesn’t make me sound too naive—but the POVERTY in the area surrounding this place was off the charts. It barely even felt like America. Or maybe it felt exactly like America. I guess it depends on who you ask.

Peter’s Perspective

These 3 touch-points barely skim the surface of Mississippi’s racially charged past. But they do help to give some insight. And if you’re like me, it’s easy to hear about this kind of stuff in the context of Mississippi and completely write it off. Because, you know… it’s Mississippi! It’s no surprise at all that things would look bad there. This place is, by almost every social and economic metric, a strong contender for the worst place in America.

But now that I’ve lived in The South for a number of years, I can tell you that to write this off as just “Mississippi problems” would be a mistake. A few months ago, a few of us went into an antique shop in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, which is part of the greater Nashville area. Nashville is one of the South’s great bastions of progressivism, so it can be easy to forget at times that Tennessee is an aggressively Southern state. But going into this antique shop was a sobering reminder of the history here. On display, we found Ku Klux Klan membership pins and confederate flag memorabilia, among other things. And I was a bit shocked, to be honest. If I owned this shop, I probably would not want to sell shit like this. But then again… it’s part of the history I suppose.

What does that say about the owners of this place? They seemed like nice people. Should this be interpreted as complicity in the racism that these objects symbolize? Or are these objects here for purely academic reasons? Maybe I was reading too far into this. But no matter how you look at it, nothing can change the fact that what these objects symbolize is key to the history of Middle Tennessee. Just a generation ago, the KKK played a big role in this community, which is how these objects ended up in antique stores near me.

But, because I’ve also lived in the North, I can tell you from first-hand experience that to write this stuff off “issues with The South” would also be a mistake. We northerners can get a bit condescending when talking about The South because we were on the right side of history. But the key implication of The North winning the Civil War was that we remained a unit. This means that The South’s problems are America’s problems. And this is not just an argument for teamwork and solidarity. As you read this, there are Confederate flags currently flying in every state of the US. What these objects symbolize may have originated in The South, but nobody, Northern or Southern, is exempt from playing a role in this fight. The Confederacy has been reincarnated not as a sovereign state, but as a state of mind, and there are—apparently—a lot of people in every corner of the U.S. who are living there.

And—while it’s VITALLY important that you take this fight to the ballot box and VOTE—the majority of this fight is not going to take place in some podunk state legislature. It’s going to play out inside each one of us. I believe the saying goes, “If you want to change the world, start by changing yourself.” So let me be the first to admit that I’m not perfect. I’ve thoughtlessly made my share of insensitive, ignorant comments and regularly catch myself thinking prejudiced thoughts. But I’m doing my best to educate myself on the issues and to recognize + correct for the racism that is inherent in the way I have been socialized. Given the whole “Cancel Culture” zeitgeist happening right now 🙄 it’s a scary thing to admit that you’ve ever been at fault. But ALL of us, no matter who you voted for, are going to have to get real about our relationship with race if we ever want things to change.

I am actually really optimistic and proud of us as a country. We still have a long way to go, but we’ve come a LONG way in a very short time. A few years ago, the comedian Chris Rock shared in an interview that when his mother was a young girl in South Carolina, she had to go to the vet to get her teeth cleaned, because the local dentist would only take whites. THE VET. And not his grandmother or great grandmother. HIS MOTHER. People are walking around America right now who remember this first-hand. So it wasn’t that long ago! But in spite of that recent history, Georgia flipped to blue in the 2020 election.

We’re on our way. But how fast we get there depends on how quickly we all jump in to lend a hand.

Up next, it’s time for some Blues.