African American Women as Civil Rights Movement Legacy Keepers in Jackson, Mississippi | Debra Schultz

Jackson, Mississippi is emerging as a civil rights memory landscape of national and international importance. As the U.S. debates whether to remove Confederate statues and insurrectionists carry Confederate flags into the U.S. Capitol, African American women have been working diligently to create public counter-narratives by preserving the legacy of the grassroots Mississippi civil rights movement. This research locates three case studies of Jackson’s African American women civil rights memory workers within African American women’s traditions of community-based and civically engaged work. This analysis of Jackson’s civil rights memoryscape examines their preservation, caregiving, and interpretation work at the Medgar and Myrlie Evers house, the Mississippi Civil Rights museum, and the Mississippi Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement. Their unique contribution is working in ways consistent with civil rights movement values of grassroots leadership and community accountability. They have faced limited resources and neglect, local veterans’ reluctance to share their stories because of trauma, white political resistance, and complex relationships to the state of Mississippi. Yet these women are resilient, creating a living legacy that speaks to current debates about the racial past, the racial backlash of the present, and the need to advance the incomplete civil rights revolution for the future.

One day in 2015, archivist Minnie Watson left the lush Tougaloo College campus to drive eight miles to talk with local schoolchildren at Medgar and Myrlie Evers’ house in Jackson’s historically Black Elrane neighborhood. Then owned by the college, house tours were by appointment only, and she was the only one who gave them. Ms. Watson pulled into the driveway of the modest mint green ranch-style house and opened her car door under the carport, just as Medgar Evers had done a few minutes after midnight on June 12, 1963. His wife Myrlie and their children Darrell, Reena, and James (Van) were inside after watching President John F. Kennedy’s passionate speech positing civil rights as a moral challenge to the nation. Just then avowed white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith stepped out from bushes across the street and assassinated Medgar Evers.

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