The first people to live in Mississippi were the Chickasaw and Choctaw. Most of them were forced west by the Indian Removal Act of 1830 which opened up land to large numbers of settlers leaving their overworked tobacco farms in Georgia and the Carolinas. The invention of the cotton gin assured a fast and steady population growth in the state which went from less the 8,000 people in 1800 to almost 800,000 in 1860. Over half of the 800,000 were slaves.
Cotton was king in Mississippi before the Civil War and it continued to be an important crop after the war with most of the slaves becoming share croppers. Life went on without a lot of change for most Mississippians until the civil rights movement of the 1960s. This is covered to some extent in the museum but to get a much better picture of the racial oppression that black people faced daily in Mississippi visit the adjoining Mississippi Civil Rights Museum.
The dual threads of cotton and field workers run through most of the museum exhibits but there are also galleries covering natural disasters, the Great Depression, New Deal Projects, sports, and music.
The museum is accessible.
RVs can be parked along North Street. The sidewalk of the museum block is in good condition. We had to park a block north in front of a church and the curb cuts in that section are in bad shape. Wheelchair users who do not have assistance will probably have to wheel down the street. Museum 32.30183, -90.17851
Hope you missed that 'bad weather' that went through some of the south Saturday and Sunday....I don't miss those days at all!
ReplyDeleteSaturday was beautiful but it rained all day Sunday after a very windy night. No tornado warnings though but one morning last week a warning siren sounded in Jackson. No sign of a storm, no warnings on TV or the internet. All I found were flood warning for other areas. Still don't know what that was all about but those sirens are eerie.
Delete