Mississippi

Visual and Performance Artist Richard Lou

I Wanted to Be a Tank Commander, of All Things

Richard A. Lou is a visual and performance artist and professor of art at the University of Memphis. Before serving as a panelist for “What Kind of Monuments Do We Deserve?,” the second program in the Mellon Foundation-supported series “How Should Societies Remember Their Sins?,” he joined us in the green room to talk about hammerhead sharks, the monuments of his childhood, and the family history he’s turning into a graphic novel.

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Civil Rights Historian Daphne Chamberlain

Run to Your Passion

Daphne Chamberlain is an associate professor of history and the vice president for strategic initiatives and social justice at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi. Before serving as a …

There’s Power—and Promise—in Talking About Monuments

Doing Better By Future Generations Starts With Breaking Today’s Culture of Silence

by Jackie Mansky |

“I get the feeling some people don’t want this conversation to happen,” said historian William Sturkey during last night’s public program at Two Mississippi Museums in Jackson, Mississippi.

The framing question …

The Mississippi Sharecropper Who Helped Black Americans Win Voting Rights | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

The Mississippi Sharecropper Who Helped Black Americans Win Voting Rights

Fannie Lou Hamer’s Legacy Reminds Us That Everyday People Can Effect Change—Even When the Nation Is Impossibly Divided

by Kate Clifford Larson |

Though Black people represented 50 percent of Mississippi’s voting age population in 1964, Jim Crow literacy tests, poll taxes, violence, and intimidation had managed to all but silence their political …

The Black Freedom Seekers Who ‘Managed to Shape Their Own Destinies’ | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

The Black Freedom Seekers Who ‘Managed to Shape Their Own Destinies’

The Many and Varied Attempts by African Americans to Escape Bondage in the Lower Mississippi Valley Tell a Larger Narrative

by S. Charles Bolton |

The Lower Mississippi Valley begins at Cairo, Illinois, where the Ohio River flows into the Mississippi, and extends south to the Head of Passes 100 miles below New Orleans, where …


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