Activists: Trump visit casts pall on civil rights triumph

JACKSON, Miss. — Four years after it broke ground and nearly two decades after civil rights veterans began pushing for its establishment, the country’s first state-sponsored civil rights museum will open Saturday in Mississippi at a cost of more than $90 million.

But for all the work that went into it and a companion state history museum here in the state capital, a growing number of the civil rights pioneers and modern-day activists it’s supposed to honor are boycotting its kickoff event.

They blame a planned visit from President Donald Trump.

“Trump has pompously shown a wanton disregard for the continuing struggles for civil, human and women’s rights,” and his presence is an “intolerable contradiction,” said Chokwe Antar Lumumba, the city’s black mayor, who on Friday joined the list of those planning to boycott Saturday’s opening ceremony.

The museum’s collection features thousands of artifacts from the state’s history between 1945 and the 1970s, including the Money, Miss., grocery store door that 14-year-old Emmett Till walked out of in 1955, before being tracked down, accused of flirting with a white woman and lynched; the rifle used to shoot civil rights activist Medgar Evers in 1963; and burned crosses used in Klansmen attacks on black activists.

The names of those killed in more than 600 documented lynchings are spread throughout the galleries.

The launch of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum and the Museum of Mississippi History — a connected series of exhibits spanning 15,000 years of local history — had attracted civil rights luminaries and their families from across the country before the White House said this week that Mr. Trump would speak.

In a matter of days, support has collapsed among key African-American leaders.

Saying Mr. Trump’s record on civil rights is “abysmal,” the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has called for the president to skip the event.

Rep. John Lewis, a prominent Georgia Democrat who helped organize the 1964 Freedom Summer voting drives in Mississippi, said he would not show up unless Mr. Trump bowed out.

More absences: former Gov. Ray Mabus and Rep. Bennie Thompson, both Mississippi Democrats, and several state politicians, including the Democratic chair of the Mississippi Black Caucus.

Outside the museum in downtown Jackson, demonstrators plan to rally as Mr. Trump’s motorcade passes and turn their backs or kneel during the ribbon-cutting in symbolic protest.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders called planned protests against Mr. Trump “very sad,” and said the “president hopes others will join him in recognizing that the movement was about removing barriers and unifying Americans of all backgrounds.”

Museum officials fear the controversy over Mr. Trump’s visit at the invitation of Republican Gov. Phil Bryant will overshadow an event that was supposed to be a point of pride for a state where activists say stark racial disparities in income, incarceration and education speak loudly to the struggles that have continued since the civil rights movement. The majority-black city resides in the last state to feature a Confederate emblem on its flag.

Mr. Trump has “turned a celebration into a slap in the face,” said Laurie Bertram Roberts, a 39-year-old Jackson resident who will lead a crowd of protesters she expects to swell to hundreds.

She named a litany of remarks and policies from the president that she called racist, including his repeated insistence that marchers at a deadly Charlottesville, Va., rally that featured white supremacists over the summer included “some very fine people.”

Others on her list: Mr. Trump’s invectives against NFL players who protest racism by kneeling during the national anthem; his jabs referring to Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts as “Pocahontas”; his statements against Black Lives Matter; and his travel ban that courts have found targets Muslims.

Like many opposed to Mr. Trump’s visit, Ms. Roberts, who is black, said she was excited about the museum and wanted it to thrive.

“Nobody is calling for people to go into the museum and protest. That would be disrespectful and weird. We’ve called for people to either turn their backs when Trump speaks or, if they want, to take a knee,” said Ms. Roberts, who runs the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund.