Trump’s visit jars opening of museum
Some civil rights leaders boycott event in Mississippi
JACKSON, Miss. — President Donald Trump’s presence jolted the opening of a civil rights museum here Saturday, generating boycotts from some leaders in the movement and small protests by activists as the state’s attempt to confront its racially violent past clashed with more recent divisions wrought by Trump’s presidency.
As the country’s first statesponsored museum on the South’s civil rights struggle opened its doors, Trump gave brief remarks, largely sticking to his prepared script as he hailed the icons of the civil rights movement and rejected the racism and hatred on display in the new museum.
“The civil rights museum records oppression, cruelty and injustice inflicted on the African-American community,” Trump, who had ignored calls to back out of the event by some civil rights veterans, said after a brief tour of the museum.
“The fight to end slavery, to break down Jim Crow, to end segregation, to gain the right to vote, and to achieve the sacred birthright of equality — that’s big stuff,” Trump added. “Those are very big phrases, very big words.”
“Here we memorialize the brave men and women who struggled to sacrifice and sacrificed so much so that others might live in freedom,” the president said, speaking to a small group of dignitaries in the museum. A larger audience of several hundred Mississippi residents assembled outside for the official ceremony.
Activists feel insulted
Paired with a second museum that aims to document the state’s overall history, the civil rights museum has drawn praise from the movement’s veterans as an honest depiction of Mississippi’s past.
Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African-American boy, was lynched in 1955 by a white mob in Money, Miss. And one of the most infamous episodes of the civil rights era took place in Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights activists — Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman — were killed while trying to register voters in 1964.
Those who made a point of skipping the president’s speech — including Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., a civil rights leader — cited Trump’s remarks after the summer’s racially tinged violence in Charlottesville, Va., and described Trump’s policies toward Mexicans, Muslims and other minorities as an insult to the museum’s purpose.
At a news conference before Air Force One touched down in Jackson, national activists and local African-American politicians said they were disappointed that the president had chosen to participate in the event.
“Today may be a grand opening, but there will be a grander opening,” said state Sen. Sollie Norwood of Jackson, who declined to attend Trump’s speech. He said he was looking forward to seeing the museum after the president left. “That will be the day that all of us will walk in.”
Amos Brown, the longtime pastor of the historic Third Baptist Church in San Francisco, listed a number of times Trump had failed to speak up for civil rights causes.
“Since Donald Trump did not show up when we needed him to speak a word on behalf of blacks who have experienced police brutality,” Brown said, “he does not deserve to be in Jackson for the celebration of the civil rights museum.”
‘Medgar’s legacy’
Myrlie Evers-Williams, the widow of Medgar Wiley Evers, a black civil rights activist who was shot in the back by a member of the Ku Klux Klan in 1963, and Charles Evers, his brother, attended Trump’s speech.
Trump acknowledged the death of Evers, calling him a martyr who had fought during World War II and then returned to Mississippi to fight for the “same rights and freedoms that he had defended in the war” by helping to register blacks to vote. For that work, Trump said, Evers was “assassinated by a member of the KKK.”
The president recognized Evers Williams, calling her “his incredible widow ,” and thanking her for carrying on “Medgar’s legacy.” He also thanked the people of Mississippi, a state, he said, “where I’ve had great success.”
Invited by Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant, a Republican, Trump attended the event Saturday in the hopes of helping to unify a country that has been struggling to repair its lingering racial schisms. But if he thought his presence here would prove to be a bridge, he may have been mistaken.
“He’s expressed a blatant and wanton disregard for human rights,” said Chokwe Antar Lumumba, mayor of Jackson, who skipped the museum’s opening. “He’s done so through the discriminatory policy he implements. He’s done so with respect to a failure to denounce the alt-right.”