Trump hails civil rights museum as some boycott
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 state-sponsored museum on the South’s civil rights struggle opened its doors, Trump gave brief remarks, hailing the icons of the civil rights movement and rejecting 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.
“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.
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, Mississippi. And one of the most-infamous episodes of the civil rights era took place in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights activists — Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman — were killed while trying to register voters in the summer of 1964.
Those who made a point of skipping the president’s speech — including Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., the civil rights leader — cited Trump’s equivocal remarks after the summer’s racially tinged violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, and described the president’s policies toward Mexicans, Muslims and other minorities as an insult to the museum’s purpose.
About 200 protesters assembled along Jackson’s streets, hoping to turn their backs on Trump’s motorcade. But it appeared the motorcade took a different route.