Day 18 - 2nd November

We left Vicksburg just before 9am and headed for Jackson Mississippi.  Jackson is where the home of Medgar Evers is located. He was a prominent civil rights activist and worked for the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People).  One night in June 1963, he had arrived home and was taking some protest t-shirts out of his car when he was shot in the back by a white supremacist, Byron de la Beckwith. He died shortly after, and the home has since been preserved as a memorial to him, and the civil rights movement. Although tours of the home have to be arranged, we just wanted to drive up and see the house.

The area has changed quite a bit since the shooting as houses have been built all around the street now, whereas at the time the area opposite the house where the shooter lay in wait was all open ground and trees & bushes.

We stood there for a few minutes, and after a short interval an African-American woman drove up & asked us if the house was open for tours. We replied not and got chatting and were soon telling her about our trip and plans. She was very friendly and asked if we were on Facebook and we soon swapped friend requests!

Following that we headed into Jackson’s main street over roads that could only be described as terrible. Cracked concrete, huge potholes and sharp ‘ridges’ were everywhere and we felt a four wheel drive would have been a better option.

There wasn’t much to choose from in central Jackson ( I suspect most of the retail is now in the outer suburbs), so we had a late breakfast (or early lunch) at a local café and then headed on our way to Selma.

Selma was picked as it was the site of a protest march following a police shooting of a black youth (sounds eerily familiar) in 1965 where approx.. 600 protesters tried to cross the Edmund Pettus bridge. They were beaten back by the police but these images were captured on photo’s and on film and led to such an outcry that President Johnson gave the marchers federal protection and a later march went all the way from Selma to Montgomery, the state capital.

However we’d decided to stop at what was billed as a ‘Slavery & Civil Rights’ museum ( “Number 9 thing to do in Selma” according to trip advisor !) and as we arrived we saw it was very close to the bridge. However the museum was actually “Enslavement & Civil War” and was run by a character called Annie Pearl Avery, in her 70’s now, who was an actual civil rights activist. She greeted us by telling us she was a living legend, and have we got wi-fi? Yes? Well these you can google me, go on, check me out! The museum was in a non-descript building (“see that red dust? That’s from the bricks crumbling. That’s what Home Depot told me”) and was more like a collection of artifacts and copies of documents assembled by an enthusiast, rather than a ‘proper’ museum per se. She was focused on trying to connect the African-American history back to Egypt (or ‘Kemet’ as she believes it should be called) so spent a bit of time taking us through this theory. She then left us to it and we wandered through some rooms, accompanied by an escort of small biting insects (insect repellent had to be applied).

She insisted on starting a DVD while we were looking around (in another room, which another couple were compelled to watch). We watched the last few minutes of it, but then she insisted on starting the next chapter whereupon we tried to sneak out (we couldn’t divert here attention to say goodbye). However she was too fast for us and as we were sitting in the car (we’d parked right outside the door) , she opened the door and saw us! However the other couple saw the chance to make their escape as well so after some selfies with her ( before you go, do you want a picture with me? Yes?”) we made our escape out of there. We drove back to the main street and walked up to the bridge, took some photo’s and then got in the car and headed off to Montgomery where we parked for the night.