President Donald Trump was traveling to Jackson on Saturday to tour new Mississippi museums documenting the state’s history and its civil rights legacy as part of celebrations of the bicentennial of its statehood.
Trump is scheduled to speak to a private group of museum patrons, visitors and veterans of the civl rights movement just prior to the official opening ceremonies for the two museums. The Mississippi Civil Rights Museum is the first state-supported museum on that topic in the nation.
Inside the 250-seat auditorium this morning, six U.S. flags with Mississippi museum signs on either side were displayed behind the president’s podium, where Trump will speak at an event closed to the general public.
The presidential visit has garnered national headlines this week, most notably after key scheduled program participants — including U.S. Reps. John Lewis, D-Ga., and Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba, and former Mississippi governor Ray Mabus — announced they would boycott the event, citing concerns over the president’s history with race.
Trump was personally invited to the opening earlier this year by Republican Gov. Phil Bryant, a 2016 campaign surrogate of the president who describes himself as a “close friend.”
Gov. Phil Bryant poses with Donald Trump shortly before events in Jackson on Aug. 24, 2016.
“Mississippi should be proud that the president of the United States has agreed to speak at the opening of the Museum of Mississippi History and the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum,” Bryant said on social media Wednesday. “The world will be watching our Bicentennial celebration. Let us come together as one Mississippi.”
Several activist groups in Mississippi have planned protests. Thompson and Lumumba scheduled their own separate event five blocks northeast of the new museums at the Smith Robertson Museum, a civil rights history venue run by the city of Jackson. in the buildup to the visit, National NAACP President Derrick Johnson called Trump’s visit “an affront to the veterans of the civil rights movement.” Johnson was president of the Mississippi NAACP before being elevated to his national post earlier this year.
Trump is expected to land at the Jackson-Medgar Wiley Evers International Airport mid-morning, and his motorcade will carry him straight to the museum. He will tour the museum before speaking to the smaller group of patrons inside and departing the premises before the larger, public event begins outside.
The unveiling of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum has for years been a planned reconciliation of sorts for a state with a battered history of racial violence and hatred and more recent efforts towards healing those divisions.
But the day incited mixed feelings as Secret Service agents and speechwriters advance the museum grounds this week in anticipation of Trump’s visit.
The museum’s concept is to center truth in the teachings of the state’s past. The overdue justice has been the museum’s grand appeal, and taxpayer dollars funding the project – the only funding structure for a museum of its kind in America – has been its selling point.
Trump attended a rally Friday night in Pensacola, Fla., where he urged voters in Alabama — just a few dozen miles from where he spoke — to vote for U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore in a special election next week. Trump, in his speech, discussed other hot button issues, including tax cuts that Congress is considering, the war on terror and the what he terms a “war on Christmas.”