'Un(re)solved' exhibit focuses on civil rights-era killings

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — An interactive exhibit in Mississippi prompts visitors to speak aloud the names of people who were killed in acts of racist violence in the United States during the civil rights era — incantations in a darkened room to honor some 150 men, women and children whose lives were cut short.

The names appear on lighted glass panels, backed by images of trees. Next to each name is a code that visitors can scan with their cellphones.

“Say his name to begin his story," or “Say her name to begin her story," says the recorded narrator, journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault, who made history in 1961 as one of the first Black students to enroll in the University of Georgia.

The traveling exhibit, “Un(re)solved,” was created by PBS Frontline with artist, filmmaker and technologist Tamara Shogaolu. It is on display until Oct. 24 at the Two Mississippi Museums in downtown Jackson. The Mississippi Civil Rights Museum and Museum of Mississippi History are under one roof and share a lobby, meeting areas and exhibit spaces.

The exhibit opened in Mississippi on Aug. 28 — 66 years to the day after Emmett Till, a Black teenager from Chicago, was abducted, tortured and killed in the Mississippi Delta after witnesses said he whistled at a white woman working in a country store. His mother insisted on an open-casket funeral in Chicago, and photos of his brutalized body became a catalyst for the civil rights movement.

“Un(re)solved” focuses on the federal investigation of more than 150 cold cases under a law enacted in 2008, the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act. Mississippi has 56 names in the exhibit — more than any other state.

Pamela D.C. Junior, director of the Two Mississippi Museums, said she knows relatives of two men listed in the exhibit, Benjamin Brown and James Earl Green.

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