Mississippi blacks claim troubles of the past are back on trump visit

The president is coming to America’s poorest, blackest state to open a civil rights museum on Saturday, and people in the neighbourhoods surrounding that gleaming tribute to the past would rather have Donald Trump visit their present.

Three miles from the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, over rutted roads, past littered lots, abandoned houses, and shuttered plants and warehouses, McElroy, 69, and other black residents of this struggling capital city say that after nearly a year of the Trump presidency, they have a definitive answer to the question candidate Trump posed when he spoke at a rally in Jackson in August last year.

Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant an early and avid supporter of Trump’s had invited the president to attend the opening months ago, but few here thought he would actually come. Except for crises such as hurricanes and oil spills, no president had set foot in small, poor, reliably Republican Mississippi for more than a decade.

Trump’s down-to-the-wire decision to attend the opening seemed to change everything. Suddenly, the focus shifted from the elderly Mississippians who had stood up to police and merchants and employers to demand their rights half a century ago. The president with a knack for dominating conversation had succeeded again. 

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders called their decision “unfortunate,” adding that Trump “hopes others will join him in recognizing that the movement was about removing barriers and unifying Americans of all backgrounds.”

On the cusp of the divisive Senate election in neighbouring Alabama, Trump has triggered a frenzy of preparation and trepidation. On Thursday, Secret Service agents and state and local police combed every corner of the downtown site where Trump will join aging veterans of the civil rights movement and local politicians for the opening of two museums one on the state’s history, the other a strikingly challenging look at the cruelties of race from the 1940s to the 1970s.

Along the streets of Jackson, even people who had no idea that a civil rights museum had just been built with $90 million in state money knew that Trump was coming.

source: washington post