In 2013, the Southern Documentary Project conducted an oral history interview with Myrlie Evers-Williams on a range of topics for the film The Toughest Job: William Winter’s Mississippi and the Farish Street Project.

Evers-Williams is activist,  journalist, and former head of the NAACP. In 1963, her husband, Medgar Wiley Evers, was gunned down by white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith in their driveway in Jackson as she and their children waited inside to welcome him home.

In this interview, Evers-Williams discusses her feelings about seeing the Mississippi State Fairgrounds, where police incarcerated and brutalized civil rights protesters in 1963. The Fairgrounds are just down the hill from the site of the new Mississippi Civil Rights Museum and Museum of Mississippi History, which open December 9, 2017.

This interview was edited by Andy Harper of SouthDocs and we share it as the Museums open to the public. The photos of the 2 Mississippi Museums under construction are by Becca Walton, top from March 2017 and bottom from May 2015.