MDAH News

Justice Fred Banks announced that he is stepping down as chair of the board of directors of the Foundation for Mississippi History (FMH), a post he has held since 2020. The board elected P. Ryan Beckett as chair and Jonathan Lee as vice-chair at its March meeting. 

Banks is a senior partner in the general litigation group in the Jackson office of Phelps Dunbar. He served in the Mississippi House of Representatives from 1976 until 1985, when he was appointed as a circuit court judge and later as a justice on the Mississippi Supreme Court. He has also served on the National Board of Directors of the NAACP for more than four decades. 

Banks graduated from Lanier High School in Jackson in 1960. He earned a BBA from Howard University followed by a JD in 1968 from the Howard University School of Law, where he graduated second in his class. Banks began his law practice during the Civil Rights Movement when there were few African American attorneys in the state. 

Banks was a leader in securing funding and public support for the Two Mississippi Museums, which opened in 2017. He served as a valued advisor on the exhibits, particularly those related to the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement.  

Beckett said, “We are grateful to Justice Banks for his leadership of the board. His wise stewardship and commitment to our state helped create and strengthen the Two Mississippi Museums.” 

Ryan Beckett is a partner in the commercial litigation group in the Ridgeland office of Butler Snow. He serves on the Board of Trustees of Millsaps College and previously served as the legal director of the Homeless Legal Clinic through the Mississippi Volunteer Lawyers Project. Beckett is a past chairman of the Mississippi Tort Claims Board, the Mississippi Symphony Orchestra’s Encore Board, and the Advisory Board of Metropolitan Bank.   

Jonathan Lee is a senior vice president and senior principal of member performance at Vizient, Incorporated. His current civic engagements include the Fondren Renaissance Foundation, the Mississippi Center for Justice, the Mississippi Symphony Foundation, and the One Percent Commission that oversees the expenditure of funds generated by a local option sales tax for infrastructure improvements for the city of Jackson.   

The FMH supports and promotes the activities, programs, and projects of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH). The FMH board meets at least twice a year to review financial reports and to consult with staff on strategic plans for the department. It advises MDAH on the direction of the Museum of Mississippi History and the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum.  

Other FMH board members are Reuben Anderson, Donna Barksdale, Phil Bryant, Kane Ditto, Mike Espy, Haley Fisackerly, Jack Garner, Beverly Hogan, Ebony Lumumba, Leslie Burl McLemore, Nora Frances McRae, and Chip Pickering. 

Pamela D. C. Junior, director of the Two Mississippi Museums in Jackson, has announced her retirement. In 2017, Junior was named the inaugural director of the first state-sponsored civil rights museum in the nation, the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. She came to the role after serving as director of the Smith Robertson Museum and Cultural Center for seventeen years. In 2019, she was promoted to director of the Two Mississippi Museums, where she continued the work of sharing the stories of Mississippi told in the Museum of the Mississippi History and the Mississippi Civil Rights Museums. 

MDAH director Katie Blount said, “Pam Junior came to MDAH with deep roots and credibility in the community, many years of experience in the museum field, and a commitment to excellence that she modeled for younger staff. She personally led many thousands of visitors through the museums, enriching their experience through her passion for history and her boundless charisma. In our first years, Pam Junior lifted-up the Two Mississippi Museums and shared them with the world. We are grateful.” 

Highlights during Junior’s service include participating in the retirement of the 1894 Mississippi state flag at the official retirement ceremony in 2020 and guiding the late Congressman John Lewis through the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum—events she counts as major personal milestones. In 2018, she spearheaded MLK Jr. Day programming with fellow museum staff and added the MLK Night of Culture in 2019, just two of the highly attended annual events at the museums. 

“Pamela is a woman who knows that she did not travel her road alone, but on the shoulders of those who came before her,” said civil rights leader Myrlie Evers. “Pamela is imbued with the fortitude, wisdom, and faith of her grandmother, mother, mentors, and civil rights veterans. Her leadership reflects her commitment to Mississippi and the honest telling of our history.” 

After graduating from Jackson State University, where Junior received a BS in education, with a minor in special education, she joined the National Park Service in 1990 as a ranger in Washington, DC. Nearly a decade later, she returned to Jackson to work for the city’s Parks and Recreation Department.  

In 1999, Junior was hired as the manager of the Smith Robertson Museum and Cultural Center, where she became co-coordinator of the National Arts Program and acquired on permanent loan the Smithsonian traveling exhibition Field to Factory: The Afro-American Migration, 1915–1940.   

Junior has been honored over the years for both her professional and community work and received numerous awards, such as the Freedom Rider Award from the Mississippi Freedom 50th Foundation, the For My People Award from the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University, the Hometown Hero Award from the Jackson Convention and Visitors Bureau, and the Museum Leadership Award by the Association of African American Museums. She was inducted into the Mississippi Tourism Hall of Fame.  

Junior will continue to serve the community as a board member for Visit Jackson and an advisory board member for the Mississippi Book Festival. She is also a member of the International Women’s Forum.   

Jackson, Miss. — Haley Crigger, a doctoral student at the University of Cincinnati, has been named the Eudora Welty Research Fellow for 2023. Haley will use archival holdings in the Eudora Welty Collection housed at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH) to research the life and works of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Eudora Welty.

“My hope for my time at MDAH is to obtain a more robust understanding of Eudora Welty’s aesthetic and metaphysical relationship with the Southern literary imagination, the landscape Flannery O’Connor referred to as ‘hardly Christ-centered,’ but ‘most certainly Christ-haunted,’ ” said Crigger.

Established in 2010 by MDAH and the Eudora Welty Foundation, the fellowship seeks to encourage and support research of the Eudora Welty Collection by graduate students.

“We’re grateful to the Eudora Welty Foundation for their continued support of our fellows,” said David Pilcher, director of the MDAH Archives and Record Services Division. “I am certain Haley will gain great insight this summer, making excellent use of newly digitized materials and extensive paper archives within the Eudora Welty Collection.”

After receiving a BA in English from Centre College in 2013, Crigger pursed a MFA in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University, graduating in 2018. She is currently working towards her PhD in creative writing and literature at the University of Cincinnati and will use the $5,000 fellowship award to cover her travel, housing, and other expenses incurred while doing her primary Welty research at the William F. Winter Archives and History Building in Jackson.

The Eudora Welty Collection is the world’s finest collection of materials related to Welty and one of the most varied literary collections in the United States. The collection includes manuscripts, letters, photographs, drawings, essays, and film and video footage that spans Welty’s entire life.

Beginning in 1957, and over the course of more than forty years, Welty donated materials to the department, primarily literary manuscripts and photographs. At her death, her remaining papers were bequeathed to MDAH and included unpublished manuscripts and 14,000 items of correspondence with family, friends, scholars, young writers, and noted writers.

The Eudora Welty Collection may be accessed at the William F. Winter Archives and History Building at 200 North Street in Jackson. For more information on the archival collection or the Eudora Welty Research Fellowship, contact Elisabeth Cambonga at 601-576-6868, or by email at ecambonga@mdah.ms.gov.

Jackson, Miss. — Registration is open for the summer 2023 History Exploration and Freedom School camps at the Two Mississippi Museums. 

Thanks to a $30,000 grant from the Geneviève McMillan-Reba Stewart Foundation, the Two Mississippi Museums added an additional camp session and kept registration fees affordable for families at $75 per student. 

"Having campers in summer 2022 brought incredible energy to the Two Mississippi Museums, and we look forward to expanding the upcoming 2023 sessions thanks to the Geneviève McMillan-Reba Stewart Foundation,” said Mississippi Department of Archives and History director Katie Blount. "Last year students enjoyed fun and engaging activities while encountering important stories from Mississippi’s history."  

History Exploration Camp is for students heading into fourth and fifth grades. Campers will explore themes such as archaeology, architecture, transportation, civil rights, and music. In addition to exhibits at the Two Mississippi Museums, students will enjoy a behind-the-scenes tour of the collections, special guest speakers, and visits to other historic sites in Jackson. History Exploration Camp sessions are June 12-16 and June 26-30. 

Freedom School Camp is for students heading into sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, where campers will deepen their understanding of the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi and its impact on the world through stories of local heroes in their communities. The grant from the McMillan-Stewart Foundation will cover costs for additional technology to support camper research projects. Students will visit historic sites throughout Jackson. Freedom School Camp is held for two consecutive weeks, July 10-21. 

These summer camps are sponsored by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. 

Learn more or register by visiting https://2mm.mdah.ms.gov/learn/families-communities.                                                                                                                           

The Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH) is pleased to announce the opening of the Eudora Welty House & Garden (EWHG) Potting Shed. The Garden Club of Jackson awarded a grant to the Eudora Welty Foundation to renovate the interior of the Welty family garage, which was originally built along with the family home in 1925 and has been converted into a much-needed potting shed and workshop.

“For the first time, this potting shed allows our garden volunteers, Cereus Weeders, a proper, dedicated space with the right equipment they need to do the weekly, hands-on work of preserving the Welty garden,” said Jessica Russell, EWHG director. “It also provides the EWHG a special opportunity to serve our local community.

Both Eudora Welty’s prose and personal correspondence are rich with imagery from the natural world. Eudora Welty once said, “I wish I had a sign to tell me what I had better do that day, write or work in the garden.”

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author mentioned in her published works more than 150 types of plants and flowers, many of which grow around her home to this day.

For Eudora Welty, gardening was not a distraction from her writing; it was an inspiration for it. Her biographer, Dr. Suzanne Marrs, observed that for Welty, “the garden and writing were linked at some profound level.”

The design team, Arkansas-based company Natural State Design, LLC (NSD), hand-selected aged materials, board by board, to blend with the building’s historic period. NSD worked closely with Welty staff and retired garden consultant Susan Haltom to meet a wide variety of needs and purposes.

Today, the Welty garden is largely maintained by the dedicated “Cereus Weeders,” a volunteer organization named after Eudora Welty’s Night-Blooming Cereus Club, a group of friends who frequently entertained themselves by attending Night-Blooming Cereus flower-watching parties in Jackson in the 1930s.

For more information call 601-576-6934 or email info@mdah.ms.gov.