Jacqueline House African American Museum

Most museums in Vicksburg center the Civil War. The Jacqueline House African American Museum doesn't—it holds more than 20,000 artifacts spanning slavery through the present day, one of the most comprehensive African American history collections in Mississippi. Personal objects, photographs, documents, and oral histories that tell a different story of this river city. Vicksburg sits on a high bluff above the Mississippi, built on ground the Natchez held for centuries before French colonists arrived in 1719. The French started plantations. The Choctaw took the land by right of conquest after the Natchez War. The United States pressed the Choctaw to cede the territory in 1801, then forcibly removed most of them west in 1830. By 1863 the city was a Confederate river-port whose surrender to Grant marked the war's turning point. After Reconstruction came a violent return to power by white supremacists in 1874 and 1875, including the Vicksburg massacre. Today the city's population is majority African American. The museum exists in that gap—the lived experience across two centuries that monuments and battlefields cannot tell. The collection holds what was kept, what was made, what endured. It's downtown. Check visitvicksburg.com for current hours and admission before you go.