This year’s 34th annual observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a federal holiday on Jan. 21 draws attention to a pair of sobering new civil rights institutions in America’s Deep South.

The Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson, "Wants to make you uncomfortable," says Director Jacqueline K. Drace. Housed in a downtown complex that’s also home to the new Museum of Mississippi History, the institution, opened in December 2017, delves with surprising honesty into the disturbing truth about the state’s racist past.

Designed as a circular layout, the museum features eight galleries surrounding a central rotunda. Displays and artifacts are vast, engaging and traumatizing and go far beyond MLK and the 1960s to confront the long history of racial injustice.

You’ll see posters from the 1800s advertising slaves for sale, Ku Klux Klan masks and robes, remnants of burnt crosses, and a re-creation of a segregated classroom from the 1950s. Two theaters show short films documenting the infamous 1955 murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till — slain for allegedly whistling at a white woman — and the life and civil rights activism of Medgar Evers.

"For me, the most emotionally pummeling section of the Civil Rights Museum was dedicated to Jim Crow," says Sierra Mannie, writing in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger. There, a gnarled, ceiling-high tree stands next to monuments listing the names of hundreds of black people known to have been lynched in Mississippi. "The museum is still collecting names," notes Mannie.

www.mcrm.mdah.ms.gov, 601-576-6800

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. (Image credit: EJI)

Even more evocative — blood chilling, in fact — is the just-opened National Memorial for Peace and Justice, crowning a hilltop overlooking Montgomery, Alabama. Organized and funded by the nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), and informally known as the national lynching memorial, it brings to light a long-neglected chapter in American history.

Writing in The New York Times, reporter Brent Staples says the memorial "represents America’s first major effort to confront the vast scope of racial-terror lynchings that for decades following Reconstruction ravaged the African-American community in the South."

From the 1870s well into the 1940s, white mobs lynched nearly 4,500 African-Americans, usually in gruesome public spectacles — and often for minor transgressions. "Across the South," Staples notes, "these bloody carnivals terrified black communities into submission, and their legacy haunts the country still."

From a distance, the memorial somewhat resembles the colonnade of Washington D.C.’s Lincoln Memorial. But what appear to be supporting columns turn out to be oxidized steel pillars hanging from the structure’s ceiling — each bearing the name of one of more than 800 counties, mostly in the South, where lynchings occurred.

Names of the victims are listed as well and when you walk among them, the ground slopes gradually downward until the columns dangle overhead like bodies.

"As you walk among the columns, a sense of serenity mutates into uneasiness," says Alexis Okeowo in the New Yorker. "By the time the ground gave way, so that the monuments hovered over my head, the experience was devastating."

Duplicates of the steel plinths lie like coffins lined up in the surrounding six-acre park, meant to challenge each named county to eventually own up to its role in the lynching violence and carry the marker home for local display.

The experience doesn’t end there. Visitors can learn more by taking in the nearby Legacy Museum, also created by the EJI, and located on the site of a former warehouse where black people were once sold as slaves. This is a narrative museum that uses interactive media, sculpture, photos, videos and documents to make the argument that the lynchings belong to a larger campaign of oppression that extends from slavery to today’s era of mass incarceration of African-Americans.

www.museumandmemorial.eji.org, 334-386-9100