Jackson Free Press

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — The W.K. Kellogg Foundation has given a $2.3 million endowment to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History to support development of educational programs that will be operated by the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum.

The endowment, announced Tuesday, will fund a partnership between the department, the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation and the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Institute. It also will fund numerous educational initiatives in the lead-up to and after the opening of the museum, including:

— Summer teacher training programs and workshops to prepare educators to teach an expanded civil rights curriculum.

— Digitizing important historical documents from the Evers collection to be housed at the museum

— Supporting the Medgar Wiley Evers Lecture Series throughout the state to engage communities in the museum's programs.

Mississippi is one of four priority places in the United States for the foundation — along with the city of New Orleans and the states of Michigan and New Mexico.

The foundation's endowment to the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum comes one year after the foundation committed $3.8 million in grants to 25 organizations across the state whose work focuses on helping Mississippi's young men of color by building a comprehensive network of support from birth into adulthood, developing their educational, emotional, physical and economic potential.

"We've come to understand that racial equity and healing are essential if we are going to accomplish our mission to support children, families and communities in Mississippi," said WKKF President and CEO La June Montgomery Tabron in a news release. "The Mississippi Civil Rights Museum will help us all take an honest look at the past in a state that was, in so many ways, the epicenter of this struggle in our county. It's important to heal the wounds of the past, so that we can move forward together and put racism behind us for good."