When the National Civil Rights Museum reopened to the public on April 4, it unveiled a $28 million renovation that includes the latest technology to tell the story of the civil rights movement. Many of the new exhibits incorporate multi-level touchscreen technology that allows visitors to access layers of information.
Baptist Memorial Health Care sponsored one of those exhibits, We Are Prepared to Die: Freedom Rides 1961.The exhibit tells the story of the Freedom Riders, civil rights activists who rode buses into southern states to challenge the non-enforcement of Supreme Court decisions that outlawed segregation in interstate travel. Police arrested riders for trespassing, unlawful assembly and violating state and local Jim Crow laws, along with other alleged offenses. The exhibit features the oral histories of six Freedom Riders who were imprisoned in the notorious Parchman Penitentiary in Mississippi.