Charles Pendleton opened his museum at 1123 Washington Street in spring 2021 — the first African American to own a Civil War museum in the United States. The collection includes the Confederate states' original letters of secession, but that's not the point. The point is recovery: more than 20,000 artifacts spanning slavery to the present, personal objects and photographs and oral histories that most of Vicksburg's institutions have never made room for. A few blocks away, a park sits on the ground where Kuhn Memorial Hospital once stood — it honors the people who ran freedom schools here in 1964, who organized voter registration drives while the Old Baptist Association nearby was bombed on October 4th of that same year for hosting civil rights meetings. Vicksburg's other museums tell you who held the bluffs. These tell you who lived on them.
