An exhibit at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum shows remnant of a burned cross with a Ku Klux Klan robe. (Photo by John Feagins)
Plenaria | Aug. 22, 2025
My family recently drove from Texas to Georgia, stopping at Methodist sites in Savannah and St. Simon’s Island where John and Charles Wesley once ministered. Coastal Georgia is steeped in colonial history, a world the Wesleys helped shape.
What struck me most on this journey was the uniquely Southern contrast: breathtaking natural and architectural beauty alongside the brutal legacy of slavery, racism, and Jim Crow. That tension is everywhere—yet so too are signs of progress and hope.
On our way home to Austin, we visited the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson. That stop became the most powerful part of the trip.
The museum tells the story of African Americans with both artistic precision and academic rigor. Its exhibits confront visitors with hard truths while honoring a people whose humanity could not be crushed by centuries of white supremacist violence. By highlighting ordinary women and men, the museum emphasizes the grassroots nature of liberation.
Arranged around a circular auditorium like the apses of a church, the museum feels more like a temple than a gallery. Its sacredness lies not in ritual or beauty but in its testimony to blood and righteous sacrifice. Visitors walk chronologically through oppression, resistance, and reform, experiencing history as a pilgrimage toward equality.
For white visitors, the museum offers something more: three centuries of evidence that demands acknowledgment and repentance. Physical relics of slavery, terrorism, brutality, and triumph speak like a prosecutor, confronting both conscience and memory.
At one point, I found myself staring at racist Sambo children’s books, minstrel posters, and Jemima kitchen figurines—objects that could have come from my grandparents’ home. To prevent denial of their toxicity, the display was placed between a list of lynching victims and a Ku Klux Klan robe beside a burned cross. Suddenly, a voice that sounded like my late father shouted, “You think you’re so smart!” I instinctively ducked. Looking to another visitor for confirmation, she silently pointed to a hidden speaker as another taunt erupted: “What you lookin’ at, boy?!”
From that place of shame, I entered the central auditorium. Within the glowing circle, history came alive through the voice of Hezekiah Watkins, a museum staff member. At age fourteen, Watkins was jailed and beaten—an ordeal that propelled him into the Freedom Riders. He told his story with humility, closing not with bitterness but with hospitality: an invitation to inspiration, reconciliation, and grace.
Reflecting afterward, I realized the Civil Rights movement was not a single struggle but part of a recurring cycle: mass fear, dehumanization, violence, and structural injustice. Again and again, America has followed this pattern—from the genocide of Indigenous peoples to the institution of slavery, from the Civil War to Jim Crow, and even into the post-9/11 era.
The irrational fear behind this pattern is often called hysteria, but hysteria feminizes and trivializes it. Historically, these fears have not come from the powerless but from the powerful. They are less hysteria than what I call orchisteria—the paranoid fear of toxic masculinity. Though women often participate, its origins lie in patriarchal dominance: the narcissistic paranoia of men protecting privilege.
The saints honored in the Civil Rights Museum show us how to dismantle this cycle. In the face of fear, they embodied virtue. Against dehumanization, they built solidarity. Before violence, they chose nonviolence. Under white supremacy, they revealed a higher law of moral supremacy.
Orchisteria is not a political pendulum swinging back and forth. It is a pathology that escalates with each cycle, concentrating wealth and power into fewer hands. Fascism is only a stage along the way; the destination is feudalism.
Mass fear. Mass dehumanization. Mass violence. Systemic injustice. That is the cycle of orchisteria.
And it is not limited to race. Today it targets immigrants, women, sexual minorities, dissidents, journalists, doctors, librarians, scientists, historians and faith leaders, replacing institutions of justice and learning with those of oppression. Its propaganda saturates screens and homes, cultivating paranoia until neighbors turn against one another. This manufactured psychosis then justifies the very authoritarian rule it was designed to promote.
America suffered a great tragedy on September 11, 2001. Yet in the hyper-vigilant years since, we have inflicted exponentially more harm on one another than the terrorists ever could.
The saints honored in the Civil Rights Museum show us how to dismantle this cycle. In the face of fear, they embodied virtue. Against dehumanization, they built solidarity. Before violence, they chose nonviolence. Under white supremacy, they revealed a higher law of moral supremacy.
I pray we can find the courage to follow their example. The testimony of the Civil Rights Museum, and the living witness of Hezekiah Watkins, gives me hope. Just as the Wesleys once stood at a crossroads in colonial America before becoming a voice for abolition, we too stand at a crossroads. May we choose the path of liberation, grace, truth, and courage.
The Rev. John P. Feagins
Photo Courtesy of Manchaca UMC
The Rev. John P. Feagins serves as pastor of Manchaca UMC in the Austin, Texas, area (Rio Texas Annual Conference). This post is republished with permission from his blog, Plenaria.