This article is part of our latest special report on Museums, which focuses on the intersection of art and politics.

For many Americans now, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s has faded into history, reflected in old black and white photos that look like they were taken in some faraway land.

For others, though, those years and the events that unfolded remain embedded in our psyches, having profoundly affected who we came to be. I count myself among the latter, which is why I decided to spend some of the last two years on sporadic road trips with a friend visiting small, sometimes out of the way civil rights museums that are sprinkled throughout the American Deep South. The timing seemed so right.

Many pay homage to the victims of long hidden injustices and crimes. At the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson, for instance, tablets memorialize Mississippians who had been lynched. On one of the days I visited, a family from the eastern part of the state had found the name of a relative there.