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'United States Solders at Camp William Penn,' 1863, Supervisory Committee for Recruiting Colored Regiments. Chromolithographic print. From the exhibition 'African American Treasures from The Kinsey Collection,' opening March 21, 2015 at the Mitchell Memorial Library, Mississippi State University. Image courtesy of the Mitchell Memorial Library

MSU hosts renowned African American artifact collection

Catherine Saunders-Watson
Catherine Saunders-Watson

STARKVILLE, Miss. (AP) – One of the world’s private largest collections of African-American art, documents and artifacts will make its first trip to Mississippi next week.

The Kinsey Collection will be at Mississippi State University’s Mitchell Memorial Library from Saturday, March 21 through June 20. It has previously been viewed by more than 4 million people at such locations as Walt Disney World and the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

“This is the most significant collection we’ve had, and certainly the largest we’ve brought to the library,” said Stephen Cunetto, administrator of systems at Mitchell Memorial Library.

Housed in the library’s John Grisham Room, the exhibit will be open to the public free of charge. Viewing times include 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays and 1 to 5 p.m. on Sundays.

The MSU exhibit will house about 70 or 80 items including documents, books and art that range in date from the early 1500s to present times. Among them will be an early copy of the Emancipation Proclamation, a signed copy of Brown v. Board of Education and rare works from early 19th-century African-American artists. It also will include pieces that relate to Mississippi.

Owned by Bernard and Shirley Kinsey of Los Angeles, the collection began during the mid-1980s when their son, Khalil, had a third-grade homework assignment to research family history.

Bernard, former vice president of Xerox Corp., and Shirley, a former teacher, couldn’t trace their family roots past their grandparents. They began acquiring pieces to trace not only their own family history, but African-American culture as a whole.

“What The Kinsey Collection does is put the ‘African’ in the story of American history,” Bernard Kinsey said in a press release about MSU’s exhibit. ‘This is the story of a people who did so much with so little, and this collection begins to fill in the blanks, trying to give those people a voice, a personality and a name.”

An opening reception with the Kinsey family is scheduled for Saturday, March 21 from 6 to 8 p.m. Bernard Kinsey will make a presentation about the exhibit on Sunday, March 22 at 3 p.m. in the Lee Hall Auditorium.

For more information, visit library.msstate.edu/Kinsey

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Information from: Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, http://djournal.com