April 12, 2024

April 12, 2024

This morning we drove to the north side of Jackson, MS and found Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument in what in the 1960’s was a new suburban black community. We read the storyboards around the parking lot to learn their story. Medgar was the NAACP Leader of Mississippi and active in organizing voter drives, boycotts, and integration campaigns. The Ku Klux Klan targeted him. He was murdered in June 1963 outside his home. His death caused a national uproar. The assassin was only convicted 31 years later.

We then walked into the subdivision to find and tour his home. The ‘60’s decoration looks like my family childhood home.

We left Jackson following the Natchez Trace Parkway northeast to the interstate and then headed north. After an hour we descended bluffs into the Mississippi Delta National Heritage Area. This crescent in northwestern Mississippi is the flat fertile bottomland between the Mississippi River and its tributary Yazoo River. It was a prime cotton growing region.

We stopped in Greenwood, MS, Cotton Capital of the World. Cotton would be hauled here and loaded on barges that sailed down the Yazoo River to Vicksburg for shipment overseas. To celebrate the Delta Heritage we tried to find a southern restaurant in Greenwood. We first stopped at a BBQ stand but it had no bathroom or tables. We next found a cute southern diner but the wait was too long.

We crossed the Yazoo and kept on driving north until we found Graball Landing down a long dirt road on the Tallahatchie River. This is supposedly where Emmett Till’s body was recovered. Wanting to learn his story, we stopped in Sumner looking for Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument. It is located in an affiliated Interpretive Center. We arrived just in time to join seventeen Minnesotans on a Civil Rights tour of the South. We followed their group across the street and into the courthouse. For the next hour we listened to the docent relate the murder.

Emmett Till was a Chicago kid who came to spend the summer of 1955 with his cousins. Not knowing the local “rules” he almost immediately got himself into trouble. He was kidnapped and killed and his body recovered at Graball Landing. The two murderers were acquitted in this courtroom. His mother exhibited his body in an open casket in Chicago for the world to see.

Afterwards we drove east past Oxford and the University of Mississippi ending in Tupelo, MS. We walked across the street to a BBQ joint. I had the brisket and Aimee had the pulled pork.