Miss Issippi

 Been a whirlwind several days since the last chance I had to write a full post.  So here I'll cover Mississippi (which we termed Miss Issippi on account of her being, we surmise, the unmarried daughter of Mr. Issippi), New Orleans, and Alabama. I'm writing from a hotel room in Atlanta where we've just arrived.

After leaving Memphis July 2, we took a full day to wind our way down back roads to stay the night in Jackson before heading to New Orleans the next day.  We took the Blues Highway, fabled Route 61, south from Memphis tracing the steps of many famous blues players in reverse who headed from the Delta to Memphis and Chicago mainly.
Mississippi has done a good job of marking the dozens of blues players' places of birth and rise to fame with a "Blues Trail," marked on a map and organized by a proper tourist-oriented web site here: http://msbluestrail.org/. We stopped at a few markers but the truth is that the map wasn't terribly well organized to be able to find your favorites and seek them out - it was best used to just see the scope of Mississippi's blues heritage and claims on so many amazing singers, guitarists, harpists, and entertainers.


Stopped into Clarksdale, passing through the "Crossroads" where Robert Johnson mythically sold his soul so that Eric Clapton could nail down a gazillion versions of the song with every other guitar hero imaginable playing along. Took a tour of the Delta Blues museum, the highlight of which was Muddy Waters' reconstructed childhood home with a life-size Muddy sitting watch outside. Hit Abe's BBQ for a round of "Big Abes" (pulled pork sandwiches with slaw) for lunch.

After lunch though we began our backroads civil rights history trail by heading south through Ruleville to see a modest but, as it turned out, more substantial memorial than most anything else we were able to find in Miss Issippi. Ruleville carved out a corner of a playground for Fannie Lou Hamer, a fiery thorn in the side of the Democratic Party who earned the epithet "that illiterate woman" from LBJ as she threatened his nomination in '64.


We took back roads southeast from there through the town of Money, MS where poor Emmet Till had the misfortune of looking askew (or whistling) at a young woman whose husband and friend came back to kidnap, beat, shoot, and toss him in the river later that night. Money is barely even a town, and this marker is about all that identifies the place many say is the birthplace of the fight for civil rights. I later learned from someone that there had been an effort to purchase the grocery by a group
wanting to establish a museum or memorial on the site. The farmer who owned the site had agreed to sell for $70-80K, until the buyers showed up with money they had raised and he learned of their intentions at which point he raised the price to $1M. I was also told this marker was the fifth placed there - the previous four having been torn down.

From Money we headed toward Greenwood, site of both mourning and protest at Till's death, and subsequently significant voter registration efforts by Sam Block. We visited the steps of the courthouse building where blacks were systematically denied for random reasons their right to register, sites of various meetings etc. Of note was the large white man in the white police-style cruiser who swung a U-turn after passing us pulled-over to the side of the road to look at the sites in a neighborhood that may not ever really have seen better days. He asked "Did we need help finding our way?" and when I said no, thanks, we're fine, he said "Best be careful 'round here..." and drove off with me wondering just what happened. We took pics in Greenwood, but mostly to remind us of what meager conditions people there still live in and not for publication.

From Greenwood we headed for Jackson with a very sad feeling that so little of this history was being acknowledged never mind commemorated appropriately here. Fortunately, in Jackson, despite finding more evidence of long term depression and the lingering legacies of segregation and economic racism, we also found more somewhat positive signs. The home of Medgar Evers, where he was tragically shot in his driveway with his family inside, has been taken over by Tougaloo College who provided an archivist to give an informal tour and excellent historical overiew. Down the street was the awesome Smith-Robertson School, from which Richard Wright graduated, now made into what we now know is one more in a series of excellent civil rights movement and African-American history museums.

We visited the Greyhound Bus station where Freedom Riders got off to be promptly hauled off to the nearby State Fairgrounds and placed in animal cages for imprisonment, and saw the formerly thriving African American business district of Farish Street. Beautiful with much potential, under partial restoration, but apparently lacking the "oomph" of a more widespread and sustained economic recovery.