In March 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. visited Marks to get support for a Poor People’s Campaign. King envisioned a march that would begin with mule and wagon trains in Mississippi before converging on Washington, D.C. The mule train eventually […]
Sisters Dorie and Joyce Ladner were community leaders during the civil rights movement. As teenagers, they joined the NAACP Youth Council and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and were mentored by civil rights leaders Vernon Dahmer, Clyde Kennard, and Medgar […]
The Mississippi Freedom Trail Marker is located in Money, about nine miles north of Greenwood. Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till came to this site to buy candy in August 1955. White shopkeeper Carolyn Bryant accused the black youth of flirting with her, […]
Civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer earned a reputation as an electrifying speaker, especially as a delegate of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. She is known for her signature line, ” I’m sick and […]
Moore dedicated himself to the civil rights movement, co-founding the Regional Council of Negro Leadership. His home served as a meeting place for many in the civil rights movement, including Bob Moses, Sam Block, Aaron Henry, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther […]
Mississippi Freedom Trail – T. R .M. Howard
Mound Bayou
Mound Bayou businessman and physician, Theodore Roosevelt Mason Howard, founded and led Mississippi’s pre-eminent civil rights organization in the 1950s, the Regional Council of Negro Leadership. […]
On June 16, 1966, SNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael made his famous “Black Power” speech here to an agitated crowd of about 600. As Carmichael shouted five times, “We want black power!” the crowd became more and more enthusiastic. […]
The Reverend George Lee was a vice president of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, a co-founder of the Belzoni NAACP branch, and a powerful public speaker. In the spring of 1955, he addressed a crowd of 10,000 gathered at […]
The historic William Chapel Missionary Baptist Church, established in 1922, was a longtime meeting place for civil rights activists before the organization of the modern civil rights movement. […]
Mississippi Freedom Trail – Aaron Henry
Clarksdale
Clarksdale pharmacist, Aaron Henry, was a major early grassroots activist in the civil rights movement. As the local NAACP president, he led a local business boycott campaign, during which he was arrested and his home and pharmacy firebombed. […]
Mississippi Freedom Trail – Unita Blackwell
Mayersville
Unita Blackwell was born in a sharecropper’s shack in Lula, Mississippi, on March 18, 1933. She would become an SNCC activist in 1964, representing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. […]
Benjamin Ellery Murph, a dentist and civil rights leader, was the charter vice president of the Laurel-Jones County NAACP in 1947 before becoming president four years later. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Murph expanded youth councils throughout Jones County, held […]
