Clarksdale, Mississippi

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Clarksdale, Mississippi
City
Nickname(s):  The Golden Buckle on the Cotton Belt
Location of Clarksdale, Mississippi
Clarksdale, Mississippi Location in the United States
Coordinates: 34°12′N 90°34′W / 34.200°N 90.567°W / 34.200; -90.567Coordinates: 34°12′N 90°34′W / 34.200°N 90.567°W / 34.200; -90.567
Country	United States
State	Mississippi
County	Coahoma
Government
• [Mayor]	Chuck Espy (D)
Area [1]
• Total	13.89 sq mi (35.98 km2)
• Land	13.89 sq mi (35.97 km2)
• Water	0.01 sq mi (0.02 km2)
Elevation	174 ft (53 m)
Population  (2010)
• Total	17,962
• Estimate  (2018)[2]	15,304
• Density	1,132.86/sq mi (437.39/km2)
Time zone	UTC−6 (Central (CST))
• Summer (DST)	UTC−5 (CDT)
ZIP Codes	38614, 38669
Area code(s)	662
FIPS code	28-13820
GNIS feature ID	0666084
Website	Clarksdale, Mississippi

Clarksdale is a city in Coahoma County, Mississippi, United States, and seat of the county.^[3]

The western boundary of the county is formed by the Mississippi River. Located in the Mississippi Delta region, Clarksdale is an agricultural and trading center, it has been home to many blues musicians. Clarksdale is named after John Clark, who founded the city in the mid-19th century.

History[edit]

The Sunflower River Bridge in Clarksdale, 1890

Former Yazoo & Mississippi Valley/Illinois Central Passenger Depot in Clarksdale, early 1900s. The building is now the location of the Delta Blues Museum.

Early history[edit]

Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians occupied the Delta region prior to the arrival of European settlers. Clarksdale was developed at the former intersection of two Indian routes: the Lower Creek Trade Path, which extended westward from Augusta, Georgia, to New Mexico; and the Chakchiuma Trade Trail, which ran northeastward to the former village at present-day Pontotoc, Mississippi.^[4]

The first removal treaty carried out under the Indian Removal Act was the 1830 Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, by which the Choctaw people were robbed of 15 million acres in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). A similar forced removal of the Chickasaw Nation began in 1837; once in Indian Territory, the Choctaw were forced out of the westernmost part of their land.^{[citation needed]}

Following the removal of the Indians, European-American settlers migrated to the Delta region, where the fertile soil was excellent for growing cotton, they brought or purchased African-American slaves to work the several cotton plantations developed in the county, always locating these on the riverfront for transportation access. John Clark founded the town in 1848 when he bought land in the area and started a timber business. Clark married the sister of James Lusk Alcorn, a major planter who owned a nearby plantation. Alcorn became a politician, elected by the state legislature as US Senator and later elected as governor of the state. Thriving from the cotton trade and associated business, Clarksdale soon earned the title "The Golden Buckle on the Cotton Belt".^{[citation needed]}

African-American slaves made the plantations work and built the wealth of King Cotton in the state. U.S. Census data shows Coahoma County, Mississippi's 1860 population was 1,521 whites and 5,085 slaves.^[5] James Alcorn was a major planter, owning 77 slaves.^{[citation needed]}

When slavery was abolished, many black families labored as sharecroppers, they gained some independence but were often at a disadvantage in negotiations with white planters. Historian Nicholas Lemann writes "segregation strengthened the grip of the sharecropper system by ensuring that most blacks would have no arena of opportunity in life except for the cotton fields" (p. 6).^[6]

During the Reconstruction Era following the Civil War, Mississippi's blacks and poor whites both benefited from the State's new constitution of 1868, which adopted universal suffrage; did away with property qualifications for suffrage or for office; provided for the state's first public school system; forbade race distinctions in the possession and inheritance of property; and prohibited limiting civil rights in travel.^[7]

Those gains were short-lived, as insurgent white paramilitary groups such as the Red Shirts worked to suppress black voting from 1868 on. By 1875 white Democrats took control of the state legislature in Mississippi, they later passed Jim Crow laws, including legal segregation of public facilities.^{[citation needed]}

A freedman named Bill Peace, who had served in the Union Army and returned to Clarksdale after the war, persuaded his former owner to allow him to form a security force to prevent theft from the plantation. On October 9, 1875, whites in Clarksdale began hearing rumors that "General Peace" was preparing his troops to plunder the town; rumors spread that he was planning to murder the whites. A white militia was formed, and they suppressed Peace's "revolt". Across Mississippi, white militias frequently formed in response to similar fears of armed black revolt.^{[citation needed]}

Twentieth-century historian Nicholas Lemann writes:

Like the establishment of sharecropping, the restoration to power of the all-white Democratic Party in the South was a development of such magnitude to whites that it became encrusted in legend; many towns have their own mythic stories of the redemption of the white South. In Clarksdale it is the story of the "race riot" of October 9, 1875.^[6]

After the Reconstruction era and construction in 1879 of the Louisville, New Orleans and Texas Railway through the town, Clarksdale was incorporated in 1882. In 1886, the town's streets were laid out; it was not until 1913 that any were paved.^[6]

African-Americans composed most of the farm labor in the county into the 1940s, when increasing mechanization reduced the need for field workers and thousands of blacks had left Mississippi in the Great Migration to Chicago and later, West Coast cities, they developed a rich musical tradition drawing from many strands of music, and influencing jazz and the blues in Chicago.^{[citation needed]}

The Great Migration[edit]

The movement of large numbers of people both to and from Clarksdale is prominent in the city's history. Prior to 1920, Delta plantations were in constant need of laborers, and many black families moved to the area to work as sharecroppers. After World War I, plantation owners even encouraged blacks to move from the other parts of Mississippi to the Delta region for work. By this time, Clarksdale had also become home to a multi-cultural mixture of Lebanese, Italian, Chinese and Jewish immigrant merchants.^[6]

By 1920, the price of cotton had fallen, and many blacks living in the Delta began to leave; the Illinois Central Railroad operated a large depot in Clarksdale and provided a Chicago-bound route for those seeking greater economic opportunities in the north; it soon became the primary departure point for many.^[6]

During the 1940s, three events occurred which increased the exodus of African-Americans from Clarksdale. First, it became possible to commercially produce a cotton crop entirely by machine, which lessened the need for a large, low-paid workforce. (Coincidentally, it was on 28 acres of the nearby Hopson Plantation where the International Harvester Company perfected the single-row mechanical cotton picking machine in 1946; soil was prepared, seeded, picked and bailed entirely by machines, while weeds were eradicated by flame.)^[8]

Second, many African-American GIs (soldiers) returned from World War II to find slim opportunities for employment in the Delta region. Finally, there appeared an accelerated climate of racial hatred, as evidenced by the violence against such figures as NAACP representative Aaron Henry.^{[citation needed]}

"The Great Migration" north became the largest movement of Americans in U.S. history, and was recounted with Clarksdale triangulated with Chicago and Washington D.C. in Nicholas Lemann's award-winning book The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How it Changed America.^[9] The History Channel later produced a documentary based on the book, narrated by actor Morgan Freeman, who is also a co-owner of Ground Zero Blues Club.^[10]

Civil rights in Clarksdale[edit]

On September 10, 1919, Black veteran L.B. Reed was lynched as part of the Red Summer of 1919.

Clarksdale played a very important role in the civil rights movement in Mississippi; the starting point for a civil rights movement in Clarksdale was the rape at gunpoint of two African-American women, Leola Tates and Erline Mills, in August 1951.^[11] The two white teenagers they said assaulted them, who admitted the event but said it was consensual, were arrested, but "despite the overwhelming evidence against them, the justice of peace court judge freed the accused perpetrators".^[12]:41

This was followed by the nearby (50 miles (80 km)) lynching of Emmett Till in 1955.

Recent history[edit]

Bill Luckett, former mayor of Clarksdale

Delta Avenue

Clarksdale's citizens are famous for their civil rights activism and Clarksdale's police department is equally famous for its efforts to limit these rights. On May 29, 1958, Martin Luther King visited Clarksdale for the first major meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). In 1960, Aaron Henry, a local pharmacist, was named state president of the NAACP, and went on to organize a two-year-long boycott of Clarksdale businesses. In 1962, King again visited Clarksdale on the first stop on a region-wide tour, where he urged a crowd of 1,000 to "stand in, sit in, and walk by the thousands".^[13][14]

National headlines in February 2013 covered the discovery of mayoral candidate Marco McMillian, who was found murdered near the town of Sherard, to the west of his home town of Clarksdale; because McMillian was openly gay and was badly beaten before his death, there was speculation that his murder qualified to be classified as a hate crime. Lawrence Reed, an acquaintance of McMillian, was charged, tried, and found guilty of the murder in April 2015.^[15]

Music history[edit]

A crossroads tribute in Clarksdale, where blues guitarist Robert Johnson supposedly sold his soul to the devil

Clarksdale has been historically significant in the history of the blues; the Mississippi Blues Trail places interpretative markers for historic sites such as Clarksdale's Riverside Hotel, where Bessie Smith died following an auto accident on Highway 61. The Riverside Hotel is just one of many historical blues sites in Clarksdale.^[16] Early supporters of the effort to preserve Clarksdale's musical legacy included the award-winning photographer and journalist Panny Mayfield, Living Blues magazine founder Jim O'Neal, and attorney Walter Thompson, father of sports journalist Wright Thompson. In 1995, Mt. Zion Memorial Fund founder Skip Henderson, a vintage guitar dealer from New Brunswick, New Jersey and friend of Delta Blues Museum founder Sid Graves, purchased the Illinois Central Railroad passenger depot to save it from planned demolition. With the help of local businessman Jon Levingston, as well as the Delta Council, Henderson received a US$1.279 million grant from the federal government to restore the passenger depot. These redevelopment funds were then transferred on the advice of Clarksdale's City attorney, Hunter Twiford, to Coahoma County, in order to establish a tourism locale termed "Blues Alley", after a phrase coined by then Mayor, Henry Espy; the popularity of the Delta Blues Museum and the growth of the Sunflower River Blues Festival and Juke Joint Festivals have provided an economic boost to the city.

Geography[edit]

Clarksdale is located on the banks of the Sunflower River in the Mississippi Delta.

According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 13.9 square miles (36 km²), of which 13.8 square miles (36 km²) is land and 0.07% is water.

U.S. Routes 49, 61, and 278 go through Clarksdale.

Demographics[edit]

As of the 2010 United States Census, There were 17,962 people residing in the city. 79.0% were African American, 19.5% White, 0.6% Asian, 0.6% Native American, 0.4% of some other race, and 0.5% from two or more races. 0.9% were Hispanic or Latino of any race.

As of the census^[19] of 2000, there were 20,645 people, 7,233 households, and 5,070 families residing in the city; the population density was 1,491.8 people per square mile (575.9/km²). There were 7,757 housing units at an average density of 560.5 per square mile (216.4/km²). The racial makeup of the city was 68.52% African American, 29.95% White, 0.58% Asian, 0.11% Native American, 0.01% Pacific Islander, 0.22% from other races, and 0.60% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 0.65% of the population.

There were 7,233 households out of which 36.8% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 35.7% were married couples living together, 30.0% had a female householder with no husband present, and 29.9% were non-families. 27.1% of all households were made up of individuals and 12.1% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.77 and the average family size was 3.38.

In the city, the population was spread out with 32.9% under the age of 18, 14.6% from 18 to 24, 25.2% from 25 to 44, 16.3% from 45 to 64, and 10.9% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 28 years. For every 100 females, there were 89.8 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 81.1 males.

The median income for a household in the city was US$20,188, and the median income for a family was US$22,592. Males had a median income of US$23,881 versus US$18,918 for females; the per capita income for the city was US$11,611. About 32.7% of families and 39.2% of the population were below the poverty line, including 46.1% of those under age 18 and 31.4% of those age 65 or over.

Arts and culture[edit]

Delta Blues Museum[edit]

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Delta Blues Museum

Juke Joint Festival at Delta Cinema in Clarksdale

In late 1979 Carnegie Public Library Director Sid Graves began a nascent display series which later became the nucleus of the Delta Blues Museum.^[20] Graves single-handedly nurtured the beginnings of the museum in the face of an indifferent community and an often recalcitrant Library Board, at times resorting to storing displays in the trunk of his car when denied space in the library; when the fledgling museum was accidentally discovered by Billy Gibbons of the rock band ZZ Top through contact with Howard Stovall Jr., the Delta Blues Museum became the subject of national attention as a pet project of the band, and the Museum began to enjoy national recognition.

In 1995 the museum, at that time Clarksdale's only attraction, grew to include a large section of the newly renovated library building, but remained under the tight control of the Carnegie Library Board, who subsequently fired Sid Graves, at the time seriously ill. Graves died in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, in January 2005. In an interim move from the renovated Library building, the Museum spent most of 1996 in a converted retail storefront on Delta Avenue under the direction of a politically connected former Wisconsin native, the late Ron Gorsegner. In 1997–1998 Coahoma County would finally provide funds to form a separate Museum Board of Directors composed mainly of socially prominent, local white blues fans, and to renovate the adjoining Illinois Central Railroad freight depot, providing a permanent home for the Delta Blues Museum.

Mississippi Blues Trail markers[edit]

A Blues Trail marker at the WROX building in Clarksdale.^[21] The site is also list on the National Register of Historic Places.^[22]

Several Mississippi Blues Trail markers are located in Clarksdale.

One is located on Stovall Road at a cabin believed to have been lived in by famed bluesman McKinley Morganfield, also known as Muddy Waters. Morganfield supposedly lived there from 1915 until 1943 while he worked on the large Stovall cotton plantation before moving to Chicago after mistreatment at the hands of a Stovall overseer.^{[citation needed]}

Another Blues Trail marker is located at the Riverside Hotel, which provided lodging to blues entertainers passing through the delta.^[23][24]

In 2009, a marker devoted to Clarksdale native Sam Cooke was unveiled in front of the New Roxy Theater.

Education[edit]

Community colleges[edit]

Coahoma Community College, a historically black college, is located in unincorporated Coahoma County, north of Clarksdale.

Public schools[edit]

The city of Clarksdale is served by the Clarksdale Municipal School District; the district has nine schools, including Clarksdale High School, with a total enrollment of 3,600 students. During the 1960s, the Clarksdale gained notoriety for being the first school district in the state of Mississippi to achieve SACS accreditation for both black and white schools, beginning the desegregation process in its schools.^[25]

Coahoma Early College High School, a non-district public high school in unincorporated Coahoma County, is located on the campus of Coahoma Community College,^[26] approximately 4.5 miles (7.2 km) north of Clarksdale.^[27]

Coahoma County Junior-Senior High School of the Coahoma County School District is in the city limits of Clarksdale,^[28] but does not serve the city.^[29]

Private schools[edit]

The city is home to three private schools^[30]

• Lee Academy
• Presbyterian Day School
• St. Elizabeth's Elementary School

Charter school[edit]

• Clarksdale Collegiate Public Charter School opened in the fall of 2018 serving kindergarten, 1st, and 2nd grade students. It plans to serve grades K–8. According to its web site, 3rd grade is being added in 2019,^[31] and it will begin serving 7th graders in 2023.^[32]

Media[edit]

Newspapers[edit]

• Clarksdale Press Register

Radio stations[edit]

• WAID (FM)
• WROX (AM)
• WCQC FM

Notable people[edit]

Born in Clarksdale[edit]

• Robert E. Bacharach – Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals.
• J. T. Gray, NFL player
• Lerone Bennett, Jr. – scholar, author and social historian.
• Marco McMillian – slain mayoral candidate.
• Charles L. Sullivan – politician, attorney and military pilot.
• Larry A. Thompson – Hollywood film producer, talent manager, lawyer, and author.
• Wright Thompson – senior writer for ESPN.
• W. Harry Vaughan – founded Georgia Tech Research Institute.
• Baseball players: Matt Duff, Cleo James, Fred Valentine.
• Football players: Ed Beatty, James Carson, Charlie Conerly, Eddie Cole,^[33] Harper Davis, Art Davis, Billy Howard, Terrence Metcalf, John Outlaw, Bobby Franklin, Mario Haggan, Darryl Harris, LaMarcus Hicks, Willie Richardson, Destry Wright, Trumaine McBride, Charles Mitchell, Roy Curry.
• Basketball players: Earl Barron, Earnie Killum.
• Boxers: Eddie Perkins, Alfonso Ratliff.
• Musicians: Eddie Boyd, Jackie Brenston, Eddie "Bongo" Brown, Willie Brown, Eddie Calhoun, Sam Cooke, Nate Dogg, Marshall Drew, Blac Elvis, Earl Hooker, John Lee Hooker, Son House, Johnny B. Moore, Junior Parker, Mack Rice, Rick Ross, Brother John Sellers, Ike Turner, Robert "Bilbo" Walker Jr..

Lived or worked in Clarksdale[edit]

• Leon Bramlett – Clarksdale farmer, businessman, and politician; place of birth missing; college football player for United States Naval Academy
• Robert Brien - professional tennis player.
• Marshall Bouldin III – portrait artist.
• Earl L. Brewer – 38th Governor of Mississippi; buried at Oakridge Cemetery in Clarksdale.
• Gus Cannon – musician.
• Jack Cristil – radio announcer.
• William Stamps Farish II – president of Standard Oil, practiced law in Clarksdale.
• Morgan Freeman – Academy Award-winning actor, lived and owned a business in Clarksdale.
• Larry M. Goodpaster – United Methodist Church Bishop; former Clarksdale pastor.
• W. C. Handy – musician; lived in Clarksdale for 6 years.
• Aaron Henry – pharmacist, civil rights leader, and politician; born just outside Clarksdale.
• Robert Johnson – influential Delta musician; resident during the 1930s. Posthumus member of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1986)
• Trumaine McBride – football player.
• Charles Mitchell – football player.
• Anthony Steen – football player; graduated from Lee Academy
• Willie Morganfield - gospel musician.
• Jack Robinson – photographer, lived in Clarksdale as a child.
• Frank Stokes – musician.
• Wade Walton – musician and barber.^[34]
• Muddy Waters – musician, moved to Clarksdale as a child.
• Howlin' Wolf – musician, performed in Clarksdale in 1930s.
• Tennessee Williams – playwright, moved to Clarksdale as a child.
• Seelig Wise – first Republican to serve in Mississippi State Senate since Reconstruction; cotton and soybean farmer in Coahoma County^[35]
• Early Wright – radio personality on WROX (AM) 1945–1998.

In popular culture[edit]

Jimmy Page and Robert Plant named their 1998 album Walking Into Clarksdale as a tribute to the significance that Clarksdale made in the history of the Delta Blues.

See also[edit]

• Delta Blues Museum
• Ground Zero Blues Club
• National Register of Historic Places listings in Coahoma County
• Riverside Hotel

References[edit]

Further reading[edit]

• Henshall, John C. (2019). Downtown Revitalisation and Delta Blues in Clarksdale, Mississippi: Lessons for Small Cities and Towns. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-981-13-2106-1.
• Motley, Clay (Summer 2018). "'Life Gets Heavy'. Blues Tourism in Clarksdale, Mississippi". Southern Cultures. 24 (2): 78–97 – via Project MUSE.
• Radishofski, Kathryn (2017). "Last (Un)Fair Deal Going Down: Blues Tourism and Racial Politics in Clarksdale, Mississippi". In Coffey, Michele Grigsby; Skipper, Jodi (eds.). Navigating Souths: Transdisciplinary Explorations of a U.S. Region. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press. pp. 214–226. JSTOR j.ctt1g0b9f4.16.
• Morrison, Minion K C (2015). "Aaron Henry, the NAACP, and indigenous leadership : the Clarksdale social movement". Aaron Henry of Mississippi : inside agitator. Fayetteville, Arkansas: University of Arkansas Press. ISBN 978-1557287595 – via Project MUSE.
• Hamlin, Françoise N. (2013). "Collision and Collusion. Local Activism, Local Agency, and Flexible Alliances". In Ownby, Ted (ed.). The Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi. pp. 35–58. ISBN 978-1-61703-933-1 – via Project MUSE.
• Hamlin, Françoise N. (2012). Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta After World War II. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 978-0-8078-3549-4 – via Project MUSE.
• Dirks, Annelieke (2007). "Between Threat and Reality: The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Emergence of Armed Self-Defense in Clarksdale and Natchez, Mississippi, 1960–1965". Journal for the Study of Radicalism. 1 (1): 71–98 – via Project MUSE.
• Curry, Constance (2000). Aaron Henry: The Fire Ever Burning. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 1496820290.
• Hornbuckle, Brian K. (1995). "Desegregation: How It Happened in Clarksdale, Mississippi" (PDF). Retrieved August 7, 2019.
• Weeks, Linton (1982). Clarksdale and Cohoma County: A History. Clarksdale, Mississippi: Clarksdale Carnegie Public Library. OCLC 9136557.

External links[edit]

Wikivoyage has a travel guide for Clarksdale.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Clarksdale, Mississippi.

• City of Clarksdale
• Clarksdale Chamber of Commerce