Greenville, MS
Indianola, in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, is where Riley B. King — born across the line in Itta Bena on September 16, 1925 — worked picking cotton and driving a tractor before he became B.B. King. The museum opened September 13, 2008 in a restored brick cotton gin where King worked in the 1940s. Inside: 15 GRAMMY awards, his Gibson ES-355 "Lucille" guitars, his tour bus, a recreation of his office, and exhibits placing his life inside the Delta's segregation-era cotton economy and the Civil Rights Movement. King chose to be buried on the museum grounds — his grave is on site. Indianola sits on US-82 between Greenwood and Greenville, half an hour west of where Highway 61 meets Highway 49 at Clarksdale (the "Crossroads" of Robert Johnson legend). The whole region is the foundation of American popular music.
Stuttgart sits at the center of the Grand Prairie of Arkansas — a perfectly flat, naturally treeless plain that became the most productive rice-growing region in the United States after the first commercial rice crop was planted here in 1904. Today Arkansas produces roughly half of all U.S. rice; Stuttgart is the largest rice-handling town in the country. The same flooded fields that produce the rice also lie directly under the Mississippi Flyway — the migration corridor for an estimated 40% of all North American waterfowl. The result: Stuttgart hosts the World's Championship Duck Calling Contest every Thanksgiving weekend (since 1936), a four-day festival that brings 50,000+ visitors and judges the country's best duck callers on a four-call sequence (hail, feed, mating, comeback). Riceland Foods is headquartered here. The Museum of the Arkansas Grand Prairie tells both the agricultural and the waterfowl stories. November–January is duck season; outside hunting season Stuttgart's flat-as-a-table terrain is itself the landscape attraction.
2332 Margaret Walker Alexander Drive in Jackson — a modest single-story brick home in the Elraine subdivision, a Black middle-class neighborhood developed in the early 1950s. Medgar and Myrlie Evers bought the house in 1956 and moved in with their two young children. They picked the house at the end of a driveway, hoping it would be harder to surveil. Medgar still parked under a carport that was visible from the street. On the night of June 11, 1963, hours after President Kennedy's televised speech on civil rights, Medgar drove home from a NAACP strategy meeting at New Jerusalem Church. He pulled into the carport just after midnight on June 12. He was carrying NAACP t-shirts that read JIM CROW MUST GO. Byron De La Beckwith, hidden in a tangle of honeysuckle across the street, shot him in the back with an Enfield .30-06 rifle. Medgar staggered toward the front door and collapsed. Myrlie and the children, who had been allowed to stay up to watch Kennedy's address, ran outside. He died at the segregated University of Mississippi Medical Center about an hour later. He was thirty-seven. Myrlie Evers stayed in the house with the children for years afterward. She kept his civil rights work going, raised the family, and spent the next thirty-one years pushing the state of Mississippi to retry the case. In 1994 — after two earlier all-white juries deadlocked in 1964 — Beckwith was finally convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. He died in jail in 2001. Myrlie went on to chair the national NAACP from 1995 to 1998. The Evers family donated the house to Tougaloo College in 1993. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2017 and a National Monument under the NPS in 2020. The interior is preserved to its 1963 state — the bullet's path through the carport wall is marked. The driveway where Medgar fell is unchanged.
The visitor center of Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site sits at the intersection of West Daisy L. Gatson Bates Drive and Park Street, directly across from the school. The school itself, completed in 1927, is still a functioning public high school — the only operating high school in the United States that is also a unit of the National Park System. About 2,500 students attend classes here every day. The NPS visitor center opened on September 24, 2007 — fifty years to the day after Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10730 and the 101st Airborne arrived. President Clinton, who as a young Arkansan had grown up in the years after the crisis, hosted the dedication gala. Civil rights activist and Georgia congressman John Lewis gave the keynote. The exhibit traces the legal history that led to Brown v. Board, the Little Rock Crisis itself, and the experiences of the Little Rock Nine after they entered Central — verbal abuse and physical attacks every day, lockers broken into, homework destroyed, one student nearly attacked with acid. Listening stations carry oral history interviews with the Nine themselves. The original 1957 Mobil gas station across Park Street, where journalists set up their typewriters during the crisis, has been restored and is part of the site. The school received National Historic Landmark designation in 1982 and became a National Historic Site under the NPS in 1998. In July 2024 the Interior Department began the process to nominate Central High for UNESCO World Heritage status.