Jackson-Medgar Wiley Evers International

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.

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.

A Victorian-Gothic rectory built in 1875 for St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Columbus, MS. Thomas Lanier Williams III — better known as Tennessee Williams — was born here March 26, 1911, the grandson of the rector Reverend Walter Dakin. He lived in the house for the first three years of his life before the family moved to Canton, then Clarksdale, and eventually St. Louis. Williams went on to write "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1947) and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (1955), winning two Pulitzer Prizes. The house was scheduled for demolition in 1993 when St. Paul's needed expansion space; preservationists moved it on flatbeds to a new site at Main Street and Tennessee Williams Way (formerly Third Street S), where it was restored to its 1911 appearance and now serves as the official Columbus Welcome Center. A certified National Literary Landmark. Columbus also produced Pulitzer Prize winner Eudora Welty (who attended Mississippi University for Women in town) and is home to Columbus Air Force Base — one of the country's largest pilot training operations.

A 33,000-square-foot aviation museum at 429 Pass Road in Gulfport, founded around the legacy of John C. Robinson — a Gulfport native and the first African-American combat pilot, who flew for Emperor Haile Selassie's Ethiopian Air Force in the 1935–36 war against Mussolini's Italian invasion. Robinson was known to the world as the "Brown Condor." Returning to the U.S., he became one of the original instructors who trained the Tuskegee Airmen. The museum's Mississippi Aviation Hall of Fame holds bronze busts of Apollo astronauts Fred Haise (born in Biloxi) and Stu Roosa, Shuttle astronauts Donald Peterson and Richard Truly, the Key Brothers (1935 endurance record holders), Roscoe Turner, and Jesse Brown (first African-American naval aviator, killed at Chosin Reservoir). Galleries on the Tuskegee Airmen, the Air Force's 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron Hurricane Hunters (based at Keesler AFB next door), crop dusting, and Mississippi's military bases from 1917 to today.