Natchez, Jackson, Vicksburg, the Delta, Oxford and Tupelo in 7 Days

Begin at the Grand Village of the Natchez Indians, the main ceremonial center of the Natchez from 1682 to 1730. The Great Sun, the nation's paramount leader, lived here, and two of the mounds have been rebuilt to the size and shape the French recorded in 1723. The French drove the Natchez out in 1730, and descendants are enrolled today in the Cherokee Nation and the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. Admission is free, and the state archives asks that you come here before you tour any mansion. Drive three miles to Forks of the Road, at Liberty Road and D'Evereux Drive. From 1832 to 1863 it was the second busiest slave market in the Deep South, and in the fall of 1863 soldiers of the 12th Wisconsin Infantry and the 58th United States Colored Troops tore the pens down, and a letter printed in the Milwaukee Sentinel in January 1864 says many of the soldiers had been sold in those pens. Exhibit panels mark the corner, and it is open from sunup to sundown. Then drive two miles to downtown. The William Johnson House is free and open daily from 8:30 to 5, with the first floor open. Johnson was born into slavery in 1809, became a free barber, kept a diary from 1835 to 1851, and claimed ownership of several enslaved people; he was shot in 1851 and his killer escaped conviction. The Natchez Museum of African American History and Culture at 301 Main Street holds exhibits on Forks of the Road, the Rhythm Club fire of April 23, 1940, in which 209 Black people died, and the 1965 boycotts and marches; ask the museum for its days. Fort Rosalie is a free bluff-top lawn over the river where the French built a fort in 1716. End at Melrose, three miles on. John T. McMurran owned or held an interest in five plantations that used the labor of more than 350 enslaved people, and the 1860 census counted twenty-two enslaved people at Melrose. Walk the grounds and outbuildings first, then take a house tour. Spend the night in Natchez.

This is a Monday. Drive 13 miles and about 20 minutes to Emerald Mound; turn off the Natchez Trace Parkway at milepost 10.3 and follow Emerald Mound Road for almost a mile. It is the second-largest Mississippian ceremonial mound in the United States, built by Plaquemine people between roughly 1250 and 1600. The tribes associated with the site asked that the public stay off the top because it is sacred, and the parkway took out the stairs in 2017, so you see it from the ground. Drive six miles to Mount Locust at milepost 15.5, an inn on the Old Trace where the Fergusons charged 25 cents for corn mush and milk and a place on the porch. Behind the house a cemetery holds 43 enslaved people, and the brick kiln marks where enslaved workers made bricks for the house. Then take the parkway about 100 miles, two hours at the 50 mph limit, to Ridgeland. Between mileposts 102.4 and 106.9 the information cabin of 1951, a short walk on the Old Trace itself and the Boyd Site stand within a few miles. The Park Service calls the Boyd Site sacred to the Choctaw and other tribal nations. The Choctaw town of Chisha Foka stood where Jackson is today, and the 1830 Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek forced the Choctaw to give up all their land east of the Mississippi. Drive three miles to Tougaloo College. The American Missionary Association bought the Boddie Plantation in 1869 to educate people who had been enslaved. On March 27, 1961, nine Tougaloo students sat down to read in the whites-only Jackson library, and Woodworth Chapel hosted speeches by Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers and Fannie Lou Hamer. The campus grounds are open, and the art collection and archives are visited by arrangement. Drive eight miles into Jackson and spend the night there.

This is a Tuesday. Start at the Old Capitol Museum, a Greek Revival statehouse that opened in 1839. The secession convention met here in January 1861, the legislature elected Hiram Revels to the Senate in 1870, and in 1890 a constitutional convention in which Democrats held 134 of 137 seats added a poll tax and a literacy test aimed at keeping Black Mississippians from voting. Admission is free, with free parking behind the museum entered from Amite Street. A short walk away, the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum opened on December 9, 2017 and covers 1945 through 1970 in galleries called "A Closed Society" and "Where Do We Go From Here?" Allow two hours. Drive a mile to Farish Street, the center of one of Mississippi's oldest Black communities. Medgar Evers ran the NAACP field office at 507 North Farish, H. C. Speir scouted blues musicians from a furniture store at 225 North Farish, and about two hundred of the district's nine hundred buildings have been lost. Then drive three and a half miles to the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home, open Tuesday to Saturday from 9 to 4 and closed from noon to 1. The Evers family planned for violence from the start: furniture stood in front of the windows, and the children learned to crawl to the bathroom. Medgar Evers was shot in the driveway just after midnight on June 12, 1963. Byron De La Beckwith, tried twice in 1964 with both juries hung, was convicted on February 5, 1994. This is still a residential street, so follow the Park Service's advice and park at Myrlie's Garden. Then drive 43 miles and about 55 minutes west on I-20 to Vicksburg and spend the night there.

Begin at the Old Court House Museum on its hilltop. It went up between 1858 and 1860, built with the labor of 100 skilled enslaved artisans, and in 1860 about two-thirds of Warren County was enslaved. The museum is a private society's collection and leans toward the Confederacy, so read it against the park. Drive three miles to Vicksburg National Military Park, where a 16-mile tour road passes the trenches of the 47-day siege that ended on July 4, 1863. The park tells what followed: as many as 20,000 enslaved people made their way to the city seeking freedom, United States Colored Troops garrisoned the town, and many of them are buried among the 18,244 graves in the national cemetery, most of them unidentified. It also holds the aftermath of December 1874, when armed white men demanded the resignation of Peter Crosby, Warren County's first Black sheriff, and by one count about 23 Black residents were killed. Allow three hours with an entrance pass; the park does not take cash. Inside the park, the USS Cairo came up from the Yazoo River after about a century in the mud. A mine sank it on December 12, 1862, the first ship sunk by an electrically detonated mine, and four Black sailors ranked Seaman served in its crew. Then take US 61 north, 106 miles and about two and a half hours, into the Delta. This is the Blues Highway, the road that carried Mississippians north in the Great Migration, and the Mississippi Blues Trail has a marker for it at Washington and Jackson Streets in Vicksburg. Spend the night in Cleveland.

Drive 26 miles and 45 minutes south to Indianola and the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center. It is built around the brick cotton gin where King worked in the 1940s, and it opened in September 2008. The galleries explain the cotton economy, the blues, Jim Crow and the movement in the Delta as well as one musician; King is buried in a memorial garden on the grounds. Allow two hours or more. Drive 24 miles and about 40 minutes to Ruleville and the Fannie Lou Hamer Memorial Garden on Byron Street. Hamer, the youngest of twenty children of sharecroppers, tried to register to vote in 1962 and was evicted from the plantation where she worked, and her grave lies beside her husband's. The garden is free, and it is a cemetery. Drive five miles to Dockery Farms. Will Dockery began the plantation in 1895, and Charley Patton's family came here around 1900. H. C. Speir found Patton here in 1929 and arranged his first recordings. It is private land and a working farm, so ask first. Then drive 16 miles to Mound Bayou. Isaiah T. Montgomery, Joshua P. T. Montgomery and Benjamin T. Green, all enslaved at Davis Bend, founded it in July 1887 as a town where Black families would own the land. Taborian Hospital opened in 1942, and Dr. T. R. M. Howard housed Black reporters and witnesses in his home during the Emmett Till trial. The museum is at 200 Roosevelt Street, and its hours are not reliably published, so call. Drive 27 miles on US 61 to Clarksdale and spend the night there.

Begin at the Delta Blues Museum in a restored freight depot of 1918, the state's oldest music museum. Muddy Waters's cabin, rebuilt from the original cypress boards of the house he lived in on the Stovall plantation, is its largest object, and you can sit inside and watch a film about his life. Clarksdale sits where US 61 met US 49, and the old junction is marked as the crossroads where, according to legend, Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil; it is a legend, not a documented event. Drive 21 miles and about 35 minutes to Sumner and the Emmett Till Interpretive Center. In the Tallahatchie County courthouse across the street, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam were tried in September 1955 for the murder of Emmett Till. Moses Wright, his great-uncle, identified the men who had taken the boy from his house, and on 23 September an all-white jury acquitted them after deliberating a little over an hour. The courtroom has been restored to its 1955 appearance, and in 2023 the courthouse became part of the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument. The center offers tours and can tell you how to reach Graball Landing, on the Tallahatchie River at the end of a gravel road. Plan to go quietly. Then drive 29 miles and about 50 minutes to Money and Bryant's Grocery. On the evening of 24 August 1955, Till, fourteen and visiting from Chicago, went into the store with his cousins. What stands now is a collapsing shell on private property, with a Mississippi Freedom Trail marker at the corner. Look from the road and do not go in. Then drive 82 miles and about two hours east to Oxford and spend the night there.

This is a Saturday. Start at Rowan Oak, where William Faulkner lived from 1930 until his death in 1962. Admission is $10, cash only. In the study the plot of A Fable is written on the wall in graphite and red grease pencil, and Caroline Barr, a former slave who had helped raise Faulkner, lived in the old servants' quarters from 1930 to 1940. Drive two miles to the Lyceum and the Circle, where on 30 September 1962 federal marshals ringed the building while a crowd of more than 2,500 rioted against the enrollment of James Meredith. Two men were shot dead, and the portico still bears bullet scars. Meredith registered inside the Lyceum on the morning of 1 October. A mile on, Oxford Square has a marker, placed in September 2021 with the Equal Justice Initiative, naming the county's known lynching victims. Drive 31 miles and about 45 minutes to Holly Springs. The Ida B. Wells-Barnett Museum stands in the house where Wells was born into slavery in 1862, and visits are by appointment. A short walk away, Rust College, founded in 1866 as a church school for freed people, was the first historically Black college founded in Mississippi, and Wells studied there in the 1870s. Then drive 60 miles and about an hour and ten minutes to Tupelo and the Natchez Trace Parkway Visitor Center at milepost 266, the parkway's headquarters, with a film, a small museum of the Old Trace and the surviving Tupelo Homesteads. Drive six miles south to the Chickasaw Village Site at milepost 261.8, where house outlines are marked on a remnant of the Black Belt Prairie and the signs carry the voices of LaDonna Brown, tribal anthropologist of the Chickasaw Nation, and Pauline Brown of the Chickasaw Language Committee. Drive four miles into Tupelo, where the trip ends. The Chickasaw Council House site, 11 miles farther south on the parkway, is the next stop if you have another morning.