Bus-Train Collision of 1942

Just after 1 p.m. on August 5, 1942, a Greyhound left its Crystal Springs stop with 52 people aboard, half of them Army Air Corps cadets bound for the flying school at Greenville. The driver waited for a northbound freight, then pulled onto the tracks in front of a southbound troop train he had not seen. It hit the rear and overturned the bus. Fifteen people died, among them bystanders Thelma Dodds and Zellie Cutrer, and cadet Richard Shinebarger, 21, married a month. Rumor of a school bus on the first day of school spread panic.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old Capitol Museum — 24 mi
  Mississippi's Greek Revival statehouse of 1839, where the legislature voted to secede, Hiram Revels was elected to the U.S. Senate and the 1890 constitution was written, now a free state museum.
• Farish Street Historic District — 24 mi
  Jackson's Black business and cultural center, where Medgar Evers kept the NAACP office and furniture-store owners recorded the blues, now a quiet National Register district.
• Mississippi Civil Rights Museum — 24 mi
  A state museum in downtown Jackson, opened in 2017 beside the Museum of Mississippi History, that tells the movement from 1945 to 1970 through the people who made it.
• Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument — 26 mi
  A modest ranch house in Jackson's Elraine neighborhood where Medgar Evers was shot in the driveway in 1963, now a unit of the National Park Service.

More markers nearby

• Tommy Johnson — steps away
• Crystal Springs — steps away
• P.T.A. Birthplace — 0.9 mi
• Robert Johnson Birthplace — 8.9 mi