Captain Brady Tonth, Jr.

Brady Tonth Jr. grew up in Mound Bayou, was senior class president at McNair High School in 1969, and went to Mississippi Valley State on a band scholarship. In 1973 he became the first ROTC pilot commissioned from the university, then the first Black trainee from Mississippi to finish Air Force pilot training, at Columbus Air Force Base. He flew for the Mississippi Air National Guard, took part in Desert Shield and Desert Storm, and in 1986 captained an all-Black three-person crew for American Airlines. He later piloted for the actor Morgan Freeman.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old Court House Museum — 8.3 mi
  Vicksburg's Greek Revival courthouse of 1860, raised on a hilltop with the labor of enslaved artisans and now a private local-history museum heavy on Confederate relics.
• Vicksburg National Military Park — 8.4 mi
  A 16-mile tour road through the trenches of the 47-day siege of 1863, with a national cemetery and the story of the thousands of enslaved people who reached freedom behind Union lines.
• USS Cairo Gunboat and Museum — 10 mi
  The raised hull of a Union river ironclad sunk by a mine in the Yazoo in 1862, displayed at Vicksburg National Military Park with the artifacts the river mud preserved.
• Windsor Ruins — 24 mi
  Twenty-three standing Corinthian columns left by an 1890 fire, the largest antebellum mansion in Mississippi, built with enslaved labor on a 2,600-acre cotton plantation.

More markers nearby

• Tobias Gibson — 4.7 mi
• Vicksburg Siege — 5.2 mi
• U.S. African Brigade — 5.7 mi
• Freedmen Fight at Milliken's Bend — 5.7 mi