The Cleveland Chinese Mission School

The school was a bargain struck with churches. After Lum v. Rice closed white public schools to Chinese children, Delta Chinese families partnered with local churches, usually Baptist, to open mission schools. Children had a white teacher during the regular school day and Chinese tutors in the evening. In return for the families' financial support, the churches required religious instruction and took decision-making responsibility. Families still refused to send their children to Black schools, which they offered as evidence they deserved social acceptance.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Dockery Farms — 5.6 mi
  The plantation on the Sunflower River where Charley Patton lived and played from about 1900, now a working farm, a National Register district and a Mississippi Blues Trail stop.
• Mound Bayou — 9.3 mi
  The Bolivar County town founded in 1887 by men who had been enslaved at Davis Bend, built to be Black-owned, home of Taborian Hospital and a museum on Roosevelt Street.
• Fannie Lou Hamer Memorial Garden — 9.9 mi
  The small park on Byron Street in Ruleville where Fannie Lou Hamer is buried beside her husband, with a Freedom Trail marker and a 2012 bronze statue.
• Parchman Farm (Mississippi State Penitentiary) — 16 mi
  The state penitentiary on Sunflower County cotton land, built in 1900 as a prison plantation, where Freedom Riders were held in 1961; a working prison with no visits and a Blues Trail marker at its gate.

More markers nearby

• Chrisman Street — 0.5 mi
• Cleveland — 0.5 mi
• Gospel and the Blues — 0.7 mi
• The Enlightenment of W.C. Handy — 0.7 mi