Cleveland

A notable visit came to Cleveland in 1967, when Senators Robert F. Kennedy and Joseph S. Clark Jr. carried their War on Poverty hearings into the Delta. The first field hearings were held in Jackson, and the next day the senators set out to visit pockets of poverty. Marian Wright and Peter Edelman came along, and Amzie Moore led the tour. They saw barefoot, underfed Black children in tattered clothes. Kennedy told Edelman he had thought West Virginia held the worst poverty in the nation, but that it paled beside what he saw in Cleveland.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Dockery Farms — 6.2 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 — 9.2 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 — 10 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

• Margaret Wade — steps away
• The Enlightenment of W.C. Handy — 0.3 mi
• Chrisman Street — 0.3 mi
• Adath Israel Temple — 0.4 mi