The Clinton Riot

Charles Caldwell, a blacksmith born to an enslaved mother who rose to the state senate, outlived the September 1875 killings by about three months. At Christmas, white Democrats lured him into a store cellar with the promise of drinks and shot him through a window as glasses were raised. A white pastor later reported that the dying Caldwell told his killers they had killed a brave man, not a coward. President Grant had already refused to send troops. Estimates of Black dead that September run from thirty-five to fifty.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument — 6.8 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.
• Farish Street Historic District — 8.7 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.
• Old Capitol Museum — 9.3 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.
• Mississippi Civil Rights Museum — 9.4 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.

More markers nearby

• Hillman College — 0.2 mi
• Clinton — 0.4 mi
• Mississippi College — 0.4 mi
• Clinton's Blues Legacy — 1.2 mi