Clinton's Blues Legacy

Clinton's blues story includes a poet. Sterling Plumpp was born in 1940 on a tenant farm in Clinton, where as a boy he tended cotton and corn. An aunt used her bootlegging money to send him to Holy Ghost High School in Jackson. He hitchhiked to Chicago in 1962, worked in a post office while writing, and published Portable Soul in 1969. His poems fuse blues and jazz rhythms, as in Blues: The Story Always Untold (1989), and a 1976 volume is titled Clinton. He taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 1971 to 2001.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument — 7.3 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 — 9.5 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 — 10 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 — 10 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

• The Clinton Riot — 1.2 mi
• Hillman College — 1.4 mi
• Clinton — 1.5 mi
• Mississippi College — 1.5 mi