Cornerstone Plaza

Black physicians in Mississippi could be trained and licensed yet shut out of the wards. Many hospitals barred African Americans, and those that took Black patients often placed them in segregated basement wards without staff privileges for their own doctors, who then handed patients to white physicians. Black doctors founded small private hospitals instead, and in rural areas these were sometimes the only hospitals for dozens of miles. This plaza on the Mississippi State Medical Association campus is built of reclaimed bricks from such hospitals, centered on the cornerstone of Greenville's Colored King's Daughters Hospital.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Natchez Trace Parkway at Ridgeland — 1.6 mi
  The stretch of the Natchez Trace around Ridgeland, where a worn section of the Old Trace, the Ross Barnett Reservoir and the Choctaw town of Chisha Foka share a few miles of parkway.
• Tougaloo College — 2.6 mi
  A historically Black college north of Jackson, founded on a former plantation in 1869, whose students staged Mississippi's first sit-in and whose chapel hosted the movement's leaders.
• Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument — 7.8 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 — 9.6 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.

More markers nearby

• Ridgeland — 1.2 mi
• Rosa Scott School — 2.1 mi
• St. Joseph Catholic School — 2.3 mi
• Dorroh Street Historic District — 2.4 mi