Dr. King Visits Batesville

King arrived on Tuesday, March 19, 1968, the morning after a Memphis rally for striking garbage workers, and Mt. Zion was his first stop on a swing through Mississippi to build support for the Poor People's Campaign. The campaign sought an economic bill of rights: a $30 billion anti-poverty package, full employment, a guaranteed annual income and more low-income housing. Organizing it had proved hard, and aides feared he was stretched too thin, but he would not be dissuaded. Most of Patton Lane High School's senior class walked over with their sponsor, Percy Bruce, to hear him.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sardis Lake and Dam — 11 mi
  A flood-control lake on the Little Tallahatchie, built from 1930s labor and a dredge named Pontotoc, with a dam that for years was the largest earth-filled dam in the world.
• Enid Lake — 12 mi
  A Corps of Engineers lake on the Yocona River, finished in 1952 after farm families were moved off the valley floor, and the home water of a world-record white crappie.
• Casey Jones Railroad Museum — 22 mi
  The old Illinois Central depot in Water Valley, where Casey Jones worked in the 1890s, with a Mississippi Blues Trail marker for the songs written about his death in 1900.
• The Lyceum and the Circle, University of Mississippi — 24 mi
  The 1848 Greek Revival building at the center of the Ole Miss campus, where federal marshals held off a mob on 30 September 1962 and James Meredith registered the next morning.

More markers nearby

• St. Stephens Episcopal Church — 0.5 mi
• Batesville — 0.6 mi
• Batesville Magnolia Cemetery — 1.4 mi
• Macedonia Rosenwald School — 5.4 mi