Dr. King Visits Laurel

King's Laurel stop on March 19, 1968, was part of a Mississippi swing for the Poor People's Campaign. The day before, in Marks, he wept at the poverty he saw and urged people to come to Washington in mule carts, old trucks, any transportation they could find. A transcript of his address at First New Hope Baptist Church in Grenada carries the same March 19 date. St. Paul had its own history of the era: the Ku Klux Klan firebombed the church the year before he spoke there.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lauren Rogers Museum of Art — 0.7 mi
  Mississippi's oldest art museum, a 1923 memorial to a timber heir in Laurel, with a major Native American basket collection and no admission fee since it opened.
• Amos Deason House — 6.6 mi
  A Greek Revival house in Ellisville where a Confederate major was shot in 1863, tied to the history of the Free State of Jones.
• African American Military History Museum — 26 mi
  The wooden USO club that opened in March 1942 for Black soldiers training at Camp Shelby, now a museum of African American military service from the Revolutionary War to Iraq.
• Forrest County Courthouse and Dahmer Memorial — 26 mi
  The courthouse where Hattiesburg held Freedom Day on January 22, 1964, and where a memorial now honors Vernon Dahmer, killed by Klansmen in 1966.

More markers nearby

• Triangle Homes — steps away
• Jones County Blues — 0.5 mi
• Beacon Homes — 0.5 mi
• Masonite Corporation — 0.5 mi