Freedom School Bombing

The Freedom School was hit before the night everyone remembers. Held at the Baptist School site on Jefferson Street, it served COFO as a center for voter registration and mass meetings, and it was firebombed more than once. Then, at 2:24 a.m. on May 1, 1965, firebombs struck a freedom house, Irene Magruder's home, the Giles store and the Wilder home within minutes of one another. Nobody is reported to have been charged. The Greenville Delta Democrat-Times was the only Southern newspaper to report it, and the Associated Press followed.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center — 0.5 mi
  A museum built around the brick cotton gin in Indianola where B.B. King worked in the 1940s, with his grave in a memorial garden on the grounds.
• Dockery Farms — 20 mi
  The plantation on the Sunflower River where Charley Patton lived and played from about 1900, now a working farm, a National Register district and a Mississippi Blues Trail stop.
• Fannie Lou Hamer Memorial Garden — 21 mi
  The small park on Byron Street in Ruleville where Fannie Lou Hamer is buried beside her husband, with a Freedom Trail marker and a 2012 bronze statue.
• Winterville Mounds — 24 mi
  A Mississippian ceremonial center north of Greenville, built by hand from about AD 1000, with a 55-foot Temple Mound and twelve of its original twenty-three mounds still standing.

More markers nearby

• Giles Penny Savers Store — 0.2 mi
• Club Ebony — 0.4 mi
• Irene Magruder — 0.4 mi
• Albert King — 0.7 mi