Freedom Village

Greenville's Mississippi Delta Blues and Heritage Festival is held on the third Saturday in September and began outside Leland at Freedom Village, one of several sites where Black Mississippians displaced for civil rights activity lived temporarily in the 1960s. Mississippi Action for Community Education, a Greenville nonprofit, organized it. By the mid-1980s it had moved to eighty acres south of Greenville, and it now meets at the Washington County Convention Center. Muddy Waters, Big Joe Williams, John Lee Hooker and Sam Chatmon all played it.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Greenville Levee and the 1927 Flood — 9.2 mi
  The Mississippi River levee at Greenville, where thousands of mostly Black refugees camped in the flood of April 1927 and where the Department of Archives and History has placed markers.
• Lakeport Plantation — 12 mi
  Arkansas's grandest surviving Greek Revival plantation house, built about 1858 by a planter who held 155 enslaved people in 1860, now an Arkansas State University museum.
• Winterville Mounds — 13 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.
• Lake Chicot State Park — 14 mi
  A state park on the largest natural lake in Arkansas, a 20-mile oxbow of the Mississippi River that was cleaned up and reopened after decades of silt.

More markers nearby

• Birthplace of Kermit the Frog — 7.1 mi
• Johnny Winter — 7.3 mi
• Son Thomas — 7.3 mi
• Ruby's Nite Spot — 7.3 mi