George A. McLean

George McLean was fired in 1934 from a sociology post in Memphis for helping organize the interracial Southern Tenant Farmers' Union in Arkansas. That year he bought a bankrupt Tupelo biweekly with family money; it had fewer than five hundred paying subscribers. A day after the 1936 tornado that killed 230, he wrote that Tupelo would build a better and greater city on the wreckage. In 1937 his paper sided with striking cotton mill workers who earned ten dollars a week, which angered industrialists across the state and made him The Nation's Man of the Year.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Winona: Fannie Lou Hamer and the Montgomery County Jail — 0.3 mi
  Two Freedom Trail stops in Winona for 9 June 1963, when Fannie Lou Hamer and other voting-rights workers were arrested at the bus depot and beaten in the Montgomery County Jail.
• Carroll County Courthouse — 11 mi
  The courthouse in Carrollton where, on 17 March 1886, armed white men fired into a courtroom and killed about two dozen Black people, and no one was ever charged.
• Grenada Freedom Movement Marker — 21 mi
  The Mississippi Freedom Trail marker at Line and Green streets for the 1966 Grenada movement, when Black children entering white schools were beaten by a mob and 13 white men were arrested.

More markers nearby

• Pops Staples — 0.4 mi
• Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway — 0.4 mi
• Ensign William Devotie Billingsley — 0.9 mi
• Fannie Lou Hamer — 9.6 mi