Giles Penny Savers Store

Oscar and Alice Giles ran a small store at the south end of Church Street, and it was hit minutes after Irene Magruder's home on May 1, 1965. Oscar Giles belonged to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. He and his neighbors fought the flames themselves before the fire trucks arrived and saved part of the building, though the store was nearly destroyed. The attack followed a county-wide registration drive that April, in which more than 450 people registered and about 150 more were turned away after failing the test.

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

• Freedom School Bombing — 0.2 mi
• Irene Magruder — 0.3 mi
• Club Ebony — 0.4 mi
• Albert King — 0.6 mi