Hi-Hat Club

The club stood in Palmers Crossing, outside the city limits, where owner Milton Barnes faced fewer restrictions than the nightspots on Mobile Street. He opened the Embassy Club there in the 1940s and rebuilt it as the Hi-Hat after a 1957 fire. Crowds of eight or nine hundred were common, and sometimes more than a thousand came. Even in the segregation era Fats Domino drew white listeners, and guitarist Chick Willis recalled carloads of white teenagers and college students parked outside, listening. Barnes also owned Barnes Cleaners and the Hattiesburg Black Sox baseball team.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mount Zion Baptist Church — 2.8 mi
  Hattiesburg's "Civil Rights Church," a Freedom School site in 1964 where Pete Seeger taught music and Martin Luther King Jr. spoke weeks before his death.
• Hub City Historic District — 3.5 mi
  Hattiesburg's twelve-block downtown, a railroad town laid out in 1880s pine country, with the Saenger Theater, the courthouse and the 1910 depot.
• Forrest County Courthouse and Dahmer Memorial — 3.6 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.
• African American Military History Museum — 4.1 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.

More markers nearby

• Bonhomie — 2.5 mi
• William Carey College — 2.6 mi
• John L. Sullivan — 3.3 mi
• William Harris Hardy — 3.6 mi