Irene Magruder

Irene Magruder (1898-1973) was the first Black resident of Indianola to open her home to civil rights workers, agreeing to house SNCC project director John Harris and others in the Bear's Den neighborhood. Six people were asleep inside when the house was firebombed on May 1, 1965. Everyone escaped. Fire trucks arrived within five minutes but took twenty to thirty minutes to set up their hoses, and the house was destroyed. Accounts say two civil rights workers who shouted at the slow response were struck by police.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center — 0.4 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

• Club Ebony — 0.2 mi
• Giles Penny Savers Store — 0.3 mi
• Albert King — 0.3 mi
• Freedom School Bombing — 0.4 mi