James L. Alcorn

Alcorn was a slaveholder with large landholdings, a Whig who opposed secession and then served the Confederacy as a general. After the war he turned Republican and argued that freed people should vote, hold office and testify in court, making him a scalawag in Reconstruction's term. Elected governor in 1869, he served while the legislature set up a state school system and Alcorn University, the first land-grant college for Black students in the United States. He resigned in 1871 for the Senate, lost the 1873 governor's race to Adelbert Ames, and helped write the 1890 constitution.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Delta Blues Museum — 6.4 mi
  The state's oldest music museum, in a restored 1918 freight depot in Clarksdale, with Muddy Waters's rebuilt cabin and instruments from Delta players.
• Freedom Park — 17 mi
  An outdoor Delta Cultural Center site on the ground of a Civil War contraband camp, where thousands of people who had escaped slavery sheltered and men enlisted.
• Delta Cultural Center — 17 mi
  A state museum in downtown Helena where King Biscuit Time, the longest-running daily blues radio show, is broadcast live from the Visitors Center.
• Elaine Massacre Memorial — 18 mi
  A memorial dedicated in 2019 in Helena for the Black people killed by white mobs and troops in the 1919 Elaine Massacre, the deadliest racial confrontation in Arkansas history.

More markers nearby

• Rocket "88" — 4.4 mi
• Clarksdale — 6.3 mi
• Wade Walton — 6.3 mi
• Ike Turner — 6.3 mi