John C. Stennis

John C. Stennis was a Kemper County farm boy who served more than forty-one years in the Senate, and his record includes what a courthouse plaque leaves out. Like most Southern Democrats of his era he joined filibusters against antilynching, poll-tax and equal-employment bills, signed the 1956 Southern Manifesto against Brown v. Board of Education and opposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Historians note he never ran on strident race-baiting. By 1982 he voted to extend the act, and in 1986 he backed Mike Espy, Mississippi's first Black member of Congress since John R. Lynch.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Dancing Rabbit Creek Treaty Site — 18 mi
  A National Historic Landmark in rural Noxubee County where the Choctaw Nation signed away its last Mississippi land on September 27, 1830.
• Mount Zion Methodist Church — 20 mi
  The Black church in Longdale burned by the Klan on June 16, 1964, rebuilt by its congregation, and the place Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner had gone to visit when they were murdered.
• Nanih Waiya — 20 mi
  The Mother Mound of the Choctaw in Winston County, a sacred origin place returned to the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians in 2008.
• Old Neshoba County Jail — 27 mi
  The 1955 jail in downtown Philadelphia where James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were held on June 21, 1964, hours before they were murdered.

More markers nearby

• Reuben Kemper — steps away
• DeKalb — 0.6 mi
• Gen. Sam Dale — 14 mi
• Ross Alexander Collins — 22 mi