Mt. Helm Baptist Church

Mount Helm's first pastor was Rev. Marion Dunbar. Early classes of Jackson College, the school that became Jackson State University, met in the church, a reminder that for Black Mississippians a sanctuary was also a schoolhouse. In 1895 Charles Price Jones came here as pastor and helped start a Baptist holiness movement that led to the Church of Christ (Holiness). The church's name honors Thomas and Mary Helm, who donated its land in 1868 so a congregation of formerly enslaved members could leave the basement of First Baptist Church.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Farish Street Historic District — 0.3 mi
  Jackson's Black business and cultural center, where Medgar Evers kept the NAACP office and furniture-store owners recorded the blues, now a quiet National Register district.
• Mississippi Civil Rights Museum — 0.6 mi
  A state museum in downtown Jackson, opened in 2017 beside the Museum of Mississippi History, that tells the movement from 1945 to 1970 through the people who made it.
• Old Capitol Museum — 0.6 mi
  Mississippi's Greek Revival statehouse of 1839, where the legislature voted to secede, Hiram Revels was elected to the U.S. Senate and the 1890 constitution was written, now a free state museum.
• Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument — 2.9 mi
  A modest ranch house in Jackson's Elraine neighborhood where Medgar Evers was shot in the driveway in 1963, now a unit of the National Park Service.

More markers nearby

• Mount Helm Baptist Church - Original Site — steps away
• Church of Christ (Holiness) USA — steps away
• Greenwood Cemetery — steps away
• Smith Robertson School — steps away