Port Gibson

Long before the 1966 boycott, Port Gibson's NAACP branch survived on word of mouth. Nate Jones came home from the Navy determined to vote; his wife, Julia, burned the yearly membership cards the day they arrived, afraid of retaliation. In the early 1960s Medgar Evers and Bob Moses held registration workshops at the Masonic Temple, and Jones and a handful of others kept returning to a registrar who kept turning them away. Their testimony fed a 1962 Justice Department suit against the county registrar. Charles Evers and Rudy Shields built on that work in 1965.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Windsor Ruins — 8.7 mi
  Twenty-three standing Corinthian columns left by an 1890 fire, the largest antebellum mansion in Mississippi, built with enslaved labor on a 2,600-acre cotton plantation.
• Alcorn State University and Oakland Memorial Chapel — 11 mi
  The 1871 Reconstruction college on the old Oakland College campus, first led by Hiram Revels, with the 1838 chapel built by Black craftsmen.
• Lake Bruin State Park — 13 mi
  A state park on a Mississippi River oxbow near St. Joseph, named for a territorial judge who owned a plantation beside it, on a former fish hatchery site.
• Mount Locust — 23 mi
  A 1780s Natchez Trace inn and cotton farm at milepost 15.5, with an enslaved people's cemetery of 43 graves and a brick kiln behind the house.

More markers nearby

• The Bernheimer Complex — steps away
• Bruinsburg — steps away
• First Baptist M.B. Church — steps away
• Battle of Port Gibson — steps away