The Marshall Plan

The Delta Council that Dean Acheson addressed in Cleveland was a body of planters and officials. It organized in 1935 at Stoneville to improve agriculture, economic development, health, education and ties to Washington, and its first leaders included cotton planters, state and federal officials and Will Dockery of Dockery Farms. Its first president was Walter M. Kethley of Delta State Teachers College. It helped form the National Cotton Council. Dr. T. R. M. Howard later presented his Regional Council of Negro Leadership as an African American version of it.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Dockery Farms — 6.8 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.
• Mound Bayou — 9.4 mi
  The Bolivar County town founded in 1887 by men who had been enslaved at Davis Bend, built to be Black-owned, home of Taborian Hospital and a museum on Roosevelt Street.
• Fannie Lou Hamer Memorial Garden — 11 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.
• Parchman Farm (Mississippi State Penitentiary) — 17 mi
  The state penitentiary on Sunflower County cotton land, built in 1900 as a prison plantation, where Freedom Riders were held in 1961; a working prison with no visits and a Blues Trail marker at its gate.

More markers nearby

• Adath Israel Temple — 0.5 mi
• Margaret Wade — 0.6 mi
• The Enlightenment of W.C. Handy — 0.6 mi
• Cleveland — 0.7 mi