Mound Bayou

Mound Bayou was founded in July 1887 by Isaiah T. Montgomery, his cousin Joshua P. T. Montgomery and Benjamin T. Green, all of whom had been enslaved at Davis Bend, as a town where Black families would own the land. A railroad needed settlers, and Isaiah Montgomery, its land agent, recruited people to clear swampland for themselves in a country of plantations. The townsite lay near older Chickasaw burial mounds.

By the early 1900s the town had banks, cotton gins, a sawmill and a school system outside the control of the white towns around it, and it drew the notice of Booker T. Washington, Theodore Roosevelt and Julius Rosenwald. In 1942 the Knights and Daughters of Tabor opened Taborian Hospital, an Art Deco building designed by McKissack and McKissack, with Black physicians on staff. Its chief surgeon, Dr. T. R. M. Howard, housed Black reporters and witnesses in his home during the Emmett Till trial and escorted them to Sumner. Medgar Evers sold insurance for Howard here, and Fannie Lou Hamer died at the hospital in 1977.

The twentieth century was harder on the town than the nineteenth. Businesses failed and local politics turned bitter, and by the late 1960s it was a small, struggling Delta town. The historic district is on the National Register, and the Mound Bayou Museum of African American Culture and History at 200 Roosevelt Street tells the town's story, including the building where the song "Let's Get It On" was first performed. Call ahead before driving out.