The Natchez Museum of African American History and Culture sits at 301 Main Street in the former United States Post Office, built around 1904. The Natchez Association for the Preservation of African American Culture opened it in 1991, and its roughly 10,000 square feet cover the city's history from its 1716 incorporation through slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction and the civil rights era. Exhibits include the Forks of the Road slave market and the Rhythm Club fire of April 23, 1940, in which 209 Black people died in a dance hall, the fourth deadliest club fire in the country's history.
The museum is the best place to understand what the 1960s meant here. Natchez was a river town where the Ku Klux Klan terrorized Black families, and in August 1965 the president of the local NAACP, George Metcalfe, survived a dynamite bomb wired to his car outside the Armstrong Tire plant where he worked. No one was ever charged. Hundreds of Black residents answered with boycotts and marches. In October about 150 marchers were bused to Parchman penitentiary, and in December the city signed the Natchez Agreement, a list of twelve NAACP demands. The violence did not stop: Ben Chester White was murdered in 1966, and Wharlest Jackson Sr., the NAACP treasurer, was killed by a bomb in his truck in 1967.
Pair the museum with the Dr. John Banks House on St. Catherine Street, the NAACP's old headquarters, which got a Mississippi Freedom Trail marker in 2023. A church owns the house, so read the marker from the street.
The closest stops worth working into your route
Roadside plaques and monuments within a short detour