Bus tour brings Gen Z students to Mississippi Delta’s civil rights landmarks

by

Michael McEwen

• Published on June 9, 2023 • Comments

Pre-law students from around the country took part in a bus tour to several civil rights sites across the Mississippi Delta this week.

On the day-long bus trip from Jackson to the Delta, the students visited landmarks and museums and learned about figures that played a vital role in the civil rights movement — both through art and political struggle. As the bus made its way through the flatlands of the Delta, students began to reflect on the region's stark landscape.

Kimberly Lopez, a student at Emory University who wants to work in human rights law, said she was shocked by the apparent poverty in a region defined by its agricultural output.

“Just how these places are filled with agriculture, but they’re only seen as places of agricultural exploitation and they’re not actually being developed. It’s just very upsetting, to be honest,” said Lopez.

Michael McEwen

Mound Bayou

Filer image — The students' bus ride took them throughout the Delta, including to the town of Indianola, where Blues icon B.B. King was laid to rest on the grounds of a museum dedicated in his honor.
(Michael McEwen / MPB News)

In the town of Mound Bayou, which was founded by former slaves and led by civil rights figure Isaiah T. Montgomery, students perused a museum. There, they saw several displays dedicated to Medgar Evers, who worked in the town as a clerk before moving to Jackson to become the state's first NAACP field officer. One student from Jackson said she hadn't heard of the town until their visit.

“I’ve never been to Mound Bayou and I’ve never been to the Delta until today, so seeing all this and learning about Isaiah T. Montgomery and Medgar Evers, it’s definitely very educational.”

The museum also contained a section displaying heavily racialized advertisements of Black Americans from the 20th century in stereotypical and offensive manner, including political cartoons of former President Barack Obama and his wife represented as monkeys.

“It’s very disturbing but it needs to be seen. People need to be more aware that it wasn’t just the bad words — they need to see how people actually visualized us,” she said. “Of course we know about this stuff and we hear about it, but it’s different when we actually see it.”

During the stop at the B.B. King Museum in Indianola, Kailee Choice, who studies political science at Texas Southern University, said it provided her greater context on the role of music in the civil rights movement.

“Being from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and with the rich history in Tulsa, especially with the race riots and Black Wall Street, coming here and seeing how in other ways we were so impactful to our community and learning more about my culture is something beautiful to me,” Choice said. “Seeing the parallels from Oklahoma in Mississippi is beautiful. It shows young Black Americans that we were prosperous, and we do things through any genre of music or art.”

The day-long tour concluded in Money, Mississippi, at the site of the former Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market where Emmitt Till — then 14 years old — allegedly whistled at the white storekeeper and was later murdered by her husband and brother in 1955.

“You can’t have law or politics without knowing history. To the Black community, history is one of the most central things we can learn to impact our politics and our laws,” said Choice, who went on to add that the trip provided vital context that she’d take into her law career.

“Coming here is really what helped me see that in my future career — I can’t go into a government position without knowing Mississippi, without knowing B.B. King or without knowing the Tulsa Race Riots. It’s something to read about it in books, but to be here, to look around with my own eyes and to really feel it? That is what is most important,” she said.