The Mt. Zion Memorial Fund
For Blues, Music, and Justice
Riverside Hotel Community Archive
Please take this short survey to share your stories, photos, videos, and documents with us!
Community Scanning Days
Saturday May 11 and Sunday May 12
10am to 7pm
Delta Blues Alley Cafe
Clarksdale, MS
Do you have precious family photos, old letters, or other important historical documents that you would like to digitally preserve and pass down to future generations? The Riverside Hotel is partnering with the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund to help digitally preserve your history! We will have several scanning stations and computers setup to digitize your important photos and documents. We will digitize your materials and provide you with digital copies on FREE external flash drives.
THIS SERVICE IS COMPLETELY FREE!
We will also be giving away special prizes to folks who bring in older photographs and documents that help us preserve the history of Clarksdale and Coahoma County!
Join us at the Delta Blues Alley Cafe on Saturday, May 11 and Sunday May 12 from 10am to 7pm and help us preserve your local history!
Please contact MZMF project director Shannon Evans for more information!
(+206) 817 9959
Our Mission
To prevent the erasure of cultural resources in African American communities by promoting the responsible practice of public history and heritage tourism.
Our Vision
We envision communities where people reach a consensus about the past, understand its nuance and complexity, and bring their curiosity about history to bear on the world.
Donate to support our Projects
Our work is about saving the soul of Mississippi.
Shannon Evans Vice President
Working with the descendants of blues artists, such as Mary Frances Hurt, the granddaughter of Mississippi John Hurt, our Mississippi non-profit promotes the inclusive and responsible practice of memorialization and historic preservation in African American communities.
Photo: Shannon Evans and Dr. Brian Mitchell, the Director of Research at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, at St. James MB Church Cemetery in Avalon, MS
Research Blog
Research is Respect: The Riverside Hotel in Clarksdale, MS
In 2024, the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund started to conduct historical research on perhaps the most important historic site in Clarksdale—the Riverside Hotel, and this blog post explains how you can be a part of the participatory research process!
Saga Unfolds in Hurt Museum Fire & Historical Marker
In this re-published article from the Jackson Clarion Ledger, one journalist finds the mystery surrounding the blues trail marker honoring legendary bluesman Mississippi John Hurt and the cause of the Mississippi John Hurt Museum fire as winding as the maze of narrow roads that crisscross the eastern edge of the Delta.
Shannon Evans Wins Oakley Award!
Please give a huge congratulations to our very own vice president, Shannon Evans, for receiving the Oakley Award from the Board of Trustees of the Association for Gravestone Studies (AGS).
Hollywood Cemetery
Holly Ridge Cemetery
Tutwiler Cemetery
Beginning with the ratification of the 1890 Mississippi State Constitution, which effectively disfranchised African American men and inspired white Mississippians to embrace more violent forms of racial discrimination, it became increasingly more difficult to preserve historical resources in African American Blues Communities. The formerly enslaved had steadily accumulated more and more land since emancipation and founded hundreds of autonomous settlements across the South. Since the 1890s, the descendants of Blues Communities dispersed, leaving the status and locations of many communities unknown.
The erasure of Blues communities in Mississippi has picked up speed in recent years due to several interconnected and destructive factors. Natural disasters (floods), population loss (migration), urban renewal (gentrification), land dispossession (heir property), and the profound lingering effects of resource hoarding (racial segregation) have prevented Americans from realizing the original goals to the Civil Rights Movement, and the erasure of historic Blues communities has accelerated due to the descendant communities’ need for technical assistance and professional training in historical research methods, which is required to overcome the erasure of African American history in government records.
THE WEBATLAS OF AFRICAN AMERICAN BURIAL GROUNDS: OUR GOAL
In partnership with descendant communities, we hope to prevent the erasure and destruction of cultural resources–homes, churches, cemeteries, schools, photographs, documents, audiovisual media, physical artifacts, and oral histories–in African American Blues Communities. We plan to accomplish this goal by:
- Documenting and preserving stories, media about African American Blues Communities
- Constructing and maintaining an interactive, publicly accessible Archive & Atlas about African American Blues Communities
- Identifying resources and co-developing resilience strategies with descendant communities
