The Mt. Zion Memorial Fund
For Blues, Music, and Justice
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
On the Streets of Bolton (MS)
This blog post was written by Mississippi Department of Transportation engineer Graham Clarke. His vast amount of field experience makes him the archetypical professional who first began to search for the Blues listening to the music and later ended up tracking down the burial grounds of Blues artists across the state. This post details his experiences in Bolton, Mississippi–a place that at the turn of the twentieth century featured the Chatmon, Patton, Sloan (Salome), and McCoy families, all of which later boasted commercial recording artists in the 1920s & 30s.
John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson
John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson was perhaps the most influential harmonica player in the 1940s. His untimely and violent death in the late 1940s cut his career short, however, and he missed out on the 1950s blues scene in Chicago. In 2012, journalist Dan Morris wrote this article about his memorial in Tennessee…
2024 Homecoming Festival Feedback & Community Archive Submission Form
We need input from everyone who attended and participated in the 2024 Homecoming Festival. Please answer the next series of questions to help the MS John Hurt Foundation and Mt. Zion Memorial Fund provide the best possible experience in the future…
Hollywood Cemetery
Holly Ridge Cemetery
Tutwiler Cemetery
SPONSORS
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.
