Hostility & Hatred

2024 African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund Grant Proposal

By T. DeWayne Moore, Executive Director of the MZMF

In 1990, music journalist Dave Ferman argued that “plenty of people have a grail to pursue—an actual physical spot that leads us into the past, into a greater understanding of ourselves and the things we love.” In 1990, many blues lovers believed that they had found their grail in “a little cabin, listing and battered,” on the farm of Carter Stovall outside of Clarksdale. “You could say that as a grail, this little cabin isn’t much. But if you’re a blues fan this feels like a sanctuary.”

The state of Mississippi has arguably the richest cultural and historical resource in the nation—the blues. Yet, it also has a very problematic past in terms of historic preservation in African American communities—especially regarding physical structures directly associated with the blues before World War II.

African Americans, in the eyes of the state, had no history worth preserving. The laws and culture of racial segregation were about resource hoarding, and the maintenance of white supremacy requires not only the silencing and erasure of African American history, but also the violence of a segregated, exploitative economy, which often prevents African Americans, such as the parents and grandparents of Muddy Waters and the ancestors of Mary Frances Hurt, from achieving economic independence through property ownership. The Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale features one of the structures around which early tourist brokers built the blues tourism industry—the cabin in which McKinley “Muddy Waters” Morganfield allegedly lived on the nearby Stovall farm. Yet, the provenance of the cabin from Stovall’s has always been in question.

The provenance of the historic home of John Hurt, however, was not in question. For 40 years, Hurt lived in a three-room shotgun house on the A.R. Perkins farm with his partner, Jessie Cole, and their son, “Man.” On the north side of Valley/Avalon Road, the house sat up on a little hill so that Hurt could keep an eye on Perkins’ cattle. Hurt eventually moved to Grenada, where he died in 1966, but shotgun house remained on the Perkins farm until 2002, when the descendants of Perkins sold the land to Dave Murphy. When Murphy got ready to sell the land to Ronald Upchurch, who planned to build a new home, his daughter Keye Murphy Williams convinced her father to retain the half acre lot to preserve the historic home. Even though one “blues professional” [perhaps Steve LaVere] offered to buy it, Murphy refused to sell it. Instead, he approached Hurt’s granddaughter, Mary Frances Wright Hurt, in 1999, explaining that she could have the house if she could get someone to move it. Thus, she enlisted the support of Peoples Bank and Trust in Carrollton and a moving company in Kosciusko, and she transported it to her family’s land—land that her great grandfather Jerry Richardson had first purchased in 1921. Wright formed the Mississippi John Hurt Blues Foundation in 2001, transformed the structure into a museum, and started organizing an annual blues festival celebrating her grandfather’s music.

In 2023, MZMF Vice President Shannon Evans drove out to the Hurt property to meet with the Mississippi State Historic Preservation Office, which intended to make the Hurt Museum a Mississippi landmark and submit a nomination to the National Register of Historic Places. The museum was made a Mississippi landmark only a few hours prior to its destruction by fire during Black History Month.

To download and read the MZMF’s entire grant proposal for the pre-preservation survey of the Mississippi John Hurt Museum, please click HERE