Roosevelt Graves Memorial Dedication
This blog post details our efforts to memorialize Blind Roosevelt Graves in Mississippi City Cemetery in Gulfport, MS. the dedication will be held on August 10, 2024.
This blog post details our efforts to memorialize Blind Roosevelt Graves in Mississippi City Cemetery in Gulfport, MS. the dedication will be held on August 10, 2024.
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!
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.
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).
Shannon Evans is dedicated to preventing the silencing of African American History as the Vice President of the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund, which is nominating her for the 2023 Oakley Award from the Association of Gravestone Studies.
Since the pandemic derailed our original campaign, the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund has renewed its campaign to mark the grave of Roosevelt Graves in Gulfport, MS
In this republished ProPublica article, Seth Freed Wessler explains that, despite layers of federal and state regulations nominally intended to protect culturally significant sites, the expansion of a Microsoft data center inspired authorities in Virginia to desecrate a historic cemetery.
This blog post not only explains the historical significance of Jim Jackson in the history of the blues, but it also introduces stakeholders to our efforts to mark his grave in the racially segregated Hernando Memorial Park Cemetery in Hernando, MS.
In 2022, the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund received a grant from the MDNHA to write a National Register of Historic Places nomination for the jook joint of recording artist Alonzo Chatmon in Glen Allan, Mississippi. This blog post details the initial stage of the project.
Although the Mississippi Blues Trail marker installed in 2009 to purportedly further “racial reconciliation” and rehabilitate the state’s image as an intransigent racist backwater claims that he was buried in Pelahatchie, Mississippi (based on the information written on his death certificate), his remains actually never made it back to the Magnolia State–a fact that Mexican American blues artist, custodian, and Mt. Zion Memorial Fund affiliate Gabriel Soria discovered in the early 1990s, when he raised the funds to mark his actual gravesite. Eschewing the Manifest Destiny-like memorialization process of the Blues Commission, Soria tracked down the descendants of the “Blues King,” learned the actual location of his remains, and worked with them to design and install his headstone in Union Cemetery in Bakersfield, California.