In October 2023, MZMF field agent Joe Austin attended the Mississippi John Hurt Memorial Walk to witness the dedication of the historical marker at St. James MB Church Cemetery. In this blog post, he explains how hostility and hatred have inhibited efforts to preserve African American history in Carroll County, MS.
The third installment of Tim Kendall’s “Story from the Heart” explores the development of the 1997 Sunflower River Blues Festival. Featuring the return performance of Clarksdale native Ike Turner, who headlined the event at his own expense, the event proved a milestone in the history of blues tourism in the Mississippi Delta.
Tim Kendall and Bill Barth bought ‘The Crossroads’ bar in Clarksdale under the impression that there was some kind of tourist industry in the Delta. In the second installment of this series, Kendall explains the nature of the Mississippi tourist industry–which did not include the entire Mississippi Delta, let alone Clarksdale.
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.
This article is the first in a series by Tim Kendall, a blues enthusiast and photographer from the United Kingdom, who, along with musician Bill Barth in the 1990s, purchased “The Crossroads” bar in Clarksdale, Mississippi from Mt. Zion Memorial Fund founder Raymond “Skip” Henderson.
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.
Shannon Evans details the similarities between plantation tourism and blues tourism, both of which employ similar mechanisms of erasure, nostalgia, and mythology. By relying on romanticized narratives that align with the expectations of white tourists, both blues and plantation tourism are detached from the historical realities of the African American experience.