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!
Shannon Evans beamishly details her return to Tutwiler, MS after many years to attend a meeting with the National Park Service (NPS) and the Mississippi Delta National Heritage Area (MDNHA).
Shannon Evans examines the white supremacist violence and turmoil that plagued the political career of Robert Gleed, an African American politician from Lowndes County who served as Senator and Columbus Alderman during Reconstruction.
In the second installment of Emily Hilliard’s blog post, she details her efforts to mark the grave of Nathan Beauregard at Shiloh MB Church in Ashland, MS.
In this blog post, Abdul Ajibola details the initial field research expedition of the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund for the American Historical Association grant in May 2022.
In this blog post, Shannon Evans examines the interments of Sandfield Cemetery, the oldest African American cemetery in Columbus, Mississippi.
Emily Hilliard is spearheading the effort to mark the grave of Nathan Beauregard, and this is the first in a series of blog posts detailing her work with the congregation at Shiloh MB Church in Ashland, Mississippi.
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.