Clarksdale, Mississippi, USA

May 25, 2023

Clarksdale is a small town in the heart of the Mississippi delta. We were there to celebrate the wedding of Joe, a dear friend of our family. The town has been in decline for much of the twentieth and twenty first centuries. Particularly devastating was the invention in the 1940s of automated cotton picking machinery. Many of the town’s black population who worked at sharecroppers immediately lost their means of support and joined the Great Migration north to St. Louis and Chicago. Those that remained faced brutal racism and the town played an important role in the Civil Rights movement. Martin Luther King, Jr. visited the town a number of times, most notably in 1958 when he attended the first major meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Another prominent Civil Rights leader, Aaron Henry, worked in the town as a pharmacist. In 1960, he was named state president of the NAACP, and went on to organize a two-year-long boycott of Clarksdale businesses that discriminated against black customers and employees.

Interestingly, the town was once also home to one of the largest Jewish populations in the state, but they also began to leave as the town declined. The Beth Israel Synagogue that the built in the 1930s remains, but is now an AirBnB.

Today, the town’s economy depends primarily on tourism generated by its claim as the home of the Delta Blues. Many famous black musicians came from the town and its surroundings. Sam Cooke, John Lee Hooker and Ike Turner were all born there. Famous bluesmen, Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson both lived in Clarksdale. In fact, just outside the town is the crossroads where Johnson famously sold his soul to the Devil. Under the legend, Johnson had a tremendous desire to become a great blues musician. He was told to go a nearby crossroads at midnight. There he was met by a large black man (the Devil) who took Johnson’s guitar and tuned it. The Devil played a few songs and then returned the guitar to Johnson, giving him mastery of the instrument. Johnson died in 1938 at the age of 27. It is unclear how he died although local legend holds that he was poisoned by the jealous husband of a woman with whom Johnson was flirting in a bar. The exact location of Johnson’s gravesite is also unknown and there are, in fact, three different gravesites at three different cemeteries all claiming to be his final resting site.

Here are some photos from our first afternoon and evening exploring the streets of Clarksdale.