Greenwood

Greenwood hired me to come show y'all around, and I want to be straight with you about what that means. They covered the trip. They didn't pick my stops, they didn't see this before I put it up, and nobody asked me to leave anything out. I'm telling you that here at the top instead of burying it, because half of this guide is about the worst thing that ever happened in this county and you deserve to know who paid for my room.

Here's what I'd say if we were sitting at the bar. Most folks do Greenwood in four hours and figure they've seen it. Howard Street is a morning. The road that runs north out of town is the rest of it, and that road is the reason to come.

The town sits on the eastern edge of the Delta, where the Tallahatchie and the Yalobusha run together and turn into the Yazoo. Ninety six miles north of Jackson, a shade under two and a half hours south of Memphis. About thirteen thousand four hundred people live here now. In 1970 it was twenty two thousand four hundred. The city's own history says the cotton trade on Front Street held up well into the 1940s, and then machines took the field work and the people left. That's the short answer to the question you'll ask yourself the first time you stand on Howard Street, which is why the downtown is so much bigger than the town.

Four blocks, and nearly everything you'd want is on them. Park anywhere you like, it's free.

Two more things on this street worth two minutes apiece. The Mississippi Blues Trail marker at 222 Howard stands at the old WGRM studio, and the visitors bureau office at 225 Howard will hand you a walking tour brochure and a straight answer about what's open this week, which matters more here than it does in most towns. Their number is 662-453-9197.

Fred Carl Jr. was a fourth generation Greenwood builder. He and his wife Margaret were putting up a house and she wanted a professional range in the kitchen, and the ones you could buy were too big and weren't safe to put in a home. So he designed one.

The sources don't line up on the dates, and I'd rather give you the shape than pick a year and sound sure. The drawing came together in the early eighties. The prototype got built in Los Angeles in 1986. The first one sold in 1987, to a woman in New York City who ordered it out of a brochure for three thousand dollars. Assembly moved home to Greenwood in late 1989 and all of it was being built here by 1990. You'll see 1987 cited as the founding year, and that's the year somebody first handed over money, not the year the town got the jobs.

Middleby bought Viking in a deal announced on the last day of 2012 for three hundred eighty million in cash, and Carl retired as chairman the month after. The headquarters is still downtown on old Cotton Row.

They filmed here from July to October of 2010 and it came out in August of 2011. Greenwood played 1960s Jackson, and the producer said going in that he expected to shoot ninety five percent of the picture in this town. You'll hear locals call it the 2010 movie. They mean the year the trucks were on their street.

One piece of housekeeping that trips people up. There are two Whittington houses in this county and they're about five miles apart. Whittington Farm on Money Road is the one from the movie. The W. M. Whittington House at 401 East Market is a different building entirely, finished in 1915 by a Birmingham architect and on the National Register since 1984, and it has nothing to do with the film. If somebody tells you they saw the Whittington house, ask which one.

Grand Boulevard runs north out of downtown under three hundred oaks that got planted in 1916, turns into County Road 518, and becomes Money Road. Everything from here on is on that one road. You'll want most of a day, and don't rush any of it.

He was fourteen. Born in Chicago on July 25, 1941, down here visiting family. The Park Service puts it this way: he was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered after reportedly whistling at a white woman. Two men came to his great uncle Moses Wright's house in Money between two and half past three in the morning on August 28, 1955 and took him out of it. Three days later two boys fishing found him in the Tallahatchie River.

The trial was in Sumner, in Tallahatchie County. An all white, all male jury acquitted both men after sixty seven minutes. They couldn't be tried again, so the next year they sold their confession to Look magazine for four thousand dollars.

His mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, held an open casket funeral in Chicago. The Park Service says her decision let the world see the racist violence inflicted upon her son and set the Civil Rights Movement into motion. Everything else in this section exists because of what she chose to do.

One thing to understand about the geography. The Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument was established on July 25, 2023, and its three sites are Graball Landing near Glendora, the courthouse in Sumner, and Roberts Temple in Chicago. None of them are in Greenwood. The statue here is a city park memorial that this town chose to build, which is its own kind of statement.

In 1946, out of about thirty nine thousand eligible Black residents in Leflore County, twenty six were registered to vote. SNCC opened a voter registration project in Greenwood in the summer of 1962, and moved its headquarters here for Freedom Summer in 1964. Sam Block, Bob Moses and Lawrence Guyot all worked out of this town.

Endesha Ida Mae Holland was born here on August 29, 1944, and she walked into the COFO office in 1962 more or less by accident. A SNCC worker named Emma Bell got her talking, she could type, and that was that. She said later she'd never heard Black people sit and discuss the vote before she walked through that door.

Her first arrest came in 1963 at a march on city hall. She was arrested thirteen more times and called herself the queen of the jails. In 1965 her home was bombed and her mother died. She left Greenwood in 1966, finished a doctorate at Minnesota in 1986, taught at SUNY Buffalo and then USC, and turned her own life into a play called From the Mississippi Delta that ran at the Goodman in Chicago and the Young Vic in London. Simon and Schuster published the memoir in 1997. She died in 2006.

Baptist Town, over around Stephens Avenue and McCain Street, has its own Blues Trail marker and shows up in The Help as Minny's neighborhood. It's a residential neighborhood where people live. Photograph the marker, not the porches.

A word of warning that applies to this whole section. Most of these places don't publish hours anywhere I could find, and several Delta restaurants keep three or four days a week. Call the morning of. Nobody will think it's strange.