Civil Rights Capital of the South — the Mississippi Museum of Art, Farish Street Blues, and Delta Soul in the Heart of Mississippi
Jackson is where the civil rights movement made some of its most consequential stands — Medgar Evers was assassinated here in 1963, James Meredith launched his 1966 March Against Fear from here, and the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum is one of the most powerful immersive history experiences in the country. Farish Street, the once-thriving Black commercial and music district, produced blues and gospel legends and is slowly reviving. The Mississippi Museum of Art holds the largest collection of Mississippi-made art anywhere. Jackson's food scene runs deep on soul food — Bully's has been servin…
Jackson was founded as a trading post on the Natchez Trace and became Mississippi's state capital in 1822. During the Civil War it was burned three times — twice by Union General William Sherman, earning the nickname 'Chimneyville.' The city's 20th-century history is inseparable from the civil rights movement: it was the site of Freedom Rider violence, the Woolworth's lunch counter sit-ins of 1963, and the 1964 Freedom Summer voter registration campaign. Medgar Evers, the NAACP's Mississippi field secretary, was shot in his driveway on June 12, 1963 — the night after President Kennedy's telev…