A history of Clarksdale
A history of Clarksdale
Cotton, two highways, a railroad, and everything that followed.
The land here is flat, black and absurdly fertile — river silt laid down over centuries. That soil made cotton, cotton made money, and money made a town.
Clarksdale grew where two things crossed: the highways that became US 61 and US 49, and the railroad. The depots moved cotton out and everything else in. By the early twentieth century the town was the commercial centre of Coahoma County, with a Black majority working the surrounding plantations under sharecropping arrangements that kept them in debt by design.
The violence of 1919, the year James Weldon Johnson called the Red Summer, reached the Delta as it reached the rest of the country. Clarksdale was not spared.
Tennessee Williams spent part of his childhood here, at the rectory of St George's Episcopal Church where his grandfather was rector. Names from the town and the county turn up throughout his plays.
Martin Luther King came to Clarksdale in 1958 and again in 1962. The town was a node in the Delta's civil rights organising, and paid for it.
Then two things emptied it. The Great Migration carried hundreds of thousands of Black Southerners north, many of them out of this county, on the Illinois Central. And mechanised cotton picking removed the need for the labour that remained. The plantations kept producing; the people were no longer required.
What was left was a small town with a disproportionate cultural inheritance and not much else — until the town worked out that the inheritance was the economy. That story is on the renaissance page.
A history of Clarksdale
A history of Clarksdale
Cotton, two highways, a railroad, and everything that followed.
The land here is flat, black and absurdly fertile — river silt laid down over centuries. That soil made cotton, cotton made money, and money made a town.
Clarksdale grew where two things crossed: the highways that became US 61 and US 49, and the railroad. The depots moved cotton out and everything else in. By the early twentieth century the town was the commercial centre of Coahoma County, with a Black majority working the surrounding plantations under sharecropping arrangements that kept them in debt by design.
The violence of 1919, the year James Weldon Johnson called the Red Summer, reached the Delta as it reached the rest of the country. Clarksdale was not spared.
Tennessee Williams spent part of his childhood here, at the rectory of St George's Episcopal Church where his grandfather was rector. Names from the town and the county turn up throughout his plays.
Martin Luther King came to Clarksdale in 1958 and again in 1962. The town was a node in the Delta's civil rights organising, and paid for it.
Then two things emptied it. The Great Migration carried hundreds of thousands of Black Southerners north, many of them out of this county, on the Illinois Central. And mechanised cotton picking removed the need for the labour that remained. The plantations kept producing; the people were no longer required.
What was left was a small town with a disproportionate cultural inheritance and not much else — until the town worked out that the inheritance was the economy. That story is on the renaissance page.