Jackson: Mississippi's capital of blues and civil rights

Capital of Mississippi on the Pearl River, Jackson holds key sites of the American civil rights movement.

The center, amid blues history and civil rights, requires a car to move among the most distant neighborhoods.

The Mississippi Civil Rights Museum tells the story of the struggle for civil rights in the state, including the assassination of activist Medgar Evers in Jackson in 1963.

A short walk away, the Old Mississippi Capitol, a state museum in neoclassical style, houses historical documents of the state dating back to the era of secession.

Heading toward the center, you visit the Mississippi Museum of Art, with collections of regional art from the Deep South.

In the evening, the Fondren district comes alive with live blues music venues, a genre born in the plantations of Mississippi between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Medgar Evers, a civil rights activist assassinated in Jackson in 1963 outside his own home, remains a central figure in American civil rights history, commemorated in the state museum today.

Mississippi, the birthplace of the blues, owes much of its musical identity to the Delta plantations north of Jackson, where the genre was born and developed between the late 1800s and early 1900s.