No question about it, Clarksdale, Mississippi, is a poor Delta town. The median household income in Coahoma County, of which Clarksdale is the seat and only town of any size, is $29,121 as of 2019, according to the Census Bureau, and over 38% of the population lives below the federal poverty level. For all of Mississippi — by household income the poorest state in the union — median household income is just over $45,000, and 19.6% of the population lives in poverty. (The U.S. figures are about $68,700 for median household income, with 10.5% living below the poverty level.)
Coahoma County is also majority black, 77.6%, compared with 37.8% for Mississippi as a whole. Since 2010, the county has lost 15.4% of its population; Mississippi has managed to eke out a 0.3% gain over the same period.
By contrast, Warren County, whose seat is Vicksburg, Mississippi, is considerably more prosperous by the same metrics, though it too lost population in the 2010s: down 6.9%. Median household income is $45,113, just over the state median, and about 20% of the population officially lives in poverty. Black and white are more evenly divided in Warren County, at 49.3% and 48.4%, respectively.
I took a walk around the downtowns of both Clarksdale and Vicksburg on the same day, Sunday, April 11, fairly early in the morning for the former, and late in the afternoon for the latter.
Poor it may be, Clarksdale is distinct as the hub of the Delta blues, a fact that the town very much plays up in the early 21st century, with a museum, music venues, plaques, public artwork and more. Funny, I have a hunch that the city fathers in segregationist Clarksdale a century or so ago didn’t give a fig for the music that the black population was creating and exporting to Chicago and other places.
Few other people were about on that Sunday morning. The first thing that caught my attention was a large mural.
That’s the back wall of the Ground Zero Blues Club, and the mural must be of recent vintage, since a Streetview image from September 2019 shows a few smaller murals, but mostly a blank wall.
That’s hardly the only public artwork in downtown Clarksdale.
The town sports a lot of interesting old buildings in various conditions, some music oriented, some ordinary commercial structures.
One of the music businesses is a place called Deak’s Mississippi Saxophones and Blues Emporium. Not something you’re likely to see anywhere else.
Late that day, I took a walkabout of similar duration in Vicksburg, after visiting the local battlefield.
It’s a larger town with larger buildings, such as The Vicksburg, formerly the Hotel Vicksburg, which I’ve read is the tallest building in town and in recent years an apartment building. Next to it are the Strand Theatre and the B.B. Club, formerly the B’nai B’rith Literary Association building, and now an event venue.
Some smaller structures grace downtown Vicksburg as well, of course.
The city is mostly on a loess bluff overlooking the Mississippi.
Old Man River.
The damage that Old Man River can do, when he’s in the mood. There’s no doubt that 1927 is the one to beat, and not just in Louisiana, though 2011 was a whopper too.
That’s on the river-facing side of the modern floodwall system protecting Vicksburg. On the town-facing side are a lot of different murals. Some details:
My own favorite, “President McKinley Visits the Land of Cotton,” is based on a photo of an arch built from cotton bales to greet the president, who visited for a little less than two hours on May 1, 1901, not long before his date with Death in Buffalo.
If possible, I like to see a presidential site on each trip. That counts as one for the trip.
