June 1, 2007

INDIANOLA, Mississippi -- In the late 1940s B.B. King played gospel music and the blues on the corner of Church and Second Streets in this small Mississippi Delta town. People patted him on the head when he sang the church music. He learned he could earn some dimes when he switched to the blues – going from "my Lord" to "my baby."

Today, less than three blocks from that street corner, the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center is being built in a complex that includes an old cotton gin where King once worked. It's scheduled to open in September 2008 and will tell not only about the rise to fame of the "King of the Blues," who claims Indianola as his hometown, but also the history of the movement to eliminate the often-horrific racism in the Delta.

Like King, the people of Indianola have seen enormous changes in the Delta as back-breaking labor on cotton plantations gave way to mechanization, as cotton in turn gradually is yielding to corn and catfish production, and as African Americans have asserted their demands for civil rights – often at considerable personal risk. For example, Fannie Lou Hamer traveled to Indianola, county seat of Sunflower County, several times in 1962 in unsuccessful attempts to register to vote before going on to become a civil rights icon.

It's important to tell the story of civil rights because students and many others know "almost nothing" about it, says Carver Randle, a successful Indianola attorney who, as head of the local NAACP, helped make some of that history. He remembered visiting the local high school shortly after the death of Hamer in 1977.

Fannie Lou Hamer

"The students didn't know who she was," recalls Randle, who says the situation has not improved. "They don't know their history because their teachers don't talk to them about it, and their parents don't talk to them about it."

King, who grew up in poverty and once drove a tractor on a Delta plantation, returns to Indianola, a town of 12,000 people, annually to perform in a "homecoming concert." He donates the proceeds to the town. Now, the town wants to give back: the museum's directors have raised $12.7 million toward the building of the museum. Local veteran journalist Jim Abbott is one of those directors. Abbott and Evelyn Roughton, a local restaurant owner, hatched the idea for the museum seven years ago.

When Abbott and Roughton first talked with "Randy" Randall, president of the Mississippi-based Planters Bank & Trust in 2000, they envisioned a museum that would be located in an old bank branch.

"We thought it might take $200,000 for some glass cases," Randall recalls. "Within a matter of weeks, we started thinking bigger."

Planners now plan to spend $14.2 million to build a museum that will "celebrate the rich cultural heritage of the Mississippi Delta, and to promote pride, hope, and understanding through exhibitions and educational programs."

Museum Site

The museum – as a storytelling institution – will provide context for the reporting that Abbott's prize-winning local weekly newspaper has been producing on civil rights for more than 30 years. Abbott, editor of the weekly Enterprise-Tocsin newspaper, has focused on these issues practically from the day he took over 37 years ago.

Just three weeks after Abbott, became editor (at 26), he ran photographs of the new cheerleaders – all white – from Indianola Academy, which had opened when whites left the public schools after desegregation was ordered. The next week he photographed the Gentry High cheerleaders who attended the virtually all black public school. They had never had their pictures in the paper. Soon afterward, Abbott – a Vietnam veteran who grew up 30 miles away in Greenwood – attended a supper where some of the men surrounded him and said, "We don't want niggers on our front page, do you understand?" It was his front page, and he didn't back down.

Like many areas of Mississippi, Indianola has long been a crucible for race relations. Not only was the Delta the birthplace of the blues, sung by such greats as King, Charley Patton, "Son" House and Robert Johnson, but Indianola itself was the also the birthplace of the White Citizens Councils, formed to fight the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision ordering school desegregation.

Robert Johnson

In the years before Abbott took over the editorship in 1970, the newspaper had supported the goals of the White Citizens Council and treated it as a relatively harmless civic organization. However, Abbott discovered that the paper in 1964 had published the names and parents' phone numbers of the young people – "outside agitators," some called them – who came to Mississippi during the voting rights drives that became known as Freedom Summer.

"It was obviously as if to say, 'If you want to call and harass these folks, it's OK,'" Abbott says.

Museum displays will include White Citizens Council membership cards and descriptions of its activities. It will also include exhibits of the civil rights activists – black and white – and entertainment industry artists such as Bob Dylan who came to the Delta during those times to support the movement.

"We're going to tell the whole story," says Cissy Anklam, a museum consultant.

However, racial strife in Indianola didn't end in the 1960s. For example, in 1986, the newspaper reported on a two-month protest when the majority-white school board appointed a white superintendent for the district, which had 93 per cent black enrollment. There had been a well-qualified black candidate for superintendent, and his supporters boycotted the town's businesses. The local chamber of commerce estimated that area businesses lost about $3 million, a severe jolt in such a small town. Ultimately, the town's powers-that-be intervened and bought out the contract of the man the board had selected; the black candidate took over.

It was a tense time "having to watch family members get angry at each other," says David Rushing, who was then a reporter at the Enterprise-Tocsin and whose own family has been in Indianola for generations.  "People would come up to me and say that my great-grandmother and great-granddaddy must be rolling over in their graves.

Jim Abbott

Abbott played "a particularly remarkably heroic role by sticking his neck out" to cover both sides fairly, Rushing says, recalling Abbott "virtually weighing every word as he was writing." Rushing says that he and Abbott were just doing "good journalism" and that the paper had already developed trust on both sides of the community.

Since that time, the townspeople have talked more openly about race, Abbott says. "The superintendent's crisis sparked a lot of that," he adds. "We had community meetings and talked about race and the two school systems and some of the needs we had as a town."

Indianola elected its first black mayor, Arthur Marble, in 2001. Today, three of the five town aldermen are black and the town has had its first black sheriff.

"The politics has changed," Abbott says. "We've gotten over a lot of hills."            

The museum will also chronicle some of these black political gains in Mississippi, which include the election of African Americans to Congress and to the state legislature.

"The fact that more African Americans, such as Morgan Freeman, are coming home to Mississippi will be part of the story," says Anklam, the consultant, referring to the actor who grew up in Greenville and owns a blues club, Ground Zero, in nearby Clarksdale.

Morgan Freeman

The celebrity connection – Freeman opened Ground Zero in 2001 – may account for the national media's extensive coverage of the blues club. Ground Zero Blues Club has been featured on CBS' 60 Minutes, CNN, the Food Network, the Travel Channel, and the Discovery Channel. Also, National Geographic Traveler, USA Today, Food and Wine magazine, the Washington Post and TV Guide have provided coverage.

However, the blues and blues venues are always big news for the local media in and around Indianola. For example, the Enterprise-Tocsin has followed B.B. King's rise and covers his trips to Indianola for homecoming concerts. Also, it has published many feature stories about local blues musicians such as David Lee Durham. In addition, it has reported on the possible sale of the town's legendary Club Ebony. Ray Charles and Howlin' Wolf are among those who have performed at Club Ebony, opened in 1945. It is also one of King's favorite venues.

Like the Enterprise-Tocsin, Mississippi Public Broadcasting has also frequently produced reports on the two topics that will be the subject of exhibits at the new King museum – blues and civil rights. For example, it broadcast a tape of King's 2006 Indianola concert and produced programs about the Blues Museum in nearby Clarksdale. It also broadcast reports about new investigations into the infamous racially motivated 1954 slaying of 14-year-old Emmett Till. In addition, Mississippi Public Radio last year aired an hour-long program featuring a concert tribute to Medgar Evers, the civil rights leader slain in 1963. For that tribute, it created a special webpage – www.everstribute.org  – and teachers' lesson plans to accompany the program.

Medgar Evers

Considering the media coverage of – and public interest in – these two prominent Delta topics, it's little wonder that there is excitement about a museum that would focus on the blues and race relations.

Gallagher & Associates, a Bethesda, Md., firm that specializes in planning exhibits, is working with the museum staff in developing interactive displays and other elements of the stories of B.B. King, who first achieved prominence as a performer in the 1950s, and his times. Anklam, a consultant who has worked with both the Smithsonian and the Newseum in Washington, D.C., says the planners realized early on that the museum would have to explore more than King's life as a performer and celebrity.

They sought to find the people with whom King grew up who could tell what life had been like then. They interviewed African Americans in their 70s and 80s who have known King since the Jim Crow era. Those stories, recorded for the museum, will evoke the day-to-day anger and sadness of the segregated, repressive society in which they grew up.

Carver Randle figures in one of these stories. When he was a child in Indianola, his family never went to the public library, he told the museum interviewers. It wasn't until he returned home from college that he realized he couldn't go to the library because it was segregated.

The museum will be composed of two linked buildings on a two-acre site. The land, donated by the city, already includes one part of the museum – the last standing brick cotton gin building in Mississippi, now restored. A second building, now under construction, will house many of the exhibits.

Museum Design

There was some consternation among the planners when they first showed King the site because the gin was in "terrible shape," recalls Allan Hammons, a public relations consultant in Greenwood who was the museum's interim executive director. At that point, King told them that he had worked there as a young man – something the planners did not know.

Says Hammons: "It was one of those moments when the hair stands up on your arms."

The museum's board has three white members and four black members. The board is headed by Bill McPherson, a member of an old Delta family that founded the Gresham Oil company and the Double Quick convenience store chain. McPherson and the board went to a fund-raising expert who told them that when they knocked on corporate or foundation doors, "you can't get other people to give money if you don't have local people contributing," recalls McPherson, who also chairs the Mississippi Blues Commission, which is developing the Mississippi Blues Trail.

Carver Randle

The Gresham-McPherson family gave a lead local gift of $350,000 and Planters Bank & Trust contributed $100,000. Other key contributions have included a $2.5 million challenge grant from former Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale and his wife, a $2 million bond passed by the state legislature to help finance construction, and a 2 per cent tourism tax on lodgings and restaurants within Indianola that has generated $300,000 so far.  

"It's a unique twist to see the economic string of people and institutions honoring and paying tribute to this man whose history and life have been overcoming adversity to pursue his dream," says Randy Randall of Planters Bank. "There are people contributing who maybe 25 years ago wouldn't have done that."

The board is also trying to get the word out about the economic opportunities that will accompany the museum's opening – the need for more restaurants, accommodations, transportation and laundry services among them. There is hope that some black businesses will benefit – not just white-owned enterprises.

The museum is also going to be important to the town's young people.  Plans are in the works to train teachers to help prepare their students for what they'll see at the museum, not only about King's life but also about the blues and the racial history of the area.

In addition, the museum is working with the Williams Winters Center for Racial Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi to develop curriculum on character building.

"Here is a town in what had been one of the most racist states in the country, a town that was the birthplace of the White Citizens Council, that was willing to take on this museum," says Cissy Anklam.  "We do not want to leave people with some romantic notion of race relations today, though. It's better, but they're still working on it."

Jim Abbott considers the new developments to be a big opportunity for the kind of storytelling that can strengthen a community.

"Organizing this museum has fostered black and white friendships and relations that will be lasting ones," he says. "I'm convinced this museum will be a catalyst, like our newspaper tries to be, for stimulating and nurturing such relationships as it tells the truth about an important time in our history."

Kay Mills, a journalist based in Santa Monica, California, is author of "Changing Channels: The Civil Rights Case That Transformed Television." She is a frequent contributor to C3 Online.