The Civil Rights Movement in Natchez

Natchez in the 1960s was one of the most dangerous places in Mississippi for Black people organizing for their rights. The Ku Klux Klan had an active, violent chapter. Churches were bombed. NAACP leader Wharlest Jackson was murdered by a car bomb in 1967. Charles Evers — brother of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers — organized boycotts of white-owned businesses. The Deacons for Defense, an armed self-defense organization, operated in Natchez to protect civil rights workers. The movement in Natchez was less nationally visible than Jackson or Selma, but no less dangerous and no less courageous. The city is only now beginning to memorialize this chapter of its history with the same attention it gives to its antebellum past.