Freedom Trail Marker at Jackson Greyhound Station; credit Jackson CVB
Jackson History
Jackson History begins with a French-Canadian, Louis Le Fleur operated the trading post situated on a bluff of the west bank of the Pearl River. Hence, the town’s original name Le Fleur’s Bluff.
In the War of 1812, when Andrew Jackson appealed to free Black people in Mississippi and Louisiana to join the Union’s fight against the British. He commanded two battalions of black soldiers who helped him win the Battle of New Orleans in 1814. Afterwards, he openly praised his black troops for their service.
Fertile land supported cash crops on nearby plantations. Economic profit was far more important than soldier valor in the minds and pocketbooks of land owners. Many white land-owners purchased African slaves from the auction blocks of Natchez to to work the plantations. Their addiction to slave-plantation economics caused Mississippi to enter the Union as a slave state by 1817.
Mississippi Legislature wanted the seat of government moved from the riverfront city of Natchez to a more central location to better serve plantation owners around the state. In addition to the central location of Le Fleur’s Bluff, they were enticed by its beautiful surroundings, abundant timber and navigable rivers.
In 1821, the location was authorized to be the seat of government. The city was renamed Jackson, in honor of General Andrew Jackson who later became the 7th U.S. President. Thus, a new capitol was crowned and whites Mississippians learned to live with a hypocrisy of preaching Christianity, but practicing little of it.
In contrast to recognizing the humanity of free black soldiers in war, enslaved Blacks were only valued as a labor commodity. Evidence of that labor value is frozen in many grand Mississippi government buildings built by slaves. Foremost among them is second state capitol built in 1832, known today as the Old Capitol.
During the Civil War, Vicksburg, only 40 miles west of Jackson, fell with the aid of U.S. Colored Troops in 1863. The fall of Vicksburg meant that Union forces now controlled Mississippi River port shipments. With its fall, White plantation owners sensed that an end to their Southern way of life was near.
Also during the Reconstruction Period (1865-1877), the first African American, Hiram Revels, was elected to the Mississippi State Legislature.
In 1870, Hiram Revels became the first U.S. Senator chosen by his peers to fill the position vacated by the former Confederate President, Jefferson Davis. His term lasted only one year. In 1877, Jackson State University was established.
After the Reconstruction Period in Jackson and elsewhere in America, the Klu Klux Klan began dismantling social gains and laying groundwork for Jim Crow segregation. Mississippi State Capitol is where the infamous Black Codes of Post-Reconstruction were enacted to limit the rights of newly freed citizens. Other Southern states quickly followed.
From a Civil Rights Movement perspective, Jackson, like Atlanta, Birmingham, Greensboro, Memphis, Nashville, Montgomery, Selma, Norfolk, and Washington DC, is Holy Ground. No American cities are more symbolic Civil Rights battlegrounds than these.
Jackson is where the assassination of Medgar Evers and the staunch, unbending leadership of Fannie Lou Hamer rose to national attention. Openly pitted against those citizen-heroes were forces evil who staged Klan rallies, church bombings, lynching and people disappearances in the 1950s and 1960s — definitely not Chamber of Commerce stuff.
But like the old folks use to say, “Change gonna come. It might be long, but change gonna come.” Despite the tireless work of our Civil Rights heroes, for much of the 1970s and 80s, the South dragged Jackson along in Civil Rights progress. Then in a signature moment of its own, Jackson finally turned the corner.
In 1994, the predominant white jury convicted Klansman Byron de la Beckwith for the murder of Medgar Evers. Though far short of a South Africa-like Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the long overdue ruling was a welcome milestone to help heal the city, the state and America.