On nation’s 250th birthday, tiny Itta Bena and the Mississippi Delta provide a window into America

By Nason Lollar | Originally published by Mississippi Today

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“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” 

— Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776 

For 250 years, America has wrestled with the meaning of these words. 

The history of one small Mississippi Delta town offers a window into how we’ve grown into these ideals.

Benjamin Grubb Humphreys was a founding father of the Magnolia State. A planter, slaveholder, military officer and politician, Humphreys helped build the antebellum Mississippi we read about in history books.

When his family’s Claiborne County plantation fell on hard times in 1846, Humphreys steamed up the Yazoo River and selected a plantation site near Roebuck Lake. The rich Delta soil surrounding it, farmed by the Choctaw for centuries and opened to settlement through the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, was an ideal spot for a plantation. 

Humphreys named his new plantation after the Choctaw phrase for a home in the woods: Itta Bena. 

As war approached, Humphreys devoted himself to the Confederacy, serving with distinction at Antietam, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg and Chickamauga. 

After the war, Humphreys returned to Mississippi politics and became the state’s first post-war governor. Like many members of Mississippi’s planter class, he sought to restore the social hierarchy that had defined his successful antebellum life. 

As governor, Humphreys opposed ratification of the 13th and 14th Amendments and enacted the infamous Black Codes. These laws imposed harsh restrictions on newly freed slaves and helped establish the segregated order that would dominate Mississippi for generations after the war.

Gov. Humphreys and his contemporaries rebuilt the post-war South, characterized by sharecropping, disenfranchisement and discrimination that dominated the Delta for decades.

Five miles west of Humphreys’ old plantation site stands a historical marker commemorating the 1925 birthplace of Riley B. King in a sharecropper’s home. 

Born in the cotton fields of Itta Bena, King learned the hard realities of a sharecropper’s life early on. In the blazing Mississippi sun, children would spend long days chopping cotton, picking cotton and singing about it alongside the adults. 

Orphaned by age 9, Riley bounced across the state, moving from Itta Bena to Kilmichael, then to Lexington and eventually to Indianola. 

Religion was a big part of Riley’s life. Early on, he was enthralled by a preacher’s unconventional delivery, which included using a guitar in his sermons. While he continued to move and change jobs, the music stayed with him. 

By the time he was 20, King had progressed to performing on street corners. And as soon as he learned that playing the blues yielded more tips in his open hat than the old religious standards, he escaped life in the fields and moved to Memphis. There, the hardships of his upbringing became a source of opportunity. 

King’s first job off the farm was serving as a disc jockey at WDIA. Soon after, calls and fan mail flooded into the radio station addressed to the personality they knew as “The Beale Street Blues Boy.” The nickname stuck and was eventually shortened, creating the name history remembers: B.B. King. 

Born into extreme poverty and surviving on his own as a kid, King used talent, discipline, persistence and a surprisingly positive outlook on a hard life to escape his situation and master a form of music deeply rooted in the suffering and endurance of the Mississippi Delta. 

Years later, King reflected on the role the blues played in his life in his autobiography. 

“As a little kid, blues meant hope, excitement, pure emotion. Blues were about feelings. They seem to bring out the feelings of the artist and they brought out my feelings as a kid. They made me wanna move, or sing, or pick up Reverend’s guitar and figure out how to make those wonderful sounds.” 

Widely regarded as one of the greatest guitarists in history, this great-grandson of slaves carried Mississippi’s music to the world stage and became one of the most celebrated musicians in America.

In 1946, as King fled the Delta, the Mississippi Legislature continued taking steps to keep society segregated. That year, lawmakers authorized the creation of the Mississippi Vocational College as a separate institution for Black students. 

After local protests prevented the school from opening at the old Greenwood Army Air Base, legislators selected another, more remote, location six miles to the west. And in a twist that could only take place in the Mississippi Delta, old plantation land in Itta Bena was transformed into an institution of higher learning for the descendants of the enslaved. 

Dr. James Herbert White was recruited to lead that institution when it opened in 1950. 

Also the son of sharecroppers, White envisioned something greater than an isolated vocational school designed to preserve the state’s “separate but equal” vision. White devoted himself not simply to constructing buildings and classrooms, but to constructing hope. 

Dr. White dreamed of building a true institution of higher learning that could lift students into lives of opportunity, dignity and excellence. Under his leadership, the school became Mississippi Valley State College, reflecting a vision that had grown well beyond its vocational beginnings. Today, the university nicknamed “The Valley” continues to produce educators, professionals, athletes and leaders whose influence extends far beyond the Mississippi Delta.

Take a Sunday drive through the Mississippi Delta, and you’ll notice historical markers everywhere. 

A few miles north of Itta Bena, there’s a marker on the banks of the Tallahatchie River memorializing the site of Emmett Till’s 1955 death. A couple of hours south, another one describes how Gen. Ulysses S. Grant used Mississippi College’s Provine Chapel as a field hospital during the Vicksburg campaign. Everywhere in between, marker after marker tells the story of how events from the front pages of American history played out across the Delta. 

What other stretch of soil could intertwine the stories of a plantation owner, a musician, an educator and the president of the United States? 

Four months after the Battle of Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln gave voice to an understanding of the American experiment that would eventually transform a thousand different corners of America, including Itta Bena. 

Standing among the graves of those who died preserving the Union, he returned to the Declaration of Independence and its central claim that all men are created equal. Lincoln acknowledged that America remained engaged in unfinished work, bringing the nation’s actions into closer alignment with its founding ideal. It was work to which he ultimately gave his life. 

Lincoln’s greatest contribution to those of us looking back across 250 years of the American experiment, though, may have been the challenge he left behind. Speaking to a generation enduring circumstances far worse than our own, he called on his countrymen to show an “increased devotion” to the cause of liberty. 

Itta Bena, Mississippi, offers a remarkable view of the American experiment today because it demonstrates that Lincoln’s challenge did not end at Gettysburg. Slowly but surely, generations of Americans accepted the responsibility of enlarging the promise contained in the Declaration.

Today, the only visible evidence of Benjamin Humphreys’ plantation is an aging historical marker at the intersection of Humphreys Street and Mississippi Highway 7 in downtown Itta Bena. 

Glance east while reading it, and you can picture the columned porch of a plantation home still rising above the Delta landscape. Walk a few minutes in any direction, and you are standing in fields once worked by Humphreys’ slaves nearly two centuries ago. 

But other than those fields stretching to the horizon, neither Humphreys, Jefferson nor Lincoln would recognize much of the small Delta town today. Those fields that once supported a plantation produced one of the most celebrated musicians in American history and gave rise to a state-supported, historically Black university. Free elections have taken place across the Delta for decades now, with candidates from all parties up and down the ballot. 

The meaning of Itta Bena was not settled at the time Benjamin Humphreys founded it. As the American story unfolded, it eventually outgrew the antebellum world that created it.

The window it offers into the American experiment is one of hope.

Viewed through the lens of history, the American experiment in self-government is much more than a battle over political opinions. Every generation inherits an unfinished country. Progress isn’t just a debate over who wins elections; it is about what we choose to build. 

If the United States of America someday celebrates a 500th anniversary, it will not happen because Americans agree on everything. We never have, and we never will. It will happen because generation after generation of Americans accepted Lincoln’s challenge, overcame their differences and devoted themselves to preserving a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. 

In the Mississippi Delta, those fading historical markers tell the story of how previous generations helped our country achieve those founding ideals. Hopefully, the historical markers that have yet to be placed will say the same about us someday.

Nason Lollar was born in Leflore County. He currently serves as principal of Germantown Middle School in Madison County. Over his 26-year career in Mississippi’s public schools, he has served as a teacher, coach, assistant principal and principal. He holds a doctor of education degree from William Carey University and is the author of “The Five Principles of Educator Professionalism: Rebuilding Trust in Schools.” A husband and father of four, he writes about education, leadership, Mississippi history and life in his spare time. 

This article was originally published by Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Source: Original Article