Around the turn of the 20th Century, the city of Natchez built on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi had the reputation of being one of the wealthiest, if not the wealthiest city in the entire United States. At the very least, it boasted of the most millionaires of any city in the country. Wealth built on cotton, wood and slavery. Natchez had been rapidly defeated in the early days of the Civil War following which of course, slaves had been emancipated. Bo weevil infestation killed off the cotton industry in the first years of the 20th Century and Natchez went into a rapid decline. Segregation, discrimination and the Jim Crow Laws reinforced by the Ku Klux Klan were the order of the day well into the 1960’s. 

The turning point came in early October 1965 in what became known as “The Parchman Ordeal”. A Civil Rights protest march was met with force by the Natchez Police Department and around 500 people were arrested. When the city goals were filled, the police turned the City Auditorium, an antebellum-style mansion into a detention centre. Many detainees were then shipped off to a state penitentiary in northern Mississippi. According to our guide, the detainees were given laxative-laced water and rotten food, stripped and hosed. After a couple of days, they were released and allowed to make their way back to Natchez. 

50 years later, Natchez held a reconciliation weekend and a monument to the protestors was unveiled just outside the City Auditorium 

Today, Natchez is a rather sad place. It still boasts a “Minor Basilica” which was a cathedral until 1977 when the Diocese (and its resident bishop) was relocated to Mississippi’s State capital, Jackson. Not far away on the mostly run down main street is the Jewish Temple B’Nai Israel, one of the few remaining traces of the once thriving Jewish community which went into decline after a boll weevil infestation decimated the cotton fields in the early 20th Century.

The synagogue finally closed about the same time the cathedral became a minor basilica and is now being renovated and will reopen as a museum.

But the good ol’ days are not completely forgotten in Natchez. We spend a little time at the last antebellum mansion completed before the Civil War broke out. It’s now a museum and wedding location (rather than a B&B like most others in the town). The mansion has a large collection of Confederate-era costumes which the town’s young worthies can dress in for their wedding photos or a social event known as The Pilgrimage, organized grand old white ladies of Natchez, still lovingly clinging on to memories of the “Old South”

The South is alive and well and living in Natchez…..

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** “The Deepest South of All…..True Stories From Natchez, Mississippi” by Richard Grant