Striving, thriving in Columbus.

There had been black freemen in Columbus since the early days of settlement when “the Big Black Tanner” William Cooper ran a tan yard and trading post where Europeans and Chickasaws did business. And Cooper wasn’t the only successful entrepreneur. Freed slave Horace King became one of the area’s preeminent bridge builders, and before becoming a barber, grocer, and saloon owner, local businessman Jack Raab made his first transaction with the purchase of his own freedom. In 1843, freemen Isaac and Thomas Williams built their four-room, two-story house that would come to be known as the Haven.

From the very beginning, Columbus also provided havens for African American worship, even if they were found at first in the basement of another church in the case of Missionary Union Baptist church, or in the outdoor brush arbor in the case of Shiloh Missionary Church. After the war, those congregations were finally able to build their own sanctuaries, even as others like the Concord CME Church were formed as well.

By the end of the nineteenth century Columbus’s African American culture and commerce were thriving, particularly along Catfish Alley, the community’s primary business district. The Queen City Hotel, constructed in 1909 by former slave Robert Walker, became a favorite stop for professional baseball players and for such nationally known performing artists as Louis Armstrong, Pearl Bailey, B. B. King, Duke Ellington, and James Brown.

African Americans in the Mississippi Hills were finding their own paths and their own voice, in the streets and in the churches and in a new art form that arose from old traditions and that took on special characteristics here in the Hills. When the blues came north from the Mississippi Delta, the bluesmen of the Hills would create their own distinctive version.