Farish Street and the City Within the City

Jim Crow built Farish Street by accident. When the law required that Black residents of Jackson could not eat at white-owned restaurants, could not be treated at white hospitals, could not bury their dead at white funeral homes, could not bank at white banks or shop at white stores on equal terms, Black Jacksonians built their own institutions. They built them on Farish Street, and what they built was a city within the city.

By the nineteen twenties and thirties, Farish Street was the economic and cultural backbone of Black Jackson. There were Black-owned law offices and insurance companies, a Black-run hospital, a weekly newspaper, a movie theater, barbershops, beauty salons, and grocery stores. The street had its own professional class, its own entertainment circuit, and its own economy, one that circulated money within the community because the rest of the city had no intention of letting it out.

The Alamo Theatre brought first-run films. The Crystal Palace Ballroom, on the upper floor of a building on Farish Street, hosted the most celebrated Black performers in the country. Local tradition holds that Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and B.B. King played there. These were national headliners who could not eat in a white restaurant in Jackson but could fill the Crystal Palace.

H.C. Speir ran his phonograph store on Farish Street. He sold phonograph machines and the records to play on them. He also quietly served as a talent scout for the record labels based in the North, auditioning local musicians in the back of his shop, making test recordings, and sending the results to Paramount and Victor and OKeh. Through him, Charley Patton, Skip James, Tommy Johnson, Robert Johnson, and the Mississippi Sheiks reached the studios. The Delta blues canon runs directly through that shop on Farish Street.

When legal desegregation came in the nineteen sixties, Black Jacksonians gained the right to spend money where they chose. Many chose the shops on Capitol Street that had previously denied them service. The economic logic that had sustained Farish Street for four decades dissolved almost immediately. Urban renewal projects and highway construction took care of the rest. Many of the street's grand buildings were lost or emptied. The businesses that had thrived in captivity did not survive freedom.