Mendenhall: Simpson County and the Movement in the Pines

Mendenhall is the county seat of Simpson County, a small city in the pine belt of central Mississippi that sits along US Route Forty-Nine roughly halfway between Jackson and Hattiesburg. In the nineteen sixties, Mendenhall became one of the organizing centers of the Mississippi civil rights movement in the area south of Jackson, where the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and later the Southern Christian Leadership Conference worked with local leaders to build voter registration campaigns in communities that had historically seen violent suppression of Black political activity. The Mendenhall Ministries, built by John Perkins, who returned to Mississippi in nineteen sixty, provided education, health services, and economic development alongside civil rights organizing, building a model of community development rooted in Christian social justice that Perkins would later codify in his influential writing.

Perkins himself had been tortured by Highway Patrol officers in Brandon in nineteen seventy while accompanying civil rights workers, and survived to become one of the most significant voices in evangelical social justice in the twentieth century. Perkins was born in nearby New Hebron in nineteen thirty and left Mississippi in nineteen forty-seven after his brother was fatally shot by a police officer. In nineteen sixty-four he opened the Voice of Calvary Bible Institute in Mendenhall, and in nineteen sixty-nine he led a boycott of white-owned stores there.

Mendenhall was first called Edna, and it was renamed for a lawyer named Thomas Mendenhall.