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Marks is a city in and the county seat of Quitman County, Mississippi. [2] As of the 2010 census, the city population was 1,735.
Sited on a bend in the Coldwater River, Marks is located in the northern reaches of the Mississippi Delta. The region has a rich heritage tied to the Civil Rights Movement and the development of country, rock and blues music.
Marks is a city in and the county seat of Quitman County, Mississippi. Marks has about 1,840 residents. Mapcarta, the open map.
- Overview
- When King came to Marks
- The legacy of Jim Crow
- A search for solutions in Marks
- Growing the future
MARKS, Miss. — Lula Green flips a sign on the front door to "open" and offers a lesson in commerce, Mississippi Delta-style: Packaged snacks bought in bulk from Sam's Club are arranged neatly on a long table and sell for 50 cents or $1. A slow cooker in a corner burbles with yellow cheese dip, and frozen chicken wings purchased from a Piggly Wiggly 20 miles away sizzle in a vat of hot oil. A handwritten menu on a whiteboard says a plate of the wings will set you back $6.50.
Green isn't doing business from a storefront — the shop she owned with her late husband burned down years ago. This is the living room of her home in Marks, once the poorest community in the poorest county in the poorest state in America, where people pay in loose change and promises.
On a recent June morning, she scoops up cooked chicken into a Styrofoam package for a boy in an oversize T-shirt. He asks for a helping of the cheese, then fumbles for money in his pockets.
"Dang, that's my last 50 cents!" the young customer says.
Green, holding up the assembled meal, pauses. "Don't worry about it," the 63-year-old grandmother replies, letting it slide until next time.
The people of Marks squeak by in creative ways, doing their best to help one another. That's how it was, too, in March 1968, when Martin Luther King Jr. visited here twice and residents say he cried after seeing shoeless black children.
Benson-Wilson, who is black, was a high school junior in 1968 when she wiggled her way through a crowd to get a glimpse of King. Her mother warned her to stay away, knowing that the presence of the 39-year-old preacher incensed the white leaders of Marks.
When King later spoke at the National Cathedral in Washington, in his final Sunday sermon before he was killed in Memphis, he relayed the bleak conditions he had seen: "I was in Marks, Mississippi, the other day, which is in Quitman County, the poorest county in the United States. And I tell you I saw hundreds of black boys and black girls walking the streets with no shoes to wear."
Four years earlier, President Lyndon B. Johnson had declared a War on Poverty, with social welfare legislation focused on education and health care. But in Marks, the movement had little effect, with conservative white politicians in Mississippi resisting federal funding because it threatened segregationist policies. King had initially been hopeful about the anti-poverty programs, but he later came to believe they were too piecemeal to be effective.
In the weeks after King's death, his civil rights organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, carried through on his promise of a Poor People's Campaign by creating a so-called Mule Train to Washington.
But there was trouble in Marks when a field office worker with the conference, Willie Bolden, was arrested while recruiting volunteers. In response, students and teachers marched peacefully to the town's jail, where they were met by armed state troopers in riot gear who beat several of them for failing to disperse.
That only strengthened local residents' resolve to get the Mule Train running. On May 13, 1968, more than 100 people, many from Quitman County, set off north in more than a dozen wagons.
Marks' mayor, Joe Shegog Jr., was 16 when the Mule Train departed for Washington. His parents wanted to participate, but, as sharecroppers working and living on land owned by whites, they couldn't risk losing their jobs and their home.
One day this month, after sweeping the dust from the sidewalk in front of the small brick building that serves as City Hall, Shegog took stock of what his town lacks: The only hospital closed two years ago after too many people had used the emergency room like a doctor's office and couldn't afford to pay their bills. The town's only full-service grocery store, a SuperValu, also closed two years ago.
Jobs evaporated when the county's several factories — which produced cotton, soybeans, car parts, rubber and shirts — began closing in the 1980s and '90s as work was consolidated or moved overseas; locals say this was exacerbated by the North American Free Trade Agreement signed by President Bill Clinton.
There's also no public busing and no sources of entertainment — the movie theater shut down in the 1960s and the public pool was filled with cement by whites after desegregation.
What the town does have is Shegog, the first black resident to win a seat on the City Council in 1987 and who became mayor in 2009.
He could have left after graduating from high school in 1971, like his classmates who moved 80 miles north to Memphis, or to Chicago and other big cities. But this small kingdom of cotton was home, the place that birthed the blues and where lush fields of soybean plants stretch in long, uniform rows like strings on the neck of a guitar.
The extreme poverty of many residents in Marks is not unique to this slice of the Delta or even the Deep South. It can be found in South Texas along the Mexico border, in the Navajo Nation in the West and the heart of Appalachia in eastern Kentucky — communities with relatively small populations, but where generations have resisted the pull of big cities in favor of open land.
"You should care because these are Americans. They deserve all the rights and privileges that go with being an American citizen," says Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., whose district includes Marks. "If they choose to live in an area like Marks, there should be givens: running water, access to sewage, roads, just like other areas. Just because there are not as many people doesn't mean that you can't provide that kind of investment. You got to have a decent quality of life."
That means the government needs to support these small towns socially and economically, Thompson says. "These communities historically don't have the resources to make all these changes happen themselves."
About half of Marks' residents are dependent on assistance from the federal government, officials say, whether it's Medicaid, food stamps or disability benefits. Many school children rely on free or reduced lunches.
But some families saw their welfare payments cut completely after nationwide changes to aid were made in 1996 under Clinton — a move meant to prod people to find work. Mississippi's welfare program gives $170 a month to a family of three, a figure that hasn't increased since 2000. It's also difficult to enroll — the state has one of the lowest user rates nationwide, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank.
Thompson, elected to the House in 1993, would like to see the federal government invest in poor rural communities as the Works Progress Administration did during the Great Depression, putting 8.5 million Americans to work by building schools, roads and other infrastructure. In Marks, the program helped to construct what would become the high school for black students.
When the SuperValu closed, Ora Phipps, who raised 10 children in Marks, had a safety net: her backyard.
She grows cabbage, corn, snap beans and okra, and neighbors — anyone really — can take from her garden, no questions asked.
Phipps, 89, who is black, relies on about $300 a month from Social Security. She also gets help from her daughter, Machell Carter, who is a registered nurse at Mississippi State Penitentiary.
Carter, in gray scrubs after an overnight shift, is the breadwinner, with a job that pays upward of $70,000 a year — pushing her far above the state's median household income of $40,600, the lowest in the nation. After high school, she left Marks and followed a sister to Norfolk, Virginia, thinking, "I'm going to try something else."
She did, and became a nurse. She returned to her rural Mississippi home in 2011, and felt like she landed in a time warp. The fundamentals of the modern day are here, and they aren't: Most people have cars and cellphones, but there's no food delivery, no Uber. "Uber, you need a credit card, and poor people don't have credit cards," Carter says.
Carter spends her free time checking on her mother, who has diabetes and hypertension and no longer drives.
- Senior Reporter
From Marks, Mississippi to either coast there was indigenous culture. They were as varied as the landscapes they inhabited, from the dense forests of the northeast to the expansive prairies in the heartland, and the arid deserts of the southwest to the rugged coastlines of the northwest.
Marks Tourism: Tripadvisor has reviews of Marks Hotels, Attractions, and Restaurants making it your best Marks travel resource.
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City of Marks is a locality in Mississippi. City of Marks is situated nearby to West Marks and Riverview. Mapcarta, the open map.
