“If you ever go to Greenville, please go down to Nelson Street,” sang bluesman Willie Love in Nelson Street Blues (1951), listing all the activities that made this neighborhood the center of African American cultural life in the Delta. Today, most retail and industry has disappeared, including the two-block Refuge Oil Mill at the railroad. Doe’s Eat Place (500 Nelson) still serves its famous tamales and steaks from its gable-front wooden building. Like Greenwood’s Lusco’s (see DR53), Doe’s began as a corner store in the 1930s owned by an Italian immigrant, here Dominick Signa. The Sno-White Laundry (828 Nelson) mentioned in Love’s song is now the Fountain Blues Bar and Lounge.
The one-story former Nelson Street YMCA and Miller Community Center (1948; 431 N. Broadway Street) features an ogee-arched parapet. The building housed Martin Marble Library, the city’s library for American Americans, established with WPA funding in 1938.
Churches continue to be neighborhood anchors. African American builder and minister Ezzie R. Smith was architect of the red brick St. Matthews AME Church (1955; 514 Nelson), where an inset tan brick cross and a circular window with a six-pointed star enliven the facade. Established in 1867, St. Matthews was the first AME church in the Delta. Smith also built the modernist, brick Mt. Horeb M.B. Church (1971; 538 Nelson), which has an exposed concrete frame, stained glass windows in the gabled facade reused from the congregation’s 1909 building, a small detached tower with a steeple, and an education wing. The diminutive red brick Church of the Redeemer (1929; 632 W. Ohea) maintains the Episcopal affinity for Gothic Revival and has a square corner tower.
An early mission to blacks in the Delta, Sacred Heart Catholic Church (560 E. Gloster Street; pictured) was founded in 1913 by the Society of the Divine Word and the Missionary Servants of the Holy Spirit. The two-story brick convent was built in 1913 under the supervision of architect-priest Father John Hoenderop of Vicksburg. During the Flood of 1927 its second floor housed scores of refugees. The masons for the Romanesque Revival church (1929) created a lively stack of round arches in the facade’s central tower, using inexpensive yellow brick and cast stone. The nation’s first seminary for black priests began at this campus in 1920 but moved to Bay St. Louis as St. Augustine’s Seminary (GC10) in 1923. In the 1950s, a one-story school building replaced the original two-story school (demolished), and it became a Head Start facility in 1977.