Neshoba County was created in 1836, and Philadelphia was designated its seat in 1838. As late as 1905 there were only 175 residents, but that year the Memphis, Jackson, and Kansas City Railroad arrived, and the town thrived. Neshoba County’s jail and courthouse played significant roles in the state’s civil rights history. The county hired local contractors B. L. Howell and Sons to build the jail ( pictured above) in 1954, just as the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling. The building, now apartments, is a one-story, flat-roofed quasi-modernist brick box. Three civil rights workers—James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman—spent a few hours here on the evening of June 21, 1964, before being released into an ambush, shot to death, and buried in a remote location.
Meridian architect Springer designed the two-story courthouse. It has a flat-roofed central block with attic-level one-bay wings, and lower two-bay wings added in 1954. On the north and south fronts, two matching loggias feature deep entablatures and columns in antis bearing Tower of the Winds capitals and wide, concrete steps. From the north steps in 1964 and 1966, Martin Luther King Jr. culminated two downtown marches with calls for the prosecution of the three civil rights workers’ killers. King later remembered that when he spoke facing the Confederate monument (1912) on the north lawn and surrounded by police who had participated in the ambush, it was the single most frightening experience of his life. The marches began at the small, wooden Mt. Nebo Missionary Baptist Church (demolished in the 1980s and replaced by the brick church at 257 Carver Avenue), where a headstone bearing the names of the murdered men has been placed.
The trial of nineteen men arrested in August 1964 finally took place in the Meridian federal courthouse (EM17). In October 1967 a jury convicted seven of them of violating the civil rights of the murdered men, making this the first successful civil rights prosecution in the state.