The Farish neighborhood today bears only a passing resemblance to its appearance during its six decades as Mississippi’s most important black neighborhood. Stretching nine blocks north of downtown to Fortification Street, along Mill, Farish, and Lamar streets, the area was subdivided in the 1870s and named for former slave Walter Farish, who operated a grocery store at the corner of Farish and Davis streets. Industries along the Illinois Central Railroad and Mill Street created jobs and sparked residential development. Rows of shotgun houses, mostly rentals, accommodated workers, but middle- and upper-income African Americans owned homes and businesses here in fashionable styles of the day. However, the district’s infrastructure reflected minimal city investment: narrow streets, poor drainage, and no green space.
In an informal mixing of building types, Farish Street developed as the principal commercial strip. Farish incubated such musicians as Robert Johnson, Sonny Boy Williamson, and Dorothy Moore, who recorded their music here, including at the Crystal Palace Ballroom (c. 1935; 540 N. Farish), and Trumpet Records and Ace Records managed the musicians. National performers also passed through the neighborhood.
Many of Jackson’s African American tradesmen and contractors lived in Farish, among them George Thomas, who built his Craftsman bungalow at 232 E. Cohea Street around 1920. But all the known buildings by builder and real estate developer Robert Rhodes Jr., including eight bungalows at the corner Cohea and Blair streets and his house at 938 N. Blair, were demolished beginning in the 1980s.
After World War II, newer neighborhoods in West Jackson began to rival Farish. Professionals such as Medgar Evers moved to new segregated subdivisions, often developed by black entrepreneurs. Evers’s National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) office, which opened at 507–509 N. Farish in January 1955, relocated later that year to the Stringer Grand Lodge Building (JM65). As Farish’s professionals moved out, decline set in. The neighborhood remained symbolically important, however, as evidenced by the funeral cortege led by Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders that followed Evers’s body from Stringer Lodge to Collins Funeral Home (1939; 415 N. Farish) after his assassination in June 1963.
Following desegregation in 1970, Farish began a steep decline, but a residents group averted massive urban renewal by having the area designated as a National Register historic district in 1979. Nevertheless, Farish Street lost most of its commerce. North of Monument Street some side streets and alleys still are packed tight with front-gabled bungalows and shotgun houses, which, with their porches, create a visual rhythm once far more common.
Writing Credits
If SAH Archipedia has been useful to you, please consider supporting it.
SAH Archipedia tells the story of the United States through its buildings, landscapes, and cities. This freely available resource empowers the public with authoritative knowledge that deepens their understanding and appreciation of the built environment. But the Society of Architectural Historians, which created SAH Archipedia with University of Virginia Press, needs your support to maintain the high-caliber research, writing, photography, cartography, editing, design, and programming that make SAH Archipedia a trusted online resource available to all who value the history of place, heritage tourism, and learning.