What's fascinating about Mobile Street in Hattiesburg is that in the early 1900s-1960s, it was a thriving area of black-owned business, with numerous black-owned physicians, banks, theaters, doctor offices, grocery stores, etc.— It existed because of, and died with, Jim Crow. 1/
Hattiesburg is a microcosm of this phenomenon. Jim Crow forced the creation of centralized black hubs of business & entertainment across the South. Mobile Street today runs through poor neighborhoods, with few businesses left, concrete slabs, & crumbling buildings. 2/
Because segregation wove black leaders (in business, arts, and otherwise) so tightly together, it also laid, in Downtown Hattiesburg's Mobile Street, the perfect storm to make it a hub for the kind of organizing and activism that would eventually end Jim Crow. 3/x
