Marks Mules and Blues Festival Celebrates Civil Rights, Delta Music Heritage

When roughly 100 men, women and children from Quitman County hitched mule-drawn wagons at Marks Community Park and headed east on Highway 6 in May 1968, they were launching a civil rights protest, not a tourism strategy. More than five decades later, Velma Wilson, a native of Marks who served as the county's first African American and first female County Administrator, founded the annual Quitman County Mules and Blues Festival to do something no protest wagon could: bring those visitors back and keep them spending money on Pecan Street.

The festival, held each fall at 330 Pecan Street in downtown Marks, links two of Mississippi's official cultural corridors: the Mississippi Blues Trail and the Mississippi Freedom Trail. The Quitman County Board of Supervisors, the City of Marks and every municipality in the county formally back the event, providing the public-sector infrastructure — policing, road access, park and street use — that makes a recurring outdoor festival financially viable in a county seat of fewer than 2,000 residents.

Wilson's strategy extends well beyond one weekend of music. During her six-year tenure as County Administrator, she secured more than $3 million in local, regional, state and federal funds for heritage projects tied directly to the festival's programming: stabilization of the Marks Rosenwald School, installation of a Civil Rights Mule Train Freedom Marker, and the design and installation of 11 wagon wheel trail markers and seven wayfinding signs throughout the city. That last project, a collaboration between Mississippi State University's Small Town Center, the Quitman County Board of Supervisors, Mayor Joe Shegog and the Marks Board of Aldermen, was unveiled at a ceremony marking the 50th anniversary of the Poor People's Campaign and now gives festival visitors a self-guided path through the history that started here.

The festival itself runs a full program: multiple music stages, heritage tours along the Mule Train Interpretive Trail, a 5K run/walk and educational sessions that connect the 1968 march to ongoing policy conversations about rural poverty. In 2022, the event served as the launchpad for the groundbreaking of the National Rhythm and Blues Hall of Fame, which will be built on five acres of land donated by the City of Marks and Quitman County, with a $500,000 state grant seeding construction costs.

That groundbreaking illustrates the broader bet Quitman County is making: use the festival as a recurring proof point to attract larger cultural investments. Each year the event draws out-of-county visitors who fill local restaurants and support craft vendors, justifying continued public expenditure on the downtown infrastructure — sidewalks, signage, ADA access, restroom facilities — that grants from the National Park Service and other federal agencies increasingly require before releasing preservation funding. The 2018 National Park Service African American Preservation grant that funded the Mule Train Cultural Interpretive Trail was itself a product of that cycle: demonstrate community investment, unlock outside dollars.

What began as a protest witnessed by a handful of Delta sharecroppers and civil rights activists has become Quitman County's most deliberate argument that history, honestly told and publicly resourced, is an economic asset worth governing carefully.