Clarksdale is named after John Clark, a settler who founded the city in the mid-19th century when he established a timber mill and business.

Many African-American musicians developed the blues here, and took this original American music with them to Chicago and other northern cities during the Great Migration.

[4] Following the removal of the Indians, European-American settlers migrated to the Delta region, where the fertile lowlands soil proved to be excellent for growing cotton after the land was cleared.

Planters advanced them supplies and seed at the beginning of the season, allowed them to buy other goods on credit, and settled with them at the end of harvest for a major portion of the crop.

Historian Nicholas Lemann writes "segregation strengthened the grip of the sharecropper system by ensuring that most blacks would have no arena of opportunity in life except for the cotton fields" (p. 6).

[8] During the Reconstruction Era following the Civil War, Mississippi's blacks and poor whites both benefited from the State's new constitution of 1868, which adopted universal suffrage; repealed property qualifications for suffrage or for office; provided for the state's first public school system; forbade race distinctions in the possession and inheritance of property; and prohibited limiting civil rights in travel.

[citation needed] A freedman named Bill Peace, who had served in the Union Army and returned to Clarksdale after the war, persuaded his former owner to allow him to form a security force to prevent theft from the plantation.

[8] African Americans composed most of the farm labor in the county into the 1940s, when increasing mechanization reduced the need for field workers.

Thousands of blacks left Mississippi in the Great Migration to Chicago, St. Louis, and later, West Coast cities to work in the defense industry.

[citation needed] In the early 20th century, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe began to settle in Mississippi, often working as merchants.

The Illinois Central Railroad operated a large depot in Clarksdale and provided a Chicago-bound route for those seeking greater economic opportunities in the north; it soon became the primary departure point for many.

)[10] Second, many African-American GIs (soldiers) returned from World War II to find slim opportunities for employment in the Delta region.

Finally, there appeared an accelerated climate of racial hatred, as evidenced by the violence against such figures as NAACP representative Aaron Henry.

[11] The History Channel later produced a documentary based on the book, narrated by actor Morgan Freeman, who is also a co-owner of Ground Zero Blues Club.

The starting point for a civil rights movement in Clarksdale was the rape at gunpoint of two African-American women, Leola Tates and Erline Mills, in August 1951.

[12] The two white teenagers they said assaulted them, who admitted the event but said it was consensual, were arrested, but "despite the overwhelming evidence against them, the justice of peace court judge freed the accused perpetrators".

[13]: 41  On May 29, 1958, Martin Luther King Jr. visited Clarksdale for the first major meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

In 1960, Aaron Henry, a local pharmacist, was named state president of the NAACP, and went on to organize a two-year-long boycott of Clarksdale businesses.

In 1962, King again visited Clarksdale on the first stop on a region-wide tour, where he urged a crowd of 1,000 to "stand in, sit in, and walk by the thousands".

The Mississippi Blues Trail places interpretative markers for historic sites such as Clarksdale's Riverside Hotel, where Bessie Smith died following an auto accident on Highway 61.

With the help of local businessman Jon Levingston, as well as the Delta Council, Henderson received a US$1.279 million grant from the federal government to restore the passenger depot.

These redevelopment funds were then transferred on the advice of Clarksdale's City attorney, Hunter Twiford, to Coahoma County, in order to establish a tourism locale termed "Blues Alley", after a phrase coined by then Mayor, Henry Espy.

In late 1979, Carnegie Public Library Director Sid Graves began a nascent display series which later became the nucleus of the Delta Blues Museum.

In an interim move from the renovated Library building, the Museum spent most of 1996 in a converted retail storefront on Delta Avenue under the direction of a politically connected Wisconsin native, the late Ron Gorsegner.

In 1997–1998, Coahoma County finally provided funds to form a separate Museum Board of Directors composed mainly of socially prominent, local white blues fans; and to renovate the adjoining Illinois Central Railroad freight depot, providing a permanent home for the Delta Blues Museum.