[4] Greenwood, Mississippi, is a town of slightly over 15,000 residents located on the banks of the Yazoo River about 130 miles (210 km) south of Memphis, Tennessee, and about 95 miles (153 km) north of Jackson, Mississippi.

The city and county are named after Greenwood Leflore, the designated leader of the Choctaw nation who ceded Mississippi land under pressure of the 1830 Indian Removal Act to the United States government in exchange for a land allotment in today's state of Oklahoma.

Greenwood was the original home of the White Citizen's Council, a white supremacist organization established in the summer of 1954 in response to a national trend towards racial integration and civil rights for African-Americans which culminated in the landmark 1955 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education.

According to U.S. News & World Report, for the 2009–10 school year Greenwood High School's student body of 719 students was 98 percent of African-American ethnicity and about 1 percent White American.

[10] Around 1988 Greenwood High School was almost split evenly between black and white students.