There's not much traffic on Washington Avenue in downtown Greenville, Miss., on this early August afternoon. I park along the 400 block and have no problem crossing a wide street that would have been filled with cars 50 years ago. My destination is Benjy Nelken's Greenville History Museum. The door is locked, but the pipe-smoking Nelken answers quickly when I call the phone number posted outside. He comes out of his office, unlocks the door and welcomes me to Greenville.
This town of about 30,000 residents, which was once referred to as the Queen City of the Delta, isn't part of Arkansas. But it might as well be. For decades, those in the southeast corner of Arkansas watched Greenville television stations, read the Greenville newspaper and gravitated toward the city on the east side of the Mississippi River. It was their place to shop, eat out and go to the doctor.
Greenville was known as a highly civilized spot during the heyday of the Delta, a town that sprouted writers as easily as the soil on nearby plantations sprouted cotton. Shelby Foote, the historian made famous by documentarian Ken Burns on his PBS series about the Civil War, was raised at Greenville. Foote once said that Greenville "boasts more published writers per capita" than any town in the country. Poet and biographer William Alexander Percy came from here. So did novelists Walker Percy, Ellen Douglas and Beverly Lowry. Hodding Carter, the publisher of Greenville's Delta Democrat-Times, won a Pulitzer Prize. Author Ben Wasson served as William Faulkner's literary agent. Bern Keating wrote two dozen books and hundreds of magazine articles through the decades. The William Alexander Percy Library downtown features a writers' exhibit on its second floor that's open to the public.
Greenville's David Cohn wrote the famous line that "the Mississippi Delta begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg." Cohn attended college at the University of Virginia and then received a law degree from Yale. He became friends with Carter and William Alexander Percy and wrote speeches for prominent Democratic politicians ranging from Arkansas' J. William Fulbright to Adlai Stevenson. Cohn was part of an amazing collection of Jewish families in Greenville. He was the son of a Polish-born immigrant who had moved to the Delta in the 1880s to become a dry-goods merchant.
Nelken, who helped put together the Century of History exhibit at downtown Greenville's Hebrew Union Temple, hails from one of those successful Jewish families. He received a football scholarship to the University of Mississippi in 1963 to play for Johnny Vaught's Rebels. His family operated a downtown store known as The Fair for nine decades. As the population declined in the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta, Nelken closed the store in 1986 and changed his occupation from retail to real estate. Because his family had saved Greenville memorabilia through the years, he decorated his real estate office with those items. In 2003, the historic Miller Building at 409 Washington Ave. went into foreclosure, and Nelken purchased it. He transformed it into the Greenville History Museum, and other Greenville families began to donate items.
During the violent civil rights era, Greenville was often an oasis in the Delta. The Encyclopedia of Southern Jewish Communities notes that "towns such as Greenwood and Cleveland became synonymous with violence and brutality during the struggle for civil rights. While racial tensions did exist in Greenville, it avoided this fate. ... In the late 1960s, when other school districts in the Deep South were under federal desegregation orders, Greenville voluntarily integrated with an absence of the violence seen elsewhere. In some cases, Jews were able to serve as intermediaries during the struggle for civil rights and sometimes played a quiet role in accommodating social change. When local newspaper editor Hodding Carter angered Greenville segregationists with his cautious support for racial justice, Jewish businessmen, including Jake Stein, continued to advertise in the paper despite others' calls for a boycott. Joe Weinberg loaned Carter the money to buy out his partner in the paper, freeing him to express his own editorial opinions and challenge the status quo."
I'm here on this day not only because I'm fascinated with Delta history but also because there's a movement to bring downtown Greenville back to life. It could provide important lessons for those trying to accomplish downtown revitalization in Arkansas Delta cities such as Blytheville, Helena and Pine Bluff.
In the 1990 census, Greenville had a population of 45,226. It was down to 34,400 by the 2010 census and has continued to fall since that time. The aforementioned cities in the Arkansas Delta have suffered a similar fate. Greenville residents are basing part of their hope on the $40 million the federal government will spend on a 62,000-square-foot federal courthouse. Construction will begin in the spring of 2019 and conclude in the fall of 2021.
Greenville business leaders aren't waiting for completion of the courthouse to make investments, though. Dinner is at the Downtown Grille, an upscale restaurant in the former Sears building on Washington Avenue that now also houses the Lofts at 517 and the Mighty Miss Brewing Co., a microbrewery. Those businesses are part of a $9.1 million redevelopment project by Bill Boykin. Once again, people have a reason to come to downtown Greenville.
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Senior Editor Rex Nelson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He's also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.
Editorial on 08/11/2018