Miles traveled as of Day Nine: 4206
I woke up a bit later than I intended on Monday, July 5, quickly took a shower and packed up for check-out. I actually ended up hanging out in the lobby for a bit while I worked on blog posts and also looked up some sites for Day Nine and Day Ten. I was really looking forward to exploring a lot of the civil rights history in the South and there were a ton of places to pick between.
My first stop on Monday, though, was lunch at Gus's World Famous Fried Chicken as recommended by Jenn Chou. I had tried to go on the 4th, but it was closed. Luckily it was open on Monday for lunch. OH MY GOD!! It was so incredibly good. The fried part was tender and tasty and crunchy, but not too crunchy. And the chicken was tender and moist and oh so good. I NEVER buy t-shirts from restaurants, but I bought one here because it was so good.
From there, I went to the National Civil Rights Museum which was just a few blocks from Gus's. The museum is located at the motel where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. I'll talk a little bit more about the experience in a later post, but the whole thing was incredibly inspiring and moving. I had intended to spend maybe an hour there and ended up there for almost three hours and I could have spent at least another hour or two there. The following picture is of where Dr. King was shot.
\From there, I drove to Jackson, MS and decided to stay off of the Interstate (55) and took a much smaller (and slower) road - state highway 51. In 80 miles of driving on the road, I passed about 60 churches and one tank (see below). I was a little sad that the tank was not outside a church, but only because I wanted to have an excuse to have a tank outside of a Jewish synagogue just to see what the difference in reaction would be. I also realized that it would take me another 6 hours to get to Jackson and since I had already been driving for two hours and it was 6pm, I switched to I-55 which got me into Jackson right at 9pm.
As I mentioned earlier, Shing directed me to a Chinese restaurant in Jackson. I should probably give some of the back story as to why I wanted to go to a Chinese restaurant in Jackson. Why there? Why now?
As part of my master's program in Sociology, I took an Asian American studies class and one of the books I read was called The Mississippi Chinese and had a lot to do with Chinese immigrants who settled in Mississippi. This population found themselves caught in-between the White and Black communities in what was termed a Middleman Minority much like Jewish populations had been in other parts of the world. As the middleman minority, the Mississippi Chinese often owned grocery stores and other businesses that would bridge the gap between Whites and Blacks. What was interesting is that Whites would categorize the Chinese as Blacks and Blacks held a great deal of resentment toward the Chinese because they enjoyed privileges from the Whites that they could not get.
Anyway, the long and the short was that I figured that I'd have as good a chance as any to get decent Chinese food. The Yelp search on Chinese restaurants in Jackson, MS yielded the following search results. I ate at Five Happiness Chinese Restaurant because it wasn't serving Korean BBQ or submarine sandwiches. Just take a look at the reviews and search results and maybe your soul will cry a little bit, too.
After dinner, I made the drive down to Hattiesburg, so that I could start my journey from there on Day Ten!
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