Guynes Street and the Elraine Subdivision: A 1950s Black Neighborhood in Jackson

In Jackson, Mississippi, as across the South, African Americans were long confined to less desirable neighborhoods. After the Civil War, freed Black families moved to cities for work but were kept to certain areas; after World War II, as white families moved to new suburban subdivisions, Black home buyers were shut out. Yet with their incomes rising, many wanted new homes with modern amenities. In 1955 two Black entrepreneurs, Winston J. Thompson and Leroy Burnett, set out to build them: the Elraine subdivision, where Medgar and Myrlie Evers would make their home.

Built by Black developers

• 1955: Thompson bought the land, parceled earlier but never cleared. He and Burnett, a fellow Mississippian, both veterans, went into partnership, financed by the Veterans Administration.
• 1955–1957: they finished thirty-six similar homes with similar floor plans, mostly in the Ranch style, advertised in the Jackson Advocate, the city's African American newspaper.
• Thompson's firm was the largest African American real estate business in Mississippi. From 1952 to 1956 he was credited with building more than 250 homes for Black families in Jackson, Meridian, Greenwood and Forest, and his was the first Black-owned business authorized to originate and service FHA and GI loans.

The author and educator Margaret Walker Alexander bought the first home, in 1955, for about $9,500. Buyers, she recalled, needed an income of $5,000 to qualify; many were teachers and other white-collar workers.

What they offered: three bedrooms, a large bath, central heat, an attached storage room and a landscaped lawn. According to original resident Grace Sweet, the Black community welcomed them as the first complete street of homes of that quality built in Jackson for African Americans, and they sold quickly. Guynes Street was later renamed Margaret W. Alexander Drive.

On the color line

Elraine lay right beside white neighborhoods. Grace Sweet recalled that a mainly Black neighborhood there was not welcomed, though there are no contemporary reports of violence or legal efforts to stop it.

• Segregation shaped daily life. Myrlie Evers-Williams later described, in her autobiography, the unwritten rule that the children did not play with the white children a block away — not for lack of wanting to, but because in Jackson a childish scuffle could be blown up into a race war.
• Elraine's residents were better off than nearby Black neighbors, and its houses were larger than the small tract houses of the adjoining working-class white streets. That adjacency probably explains how a middle-class Black neighborhood gained a foothold in northwest Jackson, while middle- and upper-class white neighborhoods grew up in the northeast and south of the city.

Neighbors

Residents remember a close-knit community — neighborhood and family celebrations, a garden club, a Christmas pageant.

Before the Everses moved in, they heard that some neighbors feared violence would follow them. Those fears eased. Alexander remembered the families' children playing together, carpooling, visiting, and Medgar Evers as a friendly neighbor who talked with people over the fence. Grace Sweet recalled his kindness: on cold nights he would get up at midnight and crawl under neighbors' houses to light their heater pilot lights.

When a sniper shot Medgar Evers in his driveway, it was neighbors who came to help him and took him to the hospital. The assassination affected the neighborhood profoundly.

A historic district

In 1994 Mississippi designated the Elraine subdivision the Medgar Evers Neighborhood Historic District — the first neighborhood historic district in Jackson. Its 44 buildings are mostly 1950s Ranch-style houses like the Everses', most still true to their design (new windows and enclosed carports are the usual changes). The neighborhood is still lived in and still predominantly Black. Visitors to the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument are asked to respect residents' privacy — no parking in driveways or yards.

Sources

Based on "Life on Guynes Street," Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument, National Park Service, and the park's page Elraine Subdivision, adapted from the National Register nomination for the Medgar Evers Historic District; rewritten in hubnx's own words. The residents' recollections and Myrlie Evers-Williams's autobiography are paraphrased. The activity's trivia questions are left out.