Mound Bayou, MS

Mound Bayou is a Bolivar County city in the Mississippi Delta, where the 2020 census counted 1,534 residents. Isaiah T. Montgomery, Joshua P. T. Montgomery, and Benjamin T. Green founded the community in 1887 as an independent Black town after the Civil War. It grew near the Louisville, New Orleans and Texas Railroad, about seven miles west of the Sunflower River and fifteen miles east of the Mississippi.

The founders imagined a place where Black residents could own land, govern their town, build businesses, and educate their children. Mound Bayou became a major center of Black enterprise and civic leadership in the Delta, with Isaiah Montgomery serving as its first mayor. U.S. Routes 61 and 278 now bypass the city, while the Mound Bayou Historic District and Isaiah Montgomery House keep its founding era visible. The city’s name, drawn from the nearby bayou and old Chickasaw mounds, ties a powerful story of self-government to the flat agricultural country around it.