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Clarksdale, Mississippi

Clarksdale, the Coahoma County seat in the Mississippi Delta, is about 81 percent Black — a city of some 12,000 Black residents at the crossroads of the Delta blues.

Clarksdale is a city of about 14,900 people, the seat of Coahoma County in the heart of the Mississippi Delta — and about 81 percent of its residents are Black. The Delta is the most heavily Black agricultural region in the United States, and Clarksdale is one of its principal cities: a cotton-trading town whose Black population descends from the plantation labor force of the richest cotton land in America, and whose musical inheritance — the Delta blues — was carried from its streets to the world. The census profile is of a small, intensely Black Delta city working with one of the region's thin economic bases. This article sets out Clarksdale's Black population in the data.

Civic Snapshot

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census Demographic Profile (DP1) and ACS 2019–2023 5-year estimates for Clarksdale city, Mississippi

The Record

The 2020 census counted roughly 12,000 Black residents in Clarksdale, a share of about 81 percent, within a Coahoma County that is itself about three-quarters Black. The city's population has fallen by nearly half from its cotton-era peak — mechanization emptied the plantations of labor and generations of Delta families left for Memphis, Chicago, and the industrial North — yet the Black share has stayed at its high level or risen, because out-migration drew from the whole population while the community that remained was the Black community that had always formed the Delta's large majority. Clarksdale's Black population is also exceptionally rooted: the surnames of its neighborhoods run back through the sharecropping era to the plantations of Coahoma County, and its civic life is carried by institutions — churches, schools, family networks — with continuous local histories of a century or more.

Clarksdale's Black history is the Delta's history in miniature. The city grew as a trading point for the plantations of the Yazoo-Mississippi floodplain, where enslaved and then sharecropping Black labor produced cotton on some of the most productive soil on earth. The Illinois Central railroad's station in Clarksdale — the depot where Muddy Waters boarded the train for Chicago in 1943 — made the city a departure gate of the Great Migration, and the music its people made became the Delta blues: Robert Johnson's legend settled at the crossroads of Highways 61 and 49 just outside the city, and Clarksdale's own sons and daughters, from Sam Cooke to Ike Turner, carried the sound outward. Today the Delta Blues Museum and the city's juke joints and festivals draw visitors from every continent to a city of fewer than 15,000 — a heritage economy built directly on the culture of its Black population. Coahoma Community College, a historically Black institution just north of the city, anchors its higher education.

Institutions

Black Clarksdale, Mississippi's congregations, schools, businesses, and civic organizations belong to the Mississippi story this gazetteer tells place by place. This page holds the frame for Clarksdale, Mississippi: the count, the share, and the record, each on its cited source.