What Is The Delta Center for Culture and Learning?
Learn About Our Work!
Click on a Delta Center program below to learn more:
International Delta Blues Project
Most Southern Place on Earth Workshop
Mississippi Delta National Heritage Area
The Delta Center for Culture and Learning at Delta State University promotes greater understanding of Mississippi Delta culture and history and its significance to the world through education, partnerships, and community engagement. The Delta Center manages various educational cultural heritage development projects including the International Delta Blues Project, the National Endowment for the Humanities Most Southern Place on Earth workshops, and the Mississippi Delta National Heritage Area, a partnership with the National Park Service.
How The Delta Center for Culture & Learning Showcases Its Impact
Published by National Humanities Alliance
“The Delta Center for Culture & Learning at Delta State University plays a critical role in bringing the history and culture of the Mississippi Delta to the public. In addition to hosting an annual NEH Landmarks Workshop for School Teachers, “The Most Southern Place on Earth,” the center runs the International Delta Blues Project and manages the Mississippi Delta National Heritage Area (MDNHA). NHA recently completed a survey of the Delta Center’s Landmarks Workshop that explores the program’s long lasting impact on participants. Through qualitative and quantitative data, the results demonstrate that the program rejuvenates teachers, helps them incorporate creative and engaging pedagogies into their classrooms, and encourages continued professional development and strong professional networks….” Read More Here
MDNHA banners at Visit Mississippi Welcome Center in Greenville, Washington County
International Delta Blues Project at GRAMMY Museum Mississippi
Most Southern Place on Earth Conference, 2018
International Delta Blues Project
The Delta Center for Culture and Learning promotes the Mississippi Delta Blues on the national and international stage through key strategic institutional partnerships and by celebrating and promoting Mississippi Delta blues musicians.
Since it’s founding, the Blues has been a key part of the Delta Center’s mission. From the International Conference on the Blues, to the National Park Service supported Spirit of the Blues Project, from the Chicago Blues Festival to the Mississippi Delta Blues Festival: Brazil, the Delta Center has been at the forefront of innovative methods for celebrating, perpetuating, and supporting the Mississippi Delta Blues.
Read more about our recent work below.
Delta Delegation honors B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center
The Delta Delegation to Brazil recently traveled to Caxias do Sul, Brazil to promote Mississippi Delta cultural heritage at the 14th annual Mississippi Delta Blues Festival (MDBF) Brazil, dubbed the B.B. King Museum Edition.
The B.B. King Museum Edition featured performances from music scholar and B.B. King Museum board member Alphonso Sanders accompanied by the B.B. King Museum Legacy Band. Claudette King, musician and youngest daughter of the late B.B. King also performed several sets at the festival. Hosted at Caxias do Sul’s Parque da Festa da Uva, stages and musical spaces were named to honor the legacy of King and the cultural heritage of Indianola, where the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center is housed.
Delta Center partners in Chicago Blues Festival Visit MS Tourism Co-op
In June 2023, the Delta Center sent ambassadors to the 2023 Chicago Blues Festival to serve in the Visit Mississippi tent as cultural ambassadors and distribute promotional materials about the Mississippi Delta to blues fans. 2023 marks the 4th time the Delta Center has coordinated for ambassadors to work with this Visit Mississippi partnership.
Delta Delegation 2022 Travels to Brazil for Mississippi Delta Blues Festival — Clarksdale Edition
In November 2022, the Delta Delegation traveling to Brazil to meet with UCS faculty and cultural program leaders and to participate in the 13th annual MDBF, dubbed the “Clarksdale Edition,” in tribute to the Mississippi Delta town’s central place in the history and contemporary landscape of the blues.
Festival goers could watch Clarksdale musicians Lee Williams and Jaxx Nassar play on the Ground Zero Stage, spend some time listening to Hambone Gallery owner Stan Street at the Red’s Juke Joint Stage, then walk a short way and be standing in front of the New Roxy Stage where 2022 Indianola Blues Challenge winner DK Harrell and music scholar/B.B. King Museum board member Alphonso Sanders weaved saxophone and guitar together, bringing the spirit of the Mississippi Delta alive for a crowd 5,000 miles from the nearest Delta crossroad.
Most Southern Place on Earth Workshop
The Most Southern Place on Earth Workshop is a Landmarks of American History and Culture Workshop that provides K-12 educators with the opportunity to engage in intensive study and discussion of the Mississippi Delta’s history and culture. Over 11 years, nearly 800 teachers have traveled to the Mississippi Delta to experience the Delta’s unique cultural heritage. The National Endowment for the Humanities has invested more than $2 million dollars in cultural heritage storytellers, educators, and institutions in the Mississippi Delta through the Most Southern Place on Earth workshop.
In a survey of 137 Most Southern workshop alumni, the National Humanities Alliance found:
100 percent said the workshop helped them grow as an educator, with 43 percent specifying “transformative growth” and 51 percent selecting “significant growth.”
100 percent rated Most Southern superior to other professional development opportunities, 62 percent of whom called it “vastly superior.”
92 percent were “extremely satisfied” with the return on their invested time and energy. The remaining 8 percent were “satisfied.”
Delta Center Produces 11th Year of most southern place on earth workshops
In the summer of 2023, the Delta Center produced the 11th year of the nationally acclaimed Most Southern Place on Earth workshop for K-12 educators. Across one week in June and another in July, over 70 K-12 educators from throughout the U.S. participated in these immersive, Mississippi Delta-based experiential learning workshops.
NEH Most Southern Portfolios produced by Duke/UNC Robertson Scholars
Robertson Scholars serve as essential members of the NEH Most Southern team and the Delta Center has hosted Robertson “Community Summer” interns since 2006.
With mentorship from Vanessa Charlot, Assistant Professor of Creative Multimedia at the University of Mississippi, Robertson Scholars and Delta Center summer interns Emily Chen, Jothi Gupta, and Mercy Jones produced short videos and a supplementary portfolio to document and contextualize the summer 2023 NEH Most Southern Place on Earth workshop.
NEH for All: The Most Southern Place on Earth: Teacher Workshops in the Mississippi Delta
National Endowment for the Humanities wrote about Most Southern, and how it exemplifies good work at the intersections of education, history, and culture. “When they return to their classrooms around the country, the teachers bring not only a new appreciation for the Mississippi Delta’s role in our national history and culture, but also new methods—focused on food, music, and landscapes—by which to teach regional history to their students.”
Mississippi Delta national heritage area
The Mississippi Delta National Heritage Area (MS Delta NHA) is housed in the Delta Center for Culture and Learning. Its mission is to preserve, perpetuate, and celebrate the Mississippi Delta’s rich and complex heritage by fostering a climate of collaboration that supports Delta communities and their economies. Since it was congressionally designated in 2009, MS Delta NHA has fulfilled its mission and Management Plan through community programs and strategic partnerships like:
The Civil Rights Heritage Archive and African American Civil Rights Network Designation (2021)
The Alliance of National Heritage Areas Spring Meeting (2022)
Read more about our recent work below.
MS Delta CIvil Rights Heritage Tourism Summit Attracts regional and national stakeholders
In September 2023, the MS Delta NHA partnered with six other organizations to host the Mississippi Delta region’s first-ever Civil Rights Heritage Tourism Summit at the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center in Indianola. The day-long summit featured a variety of panel discussions and presentations on different subjects relating to Civil Rights heritage tourism development in the Mississippi Delta.
Mississippi Delta NHA Announces 2023-24 Award recipients
In the eighth year of its grants program, the Mississippi Delta National Heritage Area has awarded $147,944.23 to eight cultural heritage development projects in the Mississippi Delta. This is the second year for the Grants Leadership Academy format.
This year’s grant projects include educational opportunities for MS Delta youth in Cleveland and Indianola, an artist residency in Belzoni, and celebration of the 45th anniversary of the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, among other projects.
MS Delta NHA Partners with MS Alliance of Nonprofits and Philanthropy on Grant Writing Workshops
At the end of March 2023, the Mississippi Delta National Heritage Area (MS Delta NHA) partnered with the Mississippi Alliance of Nonprofits and Philanthropy (The Alliance) to offer a one-and-a-half-day grant writing workshop on the campus of Delta State University for a class of nearly thirty participants.
Robertson Scholars, MS Delta NHA Civil Rights Heritage Archive Featured by NBCU
Jenna Smith and Vishal Jammulapati spent the summer of 2022 driving around the Mississippi Delta, interviewing community servant leaders about the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement in the Mississippi Delta. Smith and Jammulapati were working as Community Summer interns at the Delta Center for Culture and Learning as part of the Robertson Scholars Leadership Program at Duke University and University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.
Landmark Legislation to Ensure Long-Term Stability for America’s National Heritage Areas Now Law
In December 2022, President Biden signed the National Heritage Area Act (S. 1942). On December 22, 2022, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved the legislation by a bi-partisan vote of 326-95, after the Senate passed the legislation without opposition two days earlier. It was one of the last bills passed in the 117th Congress.
The National Heritage Area Act creates standard criteria for the funding, management, and designation of National Heritage Areas across the country and provides them an annual authorization of up to $1 million per year for the next 15 years.
