Editor's note: Lynn Wheeler, president of Wheeler Communication Group, LLC, and former Charlotte mayor pro tem, is on a weeklong civil rights tour led by Julian Bond.

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Day 4:

How do I begin? Today was so rich with different experiences that I am almost out of breath.

The Civil Rights tour bus left early from Little Rock headed down through the Mississippi Delta to Clarksdale, which is considered the birthplace of blues.

Tennessee Williams wrote that the Mississippi Delta was “the most fertile land this side of the Nile.” Because of the rich earth, cotton and soybeans covered the landscape like a multi-textured quilt, and before the advent of the cotton gin, black laborers were needed in plentiful supply to pick the cotton.

As they picked, they sang, and the Delta gave rise to a style of blues that is considered to be more deeply rooted in the African American experience than any other blues forms. In 1903, W.C. Handy heard at a bus station in Clarksdale “the weirdest music” he had ever heard. The slide guitar brought to America from Africa created a new music form and sound.

Robert Johnson (1911-1938) was one of the most famous of the Delta blues musicians. His music influenced the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton, who has called him the most important blues singer who ever lived.

One of the most interesting stories about Johnson is a famous folklore that has him visiting the Crossroads in Clarksdale (the intersection of 49 and 61) purportedly selling his soul to the devil.

What did he purportedly get in return? The ability to create the music that would make him famous.

There has been much speculation about where Johnson’s body was buried, and to date, there are three possible sites. We visited one of them.

Other renowned musicians from Clarksdale include Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Charlie Patton and Pinetop Perkins. Ike Turner was a DJ in Clarksdale, and Sam Cooke was a native.

We had lunch at Morgan Freeman’s Delta Blues club in Clarksdale and visited the B.B. King Museum in Indianola.

The most moving and emotional experience for me was seeing Bryant Grocery, a dilapidated store in Money, Miss. In 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till was tortured and murdered, reportedly for whistling at Carolyn Bryant, a white woman who owned the store.

Till was kidnapped by Bryant’s husband and another man from his uncle’s house at 2 a.m. and shot in the face at close range. They tied a fan from a cotton gin around his neck with barbed wire and dumped his body into the Tallahatchie River.

At his funeral in Chicago, his mother insisted on an open casket so that everyone could see her son’s ravaged body. National news photos shocked the nation and helped spark the Civil Rights Movement.

To stand at the site where the Emmett Till incident began and to imagine what happened to this innocent young boy brought tears to my eyes and filled my heart with pain and rage.

The South in the 1950’s and 60’s was a terrible, hateful, bigoted place. It is astounding to think that racial violence was so rampant.

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Tomorrow: Julian Bond gives a lecture on slavery, and we traverse to Natchez and then down to New Orleans for a guided tour of the destruction left by Hurricane Katrina.

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