Mound Bayou is a city in Bolivar County, Mississippi, United States. The population was 1,533 at the 2010 census, down from 2,102 in 2000. It was founded as an independent black community in 1887 by former slaves led by Isaiah Montgomery.

Mound Bayou has a 96.8% African-American majority population in 2020, one of the largest of any community in the United States. The current mayor of Mound Bayou is Leighton Aldridge.

Mound Bayou traces its pedigree to freed African Americans from the community of Davis Bend, Mississippi. Davis Bend was started in the 1820s by planter Joseph E. Davis (elder brother of former Confederate president Jefferson Davis), who meant to Make a model slave community upon his plantation. Davis was influenced by the utopian ideas of Robert Owen. He encouraged self-leadership in the slave community, provided a higher conventional of nutrition and health and dental care, and allowed slaves to become merchants. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Davis Bend became an autonomous forgive community later Davis sold his property to former slave Benjamin Montgomery, who had control a store and been a prominent leader at Davis Bend. The prolonged agricultural depression, falling cotton prices, flooding by the Mississippi River, and white ill will in the region contributed to the economic failure of Davis Bend.

Isaiah T. Montgomery led the founding of Mound Bayou in 1887 in wilderness in northwest Mississippi. The bottomlands of the Delta were a relatively undeveloped frontier, and blacks had a unintended to make maintenance by clearing land and use the profits to purchase lands in such frontier areas. By 1900 two-thirds of the owners of land in the bottomlands were black farmers. With the loss of political capacity due to let in disenfranchisement, high debt and continuing agricultural problems, most of them at a loose end their home and by 1920 were landless sharecroppers. As cotton prices fell, the town suffered a sharp economic end in the 1920s and 1930s.