TOC

Adams County

Bordering the Mississippi River in the southwestern part of the state, Adams County, the first county organized in the Mississippi Territory, has played a crucial role for three centuries. From its importance in Native American history and its role as Fort Rosalie in the colonial period to its prominence as a center of Mississippi economic and political life in the early 1800s, from Natchez as an urban center in the middle of cotton wealth to cultural tourism in the mid-twentieth century and a major civil rights boycott in the 1960s, the region has been central to Mississippi’s history and identity.

An ancient home of mound-building people, the area that became Adams County was by the early 1700s home to a confederation of Indian groups that included the Natchez. Beginning in 1716, when French colonists established the Natchez District and built Fort Rosalie as a central governmental and military post, the Natchez and French came into contact and then conflict. French leaders first brought African slaves to the area in the 1720s. French economic interests included trading with the Natchez for deerskins and trying to grow tobacco, both for sale to European markets. In 1729 the Natchez attacked Fort Rosalie, killing more than 200 of the fort’s 750 residents and undermining some of the French interest in the area. War between the French (and their Choctaw allies) and the Natchez from 1729 to 1733 led to the enslaving of a number of the Natchez. Beginning in the 1730s, the Natchez began to break up into different groups, with some of them leaving the area and some forming alliances with the English.

The successive European claims to the Mississippi River Valley meant that Natchez had multiple influences and complex demography from early in its history. The French and Africans and various Native American groups had a presence in the county in the 1730s, followed by English and then Spanish colonists. The Spanish period from the 1760s to the 1790s left a major mark on Adams County. Spanish governor Manuel Gayoso de Lemos had authority in Natchez territory from 1789 to 1798, when the region came under US control. Gayoso encouraged agricultural experimentation, planned a set of avenues for the city of Natchez, and welcomed many of the groups that gave Natchez its distinctive character.

Cotton, slavery, and trade on the Mississippi River revolutionized life in the early national period. Tobacco and especially cattle were key to the area’s economy in the late 1700s, and population increased dramatically after farmers in the Natchez area first grew cotton successfully in the 1790s. Natchez developed one of Mississippi’s first slave markets at the Forks of the Road, and it often held several hundred slaves at a time.

In the late colonial and early national periods, Natchez was Mississippi’s center for government, education, science, and religion, as well as for slave trading and the wealth generated by plantation agriculture and commerce. Founded in 1799 in the Mississippi Territory, Adams County was named for the nation’s second president. From the first territorial census in 1792 through 1840, Adams County had the highest population in Mississippi, with slaves accounting for between 42 and 52 percent of residents. As a meeting place, Adams County became crucial to movement on the Mississippi River and as the end point of the Natchez Trace. The area called Natchez Under-the-Hill became a temporary home for many steamboat workers, travelers, and gamblers.

The Natchez District was home to Mississippi’s first territorial government, and many the members of Mississippi’s political elite resided in the area. George Poindexter moved to Adams County in 1802 and became territorial attorney general in 1803, representative to the General Assembly in 1806, and the state’s second governor in 1820. William Bayard Shields arrived in Adams County in 1803 and served in a series of positions dealing with land, banking, and the law, becoming the state’s first chief justice in 1817. Conflict between Natchez elites and other Mississippi voters and political voices began in the 1790s and continued through the movement of the capital to Jackson in 1820.

With the French and then the Spanish presence, Natchez in the 1700s was the home of Mississippi’s first small group of Catholic settlers. All of the Protestant groups that ultimately grew to dominate much of Mississippi church life set up establishments in early Adams County. Baptists came to the area in 1799, and Tobias Gibson formed the first Methodist church in Washington in 1799. In 1807 James Smylie helped start the first Presbyterian group in Mississippi outside Washington. In addition, Jewish services were held in Natchez beginning around 1800.

From 1800 to 1820 Adams County’s population grew from 4,660 to 12,076, with its slave population far outnumbering whites or free blacks. In 1820 the county’s population consisted of 4,005 whites, 118 free blacks, and 7,953 slaves. With the growing cosmopolitan center of Natchez and the remarkably profitable large cotton plantations surrounding it, Adams County possessed a unique combination of urbanity and large-scale plantation slavery. For example, Adams County had far more people employed in manufacturing and commerce than any other county, and most of Mississippi’s planters who owned more than 250 slaves lived in Natchez. Adams County was one of the nation’s wealthiest areas and various commercial enterprises were established as a result. Publisher Andrew Marschalk, sometimes called the Father of Mississippi Journalism, started several newspapers in the area, including the Mississippi Gazette, which he founded in Natchez in 1802. The state’s first bank, the Bank of Mississippi, opened in Natchez in 1809, and Mississippi’s first academy, the Ker School, opened in Natchez in 1801. The territory’s first college, Jefferson College, opened in Washington in 1802, and Elizabeth Female Academy opened there in 1818.

Architecture marked and continues to distinguish Natchez. The combination of wealth, ambition, cosmopolitan tastes, and skilled craftspeople shows in numerous homes built in the early and mid-1800s, many of them large brick buildings with distinctive names. The styles shifted from Federal to Greek Revival to Italianate, often with unique artistic touches.

In the 1830s and 1840s Adams County’s importance within the state had begun to wane a bit, but it remained the county with the most residents, including the most slaves. In 1840 the county had 4,910 free whites, 283 free blacks, and 14,241 slaves. The most famous free African American in the county was William Johnson, known as the Barber of Natchez, who owned multiple businesses and left a diary detailing life in the city. Adams County trailed only Warren County in number of commercial and manufacturing workers in the state. A sprawling sawmill operation owned by Andrew Brown was one of the largest businesses in Mississippi, which helped rank Adams County among the leaders in the lumber industry.

On the eve of the Civil War, Adams County remained home to both slave plantations and city dwellers, but while many areas of the state had seen dramatic population growth, Adams County stagnated in the prewar years. With 5,648 free whites, 225 free blacks (by far the state’s largest such population), and 14,292 slaves in 1860, the population had hardly changed since 1840. What had been the richest place in Mississippi, with the biggest houses, the wealthiest people, and the most productive cotton plantations (with the highest numbers of slaves), now ranked in the middle of the state’s counties in the value and productivity of farm property—seventh in cotton production, thirtieth in corn production, and twenty-seventh in value of livestock. Fourteen counties had larger populations.

With a population of 6,612, Natchez nevertheless remained Mississippi’s largest city in 1860. Whereas foreign-born immigrants were rare in most of Mississippi, Natchez had 767 foreign-born men and 475 women, the state’s largest immigrant population. Many of the foreign-born were Irish workers.

Adams County stood as a striking exception to the Methodist and Baptist domination of the state’s religion. In 1860 census takers counted just six churches in Adams—two Presbyterian churches, one Episcopal, one Baptist, one Methodist, and one Catholic. However, these churches were larger than most of the state’s other congregations.

Among the many notable individuals in antebellum Natchez were Varina Howell, who married Jefferson Davis in 1845 and eventually became the only First Lady of the Confederate States of America, and Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, who was born a slave and became a popular opera singer in both the United States and England. Natchez native John F. H. Claiborne was a political figure and newspaperman who became an important postbellum historian of Mississippi.

After the Civil War and emancipation, Adams County retained a large African American majority. The county was briefly a center for African American politics, with Natchez minister and educator Hiram Rhoades Revels serving briefly as Mississippi’s first African American senator in 1870–71. Revels later became the first president of Alcorn College. John Roy Lynch, who like Revels arrived in Natchez during the Civil War, became the Speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives and then a member of the US Congress from 1873 to 1877.

Although Adams County had many of the largest plantations in the antebellum period, its farming people worked on some of the smallest farms in the state after the war. Only four counties had average farm sizes smaller than Adams County’s 104 acres. The transformation of large plantations into small farms was accompanied by a dramatic increase in sharecropping. About two-thirds of the county’s farmers—the highest percentage in the state in 1880—worked for shares.

Postbellum Adams County nevertheless remained one of the state’s leading centers for manufacturing and a destination for immigrant workers. In 1880 Adams County manufacturers employed 417 workers, the second-highest number in the state, and the county’s 619 foreign-born men and women (most of them from Ireland, Germany, England, and Italy) gave it the state’s largest nonnative population.

By 1900 the average farm size in Adams County had dropped to fifty-five acres, as the increasing use of sharecropping and especially tenancy divided land into even smaller units. The county’s population of 30,111 included more than 24,000 African Americans, and only 6 percent of the African Americans who farmed were landowners. Natchez remained one of the state’s larger cities, and Adams County continued to have substantial numbers of foreign-born residents (443) and industrial workers (811).

In the early twentieth century Adams County in many ways remained unique by Mississippi standards, and religion was one of the clearest manifestations of that uniqueness. In 1916 Adams ranked very low in the number of Southern Baptists (420) but third in the number of Episcopalians (463) and fourth in the number of Catholics (2,533). African Americans comprised the majority of Adams’s churchgoers. The largest group in the county was the National Baptist Convention (3,800 members), while the African Methodist Episcopal Church had a sizable membership.

Early twentieth-century Adams County was home to a number of notable and creative individuals. Residing in Natchez were editor and Prohibition leader Harriet B. Kells, prolific adventure novelist Prentiss Ingraham, and writer Alice Walworth Graham, who set some of her romance novels on the area’s plantations.

Two of Mississippi’s most important efforts to preserve particular visions of the state’s history started in Natchez. In the 1930s Natchez women led by Katherine Grafton Miller began marketing their city as a destination for tourists who wanted to experience antebellum homes and their history. In the same decade Roane Byrnes Fleming began work that eventually led to the creation of the Natchez Trace Parkway, offering both natural beauty and historic travel.

At the time of the Great Depression, Adams County retained a largely agricultural economy, but 12,608 of its 23,564 residents lived in Natchez, making it one of only three Mississippi counties in which a majority of the population lived in urban areas. African Americans made up about two-thirds of the county’s population, while the remainder featured greater ethnic diversity than existed in much of the rest of Mississippi, with a substantial number of immigrants, especially from Italy. Businesses in Adams County employed about 800 industrial workers, many of them in sawmills and a creamery. Tenants operated 80 percent of the county’s farms, which concentrated on growing cotton.

By 1960 Adams County’s population had grown to 37,730, with whites achieving a slim majority (50.5 percent) for the first time as a consequence of African American out-migration as well as an increase in the white population. Agricultural labor had declined to one of the lowest percentages in the state, and a majority of workers were employed in manufacturing. Over the next two decades, Adams County experienced an 82 percent increase in manufacturing jobs, and it ranked seventh in the state in per capita income and second in retail sales. Adams was home to Armstrong Tire and Rubber, one of the larger factories that moved to Mississippi as part of the Balance Agriculture with Industry plan. The county also had the highest value of mineral production in the state, mostly petroleum from its thirty-four proven oil wells.

In the 1950s and 1960s Adams County played a significant role in both civil rights activism and opposition to civil rights. The county’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) demanded desegregated schools immediately after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Ten years later, shortly after local NAACP president George Metcalfe attended a Natchez school board meeting to ask for the desegregation of schools, he was injured by a car bomb, and activists in several groups, including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), responded with a long boycott of white-owned stores. The Americans for the Preservation of the White Race formed in 1963 in a gas station outside Natchez, and the city’s Ku Klux Klan was among the strongest and most active in the state, with members responsible for several murders, including that of Wharlest Jackson, a black man whose truck was bombed after he was promoted over two white men at a factory in 1967. Because of the constant threat of violence, black men in Natchez welcomed a chapter of the Deacons of Defense and Justice, a militant organization that pledged to protect the black community by using violence if necessary. SNCC, the Congress of Racial Equality, and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party did not attempt mass mobilization in Natchez until they had undertaken efforts in the rest of the state.

Like many of the state’s Mississippi River counties, Adams County’s 2010 population had decreased by about 15 percent over the previous half century, reaching 32,297, most of them African Americans. The county also featured a small but significant Latino minority, about 6.5 percent of the population. With historical attractions, pilgrimage tours, museums, and festivals, Adams County is one of Mississippi’s leaders in the arts and cultural tourism.

Adams County

Alcorn County

Located along the Tennessee border in northeastern Mississippi, Alcorn County is named for James L. Alcorn, Mississippi’s twenty-eighth governor. The county was carved out of Tishomingo County in 1870, when it was originally home to 10,431 residents, roughly 75 percent of them white. Corinth, which eventually became Alcorn’s county seat, emerged in the 1850s as an important railroad center, making it a strategic site during the Civil War.

Two major battles occurred in Corinth, the first in May 1862, after the Battle of Shiloh, and the second in the fall of that year, when fighting broke out between forces helmed by Ulysses S. Grant and those led by Earl Van Dorn. The latter battle left more than eight hundred soldiers dead and the city under Union control. Corinth was also home to a Union camp for escaped slaves and served as a major hospital center for the Confederate wounded. Corinth National Cemetery houses the remains of Civil War soldiers from fifteen states. During Reconstruction some of the earliest known Ku Klux Klan activity took place in what is now Alcorn County.

By 1880 the county’s population had increased to 14,272, with whites now comprising only 69 percent of the total. As in most of northeastern Mississippi, Alcorn County’s farms were relatively small and mostly cultivated by their owners. In 1880 Alcorn ranked high among Mississippi counties in livestock and tobacco production, while corn and wheat output remained average and cotton production low. Although Alcorn had sixty-five manufacturing firms at this time, most were fairly small, and the county’s industrial sector employed only 130 men and 9 women. Whitfield Manufacturing was Alcorn’s first textile factory.

Alcorn has a unique early history with regard to women in academia. Born in 1850 in what became Alcorn, Modena Lowrey Berry had an extraordinary career as an administrator at Tippah County’s Blue Mountain College from 1873 to 1934. Her father, educator and Confederate general Mark Perrin Lowrey, had helped establish Blue Mountain in 1873. Corona College, one of the South’s first higher education institutions open to women, opened in Corinth in 1857.

In the early twentieth century Alcorn experienced significant growth. By 1910 the county’s population had reached 18,159. Despite the predominance of small farms, Alcorn ranked among the top third of Mississippi’s counties in average farm size. Most of Alcorn’s agricultural lots were plantations that had been subdivided into farms averaging about one hundred acres each. During this era more than half of Alcorn’s white farmers could claim ownership of their land, while only a small percentage of black farmers were landholders. By 1900 Alcorn County had sixty-six manufacturing establishments, employing 455 men, 126 women, and 17 children. The 1916 religious census showed that the largest denominations in Alcorn were the Methodist Episcopal Church, South; the Southern Baptist Convention; and the Missionary Baptists. The Colored Methodist Episcopal Church and the Churches of Christ had significant congregations as well.

Corinth and its surrounding areas have been home to a number of notable individuals. Authors Thomas Hal Phillips and Etheridge Knight were born there in 1922 and 1931, respectively. Phillips set many of his novels in southern locations. The Bitterweed Path, his first book, dealt more directly with homosexuality than most fiction of the era. Knight suffused his work with African American vernacular, eventually becoming an important figure in the Black Arts movement of the 1970s. Corinth also produced two notable figures associated with aviation. Born in 1909, cartoonist Russell Keaton drew the Flyin’ Jenny comic strip from 1939 to 1945. And popular stunt pilot Roscoe Turner, for whom Alcorn’s airport is named, was born outside Corinth in 1895.

By 1930 the county’s population had grown to 23,653. While a high percentage of Alcorn’s land was still cultivated, average farm size had decreased to roughly fifty acres per lot. Corinth was a growing town of 5,500 people, and the county had more than 700 people working in industry. In 1934 Alcorn County became the home of the nation’s first rural electrical cooperative. Corinth’s Depression-era residents are reputed to have developed the “slugburger,” a five-cent hamburger made affordable through the addition of cheaper, nonmeat ingredients. Corinth now hosts the annual Slugburger Festival.

In 1960 Alcorn had a population of 25,282, 87 percent of them white. The county’s farmers continued to focus on corn, ranking seventh in the state in its production. Alcorn’s manufacturing and agricultural workforces were almost equal in size, both employing more than 2,000 people. Women working in garment factories comprised a substantial proportion of the county’s labor pool. Twenty years later, however, the county experienced a significant labor shift: by 1980 Alcorn’s industrial sector employed 6,860 people, the fourth-highest number of industrial workers in the state, while fewer than 200 people worked full time in agriculture.

Alcorn’s population increased by about 47 percent between 1960 and 2010, reaching 37,057 in that year. Like many of northeastern Mississippi’s counties, Alcorn’s population was predominantly white, with small but significant African American and Latino minorities.

Alcorn County

Allain, William A.

William Allain was born on 14 February 1928 in the Adams County community of Washington. He was educated at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Mississippi, where he earned a law degree in 1950. Allain served in the US infantry for three years during the Korean War, spending significant time in combat. He practiced law in Natchez from his discharge in 1953 until 1962, when he was appointed assistant state attorney general.

In 1983, while serving as Mississippi’s attorney general, Allain filed a suit asking the state supreme court to separate the functions of the executive and legislative branches of state government, especially in the budgetary process. Members of the legislature commonly served on boards, commissions, and agencies in the executive branch, but Allain asserted that Mississippi’s 1890 constitution required a separation of powers and that legislative officials could not serve in the executive branch. The Mississippi Supreme Court ruled in favor of the attorney general and ordered the two branches to remain separate. That ruling strengthened the executive branch of state government, especially the office of governor, which is considered one of the weakest chief executives in the nation. The court’s mandate was carried out in the Administrative Reorganization Act of 1984.

From 1962 to 1975 Allain represented the State of Mississippi in cases before state courts, the federal district court, the federal circuit court of appeals, and the US Supreme Court. In 1979 he was elected state attorney general, a post in which he built a strong reputation as a consumer advocate. Two of his most notable achievements were the prevention of a utility rate increase and the exclusion of Mississippi as a nuclear waste site. In his successful 1983 campaign for governor, Allain, a Democrat, carried seventy-four of the state’s eighty-two counties.

Shortly after his inauguration as governor on 10 January 1984, Allain appointed a 250-member commission to study the state’s 1890 constitution. After a thorough review, the commission drafted a new constitution, and Allain recommended its adoption. The state legislature, however, took no action on the proposal.

A constitutional amendment restructuring the state board of education, part of the Education Reform Act of 1982, was implemented during Governor Allain’s administration. That amendment provided for an appointed superintendent of education and a nine-member board of education.

As governor, Allain continued to work to remove members of the legislature from boards that were part of the executive branch. Though unpopular with many legislators, who feared that the law gave too much power to the governor, Allain’s proposal was passed by the legislature in 1984.

In 1985 Allain appointed Reuben Anderson to the Mississippi Supreme Court, making him the state’s first African American justice.

A constitutional amendment allowing the governor to succeed himself was passed near the end of Allain’s term, with his strong endorsement. Allain considered running for reelection but eventually decided not to seek a second term.

After leaving office in January 1988, Allain resumed the practice of law in Jackson. He died there on 2 December 2013.

Allain, William A.

Americans for the Preservation of the White Race

Started in May 1963 by nine white men at a gas station outside Natchez, Americans for the Preservation of the White Race (APWR) was one of several new Mississippi organizations that formed to oppose the civil rights movement. The first issue of the group’s newspaper, American Patriot, included a policy statement asserting, “Americans for the Preservation of the White Race, Inc., is an organization dedicated to keeping the White Man White and the Black Man Black like GOD intended.” Led by its first president, charter member Rowland N. Scott of Natchez, the group had more than twenty chapters by 1964, primarily in central and southwestern Mississippi and in Louisiana. The short-lived group attracted working-class and some middle-class whites who were not only horrified by the civil rights movement but also concerned about what they saw as the moderation of some of the state’s leaders in business, education, and government.

The APWRand many other massive resistance groups claimed not to represent extremists or supporters of violence. Like the Citizens’ Councils, the APWRhosted talks by right-wing leaders: speakers at APWR meetings in 1963–64 included former governor Ross Barnett, Judge Tom Brady, Maj. Gen. Edwin Walker, and several state legislators and ministers. The group’s language varied between calls for American patriotism and angry denunciations of opponents of white supremacy. A newsletter argued in 1964 that “the only thing extreme about the organization is that we advocate ‘extreme conservatism,’ which the whole country needs a dose of.” Group leaders officially rejected violence, but some members belonged to the Ku Klux Klan and announced that they had armed themselves in preparation for the Mississippi Summer Project in 1964. Some members at the state fair in 1967 sold booklets explaining how to construct homemade bombs and raised money to help defend the men accused of murdering activist Vernon Dahmer.

As historian Joseph Crespino argues, the APWR was one of the groups, like the Ku Klux Klan, that Mississippi leaders, even those in the Citizens’ Council and government agencies such as the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, feared as a consequence of the potential for violence and bad publicity. While many white leaders were taking slow and small steps in the mid-1960s to avoid inflaming tensions or encouraging the federal government to take new action against injustices in Mississippi, the APWR took a hard line. Members condemned Erle Johnston, head of the Sovereignty Commission, for saying that the APWR “stirred whites against whites.”

Above all, the APWRused economic pressure against white business leaders who supported some forms of desegregation. The group’s leaders organized a boycott against Carthage merchants who did business with a black-owned grocery popular among civil rights activists. More dramatically, the APWRorganized a “buy-in” campaign to counter a sustained civil rights boycott of stores in downtown Natchez and then fumed when some business leaders agreed to the boycotters’ demands. In early December 1964 the group asked white shoppers throughout the region to shop in downtown Natchez but denounced twenty-three businessmen who had signed an agreement ending the boycott. The APWRlater took the same approach to oppose civil rights efforts in Fayette and Edwards.

The APWRremains a fairly mysterious group. The fact that the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission amassed files on the organization shows that people in a very conservative state government considered the AWPR’s tactics a threat to social order. The group was in decline by 1965 and seems to have disappeared by 1968.

Americans for the Preservation of the White Race

Amite County

Named for the Amite River, which the French had named for the word amitié (friendship) in hopes or celebration of good relations with the native Choctaws, Amite County is located in southern Mississippi on the Louisiana border. Amite was one of the earliest counties established in the Mississippi Territory—one of just eleven counties in existence in 1810. Notable geographic features of Amite County include the West and East Forks of the Amite River as well as several tributary creeks. The Homochitto National Forest includes some of northern Amite. Towns include Liberty, the county seat; Centreville; Crosby; Gloster; Gillsburg; and Smithdale.

In 1820 Amite was Mississippi’s third-largest county, with 6,853 people, among them 2,833 slaves. Like most of the territory not located on the Mississippi River or the Gulf of Mexico, Amite was an agricultural county, with just 35 people employed in commerce or manufacturing. Slavery remained important to Amite’s economy through the antebellum period, and by 1840 60 percent of the county’s 9,511 residents were enslaved; on the eve of the Civil War, that number peaked at 64 percent. Amite farmers produced cotton, corn, rice (ranking third among the state’s counties), orchard products (fifth), and sweet potatoes (sixth). Substantial numbers of livestock were also raised. The county’s thirty-two manufacturing establishments employed eighty-three men, mostly in lumber work and blacksmithing.

In 1853 Douglas Hancock Cooper, an Amite County planter and political figure, became the US agent to the Choctaw Nation. Cooper later worked to persuade Native American nations to support the Confederacy during the Civil War. North Carolina native James Smylie became an important leader among Amite’s Presbyterians as well as a large slave owner and a prominent church-based defender of slavery.

As in much of Mississippi, the majority of Amite County residents were Baptists. According to the religious census of 1860, Amite had twenty-two churches—eleven Baptist, eight Methodist, and three Presbyterian. The 1916 religious census similarly identified Amite as a Baptist county, with Missionary Baptists and Southern Baptists making up more than two-thirds of all church members. Most of the county’s other congregations were Colored Methodist Episcopal, Presbyterian, or Methodist.

Amite County’s population increased after the Civil War, reaching 14,000 by 1880. African Americans made up 61 percent of the population. The county remained rural and agricultural, with just 56 people employed in manufacturing. About half the county’s 1,620 farmers owned their land. Amite County’s voters gave considerable support to Populist candidates in the late 1800s.

Agriculture remained Amite’s primary industry through the early twentieth century. In 1900, 68 percent of white farmers owned land, compared to just 18 percent of African American farmers, most of whom labored as tenants and sharecroppers. Manufacturing had increased, and the county’s 69 factories employed 143 workers, almost all of them male. By 1930 86 percent of Amite’s population lived on farms, substantially higher than the 67 percent figure for the state as a whole. As in past decades, African Americans made up slightly more than half of the county’s population, most of them working as tenant farmers.

During World War II, Amite County became home to the US Army’s Camp Van Dorn, where soldiers trained for combat in Europe. The camp housed more than fifty thousand troops and was the site of significant confrontations between white and African American soldiers.

Amite was the site of important civil rights activism, especially in the early years of the organized movement. During the 1950s E. W. Steptoe, the head of the county’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), organized potential voters and started a newsletter, making his group one of the state’s largest. Amite County farmer Herbert Lee, who joined the NAACP in 1953, was killed in antiactivist violence in 1961. Anne Moody’s memoir, Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968), describes growing up in Centreville under Jim Crow. Will Campbell’s memoir, Brother to a Dragonfly (1977), chronicles rural Amite County during the Great Depression and Campbell’s role as one of the few white religious activists in the civil rights movement.

In 1960 Amite was home to 15,573 people, 54 percent of them African Americans; other than a very small Native American population, all of the rest were white. Amite ranked fifth in the state in the number of cattle and was noteworthy for its petroleum and gas production. The county was about average in the amount of corn, soybeans, and wheat produced but fell far below the state average in the production of cotton and the amount of commercial timberland. The leading industrial employer was the timber industry. As the population declined in the 1960s and 1970s, the number of people engaged in farming dropped dramatically, from 1,940 in 1960 to 200 two decades later.

Amite’s population has continued to decrease, falling to 13,599 in 2000 and 13,131 in 2010, when 41 percent of the residents were African American and 58 percent were white.

Amite County was the home of storytelling comedian Jerry Clower, who used local language and characters in his work. Artist George Williams, a self-taught woodcarver, and the Williams Brothers, gospel music producers, also have roots in Amite.

Amite County

Appellate Courts

Mississippi has had a different court system under each of its four constitutions. Frequently changed were the method of judicial selection, the number of judges, and even the names of the courts. Harder to discern but perhaps more important are the changes in the kinds of cases that have dominated the dockets of the courts and the judicial philosophies that have controlled them.

The 1817 Mississippi Constitution provided that the “judicial power of this state shall be vested in one supreme court, and such superior and inferior courts of law and equity as the Legislature may, from time to time, direct and establish.” The legislature determined that there would be four superior (trial) court districts, each with one judge. A fifth district was added in 1822. The legislature authorized the superior court judges to sit twice a year in Natchez as the Supreme Court. Any two superior court judges could resolve an appeal, though the judge who had presided over a trial was ineligible.

The judges were elected by the legislature and served for life, though few remained that long. Twenty superior court judges served during the fourteen years that this court system existed, with an average service of a little more than three years. The first judge elected was William Bayard Shields, who quickly resigned because he was appointed as a federal judge.

In 1824 the Supreme Court boldly declared a state statute unconstitutional. The legislature at its next session ordered the judges to appear and explain why they should not be removed from office. Though an investigation occurred, the court continued.

The 1832 constitution made Mississippi the first state where voters elected all judges. The new constitution created the High Court of Errors and Appeals with three justices. The first justices, elected in May 1833, were William L. Sharkey, who became chief justice, and associate justices Daniel Wright and Cotesworth Pinckney Smith. After staggered-length initial terms, all had six-year terms. In 1839 the entire state was divided into northern, central, and southern districts, a basic configuration that persists today.

A 1836 constitutional amendment required the high court to sit in Jackson. The newly constructed Capitol opened in 1839, and the court had its own courtroom in the center of the building. Many suits involved land, banks, bonds, and railroads. Numerous cases from 1830 to 1860 involved slavery.

Among the most important cases the high court decided concerned the state’s 1838 purchase of a substantial amount of stock in a new state bank. Bonds, backed by the credit of the state, were sold to fund the purchase. The bank failed, and in 1842 the legislature repudiated the bonds. In an 1852 decision, State v. Johnson, the court ruled that the bonds remained a valid debt of the state.

During the disruptions of the Civil War, only nineteen cases were decided, but the court began meeting more regularly by November 1865. An October 1866 case, Ex parte Lewis, received nationwide attention. Lewis, a black Union soldier from Maryland who remained in Mississippi at the end of the war, had kept his gun, violating an 1865 state statute declaring that blacks could not possess firearms. However, that statute violated the 1866 federal Civil Rights Act. Lewis petitioned Mississippi chief justice Alexander Hamilton Handy for release from jail, but Handy issued a lengthy opinion finding the state statute valid and the Civil Rights Act unconstitutional. The US military commander ignored the Lewis ruling. The state courts were further thwarted when civilians were tried in military courts. In October 1867 all three high court justices resigned to protest military rule, and the US Army commander named three new judges. Three decades later, the court in Lusby v. Kansas City Railroad invalidated all decisions issued during the two years when military commanders appointed the judges.

The 1869 Constitution replaced the elected high court with an appointed supreme court. The governor nominated justices, and the Senate confirmed them for nine-year terms. The new court had to address the effects of secession and defeat, ruling on agreements to pay debts in Confederate money and the validity of state laws passed during the war. Taxation and regulation of large corporations, including railroads, were also new and recurring controversies. Significant post-Reconstruction justices included J. A. P. Campbell (1876–94), Tim Cooper (1881–96), Thomas Woods (1889–1900), and Albert Whitfield (1894–1910).

The 1890 constitution did not change the number of Supreme Court justices or their method of selection. It did authorize onerous limits on suffrage with the goal of disfranchising African Americans. In 1896 the court upheld these limits in Dixon v. State. Another new provision barred leasing convicts for farmwork or other labor. Politically powerful landowners found a way around the law, and their subterfuge was sustained in Henry v. State (1906).

In 1903, with the opening of the new Mississippi State Capitol, the court moved to ornate new chambers in that building and remained there until 1973, when the Carroll Gartin Justice Building opened. A second building by that name built behind the first one opened in 2008 for the Supreme Court and the court of appeals.

A 1916 constitutional amendment doubled the size of the court to six justices and made the judgeships elective. Among the important justices of the first half of the twentieth century were Sydney Smith (1909–48), Eugene O. Sykes (1916–25), George Ethridge (1917–41), and Virgil Griffith (1929–49). These justices faced new issues dealing with automobiles, Prohibition, and the validity of various relief measures during the Great Depression.

One of the biggest political controversies the court faced was in a 1922 decision, Aetna Insurance Co. v. Robertson. The state revenue agent brought suit against many national insurance companies under the state antitrust laws, and the trial court returned a judgment in the state’s favor equal to half of that year’s budget. On appeal, Chief Justice Smith set aside the judgment because the alleged violations had been unchallenged for more than a decade.

In Brown v. State (1935), Justice Griffith wrote one of the most noteworthy dissents in the court’s history when Chief Justice Smith cited errors by the defense attorney to sustain the admission of confessions beaten out of three black men accused of murder. A year later, the US Supreme Court agreed with Griffith and reversed the decision.

The civil rights struggle came to the fore by the late 1940s. While desegregation cases were brought in federal court, the state court faced civil rights issues in criminal appeals. Willie McGee, a black man, was sentenced to death for the 1945 rape of a white woman. Bella Abzug, a New York attorney and later a member of the US House of Representatives, came to Mississippi to defend him. The Mississippi Supreme Court reversed his first two convictions but affirmed a third conviction in 1949. The defense had offered evidence that the woman had been engaged in an affair with the defendant. Justice Harvey McGehee was quoted as saying that such a suggestion was insulting.

In 1952 the Supreme Court was increased from six justices to nine. Leadership was provided by McGehee (1937–64; chief justice, 1949–64), Percy Lee (1950–66; chief justice 1964–66), William N. Ethridge (1952–71; chief justice, 1966–71), Robert Gillespie (1954–77; chief justice, 1971–77), and Neville Patterson (1964–86; chief justice 1977–86).

The court followed the directions of the Warren Court on expanded rights for criminal defendants. A personal injury lawsuit revolution began, from product liability to other claims.

Chief Justice Patterson oversaw significant changes to the administration of the court system. The court entered a May 1981 order claiming sole power to adopt rules of procedure for all the state courts. Almost all other states and the federal courts recognize the legislative branch’s right to a substantial role in the process.

A further reordering of power among the branches occurred in Alexander v. State ex rel. Allain (1983). In an opinion written by Chief Justice Patterson with the aid of Justice James L. Robertson, the court found that legislators’ historic practice of serving on executive branch boards violated the separation of powers.

Beginning in the mid-1990s, court elections centered on whether Mississippi had become a haven for frivolous personal injury suits. Justice Chuck McRae, an advocate for plaintiffs, clashed publicly with business-oriented justices and was defeated in 2002. What many observers perceived as a plaintiff-oriented court in the 1990s has changed so much that it is now often considered precisely the opposite. Chief Justice Jim Smith was defeated in 2008, perhaps because of such perceptions.

Among the trailblazers on the Supreme Court was Billy Ethridge, wheelchair-bound from childhood polio, who was appointed to the court in 1952. Lenore Prather was appointed the first female justice in 1982 and became the first female chief justice sixteen years later. The first African American, Reuben Anderson, was appointed in 1985. The first Republican to serve in the twentieth century, Jim Smith, elected in 1992, was also the last, since judicial elections became nonpartisan two years later.

Appellate Courts

Assoc. of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, MS Council

Women from eight southern states met in Atlanta in 1930 to form the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL). Three of the original twenty-six leaders came from Mississippi—Bessie Alford of McComb, Ethel Featherstun Stevens of Jackson, and Mrs. Ernest Moore of Clarksdale. The organization grew out of efforts by the Commission on Interracial Cooperation to oppose violence and to encourage greater communication between whites and African Americans. Most members, including Alford and Stevens, belonged to the Woman’s Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, a group that was working to extend its reach into issues of labor, violence, education, and race relations, especially after women gained the right to vote in 1920.

Jessie Daniel Ames, the ASWPL’s founder and president, encouraged several Mississippians to form a chapter of the organization. Stevens, Moore, and ten other women, most of them from Clarksdale and Jackson, met in 1931 to form the North Mississippi ASWPL. Alford helped form the South Mississippi chapter, which published its mission that “as a group of Mississippi women,” they were “joining our own protest to the protest of other Southern women who feel a peculiar abhorrence to mob violence.” A 1931 lynching tested the new group’s determination, but the executive committee published a statement in Jackson newspapers that condemned as inaccurate and hypocritical the reason supporters of lynching typically gave for the practice: the protection of white women against the violence of African American men. “Mississippi women know, in their souls, that the heart, the life, and the sacred honor of our men are pledged to our protection; but we plead with all our heart that we may find that protection behind justice, swift, clear-eyed, and calm, and not behind lynching, that howling, cowardly creature of the jungle.”

For a short time, Mississippians helped lead the way in advancing the organization. Alford, Stevens, and others in the state developed rules and objectives for organizing into chapters and attracting new members. In 1931 Mississippi had more women (560) in more counties (44) in the ASWPL than did any other state. By the mid-1930s, the group had about 12,000 members.

Members of the group tended to operate by alerting sheriffs and other government officials about potential lynchings. Alford, the group’s first state chair, tried to cover several South Mississippi counties, listening for news of potential violence and passing the news along to sheriffs; equally important, she encouraged women in all parts of the state to report acts of violence to the organization. After a 1934 Clarksdale lynching, she wrote to the sheriff to demand “that you & other officers use your authority and official power to identify the ringleaders of this mob and see that they are punished according to our law!”

Some women could not join the ASWPL because of opposition from their husbands or other men in their families or communities, and some remained quiet about their activities. Many felt frustrated that their church organizations and other women’s groups chose not to take stronger stances against lynching. Alford and the group’s second chair, Montie Greer of Potts Camp, wrote to the state’s senators and governor for assistance in opposing lynching.

Some past and present critics of the organization have noted that the ASWPL never admitted African American members and that some leaders seemed at least as concerned that white male atrocities were committed in the name of chivalry as they were that lynching victims died tragic deaths outside the law. National leaders such as Ames never called for a federal antilynching law, primarily because they said such a law could never cover the range of violence in the South, but that refusal put the group at odds with many other reform groups.

The ASWPL adopted a new practice in the late 1930s with a series of educational initiatives they called antilynching institutes. The institutes continued until the ASWPL disbanded in 1942 when its parent group, the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, became part of the Southern Regional Council.

Assoc. of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, MS Council

Attala County

Attala is a hilly county located in the very heart of the state and bordered on the west by the Big Black River. Founded on 23 December 1833, Attala comprises land relinquished to the United States by the Choctaw Nation under the 1830 Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. The county derives its name from Chateaubriand’s 1801 novel, Atala, which depicts a romance between a white settler and a member of Mississippi’s Natchez tribe. The county seat is Kosciusko, and notable towns and communities include Ethel, McCool, and Sallis.

In its first census, in 1840, Attala County reported 3,221 free people and 1,082 slaves. The economy was largely agricultural, though a small manufacturing sector employed locals at cotton gins, blacksmith shops, and lumber mills. By 1860 the county ranked twenty-ninth in the state in cotton production, twenty-fifth in the value of livestock, and nineteenth in production of corn. Despite its diminutive population, antebellum Attala County had a significant number of churches, the majority of which hosted Baptist and Methodist congregations.

At the turn of the century, the county’s population had risen to 26,248, with white residents continuing to slightly outnumber African Americans. Farmers still dominated the workforce, with the majority of white farmers (63 percent) owning their own land; by contrast, more than 75 percent of black farmers worked as sharecroppers. Attala was also home to a large number of manufacturing establishments, although industrial development still had little to offer the county’s population in terms of employment opportunity. By 1930, however, Attala County’s manufacturing labor force had topped eleven hundred.

Attala’s religious community continued to thrive during the early twentieth century. Indeed, the county’s Magnolia Bible College was the site of the first radio performance by the Blackwood Brothers, a quartet that eventually became a powerful force in American gospel music.

In 1960 the county’s main agricultural products included corn, cotton, soybeans, and cattle, and Attala’s timber industry had begun to produce substantial economic benefits. Yet a population decline in the county during the 1960s and 1970s contributed to diminishing agricultural production. In 1960 more than twenty-six hundred people made their living by farming, a number that dropped to two hundred by 1980.

A varied and impressive group of Mississippians have called Attala County home, including National Geographic writer Carolyn Bennett Patterson, artist L. V. Hull, folklorist Arthur Palmer Hudson, basketball star and Delta State University coach Margaret Wade, and blues musician Charlie Musselwhite. Celebrated author and civil rights activist James Meredith was born in Kosciusko in 1933. Meredith initiated the process of desegregation at the University of Mississippi, becoming the first African American student to attend the college in 1962. Actress and television personality Oprah Winfrey was born in Kosciusko in 1954 and remained there under the care of her grandmother until age six.

Between 1960 and 2010, Attala County’s population declined slightly from 21,355 to 19,564. Like other central Mississippi counties in the early twenty-first century, Attala County was mostly (56 percent) white.

Attala County

Ayers v. Fordice

In 1975 Jake Ayers Sr., a civil rights veteran from Glen Allan and parent of a student at historically black Jackson State University, filed suit in federal district court claiming that the State of Mississippi had not provided adequate resources to its historically black institutions of higher education. The Ayers suit, based on the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and on Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, eventually became a class-action lawsuit with the United States and Bennie Thompson, later a member of the US Congress, intervening as plaintiffs. The case originally was known as Ayers v. Waller since Bill Waller was Mississippi governor when it was filed. It was renamed Ayers v. Fordice in 1991 and later Ayers v. Musgrove. Attorney Ike Madison first represented the plaintiffs but later turned the case over to Alvin Chambliss.

Mississippi has three publicly funded historically black colleges and universities, Jackson State University, Alcorn State University, and Mississippi Valley State University. Before the desegregation of the University of Mississippi in 1962, black Mississippians who sought public in-state education could attend only the black schools. The state legislature unequally appropriated tax dollars so that these schools were severely underfunded, resulting in gross inequities in the available educational opportunities. Ayers’s lawsuit sought to correct these inequities.

The federal district court ruled in 1987 that by adopting race-neutral policies in admissions and other areas, Mississippi had satisfied its duty to correct the de jure segregated state university system. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the lower court’s decision in 1990. In 1992, however, the US Supreme Court found that both the district and appellate courts had applied an incorrect legal standard. The Supreme Court ruled that the Equal Protection Clause and Title VI required Mississippi to abolish any policy or practice that could be traced to de jure segregation, that continued to promote segregation, and that could be eliminated. Returning the case to district court, the Supreme Court made clear that the issue was eliminating effects of prior state-enforced segregation, not mandating equality among the state’s public institutions.

In 1995, using the Supreme Court’s standard, the district court found vestiges of segregation in Mississippi’s higher education system. In 2002, nearly three decades after the lawsuit’s inception, the state and a majority of plaintiffs reached an agreement to award the three historically black institutions $503 million over seventeen years. The settlement included funds for new programs, new facilities, and large endowments if each of the schools achieved a 10 percent nonblack student enrollment for three consecutive years. Some plaintiffs, including Lillie Ayers, the widow of Jake Ayers, who had died in 1986, appealed the settlement because they felt that the financial enhancements were not enough to compete with the state’s white institutions and that the condition of increased nonblack enrollment would be difficult to meet and was not relevant to the original intent of the suit. In 2004, however, the US Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal of the settlement.

Ayers v. Fordice

Bailey, Thomas Lowry

Before his election to the state’s highest office, Thomas L. Bailey served twenty-four years in the Mississippi House of Representatives, including twelve years as Speaker of the House. Bailey, Walter Sillers, Joseph George, and Walter Kennedy comprised the “Big Four,” chairing key committees in the House and controlling the flow of legislation during their time in power.

Bailey was born in Webster County on 6 January 1888. After a short stint teaching in the state’s public school system, he opened a law practice at Meridian in 1913. A Democrat, he represented Lauderdale County in the state legislature from 1916 to 1940, coauthoring Mississippi’s homestead exemption law and strongly supporting pension benefits for senior citizens. He was also an early supporter of the Balance Agriculture with Industry program, and after his election as governor he championed industrial expansion in the state.

Though Bailey’s administration was cut short by his death as a result of a stroke on 2 November 1946, his tenure included a series of positive and enduring accomplishments. He established the Agricultural and Industrial Board to promote industrial growth and the Mississippi Marketing Commission to assist farmers in the sale and distribution of their goods. To facilitate the transportation of goods throughout rural parts of the state, Bailey promoted the development of a secondary highway system known as the farm-to-market roads.

The Board of Trustees of the State Institutions of Higher Learning was established during his first year in office, creating Mississippi’s first nonpolitical college board. His administration also saw establishment of the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson and of the African American Mississippi Vocational College (now Mississippi Valley State University) in Itta Bena.

More than 237,000 Mississippians (one out of every nine) served in the armed forces during World War II, and Bailey predicted that their experiences would dramatically change both the state and the wider South. In his last address to the legislature he urged lawmakers to think beyond the next biennium and instead to plan for the next twenty-five years.

After the governor’s death his widow, Nellah Massey Bailey (1893–1956), entered politics. Her election as tax collector in 1947 made her Mississippi’s first woman to hold a statewide office. She won reelection in 1951 and 1955.

Thomas Bailey Drive, a segment of I-59 around Meridian, honors the former governor.

Bailey, Thomas Lowry

Banner, David (Levell Crump)

David Banner’s projects, from Mississippi: The Album to his Jackson-based organization, Heal the Hood, reflect a long-standing dedication to his home state. The son of Zeno and Carolyn Crump, Levell Crump grew up in the Queens neighborhood of Jackson. After graduating from Provine High School, Crump earned a business degree at Southern University, where he served as student government association president. He enrolled in the master of education program at the University of Maryland but left prior to graduation to focus on his music career.

Though hip-hop is one of the most prevalent popular music styles in Mississippi, rappers and producers frequently showcase their talent in informal spaces such as clubs, house parties, and impromptu gatherings and through demo recordings submitted to local radio. Crump borrowed the stage name David Banner from the Incredible Hulk comic book and embarked on a career that followed this pattern. Starting with a ten-dollar keyboard in elementary school, he began rapping at school events, experimenting with the production of beats and other musical compositions and honing his ability to translate complex social circumstance into taut lyrics. By his teenage years, Banner found selling demo recordings in the parking lot at Kroger more lucrative than his job bagging groceries inside.

In the late 1990s Banner earned regional acclaim after Jackson station WJMI began playing his songs, and in 1999 he signed a recording contract as part of the duo Crooked Lettaz. A solo album soon followed, and Banner also produced hits for several established rappers. This momentum led to a reported ten-million-dollar deal with Universal Records and the release of Mississippi: The Album in 2003.

Mississippi reached No. 1 on the Billboard R & B/hip-hop chart, establishing Banner as a leading figure in the genre. It was followed by MTA2: Baptized in Dirty Water (2004), Certified (2005), and The Greatest Story Ever Told (2008). Ten years into his major-label career, Banner had accumulated more than one hundred recording credits. As performer or producer he has recorded alongside rap’s most successful artists, including Snoop Dogg, Wyclef Jean, and Lil Wayne. Banner had a role in a 2006 film, Black Snake Moan, and served as executive producer of an Old South–skewering cartoon, That Crook’d ’Sipp, for the Cartoon Network. He appeared in Ride Along in 2014 and played the character of Cecil Gaines in The Butler in 2013.

Banner’s lyrics, though at times misogynistic, violent, and acutely profane, have added to the debate about the negative impact of certain hip-hop themes. While hit songs such as “Like a Pimp” substantiate this concern, others focus on complex struggles within Mississippi’s African American community. In “Cadillac on 22’s” Banner details everyday social pressures yet also targets structural issues: the lyric “Lord, they hung Andre Jones,” for example, both memorializes an individual and references the spate of suicides of young black men in Mississippi prisons in the 1990s, a suspicious series of events that resulted in an investigation by the US Justice Department. As for the debate about violent and sexist hip-hop lyrics, Banner testified during a 2007 congressional hearing that hip-hop “is only a reflection of what is taking place in our society. Hip-hop is sick because America is sick.”

Banner has worked to translate commercial success into community-based improvement. His Heal the Hood nonprofit organization has raised money, goods, and awareness for victims of Hurricane Katrina, provided schoolbooks and college scholarships to students in need, and hosted toy drives. Of these efforts, Banner notes, “I just thank God I have an opportunity to make kids where I’m from feel like they’re somebody.” In part because of his personal response to Katrina—suspending his career, deploying his tour buses as rescue vehicles—the National Black Caucus honored him in 2006 with a Visionary Award for humanitarian efforts.

Banner released the studio albums Death of a Pop Star in 2010, Sex, Drugs, and Video Games in 2012, and The God Box in 2017. The latter represented a return of sorts to his days of nontraditional distribution; Banner enacted what he termed a “2M1” movement, with the goal of selling two million records directly to consumers for one-dollar each via Internet download. As concept, the 2M1 model represented for Banner a grassroots opportunity to involve black consumers in black business and creative industries without corporate oversight.

Banner addresses the contradiction between his lyrics and his community-based efforts the same way many of his blues and country forebears have: by pointing out the divide between Saturday night and Sunday morning. As for his love of his home state, problems and all, he explains that he named his first album Mississippi in part to point out some frequently overlooked good points: “Every time they acknowledge me, they’re gonna have to acknowledge my state.”

Banner, David (Levell Crump)

Barbour, Haley

Haley Barbour made his name in national Republican politics and was a successful Washington, D.C., lobbyist before returning to his native Mississippi and unseating one-term Democratic governor Ronnie Musgrove in 2003.

Haley Reeves Barbour was born 22 October 1947 in Yazoo City, a small Delta town about twenty-five miles northwest of Jackson. His father, an attorney, died when Haley was young, and he and his brothers were raised by their mother. After starring at high school baseball in the 1960s, he attended the University of Mississippi, leaving a few credits short of earning an undergraduate degree.

Barbour began his political career in 1968 as a staffer for Republican Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign. Barbour subsequently returned to the University of Mississippi and earned a law degree in 1972 before becoming the southeastern coordinator for Republican Gerald Ford’s unsuccessful 1976 presidential campaign. Barbour ran for the US Senate in 1982 but was defeated by the Mississippian who had held the seat for more than thirty years, Democrat John C. Stennis.

Barbour served as Pres. Ronald Reagan’s White House political director in 1985 and chaired the Republican National Committee from 1993 to 1997. In November 1994, under Barbour’s leadership, Republicans won control of both chambers of Congress for the first time in forty years. In 2000 Barbour headed Texas governor George W. Bush’s presidential campaign advisory committee.

Barbour was one of the founders of Barbour Griffith and Rogers, a high-profile Washington lobbying firm whose client list included a wide range of corporate interests, among them Microsoft to tobacco and utility companies.

In the 2003 Mississippi governor’s race, Barbour easily defeated Jackson attorney Mitch Tyner in the primary before turning his attention to Musgrove in the general election. The Republican candidate relentlessly criticized the incumbent governor’s signature achievement—persuading Nissan to build Mississippi’s first automotive manufacturing plant, which opened about five months before the gubernatorial election. Barbour went on to defeat Musgrove, receiving 53 percent of the overall vote.

During his first year as governor Barbour was sharply criticized by advocates for the poor when he persuaded lawmakers to cut millions of dollars from the Medicaid budget. Barbour said the proudest achievements of his first term were improving the state budget, enacting limits on civil lawsuits, and persuading Toyota to build an auto manufacturing plant in the Northeast Mississippi town of Blue Springs. However, his first term was most strongly defined by Hurricane Katrina, which left a wide swath of destruction across South Mississippi when it struck in August 2005. Barbour persuaded federal officials to give Mississippi billions of dollars for storm recovery, and he easily won a second term in November 2007, receiving 57 percent of the vote.

Barbour continues to be a force in Republican politics, and in 2015 he published, with Jere Nash, America’s Greatest Storm: Leading through Hurricane Katrina.

Barbour, Haley

Barbour, William Henry, Jr.

William Henry Barbour Jr. has served as a US District Court judge for the Southern District of Mississippi since 1983. He was born in Yazoo City on 4 February 1941 and received a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University in 1963 and a law degree from the University of Mississippi School of Law in 1966. Barbour also studied at the New York University School of Law. He practiced with the Yazoo City law firm of Henry, Barbour, and DeCell until 1983; in addition, he held the position of youth counselor at the Yazoo City Court from 1971 to 1982. On 15 March 1983 Pres. Ronald Reagan named Barbour to succeed William H. Cox as a US district judge. Barbour served as chief judge from 1989 to 1996 and assumed senior status in 2006.

One of Barbour’s most notable rulings occurred in Chrissy F. v. Mississippi Department of Public Welfare (1991), which involved a chancery court that had granted custody of a six-year-old girl to her father even though he had been accused of sexually abusing her. Barbour ruled that both the chancery judge and the youth court referee had violated the girl’s constitutional rights of access to courts as well as her procedural due process rights. Children’s rights activists welcomed the decision because of its potential to increase federal courts’ protection of children. The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed Judge Barbour’s ruling on the ground of lack of subject matter jurisdiction but affirmed the decision in all other respects.

In another well-known case, 1998’s ACLU v. Fordice, Barbour ordered Mississippi to unseal the files of the defunct State Sovereignty Commission, a state agency created in 1956 to maintain racial segregation. The Mississippi legislature had officially dissolved the commission in 1977 but had also sealed the agency’s files until 2027. When the American Civil Liberties Union challenged that provision, Barbour held that the files should be unsealed but that interested parties named in the files had privacy rights that had to be protected. Barbour allowed affected persons time to protect their privacy rights before requiring the state to open the files.

In 2003 Barbour presided over United States v. Avants, which involved the 1966 slaying of sixty-seven-year-old black sharecropper Ben Chester White. Prosecutors argued that Ernest Avants and two other Klansmen had killed White to lure the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Natchez, where they intended to assassinate the civil rights leader. Avants was convicted of aiding and abetting a premeditated murder thirty-seven years earlier and died in prison in 2004.

Barbour, William Henry, Jr.

Barnett, Ross Robert

The office of governor is the only public office Ross Barnett ever held and the only political office for which he ever campaigned. He is also one of only two Mississippians who ran for the office four times. He ran and lost in 1951 and 1955, he was elected in 1959, and he ran again unsuccessfully in 1967.

Born at Standing Pine in Leake County on 22 January 1898 (the last Mississippi governor born in the nineteenth century), Barnett graduated from Mississippi College in 1922 before earning a law degree from the University of Mississippi in 1926 and opening a law practice in Jackson. He went on to become one of Mississippi’s most successful trial lawyers.

During Barnett’s administration the state of Mississippi was celebrating the centennial of the Civil War. It was also responding to the great changes brought on by the civil rights movement. Barnett, who made his first speech as governor-elect at a Citizens’ Council meeting, vowed to maintain segregation in the state’s public schools, even pledging to go to jail before he would allow any integration. In announcing his candidacy in 1959, Barnett had said, “I am a vigorous segregationist. I will work to maintain our heritage, our customs, constitutional government, rights of the states, segregation of the races, and industrial and agricultural development.” Barnett spoke widely inside and outside Mississippi on his support for state control on issues of education and voting.

In 1962 the US Supreme Court directed the University of Mississippi to admit African American James H. Meredith. Barnett took numerous steps to slow or directly oppose Meredith’s admission and condemned John F. Kennedy’s presidential administration, vowing to never “surrender to the evil and illegal forces of tyranny.” Opponents of the university’s integration clashed violently with federal troops, leading to the deaths of two people on the night of 30 September 1962. Nevertheless, Meredith ultimately enrolled, the first step in the eventual elimination of state-sponsored racial segregation in Mississippi’s public schools and universities.

Several significant economic developments also occurred during Barnett’s administration. A series of amendments to the worker’s compensation law and the enactment of a right-to-work law made Mississippi more attractive to outside industry, and more than forty thousand new jobs were created during his four years in office. Barnett’s industrial development program also included the construction of industrial parks throughout the state and the establishment of the Youth Affairs Department under the Agricultural and Industrial Board. His administration made it easier for localities to use industrial revenue boards to attract new business, and he was especially proud of persuading Standard Oil to locate refining operations on the Gulf Coast.

Barnett resumed his law practice after leaving office in 1964 but continued an active interest in state politics. In 1967 he ran for governor but was eliminated in the first primary. He was one of Mississippi’s last popular stump speakers and remained a favorite at the Neshoba County Fair until his death on 6 November 1987. While a reservoir in Hinds County and a lake in Smith County bear his name, he is most remembered for his role in the unsuccessful resistance to the desegregation of the University of Mississippi.

Barnett, Ross Robert

Benton County

Bordering Tennessee in north-central Mississippi, Benton County was organized during Reconstruction from sections of neighboring Marshall and Tippah Counties. Founded on 15 July 1870, the county comprises land formerly belonging to the Chickasaw Nation and relinquished to the United States in the 1834 Treaty of Pontotoc. According to various sources, locals declared Sen. Thomas H. Benton of Missouri to be the county’s official namesake to conceal their true allegiance to Confederate general Samuel Benton of Holly Springs. Ashland, Benton’s county seat, is named after the home of Henry Clay, a Kentucky legislator and an antebellum secretary of state.

In its first census in 1880, Benton County reported a population of 11,023 people, divided almost evenly between African Americans and whites. Sharecroppers and tenants cultivated the majority of the county’s farms, concentrating production on grain, livestock, and tobacco rather than cotton. By 1900, 57 percent of the county’s 1,550 white farmers owned their land, while only one-tenth of Benton’s African American farming community could claim ownership.

As in much of Mississippi, Baptists made up a majority of churchgoers in Benton. The 1916 religious census reported that the National Baptist Convention and the Southern Baptist Convention were the county’s two largest groups, with the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church also significant.

The decline in Benton County’s population during the first decades of the twentieth century paralleled diminishing farm ownership. Only about a third of the county’s farmers owned their own land in 1930. Four years later Benton County became one of the first counties to receive electric power from the Tennessee Valley Authority.

By 1960 Benton’s agricultural production largely consisted of corn, cotton, soybeans, wheat, and oats. The county had also developed small but substantial timber and textile manufacturing industries. County population was 7,723 that year. During the decades that followed, the number of people making their living in agriculture dropped sharply.

Benton County is the home of poet James A. Autry, who was born between Ashland and Hickory Flat in 1933, the son and grandson of Baptist ministers. Autry’s work has often contrasted rural Mississippi life with the modern world.

From 2000 to 2010 Benton’s population grew from 8,026 to 8,729. Like most counties in north-central Mississippi, Benton County had a white majority (61 percent of residents, compared to 37 percent who were African American), and its population had grown over the previous half century (by 1,005 people, or about 13 percent).

Benton County

Bilbo, Theodore Gilmore

Although he was only five feet, two inches tall, Theodore G. Bilbo, in life as in legend, was a towering figure who stalked across the pages of Mississippi history. Between 1907 and 1947 “the Man,” as he was called by friends and foes alike, occupied a prominent place in Mississippi politics.

Born at Juniper Grove in Pearl River County on 13 October 1877, Bilbo entered public school at age fifteen and graduated from high school four years later. Following a short teaching career, he attended Peabody College and Vanderbilt Law School, though he did not graduate from either institution. After losing a 1903 bid for circuit clerk to a “one-armed Confederate veteran,” Bilbo went on to win election as a state senator (1908–12), lieutenant governor (1912–16), governor (1916–20, 1928–32), and US senator (1935–47). His long career was punctuated by other defeats as well—unsuccessful campaigns for US Congress in 1918 and 1932 and for governor in 1923. Governor Bilbo’s wife, Linda Gaddy Bedgood Bilbo, made several campaign speeches for him in 1915 and may have been the first woman to actively participate in a statewide political race.

A combative individual, Bilbo made many enemies. He often insulted his political foes and responded to challenges with anger and bitterness. Bilbo faced scandals and controversies throughout his political career, including charges of bribery in 1910 and 1913 and of misappropriation of funds in the 1920s and 1940s.

Bilbo described himself as the representative of hardworking ordinary people and denounced the influence of both traditional planter elites and newer corporate elites. He wore a red necktie in reference to charges that he and his supporters were rednecks. He was a strong proponent of maintaining racial segregation and other forms of privilege for white Mississippians.

In Governor Bilbo’s second inaugural address, on 17 January 1928, he recommended moving the University of Mississippi from Oxford to Jackson and constructing a new, fifteen-million-dollar university campus. He also advocated a thorough reorganization of Mississippi’s other public institutions of higher learning, including the establishment of a commissioner of higher education. After those recommendations were defeated, Bilbo persuaded the college board to dismiss two college presidents and about fifty-three faculty members. (Critics have greatly exaggerated the number of presidents and faculty Bilbo dismissed.) Though Bilbo has been accused of attempting to punish his enemies and reward his friends, he was actually seeking to upgrade the state’s colleges. Nevertheless, several agencies withdrew accreditation from Mississippi’s institutions of higher learning for two years.

Bilbo also advocated a wide range of other political and economic reforms intended to improve the quality of life for Mississippi’s poor white farmers and workers, who formed his base of support. Bilbo’s flamboyant and often racially inflammatory campaign rhetoric and his personal involvement in higher education earned him a reputation as a demagogue.

After his second term as governor ended in 1932, Bilbo ran unsuccessfully for the US Congress. Two years later he was elected to the US Senate, winning reelection in 1940 and 1946. During his early years in the Senate Bilbo strongly supported the New Deal.

However, he gained notoriety for his aggressive opposition to all civil rights legislation. In the 1930s he supported movements to encourage African Americans to move to Africa, and he introduced a bill to prohibit racial intermarriage in Washington, D.C. He opposed antilynching legislation and conducted long filibusters against the Fair Employment Practices Committee and efforts to repeal the poll tax. In 1947 Bilbo published his only book, Take Your Choice, Separation or Mongrelization, a rambling defense of racial segregation.

After Bilbo’s 1946 reelection, a group of black World War II veterans challenged the validity of his election on the grounds that African Americans had not been allowed to vote. Before the Senate could rule on that challenge or on new corruption charges, Bilbo died at his mansion, Dream House, near Poplarville on 21 August 1947.

Bilbo, Theodore Gilmore

Black Codes

Black Codes were southern state laws that harshly restricted the rights of African Americans in 1865–66. These laws represented the former Confederate states’ first official response to slave emancipation after rejoining the Union. The legislation recognized African Americans’ freedom in part by stating that people could no longer be legally classified as property, but they denied former slaves the same rights as white men. In fact, the legislators believed that African Americans should be governed by a separate set of laws—by a black code—to firmly set aside freedpeople’s claims to citizenship. Northerners and southerners alike interpreted these laws as a defiant rejection of full African American freedom by an unredeemed southern political elite. The US Congress responded by stripping each state of its sovereignty (except for Tennessee), placing it under military rule, and initiating what became known as Radical Reconstruction.

Mississippi was the first southern state to form a new government after the Confederacy’s defeat and the first to write Black Codes. All eyes were on Mississippi, and state legislators aware of their leadership position decided to take a stand. Ignoring Pres. Andrew Johnson’s plea for moderation, the Committee on Emancipation and Freedmen wrote laws that its members warned might “seem rigid and stringent.” Yet the Black Codes were enacted with remarkable speed in November 1865. Emboldened, the other southern states quickly followed.

The Black Codes fell under three different sections of state law: civil rights, apprenticeship, and vagrancy. All three sections worked to limit freedpeople’s mobility, labor, and autonomy. In Mississippi, the revised civil rights statutes acknowledged the abolition of slavery by granting African Americans access to the courts. This action shifted African Americans’ legal status from property to personhood. Yet the Black Codes denied freedpeople the right to serve as witnesses against white people. African Americans, in other words, were not equal to white southerners under the law.

After establishing freedpeople’s access to the courts, the Black Codes turned to questions of marriage. The law granted marriage rights to African Americans as long as they married within the race. Any person, white or black, who married a member of another race faced life imprisonment. Legislators anticipated that this law would be difficult to interpret since race could often be unclear. In a tortuously complex passage, the marriage statute defined black people as “those who . . . are of pure negro blood, and those descended from a negro to the third generation, inclusive though one ancestor in each generation may have been a white person.”

The civil rights section of the Black Codes also restricted African American rights to property, freedom of movement, and employment. African Americans could not rent or lease land except in towns and cities. African American city dwellers had to carry written evidence of their employment and residence. Finally, African Americans who worked for employers longer than one month had to sign written labor contracts. These restrictions undermined independent farming by blacks, limited their movement in and out of the cities, and forced them to commit to long-term employment. Each of these mandates undercut a central principle of free labor—the ability to move and change jobs.

African Americans’ labor contracts also differed from those of white Mississippians. Former slaves who violated their labor contracts by moving off the plantation before their time of service was finished would forfeit all wages previously earned. Furthermore, the Black Codes granted all white southerners the power to enforce this law, with the legislature promising cash rewards to white people who seized and arrested African Americans who had deserted their jobs.

The Vagrancy Acts put teeth into the Black Codes’ labor regulations. Any African American without a written labor contract two weeks after New Year’s Day could be jailed as a vagrant. This policy left vulnerable to arrest anyone who was self-employed, in the process of moving, or working a short-term job that did not require a formal written contract. Moreover, vagrants had no right to trial by jury. This section of the Black Codes caught national public attention. Many Americans considered a jury trial an ancient right, and newspapers declared that Mississippi lawmakers had made freedom a farce by refusing African Americans this right.

A freedperson found guilty of vagrancy would be jailed. To keep jails from bursting at the seams, state legislators gave sheriffs the right to “hire out” imprisoned African Americans. The people who “hired” vagrants would pay the sheriffs, not the workers, sidestepping the issue of wages. To help finance this system, the state imposed a tax on all African Americans—and declared anyone unable to pay the tax a vagrant.

These laws reflected tremendous planter-class anxiety regarding the maintenance of control over land and labor. With the Vagrancy Law and the laws regulating contracts, planters attempted to guarantee themselves a large labor pool to continue production of cash crops. More pointedly, they wanted these workers cheap. The Vagrancy Law promised convict labor, and the civil rights statutes provided loopholes to avoid paying wages altogether.

The Apprenticeship Law followed the same logic, requiring each county court semiannually to record the names of all African American children under the age of eighteen whose parents “have not the means” to support them. Such boys would be apprenticed to a master until they reached age twenty-one, while girls would be apprenticed until they turned eighteen. The Black Codes required masters to provide apprentices with food, clothing, medical attention, and reading lessons (for children under the age of fifteen) but permitted “the master or mistress . . . to inflict . . . moderate corporeal chastisement.”

African Americans vigorously protested the Apprenticeship Laws and sued to get their children back. Apprenticeship was a painful reminder of slavery when children “belonged to masters,” were valued for their labor, and could be taken from family at will. Children also sued for their freedom.

Anticipating protests about this curtailment of basic freedoms, legislators attempted to keep African Americans from meeting in public. The Black Codes included acts prohibiting freedpeople from “assembling themselves together, either in the day or night,” preaching without a license, making seditious speeches, disturbing the peace, using insulting language and gestures, and carrying weapons. Any gathering, large or small, carried a threat in the eyes of law.

The protests did come, and they came from all directions. Usually sympathetic Mississippi newspapers condemned the legislators’ rashness, outraged northerners claimed that the South refused to accept defeat, and eventually the US Congress disbanded the Mississippi legislature and returned the state to military rule. The Black Codes unwittingly helped turn the tide of public opinion in favor of African American citizenship and the right to vote.

Black Codes

Bolivar County

With the Mississippi River and Arkansas border forming its western edge, Bolivar County lies in the heart of the Delta. The county was established on 9 February 1836 from lands ceded to United States by the Choctaw Nation in 1830. The county is named for Simón Bolívar, a Spanish general celebrated for his contributions to independence movements in Central and South America. Bolivar possesses two county seats, Cleveland and Rosedale.

In its early years, Bolivar County had an almost entirely agricultural economy. In its first census in 1840, 838 people worked in agriculture, while only 5 were employed in manufacturing and commerce. In that year the county’s population consisted of 384 free whites, 1 free black, and 971 slaves. By 1860 Bolivar’s 9,078 slaves constituted 87 percent of the population, the fourth-highest ratio of slaves to free people in Mississippi.

Delta farmland was astonishingly valuable: on the eve of the Civil War Bolivar County had the second-highest land value in Mississippi. Despite its small population, the county ranked fourteenth in the state in cotton production. However, Bolivar ranked much lower in corn production (thirty-first) and in the value of its livestock (twenty-ninth). In 1860 Bolivar County employed only one person, a carriage maker, in manufacturing.

Postbellum Bolivar had a relatively small number of farms, but they, like many agricultural establishments in the Delta, were among the state’s largest. Bolivar’s nonagricultural economic sector remained relatively undeveloped, as the county’s twenty manufacturing firms employed only fifty-one men in 1880.

In 1887 Isaiah T. Montgomery, Joshua P. T. Montgomery, and Benjamin T. Green formed the town of Mound Bayou. An experiment in African American self-determination, Mound Bayou featured black mayors, banks, businesses, consumers, schools, and eventually a hospital. With much discussion about using Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee model, Mound Bayou earned the nickname the Jewel of the Delta.

Mound Bayou made Bolivar County a favored destination for African Americans interested in finding work, land, and a thriving African American economy and society. By 1880 Bolivar County was home to 15,958 African Americans and 2,694 whites. Leading Reconstruction-era politician Blanche Bruce, a former slave from Virginia, held several political positions and ran a newspaper in Bolivar County before serving as one of Mississippi’s US senators from 1875 to 1881.

The rush into the Delta continued in the late nineteenth century, and by 1900 Bolivar County had more than thirty-five thousand people, more than thirty-one thousand of them African Americans. But only 12 percent of Bolivar’s black farmers owned their own land, compared to 44 percent of the county’s white farmers. The partitioning of plantation farmland and shrinking lot acreage in Bolivar reflected a dramatic trend throughout the Mississippi Delta in the late 1800s. In 1880 the average farm in Bolivar was 311 acres, far larger than the state average. By 1900, with owners dividing land among growing numbers of tenants and sharecroppers, the county’s average farm size of 44 acres was among the lowest in the state.

The presence of Mound Bayou eventually helped to stimulate the development of small manufacturing firms. By the turn of the century, Bolivar County’s 117 manufacturing firms employed 383 workers, all of them male. Bolivar was also home to a small but significant portion of the Mississippi Delta’s growing immigrant population. In 1900 this population comprised 311 people and included some of the most sizable Italian (135 people) and Chinese (31 people) groups in the state.

With a small free population and a heavy concentration on agriculture, residents in antebellum Bolivar County did relatively little to develop a religious infrastructure. In 1860 the county had only five churches, all of them Methodist. By 1916, however, Bolivar was home to more than sixteen thousand Missionary Baptists, the largest concentration of the state’s leading religious denomination and more than two-thirds of Bolivar’s church members. The African Methodist Episcopal Church; the Methodist Episcopal Church, South; the Catholic Church; and the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church also had large memberships.

From 1900 to 1930 Bolivar County witnessed one of the most dramatic population increases in the state, doubling from around 35,000 to more than 71,000, all but 3,240 of whom lived in what were considered rural areas. As the Great Depression set in, Bolivar had the second-largest population and fourth-highest population density among Mississippi counties. Bolivar continued to maintain a significant African American majority. The county was also home to 314 Italians and 766 Russians, an uncommonly diverse population for rural Mississippi. Bolivar had more than thirteen thousand farms, but only 8.6 percent of farmers owned their land.

With the simultaneous presence of Mound Bayou and a large African American majority, it is no surprise that Bolivar County was the site of creative efforts both to organize African Americans and to address issues specific to residents of the Mississippi Delta. During the 1920s Bolivar County was home to seventeen chapters of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), one of the highest concentrations of such groups in the country. Founded by Marcus Garvey, the UNIA held up the goal of self-determination for all people of African descent. UNIA leader Adam Newson of Merigold was one of the state’s most prominent organizers. In 1936 the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union and a group of activists working from a range of Christian, socialist, and integrationist perspectives established the Delta Cooperative Farm near Hillhouse. To address the area’s lack of medical care, the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority created the Mississippi Health Project in the 1930s.

Activist Amzie Moore moved to Bolivar County in 1935 and lived and worked there for the rest of his life. Moore provided an important link between early organizational efforts and the civil rights protests of the 1960s. Doctor and business leader T. R. M. Howard moved to Mound Bayou in the 1940s and in 1951 organized the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, one of Mississippi’s first homegrown civil rights organizations. Sam Block, an activist who worked a great deal in Greenwood, was born in Cleveland in 1939. The short-lived Mississippi Freedom Labor Union began among Bolivar’s cotton farmers in 1965.

Several important musicians and artists hail from Bolivar County, which is divided by the famed blues thoroughfare Highway 61. Henry Townsend grew up in Shelby, David “Honeyboy” Edwards was born in Shaw, and Jimmy Reid is also from Bolivar. In 1954 Pup and Lee McCarty started McCarty Pottery, a unique and lasting effort to create art from Mississippi mud. Milburne Crowe founded the Mound Bayou Historical Society to gather information and to share the area’s unique story. Editor and author Charles East was born in Shelby in 1924, and author Jack Butler was born in Alligator in 1944.

Delta State Teachers College was created by the legislature in 1924 and opened in Cleveland the following year. Although the school was located in a largely black county, it admitted only white students. In 1955 the school expanded, becoming Delta State College and developing a larger set of institutional goals; by 1974 it had become a university. The school began admitting African American students in 1967 and has subsequently worked in numerous ways to serve its larger community. Delta State’s notable sports figures include basketball star Lusia Harris and baseball coach Dave “Boo” Ferris, and the teams have been known as the Statesmen, Lady Statesmen, and more recently the Fighting Okra.

The Sillers family held considerable power in and beyond Bolivar County. Walter Sillers Jr., the son of a powerful state legislator, helped organize the Delta Council, a cotton planters’ organization that helped influence national agricultural policy for generations. Sillers served in the Mississippi House of Representatives for fifty years, representing cotton growers and opposing the state’s political system and efforts to integrate schools. His sister, Florence Sillers Ogden, wrote a conservative column in the Delta for years and helped organize the Women for Constitutional Government in Jackson in 1962.

In the mid-twentieth century, Bolivar County’s substantial population began to decline. In 1960 the county was home to 54,464 people, more than two-thirds of them African Americans. Bolivar was among the top five counties in Mississippi in the percentage of people with less than five years of schooling (37 percent). Although the county’s agricultural workforce declined by 89 percent from 1960 to 1980, Bolivar still had the most agricultural laborers of any county in the state throughout the 1980s. During this era Bolivar ranked second in cotton production and first in wheat and rice; in fact, almost half of the state’s rice came from Bolivar. Conversely, the county had relatively little livestock and low corn production. By Mississippi standards, Bolivar maintained a large international community, with more than a thousand people born outside the United States. About half of the county’s immigrants were from Italy, while the majority of the others hailed from China and Mexico.

In 2010 Bolivar County’s population of 34,145 remained predominantly African American. As in many Mississippi Delta counties, Bolivar’s population had declined since 1960, losing 20,319 people (37 percent) over the previous half century.

Bolivar County

Boycotts, Civil Rights

Boycotts consist of withholding business or involvement as a form of protest. Mississippians frequently used boycotts as political tools in the civil rights movement to challenge particular forms of discrimination. Boycotts were ways of forcing issues by making situations difficult and potentially unbearable for the targeted people or businesses. Civil rights activists frequently used the phrase selective buying to make clear that they were giving their business only to people who treated them with respect or who had clearly rejected Jim Crow practices.

Boycotts often began after a dramatic incident—an act of violence or insult. The murder of George Lee in Belzoni, the attempted murder of George Metcalfe in Natchez, and the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis all led immediately to boycotts. In Clarksdale the decision to prohibit African American musicians from marching in a parade sparked a boycott. Some boycotts began as parts of broad strategies to force change, while others addressed very specific issues.

The boycotts of white-owned businesses often involved grievances regarding issues outside the stores. Boycotters addressed school segregation, violence, hiring practices, the makeup of local government agencies, and other matters. In some cases boycotters demanded greater access to government. Boycotts also dramatized issues involving the stores themselves, such as the refusal to allow African Americans to eat in restaurants or to try on clothing before purchasing it. “Don’t Shop Where You Can’t Eat” was a common demand. Other boycotts involved what activists called “courtesy titles”—that is, African Americans’ right to be called “Mr.,” “Mrs.,” or “Miss” rather than by their first names. And some involved demands that stores hire African Americans in positions other than the most menial.

Boycotts are intriguing forms of protest, because unlike strikes, marches, pickets, or other forms of direct action, they consist of not doing something: authorities have difficulty arresting people for staying out of stores. By not shopping, boycotters could also uphold an ideal of self-control, saying that some ideals outweighed the need for certain goods or conveniences such as riding a bus. Women were especially important in boycotts, in part because they were often the primary shoppers in their households. Ministers often made the point that boycotting was an expression of high moral principle, sometimes encouraging people to avoid spending money on new clothing for Easter or Christmas when higher goals were at stake.

Activists grew quite ready to boycott, especially after the tactic proved effective. Charles Evers led boycotts in Natchez and Fayette and showed he was ready to use force against African Americans who continued to patronize the boycotted stores. The 1965–66 Natchez boycott ended with a complete victory for Evers and his fellow activists: according to Evers, “Everything we asked for we have gotten concessions on, and then some.”

White Mississippians who opposed the civil rights movement responded to the boycotts in a variety of ways. Sometimes they tried to ignore the boycotts, hoping the protesters would run out of energy and nerve. Increasingly, however, authorities tried to make boycotts illegal. Boycotters in Jackson, Clarksdale, Natchez, and Greenwood faced arrest for “conspiring to commit acts injurious to public trade.” In 1966 Mississippi senator James O. Eastland suggested that the federal government should make boycotting illegal, and in 1968 the Mississippi legislature passed a law prohibiting certain types of boycotts. Business leaders in Port Gibson and Vicksburg sued activists, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, for money supposedly lost because of the boycotts.

Some white Mississippians used organized boycotts against groups they felt were becoming too friendly to the goals of the civil rights movement. Americans for the Preservation of the White Race, a small group organized in Natchez in 1963, condemned and sometimes boycotted businesses, especially national chain stores without strong Mississippi ties, that changed their traditionally discriminatory practices.

Prominent civil rights boycotts in Mississippi included Belzoni, 1955; Jackson, 1960, 1962–63; Clarksdale, 1961; Canton, 1964; Issaquena County, 1964; Sharkey County, 1964; Natchez, 1965–66; Greenwood, 1965, 1968; Edwards, 1966; Grenada, 1966; Port Gibson, 1966; Fayette, 1966; Indianola, 1968; Rosedale, 1970; Vicksburg, 1972; Holly Springs and Byhalia, 1974.

Boycotts, Civil Rights

Bryant, Phil

Phil Bryant was elected governor of Mississippi in the November 2011 Republican landslide. In that historic election, Republicans won all statewide offices, except for attorney general, and won majorities in both houses of the Mississippi Legislature. Bryant defeated the Democrat candidate, Mayor Johnny Dupree of Hattiesburg, by a 61- to 39-percent majority. Dupree was the first African American candidate in Mississippi history to win a major-party nomination for governor. Bryant campaigned as a populist conservative, promising job creation and lower taxes while opposing abortion, gay rights, illegal immigration, and gun restrictions.

Although his 2011 campaign was his first run for governor, Bryant had successfully conducted three previous statewide races, two for state auditor and one for lieutenant governor. In his 2003 state auditor re-election campaign he had carried 81 of Mississippi’s 82 counties.

Bryant was born on December 9, 1954, in Moorhead, a small Sunflower County community in the Mississippi Delta. His varied educational background includes an associate degree from Hinds Community College, a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from the University of Southern Mississippi, and a master’s degree in political science from Mississippi College. He has been honored as a distinguished alumni by all three institutions and has served as adjunct professor of government at Mississippi College.

He was elected to the House of Representatives from Rankin County in 1991 and re-elected in 1992 under the new redistricting plan. As a member of the House, he served as vice chairman of the Insurance Committee and authored the Capital Gains Tax Cut Act of 1994. In 1995 he was re-elected to the House and served until Gov. Kirk Fordice appointed him state auditor in 1996.

In 1999 Bryant was elected state auditor and re-elected in 2003. During his tenure as state auditor, Phil Bryant recovered more than $12 million in state funds that had been embezzled, or otherwise misused. He was elected lieutenant governor with 59 percent of the votes in November 2007, defeating Democrat candidate Jamie Franks Jr.

Among his many awards and honors is the 2004 Statesman of the Year Award by American Family Radio. He has been a longtime member of the National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action and is the recipient of the Kirk Fordice Freedom Award presented by the Central Mississippi chapter of the NRA.

As governor, Bryant’s economic development efforts and large financial incentives landed a few high profile successes, such as Yokohama Tire Corporation, but jobs production remained difficult as the state struggled to recover from the 2009 recession. In 2014 he announced Opportunity Mississippi, a program designed to bring “performance-based budgeting” to agencies in state government. Educational efforts included support for charter schools and literacy programs.

Bryant embraced his reputation as “the nation’s first tea party governor” by spending considerable energy opposing Pres. Barack Obama’s policies, such as refusing to expand Medicaid in Mississippi due to its integral role in the Affordable Care Act. He also joined dozens of other states suing to overturn deferment of immigration law enforcement by executive order and publicly vowed to block resettlement of any Syrian civil war refugees in the state. Bryant led the opposition that defeated a state constitutional amendment regarding public school funding, Initiative 42, in a statewide referendum and has opposed efforts to remove Confederate symbols from the state flag.

In 2015 he easily won a second term with 66 percent of the vote against Democrat Robert Gray, a surprise nominee and truck driver who ran a low-budget campaign. He continues to campaign for new industry and takes note of the decline in Mississippi unemployment from 9.2 percent when he took office in 2012 to 4.5 percent in 2018. He signed into law the nation’s most restrictive law against abortion and signed and supports House Bill 1523, the Religious Liberty Accommodations Act, also known as the Protecting Freedom of Conscience from Government Discrimination Act. Supporters of that act see it as offering support for deep religious convictions; opponents believe it allows discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people in the state. In his second term as governor, Bryant has taken a broader role in national politics, first endorsing presidential candidate Ted Cruz and then supporting the successful candidacy of Donald Trump, who won 58 percent of the state’s votes in the 2016 presidential election. In 2018 he named Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith to be the state’s first woman US senator.

Bryant, Phil

Calhoun County

Located in north-central Mississippi on land historically populated by Choctaw and Chickasaw peoples, Calhoun County was founded in 1852 and named for South Carolina political leader John C. Calhoun. Notable geographic features in Calhoun County include the Skuna and Yalobusha Rivers. Calhoun is also home to a ceremonial site from the late Woodland period. The county seat is Pittsboro. Other towns in Calhoun County include Bruce, Calhoun City, Derma, and Vardaman.

In its first census in 1860, Calhoun was home to more than nine thousand people. Slaves made up 19 percent of the population—the second-lowest percentage in Mississippi. As in many counties with more free people than slaves, corn was a more important commodity than cotton and other cash crops. Sixty-five men worked in industry—mostly in the lumber industry and small blacksmith shops. Calhoun County had thirty-six churches, sixteen of them Baptist, fourteen Methodist, and six Presbyterian.

By 1880 the population of Calhoun County had grown to 13,492, with African Americans accounting for one quarter of the residents. Calhoun had only thirty-eight industrial workers, and more than 75 percent of the county’s farmers owned their own land. By 1900 the population increased by more than two thousand, yet landownership had declined dramatically: 57 percent of the county’s white famers owned their land, as did just 24 percent of African American farmers.

The 1916 religious census found that members of the Southern Baptist Convention made up more than half of Calhoun’s churchgoers, with the Methodist Episcopal Church, South; Colored Methodist Episcopal Church; and the National Baptist Convention as the next-largest groups. Calhoun County hosted the state’s first Sacred Harp singing convention in 1878. Born in Calhoun County in 1898, Zelma Wells Price became a state legislator from Washington County with a particular interest in opposing the sale of alcohol.

Calhoun County’s overall population changed very little between 1900 and 1930, though African Americans dropped to one-fifth of all residents. By 1930 Calhoun had seventy-one manufacturing establishments, and they employed 528 people. Agriculture remained the primary employer, and corn was the most important crop.

By 1960 Calhoun had a population of almost sixteen thousand people, 73 percent of them white. Calhoun’s farmers grew the second-highest amount of corn in the state and had the seventh-highest number of hogs. The county’s production of other agricultural crops and timber was about average for the state. Along with its timber industry, Calhoun had a growing furniture industry that employed 763 people.

Vardaman has become a central place for the growing and marketing of sweet potatoes. Now called the Sweet Potato Capital of the World, the town hosts the annual Sweet Potato Festival.

Calhoun County was the home of the forty-second and forty-seventh governor of Mississippi, Dennis Murphree. Maj. Gen. Fox Conner, chief of operations for the American Expeditionary Force during World War I and a mentor to George C. Marshall and Dwight D. Eisenhower, was also born in Calhoun County. Ann Downing, an important southern gospel musician, was born in Pittsboro in 1945 and learned to sing in area churches and singing schools. Laurie Parker, author of Everywhere in Mississippi and other works about the state, was born in Bruce in 1963.

Other notable people from Calhoun County include National Football League players Frederick L. Thomas, Armegis Spearman, Cornelius Wortham, and M. D. Jennings as well as Major League Baseball player Dave Parker, who was the National League’s Most Valuable Player in 1978. Saxophone player and Mississippi Musicians’ Hall of Fame member John “Ace” Cannon also resided in Calhoun County.

The county’s population fluctuated slightly but remained relatively stable between 1960 (15,941) and 2010 (14,962). In 2010, 67 percent of Calhoun’s residents were white, 28 percent were black, and 5.4 percent were Latino/Hispanic.

Calhoun County

Canton Civil Rights Movement

The Canton movement for civil rights sought to address issues common to many segregated communities in the state. In addition to experiencing voter disfranchisement, many African Americans in the town lived in extreme poverty, and the community had an infant mortality rate of 42 percent, one of the highest in the state. Community activists included local residents and, beginning in 1963, workers from the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), an umbrella group that comprised the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), among other organizations. CORE was particularly active in Canton. Workers had a variety of aims, including voter registration, the building of a community center and library, and increased literacy.

In the early 1950s three hundred black Cantonians marched to the courthouse to register to vote; forty applicants succeeded. Throughout the decade and into the 1960s, only two hundred more of Canton’s African Americans registered. Over an eight-month period beginning in 1963, COFO organized one thousand attempted registrations, only thirty of which succeeded. At this point, hundreds of people filed affidavits with the US Justice Department on the grounds of voter discrimination.

In January 1964 members of the black community began a selective buying campaign, boycotting twenty-one stores and three products (Mosby’s Milk, Barq’s Root Beer, and Hart’s Bread) because the companies that produced them maintained unfair hiring practices. COFO said the boycott was 90 percent effective. One store owner came to a mass meeting to apologize for past discrimination. However, many community members active in the boycott faced reprisals from hostile police and an active Citizens’ Council. The Canton City Council passed a law banning people from handing out leaflets without the permission of the police department, and many arrests followed when activists continued to spread the word about the boycott. Later that year the State Senate discussed making selective buying campaigns illegal.

Individual community members often faced reprisals—sometimes violent—as well. When George Washington, a black businessman, refused to serve as an informer for those trying to halt the work of activists, the gas pumps at his grocery store were removed and his meat deliveries cut off. Police officers beat two teens severely after they left a voter registration meeting in February 1964, shooting blanks near the young men’s heads and threatening to kill their family members. In July 1964 white gas station attendant Price Lewis shot at a group of black teenagers who volunteered with COFO.

The workers in Madison County planned the first of three Freedom Days on 28 February 1964, when 350 African Americans marched to the courthouse to register to vote. In March almost 3,000 black schoolchildren boycotted Canton’s segregated schools to protest their inadequate facilities. A second Freedom Day followed on 13 March, with a third held on 29 May and featuring CORE director James Farmer as a speaker. Following that meeting, white supremacists shot at and attempted to bomb the Freedom House.

An important element of the movement in Canton was the creation of the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM) in 1965. CDGM was Head Start program that provided preschool and medical care for children as well as jobs in impoverished areas. Despite these advances, state officials often charged CDGM with mismanagement. Many members of Canton’s black community felt that the CDGM’s hiring practices, controlled by Rev. James McRee and George Raymond, were unfair. The state cut funding from the Head Start programs in 1967, and CDGM was replaced by other organizations.

James Meredith’s March against Fear came to Canton in July 1966, and activists met the two hundred marchers as they entered the town, taking them to a rally at the courthouse with a crowd of one thousand. The marchers had planned to camp at a black public school, but city officials forbade this action. Led by Stokely Carmichael, the crowd began to set up tents in spite of the presence of heavily armed state troopers. The troopers fired gas into the crowds, burning and blinding many of marchers, and then beat those who did not disperse.

The movement in Madison County relied on the leadership of several key persons. C. O. Chinn, a local business owner known for his fearlessness, provided his store as a space for meetings and protected other activists from violent attacks. George Raymond, a former freedom rider from New Orleans, provided much of the strategy for the Canton movement, serving as the only staff member when the first CORE office opened in the county in 1963. Anne Moody, a Tougaloo College graduate later known for her memoir, Coming of Age in Mississippi, spent Freedom Summer 1964 in Canton. Annie Devine, a well-respected teacher and insurance saleswoman who was intimately familiar with the workings of both Canton’s black and white communities, provided essential leadership and later served as a member of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s delegation to the 1964 Democratic National Convention.

Canton Civil Rights Movement

Carroll County

Carroll County is a hilly area with fertile valleys in central Mississippi, flanked by the Big Black River along its southeastern border and originally by the Tallahatchie and Yazoo Rivers at its western periphery. The county was founded on 23 December 1833 from land ceded to the United States by the Choctaw Nation under the 1830 Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. A significant percentage of the original county acreage was eventually incorporated into neighboring Leflore, Grenada, and Montgomery Counties. Carroll County and its seat, Carrollton, take their names from wealthy colonial politician Charles Carroll. In 1840 the county’s population was almost evenly divided, with 5,136 whites, 1 free black, and 5,344 slaves.

By 1860 the county’s slave population of 13,808—the ninth-highest in the state—was markedly larger than the county’s free population of 8,227. Through the toil of this sizable slave labor force, antebellum Carroll County developed a flourishing agricultural economy and the sixth-most-valuable farmland in Mississippi. Carroll County’s farms and plantations ranked eighth in the state in cotton grown, fifth in corn and sweet potatoes, third in livestock, and first in peas and beans by a wide margin. The county had twenty-three churches, divided evenly among Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians.

In the postbellum period, the county’s population remained largely African American. Carroll County had a higher percentage of farmers who owned their farms (65 percent) than the state average in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and those farmers tended to work larger-than-average lots of land. The county had a small manufacturing economy in 1880, with twenty-one establishments employing forty-five men, nineteen women, and eleven children.

In the early 1890s Mississippi’s first chapter of the Southern Farmers’ Alliance formed in Carroll County, and the journal of the state’s Colored Farmers’ Alliance, the Advocate, was published in Vaiden. Carroll County was the home of James Z. George, a Populist leader who became a main force behind the state’s 1890 constitution.

By the early twentieth century, Carroll had grown to more than twenty thousand people, with African Americans still slightly outnumbering whites. Farming continued to dominate the economy. Slightly more than half of Carroll’s white farmers owned their own land, while only 17 percent of African American farmers did so; the rest were either tenants or sharecroppers.

In 1916 the county’s churchgoing population was divided among several Protestant groups. The National Baptist Convention and Southern Baptist Convention were the largest denominations, followed by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South; the Methodist Episcopal Church; the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church; the Presbyterian Church, and the Disciples of Christ.

In 1930 Carroll County was still extremely rural, with 90 percent of the population living on farms. Less than a quarter of the county’s farmers owned their land, while Carroll had a small but growing industrial base of about 150 workers.

Carroll has been home to a good number of creative Mississippians. Willie Narmour and Shell Smith, popular string band musicians of the 1920s and 1930s, grew up there. Elizabeth Spencer, author of The Voice at the Back Door and Light in the Piazza, grew up in Carrollton, which she discusses in her memoir, Landscapes of the Heart.

In 1960 Carroll County was home to 11,117 people, about 58 percent of them African American. Two-thirds of the workforce was involved in production of various agricultural staples, including cotton, corn, wheat, livestock, soybeans, and timber. By 1980 the agricultural workforce had decreased to around 10 percent of the working population. The county’s few manufacturing firms were largely connected to the timber and furniture industries, while a few minor mineral industries had emerged as well, producing sand and gravel. Carroll was one of the state’s poorest counties, with the second-lowest per capita income and more than 10 percent of the population receiving federal aid.

Between 1960 and 2010, Carroll County’s population remained relatively stable, although the white proportion of the total increased to 66 percent, a phenomenon common in many central Mississippi counties.

Carroll County

Chicago, Black Mississippians in

Between 1910 and 1950 Chicago was the crossroads of northern urbanity. The first mass movement of black southerners to northern cities occurred during and immediately after World War I. Participants in this Great Migration left their southern homes but brought with them, as Mississippi native Richard Wright notes in his 1945 autobiography Black Boy, the “scars, visible and invisible,” of southern boyhood. Wright was both fascinated and intimidated by his move north. “I was seized by doubt,” he recalled of the moment he walked out of the railroad station in Chicago. “Should I have come here? But going back was impossible. I had fled a known terror, and perhaps I could cope with this unknown terror that lay ahead.”

Wright wrote that, on the one hand, Chicago was the quintessential “self-conscious” and “known” city; on the other, it was the place where the contemporary facts of African American experience took “their starkest form [and] crudest manifestation.” Wright stressed, “There is an open and raw beauty about that city that seems either to kill or endow one with the spirit of life. I felt those extremes of possibility, death and hope, while I lived half hungry and afraid in a city to which I had fled . . . to tell my story.”

Most migrants were barely literate and never left such vivid recollections of their experience. Yet black southerners “recognized that their future lay in the North.” “Northern fever” permeated the black South, as letters, rumors, gossip, and black newspapers carried word of higher wages and better treatment in the North. Approximately half a million black southerners chose to say farewell to the South and start life anew in northern cities during 1916–19, and nearly one million more followed in the 1920s. From the cities, towns, and farms of the Deep South, especially Mississippi, they poured into any northern city where jobs could be found.

Stepping off the trains, African American migrants flocked to Chicago’s South Side neighborhoods. In 1910, 78 percent of black Chicagoans lived in a narrow strip of South Side land known as the Black Belt. From 1916 until 1948, racially restrictive covenants kept other Chicago neighborhoods white. These covenants covered large parts of the city and, in combination with zones of nonresidential use, almost wholly surrounded the African American residential districts of the period, cutting off corridors of extension.

The urban landscape, while segregated and disorienting, was exciting as well. In the early 1920s migrants headed for the Stroll District—South State Street and 35th Street. A decade later migrants headed deeper into Chicago’s Black Belt to the popular Bronzeville neighborhood, whose heart was the intersection of 47th Street and South Parkway (now Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard). The massive migration of African Americans from the South to northern cities revealed the creation of “a city within a city” in Chicago, as Bronzeville became the capital of black America. An extended walk in any direction from that intersection would have brought institutions of local black life into view—the Wabash YMCA west on 39th Street and the Provident Hospital east along 51st Street, Supreme Liberty Life Insurance on South Park at 35th, and the offices of the Chicago Defender and the Associated Negro Press just west along 35th. A wide variety of churches and spiritual homes could also be found, among them the Olivet Baptist Church at 31st and South Park, the Metropolitan Community Church ten blocks south, and the small but growing Second Temple of the Nation of Islam further south and west of 63rd and Cottage Grove.

Bronzeville certainly possessed many of the signs of a high quality of life. But it was also a community of stark contrasts, the “facets of its life as varied as the colors of its people’s skins.” These contrasts between urban achievement and profound social problems grew with continued northward migration through the Great Depression and World War II, as Bronzeville’s already crowded tenement apartments absorbed wave after wave of newcomers. As migration picked up steam again between 1942 and 1944, some sixty thousand more new arrivals doubled the city’s black population to 337,000, one-tenth of the total. Buildings abandoned and condemned in the 1930s were reinhabited during the war years, and the Black Belt remained, in Richard Wright’s words, “an undigested lump in Chicago’s melting pot.”

Chicago, Black Mississippians in

Chickasaw County

Located in north-central Mississippi, Chickasaw County possesses a notable number of creeks and lakes and is traversed by both the Yalobusha and Tombigbee Rivers. Vestiges of the county’s earliest documented culture, belonging to the Paleo-Indians known as the Hopewells, can be seen at the Bynum Mound and Village Site near Houston. The French and British also occupied Chickasaw lands during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Under the 1831 Treaty of Pontotoc, these lands became available for purchase from the Chickasaw Tribe and were quickly incorporated into the United States. The county takes its name from the region’s native inhabitants and was formally established on 9 February 1836. Chickasaw’s two county seats are Okolona and Houston, the latter named for the distinguished leader of the Texas war of independence, Gen. Sam Houston.

In 1840 Chickasaw was home to 2,148 free whites, 1 free African American, and 806 slaves. Early on, the county was almost entirely agricultural, and the plantation economy was central to Chickasaw’s antebellum prosperity. By 1860 the county had changed substantially. Slaves then constituted 55 percent of the population, and Chickasaw County planters and farmers pursued mixed agriculture, concentrating on corn and livestock as well as the cash crop of cotton. Following the construction of the Mobile and Ohio Railroad through Chickasaw in 1859, the county’s main sphere of commercial activity shifted from Houston to Okolona. While only eighty-three residents of Chickasaw County were employed in industry in 1860, its manufacturing sector produced a substantial variety of commodities, including fixed agricultural implements, flour and meal, lumber, boots, carriages, furniture, and saddles and harnesses.

As in much of Mississippi, most of Chickasaw’s antebellum congregants attended Baptist or Methodist churches. Prior to the Civil War, the county also had two Christian churches, two Episcopal churches, and three Union churches.

Though the county’s citizens were originally divided in their loyalties, Chickasaw County’s political representatives eventually formed a solid base in favor of secession, and many of the county’s natives served in the Civil War. In addition to several attempts by federal troops to destroy the stretch of the Mobile and Ohio Railroad running through the county, a number of battles and raids took place in Chickasaw. Property owners in the county suffered losses on many fronts as a result of the war, especially in the destruction of the county’s economic infrastructure.

Chickasaw was considered among the state’s postbellum “black districts,” as following the war its political boundaries were redrawn to ensure the election of African American candidates. Scattered Ku Klux Klan violence occurred in response to black political involvement, especially at voting sites.

The county’s population struggled during the postbellum era. In 1872 Clay and Webster Counties annexed portions of Chickasaw. Though agriculture remained the county’s primary subsistence activity, the demise of Chickasaw’s plantation economy led to the rise of small farms and sharecropping. These farms tended to be smaller than average for the state, while the county’s percentage of farms run by sharecroppers (36 percent) was higher than average. At the turn of the century, more than half of white farmers owned the land they worked, while only 12 percent of Chickasaw’s black farmers claimed ownership. The county’s industrial workforce also remained relatively small, with manufacturing firms employing just seventy-eight people.

Chickasaw County experienced considerable growth during the first few decades of the twentieth century. By 1900 the county’s population had grown to almost twenty thousand, and in 1909 the county constructed Mississippi’s first Carnegie Library in Houston. Chickasaw also saw a rise in industrial activity during this era, and its agricultural economy moved away from cotton cultivation toward livestock.

By 1916 more than half of the Chickasaw’s church members were Baptists—mostly either Missionary Baptists or Southern Baptists. Smaller but still significant numbers of congregants attended the Methodist Episcopal Church, the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, and the Presbyterian Church. Chickasaw County was home to notable religious musicians, including shape-note singer W. A. Beasley and the Pilgrim Jubilees gospel group.

Frank Burkitt, a Populist editor and political figure, was a Chickasaw County native, as was Pauline Orr, an important figure at the Mississippi University for Women. Blues musician Booker “Bukka” White was born in Houston in 1909. Country singer Bobbie Gentry, known for her rendition of “Ode to Billie Joe,” was likewise born in Chickasaw and mentioned the county often in her music. Chickasaw has long been home to Sparta Opry, a live country music show. William Raspberry, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, grew up in Okolona and graduated from Okolona College High School in 1952.

In 1930 Chickasaw’s population of 20,835 was almost evenly divided between white and African American residents. Only about 29 percent of farmers owned their own land. Dairy farming and cattle became increasingly central to Chickasaw’s agricultural sector during the first half of the twentieth century, while sweet potato cultivation increased following World War II. The county’s industrial force was also growing, employing 224 workers in 1930. During the Great Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps constructed the Natchez Trace Game Area in Chickasaw.

By 1960 Chickasaw County’s population had dropped below 17,000, and almost two-thirds of residents were white. Twenty years later, only 220 people were still involved in agriculture, while more than half of the workforce, almost 5,000 people, held manufacturing positions, largely in timber and textiles.

Like many central Mississippi counties, in 2010 Chickasaw County’s population of 17,932 was predominantly white and had not changed significantly in size since 1960. However, a small but significant Latino/Hispanic minority had emerged.

Chickasaw County

Chickasaw-European Relations

Hernando de Soto’s treasure-hunting expedition from mid-December 1540 to mid-June 1541 marked the first direct exposure to Europeans for the members of the Chickasaw tribe. After three months of the Spaniards’ demands and impositions, the Chickasaw suddenly attacked, inflicting heavy losses in terms of men, horses, and equipment. The weakened Spaniards at last moved on, but for two centuries thereafter they left the Chickasaw strictly alone. The tribe remained out of continuous contact with Europeans until the end of the seventeenth century. (La Salle briefly encountered two of them on his 1682 expedition down the Mississippi.)

In 1698 Thomas Welch and Anthony Dodsworth arrived with packhorses from Charles Town, South Carolina, and in short order the English built a thriving commerce. A year later, Iberville landed at Biloxi and founded the French colony of Louisiana and two Englishmen led a Chickasaw raid on an Acolapissa village near the mouth of the Pearl River, taking many captives. The French knew that they now faced a grave strategic threat to their North American empire (governed from Quebec) as a consequence of the English presence on the Mississippi near the mouth of the Ohio. The Chickasaw thus occupied an area both England and France deemed crucial to control of North America.

The English pack trains brought profound, traumatic change to Chickasaw culture and destiny. Into a Late Stone Age society the English introduced guns, ammunition, and horses; machine-woven cloth and Bengal silk; metal hoes, knives, hatchets, axes, and scissors; brass wire and kettles; beads, mirrors, vermillion pigment, and “Dutch pretties”; and alcohol. In return, the Chickasaw offered deer hides (leather, buckskins); bear and buffalo furs and robes; wolf, panther, and other pelts; honey, beeswax, tallow, salt, and hickory-nut oil; and captives for the Charles Town slave market. When needed, conch shells continued as currency, but the demand had increased tremendously.

Like the Choctaw and others, the Chickasaw began to crave the traders’ wares and soon considered them necessities. Without firearms, the Indians rightly concluded, their existence was at stake. Hence, the Chickasaw and others expanded their hunting range dramatically to get more deerskins for trade, leading to clashes with many tribes—Choctaw, Shawnee, Cherokee, Kickapoo, Illini, Mobile, Osage, Quapaw, and Creek—some of them French allies. Particularly after 1763, as white settlers moved west and plantation agriculture began appearing, increasing hunting ranges fueled economic rivalries, movement, conflict, pillage, and bloodshed among the tribes.

The heavy involvement by the Chickasaw in the slave trade intensified their warlike character, making them the most notorious Indian slavers of the Southeast. Enslavement of captives was an ancient Chickasaw practice. The tribe’s women, who did most of the farming, had often urged their men to get more captives. Now, with English traders providing a huge market for Indian slaves, Chickasaw slaving parties ranged along the Lower Mississippi into Illinois and up the Arkansas and Red Rivers. The English paid well in goods, guns, and horses and then sold the captives at Charles Town, whence they usually were shipped to the West Indies in exchange for blacks to work on the North American plantations. The Chickasaw slave trade not only filled English pockets but also stoked the tribe’s resistance to French traders and French-influenced tribes, particularly the Choctaw, and to Roman Catholic missionaries, thereby serving England’s strategic interests. The French retaliated, though less effectively, by offering bounties to the Choctaw for Chickasaw scalps and captives and inciting the Choctaw to attack the pack trains.

Knowing that they needed support from the major tribes to establish Louisiana, the French tried, with modest success at times, to promote peace between the Choctaw and Chickasaw. By the 1720s, however, it was obvious the Chickasaw would never expel the English traders, with whom the French could not compete at any level—quantity, quality, or price. If the French North American empire were to defeat the English challenge, not only was Choctaw support, wavering but still holding, essential, but the Chickasaw must be destroyed. France’s attempts to do so resulted in the Chickasaw Wars (1723–53), during which the tribe frustrated two hugely expensive French expeditions (1736, 1739–40). Though the Chickasaw remained unconquered, repeated French and Choctaw raids and crop burnings and devastating outbreaks of smallpox weakened the Chickasaw both in numbers and in cultural cohesion.

From the start, a smattering of English traders had lived with and married the Chickasaw. After the French and Indian War (1754–63) ended France’s North American empire, increasing numbers of English joined the Chickasaw, raised mixed-blood families, and became tribal leaders because of their and their descendants’ knowledge of English, writing, and business. The tribe also continued to adopt remnants of other tribes, most notably Natchez refugees after 1729. A small but persistent pro-French faction, hoping to avoid French and Choctaw depredations, unintentionally undermined tribal leaders’ authority. Moreover, warriors were evolving from subsistence hunters to frontier businessmen, eagerly searching for items to pay for English goods. Trading posts gradually displaced the old council houses.

With the French gone and the Spanish weakening, the Chickasaw, like all of the southeastern Indians, found less maneuvering room between rival white powers. For the Chickasaw, subjection to the authority of another government was unprecedented. A 1763 British royal decree reserved for the Indians the vast territory from the Appalachians to the Mississippi and from the Ohio south to the thirty-first parallel. The Chickasaw supported the British against Pontiac’s Rebellion (1763) and maintained claims to land along the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers against the Shawnee and Cherokee, but relative peace prevailed. A growing group of traders, peddlers, hunters, and frontier farmers, however, strained the tribe. Unscrupulous traders cheated and stole, smuggled liquor, and wreaked havoc in the villages; hunters poached on tribal lands; transient frontiersmen squatted or “bought” land (which was illegal). Chickasaw began to own black slaves, thus beginning the transformation of the Lower Mississippi Valley into an agricultural-export economy. Continuing white-Indian marriages spawned more mixed-blood families whose power in the tribe continued to grow.

During the American Revolution (1775–83), most Chickasaw villages preferred neutrality. The British courted the chiefs, who agreed in 1777 to guard the land routes and the Mississippi River from the Ohio past the Chickasaw Bluffs. The Americans completed Fort Jefferson at the mouth of the Ohio in 1780 as a base for operations down the Mississippi by George Rogers Clark. A force of Chickasaw led by James Colbert, son of James Logan Colbert, an immigrant Scottish trader who became patriarch of a family of mixed-bloods that dominated Chickasaw political life for generations, besieged the fort and forced its abandonment in June 1781.

Spain, seeking recovery of Florida from Great Britain, joined the Americans in 1779 and captured Pensacola, Mobile, Baton Rouge, and Natchez. British refugees from West Florida fled to the Chickasaw, the sole British ally in the region, further increasing the Anglo presence among the tribe. Reinforced by refugees, Chickasaw raiders, most notably Colbert’s Chickasaw Company, virtually closed the Mississippi to Spanish shipping. They also foiled Spanish attempts to capture Colbert at Chickasaw Bluffs and to use the northern Indians, especially the Kickapoo, against them. In 1782 Colbert captured the wife and children of Spain’s lieutenant governor of Illinois. Yet Spanish intrigues among the southeastern Indians continued long after the revolution. For a time, the Indians again played white governments against each other: Spain versus the new United States of America. Factions among the Chickasaw—pro-Spanish (formerly pro-French), pro-British (after 1783, pro–United States), vacillators, and many self-serving mixed-bloods—disputed the tribe’s future course. Three years of palavers and intrigues led to an agreement concluded by the pro-American (and largest) faction. The Treaty of Hopewell (signed by the Chickasaw on 3 January 1786) recognized US sovereignty.

Spain continued to seek control of the Lower Mississippi, principally by posing as the protector of the southeastern Indians but also by inciting the pro-Spanish Creek against the pro-American Chickasaw. In 1785 Spanish troops, supported by the pro-Spanish Chickasaw, built Fort San Fernando at Chickasaw Bluffs. Nevertheless, a majority of the Chickasaw finally supported fighting against the pro-Spanish Creek in 1793–95. (Some Chickasaw fought under Gen. Anthony Wayne at Fallen Timbers in 1794 to subdue Ohio’s Indians.) In the Treaty of San Lorenzo (1795), the United States prevailed. Spain recognized American sovereignty east of the Mississippi down to the thirty-first parallel and abandoned Fort San Fernando, which became Fort Adams (1797).

Chickasaw-European Relations

Chinese

During the post–Civil War period, southern planters experimented with Chinese labor as an alternative to freed slaves. The experiment failed, but the Chinese immigrants remained. Many found an economic niche by opening grocery stores in black neighborhoods. The union benefited both the African Americans, who found relief from plantation-based commissaries, and the Chinese, who found new financial opportunities as merchants.

Other Chinese also came to the Mississippi Delta—some from California after having worked on the railroads, others escaping turmoil in China in the early twentieth century. As Chinese established an economic presence, family members came to join them, often to work in the grocery stores. That support system, combined with difficult political and economic conditions in China, led the number of Chinese in the Delta to grow from 183 in 1900 to 743 in 1940.

Living in the Delta was a challenge for early Chinese immigrants. Not inclined toward assimilation with the black minority and rejected by the prejudice of the white majority, the Chinese found themselves socially isolated. Many Chinese cultivated the white community, seeking social affirmation. They began sending their children to white churches and giving money to causes and programs favored by white leaders. Some anglicized their Chinese family names.

Such efforts ultimately met with some success, and the white community gradually ceased to perceive the Chinese as nonwhite and began to grant them some degree of privilege, allowing them to frequent public places from which blacks were barred. Chinese grocers improved their stores, acknowledged Jim Crow laws, and began to have white customers. In addition to business, these efforts provided Delta Chinese with increased social mobility.

In some communities, embracing the white community had the important tangential benefit of giving the Chinese access to white public schools. The Mississippi Constitution, adopted in 1890 by conservative Democrats determined to eliminate the last vestiges of Republican Reconstruction, included a clear mandate for a dual school system for whites and blacks. Since the document did not address education for Chinese, they attended white schools in communities throughout the Delta. In 1924, however, Rosedale officials declared that Chinese children could no longer attend white schools, prompting a lawsuit. The case, Lum v. Rice, ultimately reached the US Supreme Court, which upheld the Mississippi Supreme Court’s ruling denying Chinese students access to white public schools.

In response, Mississippi Chinese developed partnerships with local (usually Baptist) churches to establish mission schools. Chinese children attending these schools received instruction from a white teacher during the regular school day and supplemental instruction from Chinese tutors in the evenings. In return for their financial support, the churches required inclusion of religious instruction in the curriculum and received decision-making responsibility for the schools.

These schools provided an educational lifeline for Chinese living throughout the Delta, where few acceptable educational alternatives existed. Not only did Chinese children receive an education comparable to that of whites, but the refusal to send children to black schools provided further evidence that the Chinese deserved social acceptance.

World War II gave the Delta Chinese further opportunities to prove themselves. Some enlisted in the armed services, others engaged in rigorous fund-raising in support of the war effort, and all demonstrated their patriotism. The alliance between China and the United States against a common enemy, Japan, further cemented the bond between white and Chinese Mississippians. The enthusiasm with which the Delta Chinese embraced the war effort impressed their white neighbors.

After World War II, Chinese children in the Delta gradually began to attend white public schools, with the timeline for doing so dictated by the individual school districts. The significant increase in access to high-quality public education at both the K–12 and postsecondary levels proved a double-edged sword for Chinese families. The downside to improved education was a decrease in the willingness to take over the family grocery store and remain insulated from the outside world and an increase in the desire to pursue economic and educational opportunities elsewhere. The number of people of Chinese ancestry in the Delta peaked at about 1,200 in 1960 and declined to fewer than 1,000 by the 1990s. The 2010 census counted 3,695 people of Chinese ancestry in the state of Mississippi.

The Chinese have made valuable contributions to the quality of life in the Delta. People of Chinese descent have served as mayors, as leaders of civic clubs and churches, and in all facets of community life. Their stores and businesses have contributed significantly to the economy, and they have a strong record of philanthropic support for community causes, especially education. And when US president Bill Clinton proclaimed 26 October 1998 Chinese Veterans of World War II Day, longtime Delta resident Kenneth Gong was one of the White House honorees.

In 2012 the Mississippi Delta Chinese History Museum opened in the Capps Archive and Museum at Delta State University in Cleveland.

Chinese

Choctaw County

Choctaw County, founded in 1833, is located in central Mississippi. The county is named for the Choctaw people. The Natchez Trace Parkway travels through Choctaw County, and the Tombigbee National Forest is partially located in the county. Waterways in the county include Besa Chitto Creek and Big Bywy Ditch. The county seat is Ackerman. Other towns include French Camp, Mathison, and Weir.

In its first census in 1840, Choctaw County had a population of 6,010, 74 percent of them free and 26 percent slaves. The vast majority of residents worked in agriculture, with only sixty-three people employed in manufacturing. While many parts of Mississippi witnessed dramatic increases in the percentage of slaves in the 1840s and 1850s, Choctaw County registered only a 1 percent increase in slaves by 1860. At the end of the antebellum period, Choctaw was home to more than fifteen thousand residents, most of whom worked on farms. As in many areas with free majorities, Choctaw emphasized corn and livestock more than cotton. With forty-three industrial establishments employing 146 workers, Choctaw had a more active industrial economy than most Mississippi counties. The Mississippi Manufacturing Company, chartered in 1848, became one of the state’s first significant textile mills. Choctaw had forty free women working in establishments that turned cotton and wool into cloth. Other industrial workers were employed primarily in blacksmithing and lumber.

In the religious census of 1860, Choctaw County had seventy-three churches, the most in the state, among them thirty-six Baptist churches, twenty-seven Methodist churches, eight Presbyterian churches, and two Christian churches.

In 1880 Choctaw County had a population of 9,036, 6,537 of them white and 2,498 African American. The county’s twenty-nine manufacturing establishments employed just fifty-three men and no women. Agriculture remained the primary economic concern, and about two-thirds of the 1,358 farmers owned their land. Representing the interests of smaller farmers, the Populist movement did particularly well in Choctaw County.

By 1900 Choctaw County’s population had topped 13,000. Two-thirds of the 1,684 white farmers owned their farmland, about twice the rate among the 505 black farmers. The number of industrial workers increased to 102.

According to the religious census of 1916, the largest church groups in Choctaw County were Southern Baptists and Missionary Baptists, which combined to account for more than half of Choctaw’s churchgoers. Other major groups included the Methodist Episcopal Church, South; the Methodist Episcopal Church; the Presbyterian Church; and the Churches of Christ. Methodists founded Wood College in Mathiston in 1886. The Blackwood Brothers, one of the most popular quartets in gospel music, started in Ackerman in the 1930s, first singing in churches and soon performing on the radio. Other musicians of note who grew up in Choctaw County include fiddlers Hoyt Ming, Willie Narmour, and Dock Hemphill.

From 1900 to 1930 Choctaw’s population declined slightly, with the county now home to 12,339 people, 8,866 of them white and 3,473 African American. Choctaw County farmers grew more corn than their counterparts elsewhere in Mississippi.

By 1960 Choctaw County’s 8,423 people represented one of the state’s smallest and most sparsely settled populations, and 70 percent of residents were white. More than half of the workforce still labored in agriculture, largely corn and cattle. Over the next two decades, the number of people involved in manufacturing rose from 310 to 1,310, though personal income rose only from third-lowest in the state to seventh-lowest over that period.

Notable people born or residing in Choctaw County include National Football League player Kenneth Johnson and Major League Baseball pitcher Roy Oswalt, who also played on the gold-medal-winning team during the 2000 Olympics. Choctaw County was home to another Olympian, track star Coby Miller, who earned a silver medal in the men’s 4 ×100 relay in the 2004 Olympics. Cheryl Prewitt, Miss America 1980, is from Choctaw County, as are two Mississippi governors. James P. Coleman, the state’s fifty-first chief executive, and Ray Mabus (fifty-ninth), who later served as US secretary of the navy and ambassador to Saudi Arabia.

Like many central Mississippi counties, Choctaw County’s 2010 population remained predominantly white, and at 8,547, it had not changed significantly in size since 1960.

Choctaw County

Choctaw Indians, Mississippi Band of

The Mississippi Choctaw live in eight recognized communities throughout east-central Mississippi. Despite one of the highest blood quorum requirements of any American Indian tribe (50 percent), tribal rolls have been steadily increasing in recent years, with approximately ten thousand members today.

Two distinct myths explain how the Choctaw came to live in Mississippi. In the migration myth, two brothers, Chahta and Chikasa, traveled from the West looking for more fertile hunting grounds. Each night they planted a pole in the ground, and each morning the pole leaned in the direction the group was to travel that day. One rainy night, the two groups became separated, with Chikasa’s group continuing across the swelling waters of the Pearl River while Chahta’s group remained behind. In the morning, Chahta found the pole upright, indicating that they had finally reached their new home at the Nanih Waiya mound, translated variously as “leaning hill” or “mother mound.” In the second myth, the Choctaw emerged from the center of the earth out of a hole in the sacred Nanih Waiya mound, following the Seminole, Cherokee, Creek, and Chickasaw, who scattered throughout the Southeast. Emerging last, the Choctaw were granted the lands of their birthplace as their home. Although the two myths differ dramatically, both describe connections to neighboring tribes and identify Nanih Waiya as the spiritual and geographical center of the Choctaw homeland, granted to the tribe by divine right. Archaeological, historical, and linguistic records support both a migration from the West and the coherent founding of a distinct tribe in the Nanih Waiya area in Winston County.

Written documents first record the name Choctaw at the end of the seventeenth century. At this time, the Choctaw lived in three distinct districts, with two divisions and multiple clans within each division that established social and political boundaries. As an exogamous, matrilineal community, tribe members were expected to marry outside their clan. While clan identity is no longer recognized, some tribe members, particularly in the more conservative communities of Bogue Chitto and Conehatta, continue to encourage dating and marriage outside a member’s community.

With the increase in Europeans in America during the eighteenth century, the Choctaw formed alliances first with the French in wars against the British and their Indian allies, the Chickasaw, and then, after the Revolutionary War, with the new Americans against the Spanish and their Indian allies, the Creek. However, while Western histories focus on colonial powers and alliances, oral traditions within the tribe today emphasize relations with neighboring Indian tribes, in particular the cyclical conflicts with the Chickasaw and Creek over hunting grounds. The major exception is Removal, a cataclysmic policy that dominates both written and oral accounts. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, Andrew Jackson was struggling with the “Indian problem”—that is, too many autonomous Indian groups unwilling to allow unrestricted access to the lands and resources of their homelands. His solution was to remove the Indians east of the Mississippi to lands far west of it even though those lands were less agriculturally fertile and less forested and thus less suitable for the game Indians traditionally hunted. This Removal eventually became known as the Trail of Tears, and an estimated 20–25 percent of the southeastern Indians died during Removal. The Choctaw were the first of the southeastern tribes to be removed, following the signing the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in 1830. Over the next seventy years, the US government exerted consistent pressure to remove all of the Choctaw to Oklahoma, with at least one other major Removal effort at the turn of the century. According to estimates, roughly fourteen thousand of the twenty thousand Choctaw were removed to Oklahoma, with approximately twenty-five hundred dying along the way. In light of the two tribal creation myths, forced Removal from what they viewed as their divinely given lands was particularly traumatic. Today, Choctaw prophecies warn of the Third Removal, which will signal dramatic changes for Choctaw and non-Choctaw alike, perhaps a sign of the end of the world.

Each Choctaw who remained in Mississippi was promised 640 acres of land in return for agreeing to become an American citizen. However, few Choctaw ever received their land, and those who did often lost it through swindles perpetrated by unscrupulous land speculators. Most who stayed were soon driven onto undesirable swampland, where they attempted to continue farming. Eventually, they became sharecroppers on land they had once owned, entering a period of intense geographical and social isolation. As brown-skinned people in a color-conscious South that saw things in black and white, the Choctaw did not fit in. They fought aggressively to avoid being categorized as black and thus subjected to intense discrimination, but the white community refused to accept the Choctaw.

The tribe’s increasingly visible and powerful role in the Mississippi economy has begun to change this isolation. The creation of an industrial park in 1979 opened an era during which the tribe enticed major businesses to build factories on Choctaw lands. As part of the effort to develop industry and factory jobs, the tribe eventually started establishing tribal businesses, including casinos that opened in 1994 and 2000. Today, the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians is one of the state’s largest employers. Under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 (which permitted the organization of tribal governments) and the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975 (which permitted tribes to have greater ownership of services and programs on the reservation), the Mississippi Choctaw have reestablished an autonomous tribal government that has received federal recognition.

Despite brief periods of isolation, the Choctaw generally have been open to new ideas and new technologies, readily transforming other American Indian or Anglo rituals, clothing, weapons, and political systems to fit within their own culture. This borrowing and sharing have led to some of the most iconic symbols of Choctaw identity today, such as the black felt hats worn by the men, known in the Choctaw language as shapo (from the French chapeau [hat]), and the men’s traditional ribbon shirts, which are worn by Indian tribes throughout the Southeast. Women’s dresses draw from both European settlers and neighboring Indian tribes, employing the basic form worn by European missionary women in the nineteenth century but adding ribbons and beadwork to transform their clothing within a Choctaw and more broadly southeastern Indian aesthetic. Of course, European missionaries brought with them much more than clothing styles. Written records from early missionaries suggest the Choctaw had a coherent belief system that governed their views on both earthly and otherworldly matters, including sources of supernatural power, with the ultimate source being the sun. However, those belief systems were organized only loosely in terms of a single pervasive religion. Written records and oral traditions do not provide enough evidence for contemporary Choctaw interested in following a native religion to do so. By choice or by default, the majority of contemporary Choctaw are Christian.

The synthesis of multiple cultures continues today. Modern Choctaw homes are indistinguishable from the homes of their socioeconomically comparable non-Choctaw neighbors in terms of technological amenities. However, aesthetic and decorative elements articulate a distinct ethnic identity as both American Indian and Choctaw. Many homes display arts and crafts from other Indian tribes, particularly items bought on visits out west. Virtually all homes, however, have specifically Choctaw items hanging on walls, among them star quilts and stickball sticks and swamp cane baskets, which are still made from materials drawn directly from nearby forests and swamps. While tribe members continue to prepare traditional foods such as banaha —a mixture of corn and peas—and hominy, their dinner tables are more likely to be indistinguishable from those of their non-Indian neighbors, featuring southern staples such as cornbread, fried chicken, greens, and slow-cooked vegetables seasoned with meat.

Choctaw Indians, Mississippi Band of

Citizens’ Council

The Citizens’ Councils formed in the Mississippi Delta just months after the US Supreme Court handed down its landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. Founder William “Tut” Patterson was determined to fight the integration of Mississippi’s public schools and began to gather individuals who shared his resolve. When William J. Simmons became the organization’s primary strategist for positioning the Councils in the court of public opinion, he knew that mass distribution of its message would be key. The organization had quickly outgrown its pamphlet and town-meeting-style information distribution system and needed a communication tool to help promote its ideologies beyond Mississippi’s borders.

The first edition of the Citizens’ Council was published in October 1955. The four-page newspaper-style monthly newsletter became the “official publication of the Citizens’ Council,” and organizers claimed distribution to all fifty states and beyond. The publication was “dedicated to the maintenance of peace, good order, and tranquility in our community and in our State and to the preservation of States’ Rights.” With extreme optimism, the Council printed 125,000 copies of the first issue for distribution to like-minded individuals throughout the South. Subsequent print runs dropped substantially, and Simmons estimated the average circulation at 40,000 in November 1956.

At first glance, the Citizens’ Council could have easily been mistaken for a small-town weekly, since it featured many traditional newspaper elements (a distinct nameplate, letters to the editor, and political cartoons). However, each monthly edition featured a very focused and strategic message: supporters needed to mobilize and fight to preserve segregated classrooms in the South. Because it did not carry advertising, the publication became the mouthpiece for the Councils, offering editors complete license to espouse the organization’s propaganda. Contributors promoted participation in the Citizens’ Councils as a means to preserve the “southern way of life.” Charts, maps, and stories detailed the organization’s rapid growth and radio and television efforts.

Stories also reported incidents of violence and the supposedly negative consequences where schools had been integrated. The publication often cited survey data to substantiate these claims, including one study that found “Racial Integration Has Lowered Standards of Public Education.” Typical headlines read, “Big City Press Conceals Face in Racial Violence” or “Council Movement Spreads as Nation Reacts to Danger.”

The Citizens’ Council filled its pages with stories from journalists across the South. Thomas Waring, editor of South Carolina’s Charleston News and Courier, was a frequent contributor. Early issues included Waring’s three-part series on the formation of the Citizens’ Council and its benefits for southerners. Other contributions included editorial comment from the pages of the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, Prentiss Headlight, Natchez Times, and Winston County Journal, while Council supporters authored guest editorials.

The Citizens’ Council maintained its four-page newspaper layout for five years. In October 1961 the format changed to a newsmagazine-style publication and the name was shortened to The Citizen. At this point, the content shifted to longer pieces written as features. The magazine often devoted entire issues to one specific topic, with articles contributed by prestigious members of Congress, scientists, authors, and clergy. Each issue sold for thirty-five cents; a yearly subscription cost three dollars.

Although the appearance changed, the message remained the same—organizing to resist desegregation. Attacking the credibility and patriotism of civil rights proponents, providing data to support the demise of society should integration occur, and continuing to encourage active resistance remained the publication’s primary focus. In 1961, the organization reported 50,000 subscribers, but that number dropped to 23,056 the following year.

By the mid-1960s the Citizens’ Councils and their publications began to promote the idea of private school education as an alternative to integrated public school systems. The Citizen remained in publication until 1989 with Simmons as publisher.

Citizens’ Council

Citizens’ Councils

In July 1954, following the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, a small grassroots organization formed in Indianola, Mississippi, to mount organized resistance against integration. Representing the first of the Citizens’ Councils, the Indianola branch, under the leadership of Delta planter Robert “Tut” Patterson, was the first in a wave of chapters throughout Mississippi that sought to maintain states’ rights and racial integrity. The Citizens’ Councils (also known as the White Citizens’ Councils) soon became one of the South’s most recognizable and active white resistance organizations. By October 1954 the rapid growth of individual chapters led to the formation of an umbrella organization, the Association of Citizens’ Councils of Mississippi (ACC), providing access to a broader base of funding and opportunities for more diverse activities. Similar state organizations formed throughout the South, leading to the 1956 formation of the Citizens’ Councils of America, a loosely organized network of white resistance groups that included the Georgia States’ Rights Council, the North Carolina Patriots, the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government, and the Virginia Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberties. Nevertheless, the ACC remained the most closely connected and effective organization of its kind.

The Citizens’ Council primarily mobilized white business and civic leaders to commit to maintaining racial segregation in their communities through economic pressure. White employers could exercise their economic power over black employees, for example, as a way to discourage them from working for integration or voting rights. Council leaders throughout Mississippi emphasized this method over violent or illegal means, distinguishing their methods and members from those of the Ku Klux Klan and other more brutal organizations. Despite this distinction, however, the Council gained a reputation among civil rights groups for using members’ economic and political positions to stifle Mississippi’s civil rights movement. This reputation led many Council opponents to label the organization “the uptown Klan.” Its supporters included Mississippi governor Ross Barnett, Sen. James O. Eastland, Jackson mayor Allen Thompson, and Reps. John Bell Williams and William Colmer.

The core of Council ideology encompassed firm notions of white supremacy, as evidenced by the organization’s publications. Citizens’ Council leaders remained fully dedicated to the preservation of segregation and denial of equal political rights for black Mississippians. Exploiting long-standing fears of a growing federal government and of communist subversion, the Council’s leaders connected the organization’s objectives to national concerns, concealing racist attitudes within a more complex web of conservative values. This tactic left a thriving conservative legacy in the white South long after the Council movement dissipated.

In 1956 the ACC began the Educational Fund of the Citizens’ Council, receiving an official charter of incorporation from Mississippi’s secretary of state on 15 December. The Educational Fund, headquartered in Greenwood, represented a fundamental function of the Citizens’ Council that extended beyond local concerns, working to promote open discussion throughout the United States about “pertinent” national issues, to disseminate “facts” to all Americans, and to “improve” the US educational system. The fund advanced these objectives primarily by issuing publications and using radio and television to “tell the South’s story” to the rest of the nation. ACC leaders also traveled extensively throughout the country to spread the Council’s message and to connect its fight for segregation to conservative perspectives on national issues.

As part of the Educational Fund’s public relations effort and under the editorship of William J. Simmons, perhaps the best known of Council spokesmen, a monthly newsletter, the Citizens’ Council, began publication in October 1955. The newsletter evolved into a monthly magazine in October 1961 and continued publication until 1989 under the title The Citizen. Some chapters of the Citizens’ Councils published newsletters as well. The Jackson Citizens’ Council, for example, published a monthly newsletter, Aspect, that contained local news related to civil rights activity and to the status of the Jackson Council.

The Citizens’ Council also funded Forum, a weekly television and radio program that aired between 1957 and 1966. Most of the episodes were recorded in Washington, D.C., and they frequently featured members of Congress, lending them legitimacy as public affairs programming and concealing their function as an arm of segregationist propaganda. Topics rarely dealt directly with race or segregation, focusing instead on issues such as foreign policy, the federal deficit, and the threat of communism. By April 1961 the Citizens’ Council boasted that 383 television and radio stations aired Forum. The Citizens’ Council’s commitment to Forum revealed the diversity of the organization’s activities and its vision of reaching out to an American rather than regional audience.

Perhaps the Council’s most lasting legacy in Mississippi was its campaign to establish a series of Council schools for white children as an alternative to an integrated public school system. Dr. Medford Evans, a former professor and frequent Council spokesman, led an effort to create a “how-to” guide for starting a private school. In 1964 the Citizens’ Council officially opened Council School No. 1 in a North Jackson home. By 1967, Nos. 2 and 3 had been established. The Jackson academies served as models for similar schools throughout the state, although the Council itself was not directly affiliated with most of the private academies that arose throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s.

While the Citizens’ Council movement throughout the South began to weaken by the early 1960s, it remained effective in Mississippi until the end of the decade. White southerners’ acceptance of integration as inevitable, coupled with shifting national priorities, contributed to a severe decline in membership. Ironically, the Council’s tactic of subverting race to more nationally potent issues in its various public relations campaigns led to a less cohesive message that was easily absorbed by the national conservative wave of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Citizens’ Councils

Civil Rights Law of 1873

Passed after the Civil War, the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery and freed some four million slaves in the United States, leading led to the question of their legal status: they were no longer slaves, but they also were not citizens. The governments of all of the former slave states grappled with this issue, but it was especially important in Mississippi, where former slaves comprised 55 percent of the population.

Southern white Democratic leaders could not imagine former slaves as equals after generations of prohibiting them from even learning to read and write. Moreover, whites feared that blacks would vote for the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln and the North and were concerned about losing the relatively cheap labor considered integral to the economy. The governments of Mississippi and many other former slave states reacted by adopting a series of restrictive laws known as the Black Codes that sought to prevent African Americans from gaining political power and to prevent changes in labor and social relations. Mississippi simply replaced the word slave with freedman in the criminal code and used vagrancy laws to maintain the previous rules of etiquette governing black-white social interactions.

The Radical Republican–dominated US Congress, already in a power struggle with Pres. Andrew Johnson, a southern Democrat, reacted angrily and deposed the state governments appointed by Johnson immediately after the Civil War. Congress declared Mississippi under the control of the Fourth Military District, subject to martial law, and prohibited most white southern leaders from political and civic participation, beginning what became known as Radical Reconstruction or Congressional Reconstruction. Fearing that the return of southern Democrats to national politics would help the party regain control of the federal government, Radical Republicans demanded that blacks receive not only civil liberties but also the right to vote, which had been denied to African Americans as late as 1867 in New Jersey, Ohio, and Maryland. That same year, at least ten states, including California, New Jersey, and Ohio, initially rejected the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted citizenship to blacks and former slaves.

White Mississippians who joined the new Republican Party were known derisively as scalawags; the party, which dominated Mississippi’s Reconstruction-era politics, also included carpetbaggers (northerners and former Union soldiers who had moved south) and local free blacks and former slaves. The new state government began adopting a series of laws abolishing the Black Codes by guaranteeing civil liberties and voting rights and ratifying the Fourteenth Amendment. On 7 February 1873 their efforts culminated in Mississippi’s adoption of the most sweeping civil rights legislation enacted to date.

The Civil Rights Law of 1873 sought to guarantee a degree of social equality beyond mere civic equality by requiring equal accommodations and prohibiting discrimination in places of public accommodation and entertainment such as inns, hotels, and theaters. It amended and expanded an 1871 law that outlawed segregation on railroads, stagecoaches, and steamboats, imposing penalties of up to one thousand dollars and three years in jail. The sweeping new law soon received its first test when George Donnell, doorkeeper of the Angelo Concert Hall in Jackson, denied admission to a black man, Hannibal C. “Ham” Carter, and Carter obtained a warrant for Donnell’s arrest.

Carter was a unique plaintiff. He came from an Indiana family of free blacks, captained a regiment of the Louisiana Native Guards, and was a Republican Party activist who had been an 1872 presidential elector for Ulysses S. Grant and had served a brief stint as Mississippi’s interim secretary of state. Representing Warren County in the Mississippi House of Representatives, he sponsored the bill and worked for its passage. The theater incident might have represented a deliberate test of the new law, a strategy civil rights activists pursued decades later.

Donnell allowed Carter and his companion, D. Webster, inside the hall but denied Carter’s request to sit in a section reserved for whites, arguing that the value of the tickets would drop if Carter were allowed to sit there. Carter summoned the sheriff of Hinds County, who then jailed Donnell until he paid a hundred-dollar fine. A judge agreed with Donnell’s treatment, so he appealed to the state’s highest court. The Mississippi Supreme Court heard Donnell v. State of Mississippi during its April 1873 term and then unanimously upheld the law and Donnell’s arrest. However, the Civil Rights Law of 1873 apparently fell into desuetude, a legal principle that renders a law invalid after a long period of nonenforcement. Although none of the amended statutes were explicitly repealed, they were not included in the 1880 Mississippi Code or in subsequent publications of state law. The 1888 Mississippi criminal statute that required all railroads to provide separate but equal accommodations for white and black travelers may have invalidated portions of the Civil Rights Law by declaring all prior conflicting statutes repealed.

Other southern states and the US Congress adopted or debated similar legislation around the time of Mississippi’s enactment of the Civil Rights Law. In 1870 Radical Republican senator Charles Sumner proposed the most well known of these measures, which Congress enacted as the Civil Rights Act of 1875, known as the Force Act to its opponents. The US Supreme Court struck down the law as unconstitutional by an 8–1 majority in a series of decisions known as the Civil Rights Cases of 1883. Congress did not pass another civil rights bill until 1957. Many northern states filled the void with carbon copies of the civil rights bills adopted by Congress and the southern states in the 1870s, but these measures did not enjoy widespread popular support in either the North or the South and were not regularly enforced until after the modern civil rights movement.

Civil Rights Law of 1873

Civil Rights Movement, Legacies of

The civil rights movement had a lasting impact on Mississippi’s politics, culture, and society. And although pinpointing the impact or legacy of social movements is notoriously difficult, the civil rights movement in Mississippi has received considerable scholarly attention, with particular focus on the movement’s impact on the development of leaders and organizations, changes in political participation and officeholding, shifts in school desegregation, and the development of social policies. The movement also shaped social attitudes, racial interactions, and collective memory, but those arenas are less well understood. The movement’s legacy also includes the white response to the civil rights movement that further shaped Mississippi after the movement’s heyday.

The Mississippi civil rights movement in the early 1960s was noteworthy for its emphasis on community organizing and the development of new local leaders and organizations, many of whom went on to become involved in later phases of the civil rights movement and other social movements. This category includes Mississippians Fannie Lou Hamer, Aaron Henry, and Hollis Watkins and leaders from outside Mississippi such as Mario Savio and Stokeley Carmichael. While the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and some other organizations folded, numerous other groups, among them legal advocacy organizations, community health centers, and educational programs, have continued to pursue movement goals.

The increase in black political participation is one of the most visible and widely celebrated legacies of the civil rights movement. Mississippi had the country’s lowest rates of black voter registration and voting at the beginning of the 1960s, but by the end of the decade, the combination of civil rights organizing and the 1965 Voting Rights Act had led to dramatic increases in those areas. The election of black candidates to office lagged behind, however, as a consequence of a variety of vote dilution mechanisms (such as the gerrymandering of electoral districts to favor white candidates) that thwarted black candidates at the municipal, county, and state levels. Court decisions handed down during the 1970s reversed many policies that had discriminatory effects, paving the way for a new generation of black elected officials, and Mississippi has long boasted the largest number of African American elected officeholders in the United States. The political impact of black elected officials on policy has been uneven, however. Some gains have occurred in the form of more responsive and equitable policies, but political influence has been limited mainly to offices in majority-black electoral districts. As African Americans’ political participation and officeholding increased, many whites in Mississippi (and elsewhere in the South) shifted their support to the Republican Party. Thus, the civil rights movement helped to undermine traditional one-party politics and the Democratic Party’s long-standing dominance in Mississippi, one of the most important changes in American politics in the post–civil rights era.

Court-ordered school desegregation plans instituted beginning in the early 1960s initially generated minimal changes because they required black parents to apply to have their children attend formerly all-white schools, potentially subjecting the children and their families to harassment. The US Supreme Court’s Alexander v. Holmes decision (1969) paved the way for widespread school desegregation over the next few years, with little of the massive resistance that had followed the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. However, many Mississippi communities established private, white-controlled academies that not only refused to integrate but also damaged the public school systems. Initial efforts to desegregate Mississippi’s colleges and universities also met fierce resistance, as in the case of James Meredith’s 1962 enrollment at the University of Mississippi, which led to a full-scale riot by white students. However, the past five decades have seen significant increases at black enrollment in Mississippi’s formerly all-white postsecondary institutions.

Changing attitudes and beliefs are more difficult to document, but public discourse by elected officials and community leaders has shifted away from traditional white supremacist arguments on behalf of Mississippi’s segregated institutions and culture. Key leaders and events of the civil rights movement have been memorialized. Civil-rights-era crimes against movement activists have recently received new investigations, and in some cases, perpetrators have been tried, convicted, and jailed. By opening up educational and job opportunities, the civil rights movement played an important role in reducing economic inequalities, especially by creating new possibilities for the growth of black middle class. However, these and subsequent initiatives have garnered less success in reducing the broader structural economic inequities between blacks and whites, and many of the movement’s larger objectives have been undermined by continued resistance to racial equality.

Civil Rights Movement, Legacies of

Civil Rights Movement, Women in

African American and white women involved in the civil rights movement never represented a homogeneous group. Different women had different tools with which to exercise their influence and effect change.

African American women stood stalwartly on the front lines of the civil right movement, but they often did not hold formal leadership positions and are consequently not always visible in photographs and other historical documentation. These women organized via their churches, in their homes, and throughout their immediate communities, taking advantage of their traditional gender roles and domestic space. In many cases, therefore, the opportunities available involved positions that supported the activities of male leaders; in other instances, however, women taught citizenship classes, attended mass meetings, and canvassed for voter registration, enhancing their ordinary activities to encompass the movement’s needs.

Class also played a determining factor in black women’s experiences and activism. Vera Pigee, a Clarksdale beautician loyal to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and other self-employed women could spend considerable time and resources organizing and planning, as Pigee did in her work with the group’s Youth Councils and as secretary of the local branch. In contrast, Fannie Lou Hamer, a displaced sharecropper with a greater sense of urgency, found her voice in the direct-action-driven Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and later in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Many black women found motivation for their activities in their religious faith, putting their bodies on the line, endangering their families and friends, and suffering the same indignities and dangers as black men. Many of the women associated with the movement went on to work with poverty programs such as Head Start or ran for office: Victoria Gray Adams, for example, ran for the US Senate on the Freedom Democratic Party ticket, and Unita Blackwell of Mayersville became Mississippi’s first black female mayor.

Unlike their black peers, white women in the civil rights movement rarely felt physically imperiled. Their involvement stemmed from a sense of empathy with the plight of African Americans and from a strong desire for social, legal, political, and economic justice, often cultivated by educational or religious institutions. In particular, northern white women lived and worked with African Americans during the 1964 Summer Project, with many of these volunteers returning to college in the fall. Some of these same women went on to found the women’s movement shortly thereafter, as their politicization manifested itself in other struggles for equality.

White women from Mississippi also participated. Most of them came from middle-class families and joined the movement via student activities or religious institutions. Hazel Brannon Smith questioned the morality of segregation in her newspaper, the Lexington Advertiser, while Jean Cauthen did so via her Clarksdale radio show. Both women suffered harassment. Others, among them Barbara Barnes, the president of Young Women’s Christian Association operations in Jackson, mediated institutional integration quietly, and Jane Schutt served on the state’s first US Civil Rights Commission Advisory Committee until her husband’s job became threatened. Such women’s involvement risked their economic, social, and political standing in white society.

Civil Rights Movement, Women in

Civil War Monuments

Memorials that honor Civil War participants exist in numerous Mississippi communities, with the vast majority erected in homage to the Confederate cause. Most monuments are found on battlefields, in cemeteries, and on courthouse lawns or public squares. The single largest site for memorials is within and near Vicksburg National Military Park. After Congress established the park in 1899, efforts to accurately mark troop positions and honor participants in both armies resulted in the erection of an astonishing array of battlefield monuments—more than 1,320 state memorials, unit monuments, markers, plaques, statues, busts, and reliefs. Among the most imposing of these monuments is the Illinois State Memorial, dedicated in October 1906. Modeled after the Roman Pantheon, the memorial contains bronze tablets bearing the names of all 36,325 Union participants from Illinois. Former Confederate states likewise commemorated their soldiers. The Mississippi State Memorial, dedicated in 1909, soars seventy-six feet into the air and is constructed of granite. Bronze figures depict the actions of Mississippi troops during the siege, while a statue of Clio is perched at the monument’s front. Elsewhere, an equestrian statue of Ulysses S. Grant honors the conqueror of Vicksburg, while a dramatic Confederate memorial depicts the moment when Gen. Lloyd Tilghman received a mortal wound at Champion Hill.

While Vicksburg represents the pinnacle of Civil War memorialization efforts in Mississippi, monuments in individual communities symbolize efforts to recognize units and men from those locales as well as the Confederate experience. Immediately after the war, political turmoil and the general impoverishment of the state prevented most communities from recognizing their veterans with a monument. When monuments later began to appear, they were generally placed in cemeteries and were relatively modest obelisks. Such monuments are found in cemeteries at Baldwyn, Booneville, Brookhaven, Canton, Columbus, Crystal Springs, Hernando, Holly Springs, and Meridian. A monument at Woodville features a draped cloth reminiscent of a shroud. Placing monuments in the midst of Confederate dead conveyed the sense of loss felt by many Mississippians.

The shift toward more ornate memorials coincided with a monument-building boom between 1885 and 1915, the era when most local monuments were erected in Mississippi and in other states. An intense interest in the Civil War in this period coincided with the solidification of the Lost Cause ideology. Commercial firms vied for contracts to erect monuments, solicited business from chapters of the United Confederate Veterans (UCV) and United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), and extolled successes in advertisements in Confederate Veteran magazine. John A. Stinson of the Columbus Marble Works obtained contracts for several monuments in the state.

The monuments represented a considerable investment from individuals and groups. Raising money to erect a memorial often took years and involved numerous fund-raising schemes, the vast majority of them undertaken by UDC women. These efforts constituted a socially approved outlet for women’s energies and talents, and speakers at dedication ceremonies fittingly extolled these women’s crucial role in the projects. By the 1880s and 1890s women played key roles in memorialization efforts and in selecting monument designs. Those designs became more elaborate, usually including a statue of a Confederate soldier, almost invariably at parade rest, atop a marble or granite pedestal. Monuments increasingly appeared in highly visible public venues such as courthouse squares. Many towns, among them Columbus and Meridian, that had previously erected monuments in cemeteries added one in the heart of the community. The Columbus monument, dedicated in 1912, features three soldiers and forms a striking adornment to the backdrop provided by the Lowndes County Courthouse. Other multifigure monuments were erected in Greenwood, Hattiesburg, Heidelberg, Laurel, West Point, and Yazoo City; those in Belzoni and Poplarville jointly commemorate Confederate men and women as well as veterans of World War I. Holly Springs placed a second monument in a more prominent part of Hillcrest Cemetery. The monument features two soldiers on either side of the monument with arms grounded. The New Capitol in Jackson has the Monument to Women of the Confederacy, which is identical to a monument in Nashville, Tennessee.

Dedication festivities eventually took on the trappings of ritual. On 29 September 1907, for example, a thirty-seven-foot-tall monument was unveiled at Brandon, in Rankin County. Surmounted by a “lifelike, beautiful, and impressive” statue of a representative “Confederate infantryman on guard,” the monument is inscribed on all four sides with “appropriate expressions of sentiment in verse and prose.” An “eloquent prayer” opened the ceremony, after which Major Patrick Henry, commander of the local UCV, made a brief address before acting as master of ceremonies. The “popular young Mayor of Brandon,” G. O. Robinson, “extended a cordial welcome to veterans and other guests.” Addresses were made by Daisy McLaurin Stevens, president of the Mississippi Division, UDC, and W. S. May and Julia Jayne Walker, representing the Brandon UDC chapter, which had labored to erect the monument. Although Gen. Robert Lowry, commander of the Mississippi Division, UCV, was absent as a consequence of the death of his son, four former Confederate officers spoke before May, Annie Henry, and Marie Collier unveiled the monument. After the singing of the “Bonnie Blue Flag” and “Dixie,” a benediction concluded the exercises and the assembled crowd “adjourned to the courthouse yard and enjoyed a bountiful dinner provided by the good ladies of Brandon.”

The Confederate Veteran reported glowingly on similar ceremonies in scores of Mississippi communities. In each case, speakers lauded both the Confederate veterans and the women who toiled so diligently to build the monuments. By 1900 time was winnowing the ranks of the Civil War generation, and monuments were perceived as a means of permanently enshrining the Confederate cause. A Confederate monument erected in 1908 in Lexington was explicitly dedicated “To the Holmes County soldiers of 1861–65 and members of Holmes County Camp, No, 398, U.C.V., in memory of their patriotism and heroism, and to commend their example to future generations.” This monument also reflected unrepentant Lost Cause ideology with an inscription declaring, “The men were right who wore the gray, and right can never die.” The twin themes of honoring local Confederate veterans and defending southern honor appear on the vast majority of monuments erected after 1900.

Less explicitly, the ceremonies also buttressed white supremacy. One of the state’s most unusual monuments reflects the paternalism of some former Confederates toward their erstwhile slaves. In Canton, William Howcott of New Orleans dedicated a monument to the slave who accompanied him during the Civil War, Willis Howcott, “a colored boy of rare loyalty and faithfulness.” The seventeen thousand African Americans from Mississippi who served the Union cause have been memorialized in a sculpture dedicated in February 2004 at Vicksburg National Military Park. The African American Monument depicts two Union soldiers and a field hand and evinces modern recognition for the thousands of men who served in US Colored Troops units during the Civil War. By extension, it also rebuffs the Lost Cause ideology reflected in the many Confederate monuments scattered across the state.

Civil War Monuments

Claiborne County

Claiborne County lies directly east of Tensas Parish, Louisiana, between Vicksburg and Natchez. The county is bordered on the west by the Mississippi River, and the Big Black River forms its northern boundary with Warren County. Bayou Pierre wends east across the county from its Mississippi River origins in southwestern Claiborne.

The county’s lands were home to the Natchez and Choctaw Indians prior to the arrival of Europeans. The French and then the Spanish occupied the area during the eighteenth century, before it was formally annexed by the United States in 1798. Claiborne officially became the Mississippi Territory’s fourth county on 27 January 1802. It is named for William C. Claiborne, the territory’s second governor.

In 1810 Claiborne’s population of 3,102 was almost evenly divided between slaves and whites. The potential for increased cotton production contributed to a rapid expansion of the slave population to 12,296 (the eighth-highest total in the state) by 1860, while the county’s white population leveled off and actually declined slightly to less than a third of the number of slaves.

Early on, the number of people employed in commerce and manufacturing was small—less than one-tenth of the county’s agricultural workforce. By 1840, however, Claiborne County ranked third in the state in the number of commercial and manufacturing laborers. The county’s largest nonagricultural employers included four lumber mills and two carriage manufacturers.

The county seat, Port Gibson, became a trading hub for white settlers, helping the county relatively quickly develop large-scale cotton cultivation. Thus, the plantation economy dominated antebellum Claiborne, and the county was home to some of the largest farms in Mississippi, with its 305 farms averaging more than four hundred acres of improved land. In 1860 it ranked fourteenth in the state in cotton production but only twenty-fourth in the production of corn.

Revivalist Lorenzo Dow, one of the state’s first ministers, built a cabin and began preaching near Port Gibson in 1807. The county was also home to Mississippi’s third governor, Walter Leake. A decade later, Presbyterian leaders founded Oakland College, one of the state’s first higher-education institutions. Later in the antebellum period, Port Gibson native and Oakland College alumnus Henry Hughes wrote Treatise on Sociology, Theoretical and Practical, a proslavery tome considered one the first important sociological works. Poet Irwin Russell, author of “Christmas Night in the Quarters,” was born in Port Gibson in 1853. The Windsor Ruins, the columns of one of the South’s largest Greek Revival mansions, still stand in Claiborne County, more than a century after a fire devastated the home.

In 1860 the county had fourteen established churches, with the Methodists and Presbyterians possessing both the largest congregations and the largest buildings. One of Mississippi’s earliest synagogues was built in Port Gibson in 1859. A year earlier, architect James Jones began construction on an elaborate replacement for the original First Presbyterian Church of Port Gibson. This church, still standing, is known for its unusual steeple, which is crowned by a twelve-foot gold hand pointing skyward.

With the interests of the county’s entrenched plantation majority to defend, Claiborne’s white citizens staunchly supported the Confederate cause. Many residents suffered greatly during the war, enduring privation from Union raids, the loss of many soldiers, the repeated burning and bombardment of Great Gulf by US forces, and the Battle of Port Gibson, along with a number of smaller conflicts. When Union troops led by Ulysses S. Grant took Port Gibson as part of the 1863 Vicksburg Campaign, Grant proclaimed the town “too beautiful to burn.”

In the postbellum period, Claiborne County’s population remained stable, maintaining a substantial African American majority (77 percent of the county’s 16,768 people in 1880). By 1900 Claiborne’s population had topped 20,000. Significant Irish and German populations moved to the area in the late 1800s, and Syrian and Lebanese immigration began in the early 1900s. In spite of the port economy of its county seat, turn-of-the-century Claiborne County possessed only a small industrial population of about 200, and most residents still worked in agriculture. More than half of Claiborne’s 671 farming families owned their farms in 1900, compared to only 7 percent of the county’s 2,300 black farm families. Most African Americans were tenants or sharecroppers.

A 1916 religious census showed that about half of the church members in Claiborne County belonged to Missionary Baptist Conventions. The Methodist Episcopal Church, African Methodist Episcopal Church, Southern Baptist Convention, Presbyterians, Disciples of Christ, and Episcopalians were other religious groups of significant size.

In 1930 African Americans made up about three-quarters of Claiborne’s population of 12,152. The county remained very rural, with no towns of more than 2,000 people and just 358 industrial laborers. Thirty years later the population remained almost unchanged, with about 11,000 people and African Americans still outnumbering whites three to one. However, in 1960 less than a third of its population worked in agriculture, with another third employed in manufacturing. A significant portion of Claiborne’s female laborers were employed as domestic workers. During the mid-twentieth century the county’s agriculture combined cotton, corn, soybeans, wheat, and livestock. Claiborne boasted the second-highest number of hogs in the state in 1960 and was the only county with more hogs than people.

In 1918 F. S. Wolcott established Port Gibson as the official home of the Rabbit’s Foot Minstrels, a traveling music group that included such celebrated performers as Rufus Thomas, Ma Rainey, and Louis Jordan. Olivia Valentine Hastings, one of the greatest proponents of education in Mississippi, grew up in Claiborne County. Author Berry Morgan was born in Port Gibson in 1919 and modeled the fictional Kings Town after his hometown. Pete Brown, who in 1964 became the first African American golfer to win a Professional Golfers’ Association of America event, was born in Port Gibson.

Claiborne County was the site of years of voter registration efforts, a sustained and effective civil rights boycott that ended in 1967, and leadership from Charles Evers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The county was also the home of significant civil rights opposition. Port Gibson native John Satterfield, a leading adversary of the movement, served as Gov. Ross Barnett’s lawyer and a lobbyist against civil rights legislation. A noteworthy case, NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co., began in 1969 when white-owned businesses sued the NAACP and others for the economic harm caused by boycotts . The case spent more than eleven years winding its way through the judicial system until the US Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment prevented states from prohibiting peaceful political activity such as boycotts.

Like most counties along the Mississippi River, Claiborne County’s 2010 population was predominantly black—84 percent of its 9,604 citizens identified themselves as African American. The county’s overall population had declined by roughly 11 percent (1,241 people) over the previous half century.

Emilye Crosby, A Little Taste of Freedom: The Black Freedom Struggle in Claiborne County, Mississippi (2005); Katy McCaleb Headley, Claiborne County, Mississippi: The Promised Land (1976); Mississippi State Planning Commission, Progress Report on State Planning in Mississippi (1938); Mississippi Statistical Abstract, Mississippi State University (1952–2010); Charles Sydnor and Claude Bennett, Mississippi History (1939); University of Virginia Library, Historical Census Browser website, http://mapserver.lib.virginia.edu; E. Nolan Waller and Dani A. Smith, Growth Profiles of Mississippi’s Counties, 1960–1980 (1985).

Claiborne County

Clarke County

Traversed from north to south by the Chickasawhay River, Clarke County borders Alabama in southeastern Mississippi’s Piney Woods region. The county was established in December 1833 from lands ceded to the United States by the Choctaw Nation under the 1830 Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. It is named for Joshua G. Clarke, Mississippi’s first state chancellor. Clarke’s county seat is Quitman, and its largest towns include Pachuta, Shubuta, and Stonewall.

At the time of its first census in 1840, the county had about twice as many whites (2,077) as slaves (909). However, Clarke’s reliance on slave labor subsequently intensified, and by 1860 the county had 5,695 whites and 5,076 slaves. Like most Piney Woods counties during this era, Clarke County comprised primarily small farms and ranked fairly low in the state in agricultural production. Clarke County remained distinctive in that it was the only county in the Mississippi to concentrate on tobacco cultivation. The eighty thousand pounds of tobacco grown on Clarke’s farms in 1860 outstripped the entirety of the rest of the state. On the eve of the Civil War, Clark County had only six churches—three Baptist, two Methodist, and one Presbyterian—a surprisingly low ratio of churches to citizens.

Clarke County’s 1880 population of 15,021 remained almost evenly split between whites and African Americans. Although the county’s producers continued to concentrate on agriculture, its twenty manufacturing firms employed more workers (158) than most Mississippi counties of the era.

By 1900 two-thirds of Clarke’s white farmers owned their land, compared to one-third of the county’s black farmers (considerably higher than the state average of 14 percent). With the rise of textile mills in Stonewall at the end of the nineteenth century, Clarke’s industrial workforce expanded to 575 (including 198 women and 120 children) in 1900. Mississippi’s first (unsuccessful) attempt to drill an oil well took place near Enterprise in 1903.

As in much of Mississippi, Baptists made up about half of the county’s churchgoers in the early twentieth century. The 1916 religious census showed that the National Baptist Convention and the Southern Baptist Convention had the highest memberships in the county, followed by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South; the African Methodist Episcopal Church; the Presbyterians; and the Disciples of Christ.

In 1930 Clarke County’s 1,793 industrial workers ranked fifth in the state. The county’s largest business, Stonewall Cotton Mill in Enterprise, employed more than 500 people. During the Great Depression, the Congress of Industrial Organizations made significant efforts to recruit Stonewall’s workers.

Clarke was home to nearly 20,000 people in 1930, but the county’s population declined over the next several decades, reaching 16,493 in 1960. Its racial demographics remained stable, with whites maintaining a slight majority (60 percent) over African Americans. Clarke’s economic activity largely revolved around textiles and timber, and the county possessed the sixth-largest timber acreage in the state. With sixteen oil wells, petroleum also figured prominently in the county’s economy.

Clarke County has left its distinctive mark on popular culture. Shubuta’s Osceola McCarty attracted national attention in the 1990s for her major donation to the University of Southern Mississippi. In 2004 Women’s Studies scholar Gayle Graham Yates published Life and Death in a Small Town: Memories of Shubuta, Mississippi, a personal memoir and history of Yates’s hometown. In addition, Al Young, a distinguished novelist and 2005–7 poet laureate of California, set a poem, “Pachuta, Mississippi/A Memoir,” in Clarke County.

Like many of Mississippi’s eastern counties, Clarke County’s 2010 population of 16,732 was predominantly (two-thirds) white. While Clarke’s population had not changed significantly in size over the previous half century, the county boasted a small but growing Latino population.

Clarke County

Clay County

One of the counties organized during Reconstruction, Clay County in northeastern Mississippi was formed from parts of Chickasaw, Lowndes, Monroe, and Oktibbeha Counties. Originally named Colfax County for Schuyler Colfax, a Republican who served as vice president under Ulysses S. Grant, the county was established in May 1871. Following the end of Reconstruction and the return of Democratic ascendancy, the county was renamed after Henry Clay, secretary of state under John Quincy Adams. West Point, the county seat, was formerly a nexus of the Illinois Central, Mobile and Ohio, and Southern railways. The Tombigbee River shapes a long stretch of Clay’s eastern border.

At its first census in 1880, Clay was home to 17,367 residents, with African Americans comprising 70 percent of the population. Tenants and sharecroppers did most of the farming during this era, as owners operated only 43 percent of the county’s farms. Clay’s early agricultural economy was mixed, with farmers concentrating on grain, cotton, and livestock. Clay’s manufacturing sector remained nascent: twenty-four small companies employed only fifty-nine male workers. The county had a small foreign-born population, most of them Irish.

The average farm size in Clay County declined from 132 acres in 1880 to 70 acres in 1900. This development, a typical consequence of the increase in tenancy and sharecropping, had a far more pronounced impact on African American farmers. At the turn of the century, 62 percent of Clay County’s white farmers worked their own land, while only 11 percent of African American farmers did so.

Though Clay remained largely agricultural, by 1900 the town of West Point had grown to 4,400 people. Clay County’s 70 industrial establishments employed 228 workers, almost all of them men. The county’s foreign-born contingent had grown to 90 people and included Russians and Germans.

In 1916 West Point’s Payne Field, a training area for American troops during World War I, opened as Mississippi’s first airport. The county seat also served as an educational center for women in eastern Mississippi: in 1894 the Southern Women’s College moved to West Point from Oxford. A year later, the town became the site of Mary Holmes College, a Presbyterian school for African American women.

Clay County’s population remained steady in the early twentieth century. In 1930 African Americans made more than two-thirds of Clay’s population of 17,931. The county’s agricultural production was evenly divided among cotton, corn, and grain, and tenant farmers outnumbered landowners by about two to one. Fifteen manufacturing firms employed 185 people. Among these firms was Bryan Foods, a meat products manufacturer founded in Clay County in 1936 that remains in operation, billing itself as the Flavor of the South.

Blues musician Howlin’ Wolf (Chester Burnett) was born in the Clay County community of White Station in 1910. Lenore Prather, the first woman to serve as the chief justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court, was born in West Point in 1931 and began her judicial career there in 1965. Clay County hosted the state’s first national golf championship in 1999 when the US Women’s Open was held at West Point’s Old Waverly Golf Club.

By 1960 Clay County was home to 18,933 people, 51.3 percent of them African Americans. Less than one-third of Clay’s workforce was employed in agriculture, which focused largely on the production of soybeans. Agriculture continued to decline, and by 1980 only 150 workers were employed in this economic sector. The majority of nonagricultural laborers worked in food production and fabricated metal; the county’s female workers were mostly employed in textiles or domestic labor.

The county’s 2010 population, 20,634, remained largely unchanged over the previous half century. However, the percentage of African Americans had risen to nearly 60 percent.

Clay County

Coahoma County

Coahoma County is located in the northern Delta, with the Mississippi River shaping much of the county’s winding western border. Founded on 9 February 1836 from land ceded to the United States by the Choctaw Nation in 1830, the county derives its name from a Choctaw term meaning “red panther.” Clarksdale, the county seat and Coahoma’s largest city, is named for John Clark, a Coahoma resident and brother-in-law of Mississippi governor and senator James Alcorn.

Coahoma County remained a sparsely settled frontier until late in the antebellum period, with only 766 whites and 524 slaves in the 1840 census, numbers that grew to 1,521 and 5,083, respectively, in 1860. With slaves comprising 77 percent of Coahoma’s population, the county had one of Mississippi’s highest slave majorities on the eve of the Civil War. In addition, only about a quarter of the county’s farmland was improved, half the statewide cultivation rate. The county ranked thirty-second among Mississippi jurisdictions in the production of cotton, forty-third in livestock, and forty-sixth in corn. Coahoma had no one employed in commerce or manufacturing. With the fourteenth-highest farm property value, however, the county had great agricultural potential.

In 1880 African Americans comprised 82 percent of the county’s population of 13,568. Unlike many Delta counties, Coahoma had a substantial landowning population. The county’s farmers owned more than half of Coahoma’s farms, while sharecroppers accounted for less than 20 percent of the agricultural workforce. The average farm in Coahoma was 357 acres, among the largest in the state. The county remained predominantly agricultural, with only three manufacturing firms employing fifty-six men and four children.

By the turn of the century, the county showed evidence of dramatic regional transitions. Large numbers of African Americans moved to the Delta in search of land and employment, nearly doubling Coahoma’s population over the last two decades of the nineteenth century and ranking the county fourth in Mississippi in population density. By 1900 the county had more than twenty-six thousand residents, the overwhelming majority of them African American. The average farm in Coahoma County had shrunk to just forty-eight acres, a startling decline in just a generation. This decline was typical of the region, where plantations were being partitioned into small farms for tenants and sharecroppers. Coahoma County had more than twenty-six hundred sharecropping households, the second-highest figure in the state, while the number of landowners had dropped: only 235 of the 3,797 African American farming households (6 percent) could claim ownership. By contrast, almost half of the county’s 258 white farmers owned their land. The development of the timber industry also produced a sudden increase in industrial employment. In 1900 Coahoma’s 78 manufacturing firms employed 475 workers, all of them men. Finally, the county’s developing economy attracted a significant immigrant contingent. In the opening decade of the twentieth century, Coahoma had a significant number of residents from Russia, China, Germany, Italy, Palestine, Syria, and Poland, the great majority of them male.

Though only thirteen churches, most of them Methodist, had served the county’s people in 1860, by 1916 Coahoma’s religious infrastructure reflected the choices of the county’s black majority. More than sixteen thousand of Coahoma’s twenty-one thousand congregants attended Missionary Baptist churches, and another twenty-two hundred were members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The Methodist Episcopal Church, South and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church had significant memberships. In addition, the county was home to more Catholics (314) than Southern Baptists (286).

Early twentieth-century Coahoma County was the second home of playwright Tennessee Williams, who based many of his works on scenes in and around Clarksdale. Feminist editor Minnie Brewer also grew up in Clarksdale, and scientist Elizabeth Lee Hazen was born in Rich and grew up in Lula. Charlie Conerly, a football star for the University of Mississippi and the New York Giants, was born in Clarksdale in 1921.

In 1930 Coahoma had a population of 46,237, the fifth-highest in Mississippi. As the Great Depression set in, an exceptionally large percentage of the county’s land was cultivated. The county continued to suffer from low rates of landownership, as 94 percent of all farmers were tenants or sharecroppers. Like many Delta counties, Coahoma experienced a substantial influx of Mexican farm laborers during the 1920s and 1930s. Although the county continued to support a substantial industrial workforce, with 462 industrial workers, this sector had not grown over the previous three decades.

Coahoma County occupies a crucial place in the history of the blues, and Clarksdale is the site of the Delta Blues Museum as well as the annual Sunflower River Blues and Gospel Festival and the Juke Joint Festival. Muddy Waters (McKinley Morganfield) grew up in Coahoma County. Son House was born in Riverton, near Clarksdale, and John Lee Hooker was born in Vance. Willie Brown, Sam Cooke, Ike Turner, and Big Jack Johnson are just a few of the other important musicians associated with Coahoma County. Many more spent time in Clarksdale, often at the Riverside Hotel, as part of their travels, and the hotel is where Bessie Smith died. Charley Patton, Son House, Louise Johnson, and Bertha Lee Pate lived in Lula for a time. When folklorists Alan Lomax and John Work began documenting the Delta blues in the 1930s, Coahoma County was a principal locality for their study. Much-loved blues disc jockey Early Wright worked for years for Clarksdale’s WROX. And according to a popular blues legend, Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil in exchange for musical genius at the crossroads of Highway 61 and Highway 49.

Coahoma was central to other important movements in Mississippi. The county was home to the state’s first African American agricultural high school and for a time to Mississippi’s only community college for African Americans. Oscar Johnston, a banker and planter who became the president of Delta Pine and Land Company and a leader in American agricultural policy in the 1930s, lived in Clarksdale. Clarksdale native Blanche Montgomery Ralston edited the Mississippi Woman’s Magazine for the Mississippi Federation of Women’s Clubs before working with Johnston and others to form the Delta Council in the 1930s.

Aaron Henry, a political organizer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and a longtime civil rights activist, worked as a pharmacist in Clarksdale. Dr. T. R. M. Howard ran the Regional Council of Negro Leadership from Mound Bayou. Unita Blackwell, famous for her work farther south in Issaquena County, was born in Lula. Activist and author Vera Pigee worked for the NAACP in Coahoma from the 1950s through the 1970s. Author and Ebony editor Lerone Bennett, whose political activism manifested in such works as Confrontation: Black and White, The Negro Mood, and Black Power USA, grew up in Clarksdale.

Coahoma’s population demographics changed little over the three decades following the Great Depression: in 1960 the county was home to 46,212 residents, 68 percent of them African American. The majority of Coahoma’s workforce was employed in agriculture, focusing on cotton, wheat, oats, and soybean production. Although the number of agricultural workers had declined significantly by 1980, Coahoma still ranked fifth in the state in the number of people employed in farming. Coahoma’s manufacturing sector was based largely on food processing and fabricated metal, with a significant number of laborers also involved in retail. More than a third of Coahoma’s population had less than five years of schooling, and Coahoma County ranked second in the state in amount of public assistance payments received. The county also possessed Mississippi’s third-largest Chinese American community.

Like many Delta counties in 2010, Coahoma County’s population of 26,151 was predominantly African American (76 percent) and had declined during the second half of the twentieth century. Indeed, Coahoma County’s population showed one of the greatest proportional decreases in the state during this period, shrinking by 43 percent since 1960. Though the number of total inhabitants shrank between 1960 and 2010, the county’s proportion of African Americans increased, and its Latino population grew to about 300.

Coahoma County

Coleman, James Plemon

Not since George Poindexter (1820–22) had Mississippi had a governor with a broader range of political experience than James Plemon Coleman. He was also one of the few twentieth-century governors elected in his first campaign for the office. At the time of his 1955 election, Coleman, who was born near Ackerman on his family farm in Choctaw County on 9 January 1914, had already served as an aide to a US congressman, a district attorney, a circuit judge, a state attorney general, and a justice of the state Supreme Court.

Coleman was elected in Mississippi’s first general election after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, in which the US Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Segregation was the overriding issue of the 1955 campaign, and Coleman promised to avoid integrating the schools. He also emphasized the need for a new state constitution and the need for continued industrial development. At a 1957 meeting in the Mississippi Governor’s Mansion, Coleman and Gov. James E. Folsom of Alabama, along with legislators from both states, initiated plans for the Tennessee-Tombigbee Project, a vast inland waterway linking the Tennessee and Tombigbee Rivers with the Gulf of Mexico that finally opened in the early 1980s.

Coleman failed in his effort to secure a new constitution for Mississippi. Although he called the legislature into special session and urged lawmakers to write a new constitution, he could not persuade the leaders to do so. However, legislators did pass a resolution of interposition, authorizing the state to prohibit the implementation of the Brown decision in Mississippi, and created the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission to carry out the resolution. Coleman considered the theory of interposition “legal poppycock,” but under his leadership, the state maintained segregated schools, and he claimed that African Americans were satisfied with Mississippi’s school equalization efforts, though many African American leaders publicly disagreed. Coleman worked with university leaders to obstruct and deny Clennon King’s application to attend the University of Mississippi and Clyde Kennard’s application to Mississippi Southern College (now the University of Southern Mississippi).

After his gubernatorial term expired, Coleman was elected to the Mississippi House of Representatives from Choctaw County, making him one of the few Mississippians to serve in all three branches of state government.

In 1965 Coleman was appointed to the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and he served as chief judge from 1979 to 1981. He retired from the Fifth Circuit on 31 January 1984, and he died in 1991.

In addition to his public service and legal career, Coleman was also an author and historian. He is best known for Choctaw County Chronicles: A History of Choctaw County Mississippi, 1830–1973. J. P. Coleman State Park near Iuka is named in his honor.

Coleman, James Plemon

Confederate Symbol Controversies at the University of Mississippi

Although a number of other educational institutions have utilized Confederate symbols, the University of Mississippi is the school most closely associated with these emblems. And while protests over the use of Confederate symbols spanned the South during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the University of Mississippi has maintained the longest continuing dialogue on the issue. Opponents of these representations of the Lost Cause point out their adoption by segregationists, trace their origins to a conflict fought to preserve slavery, stress that campus symbols should represent all students, and highlight the damage these relics of the past cause to the university’s reputation and recruitment efforts. Proponents, conversely, reject historical interpretations that place slavery as a central cause of the Civil War, tout the emblem either as honoring dead soldiers or as simply representing school spirit, deny any personal racism, and defend the Confederate flag, the song “Dixie,” and Colonel Reb against perceived assaults on southern heritage.

The University of Mississippi and what is now the University of Southern Mississippi (USM) began using Confederate symbols in the 1930s and early 1940s. The University of Mississippi sports teams became known as the Rebels, while USM started in 1940 as the Confederates before quickly changing to the Southerners. Colonel Reb became the University of Mississippi’s mascot in 1937, while USM adopted General Nat, in a reference to Nathan Bedford Forrest, in 1953. USM changed its sports team and mascot to the Golden Eagles in 1972, but change came more slowly at the University of Mississippi.

Confrontations regarding Confederate symbols at the University of Mississippi and the effort to eliminate their use began in 1970. By that time, black enrollment had increased to more than two hundred students. At three separate protests, African American students burned a rebel banner, and the Black Student Union (BSU) published a set of demands that included curtailing the use of Confederate flags on campus. A proposal by the administration to add the letters UM to the school flag never became a reality, and the issue faded from public consciousness until 1979, when a brief flurry of debate occurred after the senior class donated Traveler, a horse named after Robert E. Lee’s steed, for the Colonel Reb mascot to ride.

The symbol conflict received national attention in 1982 when the university’s first black cheerleader, John Hawkins, refused to wave the Confederate flag at football games. In addition, when the university commemorated the twentieth anniversary of James Meredith’s 1962 integration of the school, he called for his alma mater to eliminate the use of all Civil War symbols. A few weeks later, twenty-nine members of the Ku Klux Klan marched through Oxford in support of the Confederate flag. While the student government passed a resolution favoring the continued use of such symbols and white students circulated supportive petitions, the BSU held a demonstration, presented the governor and the president of the board of trustees with a list of thirteen demands that included the abandonment of all Confederate symbols, and sponsored a boycott of the Red-Blue football game.

In April 1983, two days after a student rally of fifteen hundred flag proponents threatened to turn violent, Chancellor Porter L. Fortune instituted a new policy restricting official representatives of the university from wearing anything but university-registered symbols, which did not include the Confederate banner. In addition, the campus bookstore stopped selling rebel flags and merchandise with its image. But private individuals were still permitted to display the flag at university functions. The following autumn, the administration attempted unsuccessfully to introduce a new red, white, and blue flag with the words Ole Miss.

In 1985 Chancellor Gerald Turner requested that the school band play “Dixie” less often at sporting events, prompting a wave of columns and letters to the editor in the campus newspaper. The Confederate symbol issue subsequently resurfaced every fall with the start of football season. In 1989 the senior class fund-raiser created the “Battle M” flag (a blue block M with white stars on a solid red background). The mild success of this grassroots initiative encouraged the administration officially to adopt the new emblem, but the rebel standard continued to dominate in the stands.

In 1991, recognizing that the controversial symbols harmed the university’s image and recruitment efforts, both the Alumni Association Board and the Faculty Senate officially requested that fans not bring these Confederate emblems to university athletic events. The administration then announced a ban on all flags larger than twelve inches by eighteen inches in an effort to sidestep concerns about freedom of speech. During the 1993 basketball season, four black band members announced their refusal to play “Dixie.” The student government endorsed the song’s use, while the BSU instituted an economic boycott of campus food services. Outside organizations including the Southern Heritage Foundation, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and a Civil War reenactors group sponsored rallies in support of the campus Confederate symbols.

In 1996 the university altered the official flag to a solid red M on a blue background, a design that television viewers were less likely to confuse with the rebel battle standard. Many spectators nevertheless continued to favor the Confederate flag. Thus, in the fall of 1997, head football coach Tommy Tuberville asked fans to leave these banners at home, and the Associated Student Body requested that sticks be banned in the stands, another attempt to discourage spectators from bringing the flags. The administration quickly instituted the ban.

When rumors surfaced in 2002 that the administration was trying to eliminate “Dixie” from the band’s repertoire, Chancellor Robert Khayat announced that the university would retain both the tune and the Colonel Reb mascot. The following year, however, the university removed Colonel Reb as an on-field mascot, and in 2009 Chancellor Dan Jones ended the university band’s playing of “From Dixie with Love” so that students would not yell, “The South will rise again!” after the song ended. In 2010, the school adopted the Rebel Bear as its official mascot, a move that remains controversial in 2015, albeit less so as time goes by.

The issue of the Confederate battle flag returned to prominence in 2015 in the wake of shootings in Charleston, South Carolina, perpetrated by a gunman who used the flag as a symbol of white supremacy. According to a statement released by interim chancellor Morris H. Stocks, “The University of Mississippi community came to the realization years ago that the Confederate battle flag did not represent many of our core values such as civility and respect for others. Since that time, we have become a stronger and better university.”

Confederate Symbol Controversies at the University of Mississippi

Constitution of 1890

The Mississippi Constitution of 1890, the state’s fourth basic document, capped a turbulent century of legal and political change. Situated squarely in the context of state party politics, the charter reflected post-Reconstruction activists’ goal of restoring white supremacy in the state. Democrats, who in 1875 had used fraud and intimidation to wrest control of state government from retreating Republicans, split into two factions, the Bourbons and the Rednecks. The two groups agreed on the goal of minimizing political participation by black citizens, who outnumbered whites in thirty-nine of the state’s seventy-five counties, but disagreed on the preferred legal means for doing so. The Bourbons, most of them Delta plantation owners, supported formal voting limitations via educational and property ownership qualifications and poll taxes. In contrast, the Rednecks, who included more numerous poor residents from the hill regions, objected to such strategies, which would have disenfranchised poor whites as well as blacks, and sought instead to apportion legislative seats based solely on white population counts.

The Democratic factions remained at odds until early 1890, when Mississippi officials, alarmed by the possibility that Congress would pass a bill authorizing federal supervision of state and local elections, acted. Gov. John Stone approved a legislative call for an August constitutional convention. While more occupationally diverse than its predecessors, the 1890 assembly broke fundamentally along the divides of partisanship and race, with Democrats holding 134 of the 137 seats. Among the Republicans was the lone black delegate, Isaiah T. Montgomery.

For ten weeks delegates pursued the Bourbon-Redneck agenda and constructed barriers to full black participation in Mississippi governance. Like other conservative southern constitutions of the time, Mississippi’s 1890 document prescribed common voting qualifications but added a cumulative poll tax and a literacy test. No citizen could vote without paying two dollars and showing valid receipts for the previous two elections. Nor could one vote without interpreting a passage from the state constitution, chosen at the discretion of a polling registrar. For statewide elections, delegates also instituted a new “county unit system” that assigned one electoral vote to the winner of the county popular vote. Much like the national Electoral College, aggregated unit votes determined the victor. The convention also fashioned a complex legislative reapportionment scheme, including floater delegates and three geographic zones, as a fail-safe in case federal courts struck down the suffrage restrictions.

The 1890 constitution also featured institutional changes that shaped Mississippi’s governance for much of the twentieth century. Delegates authorized the legislature to levy taxes and to regulate private corporations. Bourbons instituted a mandatory committee system to review all proposed legislation, a tactic that worked in their political favor for decades. The office of the governor both won and lost, keeping the authority to appoint judges and gaining partial veto power over revenue bills but losing the privilege of succession. All told the document contained 15 articles and 285 sections.

The convention approved the 1890 constitution by a 129–8 vote. Neither Bourbons nor Rednecks claimed an ideological victory except in their joint efforts to reinstate white supremacy.

The Jackson Clarion-Ledger offered one hundred dollars in gold to anyone who truly understood the lengthy and complex document. No one has ever claimed the reward.

Constitution of 1890

Constitutional Development Since 1890

Mississippi still operates under a constitution adopted more than 125 years ago. Unlike the nineteenth century, when Mississippians preferred holistic political reform at almost generational intervals, citizens and their elected representatives subsequently have opted for piecemeal change. Like many states, Mississippi has come to prefer amendments as the primary agents of constitutional change. Approximately 150 amendments have come before the electorate, and about 80 percent have been approved. More than 60 amendments have become law in the past third of a century alone.

A few patterns of change have emerged. The dynamic generally involves repeal rather than regeneration, as voters have used amendments to correct the errors of the past rather than to innovate. Several amendments, for example, have redressed Mississippi’s legacy of racism. The framers of the 1890 constitution had intended the document to restore white supremacy, and it did so for nearly three-quarters of a century. Since the 1960s, however, voters have repealed key impediments to the full participation by blacks in the public life of the state. Literacy tests and poll taxes fell by the wayside in 1975, followed by segregated schools in 1978 and mixed-race marriages nine years later. These changes came years and sometimes decades after Congress or the US Supreme Court had already invalidated these practices; thus, the amendments merely amounted to housekeeping. Another set of amendments repealed an array of restrictions on corporations, mainly railroads, in keeping with ongoing impulses to create a more favorable climate for economic growth and industry. A third group of measures has removed outdated provisions, such as one providing pensions for widows of Confederate veterans. Despite these efforts, however, Mississippi’s constitution still contains many archaic provisions.

A few amendments have introduced new practices or institutions, particularly regarding the operations of the judicial branch. Dissatisfied with having the governor responsible for appointing judges, voters in the early twentieth century approved the election of the trial and appellate bench, and in 1995 the state moved to nonpartisan campaigns and ballots. In 1979 the electorate approved the creation of the Commission on Judicial Performance, now an active and well-respected entity that investigates charges of misconduct against sitting judges.

Some Mississippians, however, continue to argue that a comprehensive overhaul would be preferable to incremental constitutional reform. State officials, citizens, and outside observers have at various times called for constitutional conventions, and in the 1980s Gov. William Allain appointed a special study commission to consider wholesale revision. The group prepared and circulated a draft of a proposed new constitution designed to cure the inadequacies of the current document. Included in this streamlined version (thirteen articles and fifty-five sections) were new clauses on equal protection, civil rights, and an initiative procedure. None of these more drastic efforts has yet succeeded, but modernization of the 1890 constitution, whether piece by piece or wholesale, will certainly continue.

Constitutional Development Since 1890

Convict Leasing and Chain Gangs

Bankrupt in the wake of the Civil War and faced with the difficult task of rebuilding and sustaining an infrastructure, Mississippi and other state governments turned to a familiar expedient to fund their penal institutions. In the late 1860s many southern prisons began leasing convicts to plantations and industries bereft of the cheap labor formerly supplied by slaves. As the majority of inmates were African American, this new form of compulsory labor helped to bridge the gap between the Black Codes and Jim Crow as a form of social control that embodied the common racial hierarchies in the South. Likewise, vagrancy laws criminalized the social mobility recently acquired by former slaves and produced a steady supply of bodies for the prison labor system.

Although prisoners in the convict lease system were used for a variety of arduous tasks from railroad construction to cutting timber, inmates in Mississippi worked primarily on large cotton plantations. Edward Richardson, a plantation owner who had lost his fortune in the Civil War, was perhaps the state’s greatest beneficiary of prison labor. The first to have a convict contract with the state, officials paid Richardson eighteen thousand dollars a year for “care” of the prisoners. With the added income from the profits of their labor, he eventually regained his wealth, setting an inspiring precedent for the southern business community.

After reaching its acme in the 1880s, the convict leasing era wound down as a consequence of accusations that too many affluent southerners had profited from the system and of moral indignation over the treatment of convicts. Inmates were forced to work dangerous jobs that free laborers refused to take and were subject to wanton physical punishment and severe deprivation, conditions that resulted in high death rates among the prison population. Outrage was further fueled by the fact that the state did not maintain separate facilities or mandate special treatment for children, and many were leased out under the system. Publicity regarding these deplorable realities led to a public outcry that forced Mississippi to abolish convict leasing in 1890, the first state to do so.

Individual counties, however, retained the right to use prison labor, and county-run chain gangs replaced convict labor in the early 1900s. Cuffed together at the ankle in small groups, prisoners were put to work expanding and repairing transportation routes as part of the Good Roads Movement, an urbanization effort aimed at increasing accessibility in the South. Though considered a troubling part of the past today, this use of convicts was generally championed in its time, and supporters, including the US Department of Agriculture, considered it an efficient and progressive way to both build roads and control criminals.

As with the convict lease system, most of the chain gang laborers were African Americans, who were thought to require a generous measure of discipline for proper “rehabilitation.” But convicts on county-run chain gangs often slept in cages and were subject to brutal corporal punishment and suffered from a host of debilitating ailments, including malnutrition, heatstroke, frostbite, contagious diseases, and shackle poisoning (infections caused by the constant rubbing of iron against the skin). Work songs helped to sustain morale and increase chances of survival, allowing prisoners to labor in a steady rhythm that could be slowed to protect the infirm or inefficient. As with the convict lease system, mounting public outrage resulted in bans on chain gangs nationwide by the mid-twentieth century.

Mississippi consolidated much of its convict labor force on Parchman Farm, a profitable and self-sustaining penal cotton plantation located on twenty thousand acres in the Yazoo Delta. Parchman was established in 1904 by Gov. James K. Vardaman, a proponent of prison reform who billed himself as a progressive and visionary but who regarded African Americans as mentally inferior and touted a paternalistic brand of racism that envisioned a pacified black population reconciled to subordinate social position.

Convict Leasing and Chain Gangs

Coordinating Committee for Fundamental American Freedoms

A prosegregation propaganda organization with close links to the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission (MSSC), the Coordinating Committee for Fundamental American Freedoms (CCFAF) was founded in July 1963 and headquartered at the Carroll Arms Hotel in Washington, D.C. It was established after a month of exploratory talks in the capital between Mississippi senator James O. Eastland, MSSC director Erle E. Johnston Jr., Yazoo City attorney John C. Satterfield, and the former executive director of the Virginia Commission on Constitutional Government, Hugh V. White Jr. The committee’s explicit goal was to raise and coordinate opposition to Pres. John F. Kennedy’s pending civil rights bill, but it also represented a broader ideological effort to bridge the gap between Mississippi’s segregationists and national conservatives. Attempting to recast the South’s sectional battle for continued segregation as part of a broader national conservative movement, the group appointed New England publisher William Loeb as its chair. Virginia newspaperman James J. Kilpatrick served as vice chair, Satterfield held the post of secretary-treasurer, and the founder of Richmond’s Patrick Henry Club, John S. Synon, was hired as full-time director.

The committee disseminated reams of propaganda material (1.4 million mailings by April 1964) decrying the civil rights proposals. Notable pamphlets included The Federal Eye Looking down Your Throat, Blueprint for Total Regimentation, and Due Process of Law or Government by Intimidation?, which originated as a speech Satterfield delivered to the Jackson Rotary Club in November 1962. An advertisement headed “$100 Billion Blackjack” appeared in 215 newspapers published outside the South and drew on many of the traditional arguments of southern resistance to desegregation, including claims that the proposed legislation promoted socialist ideas, violated states’ rights, and would create a dictatorial and “omnipotent president.” Reflecting the committee’s desire to rid itself of the taint of southern resistance’s sectionalism, it made no clear reference to segregation and promoted the committee as a group based in the nation’s capital. CCFAF outspent every other lobby group in the nation in 1964, and that expenditure brought tangible results: New York Republican Kenneth Keating, for example, claimed that the blackjack advertisement swung his mailbag from five to one in favor of the bill to five to two against.

Satterfield, a close aide to Ross Barnett during the University of Mississippi crisis of 1962, former president of the American Bar Association, and according to Time magazine the “most prominent segregationist lawyer in the country,” was the driving force behind the CCFAF. He was also the closest link between the committee and the MSSC, whose board members agreed to pay him $2,000 per month for the first four months of CCFAF’s existence. Indeed, of the $343,191 that CCFAF spent, $262,581 arrived through Sovereignty Commission coffers, and more than $200,000 of that money was donated anonymously by the New York–based racist Wickliffe Preston Draper. Once the 1964 Civil Rights Act passed, Draper offered further financial support for Satterfield’s plans to develop CCFAF into a permanent organization studying state sovereignty and civil rights, but newly elected Mississippi governor Paul B. Johnson Jr. ignored Satterfield’s schemes. After brief attempts to funnel the emerging “white backlash” into support for George C. Wallace’s 1964 presidential campaign, CCFAF dissolved.

Coordinating Committee for Fundamental American Freedoms

Copiah County

Copiah County is located in central Mississippi, just south of Hinds County. The Pearl River forms its eastern boundary, and several tributaries of Bayou Pierre traverse its northwestern region. Copiah County was established on 21 January 1823 from land ceded to the United States by the Choctaw Tribe and takes its name from a Choctaw word meaning “calling panther.” Hazlehurst, Copiah’s county seat, was named for local railroad engineer George Hazlehurst. Other sizable towns include Crystal Springs and Wesson. In the late nineteenth century the mineral springs at Brown Wells attracted visitors seeking its reputed medicinal benefits, and Lake Chautauqua was a popular recreational and religious destination in Copiah.

In 1830 Copiah County had far more free people (5,247) than slaves (1,754). By 1860, however, the county’s 7,965 slaves slightly outnumbered the free population of 7,433. Twenty years later, Copiah County’s population had grown dramatically to 27,552, making it one of the larger counties in the state. African Americans continued to outnumber whites by a small margin, and most of the county’s population lived on farms.

Both railroad construction and the rise of manufacturing in the county contributed to Copiah’s increasing prosperity after the Civil War, an unusual combination for Mississippi. Industrialist James Wesson established a mill village, with several large and impressive buildings, in an attempt to re-create his earlier successes in Bankston and in his native state of Georgia. In 1880 Copiah County firms had more than one million dollars invested in manufacturing, by far the largest such investment in any Mississippi county and almost a quarter of the state’s total industrial assets. The county’s 659 nonagricultural workers also topped the state, and its 232 women employed in manufacturing comprised more than half of the state’s female industrial workforce.

Copiah’s population continued to grow in the early twentieth century, exceeding thirty-four thousand in 1900, and the county remained central to the state’s industrial economy. Its 137 industrial establishments and 1,287 industrial workers (roughly half of them women and children) ranked among the highest in Mississippi. Nevertheless, most of Copiah’s citizens worked on farms. The distinction between the county’s white and black farmers was clear: 61 percent of white farmers owned their land, compared to 18 percent of African American farmers.

Like many parts of Mississippi, Copiah was a Baptist county. In 1916 more than 9,000 of the county’s 13,800 church members identified as congregants of either the Southern Baptist Convention or the Missionary Baptists. Other denominations with significant membership included the Methodists and Presbyterians. Hazlehurst was the home of W. S. Pleasant, an early leader of the Church of God in Christ.

Blues legend Robert Johnson was born in Copiah County in 1911, although he is frequently more associated with the Mississippi Delta. Tommy Johnson and his blues-playing brothers likewise grew up in Copiah. Susie Powell started several of Mississippi’s first canning clubs in Copiah County in 1911.

In 1930, 92 percent of Copiah’s African American farmers and 58 percent of white farmers were tenants. The county’s population was almost evenly split between white and black residents. Copiah retained its larger-than-average industrial workforce, which was now supported by four canneries, a cottonseed oil mill, and several sawmills.

By 1960 Copiah County’s population had decreased to 27,051, with African Americans comprising 52 percent of the total. The number of agricultural laborers subsequently declined by nearly 90 percent, from 2,120 workers in 1960 to 270 in 1980. However, Copiah’s economy continued to rely on livestock, and in 1980 the county had the state’s fourth-largest cattle population. Copiah also contained a significant amount of commercial forest acreage, and almost half of its manufacturing workforce was involved in lumber or furniture production. Manufacturing, primarily work in textiles, employed the largest number of women.

Celebrated Copiah County natives include civil rights activist A. M. E. Logan, who was born in Myles; artists Mary T. Smith and Luster Willis; and Judge Burnita Shelton Matthews. Jackson-born playwright Beth Henley set her play and movie Crimes of the Heart in Hazlehurst. The county is also home to Copiah-Lincoln Junior College, founded in 1928 in Wesson. Copiah is well known as the Tomato Capital of the World, and it holds annual festivities to celebrate this agricultural heritage.

Copiah County’s population has increased only slightly since 1960, reaching 29,449 in 2010. African Americans continued to make up slightly more than half the population, and a small Latino/Hispanic minority had emerged.

Copiah County

County Government

Once described as “the ‘dark continent’ of the state’s political system,” Mississippi’s counties have experienced considerable change since the 1980s. In the wake of Operation Pretense and the Mississippi legislature’s subsequent passage of the County Government Reorganization Act of 1988, officials have made considerable progress in modernizing and professionalizing the county as a unit of local government.

Counties have existed as organizational units in what is now Mississippi since 1799, eighteen years before statehood. All four of Mississippi’s constitutions (1817, 1832, 1869, and 1890) have mentioned counties, placed the county’s governing authority in the judicial branch of government, and established functions for the governing authority that were executive or legislative in nature. Although constitutional bodies, counties are creatures of the state and possess the powers and functions granted by the Mississippi Constitution and the statutes adopted by the state legislature.

Since 1918 Mississippi has been divided into eighty-two counties, each of which is subdivided into five districts (traditionally called beats), which are to be as equal as possible in population. County government is headquartered at municipalities designated as county seats. Seventy-two counties have one county seat, while the remainder have two county seats because the county is divided into two court districts. Each county seat maintains a county courthouse.

Prior to 1988, counties operated under a beat system of organization and road and bridge management, with each of the county’s five supervisors independently managing roads and bridges in his or her beat and allocating money as he or she saw fit subject to the limitations of state law and the approval of the entire board of supervisors. County revenues for roads and bridges were usually divided equally among the beats, without regard to road mileage or conditions.

Between 1984 and 1987, the FBI, with the cooperation of state auditor Ray Mabus, conducted Operation Pretense, a sting operation involving purchasing activities in twenty-six counties. Seventy-one public officials, including fifty-five county supervisors, were ultimately convicted on felony charges. The Mississippi legislature responded to this corruption by passing the County Government Reorganization Act of 1988, which required all counties to move to a unit system of centralized road administration unless exempted by a majority of the qualified electors of the county. Under a unit system, the administration of roads (planning, funding, construction, purchase of equipment and supplies, employment, and so forth) is conducted on the basis of the needs of the county as a whole, without regard to district boundaries. A unit system requires the appointment of a county administrator and a road manager. At present, forty-four counties operate under the unit system, with the remainder using beat or district systems. In addition, the legislation required all counties to adopt a centralized system for purchasing, receiving, and inventory control and general personnel administration.

Each county’s governing authority consists of a five-member board of supervisors, each of whom is elected from a district. No professional qualifications exist for the position of supervisor, and there is no limit on the number of terms a supervisor may serve. State statutes provide a process to fill vacancies, and the constitution and statutes list nine reasons for a supervisor’s removal from office. The annual salary of a supervisor is fixed by statute based on the total assessed valuation of property in the county for the preceding tax year. The board of supervisors elects one member as president and one member as vice president. Regular meetings are held every month, and the board is attended by the county sheriff or deputy sheriff and the chancery clerk or deputy chancery clerk to execute and process the board’s orders.

The board of supervisors has powers in the areas of general administration (meetings, budget, appropriation of funds, elections, and managing county property), law enforcement and courts (funding the employees, facilities, and programs of the sheriff, the court system, and the county jail), health and public welfare (zoning, planning, construction, subdivision regulation, solid waste collection and disposal, fire protection, emergency management, homeland security, public welfare, and physical and mental health), taxation, recreation and soil and water conservation, public works (roads, bridges, drainage, and public buildings), industrial development, and intergovernmental cooperation. Thus, the board of supervisors must guide and establish policy for the complex multimillion-dollar enterprise of county government.

County government also requires other elected and appointed officials. Elected officials serve four-year terms concurrent with those of the members of the board of supervisors and include the chancery clerk, the circuit clerk, the sheriff, the coroner, the constables, the justice court judges, and the tax assessor and/or collector. The major appointed county officials include the board attorney, the county administrator, the county engineer, and the road manager.

The chancery clerk serves as the clerk of the chancery court, the clerk of the board of supervisors, the recorder and preserver of all land records, and the bookkeeper. The circuit clerk serves as the clerk of the circuit court; has certain administrative duties in the election process, including voter registration; and issues marriage licenses. The sheriff is the county’s chief law enforcement officer. Justice court judges have jurisdiction over limited civil and criminal actions and receive assistance from the constables in executing criminal judgments. Depending on qualifications, the county coroner serves as either the county medical examiner or the county medical examiner investigator and is responsible for investigating deaths.

The attorney for the board of supervisors performs a wide range of legal duties. The county administrator is charged by statute with performing twenty specific administrative duties. The county engineer has a full range of typical engineering responsibilities, and the road manager oversees the construction and maintenance of roads and bridges.

Administration of justice at the county level is handled by the justice courts (found in all eighty-two counties), the county courts (nineteen counties), and two general-jurisdiction trial courts—the circuit courts (twenty-two districts covering the state) and the chancery courts (twenty districts covering the state). The justice courts have jurisdiction over small-claims civil cases, misdemeanor criminal cases, and traffic offenses occurring outside a municipality. County courts have jurisdiction over eminent domain proceedings and juvenile matters, share jurisdiction with the circuit and chancery courts in some civil matters and noncapital felony cases transferred from circuit court, and have concurrent jurisdiction with justice courts, both civil and criminal. Chancery courts have responsibility for land records as well as jurisdiction over juvenile matters in counties that lack county courts, equity disputes, domestic matters, guardianships, sanity hearings, wills, and challenges to the constitutionality of state laws. Circuit courts hear major felony cases, major civil lawsuits, and appeals from lower courts and certain administrative boards and commissions.

County Government

Courthouse Squares

One of the most identifiable public spaces in Mississippi is the courthouse square. Courthouse squares are defined as places located at the center of the original town plan and designated as the location for the county courthouse.

The idea for a centrally located courthouse square apparently originated with Scots-Irish immigrants, many of whom were familiar with a central square with a prominent public building from some early seventeenth-century towns the English had laid out in Northern Ireland.

Complicating the origins of this town form as it developed in Mississippi was the political significance the Mississippi legislature gave it in the mid-1830s. After the Choctaw and Chickasaw land cessions of the early 1830s, the legislature granted full power to the boards of police (the forerunners of today’s boards of supervisors) to locate the “seats of justice of several of these new counties at the geographical center or the most convenient point within five miles thereof.” Although not all courthouse squares were mandated in this fashion, the idea certainly worked well and was imitated throughout the state. The centralized location of the seat of government was one of the most concrete examples of Jacksonian democracy. Courthouse squares were theoretically located equidistant from citizens in all parts of the county, just as many southern states had placed their capitals in geographically central locations to improve access for all citizens.

Courthouse squares are not as ubiquitous or as similar as many people believe. They can generally be classified into four common types:

Block square: The center square of a nine-block grid is the location of the courthouse. The streets bordering the square intersect at right angles. This is the most common type of central courthouse square in Mississippi. Included in this type are Canton, Carrollton, Houston, Kosciusko, Philadelphia, and Ripley.

Philadelphia or Lancaster square: The center square is superimposed over the intersection of two roads, with the corner area from each surrounding square taken to form the center square. Each street intersects the central square at the midpoint of a side. Mississippi currently has no squares that follow this pattern.

Harrisonburg square: The center square has streets intersecting the midpoint on two flanking sides, with no intersecting streets on the other two sides. In Mississippi, Charleston and Oxford follow this layout.

Four-block square: The center square has streets intersecting each of its sides as well as intersecting streets at each corner, meaning that a total of twelve streets enter the square. Hernando and Lexington are two Mississippi examples of this type.

The square in Holly Springs is a combination of the Harrisonburg and four-block square plans. The square in Holly Springs is more of a rectangle, with roughly twice the space of the better-known Oxford square.

A few county seats have open squares but no courthouse. Some of these, such as Grenada, Calhoun City, and Bruce, have never had courthouses. The open square in Pontotoc resulted from the demolition of the nineteenth-century courthouse, which stood on the square until the 1916 construction of the present courthouse, which faces onto the square. A similar fate befell Brandon in the 1920s, when its 1850s Greek Revival courthouse burned and a newer, larger building was constructed facing the now open square.

The courthouse in Natchez is located on the original plaza laid out by the Spanish in the 1790s. As originally designed in typical Spanish Colonial fashion, the plaza was an open area onto which public buildings, most notably the church, would face. However, this arrangement did not last long, and the courthouse was constructed in the middle of the plaza around 1820, thus Americanizing the Spanish plan.

Woodville’s square is really a long rectangle that includes the square with the courthouse and a smaller area with the town hall (originally the location of the market house) to the north across Main Street. To the south of the courthouse was a small monument park.

In addition, the courthouse occupies an entire city block in many county seats, but this block was never the town’s center square. The land often was donated to the county after the town was established or was purchased by the county when it needed a site for a new courthouse arose. Corinth, for example, was designated as the second district seat of old Tishomingo County in 1859, five years after the town was laid out at the intersection of the Mobile and Ohio and Memphis and Charleston Railroads. That arrangement persisted, with Jacinto as the first judicial district seat, until the county was subdivided in 1870 into Alcorn County, Prentiss County, and a smaller Tishomingo County. Corinth then became the seat of Alcorn County. Other railroad towns laid out on a grid include Tupelo, Cleveland, and Meridian.

Courthouse Squares

Covington County

Covington County lies in southern Mississippi’s Piney Woods region, with the Okatoma River running north–south through it. Covington County was long inhabited by Native Americans prior to the arrival of Europeans. Covington was established from parts of Lawrence and Wayne Counties on 5 January 1819. Many of its early settlers came from North Carolina. The county is named for congressman and Revolutionary War hero Leonard Covington of Maryland, who was stationed in Mississippi Territory during the war and played a central role in negotiations with the Creek Indians. Williamsburg served as Covington’s county seat from 1824 to 1906, when the seat was moved to Collins.

In the 1820 census Covington had 1,824 whites and 406 slaves. Forty years later the county was home to 2,845 whites and 1,564 slaves, much smaller population growth than occurred in many other parts of Mississippi. The enslaved percentage of the county’s population was also much lower than that in many of the state’s other counties.

While much of Mississippi intensified cotton cultivation in the late antebellum period, Covington, like other Piney Woods counties, decreased production of the staple. Though the county ranked among the bottom ten in cotton, corn, and livestock, it placed among the state’s top rice producers. A small number of Covington’s men worked in manufacturing during this era, most of them in lumber mills.

Covington County’s population showed little growth early in the postbellum period: as late as 1880 the county had only six thousand people. Growth subsequently picked up, and the population more than doubled by 1900, topping thirteen thousand, including forty-six hundred African Americans. With the newly constructed Gulf and Ship Island Railroad and a growing lumber industry, the county’s population continued to grow during the first decades of the twentieth century.

As in most of the Piney Woods region, few of Covington’s farmers were tenants or sharecroppers. In 1900, 86 percent of all white farmers and 59 percent of black farmers owned their land, far above the state averages. With slightly larger-than-average farms, agriculture was Covington’s central economic activity during this era. In 1880 the county’s twelve manufacturing firms employed a mere eighteen people. However, the county’s industrial production, especially in lumber, increased in the late 1800s, and two decades later the county had forty-two companies employing almost three hundred men. Collins was one of many South Mississippi towns that began as a lumber camp.

While in 1860 the county was home to six Baptist, six Methodist, and four Presbyterian churches, by 1916 about two-thirds of the county’s church congregants were members of either the Southern Baptist or Missionary Baptist conventions. Others belonged to the Methodist Episcopal Church, South; the Presbyterian Church US; or the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church.

Covington County’s population growth slowed after the first decade of the twentieth century. In 1930 the county was home to 15,028 people, about two-thirds of them white. Though the county’s racial profile remained stable over the next three decades, its population began to decline, reaching 13,637 in 1960. That year also marked the beginning of a declining reliance on agriculture, though manufacturing was slow to take its place. In 1980 Covington still ranked in the bottom half of the state in industrial employment.

Covington County can claim actors, athletes, and at least one important writer among its natives. Dana Andrews, a major film star during the 1940s, was born in 1909 in Collins. Gerald McRaney, who has often portrayed southern characters in television and film and is perhaps best known for his starring role in the television sitcom Major Dad, was born in Collins in 1947. Alcorn State University and Tennessee Titans quarterback Steve McNair was born in Mount Olive in 1973. And author Ralph Eubanks described his childhood in Mount Olive in his memoir, Ever Is a Long Time: A Journey into Mississippi’s Dark Past.

Like many southern Mississippi counties, Covington’s 2010 population was predominantly white and had increased in size since 1960, growing by about 43 percent to 19,568.

Covington County

DeSoto County

Located in the northwestern corner of the state, DeSoto County is bounded by the Mississippi River to the west, Tennessee to the north, and the Coldwater River and Arkabutla Lake to the south. DeSoto was established on 9 February 1836 from land ceded to the United States by the Chickasaw Nation under the 1832 Treaty of Pontotoc. Both the county and its seat, Hernando, are named for sixteenth-century explorer Hernando de Soto. In 1872 Tate County annexed a portion of DeSoto County.

Already well populated at its first census in 1840, DeSoto County was home to 3,981 free people, who outnumbered the county’s slave population by almost a thousand. Perhaps because of its proximity to Memphis, the area had a significant nonagricultural workforce early on, with nearly 100 people working in commerce and manufacturing.

DeSoto’s population grew rapidly over the next twenty years, and by 1860 the county’s slave population numbered 13,987, 60 percent of the total. Agricultural production in DeSoto was high on the eve of the Civil War, when the county ranked seventh in the state in its value of livestock, eleventh in the production of cotton, and thirteenth in the production of corn. County farms were also among the most productive in the state in growing potatoes and orchard products.

The Mississippi Delta was a destination for many of the South’s African Americans in the post–Civil War years. During the late 1800s DeSoto’s black population increased while its white population declined. Like many Delta counties, DeSoto emerged as a sharecropping county during Reconstruction, with almost half its farms (far above the state average) tended by sharecroppers in 1880. As a result, the county’s farms dramatically decreased in size, averaging just 86 acres, the lowest figure in Mississippi, and well below the state average of 156 acres.

By 1900 only 9 percent of DeSoto’s black farmers owned their own farms, with the rest working either as tenants or sharecroppers. In contrast, 53 percent of the county’s white farmers claimed ownership. Industry remained small, but it was clearly growing, with sixty-one companies employing 124 men and 1 woman. DeSoto was now a large county, with more than 24,000 people, 77 percent of them African American.

In 1860 the county had thirty-two churches, most of them Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian. After the turn of the century, in contrast, religious life in DeSoto reflected its growing African American population, with Missionary Baptists the largest group and the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church stronger in DeSoto than in any other Mississippi county except Marshall. The Methodist Episcopal Church and Southern Baptist Convention also had significant congregations.

DeSoto’s population stabilized in the early twentieth century, increasing only slightly from 1900 to 1930. As the Great Depression loomed, the majority of DeSoto’s farming population was African American, and nearly 90 percent worked as tenants or sharecroppers.

Between 1960 and 1980, DeSoto’s population more than doubled from 23,891 to 53,930. African Americans comprised 61 percent of that number. DeSoto experienced a dramatic transition in its labor market, as its farming workforce fell from nearly half the county’s population in 1960 to just under 2 percent by 1980. Just under one-fifth of DeSoto’s laborers worked in manufacturing, primarily in food production, timber, or textiles. Many women worked in private homes, and more than 30 percent of the population had less than five years of schooling.

In June 1966 James Meredith, who had been the University of Mississippi’s first African American student, announced he would begin his March against Fear to raise awareness about black voter registration in Mississippi. He planned to walk from the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, passing through DeSoto County. Meredith’s journey was aborted when he was shot several times in Hernando, but other activists completed the walk on his behalf.

DeSoto County has had its share of notable citizens. Nathan Bedford Forrest, Confederate general and first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, moved to Hernando at age twenty-one. W. C. Faulkner, grandfather of celebrated author William Faulkner, described DeSoto County’s Horn Lake as “Hell’s Hole” in his novel The White Rose of Memphis. Author John Grisham spent several years in the 1980s working as an attorney in DeSoto County, and some readers find traces of the area in his work. In the mid-1990s the blues rock band North Mississippi Allstars formed in Hernando. DeSoto has also long had a close connection to Memphis, and the county courthouse in Hernando displays a mural originally painted for the Gayoso Hotel in the Tennessee city.

Like many counties in northern Mississippi, DeSoto County had a white majority in 2010, hosted a small but significant Hispanic/Latino minority, and had grown significantly during the last half of the twentieth century. Though DeSoto’s black population had declined to 22 percent, its total population had undergone the state’s largest proportional increase during this period, growing by 575 percent since 1960 to more than 130,000, making it the third-largest county in the state. Like several neighboring counties, DeSoto’s white population increased over this period. Southaven has been Mississippi’s fastest-growing Mississippi city in recent years, attracting Memphis residents to its suburban neighborhoods. DeSoto’s convention center, proximity to gaming establishments, growing shopping facilities, and diverse recreational amenities have helped the county maintain some of Mississippi’s lowest poverty rates.

DeSoto County

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Disfranchisement

Mississippi became the first southern state to disfranchise its African American voters when it called a constitutional convention in August 1890. Over the next dozen or so years, every other former Confederate state called a convention or ratified an amendment intended to eliminate as many black voters as possible. In the process, a large number of white voters also lost the right to vote. Disfranchisement was a decisive episode in southern history because it ended black voting, which had been introduced during Reconstruction, and forged the Solid South, with the one-party system and massively reduced electorate that characterized the region’s politics until the implementation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

As was the case in all the disfranchising states, the initiators were the leaders of the Democratic Party, who had never accepted the legitimacy of African American voting after passage of the Reconstruction Act of 1867. The idea that former slaves, free blacks, and their descendants could vote threatened white privilege and supremacy, particularly because African Americans persisted in voting for Republican candidates. In the 1870s and 1880s the Democrats manipulated the black vote, principally through intimidation and violence but also by committing fraud at the ballot box. Especially in Mississippi, these illegal and vicious methods, along with white Democrats’ schemes to fuse with independent black factions, had proven so effective that the Republican Party was quite weak by 1890.

The late 1880s had seen a flurry of interest in calling a convention to revise the state’s constitution. Surprisingly, that interest came from farmers from predominantly white counties who were joining the Farmers’ Alliance to get their economic and political grievances redressed. These rural voters wanted the constitution changed to reduce government expenditures and taxes, end tax preferences for corporations, reduce the Black Belt’s representation in the legislature, and provide for an elected judiciary. As the movement grew, Black Belt legislators realized that they could defuse this challenge by agreeing to hold a convention and focusing on the agrarians’ desire to eliminate the black vote. Most Democrats were also concerned with outflanking the efforts of the northern Republicans in Congress to strengthen the enforcement of voting rights through the recently introduced Federal Elections Bill (the Lodge Bill). In January 1890, therefore, the Mississippi legislature voted 84–53 to call a convention. A mere 39,000 of the state’s 240,710 eligible voters participated in the convention election, choosing 130 Democrats and 4 others as delegates.

The suffrage issue dominated the convention, but finding the means of eliminating black voters proved thoroughly perplexing. The franchise committee considered a vast array of possibilities, including even such surprising suggestions as plural voting (giving more votes to wealthier whites) and woman suffrage (increasing the white vote to offset the black vote). Ultimately, the convention decided to reduce the black vote by instituting such qualifications for voting as lengthy residence requirements, payment of an annual two-dollar poll tax, and literacy tests that required voters to read a section of the state constitution. In addition, the constitution mandated the use of the secret ballot, another provision that required voters to be able to read. Moreover, voters were disqualified if they had been convicted of any of a long list of criminal offenses that blacks were believed to be more prone to commit.

Because the literacy provision would disfranchise many white voters as well, the drafters of the constitution stipulated that merely “understanding” the clause to the registrar’s satisfaction might suffice. The state’s leading Democratic newspaper, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, described this loophole as “a transparent fraud,” and observers throughout the state denounced it as corrupt and out of place in a constitution that was intended to remove blacks and thereby “purify the vote,” as the disfranchisers described their aims, and to end electoral fraud. Further criticism arose from delegates in the Black Belt, who feared that the restrictions on black voting were inadequate. But their demands for an added property qualification were countered by representatives from white-dominated counties, who worried that these tests would remove white voters even though Sen. James Z. George, the chair of the Franchise Committee and an ally of the agrarian wing of the party, had already obtained a reapportionment scheme that favored the white counties. With George assuming a lead role, the entire constitution, including the suffrage provisions and the reapportionment plan, was approved. George was considered the architect of the disfranchisement scheme, which he defended at great length and with stunning self-righteousness in the Senate.

Other states studied and often emulated Mississippi’s approach to disfranchisement, which proved devastatingly effective. A mere 69,905 whites and 9,036 African Americans voted in the 1892 congressional elections, the first held under the new constitution. The main objective of banishing African Americans from the state’s political life had been achieved. The political dominance of the Democratic Party and the white race was secure.

Disfranchisement

Eugenics

Derived from Greek to mean “well born,” eugenics was coined as a term to “express the science of improving stock . . . especially in the case of man” and was first promoted in 1883 by Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin. Eugenic thought had both positive and negative components. Positive eugenics encouraged the proliferation of the “well born,” while negative eugenics strove to control the population of those believed to be unfit. Negative eugenics had varied manifestations in the American South and in Mississippi specifically, including restrictions on interracial marriages or those considered mentally incompetent, sex-based segregation of mental health facilities, sterilization, and, as seen in Virginia, a drive to document the ethnic composition of citizens. Eugenic practice in Mississippi initially sought to safeguard the supposed purity of the white race through control of mentally degenerate whites but in the mid-twentieth century became a justification for the sterilization of economically disadvantaged black women.

As historian Edward J. Larson notes in Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South, eugenic practice was introduced formally in Mississippi in 1913 by J. N. Fox, a physician at the state mental hospital in Jackson. Fox promoted the control of mental illness and disability through restrictions on marriage. At the 1913 annual meeting of the Mississippi Medical Association, Fox stated, “It is a well-known fact that when two feebleminded persons mate, their offspring is sure to be feebleminded also.” He went on to state that these offspring were likely to become “murderers, sexual perverts, and pyro-maniacs.”

Though Fox was the first to formally present a eugenic program to Mississippi physicians, the idea was not new. In 1912 J. M. Buchanan, superintendent of the East Mississippi Insane Asylum, wrote an article urging compulsory sterilization not only of severe cases but also of those suffering from “any form of nervous instability.”

With the support of the state’s physicians, Gov. Theodore G. Bilbo began to promote eugenics in 1919, pushing for a separate facility for the “mentally retarded” after Thomas H. Haines, an official of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene, observed Mississippi’s prisons and noted that “imbeciles” lacked “common sense” but were “highly sexed.” Haines deliberately sought to promote eugenic practice, and his biased and unscientific survey found “200 or 300 feebleminded delinquents passing through the courts of Mississippi each year.” Based on his findings, he suggested the creation of a separate “colony” as a more efficient and cost-effective way to care for and sexually segregate those with mental illness or disability. Such a colony would be located in a rural area, with the “higher grade morons” able to function on self-supporting agricultural settlements near the main institution. The colony would also begin sterilizing its residents.

On 2 April 1920, after hearing testimony in support from the State Federation of Women’s Clubs, the Mississippi House of Representatives approved legislation to create an institution, making it the last state in the Deep South to pass such a measure. The Jackson Daily News heralded the law, noting that it would “put a final stop to the increase of much useless humanity.” However, poor and rural Mississippi never prioritized funding for eugenic programs, and interest in the idea declined after Bilbo left office later that year. Eugenics returned to prominence with Bilbo’s reelection as governor in 1928, and the state soon had the Deep South’s first comprehensive eugenic sterilization law, lauded as the “result of a social awakening.” Bilbo’s inaugural address implicitly argued for sterilization and the expansion of the Mississippi Colony: “The state has spent its millions in the effort to advance our civilization, to educate and uplift our people yet our feebleminded, epileptic, insane, paupers and criminals can reproduce without restriction, thus continuing to corrupt our society and increase tax burdens on our people.” The appropriations bill to fund the new institution was introduced by Jacksonian Wiley Harris, who noted that “surely society owes to posterity no higher duty than by humane methods to breed out of the race such defectives as those who at once become a burden to the state and a scourge to their descendents.” H. H. Ramsey, the superintendent of the Mississippi School and Colony for the Feebleminded, was a major proponent of eugenics and began working on a joint effort to identify developmentally disabled and ill children in the state’s schools while expanding the sexually segregated facilities to include vocational training with plans for future sterilization of patients.

The cost of implementation and the rising demand for social services with the onset of the Great Depression meant that this comprehensive law did not have a major effect until the mid-1930s. The Mississippi Colony performed few sterilizations because the state lacked the funds to fight court appeals from patients’ families, who were required to consent to the operations. Sterilizations continued at state institutions at a declining rate until World War II, when the East Mississippi Insane Asylum in Meridian lost its only surgeon to the war effort. By 1941 the Mississippi Colony’s leadership no longer promoted eugenics. However, the comprehensive sterilization law remains on the books, with its only alteration the 1984 deletion of epilepsy from the conditions requiring sterilization.

In the mid-twentieth century, eugenics turned from the protection of the “purity” of the white race to population control for the poor. Mississippi’s politicians and doctors began to impose eugenic practice on the black population of the Delta. With the mechanization of crops and increased civil rights activity, politicians and the Citizens’ Council began to attempt to disperse the state’s black population—to curb the “black tide which threatens to engulf us.” According to Dorothy Roberts, surgeons commonly sterilized black women without their consent while they were hospitalized for other surgeries, with as many as 60 percent of women at one Delta hospital given postpartum sterilizations. The practice was so prevalent that it became known as the “Mississippi appendectomy,” and among those affected was Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party leader Fannie Lou Hamer, who was sterilized at Sunflower City Hospital after a minor operation in 1961.

In 1972 the Mississippi House considered a bill that made it a felony for a welfare recipient to give birth to a second illegitimate child, providing penalties of between one and five years’ incarceration or sterilization. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was outraged at the bill’s implications for the communities in which the group worked and condemned the measure as a “genocide bill,” citing Rep. Stone Barefield, who stated during the floor debate, “When the cutting starts, they’ll head to Chicago.” The campaign against the bill gained national attention, and the Mississippi Senate passed a less restrictive bill that nevertheless declared unmarried parenthood to be a crime. Sterilization was deleted as a penalty, the charge was changed from a felony to a misdemeanor, and the punishment was reduced to between thirty and ninety days in jail. This law remains on the books.

The practice of eugenics in Mississippi has had a variety of manifestations. From pseudoscientific actions designed to protect whites from degenerative mental illness to the involuntary sterilization of black Delta women in the 1960s and 1970s, the practice has signaled a historic drive among state officials to maintain strict class- and race-based hierarchies, with troubling implications for human rights.

Eugenics

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Farish Street

Farish Street in Jackson is the heart of one of the country’s oldest African American communities, founded before the end of the Civil War. The neighborhood was home to the city’s small black middle class, which developed after Reconstruction and survived until desegregation. Farish Street’s identity as a hub of black life emerged from the migration of freed slaves searching for a more favorable social environment and the reality of enforced segregation.

The Farish Street neighborhood embodied the dreams, ideas, and values of these freed blacks, serving as their social, political, business, and cultural center. The district was home to a black-run hospital, funeral homes, churches, theaters, and schools. By 1908 one-third of the district was owned by blacks, and half of its black families owned their homes. From 1890 to the 1960s residents of the district could proudly claim self-sufficiency and basic freedom from white domination.

The area features numerous African American vernacular building types from ca. 1860 through the 1940s. Many of these structures were built by black carpenters, plasterers, and brick masons who were first- and second-generation freed slaves. Famous buildings in the Farish neighborhood include the Alamo Theatre and the Crystal Palace, venues for the most popular African American performers who came through Jackson.

Many early African American political leaders found a safe haven for their work in the Farish Street neighborhood. In the early twentieth century the Black and Tan Party, which consisted of the few blacks who “qualified” to vote, conducted business on Farish Street. From 1930 until his death in 1970, Dr. A. H. McCoy practiced general dentistry and dental surgery at the corner of Capitol and Farish Streets. McCoy was also passionate about equal rights and social justice. He was state president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for many years, enduring threats, thrown bricks, and firebombs. During McCoy’s tenure as NAACP president, the organization held its meetings on Farish Street, always changing the location for security reasons. Medgar Evers became the organization’s state field secretary in 1954 and worked from an office at 507 North Farish Street. After his 1963 murder, most of the attendees at his funeral marched to Collins Funeral Home on North Farish Street in a mass civil rights demonstration.

For music fans, Farish Street is probably most remembered for the work of H. C. Speir and Lillian McMurry, two white furniture store owners who discovered and promoted local blues musicians. During the 1920s Speir’s Furniture store at 225 North Farish Street sold phonographs and records. Noting the heavy demand for so-called race records as well as the wealth of talent literally just outside his door, Speir basically became a freelance talent scout. He would locate, audition, rehearse, and sometimes record local blues musicians. Some of the musicians he recorded or discovered include Ishman Bracey, Tommy Johnson, Charley Patton, and the Mississippi Sheiks. McMurry’s furniture store opened in 1949 at 309 North Farish Street, and a year later she went into the record business. Between 1951 and 1955 McMurry’s Trumpet Records label recorded some of the most important local blues musicians, among them Elmore James, Sonny Boy Williamson II, and Jerry McCain.

Farish Street has been compared to Rampart Street in New Orleans, South Parkway in Chicago, 18th and Vine in Kansas City, and Beale Street in Memphis. These streets were all hubs of black cultural life that lost their sense of neighborhood significance because of urban renewal or, ironically, because of desegregation. In 1980 the area was designated the Farish Street District and added to the National Register of Historic Places, and in 1995 it was added to the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s list of Most Endangered Places as a consequence of neglect and of the demolition of two hundred of the area’s nine hundred buildings. In 2002 the city of Jackson signed a forty-five-year lease with Performa Entertainment Real Estate for development and management of the Farish Street Entertainment District, located on the two blocks of Farish between Amite and Hamilton Streets. However, the project has been dormant since 2014 after the US Department of Housing and Urban Development found that federal funds for the project had been misspent, and the City of Jackson no longer considers it a priority.

Farish Street

Finch, Charles Clifton

Cliff Finch campaigned for governor in 1975 on the promise of more and better-paying jobs for Mississippians. To dramatize his concern for the hardships of the state’s working people, Finch spent one day a week during the late stages of his campaign bagging groceries at supermarkets, driving bulldozers, and working at other ordinary jobs, bringing a sack lunch. His campaign tactics were very popular and helped him reach the governor’s office in his first try.

The oldest of five children, Finch was born in Pope, in Panola County, on 4 April 1927. He enlisted in the US Army at age eighteen and served in Italy during World War II. Finch subsequently signed on with a construction company and spent a year doing heavy construction work in Guam before working his way through the University of Mississippi. After graduating from the law school in 1958, he opened a law office in Batesville.

In 1960 Finch entered politics, winning election to the Mississippi House of Representatives. He won the post of district attorney for the 17th Judicial District in 1964 and was reelected four years later. His first statewide campaign was an unsuccessful race for lieutenant governor in 1971.

In 1975 Finch conducted a populist gubernatorial campaign that united working-class black and white voters. In the general election, Finch, a Democrat, narrowly defeated Republican Gil Carmichael and Henry Kirksey, a black independent. In 1977 Finch signed a bill abolishing the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission.

In 1978 Sen. James Eastland retired from the US Senate, surrendering the seat he had held since 1941. Although he still had two years remaining on his four-year gubernatorial term, Finch ran for the Senate seat but lost in the Democratic primary. Republican Thad Cochran went on to win the post.

Finch also sought the 1980 Democratic nomination for the US presidency, entering the New Hampshire primary. He garnered little support and withdrew from the campaign soon thereafter to return to his Batesville law practice. He remained a practicing attorney until his death on 22 April 1986.

Finch, Charles Clifton

Fordice, Kirk

In 1991, having never before held public office, Kirk Fordice was elected Mississippi’s first Republican governor in 118 years. In his successful reelection bid in 1995, he became the first Mississippi governor to succeed himself in more than a century.

Daniel Kirkwood Fordice was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on 10 February 1934. He attended Purdue University, earned a bachelor’s degree in 1956 and a master’s degree one year later. Fordice then served two years’ active duty with the US Army, followed by eighteen years in the Army Reserve, retiring with the rank of colonel in 1977.

At the time of his election to the governorship, Fordice was the CEO of Fordice Construction, a heavy-construction general contracting firm in Vicksburg. He had previously served as president of the Associated General Contractors of America, a position in which he often dealt with state and federal governments.

Fordice joined the Republican Party in 1964 and developed strong and long-lasting connections to party leaders and financial contributors. He campaigned as a business leader and benefited from voters’ frustration about incumbent Democratic governor Ray Mabus’s reform efforts. Fordice narrowly defeated Mabus in 1991 and won reelection four years later over Dick Molpus by a much wider margin, campaigning on platforms to lower taxes, encourage more local control over schools, and create a climate for business growth. Fordice also supported the goals of religious conservatives, such as limiting access to abortion and supporting prayer in schools.

As governor, Fordice became famous for his bluntness, which he attributed to the fact that he was not a conventionally polished politician. He attracted considerable criticism for remarks about the possibility of calling out the National Guard to oppose raising taxes to improve historically African American universities, and his second race for the governor’s office included bitter disagreements about whether his marital difficulties should be part of political discussions.

While governor, Fordice chaired the Southern Governors’ Association and the Southern Growth Policies Board and was instrumental in bringing the annual meetings of both organizations to Biloxi. An avid sportsman, outdoorsman, and horseman, Fordice held lifelong memberships in the National Rifle Association, the Nature Conservancy, and the American Quarter Horse Association. He was also a member of the Game Conservation International Club and Safari International.

After leaving the governor’s office, Fordice remained in Jackson and played an active role in business and civic affairs. Twice divorced, he died in Jackson in 2004.

Fordice, Kirk

Forrest County

Located in the Piney Woods of southern Mississippi, the northern half of Forrest County is traversed by the Pascagoula River. Formally established on 6 January 1908 from land ceded to the United States by the Choctaw Nation, Forrest includes the area formerly comprising the Second District of Perry County. The county is named for Nathan Bedford Forrest, Confederate general and first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Hattiesburg, the county seat, takes its name from Hattie Hardy, the wife of the city’s founder, Capt. W. H. Hardy.

At its first census in 1910, Forrest County had a population of 20,722 and was 65 percent white. Forrest grew quickly as the railroad hub of the Piney Woods region and educational center of southern Mississippi. The founding of Mississippi Normal College (now the University of Southern Mississippi) in 1910 was a momentous occasion for both the county and the city of Hattiesburg. Mississippi Woman’s College, which later became William Carey University, opened in Hattiesburg the following year.

Forrest County’s population grew to 30,115 by 1930, with the county’s racial profile remaining largely unchanged as whites made up two-thirds of the population. Forrest was one of the few counties in Mississippi at the time with more nonagricultural laborers than farmers: as the Great Depression set in, the county had 2,244 industrial workers and just 1,026 farm owners and tenants. With the growing city of Hattiesburg and its population of 13,270, Forrest was also one of the five Mississippi counties with more urban dwellers than rural residents. Forrest had a small but substantial immigrant population of about 200, with Russians making up the largest group.

Writers have been a crucial part of the creative life of Hattiesburg and Forrest County. Novelists James Street and Elliott Chaze as well as several other authors developed their skills while working for the Hattiesburg American. Cliff Sessions went to the University of Southern Mississippi and worked in radio before becoming one of the most notable journalists of the civil rights era. P. D. East’s publication, the Petal Paper, developed a reputation in the 1950s for unconventional and challenging work. Other local writers, such as poet Angela Ball, fiction writer Frederick Barthelme, and scholars including Noel Polk and Neil McMillen have taught at the University of Southern Mississippi.

Hattiesburg has long been a media leader. WDBT was one of the first radio stations in Mississippi, while WDAM was one of the state’s first television stations. Forrest County was also an important stop on the High Hat Chitlin’ Circuit.

Hattiesburg has played a significant role in Mississippi’s labor history. The city was the site of substantial Knights of Labor activity, and Hattiesburg fireman Ray Bryant became the first president of the state AFL-CIO. In 1911 nursing organizer Jennie Mae Quinn started the Hattiesburg Association of Graduate Nurses, the first group of its kind in Mississippi. Mississippi’s first Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs also started in Hattiesburg.

Forrest County was home to a number of civil rights activists as well as the site of some of the movement’s tragedies. Victoria Gray Adams, a founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, was born in Palmer’s Crossing in 1926, and Dorie and Joyce Ladner were born in the same community in the 1940s. In 1955 Forrest County native Clyde Kennard applied to become the first African American to attend what is now the University of Southern Mississippi. His application was denied, and he spent considerable time in jail on dubious charges. Vernon Dahmer, a business owner and leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), spearheaded voter registration movements in his home county until 1966, when he was murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan. The Congress of Racial Equality, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Delta Ministry, and other major civil rights organizations also had activists working in Hattiesburg, among them Lawrence Guyot, Mattie Bivins, Hollis Watkins, and Curtis Hayes.

Forrest’s population had grown to 52,722 by 1960, with whites still comprising 72 percent of the county’s residents. Forrest was one of only three Mississippi counties whose population boasted a median level of schooling of eleven or more years, and the county registered in the top five for nonagricultural employment, retail sales, bank deposits, and per capita income. The county also had the state’s largest retail workforce, though chemical manufacturing was Forrest’s largest industry. The county boasted a small international contingent, most of them Mexican. Forrest’s population continued to increase over the next two decades, and by 1980 the county was home to more than 66,000 people.

As in many counties in southeastern Mississippi, Forrest County’s 2010 population remained predominantly white (60 percent), and the 74,943 residents included a small but significant Latino community. Like neighboring Lamar and Jones Counties, Forrest’s proportion of African Americans also grew over the previous half century.

Forrest County

Franklin County

Located in the southwestern part of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, Franklin County was founded in 1809 and named for Benjamin Franklin. One of Mississippi’s earliest counties, Franklin’s notable geographical features include the Homochitto River and part of the Homochitto National Forest. Towns include Meadville (the county seat, named for political, military, and financial leader Cowles Mead) and Bude and Roxie.

In the state’s first full census of 1820, Franklin County had a population of 3,821, 60 percent of them free and 40 percent enslaved. The great majority worked in agriculture, with just 38 people employed in manufacturing or commerce.

By 1840 Franklin County’s 2,699 slaves comprised 57 percent of the population, a proportion that grew slightly to 60 percent over the next two decades. By 1860 its primary agricultural product was cotton, and the county’s five manufacturing establishments employed just 23 men in lumber work and making shoes.

In 1880 Franklin County had 9,729 residents and was roughly half African American and half white. Manufacturing remained minimal, with eight firms employing 12 people. Fifty-eight percent of the county’s 1,236 farmers owned their land. Franklin was one of several Mississippi counties with high numbers of Populist voters in the 1880s and early 1890s.

In 1900 the county had a population of 13,678, divided almost evenly between African American and white residents. As in much of Mississippi, dramatic differences existed between white and black landowning. While 72 percent of white farmers owned their land, only 19 percent of black farmers did so. Most African Americans working in agriculture were tenants and sharecroppers. Novelist Richard Wright was born into a family of agricultural workers in the Roxie area, about twenty miles east of Natchez. Industry and immigration remained relatively limited. The county had only 19 foreign-born residents, and its thirty-three industrial establishments employed just 114 workers, all of them male. Most of Franklin County’s churchgoers were Baptist, with the Southern Baptist Convention dominant. The National Baptist Convention and the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, also had significant numbers of adherents.

In 1930 the population had decreased slightly, and whites made up 60 percent of Franklin County residents. About half of the white farmers and 87 percent of the African American farmers worked as tenants.

By 1960 Franklin County’s population had decreased to 9,286, making it one of five counties in Mississippi with a population density of less than 20 people per square mile. Whites continued to hold the majority, but the number of people employed in furniture manufacturing now outstripped those in agriculture. Franklin also had thirty-one proven oil wells, providing the county with the third-highest mineral production value in the state.

In May 1964 members of the Ku Klux Klan in Franklin County kidnapped and murdered African Americans Charles Moore and Henry Dee. Not until 2007 was Klansman James Ford Seale convicted of one count of conspiracy and two counts of kidnapping and sentenced to three life terms. The families of Moore and Dee filed a civil lawsuit against Franklin County, stating that the county sheriff and one of his deputies had collaborated with the Klan to cover up the murders. Franklin County settled with the families in 2010.

Like many counties in or near the Mississippi Delta, Franklin’s population decreased between 1960 and 2010, when it reached 8,118, with 65 percent of its residents white.

Franklin County

Free Blacks in Antebellum Mississippi

In 1840 Mississippi had 1,366 free blacks, most of whom lived in Natchez and other towns in southwestern counties along the Mississippi River. By 1860 that number had declined to 773, principally because local and state governments had made it increasingly difficult to emancipate slaves. As agitation over the morality of slavery grew in northern states and southerners increasingly feared that free blacks might assist in slave rebellions, the plight of the state’s free people of color worsened, even when those African Americans themselves owned slaves and accommodated to the larger social order of slavery.

In a world where all blacks were presumed to be enslaved, African Americans could achieve free status in a few relatively simple ways. A child born to a free black woman was free. A slave owner could manumit a slave when a legal authority such as the state legislature or a judicial officer endorsed the manumission. And a slave who had been legally manumitted in another state could move to Mississippi. In many cases, manumitted blacks were the sons and daughters of the same white owners who freed them: in 1860, 601 of Mississippi’s free blacks were mulattoes.

Antebellum Mississippi’s free blacks were constrained by a social order rooted firmly in the institution of slavery. Free blacks were forbidden by law to serve on juries or testify against whites, carry weapons unless licensed, move about without documented evidence of their freedom and proof of employment, vote or run for any public office, set type or work for a newspaper, sell or trade goods in other than designated towns, operate grocery stores or taverns, work on boats or river craft, serve as ministers, and assault or use abusive language toward whites. Violation of these laws could result in fines, imprisonment, whippings, and even enslavement.

However, blacks who had been emancipated in Mississippi could own property in the state. They also could marry, learn to read and write (although no schools for free blacks existed), have recourse to the law for the enforcement of contracts, and enjoy the security of family life not subject to sale or enslavement unless specific laws were violated. Natchez barber William Johnson and a few other enterprising free blacks accumulated small amounts of wealth and even owned slaves. Such free men and women worked as farmers, barbers, hack drivers, woodcutters, carpenters, brick masons, laundresses, and cooks, and some inherited property from white fathers and relatives.

Many of the state’s slave-owning free blacks enjoyed a relatively protected status in their communities principally because they accommodated themselves to and at least publicly supported dominant white racial mores. Deference to all whites and knowing one’s place might help to safeguard free African Americans’ well-being but also circumscribed their freedom, keeping them from being truly free. And no matter how well they followed the rules, they remained vulnerable to outbreaks of white hysteria.

Free Blacks in Antebellum Mississippi

Free State of Jones

The Free State of Jones is perhaps Mississippi’s most enduring Civil War legend. Long a staple of folklore, fiction, and history, this anti-Confederate uprising has inspired five full-length books and countless articles and essays. Fascination with the legend endures not only because white men and women of a Deep South state fought against the Confederacy but also because of interracial collaboration between Newt Knight, captain of the Knight Company, a band of deserters, and Rachel, a slave. Their alliance led to the growth of a mixed-race community that survives today.

More than simply a local Civil War tale, the Free State of Jones is important for what it reveals about class, race, and gender relations in the Old South. Few large slaveholders lived in Mississippi’s Piney Woods, and most families that opposed the Confederacy came from the nonslaveholding yeomanry. Women and children from closely related families protected their male relatives from Confederate authorities, while resourceful slaves provided deserters with food and supplies pilfered from their masters.

The true facts and significance of the Jones County uprising have long been disputed. There is no hard evidence, for example, to support the Natchez Courier ’s 1864 claim that the county had formally seceded from the Confederacy and formed its own republic, although the Jones County region certainly was a hotbed of internal dissent. The majority of Jones County voters initially opposed the state’s secession from the Union, and by 1863 widespread desertions from the Confederate Army contributed to an already explosive social and political climate, producing violent clashes between community factions and between deserters and Confederate militia.

The Knight Company maintained its camp on the Leaf River at the intersection of Jones, Covington, and Jasper Counties. At the height of the company’s power, it included between one hundred and three hundred men. In early 1864 reports that Jones County deserters had killed or threatened Confederate officials convinced Confederate leaders to send two expeditions into the region to quell unrest. Col. Henry Maury led the first expedition on 2 March 1864, and Col. Robert Lowry (future governor of Mississippi) headed the second on 14 April. During a weeklong raid, Lowry’s men executed eleven suspected deserters but failed to capture Knight and some twenty members of his band. During Reconstruction, Republicans rewarded several members or supporters of the band with local political appointments, but their influence was eroded by the return to power of pro-Confederate Democrats.

By 1900 the image of the Free State of Jones had been reshaped by the myth of the Lost Cause, which insisted that the Confederacy had been formed to protect liberty and independence by defending states against a too-powerful federal government and that the issue of slavery was peripheral to antebellum sectional tensions. Conceptions of a Solid South, accompanied by campaigns of white supremacy and implementation of racial segregation, left little room for white southerners who armed themselves against the Confederacy and allied with slaves. Knight’s forces increasingly became dismissed as a gang of poor white outlaws and bandits.

Lost Cause versions of the Free State of Jones have been revised in the wake of historians’ current emphasis on studying the Civil War’s home front as well as its battlefields. Like various other unionist strongholds throughout the South, Jones County’s inner war indicated deep political fissures within the white South that blurred gender and racial boundaries and threatened the slaveholding patriarchy from within.

A 2016 Hollywood film, The Free State of Jones, revived and expanded interest in the story.

Free State of Jones

Freedom City

Advised and supported by the Delta Ministry, ninety-four African Americans moved to four hundred acres of land in Wayside, Mississippi, to begin Freedom City in July 1966. Influenced by Israeli kibbutzim, the ministry’s plan called for residents to build their own houses and establish an industrial and agricultural cooperative. The ministry hoped that the community would become a model to be emulated by other blacks who had lost their plantation jobs to mechanization and chemicals as well as provide African American Mississippians with an alternative to migrating to urban northern ghettoes that were bedeviled by increasing unemployment and other social problems.

Difficulties beset Freedom City from the beginning. Unskilled, ill educated, and unaccustomed to acting without the direction of plantation owners, many residents could not adopt disciplined work patterns, and their growing sense of freedom made them balk at direction from others and undermined the cooperative ideal. The residents were largely uninterested in farming, which they associated with deprivation, and the money earned from the harvests did not cover the mortgage on the land. The federal government at first rejected and then stalled grant applications from the Delta Opportunities Corporation (DOC), which the Delta Ministry had created with sympathetic Mississippians to provide adult basic education and vocational training for Freedom City residents and other unemployed agricultural workers. A storm destroyed most of the temporary plastic huts in which the families at Freedom City had been living. Concerned by the Delta Ministry’s financial problems, the National Council of Churches, the ministry’s sponsor, refused to allow Freedom City to be included in the ministry’s budget, forcing money for the project to be raised separately and consequently depriving Freedom City of adequate funding. The site’s poor conditions, the extensive training required by its workforce, and the fear of a hostile business environment deterred potential industrial employers despite the ministry’s extensive efforts to attract them.

Freedom City children integrated the local school, and with assistance from the ministry’s tutoring project, half of them completed the school year with passing grades. Some of the children made rapid progress despite their previous poor schooling. After considerable discussion, the residents agreed to allow two white families to join them in the summer of 1967.

The following November, the DOC began its federally funded training program. The Ford Foundation agreed to pay for building materials for fifty homes at Freedom City, and ground was broken for houses in May 1968. Families moved into ten new homes in August 1969, but eight of their ceilings collapsed; another eight houses remained under construction. In 1970 Freedom City’s residents decided to lease 320 acres of the site to a white farmer; the remaining 80 acres became Freedom Village, and the focus turned to building houses and amenities. Internal disagreements and staff turnover plagued the DOC, and in 1971 the Nixon administration ended funding for the self-help housing training program. The ministry was unable to find alternative backers for the program. Only twenty of the planned fifty houses ultimately were built. With support from the United Methodist Church and the United Presbyterian Church in the United States, the ministry sponsored a small ceramics cooperative at Freedom Village, but the project was not economically viable and closed in February 1973. Plagued by budget and staff cuts, the ministry scaled down and then ended its involvement in Freedom Village. The site remains in existence and began hosting the annual Delta Blues Festival in 1977.

Freedom City

Gay Life

Mississippi, the nation’s poorest state, upsets dominant notions of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community and history. Though in many places queer life is conceived as an urban phenomenon, in Mississippi it more commonly has been characterized by the careful negotiation of local institutions—home, church, school, and workplace. Such sites are often assumed to be hostile to sexual and gender nonconformity, but such nonconformity has flourished in precisely these settings in Mississippi. Older LGBT Mississippians recall meeting sexual partners at church socials and family reunions, in classrooms and on shop floors, on athletic fields and at roadside rest areas. If households and employers, educational and religious organizations sometimes condemned “deviant” sexualities and genders, those institutions’ buildings and grounds often became the most common sites for queer sexual activity.

Finding friends and partners across a largely rural landscape, queer Mississippians have relied on circulation as much as congregation. The state has long harbored queer networks but has only recently developed lesbian and gay cultures. Before the 1960s same-sex play between adolescents was tacitly condoned, and queer sex between adults was clandestine but common. Though an 1839 sodomy law criminalized oral and anal sex and seven men were imprisoned under the statute over the next four decades, homosexual activity was quietly accommodated with a prevailing pretense of ignorance. By the 1970s, however, LGBT identity politics and organized Christian resistance had grown hand in hand.

For women in particular, education and separatist organizations have proved critical in the forging of same-sex worlds and relationships. In the early 1890s suffragist Pauline Orr and Miriam Paslay created a life together as professors at the first state-funded women’s college in the United States, the Industrial Institute and College (now Mississippi University for Women) in Columbus, where they promoted a broad curriculum rather than a focus on “domestic science.” They also advocated equal pay for equal work at other state universities. A century later, Brenda and Wanda Henson founded Camp Sister Spirit near Ovett, a feminist retreat that hosted events for women only, lesbians, and gay men. Despite facing death threats, the Hensons also cultivated a nonprofit organization that worked to alleviate hunger, poverty, and bigotry in the region. Though anchored in state and local struggles for social change, Orr and Paslay and the Hensons became key figures in national and international women’s reform movements.

When male public figures have been implicated in homosexual acts, mainstream media scandals historically have erupted. In the 1890s newspapers exposed Prof. William Sims, who was kicked off the faculty at the University of Mississippi, as well as planter-politician Dabney Marshall, who murdered his accuser. Jon Hinson represented Mississippi’s 4th District in the US House of Representatives from 1979 until 1981, when he was forced to resign after being charged with sodomy. Two years later, gubernatorial candidate Bill Allain faced rumors that he had engaged in homosexual acts with two male transvestites but nevertheless won election. While oppressive discourses continually cast homosexuality as new or as elsewhere, a number of Mississippians have produced queer narratives with local settings—playwrights Mart Crowley and Tennessee Williams, novelists Hubert Creekmore and Thomas Hal Phillips, poets and memoirists William Alexander Percy and Kevin Sessums, physique artist and pulp novelist Carl Corley.

Scandals involving black civil rights activist Aaron Henry and white advocate Bill Higgs marked a crucial turning point in regional queer history. When accused in the early 1960s of intercourse with younger men, the two movement leaders denied the allegations, a required response given the cultural climate of the times. But these charges linked queer sexuality and racial equality, both in alarmist rhetoric and in practice, and the strident legal-political crackdown against members of the LGBT community that emerged elsewhere in the 1950s did not reach Mississippi until the following decade and formed part of the massive resistance to African American freedom struggles.

Establishments that accommodated or were friendly to the LGBT community date back nearly a century, with “gay bars” existing from the 1940s onward in Mississippi. Most of these establishments catered to mixed clienteles—young and old, women and men, gender normative and nonnormative. Mirroring larger divides, however, these businesses often have remained racially segregated. When towns and cities achieved the critical mass to support more than one queer bar, separate black and white establishments usually resulted. In Jackson in the 1970s and 1980s, for example, the two were located directly across the street from one another.

Although fundamentalist preachers from Mississippi have founded some of today’s most prolific vehicles of homophobia (Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association and Fred Phelps’s Westboro Baptist Church), many queer Mississippians, black and white, have retained strong commitments to Christian spirituality. While the Mississippi Gay Alliance, founded in 1973, and its longtime leader, Eddie Sandifer, often advocated a radical political agenda linking various left causes, the most successful organizing, Sandifer concedes, has occurred through LGBT congregations such as the Metropolitan Community Church, which opened in Jackson in 1983. The twenty-first-century political struggle has largely been led by Equality Mississippi and its executive director, Jody Renaldo.

Transgender persons have occasionally found amenable physicians, including gay doctor Ben Folk, and hospitals for treatments, as at the University Medical Center in Jackson. More frequently they have traveled abroad for lower-cost sex reassignment surgery. While only a minority of queer Mississippians have moved to major out-of-state cities, many have returned regularly throughout their lives and permanently in retirement. Ironically, as mainstream media fixate on rural prejudice and brutality, American antiviolence projects report a far greater incidence of homophobic assault and murder in urban centers, with their high LGBT visibility. Thus, some LGBT people find greater safety in Mississippi, whereas many queer urbanites consider the form of selective visibility practiced there an ideological impossibility. Often belittled as backward or exceptionally repressive, Mississippi continues to hold a deep emotional grip on many of its queer natives.

In recent years, issues of law and politics have been central to gay and lesbian life. Beginning in 1993 state and federal courts, the US Congress, state legislatures, and state referenda tackled the issue of same-sex marriage, with some states permitting it and others as well as the federal government defining marriage as solely involving a man and a woman. In response to this patchwork of laws, numerous gay and lesbian residents of Mississippi and other states where same-sex marriage remained illegal began traveling outside their home states to be married elsewhere. In 2015, however, the US Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that all laws against same-sex marriage were unconstitutional, and Mississippi’s first same-sex marriages took place.

In the spring of 2016 the Mississippi legislature passed House Bill 1523, officially named the “Protecting Freedom of Conscience from Government Discrimination Act,” and Gov. Phil Bryant signed it into law on 5 April. The act declared that public employees, businesses, and social workers could not be punished for denying services based on the beliefs that marriage is strictly between a man and a woman, that sexual intercourse should only take place within such a marriage, and that gender is determined at birth. In addition, the measure said that the government could not prevent businesses from firing transgender employees, clerks from refusing to license same-sex marriages, or adoption agencies from refusing to place children with unmarried couples believed to be having sex. Finally, the law declared that businesses and other institutions could not be prevented from establishing “sex-specific standards or policies concerning employee or student dress or grooming, or concerning access to restrooms, spas, baths, showers, dressing rooms, locker rooms, or other intimate facilities or settings.” Authors claimed that the law protected business owners and public officials from being forced to violate their religious beliefs. Opponents, however, argued that the measure in fact sanctioned religious discrimination, permitting people to impose their religious views on others, and compared it to earlier religion-based arguments for racial segregation. As with North Carolina’s better-known “Bathroom Bill,” other states and localities responded by banning employees from nonessential travel to Mississippi, and several governments warned LGBT travelers about visiting the state. Legal challenges to House Bill 1523 led to an injunction against the bill in June 2016, but appeals overturned that injunction the following year, and the law went into effect in October 2017.

Gay Life

George County

Located in the Piney Woods region of southeastern Mississippi, George County is bounded to the east by the Alabama state line. The Chickasawhay and Leaf Rivers flow into the Pascagoula River near George’s northern boundary, while the Escatawpa River traverses the county’s southeastern corner. George was established on 16 March 1910 from lands formerly included in Jackson and Greene Counties. The county is named for James Z. George, a US senator from Mississippi. Lucedale, the county seat, takes its name from Gregory Luce, a lumber entrepreneur who moved to the area in the late nineteenth century, and is the hometown of mystery author Carolyn Haines and football star Eric Moulds, who played receiver for Mississippi State University and the NFL’s Buffalo Bills.

In the 1910 census, George County had a total of 6,599 residents, of whom 72 percent were white and 28 percent were African American. Among the county’s agricultural workforce, 96 percent owned their land, the highest percentage in the state.

George County experienced little overall population growth over the next two decades, with only 7,523 people in 1930. However, whites accounted for 87 percent of that total. George County had no cities and one of the state’s lowest population densities. Landownership rates remained high.

George County’s population topped eleven thousand in 1960 and fifteen thousand two decades later, when 88 percent of residents were white. George developed a small but significant manufacturing industry that produced transportation equipment. Although public administration was George’s largest employer, a significant portion of the county’s laborers also worked in retail. Agriculture, which employed 14 percent of George’s workforce, was concentrated on soybeans and hogs.

In 2010, George, like many southeastern Mississippi counties, remained predominantly white, included a small but significant Hispanic/Latino minority, and had experienced continued population increases, surpassing twenty-two thousand.

George County

Greene County

Greene County is located in the Piney Woods region of southeastern Mississippi along the Alabama border. The Leaf and Chickasawhay Rivers traverse the county; both are tributaries of the Pascagoula River, which empties into the Gulf of Mexico. Greene County was established on 9 December 1811 and is named for the Revolutionary War general Nathanael Greene. Founded in 1906, Leakesville, the county seat, is named for Walter Leake, governor of Mississippi from 1822 to 1825.

In the 1820 census, Greene County had a small population—1,065 free people and 380 slaves. Virtually everyone in the county worked in agriculture, with only seven people employed in commerce and manufacturing. Twenty years later, Greene’s population had hardly changed, reaching only 1,207 free people and 429 slaves.

While much of Mississippi had experienced dramatic population growth by 1860, Greene County was still home to only 1,527 free people and 705 slaves. On the eve of the Civil War, Greene’s agricultural yields ranked near the bottom of the state in most categories: with just 146 bales, the county’s cotton production was second-lowest; corn output had the same rank, and the value of livestock was third-lowest in the state. However, antebellum Greene County ranked near the top in rice production, coming in fourth among Mississippi counties. Like other Piney Woods counties, Greene maintained both considerable support for and opposition to the Confederacy.

Greene County’s population grew following the Civil War, reaching 3,194 (75 percent of them white) by 1880. Virtually all of Greene’s farmers owned their land (96 percent), so the county had almost no renting or sharecropping. Greene County farms averaged 268 acres, far above the state average. The county had two manufacturing firms that employed eleven men and one child. Like other Piney Woods counties, Greene did not attract immigrants: only seven people born outside the United States lived in the county.

By the opening decades of the twentieth century, Greene County’s distinction as a haven for yeoman farmers was beginning to change. In 1900, twenty-five manufacturing firms, including some lumber companies, employed 282 male industrial workers. However, the county continued to maintain high rates of landownership: 94 percent of Greene County’s white farmers and 122 of the total of 141 African American farmers (87 percent) owned the land they farmed. Moreover, the county’s farms remained fairly large.

Prior to the Civil War, Greene County had been home to fourteen churches—seven Methodist, five Baptist, and two Presbyterian. These denominations continued to dominate the county’s religious landscape into the twentieth century. In 1916 Baptists, both Southern and Missionary, Methodists, and Presbyterians reported the largest church memberships in the county.

In 1930 the county’s 10,644 residents (75 percent of whom were white) lived in a rural area with the fourth-lowest population density in Mississippi. Most white and African American farmers still owned their farms, but the industrial workforce had grown dramatically, topping 1,000.

Thirty years later, Greene’s population had decreased to 8,366, giving it the second-lowest population density in the state. Likewise, Greene’s labor force was the second-smallest in Mississippi, with more than 40 percent of workers engaged in the production of corn and winter wheat and the care of livestock. Although Greene contained more than 408,000 acres of commercial forest, the second-highest acreage in the state, by 1980 only 470 workers were employed in manufacturing, few of them in timber-related industries.

As with many of the state’s southeastern counties, in 2010 Greene County’s population had a white majority (72.5 percent). A total of 14,400 people lived there.

Greene County

Greenwood Civil Rights Movement

Greenwood sits on the banks of the Yazoo River in Leflore County in the eastern Mississippi Delta. In the 1960s the city, sometimes called the Cotton Capital of the World, exported eight hundred thousand bales a year. When the civil rights movement erupted in Greenwood, blacks comprised nearly two-thirds of the county residents, but only a small percentage had registered to vote. Further, segregation in housing divided the genteel homes of the upper-class white population from the African American neighborhood across the river and railroad tracks. Greenwood’s African American community drew strength from Wesley United Methodist and other old churches; its historic neighborhoods, such as the Browning community; and its academic institutions, which included Mississippi Valley State University in nearby Itta Bena. Greenwood also harbored the state headquarters of the white Citizens’ Council.

Although a chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was founded in the city in 1952, voting among blacks remained limited, and in June 1962 organizer Bob Moses of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) arrived in Greenwood to begin a renewed effort to register blacks. He established connections with local leaders, but initial resistance to civil rights efforts proved strong, and activists struggled to find places to meet, holding mass gatherings in the city junkyard, Rev. Aaron Johnson’s First Christian Church, and the home of local civil rights veteran Dewey Greene, among other locations. Throughout 1963 activists and members of SNCC endured arrests and violence, fighting back with meetings and marches. During the Freedom Summer of 1964, Greenwood became the nerve center of SNCC’s efforts in the Delta. In 1965 federal registrars arrived to ensure the vote for Greenwood blacks, the Greenwood Voters League encouraged citizens to register, and African American students integrated Greenwood’s middle school.

After these important victories, Greenwood activists decided to tackle economic problems, and the area’s civil rights protests reached their climax. Greenwood native James Moore and others built on their previous gains and found new allies. In the fall of 1967 Father Nathaniel Machesky, the head of Greenwood’s St. Francis Center, a poor-relief organization, and African American ministers William Wallace of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church and M. J. Black of the African Methodist Episcopal Church orchestrated what became an eighteen-month boycott of local merchants to protest racial discrimination. Members of Greenwood’s African American community were rallied by clerics and other activists, including Mary Boothe, who became director of what became known as the Greenwood Movement, and many National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party members, . Whites responded to the nonviolent boycott with a firebombing and repeated drive-by shootings at the St. Francis Center and with court orders to prevent picketing. By early 1969, however, the campaign had forced white storekeepers to hire blacks and brought paved streets and street lighting to Greenwood’s African American neighborhoods.

The Greenwood Movement remains important for at least three reasons. First, it derived potency from community energy and challenged discrimination on both the political and economic levels. Second, its sustained mass demonstrations, rare in Mississippi, resembled the earlier protest campaigns of Albany, Georgia, and Selma, Alabama. Third, the involvement of nuns, monks, and priests in the boycott made Greenwood a notable example of the Catholic Church’s participation in the civil rights struggle.

Greenwood Civil Rights Movement

Grenada County

Located in north-central Mississippi, Grenada County is traversed from east to west by the Yalobusha River. A significant portion of Grenada Lake lies in the county’s northeastern corner. Grenada was established on 9 May 1870 from areas formerly included in Yalobusha, Tallahatchie, and Carroll Counties. These lands were originally acquired from the Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians under the 1830 Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. Both the county and its seat, Grenada, are named for the Spanish province of Granada.

The 1870 census counted 10,571 Grenada residents, a number that grew to 12,071 (73 percent of them African American) ten years later. The county’s people worked primarily in agriculture, raising a mix of grains, cotton, and livestock. Only 44 percent of Grenada’s farms were cultivated by their owners, with tenants and sharecroppers tending the remaining farmland. Grenada also had a small manufacturing base, with twenty-three companies employing forty-five industrial workers. Germans comprised the largest share of the county’s sixty-five immigrants.

Influential Mississippians who called Grenada home in the late nineteenth century included activist Sallie Reneau, who campaigned to acquire funding for a state college for women. Former Confederate general Edward Cary Walthall moved to Grenada in 1871 and became a leading lawyer for the railroad companies that eventually dominated Mississippi’s transportation system. He also was a leading voice in the Democratic Party’s efforts to bring an end to Reconstruction.

At the turn of the century, Grenada remained largely a farming county, but most of the county’s white farmers owned their land, whereas most African American farmers did not. Grenada’s manufacturing sector supported a workforce of 133, including 6 women. The county was home to 14,122 people in 1900.

In 1916 Missionary Baptists were the largest religious denomination in Grenada County, followed by the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the Methodist Episcopal Church, South; the Southern Baptist Convention; and the Presbyterians. In 1922 the West Harmony Convention of shape-note singers began in Grenada County.

By 1930 Grenada had a population of 16,802, 9,987 of them African American. The county’s urban population had grown to 4,349, and its industrial sector employed almost 600 workers. The majority of Grenada’s farmers were tenants. Camp McCain, south of Grenada, became a major military training site for soldiers during World War II.

Several of Mississippi’s most important political figures have hailed from Grenada County. William Winter, who as governor made great efforts to address generations of inequitable education in the state, was born in Grenada in 1923. Delta-based civil rights activist Amzie Moore was born on a Grenada County plantation in 1911. Erle Johnston, head of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, was born in Grenada, as was Trent Lott, congressman, senator, and longtime Gulf Coast resident. In 1966 the town of Grenada was the site of a substantial civil rights boycott.

Donna Tartt, author of the novels The Secret History (1992), The Little Friend (2003), and The Goldfinch (2013) was born in 1963 in Grenada and grew up in the county.

By 1960 the county’s population, almost evenly divided between African Americans and whites, had grown to 18,409. Grenada’s industrial workforce comprised almost 2,000 people, a number that nearly doubled to 3,850 a decade later. Textile production, retail, and domestic work became the county’s largest employment sectors. By 1980, less than 2 percent of the county’s more than twenty thousand residents worked in agriculture, focusing on cotton, soybeans, winter wheat, and cattle.

Like many counties in northern Mississippi, Grenada’s population continued to grow in the early twenty-first century, reaching almost 22,000 in 2010. The county’s racial profile had shifted, with whites comprising a 57 percent majority. Hugh White State Park, home to a Corps of Engineers lake, park, and golf course, is in Grenada County. Grenada also hosts at least three annual festivals.

Grenada County

Hamer, Fannie Lou

A civil rights activist and role model for other activists, Fannie Lou Townsend Hamer was born in 1917 in Montgomery County, Mississippi, the youngest of the twenty children of sharecroppers James Lee and Lou Ella Bramlett Townsend. Townsend grew up on the E. W. Brandon Plantation in Sunflower County, where her parents moved in 1919. She began picking cotton on the plantation at age six and after sixth grade left school entirely to help support her family by working in the fields. In 1944 she married Perry “Pap” Hamer, also a sharecropper, and the two moved to the W. D. Marlow Plantation outside Ruleville.

On the Marlow Plantation, Fannie Lou Hamer worked with her husband in the fields, performed domestic work for the white family, and served as timekeeper for the plantation. Her life during this period was no less difficult than the years of her youth. For example, in 1961, during surgery to remove a small cyst in her stomach, a white doctor performed a hysterectomy without her knowledge or permission. In 1962, after Hamer attempted to register to vote, W. D. Marlow evicted the Hamers. That year the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) came to the Mississippi Delta, and Hamer worked with the group on voter registration drives. Whites responded by threatening her with violence, and in 1963 she and several other SNCC workers returning from a voter registration conference in South Carolina were arrested and taken to the Winona jail and severely beaten. Hamer never completely recovered from injuries sustained in the attack.

Despite such physical and emotional intimidation, Hamer persisted in her work with SNCC, becoming one of the most visible and influential of Mississippi’s grassroots activists. In 1963 she passed the voter registration test, and the following year she cast her first vote in a Mississippi election. Later in 1964 Hamer became one of the founding members of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which challenged the seating of the state’s all-white delegation to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. Hamer’s “I Question America” speech at the convention catapulted her to national prominence despite President Lyndon Johnson’s attempts to prevent the nation from seeing and hearing her. When the Democratic Party offered to give two convention seats to the Mississippi Freedom Democrats, she replied, “We didn’t come all this way for no two seats.” While she failed to win a seat at the 1964 convention, she served as a delegate to the 1968 and 1972 Democratic National Conventions.

With a powerful voice rooted in African American religious traditions, and determined to face obstacles and opponents directly, Hamer could inspire awe in fellow activists and great irritation in her opponents. Many of her words—phrases such as “I question America,” “Sick and tired of being sick and tired,” “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free”—became memorable rallying points and expressions of both discontent and resilience.

She twice ran unsuccessfully for the US Congress from Mississippi’s 2nd District. Legal action that she initiated against Sunflower County voter registration officials ( Hamer v. Campbell, 1965) eventually led to the eradication of discriminatory procedures such as the poll tax.

After 1964 Hamer devoted much of her energy to alleviating the plight of other economically impoverished Delta residents. She organized clothing and food drives, worked with the Head Start program in Sunflower County, and supported the Mississippi Freedom Labor Union, which represented day laborers, domestics, and truck drivers. Most significant were two efforts Hamer undertook with assistance from charitable organizations outside the South: the Pig Bank, established in 1968 with help from the National Council of Negro Women, and the Freedom Farm Cooperative, founded in 1969, with funding from several outside sources. Both programs provided food for local residents; in addition, Freedom Farm Cooperative provided agricultural jobs, food stamps, housing, and scholarships for young people; support for African American entrepreneurial efforts; and assistance with acquiring home loans, including down payments. Hamer served as assistant director until Freedom Farm dissolved in 1974.

Hamer was also a driving force in the desegregation of Sunflower County schools, initiating legal action that resulted in the creation of one merged public school system and protected the jobs of African American teachers and administrators ( Hamer et al. v. Sunflower County, 1970).

Hamer’s health declined, and she died on 14 March 1977 of heart failure brought on by cancer, hypertension, and diabetes. Her legacies of courage, straight talk to powerful people, and activism on behalf of poor people continue to offer inspiration.

Hamer, Fannie Lou

Hamer, Fannie Lou, – “I Question America” Testimony

On Saturday, 22 August 1964, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party appeared before the Credentials Committee at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, to challenge the seating of the all-white delegation elected by the state’s Democratic Party. Fannie Lou Hamer’s delivered dramatic testimony before the committee, provoking President Lyndon Johnson to take to the airwaves in an attempt to prevent the nation’s citizens from seeing and hearing her. Hamer utilized the power of personal narrative, offering an emotional recollection of her struggle to vote that galvanized listeners in the convention hall.

Hamer detailed her attempts to register to vote and the harassment and violent intimidation she and other activists received at the hands of law enforcement officials. She also told the committee of her family’s eviction from their longtime home because of her refusal to withdraw her registration. Her narrative reached its climax when she described her arrest and beating after attending a voter registration conference:

After I was placed in the cell I began to hear sounds of licks and screams. I could hear the sounds of licks and horrible screams [as they beat another woman].

They beat her, I don’t know how long. And after a while she began to pray, and asked God to have mercy on those people.

And it wasn’t too long before three white men came to my cell. . . .

I was carried . . . into another cell where they had two Negro prisoners. The State Highway Patrolmen ordered the first Negro to take the blackjack. . . . And I laid on my face, the first Negro began to beat me. . . .

After the first Negro had beat until he was exhausted, the State Highway Patrolman ordered the second Negro to take the blackjack.

The second Negro began to beat. . . . I began to scream and one white man got up and began to beat me in my head and tell me to hush.

Hamer closed with a powerful appeal: “All of this is on account of we want to register, to become first-class citizens. And if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?”

Evening news programs aired Hamer’s testimony, prompting a deluge of telegrams and phone calls in which citizens urged White House officials to seat the Freedom Democrats. The Democratic Party establishment resisted those calls, but Hamer’s testimony left a powerful mark on the American consciousness, and four years later, party officials seated an integrated Mississippi delegation.

Hamer, Fannie Lou, – “I Question America” Testimony

Hancock County

Hancock County is located on the Gulf Coast, with the Pearl River and Louisiana border forming much of its western boundary. The county was established on 14 December 1812 and is named for John Hancock, signer of the Declaration of Independence. Bay St. Louis is the county seat.

Like Mississippi’s other coastal counties, Hancock is distinctive for its early emphasis on tourism and connection to New Orleans, its cultural and religious diversity, its nonagricultural economy, and its beaches. The presence of fresh seafood, ethnic diversity, and a tourist trade have contributed to the development of a unique cuisine and economy.

In its first census in 1820, Hancock had a small population of 1,142 free whites, 321 slaves, and 131 free blacks, the second-largest such group in Mississippi. Hancock was also the only county in the new state in which the majority of laborers (161) worked in manufacturing and commerce, as compared to 153 who worked in agriculture.

By 1840 Hancock had ten sawmills, the most in Mississippi. The free population had grown to 2,311, of whom only 74 were African Americans, while the slave population numbered 1,056. Although nonagricultural laborers no longer dominated the county’s workforce, more than a quarter of its people—still the highest percentage in the state—were employed in commerce and manufacturing. By the 1840s the town of Shieldsboro had a quality hotel and a number of boardinghouses and was developing a reputation as a tourist destination.

Hancock County’s population did not change a great deal during the late antebellum period. As in most of Mississippi, the number of free blacks was declining. A decade before the Civil War began, the county was home to only twelve free blacks, a number that dropped to zero ten years later. By 1850 a relatively small proportion of the county’s farmland had been improved. Hancock ranked last in the state in cotton production, second-to-last in corn, and third-to-last in the value of its livestock. However, Hancock ranked fifth in Mississippi in rice production. In 1860, Hancock’s 27 percent constituted one of the smallest slave populations in the state.

In the postbellum period, whites comprised 4,635 of the county’s 6,439 people (72 percent). With only 364 farms, most of them owned by the people who ran them, the county’s agricultural sector remained fairly underdeveloped. By 1880 Hancock and Harrison, a neighboring county to the east, had the highest proportions of immigrants in Mississippi, with 4.27 percent and 6.88 percent, respectively. These counties were home to small but substantial German, French, and English contingents, and a number of Italian and Austrian immigrants arrived in the late 1800s. To advance and profit from the Mississippi timber industry, the firm of Poitevant and Favre built one of the largest sawmills in the country in Hancock County in the final decades of the nineteenth century.

In 1875 leaders in Shieldsboro changed the town’s name to Bay St. Louis. Several years later, the Louisville and Nashville Railroad purchased the coastal track, permanently linking New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. With the expansion of its gambling infrastructure, Bay St. Louis quickly became a popular resort area and weekend destination for New Orleans residents.

Over the next few decades the county’s population increased dramatically, reaching 11,886 people in 1900. With only 530 farms, Hancock was now a trading and industrial county. The great majority of the county’s small agricultural community (90 percent of white farmers, and 34 percent of the forty-four African American farmers) owned the land they farmed. The county had fewer than fifty tenants and sharecroppers.

During the opening decades of the twentieth century, the county boasted a unique industrial sector and immigrant population. In the early 1900s, Hancock had 349 foreign-born residents, with Italians slightly outnumbering Germans and French. It was one of only ten Mississippi counties with more than 1,000 industrial workers: 1,077 people, most of them men, worked in the county’s forty industrial establishments, many of them involved in either timber or seafood.

In 1850 Hancock County had three Methodist churches, one Baptist church, and one Catholic church. By 1916 Hancock and Harrison were among the few counties in the state in which Catholics comprised the largest religious contingent. In addition to the county’s 4,374 Catholics, Hancock also had just over 2,000 Baptists (1,237 Missionary Baptists and 827 Southern Baptists), while its Methodist congregants numbered fewer than 1,000. A Methodist campground, Gulfside, was established in Waveland in 1923.

A host of artists and writers grew up in or chose to move to Hancock County. John F. H. Claiborne moved to Bay St. Louis in the mid-1800s and stayed there for the remainder of his life, writing numerous works on the history of Mississippi. Eliza Jane Poitevant, better known by her pen name Pearl Rivers, grew up in Pearlington before becoming an important journalist in New Orleans in the late nineteenth century. Sculptor Richmond Barthé, born in Bay St. Louis in 1901, was an important artist in the Harlem Renaissance, and self-taught artist William Beecher was also born in the city in 1902. In recent years, the county has worked to support creative people, celebrating and supporting art through the production of public murals in churches, libraries, and other downtown buildings.

With a substantial immigrant population and unique economy, Hancock remained unusual by Mississippi standards in 1930. The county’s population had remained stable over the previous three decades, and as the Great Depression set in, Hancock was home to 11,415 residents, 8,596 of whom identified as white, 2,815 as black, and 4 as “other.” More than a quarter of the county’s population lived in urban settings, and Hancock had the lowest percentage of farmland and very few tenant farmers.

Hancock has maintained an important connection to the U.S. military since Bay St. Louis native Henry Jetton Tudbury became the state’s best-known soldier during World War I. During World War II, the county was home to a Merchant Marine academy. In 1961 the John C. Stennis Space Center started operations in Hancock. This facility for testing National Aeronautics and Space Administration rocket engines has been a major employer and influence on the Gulf Coast, encouraging the development of new technologies, related research, and industry.

By 1960 Hancock’s population had grown to 14,039, 84 percent of them white. Hancock’s agricultural sector continued to shrink, employing fewer than 100 people by 1970. Manufacturing employment, conversely, grew from 90 workers in 1960 to more than 1,000 in 1970. The county’s per capita income doubled over the same decade. By 1980 the county was home to almost 25,000 residents.

Hurricanes Camille and Katrina did extraordinary damage to Hancock County. Camille made landfall near Bay St. Louis in August 1969, with winds gusting to two hundred miles per hour. The severe destruction ultimately led to opportunities to build larger, newer structures, but many of them did not survive Katrina thirty-six years later. Katrina was even more devastating, killing fifty-one people in Hancock County; destroying all buildings near the beach in Bay St. Louis, Pearlington, and Waveland; and reshaping the environment and economy of the entire area.

Like many counties in Southeast Mississippi, in 2010 Hancock County was predominantly white, had a small but significant Hispanic/Latino minority, and had experienced significant population growth during the last half of the twentieth century. With an increase of more than 200 percent since 1960, Hancock County’s population has undergone one of the largest proportional expansions in the state during this period, reaching 43,929 residents.

Hancock County

Harrison County

Located on the Gulf Coast, Harrison County was established on 5 February 1841 from portions of Hancock, Jackson, and Perry Counties. The county is named for William Henry Harrison, ninth president of the United States. Gulfport and Biloxi are the county seats.

Mississippi’s Gulf Coast was crucial to the history of the colonial period as a meeting point for European and Native American people. In 1699 the French, led by Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d’Iberville, established Fort Maurepas as the first European capital in Mississippi. For three years the settlement was organized under the leadership of Jean de Sauvole and Iberville’s brother, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville. As a military and political leader, Bienville remained on the Gulf Coast for many years, residing in the area that eventually became Harrison County until 1722.

At its first census in 1850, Harrison County was home to 3,378 whites, 56 free blacks, and 1,441 slaves. Like other Gulf Coast counties during the antebellum period, Harrison did not have a well-developed agricultural economy. The county ranked among the bottom in the state in the value of its cotton, corn, and livestock. However, by 1860 Harrison produced more rice than any other county in Mississippi. That year, 138 of Harrison’s laborers worked in manufacturing and commerce, the majority of them employed by the county’s eight sawmills and two steam engines. Antebellum Harrison County was notable for its large foreign-born population. On the eve of the Civil War, 584 people born outside the United States lived in the county, the third-highest number in the state. In 1860 slaves made up 21 percent of the county’s population.

Though few Civil War battles took place on the Gulf Coast, Harrison County became a significant site for former Confederates after the war. Jefferson Davis moved to the Beauvoir Plantation in Biloxi in 1877 and spent much time writing his memoirs. After his death in 1889, Beauvoir became a home for Confederate veterans.

In the years after the Civil War both Harrison’s population and its agricultural sector remained relatively small. However, the county had the state’s largest proportion of foreign-born people, with immigrants, the majority of them either Germans or Irish, comprising nearly 7 percent of the population. In 1880 Harrison had only 190 farms, the fourth-fewest in Mississippi, and almost all of the county’s farmers owned their land. That year, Harrison’s 2,146 African Americans comprised 27 percent of the county’s population of 7,895.

Rapid expansion occurred in Harrison County during the late 1800s, with the total population more than doubling to 21,002 by 1900. Though the county’s farming workforce continued to dwindle, the number of industrial laborers increased rapidly as the residents of coastal counties found jobs in industry and fishing rather than agriculture. Between the 1890s and 1930s the Biloxi schooner emerged as a distinctive type of Mississippi fishing boat, primarily for oystering. By 1900 the county’s nearly one hundred industrial firms employed 1,577 people (1,172 men, 270 women, and 135 children), the second-highest number of nonagricultural workers in the state.

Harrison’s immigrant population also grew dramatically during this period. Germans and Irish still comprised the largest foreign-born groups, but the turn of the century also found the county home to French, Austrian, English, Italian, Swedish, Danish, Russian, and Canadian residents. Harrison likewise had the highest number of second-generation immigrants. Several foreign-born groups, including those from Italy and Greece, came from countries with well-developed fishing cultures. Immigrant laborers from such backgrounds moved quickly into fishing and canning industries. Beginning in 1887 the Knights of Labor found success organizing unions in several of Biloxi’s canning factories.

Religious life in antebellum Harrison County did not center on the Baptist and Methodist groups that dominated most of Mississippi. Of the eight churches in the county in 1860, three were Methodist, two were Baptist, two were Catholic, and one was Episcopalian. By 1916, with its diverse population of newly arrived European immigrants, Harrison County was home to 8,434 Catholics, by far the most in the state. With more than 800 congregants, the county’s Episcopalian contingent was also Mississippi’s largest. Since the 1920s and 1930s, Biloxi and Pass Christian have hosted Blessing of the Fleet ceremonies, where Catholic priests confer benedictions for the safety and progress of fishing people. In the 1930s the Church of Our Lady of the Gulf had more than 3,000 members, Mississippi’s largest Catholic community.

Like other coastal counties, Harrison developed an arts community, which, along with the county’s beaches, sports, and hospitality, attracted tourists. Since the antebellum period, the county has also maintained a reputation as a desirable destination for gamblers. The first hotels designed to accommodate northerners looking to spend winters on the Gulf Coast opened in 1883 in Pass Christian. The expansion of railroads in Harrison and the county’s proximity to New Orleans brought increasing numbers of tourists and winter residents, especially during the 1920s.

George Ohr, known as the Mad Potter of Biloxi, opened Biloxi Art and Novelty Pottery in 1879. From about 1880 to 1910 Ohr made some of the most ingenious pottery of the era. Painter Dusti Bongé was born in Biloxi in 1903, and Mary Kimbrough Sinclair, author of the memoir Southern Belle, spent much of her childhood in the city. The county’s connection to New Orleans is also evident from the founding of Barq’s Root Beer, which was invented in Biloxi in 1898 by New Orleans native Edward Barq.

Harrison County experienced several developments related to the military during the first half of the twentieth century. In 1941 Beauvoir Plantation became a museum honoring Jefferson Davis, and Confederate veterans continued to live there until the 1950s. In 1941 the Air Force opened Keesler Field in Biloxi, bringing thousands of people to the area during World War II. The town of Saucier also operated a prisoner-of-war camp throughout the war.

By 1930 the population had reached 44,143, the sixth-highest in the state, with whites comprising 82 percent of the total. Biloxi was the third-largest city in Mississippi, and Harrison was one of only nine counties in the state with more than 1,500 industrial workers. As the Great Depression set in, officials generally did not consider farming men and women unemployed. However, in coastal Harrison, with its large urban workforce, 1,300 men and more than 300 women—the highest numbers reported in Mississippi—were classified as unemployed.

From 1930 to 1960 Harrison County experienced dramatic population growth, reaching nearly 120,000 residents. In 1960 the county had the second-largest population in Mississippi and boasted the second-highest population density in the state. Whites continued to comprise a large majority. Harrison also continued to draw new immigrants, many of them Mexican, and was now home to smaller but substantial Vietnamese, Indian, Japanese, and Filipino communities. Indeed, the county had Mississippi’s highest concentration of Vietnamese natives, the majority of whom worked in fishing and related industries.

In 1960 Harrison’s large nonagricultural labor force was distributed among fishing, shrimping, manufacturing, retail, construction, and service jobs. Those working in agriculture were few. The county had the second-highest percentage of high school graduates in Mississippi and the lowest percentage of residents with less than five years of schooling.

Harrison County has a unique civil rights history. In 1960 Dr. Gilbert Mason headed one of the state’s first direct-action demonstrations, organizing a “wade-in” to protest beach segregation. Mason also helped establish the county’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Activist Lawrence Guyot, an important figure in the movement and member of both the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, was born in Pass Christian.

A diverse range of celebrated individuals hail from Harrison County. Natasha Trethewey, who served as US poet laureate in 2012–13, is a native of Gulfport. Her work, perhaps most notably the poems in her collection, Native Guard, has dealt with coastal life and issues of race. Fred Haise, one of the astronauts on the 1970 Apollo 13 flight that suffered a crippling mechanical failure but nevertheless returned to earth, was born in Biloxi in 1933. Journalist Robin Roberts, who has worked for both ESPN and national morning news programs, grew up in Biloxi and Pass Christian. Gulfport native Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf (born Chris Jackson) led a notable career as a basketball player at Louisiana State University and in the National Basketball Association. Writer Jesmyn Ward was born in DeLisle outside Pass Christian. Her novel, Salvage the Bones, deals with characters on the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina and won the 2011 National Book Award. The Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art opened in Biloxi in 1992.

Hurricanes Camille and Katrina wreaked havoc on Harrison County’s population and economy. In 1969 Camille leveled Pass Christian, killing more than 100 people in Harrison County and leaving more than 40,000 homeless. Thirty-six years later Katrina led to the deaths of 126 people and destroyed countless buildings, from historic sites to newer commercial and gambling establishments.

Like other counties in coastal Mississippi, in 2010 Harrison County’s population remained composed of a white majority. Harrison’s 187,105 people represented an increase of 56 percent since 1960 and made it the second-largest county in Mississippi. The county also possessed a small but significant Hispanic/Latino minority as well as a significant Asian minority.

Harrison County

Hattiesburg American

The first issue of the Hattiesburg American appeared on 1 October 1917, but the paper originated in 1897 as the Hattiesburg Progress. William Henry Seitzler published the paper twice a week until 1899, when it began appearing every day and changed its name to the Daily Progress. In 1907 the paper became the Hattiesburg Daily News, and by 1923 it was headquartered in a three-story wood frame building on Front Street. It continued as the Daily News until Howard S. Williams acquired the paper in 1917. The new name, Hattiesburg American, was inspired by the US entry into World War I. The first issue of the Hattiesburg American had eight pages and sold for five cents. The circulation was 2,206, and twenty-two “carrier boys” serviced Hattiesburg and the army’s Camp Shelby, located just south of Hattiesburg.

In early 1923 Williams announced the sale of the paper to Rev. Gus Shaw Harmon for seventy-five thousand dollars. Williams wanted Harmon, a Methodist minister for the past two and a half decades, to use the American as a conduit for the ministry. The Harmon family owned the paper for the next thirty-seven years, with business manager Thomas St. John acquiring a partial stake. Circulation grew from 6,402 in 1926 to 14,795 in 1957.

In 1960 the Harmons and St. John sold the paper to Robert, Zach, and Henry Hederman, owners of the Jackson Clarion-Ledger and Jackson Daily News. St. John stayed aboard as general editor until two months before his death in 1963. His role was taken over by his son, Larry, who had previously been the assistant general manager and had worked for the American in various capacities since he was eleven years old.

According to an interview with American editorial page editor Ben Lee, under the Harmons and Hederman, the paper’s basic editorial tenet involved “not opposing anything except forest fires and drownings, being in favor of everything else, making no one mad, rocking no boats, and endorsing no political candidates.” However, in the early 1960s, the paper became an outspoken opponent of the Republican Party, arguing that its development in Mississippi would benefit “the 920,000 Negroes who dwell here” and denouncing national party figures for their opposition to continued segregation. In 1972, the American moved to a building on Main Street that would serve as its home for the next four decades. Leonard Lowery served as a reporter and editor at the paper from 1938 until he succumbed to a heart attack in the American ’s newsroom on Christmas Eve 1982.

In 1982 the Hederman brothers sold their daily newspapers in Hattiesburg and Jackson along with several weeklies to the Gannett Company. The sale led to major changes in the newspaper’s facilities as well as in its appearance and content. The newspaper’s Main Street headquarters underwent a $5.6 million expansion, almost doubling its square footage and increasing the press capacity by 75 percent. Gannett began printing USA Today in Hattiesburg.

In early 2006 the Hattiesburg American switched from afternoon delivery to morning delivery; the following year, its layout was redesigned and the paper began to emphasize local news. By 2013 the paper had a weekday circulation of sixty-five hundred and a weekend circulation of thirty-four thousand, though additional readers accessed the online edition via the American ’s website.

In 2009 printing operations were moved to the Clarion-Ledger ’s facility in Jackson, and the following year Gannett announced that the American ’s Main Street building was for sale. In 2014 the paper’s staff moved to new offices on Mamie Street in Hattiesburg.

Hattiesburg American

Hattiesburg Civil Rights Movement

The 1962 arrival in Hattiesburg of Hollis Watkins and Curtis Hayes marked the beginning of the Hattiesburg civil rights movement. The two volunteers from Pike County were sent by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to organize African Americans attempting to register to vote in Forrest County. At the time one-third of Forrest County’s population was African American, but only about fifty African Americans were registered to vote.

The main obstacle to African American voter registration was the county’s circuit clerk and registrar of voters, Theron Lynd, elected in 1959. Although the Hattiesburg community was more sympathetic to civil rights struggles than were other Mississippi communities, the town remained segregated. Lynd denied African Americans the vote by refusing to answer their questions about the registration form and by selecting the most difficult sections of the Mississippi state constitution for them to interpret, a requirement of the literacy test for registration. In 1960 Lynd refused to open his records to federal government officials, who then filed a lawsuit against him. In 1961 Lynd was found guilty of violating the Civil Rights Act of 1957, but federal district judge Harold E. Cox, an avowed racist, refused to force Lynd to comply with the government’s requests.

In 1962 the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals overruled Cox and placed an injunction on Lynd to cease his discrimination. Lynd ignored the injunction, but these court decisions encouraged SNCC and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to send Watkins and Hayes to establish Hattiesburg’s voter registration drive.

The Hattiesburg headquarters for SNCC, the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), and later the NAACP was located in the African American hotel run by Mrs. Lenon E. Woods: activists called it Freedom House. The Hattiesburg movement consisted primarily of older and younger African Americans, including many activists too young to even apply to vote. Middle-aged African Americans supported these efforts with donations of money, food, and lodging. However, the best-known participants in the movement were African American and white clergymen.

Those activists included Rev. L. P. Ponder of St. John’s Methodist Church in Palmer’s Crossing, a tiny hamlet just outside Hattiesburg. In 1962 Ponder and a group of his parishioners attempted to register to vote at the county courthouse in Hattiesburg. Although none passed the registration test, that group included three important figures in the Hattiesburg movement: Virgie Robinson, the Rev. J. W. Brown, and Victoria Gray Adams. They remained involved in the movement in any way they could, and Robinson even went to jail. Adams, one of the few middle-aged activists and a mother of three, became the manager of the Hattiesburg movement in September 1962, when Watkins and Hayes left to work in the Mississippi Delta. A few of those in the Palmer’s Crossing group, including Brown, were employed as school bus drivers, and all were fired by the next day. However, the involvement of St. John’s Methodist Church inspired many other religious leaders and citizens to join the civil rights movement. An exception was the Rev. R. W. Woullard of Hattiesburg’s largest Baptist church, who opposed the movement. In 1959 Clyde Kennard, a black man, had applied for admission to Mississippi Southern College (now the University of Southern Mississippi), and Woullard had used his influence to help block Kennard’s entrance.

In the summer of 1962 Watkins and Hayes established the Forrest County Voters League. By the end of the summer more than one hundred African Americans had attempted to register to vote, and under pressure from the federal government, Lynd had acknowledged four of those applicants as qualified to vote. When Watkins and Hayes left, Adams addressed organizational disagreements between SNCC and the local NAACP, led by Vernon Dahmer, and the two organizations united their efforts in 1963.

After assuming leadership of the movement, Adams attended a workshop that inspired her to begin citizenship classes around the Hattiesburg area, teaching African Americans to read and write. These classes allowed Adams access to groups of people who hesitated to join the movement but who desired the basic skills she taught. By using the state constitution and Mississippi’s voter registration forms as the texts for her classes, Adams not only taught her students to read but prepared them for the literacy requirement of the voter registration test.

Despite Adams’s attempts, the Hattiesburg movement moved too slowly for the civil rights organizations. Another Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling found Lynd in contempt and ordered him to register forty-three African Americans. Lynd appealed the ruling to the US Supreme Court, which upheld the lower court decisions against Lynd. Bob Moses, codirector of the COFO, called for his fellow activists to converge on Hattiesburg before the 1964 elections. In the fall of 1963 the Voice of the Movement newsletter was created and distributed among African Americans. In addition, civil rights leaders in Mississippi staged a mock election, the Freedom Ballot, and Hattiesburg had the largest African American turnout in the state.

On 22 January 1964 the Hattiesburg movement staged the first Freedom Day, during which picketers would march in front of the courthouse while large numbers of African Americans applied to vote. In anticipation of mass arrests, experienced activists Fannie Lou Hamer, Amzie Moore, James Forman, John Lewis, and Ella Baker traveled to Hattiesburg with the intention of going to jail to keep up the morale of the locals arrested. Everyone agreed to refuse bail to draw more attention to the cause.

Inspired by speeches given the night before, around two hundred people from all over the South braved the rain to demonstrate at the courthouse, with newspaper reporters and television cameras documenting the protest. The police ordered the picketers to disband, but they refused. By the time the courthouse closed that day, seventy-five African Americans had stood in line all day to register to vote, but only twelve had been allowed inside. They were not notified of the results of their tests.

Only two people were arrested on Freedom Day: Moses, for refusing to leave the sidewalk across the street from the courthouse, and Oscar Chase, an African American who had recently graduated from Yale Law School and who was arrested for failing to report that he had hit a parked truck with his car (though the incident caused no damage to the truck). In jail Chase was beaten by a white cellmate while guards watched, and his bail was paid the next day. Moses refused bail and had no problems in jail awaiting his court date with Judge Mildred W. Norris. Norris requested that those in attendance who were sitting on the “wrong” sides of the courtroom segregate themselves. However, Howard Zinn, an adviser for SNCC, brought to her attention to the fact that the US Supreme Court had ruled segregated courtrooms unconstitutional, and Norris continued with the case. She found Moses guilty of obstructing sidewalk traffic and refusing to move when police asked.

By the end of that week, 150 African Americans had completed the voter registration test in Hattiesburg, and more continued to picket outside, earning the name the “Perpetual Picket.” More activists were arrested as the movement ushered in Freedom Summer 1964. Freedom House hosted the largest organization in the state, and Hattiesburg was a center of activity, including founding freedom schools and libraries.

Hattiesburg movement members were active in founding the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which challenged the white delegates at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. In the mid-1960s Hamer, Adams, and the Rev. John Cameron ran for Congress from Mississippi, a landmark event for the state’s African Americans.

Hattiesburg Civil Rights Movement

Hinds County

As the home of Mississippi’s capital city, Hinds County has long been the center of the state’s government as well as a hub of educational, economic, and cultural life. Jackson is Mississippi’s largest city, and Hinds County, a largely urban county in a primarily rural and agricultural state, has been the most populous county in the state since 1860. Chosen in part for its central location, Jackson has great importance to Mississippians as the site of state government, as the headquarters of numerous businesses and other organizations, and as a location for meetings, conferences, entertainment, and even the state fair. The Pearl River runs through Hinds County and Jackson. The county seat is Jackson, and other notable towns include Raymond, Bolton, Cayuga, Clinton, Edwards, Learned, Oakley, Pocahontas, Terry, Tougaloo, and Utica.

Founded in 1821 on land ceded by the Choctaw in the Treaty of Doak’s Stand, Hinds County was named for Gen. Thomas Hinds. Jackson, named for Gen. Andrew Jackson years before he became president, became the capital in 1821, four years after Mississippi statehood. The plan for the city had roots in Thomas Jefferson’s goal for state capitals to be small cities with numerous green spaces. The state government began meeting in Jackson in 1822 in a small brick building that served as the state’s first capitol. The larger, more impressive Greek Revival structure that eventually became known as the Old Capitol was designed by architect William Nichols and constructed in the 1830s, opening in 1839. In 1842 Gov. Tilghman Tucker became the first governor to move into the Governor’s Mansion, also designed by Nichols.

Despite a growing urban core, antebellum Hinds County was an agricultural powerhouse. In its first census in 1830, the county had a population of 5,433 free people and 3,212 slaves. Just ten years later, Hinds County had the state’s second-largest overall population, including the second-largest slave population. In 1840 Hinds had almost twice as many slaves (12,275) as free people (6,823). Jackson had about three hundred people working in manufacturing.

By 1860 Hinds County was the largest in the state, with 8,776 free people and 22,363 slaves, the largest such population and a ratio that ranked thirteenth among Mississippi counties. With its 3,199 people, Jackson was the state’s fourth-largest city, with the second-most people born outside the United States. In 1860 Jackson had the fifth-highest number of manufacturing workers in the state, most of them making woolen goods, but Hinds remained devoted to agriculture. It ranked second in the state in cotton production and was among Mississippi’s top seven counties in corn, livestock, oats, peas and beans, and sweet potatoes.

Hinds County had twenty-three churches in 1860—eight Baptist, seven Methodist, three Presbyterian, two Christian, two Episcopal, and one Catholic. In 1861, fifteen Jewish families founded Beth Israel Congregation.

Jackson was the site of Mississippi’s secession convention and home of the state’s leading secessionist newspaper, the Mississippian, edited by Ethelbert Barksdale . The state government operated in the city until Union forces took it in May 1863. As part of a broad effort to take Vicksburg and weaken the forces that might defend it, Union troops led by Ulysses S. Grant fought back Confederates first at Raymond and then at Jackson. William Sherman’s men quickly burned a considerable number of Jackson buildings and railroads, leading some to begin referring to the city as Chimneyville. The state government had to flee the city.

Postbellum Hinds County grew dramatically, reaching 43,958 people (73 percent of them African Americans) in 1880. About half of the county’s farmers owned their land, while the rest were renters or sharecroppers. The county employed 206 men and 14 women in industry, a number higher than most in the state but not as large as might be expected for a growing urban area. In 1880 Hinds had the state’s second-highest number of foreign-born people, with 501 men and women, mostly from Ireland, Germany, and England.

By 1900 Hinds County’s 186 industrial establishments were the most in the state, while its 6,607 farms were second. Its population of 52,577 included almost 40,000 African Americans. For such a large county, Hinds had a relatively small number of foreign-born residents, with Irish, German, and English immigrants making up the majority of the county’s 275 nonnatives. As a consequence of the county’s large African American majority. Missionary Baptists were the most popular religious group in the 1916 religious census, followed by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South; the Southern Baptist Convention; the Methodist Episcopal Church; the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church; the Catholic Church; and the Presbyterian and Episcopalian churches. Charles P. Jones, a leader of the Church of God in Christ and later of the Church of Christ (Holiness), pastored a church in Jackson in the 1890s and early 1900s.

By the turn of the twentieth century, Jackson was growing in numerous ways. The expansion of government, with new departments and responsibilities, led to the building of the New Capitol, a large and impressive Beaux Arts building designed by Theodore Link that opened in 1903. Farish Street and the surrounding neighborhood became a site for African American business and leadership, with churches, funeral homes, restaurants, and entertainment catering to and mostly run by African Americans.

Hinds County also became a center of the state’s educational activity, with numerous offices dealing with public education as well as a large and diverse array of colleges and universities. Tougaloo College, Millsaps College, and Mississippi College have roots in the 1800s and connections to religious institutions. Hinds was also home to many other institutions that are now defunct, among them Mount Herman Seminary near Clinton; Hillman College (a women’s college that became part of Mississippi College); the Southern Christian Institute in Edwards; St. Andrew’s College in Jackson; Campbell College (a predecessor of Jackson State University); and Utica Normal and Industrial School. The growth of Jackson State University and Hinds Community College expanded educational opportunities, and Jackson State changed from a teachers’ college for African American students to a broad-ranging university with numerous strengths. The University of Mississippi Medical Center opened in Jackson in 1955 and attracted international attention in 1963 and 1964 when surgeon James D. Hardy and his team performed the world’s first lung and heart transplants.

Sometimes in partnership with the city’s educational institutions, Jackson writers have produced an extraordinary body of work. The importance of books and reading showed in one of the key events of the city’s civil rights history, when students from Tougaloo College staged a sit-in at an whites-only library. Eudora Welty was born in Jackson in 1909 and resided there for most of her life. Living near the Belhaven campus and with friends throughout the city, Welty used Jackson and many other Mississippi locations as settings for her work. Richard Wright spent part of his childhood in Jackson and in Black Boy memorably detailed frustrations with his education in the city. Margaret Walker Alexander, author of “For My People,” Jubilee, and many other works, spent much of her professional life teaching at Jackson State University. Playwright Beth Henley was born in Jackson, as were novelist Richard Ford and poets James T. Whitehead, Turner Cassity, John Stone, and John Freeman. John Alfred Williams, a leader of the Black Arts movement, was born in Jackson in 1925, and poet and literary scholar Jerry Ward helped lead a movement of artists connected to Tougaloo College in the 1980s. Barry Hannah grew up in Clinton, attended Mississippi College, and set some of his work there. Poet Sterling Plumpp grew up outside Clinton and moved to Jackson before leaving the state. Novelist Kathryn Stockett grew up in Hinds County and set her best-selling novel, The Help, in 1960s Jackson.

Hinds is far less famous for its music scene than are New Orleans, Memphis, and the Mississippi Delta, but the county has been important both as a place to play and record and as the home of numerous notable musicians. Early blues artists such as Charley Patton, Tommy Johnson, and the Chatmon family grew up in rural Hinds, and Patton made his first recordings in Jackson. Farish Street has been the home of extraordinary music of various genres, and record labels Trumpet Records, Ace Records, and Malaco Records started in Jackson. Blues and jazz singer Cassandra Wilson was born in Jackson in 1955, and rap musician David Banner (Levell Crump) is a Jackson native whose lyrics frequently comment on Mississippi issues. Country musician Faith Hill and R&B singer Dorothy Moore also have roots in Hinds. Musicians not affiliated with distinctively southern forms of music also hail from Jackson. Conductor and composer Lehman Engel, born in 1910, grew up in the city, as did innovative contemporary musician Milton Babbitt. Jackson’s festivals, concert halls, colleges, and churches have offered settings for a great deal of music, and the Mississippi Mass Choir got its start in the city in 1988.

The state’s capital city and largest urban area is also home to one of Mississippi’s most active and eclectic settings for the visual arts. The Mississippi Art Association began in 1911 to solicit work for the state fair, and its efforts eventually led to the creation of the Mississippi Museum of Art. Painter William Hollingsworth, born in 1910, has been called the Faulkner of Visual Arts because of his range of work about the people of Mississippi. Marie Hull did extraordinary work while teaching from her home in Jackson. Many artists had affiliations with Jackson colleges. While Karl and Mildred Wolfe were establishing the Wolfe Studio, for example, they also taught at Millsaps College. The Mississippi Art Colony has met in Utica since the 1970s, and the Tougaloo Art Colony began operation in 1997. Recent artists with strong Hinds County connections include painters Randy Hayes, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Lynn Green Root, Laurence Arthur Jones, and Wyatt Waters; sculptor James Seawright; and stained glass artist Andrew Young. Architect N. W. Overstreet and his firm, working in Jackson from the 1910s through the 1960s, helped define the look of the city, creating many modernist buildings of reinforced concrete. The firm’s work included the monumental Bailey School (designed by Overstreet and A. H. Town), an Art Deco building with sculptural concrete reliefs of Andrew Jackson and Chief Pushmataha; the Walthall Hotel; and the First National Bank building (now Trustmark).

In 1930, with more than eighty-five thousand people, Hinds County was Mississippi’s leading urban center. With about one thousand people per square mile, Hinds had the densest population in the state as well as the most whites and second-most African Americans. Hinds had the second-highest number of industrial workers (more than twenty-five hundred), and it still had more than sixty-six hundred farms. As in most of the state, by 1930 the majority of the county’s farmers, black and white, were tenants.

Hinds County’s population more than doubled to 187,045 between 1930 and 1960 and grew to 250,998 by 1980, maintaining its standing as most populated county with the highest density. Sixty percent of the population was white, and almost 50 percent had a high school education or more, the highest percentage in the state. Fewer than 4,000 members of the labor force of more than 80,000 were involved in agriculture. Many important Mississippi businesses—among them McRae’s Department Stores, the Jitney Jungle groceries, Mississippi Power and Light, and WorldCom—maintained headquarters in Hinds County.

As the state capital, Jackson has been the primary location for Mississippi’s media, beginning with the Eastern Clarion, predecessor of the Jackson Clarion-Ledger. Other newspapers have included or still include the Jackson Daily News; the city’s leading African American–run newspaper, the Jackson Advocate; the Prohibition newspaper Mississippi White Ribbon; the civil rights newspaper Eagle Eye; the 1960s counterculture publication the Kudzu; and the current Mississippi Magazine and Jackson Free Press. The Clarion-Ledger has long had the state’s highest newspaper circulation, and its notable journalists and columnists have included Tom Ethridge, Bill Minor, and Jerry Mitchell. Jackson was also home to Mississippi’s first and largest television stations and now hosts the state’s public television and radio network.

In the 1950s and 1960s, with its combination of a large African American population, key institutions, and inspired and creative leadership, Jackson became one of the centers of the state’s civil rights movement. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and other groups had operated in Jackson for years, with voting rights work and the development of educational institutions among the most notable efforts. Many more recent protesters attended Tougaloo College, while others came from other colleges, especially Jackson State, and the city’s churches, labor and civic groups. In the early 1960s protesters began a series of efforts to integrate all-white libraries, lunch counters, bus stations, other business locations, churches, and public facilities. In 1961 Freedom Riders dramatized transportation segregation and many spent part of the summer in jail. An extended boycott in 1962–63, led primarily by NAACP secretary Medgar Evers, called for an end to racial segregation, and Evers’s June 1963 murder demonstrated the lengths to which opponents of civil rights would go. Hinds County is also important because numerous activists who grew up there, including Carpenter’s A. M. E. Logan, Terry’s Robert C. Smith, Edwards’s George Lee, and Jackson’s Gladys Noel Bates, Charles McLaurin, Constance Slaughter-Harvey, Colia L. L. Clark, Gilbert Mason, and Henry T. Wingate, among many others.

Jackson was also notable for opposition to civil rights work. While civil rights activists started Womanpower Unlimited to help jailed activists, Jackson was also the home of Women for Constitutional Government, a southern organization that condemned federal efforts to desegregate schools. Jackson was the headquarters of the Citizens’ Council and its first school, Citizens’ Council School Number 1. While the Jackson Chamber of Commerce called for obeying federal laws requiring desegregation, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, also headquartered in the city, worked to maintain segregation. In 1967 the bombing of the Temple Beth Israel, where Rabbi Perry Nussbaum had criticized racial segregation, demonstrated further divisions in the community.

In recent years, Hinds County has become the center for an expanding institutional base for a multiethnic Mississippi. The Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life began work in Jackson in 1986, continuing the work of the Henry S. Jacobs Camp in Utica. In 1992 some Jackson ministers founded Mission Mississippi to encourage better relations between white and African American Christians, and in 2000 the International Museum of Muslim Cultures opened to encourage study and understanding of that faith. Jackson is home to Mississippi’s largest community of Indian immigrants, many of them drawn to the city’s computer industry. Festivals celebrating Irish culture, Italian life, and Greek life (building on the city’s history of Greek restaurants) are important annual events.

By 1980 the number of Hinds County residents involved in agriculture had declined to less than 1,000. Conversely, the manufacturing workforce continued to grow, reaching 9,450 in 1960 and 15,500 in 1980. Industry in Hinds revolved around the production of furniture, durable goods, and food products. More than 6,500 persons were employed in retail trade, with finance, insurance, and real estate employing another 4,421. Hospitals, public administration, and education were other large employers. In 1980 Hinds boasted the highest personal income, bank deposits, and retail sales in the state and had the second-highest per capita income.

During the second half of the twentieth century Hinds’s population increased by about 58,000 people, and between 1980 and 2010, it grew by nearly 70,000, reaching 245,285. The county’s racial profile shifted dramatically, as a two-thirds white majority became to a two-thirds black majority, a consequence not only of new African American arrivals but also of white flight to neighboring counties. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, small Latino/Hispanic and Asian minorities had emerged in Hinds County as well as in neighboring Madison County.

Hinds County

Holmes County

Holmes County, created in 1833 from part of Yazoo County and located in central Mississippi, was named for former governor David Holmes. Notable features in Holmes County include Tchula Lake and the Hillside National Wildlife Refuge, Mathews Brake National Wildlife Refuge, Morgan Brake National Wildlife Refuge, and Theodore Roosevelt National Wildlife Refuge. The county is also home to Holmes County State Park. The county seat is Lexington, and other towns include Durant, Goodman, and Pickens.

In 1840 the county had a population of 5,566 slaves and 3,886 free people. By 1860 the slave population had grown to 11,975, more than twice the free population of 5,816. The county was a leading producer of cotton (ninth among counties in the state), was sixth in the value of its livestock, and ranked twelfth in growing corn. In 1860 only 41 residents worked in manufacturing. Of the fourteen churches in Holmes in 1840, eight were Methodist, three were Presbyterian, two were Baptist, and one was Episcopalian.

Holmes County grew rapidly in the postbellum period, as numerous migrants came to farm the rich Delta land. The African American population almost doubled to 20,233 in 1880, while the white population grew by only 1,000. But population expansion did not mean the growth of farm-owning prosperity—almost half of Holmes County’s farmers worked as sharecroppers, and the county had only 45 industrial workers.

By 1900 Holmes had a population of 36,838, including more than 28,000 African Americans. The area remained agricultural, with more than 5,000 farms. Whereas 57 percent of the 1,000 white farmers owned their own land, only 12 percent of African American farmers did so, meaning that the county had more than 3,400 black tenant farmers and sharecroppers. Holmes County employed 214 industrial workers, all but 4 of them men. Durant was home to an active Colored Farmers’ Alliance, and the county’s superintendent of schools, William Hall Smith, started Mississippi’s first Corn Clubs, the precursors to 4-H Clubs. The Order of the Eastern Star, a women’s Masonic organization, claimed Holmes County’s Eureka Masonic College (known as the Little Red Schoolhouse) as its birthplace. Edmond F. Noel, the thirty-seventh governor of Mississippi, was from Holmes County.

As in many counties with African American majorities, Missionary Baptists dominated the religious landscape, with more than three times as many as the Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians who called the county home. Holmes County was also important in the history of the Church of God in Christ, a holiness group. In 1897 minister and denominational founder Charles Hamilton Mason led a Lexington revival that formed the basis for the group’s first church. In the 1920s Illinois native Arenia Mallory moved to Holmes County, where she founded Saints Industrial and Literary School as a Church of God institution; she served as its principal for more than fifty years. In the 1930s the Mississippi Health Project, a program originated by the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, began at the Saints school.

From 1900 to 1930 the population changed very little, although the rate of farm ownership decreased, so that 89 percent of African American farmers and 64 percent of white farmers were now tenants or sharecroppers. The industrial population grew to 639, although the county remained primarily agricultural. Two experimental agricultural communities, Providence Farm and Mileston, began in the late 1930s and 1940s to address farmworkers’ problems. Providence Farm included a substantial Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union.

Holmes County was the birthplace to several scholars interested in the history and culture of Mississippi and the South. John A. Lomax was born near Goodman in 1867 before moving to Texas. Lomax was a folklorist and musicologist famous for collecting American music, including the music of rural African Americans. Historian David Herbert Donald, known for his scholarship on Abraham Lincoln, was also born in Goodman. Tchula native Chalmers Archer Jr., an author and educator born in 1938, described his upbringing in Growing Up Black in Rural Mississippi. Other notable natives of Holmes County include blues musicians Lester Davenport, Jimmy Dawkins, and Lonnie Pitchford as well as Monroe Saffold Jr., who won the Amateur Athletic Union’s US masters’-level bodybuilding championship in 1990.

By 1960 Holmes County’s population had decreased to 27,096, with African Americans holding a 71 percent majority. Almost half of the 1960 workforce was still involved in the agricultural production of cotton, soybeans, oats, and livestock, but agricultural employment dropped to less than 8 percent by 1980. In that year Holmes had a small but growing manufacturing sector that concentrated on furniture and apparel.

The Holmes County civil rights movement grew in part from organized community efforts at Mileston. Beginning in 1963 a group of local activists including Hartman Turnbow joined with Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organizers to make sustained efforts to register African Americans to vote. Just four years later, Holmes County schoolteacher Robert Clark became the first African American elected to the Mississippi House of Representatives since Reconstruction. Hazel Brannon Smith, the white editor of the Durant News and Lexington Advertiser, never officially joined the movement but consistently wrote articles condemning racial violence. In 1964 Smith became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing.

As in many Delta counties in Mississippi, Holmes County’s population was predominantly African American and decreased overall during the last half of the twentieth century. The 2010 population of 19,198 represented a drop of 29 percent (7,898) since 1960 and was 83.4 percent African American and 15.6 percent white. In recent years Holmes County has consistently had one of Mississippi’s highest poverty rates, topping 40 percent.

Holmes County

Holmes County Civil Rights Movement

The seeds for the emergence of the civil rights movement in Holmes County were planted during the Great Depression. The federal government, through the Farm Security Administration, bought five foreclosed plantations in the county as part of the effort to turn poor tenants and sharecroppers into landowners. The agency divided these ninety-five hundred acres into more than one hundred farms, all of which contained at least sixty acres. The original tenants received the land, a home, and all the tools, equipment, and mules needed to be independent farmers. After five years, those who continued on the farms received low-interest, long-term mortgages. The landowning blacks in this community, Mileston, had their own cooperative cotton gin and mercantile store. They shared tools with each other and swapped labor. Mileston farmers developed a sense of pride and independence through owning land and being relatively free from the interference and control of whites.

In late 1962 student workers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) sought to establish contacts in the county of Leflore and the city of Greenwood, thirty miles north of Mileston. Some Mileston residents, among them Annie Mitchell Carnegie and her brother, Ozell Mitchell, had secretly been involved with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and other groups. They and other Mileston blacks asked SNCC workers to come to Mileston, and by the spring of 1963, SNCC workers were conducting a citizenship school at the church of Rev. J. J. Russell, concentrating on lessons about interpreting sections of the state constitution, a part of the literacy test required for registration.

On 9 April 1963, fourteen African Americans from Mileston made their way to the county seat of Lexington to register. Word had leaked out about their coming, and a group consisting of the deputy sheriff, his deputies, thirty auxiliary policemen, and other white officials stood in front of the courthouse, attempting to intimidate the farmers and deter them from registering. Led by Hartman Turnbow, all fourteen took the literacy test over the next two days, but all failed.

A month later white night riders firebombed Turnbow’s home and fired shots at him. A key component of the Holmes County movement was that its participants believed in self-defense: Turnbow returned fire, and his assailants fled. The Mileston community stood firm and began holding mass meetings to drum up support. Turnbow and others traveled across the county and rallied other blacks.

Landownership played a key role in the early part of the movement. The Mileston farmers and other landowning blacks had the economic independence to weather white oppression. With the exceptions of teacher Bernice Montgomery and Rev. Russell, most educators and ministers did not join the early movement because they depended on whites for their livelihoods.

Holmes County activists took part in some of the central moments of the Mississippi civil rights movement. They played a major role in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which challenged the seating of the all-white Mississippi delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. The Holmes County movement benefited from the influx of northern students during the Freedom Summer of 1964 as well as from the passage of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. By the mid-1960s Holmes County activists pushed not only for the vote but also for the integration of all public facilities, launching a selective-buying campaign that eventually forced white merchants and politicians in Lexington to acquiesce to many of the demands. The dedication and intensity of the Holmes County activists efforts paid off in 1968. Robert Clark, a teacher from the small hamlet of Ebenezer, became the first African American elected to the Mississippi state legislature since the 1890s.

Holmes County Civil Rights Movement

Howell, Bailey

Born in Middleton, Tennessee, on 20 January 1937 to Walter and Martha Howell, Bailey Howell developed into one of the finest and most consistent basketballers ever to play the game. Playing for Middleton High School between 1953 and 1955, Howell scored 1,187 points, a Tennessee high school record at the time. He was selected all-conference each season, all-state his junior and senior seasons, and all-American his senior year.

From a list that included Memphis State, the University of Mississippi, the University of Tennessee, Vanderbilt, the University of Kentucky, and others, Howell chose to continue his education and playing career at Mississippi State. During his three varsity seasons, Howell led the Bulldogs to a 64–14 record. Averaging 27.1 points and 17.0 rebounds per game (both of which are still school records), Howell concluded his career as Mississippi State’s leading scorer (2,030 points) and leading rebounder (1,277 rebounds). Howell’s 47 points against Union in 1958 and his 34 rebounds against Louisiana State University in 1957 remain single-game records for a Bulldog basketball player. He also continues to rank at or near the top in several other statistical categories.

One of the greatest players in Southeastern Conference (SEC) history, Howell was named first team all-conference each of his three seasons. He was the conference’s Sophomore of the Year in 1957 and won the SEC’s scoring title the following two seasons (averaging 27.8 and 27.5 points per game, respectively). In both 1958 and 1959 Howell earned the SEC’s Most Valuable Player award, and in his senior season Howell led the Bulldogs to the conference championship.

Howell finished in the Top 10 nationally in scoring and rebounding every year, led the nation in field-goal percentage (56.8 percent) as a sophomore, finished fourth in scoring as a junior and senior, and finished second in rebounding as a senior. In 1958–59, Howell’s senior season, the Bulldogs posted a 24–1 record and were ranked third in the nation. However, because the State of Mississippi prohibited its collegiate sports teams from competing against teams with African American players, Howell’s Bulldogs never appeared in the National Collegiate Athletic Association Tournament. Despite this lack of national exposure, Howell was named an all-American following both his junior and senior seasons.

In 1959 the Detroit Pistons selected Howell with the second overall pick in the National Basketball Association (NBA) draft. Between 1959 and 1971 Howell played for Detroit, Baltimore, Boston (with whom he won the 1968 and 1969 NBA championships, averaging nearly 20 points per game), and Philadelphia. He posted a career scoring average of 18.7 points per game and made the NBA All-Star Team six times. Howell finished his career ranked in the league’s Top 10 in nine statistical categories. In September 1997 he was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.

Since the end of his basketball career, Howell and his wife, Mary Lou, have lived in Starkville, where he has remained active in business, the community, and the Starkville Church of Christ. He is also a member of the Tennessee, Mississippi, and Mississippi State University Halls of Fame, and the Bailey Howell Award is given annually to the best collegiate basketball player in the Magnolia State. Mississippi State retired his No. 52 jersey in 2009 and in 2015 named the street running past the school’s basketball arena Bailey Howell Drive.

Howell, Bailey

Humphreys County

Located in the central Delta and named for Confederate general and Mississippi governor Benjamin Humphreys, Humphreys County was founded in 1918. The Yazoo River flows through the county, and part of the Theodore Roosevelt National Wildlife Refuge lies within its boundaries. The county seat is Belzoni. Other towns include Isola, Louise, and Silver City.

In 1930 Humphreys had a population of 24,729, of whom 17,032 (69 percent) were African American. A rural and agricultural county with fewer than 200 industrial workers, Humphreys had more than fifty-six hundred farms, the majority of them worked by tenants and sharecroppers. During World War II, a site near Belzoni hosted a branch of Hinds County’s Camp McCain for prisoners of war.

By 1960 Humphreys’s population had declined to 19,093. Its racial demographics remained largely unchanged, though a small Chinese community had developed. Agricultural employment accounted for more than half of the workforce, and the crops grown included cotton, soybeans, winter wheat, rice, and oats. About 300 people worked in furniture and textile manufacturing. In 1976 Gov. Cliff Finch named Humphreys County the Farm-Raised Catfish Capital of the World because of its new efforts at catfish production. The county remained the top catfish-producing county in the United States until changes in the industry in the early twenty-first century.

Belzoni was the site of civil rights activity in the 1950s and some violent opposition. Minister George Lee and businessman Gus Courts helped organize a chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1953. Lee was murdered in 1955—no charges were ever filed in the case—and Courts was driven from the area.

Humphreys County has been home to an impressive number of artists, musicians, and athletes. Blues musicians Elmore James and Pinetop Perkins spent part of their childhoods there, as did rhythm and blues performer Denise LaSalle. Jazz musician George Cartwright of the band Curlew was born in 1950 in the Humphreys town of Midnight. Artist Ethel Wright Mohammed lived in Belzoni for decades beginning in the 1920s, embroidering pictures of rural life, often specific to the Mississippi Delta. Basketball star Spencer Haywood’s long journey through the University of Detroit, the Olympics, the American Basketball Association, and the National Basketball Association began in Silver City. Lawrence Gordon, former president of Twentieth Century Fox and producer of numerous movies, including Die Hard, Predator, Field of Dreams, Hellboy, Watchmen, and Boogie Nights, is a native of Belzoni.

From 1960 to 1980 the county’s population again declined, reaching 13,931. Humphreys added a number of new industrial jobs, but private household work followed agriculture as the largest employer. More than 30 percent of the population, a figure considerably higher than the Mississippi average, had fewer than five years of education.

As in many core Delta counties, Humphreys County’s 2010 population was predominantly African American and had declined over the last half of the twentieth century. In fact, Humphrey County’s population had undergone one of the largest proportional decreases in the state, shrinking by 50.9 percent since 1960. By 2010 population of 9,375 was 74.5 percent African American and 23.5 percent white.

Humphreys County

Issaquena County

Founded from land ceded to the United States by the Choctaw Indians in 1820, Issaquena County was established on 23 January 1844. The county’s name is taken from a Native American phrase that roughly translates as “deer river.” Issaquena is located along the Mississippi-Arkansas border in the Delta, and the Mississippi River forms the county’s snaking western edge. Mayersville, Issaquena’s county seat, is named for landowner David Mayers.

Antebellum Issaquena County had a large slave majority. At the county’s first census, in 1850, Issaquena had a free population of 373 and a slave population of 4,105. A decade later, the free population had grown to 587, while the slave population had increased to 7,244. With slaves making up 93 percent of the population, Issaquena had the highest percentage of slaves in Mississippi on the eve of the Civil War.

Despite its small population, in the late antebellum period Issaquena County had the state’s ninth-most-valuable farmland. The county’s farms, with their large slave workforce, were among the top cotton producers in Mississippi. Conversely, Issaquena farmers concentrated far less on corn and livestock, ranking among the middle in output in these agricultural categories. According to the 1860 census, only one person in the county, a laborer earning three hundred dollars a year at a lumber mill, worked in manufacturing.

Postbellum Issaquena County continued to represent a distinctive socioeconomic profile within the Mississippi Delta. In 1880 African Americans accounted for 92 percent of the county’s 10,004 people. Issaquena also maintained the state’s smallest industrial workforce, with a single manufacturing firm employing just three people.

In 1880 Issaquena’s farms were far larger than the state average, but the county experienced extraordinary changes in its agricultural sector over the remainder of the century. While the county’s population size and racial profile remained stable, by 1900 the average farm size had decreased to fifty-five acres, far smaller than Mississippi’s average of eighty-three acres.

Issaquena County was home to W. E. Mollison, a powerful figure in education and the law in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Born in Issaquena County, Mollison left Mississippi to attend Fisk University and Oberlin College. He later served in a variety of positions, including as the county’s school superintendent. Mollison was one of the few practicing African American attorneys in Mississippi during this period.

On the eve of the Civil War, Issaquena County had three churches, all of them Methodist. More than half a century later, Missionary Baptists were the largest denomination, followed by the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

In 1930 Issaquena had a population of 5,734 people and the third-lowest population density in the state. As the Great Depression set in, African Americans comprised 81 percent of the county’s population. Tenants operated 86 percent of all farms.

Issaquena County natives of note include two important Mississippi political figures, at least one notable artist, and one of history’s most revered blues musicians. C. B. “Buddie” Newman, the powerful Speaker of the Mississippi House during the 1970s and 1980s, was born in Valley Park, the son of a railroad foreman. Unita Blackwell, an activist, organizer, and Mayersville political figure, grew up in Coahoma but moved to Issaquena County with her husband in the 1950s. Blackwell was an ardent supporter of African American enfranchisement in the 1960s and 1970s and played a key role in the incorporation of Mayersville. In 1977 she became the town’s first mayor and the first African American woman to hold that office in Mississippi. Rev. H. D. Dennis, famous for Margaret’s Grocery, a folk art destination and general store (named after his wife), was born in Issaquena County in 1916. Electric blues musician Muddy Waters (McKinley Morganfield) was born in Issaquena County on 4 April 1913, though he soon relocated with his grandmother to the Stovall Plantation, near Clarksdale.

By 1960 Issaquena’s population had shrunk to 3,576, and the county possessed the lowest population density in Mississippi. The depopulation continued in the 1960s and 1970s, and by 1980 only 2,513 residents called Issaquena County home. African Americans still comprised a majority but made up only 67 percent of the total population. Two-thirds of the labor force worked in agriculture, and much of the county’s acreage was used for cultivating cotton, soybeans, winter wheat, oats, and cattle. One of the poorest counties in the state, Issaquena had Mississippi’s lowest per capita income in 1980 and struggled to provide education for its residents. Almost 40 percent of the population had fewer than five years of education, and less than 12 percent had graduated from high school.

Like many Delta counties in Mississippi, Issaquena County’s 2010 population remained predominantly African American and had shown an overall decline in size during the last half of the twentieth century. Indeed, the county’s population had undergone one of the greatest proportional decreases in the state, shrinking by about 60 percent since 1960 and making it the smallest county in Mississippi, with only 1,406 residents. Issaquena continued to suffer from some of the highest poverty rates in the state.

Issaquena County

Itawamba County

Named for Chickasaw leader Itawambe Miko (Levi Colbert), Itawamba County was founded in 1836 on land ceded by the Chickasaw in the Treaty of Pontotoc. Itawamba County is located in northeastern Mississippi, on the Alabama border. The Tombigbee River flows through Itawamba, as does the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway. The Natchez Trace Parkway travels through the county. The seat is Fulton, and other towns include Mantachie and Tremont.

In the 1840 census, Itawamba had 4,655 free residents and 720 slaves. Ninety-four people worked in commerce and manufacturing. By 1860 the population had grown to 14,167 free people and 3,528 slaves, one of the lowest percentages among the state’s counties. Itawamba ranked thirty-fifth in the state in cotton production and also grew corn, sweet potatoes, peas, and beans. Itawamba’s manufacturing sector employed one hundred people at a variety of companies. The county’s seventeen houses of worship included eight Baptist churches, six Methodist churches, and three Presbyterian churches.

After the Civil War, Itawamba continued to have a large white majority, with whites making up 90 percent of the county’s 10,663 people in 1880. Most of those residents worked in agriculture, and 80 percent of farmers owned their land. Only twelve people worked in manufacturing. In 1900 African Americans still comprised less than 10 percent of the county’s 13,544 residents. Most farmers owned their land, and as in many such counties, the average farm size was fairly large, at 121 acres. Itawamba had only fifty-three industrial workers in 1900. The 1916 religious census found the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, to be the largest religious group, followed by the Southern Baptist Convention and the Churches of Christ.

In 1930 Itawamba was one of Mississippi’s least populated counties, with the second-lowest population density in the state. Only 6 percent of the county’s 18,225 residents were African Americans, giving Itawamba the lowest percentage of African Americans per square mile in the state. In a dramatic change since 1900, tenant farmers ran about two-thirds of the county’s farms, and the number of industrial workers had grown to 317.

Itawamba’s population declined to just over fifteen thousand by 1960 but topped twenty thousand two decades later. The county’s labor force followed state trends, with agriculture losing workers and manufacturing gaining them. Although Itawamba’s industry was slow to grow, it employed more than twenty-five hundred people in 1980, largely in textile and clothing production. Those who worked in agriculture relied on corn, soybeans, and livestock.

Singer Tammy Wynette, born Virginia Wynette Pugh in 1942, grew up in Itawamba County. Poet and author Elmo Howell, born in Itawamba County in 1918, wrote widely on Mississippi’s small towns and country roads. Sculptor Burgess Delaney, born in 1914, grew up in rural Itawamba County and spent his entire life there, using local clay in his work. Congressman John Rankin was born 1882 in rural Itawamba County. From the 1920s through the 1940s he was an outspoken conservative on issues of race and the power of government. Sharion Aycock, the first female federal district court judge in Mississippi and first woman elected head of the Mississippi Bar Association, grew up in Tremont. In 2010 the county’s Constance McMillen joined with the American Civil Liberties Union in a successful suit that forced the Itawamba County School District to allow her to attend the Itawamba Agricultural High School prom with her girlfriend.

In 2010 Itawamba’s population of 23,401 was 92.4 percent white and roughly 6.5 percent African American.

Itawamba County

Jackson Civil Rights Movement

The civil rights movement in Jackson encompassed the direct action protests in Mississippi’s capital city in the early 1960s. The grassroots campaign to end racial discrimination in Jackson emerged out of the Tougaloo College and North Jackson Youth Councils of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The wave of sit-ins that began in Greensboro, North Carolina, in February 1960 inspired similar protests in Mississippi, but the state NAACP’s conservative leadership, fearful of violent reprisals against African Americans, remained focused on voter registration drives. Nevertheless, Medgar Evers, the NAACP’s field secretary for Mississippi since 1954 and only paid worker in the state, recognized Youth Council members’ desire to engage in coordinated protests in the capital city and helped organize a boycott of downtown businesses around Easter 1960. In March 1961, nine Tougaloo students and members of the NAACP Youth Council carried out a meticulously planned sit-in at the whites-only Jackson Public Library on North State Street. After explaining to the librarians that they needed books that they could not obtain at the “colored branch,” the nine Tougaloo students were confronted by police and arrested for breach of the peace. The prolonged incarceration and trial of the Tougaloo Nine prompted prayer assemblies at Jackson State and outside the courthouse. The police saw these gatherings as unlawful demonstrations and responded with dogs, clubs, and tear gas.

According to Myrlie Evers, the Tougaloo Nine sit-in represented “the change of tide in Mississippi.” Jackson-area students and Youth Council members throughout the state now attempted sit-ins at various public spaces, among them the zoo and Jackson’s buses, parks, and swimming pools. Outsiders also spurred local movement activity: two months after the library sit-in, waves of Freedom Riders began arriving at the Trailways station in downtown Jackson, provoking more than three hundred arrests by the end of the summer. With most riders choosing to remain in Parchman Prison and the Hinds County jail rather than posting bond, African American churchwomen in Jackson organized Womanpower Unlimited to help the riders while they were in jail and after their release. For the next several years, Womanpower Unlimited, led by Clarie Collins Harvey, raised funds and coordinated support for local and out-of-state activists whom police detained during peaceful protests. The arrests and trials of the Freedom Riders also brought in a new group of civil rights workers, as David Dennis and Tom Gaither of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and James Bevel, Diane Nash, and Bernard Lafayette of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) continued to organize in Mississippi after their release from jail. In early 1962 the Council of Federated Organizations brought the NAACP, CORE, SNCC, and local groups into a statewide civil rights coalition.

From late 1961 through 1962 much of the Jackson NAACP’s efforts centered on voter registration drives and legal challenges, including an ultimately successful lawsuit to enroll Jackson State student James Meredith at the University of Mississippi. A suit to remove segregated seating aboard Jackson’s privately owned buses won in court, but many white drivers ignored the court order. The newly organized Jackson Nonviolent Movement, led by Gaither and Tougaloo student Joan Trumpauer, then spearheaded further boycotts of buses. Yet, like an attempted boycott campaign of white-owned downtown businesses in December 1961, the bus boycott failed to garner massive support from local blacks.

With the desegregation of the University of Mississippi and the renewed hope that change was possible, civil rights activity picked up once again. In October 1962 the NAACP’s North Jackson Youth Council, advised by Tougaloo sociology professor John Salter, coordinated a boycott of the Mississippi State Fair for Negroes. This time, most people stayed away from the fairgrounds, and the Youth Council planned a more comprehensive campaign. Recognizing that the holiday shopping season typically drew thousands of African Americans to the white-owned businesses along Capitol Street, Salter and the Youth Council members coordinated an economic boycott of downtown businesses. Activists demanded equal hiring practices, the use of courtesy titles, and an end to segregated seating and restrooms. With the campaign receiving endorsements from Evers and the local SNCC and CORE representatives, the boycott leaflets now officially bore the name Jackson movement.

Black students distributed leaflets and spoke in churches throughout the community, and by Christmas 1962 Evers deemed the boycott “60–65 percent effective.” When neither Mayor Allen Thompson nor white business owners gave in to any of the demands, movement leaders extended the economic boycott into 1963. Emboldened by the campaign in Birmingham, where city officials finally agreed to form a biracial commission and begin dismantling racial discrimination in businesses, movement leaders hoped to utilize direct action tactics in Jackson. In May, with the boycott in its sixth month, the state NAACP announced the possibility of future mass marches, picketing, and demonstrations. In addition to the earlier demands, the movement called for the mayor to create a biracial committee, hire black policemen and school crossing guards, and desegregate all public facilities. In a final effort to avert a Birmingham-like confrontation, Rev. Edwin King Jr., Tougaloo’s new chaplain, organized a series of interracial ministers’ meetings to encourage dialogue among city and state religious leaders. After white ministers refused to join their black counterparts in demanding an end to racial discrimination in Jackson, and with Mayor Thompson refusing to budge, the direct action phase of the movement commenced on 28 May.

For a week and a half in late May and early June 1963, coordinated protests took place throughout the city. On the first day, five students and teachers were arrested on Capitol Street for carrying signs that declared, “Jackson Needs a Bi-Racial Committee,” while at nearby Woolworth’s lunch counter, one of the most violent sit-ins of the civil rights movement began to unfold. For more than two hours, Tougaloo students and adults sat on stools while a growing white mob hurled racist insults and sprayed ketchup and mustard on them. As police watched from outside the store, some in the mob threw the students on the floor: at one point an ex-police officer pulled student Memphis Norman to the ground and stomped repeatedly on his head. When members of the mob began to pick up merchandise to use as projectiles, the manager finally intervened and ordered everyone out. The nationwide media coverage of the violence at Woolworth’s provoked a temporary change of heart for Mayor Thompson, who privately told some black ministers that he would agree to some of the movement’s demands. The ministers reported the concessions to a jubilant crowd at a mass meeting that night, but the mayor announced that he had not agreed to any deal, and demonstrations resumed. During the next week, Jackson police arrested more than six hundred people, most of them high school and college students, for picketing and attempted sit-ins. Police arrested several Lanier High School students who gathered at lunch to sing freedom songs, while movement leaders and ministers staged a kneel-in on the steps of the Federal Building on Capitol Street. The largest demonstration occurred on 30 May, when police clubbed several marchers and arrested four hundred students as they walked down Farish Street. The city incarcerated those arrested in makeshift jail cells at the livestock area of the State Fairgrounds.

The direct action protests diminished as the national NAACP grew weary of supplying bail funds and the Hinds County Chancery Court granted the mayor an injunction that prohibited the movement from coordinating future demonstrations or acts of civil disobedience. Convinced that any civil rights activity would result in arrests and recognizing that mass demonstrations were no longer financially feasible, Evers and King argued for smaller, targeted protests. Evers and King sought to confront white Christians more directly regarding the immorality of segregation and planned a series of church visits throughout Jackson. On 9 June, black students attended worship at St. Peter’s Catholic Church, while ushers at several Baptist and Methodist churches turned other students away. However, police refrained from making any arrests. The easing of tensions did not last long, for two days later, a sniper killed Evers in the driveway of his home.

Anger over Evers’s murder awakened people’s activism. Mass meetings filled to capacity, and people took to the streets of Jackson in spontaneous marches. Thousands packed into the Masonic Temple for Evers’s 15 June funeral, where friends and civil rights leaders from across the country eulogized the NAACP leader. In keeping with an arrangement with city officials, the mourners marched silently from the temple down Farish Street to the funeral home. When the end of the procession reached the funeral home, after most of the out-of-town leaders had departed, the hundreds still present began singing freedom songs. They then marched back toward the intersection at Capitol Street, the central target of the movement’s boycotts, sit-ins, and protests for the past six months. A verbal back-and-forth with the assembled police soon turned violent, as stones flew through the air and police ran forward with dogs and clubs. Police arrested more than two dozen people, including Salter and King.

The funeral procession and the unplanned protest on Capitol Street marked the final demonstrations of the Jackson movement. On 18 June Mayor Thompson, pressured by the Kennedy administration, agreed to meet some of the movement’s demands, including hiring black policemen and crossing guards. This agreement fell well short of the original demands, failing to provide for desegregated public facilities and businesses or for a biracial committee. Yet encouraged by NAACP leaders and more conservative local ministers, a majority at a mass meeting at a Pearl Street African Methodist Episcopal Church voted to accept the compromise. While this decision represented the end of Jackson’s mass movement, smaller protests and activities continued. King led students, faculty, and out-of-state ministers back to local white-only churches for the next ten months, resulting in more than forty arrests. Tougaloo activists also waged an increasingly successful campaign to desegregate the city’s entertainment venues by encouraging performers to cancel scheduled appearances. In the end, the desegregation of Jackson’s public accommodations and businesses occurred through federal law and reluctant local compliance. In July 1964 Jackson Chamber of Commerce leaders called on the city’s businesses to comply with the new Civil Rights Act, a request reluctantly seconded by Mayor Thompson.

Jackson Civil Rights Movement

Jackson Clarion-Ledger

The Clarion-Ledger was founded in 1837 in Paulding, Jasper County. Known initially as the Eastern Clarion, the paper was sold later that year and moved to Meridian. After the Civil War, the paper moved to Jackson, merged with the Standard, and became known as the Clarion. Owners Col. J. L. Power and Col. Robert H. Henry renamed the paper the Daily Clarion-Ledger after combining it with the State Ledger (printed in Brookhaven and Newton) in 1888. The company is listed as the second-oldest corporation in Mississippi.

Henry was a member of the Hederman family, and when he retired in 1912, other family members began managing the paper. Scott County printers Robert M. “Bert” Hederman (1877–1944) and Thomas M. Hederman (1878–1948) acquired control of the Clarion-Ledger in 1922. Bert Hederman took over the printing business that Henry had started, while Tom Hederman became the paper’s business manager and editor. In 1954 Robert M. Hederman Jr. (1910–96) and Thomas M. Hederman Jr. (1911–85) acquired the Jackson Daily News (an afternoon paper founded in 1892) and merged its printing plant with that of the Clarion-Ledger.

On 1 April 1982 the Hederman family sold the morning Jackson Clarion-Ledger, the afternoon Jackson Daily News, the Hattiesburg American, and six weeklies to Gannett for $110 million. The Clarion-Ledger had a circulation of 66,620, mostly in the communities surrounding the state capital. The Daily News had a circulation of 40,147.

Gannett consolidated the two Jackson newspapers in 1989. Over the next decade Gannett launched a multistep expansion that included moving the newspaper from 311 East Pearl Street to 201 South Congress Street in 1996. Other changes included acquiring the Hederman Brothers printing building in 1993, adding a second press line in 1995 (expanding from eight units to fifteen units and providing the capability to print up to sixty thousand papers per hour), and the renovation on the west side of the building, which houses circulation and production facilities.

Prior to 1970 the Clarion-Ledger and the other Hederman papers were known for their racist politics, promoting segregation and supporting the efforts of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a quasi-secret government agency. Rea Hederman became the Clarion-Ledger ’s editor in 1970 and made dramatic changes in the newspaper’s tone. It subsequently won numerous national prizes, including a 1979 Heywood Broun Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Award, a National Education Reporting Award, and a George Polk Award, all in 1981. The newspaper also won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1983 for its robust coverage of the dire state of public education in Mississippi and the marathon legislative initiative that led to the adoption of the 1982 Education Improvement Act.

Reporter Jerry Mitchell, credited with reopening many old civil rights cases, has added to the newspaper’s list of awards. He was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2006. His other awards include a 2005 George Polk Award for Justice Reporting, a 1999 Heywood Broun Award, the 1999 Sidney Hillman Award, and the 2005 Columbia Journalism School Citation for Coverage of Race and Ethnicity. In 2009 he was named a Macarthur Foundation Fellow, receiving five hundred thousand dollars because his “life and work serve as an example of how a journalist willing to take risks and unsettle waters can make a difference in the pursuit of justice.”

Distributed throughout the state, the Clarion-Ledger has the largest circulation in Mississippi. However, like most other newspapers, its circulation has dropped in recent years, falling to about sixty thousand by the 2010s.

Jackson Clarion-Ledger

Jackson County

Jackson County on the Gulf Coast played an important role in Mississippi’s early development. Founded in 1812, it was named after Andrew Jackson. For much of its history, artists have flocked to Jackson County, establishing a unique art community. Compared to other parts of Mississippi, Jackson County is ethnically diverse and has few farms. Instead of depending on agriculture, the county developed mammoth timber and transportation industries. The county’s recent history boasts population growth, industrial development, and increased government spending. Major cities include Escatawpa, Gautier, Moss Point, and Ocean Springs. The county seat, Pascagoula, became one of Mississippi’s largest cities in the mid-twentieth century. Because of its geography, Jackson County is vulnerable to the natural disasters common in coastal areas.

The founding of Jackson County dates to the 1600s, when French and then Spanish colonists encountered Native Americans on the Gulf Coast. These Europeans as well as some English and German settlers in the area interacted with the Biloxi, Pascagoula, and Moctobi tribes.

In the 1690s French colonizer Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d’Iberville, established several Gulf Coast forts and settlements, some of which eventually became Gautier and Ocean Springs. Iberville’s commandant, Jean de Sauvole, built Fort Maurepas (the foundation of what became Ocean Springs) and developed relations with the Biloxi and other tribes. These relationships assisted the French in obtaining land for municipal development. Spanish settlers later took control of the area until 1810, when Spain relinquished this land to the US government and the area became part of Mississippi Territory. In 1812 the Mississippi government divided the area into three counties: Mobile County to the east, Hancock County on the west, and Jackson County in the middle.

Jackson County had few residents in the early 1800s. According to the 1820 census, the population consisted of 1,300 free whites, 321 slaves, and 61 free blacks. The county subsequently experienced significant growth, doubling by 1840 to 2,955 whites, 1,087 slaves, and 80 free African Americans, the second-highest number in the state.

Jackson contained the fewest improved acres of farmland in the state in 1860. Unlike most of Mississippi, its farms produced very little corn or livestock, and it exported the smallest amount of cotton in the state. Jackson County did, however, rank thirteenth in rice production and eleventh in the value of its orchards. It relied on a growing timber industry, with two sawmills in operation by 1840. In 1875 the state’s first wood treatment establishment opened in Pascagoula. These industries continued to grow. In 1880 Jackson County had only twenty-three farms, almost all of them run by their owners.

A cotton depot opened in Jackson County in 1819, the Round Island Lighthouse began its work in 1832, and Pascagoula was a popular steamboat stop. All of these factors made Jackson one of the earliest areas in the state to attract tourists, initially drawing travelers intrigued by salt water and seafood. Because of its proximity to waterways, the county built a reliable transportation industry.

Mirroring other counties in the state, Jackson contained a high number of Methodist and Baptist congregations. In 1860 Jackson County had fifteen Methodist churches and six Baptist churches. The county’s two Catholic churches expanded as Jackson attracted a more immigrants than did other parts of Mississippi, including substantial numbers of German and Irish workers.

In 1900 Jackson had 478 foreign-born residents and 1,200 white residents born in the United States to immigrant parents. The majority of those immigrants were Germans, while others were English, Irish, Italian, Canadian, Danish, and Swedish. There were twice as many men than women, and many worked in fishing or canning factories. The importance of immigration and past immigrant settlement meant that cultural life on the Gulf Coast stood out within Mississippi. According to the 1916 religious census, Catholics were the largest religious group in Jackson County, making up more than a quarter of all church members. Various Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians also lived in the county.

Jackson County’s population grew dramatically around the turn of the century. Between 1880 and 1900 the population mushroomed from 7,607 to 16,513, about a third of them African American. The increase in population paralleled the rise of the Jackson County industrial economy. The county ranked near the top in the state in industrial employment, with 1,329 county residents, all but 21 of them men, holding industrial jobs. Michigan lumberman Delos Blodgett bought considerable timberland and employed numerous South Mississippi workers in the late 1800s and early 1900s. By the early twentieth century the L. N. Dantzler Lumber Company, with headquarters in Moss Point, was one of the largest in the state. Jackson remained a largely nonagricultural county, but its total number of farms rose to 544 in 1900. Almost all farmers owned their farmland.

Jackson County began welcoming artists and developed a unique arts community. Shearwater Pottery began as an Anderson family business in the 1920s, and numerous visual artists flourished there. Walter Anderson, born in 1903, served as a phenomenal force for creativity in Ocean Springs. Opened in 1991, the Walter Anderson Museum features many of his works, including wall murals he created in the 1950s. Many other artists, some with connections to New Orleans, have lived and worked in Jackson County. The county is also home to buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and Bruce Goff. An ornamental cottage tradition with roots in the 1800s contributes to the unique architecture in Ocean Springs. Jackson and other coastal counties host numerous art groups and festivals year round.

In 1930 white residents made up about three-quarters of the county’s 16,000 residents. Jackson was one of the few Mississippi counties with more urban than rural residents. In the late 1930s and 1940s Ingalls Shipbuilding, spawned by the Balance Agriculture with Industry program, brought significant changes to the area. The company quickly became the state’s largest industrial employer.

Through World War II, industrial and military employers used high wages to lure large numbers of people to the Gulf Coast, and the small town of Pascagoula suddenly became a small city. One of many migrants to the area was Chester Paul Lott, who moved to the coast to work at Ingalls. His son, Trent, grew up in Pascagoula and went on to become a longtime Mississippi senator.

A number of creative individuals have called the coastal county home. Singer-songwriter Jimmy Buffett, though more associated with the Caribbean and Florida beach life, was born in Pascagoula in 1946. Writer Al Young was born in Ocean Springs in 1939 before moving with his family to Detroit. Born in 1897, Jacob Reddix grew up in Vancleave and became a scholar and served as president of Jackson State College for twenty-five years. Journalist Ira Harkey bought the Pascagoula Chronicle-Star in 1949 and started a long career as editor and columnist, winning a Pulitzer Prize.

Jackson County’s population more than tripled between 1930 and 1960, with the white majority growing to 80 percent. At midcentury, Jackson had the state’s highest per capita income. The number of residents reached almost 120,000 by 1980, making Jackson the third-most-populous county in the state. The county’s industrial base continued to grow, employing more than 20,000 people—more than half the county’s workforce and the highest number of industrial workers in Mississippi. The majority of those employed worked producing transportation equipment, specifically ships. More than one-fifth of the county’s female laborers also worked in manufacturing. Retail accounted for another large segment of the workforce. Jackson County also claimed one of the better educational systems in the state, no doubt as a consequence of its industrial success. The county also had Mississippi’s fourth-largest Mexican immigrant community.

Jackson County suffered extraordinary architectural and human damage from Hurricane Katrina in 2005, but by 2010 Jackson County’s population of nearly 140,000 placed it among the largest in the state. That number represented an increase of more than 150 percent since 1960. Seventy-two percent of the population was white, while 21 percent was African American, 4.5 percent was Hispanic, and 2 percent was Asian.

Jackson County

Jackson State College Killings, 14 May 1970

The shootings on the campus of Jackson State College on 14 May 1970 began with the throwing of rocks at passing cars on Lynch Street, a sporadic occurrence in preceding years. Lynch Street, a four-lane thoroughfare that bisected the campus and that was named for John Roy Lynch, the state’s first African American member of Congress, connected West Jackson’s white suburbs to the city’s business district. Businesses serving the black neighborhoods just east of the campus on Lynch Street included a few bars and pool halls that attracted students and a group of nonstudents known as cornerboys. Fear and resentment between the two groups sometimes boiled over into physical confrontations, including a May 1969 rock-throwing fight.

Yet racial tension provoked most of the conflict on Lynch Street. In February 1964 a white motorist hit a black student in front of her dormitory, breaking her leg. After police let the driver continue, students blocked traffic and later that night threw bottles and rocks at a barricade of city policemen. Claiming to see a sniper, the police fired their shotguns into the air and then into the crowd, wounding three. The incident provoked further distrust of white policemen and white motorists, many of whom taunted students as they passed through campus. On 10 May 1967 students again blocked traffic on Lynch Street, this time to thwart the capture of a black student whom the police had accused of speeding. Groups of students and cornerboys threw projectiles at the police, set small fires, and looted a few businesses. The next night, officers and a large contingent of black youth confronted each other once again: this time a bottle thrown from the crowd seriously cut a police officer’s neck. The injured officer discharged his shotgun in the air, and as the crowd moved toward the barricade, policemen opened fire. Ben Brown, a twenty-two-year-old nonstudent, was hit with buckshot on Lynch Street and later died. In addition, two students were wounded by birdshot. Another confrontation arose eleven months later when a crowd of demonstrators and rock throwers gathered to express outrage over the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., but police seemed more restrained, using tear gas instead of bullets to disperse the protest.

On the night of 13 May 1970 a crowd in front of Alexander Hall, the women’s dorm, again began throwing rocks and bottles at white motorists on Lynch Street, eventually hitting a passing patrol car. No one is certain what provoked this latest volley of projectiles, but many students had come to regard throwing rocks as an annual springtime ritual to express dissatisfaction with the white establishment. Just nine days earlier, National Guardsmen had opened fire on antiwar demonstrators at Ohio’s Kent State University, killing four students and injuring nine. Yet neither antiwar nor civil rights activism was prevalent among the student body at Jackson State.

Hundreds of students began to gather on Lynch Street between Alexander Hall and Stewart Hall, the men’s dorm. Many ignored a 10:30 p.m. curfew set by college president John Peoples, and students and nonstudents struck campus security cars and set fire to two trash trailers. Some attempted to burn down the ROTC building, but members of the Jackson police and the highway patrol arrived to secure the area, and the students began to disperse. The next day, Peoples chastised his students for “the annual riot,” while Jackson mayor Russell Davis downplayed the incident, assuring residents that officers “did a good job” and that the situation could have been much worse. Neither expected a repeat of the violence.

But at about 9:30 the following night, a small group in front of Stewart Hall began tossing stones at white drivers as police and highway patrolmen arrived to close off the street. False rumors began spreading that civil rights leader Charles Evers and his wife had been murdered. Evers was the mayor of Fayette, the brother of the slain Medgar Evers, and the father of a Jackson State student. Some nonstudents commandeered a nearby dump truck, intending to dump its load of dirt in the middle of Lynch Street. When it stalled near Stewart Hall, a young man pulled out his revolver and shot at the engine and the gas tank, setting the truck ablaze. Crowds continued to build in front of Stewart and Alexander Halls, throwing rocks and other objects and shouting insults. Patrolmen fired shotguns, and National Guardsmen began leaving their posts to come to the aid of the police officers. Accompanied by a tank, Guardsmen moved into positions along the fence in front of Alexander Hall, flanked by city police and highway patrolmen.

As bottles began crashing on either side of the officers, members of the highway patrol and city police opened fire, mostly in the direction of Alexander Hall. Officers claimed to see a sniper in an upper window of the dormitory and fired shotguns, rifles, and submachine guns at the building for approximately twenty-eight seconds, unleashing more than four hundred rounds. Students sought cover, but a buckshot slug killed James Earl Green, a senior at Jim Hill High School who had stopped across the street from Alexander Hall on his way home after work at a nearby grocery store. Three buckshot pellets killed Phillip Gibbs, a junior at Jackson State. Twelve others were wounded, most of them students and all of them either inside or in the vicinity of Alexander Hall.

For weeks thereafter, black and white students gathered at the Governor’s Mansion to protest the tragedy. After reading a report from the highway patrol, Gov. John Bell Williams announced on television that “the responsibility must rest with the protesters.” Mayor Davis tried to quell the tension by appointing a biracial committee to investigate the incident. US attorney general John Mitchell arrived in Jackson and requested a federal grand jury because the highway patrolmen refused to cooperate with an FBI investigation. The federal grand jury, presided over by Judge Harold Cox, declined to indict any of the officers.

In September 1970 the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest released its report on the Kent State and Jackson State shootings. While the commission did not intend to assign guilt, its findings disputed many of the central claims of the highway patrol and the grand jury. The commission ultimately found fault with the officers’ actions that night, concluding that the indiscriminate twenty-eight-second fusillade “was an unreasonable, unjustified overreaction.”

Following the violence in 1970, the city closed Lynch Street between Barrett Drive and Dalton, a move the college had long urged. The university later converted the space into the Gibbs-Green Plaza, a popular outdoor area where students congregate. The city later modified the street’s name to J. R. Lynch Street. The Jackson State Class of 1971, to which Gibbs had belonged, erected a memorial to the “Martyrs of May 14, 1970,” in front of Stewart Hall. Every May, the Jackson State community gathers for Gibbs-Green Memorial activities.

Jackson State College Killings, 14 May 1970

Jails and Prisons

Like other jurisdictions, Mississippi utilizes a broad array of correctional measures, among them local county jails, state prisons, regional jail facilities, and juvenile facilities. The sheriff of each county is charged with operating the local facility, hiring personnel to supervise inmates, and providing transportation and services such as meals, recreation, and medical treatment. Local jails are extremely diverse in terms of inmate capacity, physical size and structure, and number and type of personnel, ranging from one- or two-cell facilities in rural areas to the Harrison County Jail and other facilities with inmate capacities exceeding five hundred.

The inmate population in local jails is extremely diverse. Local jails were originally developed to provide housing for suspects awaiting trial on either state or local charges and for local inmates serving sentences for misdemeanor criminal offenses or violations of city ordinances. However, for a variety of reasons, most local jails now also house state inmates on a long-term basis. State inmates customarily remain in local jails for thirty days following their convictions while awaiting transfer to the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility for processing and classification. Depending on the availability of beds in state facilities, state inmates may remain in local jails for longer periods of time. In addition to state inmates awaiting transfer, local jails are typically approved to retain state inmates who qualify for trusty status or who will participate in approved work programs. While in the local facility, these inmates provide services to the county or municipality, including building and property maintenance, construction, and beautification projects for public facilities, roads, and parks. Funding for local jails is a county responsibility. As with other county expenditures, the Board of Supervisors is responsible for funding the operation of the jail and the provision of inmate services.

The Mississippi Department of Corrections is the agency responsible for the operation and maintenance of the state prison system. Mississippi currently operates three public prison facilities: the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility at Pearl, and the South Mississippi Correctional Institution at Leakesville. All are accredited by the American Correctional Association.

Officially opened in 1901, the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman is the oldest state prison in Mississippi and is located on approximately eighteen thousand acres in Sunflower County. The only maximum security prison in the state, Parchman, as it is known, is also the largest facility, with approximately 3,350 beds. Mississippi’s death row inmates are held at Parchman.

The Central Mississippi Correctional Facility opened its doors in 1986 and is situated on 171 acres in Rankin County, near Jackson. The facility currently serves as the receiving and classification center for all inmates sentenced to the custody of the Mississippi Department of Corrections. During this process, inmates receive medical and psychological examinations, screening for sexually transmitted diseases, and educational and intelligence testing. In addition to serving as the classification center, the institution houses approximately thirty-four hundred inmates and is the only state facility authorized to house female offenders, including those on death row. The institution is also authorized to house male offenders. The Central Mississippi Correctional Facility has minimum-, medium-, and maximum-security units and provides housing for male inmates with medical or physical conditions that require ongoing or specialized treatment.

The South Mississippi Correctional Center was established in 1989 and is located in Greene County. It is the smallest state facility, with an inmate capacity of approximately thirty-two hundred. This institution has minimum-, medium-, and maximum-security areas and offers the regimented inmate discipline program, a paramilitary-style boot camp to which offenders can be sentenced.

To augment the number of beds available at the three major state prisons, the Mississippi legislature approved the creation of fifteen regional facilities that are jointly operated by the county and state. Each facility is authorized to house 280 state inmates. Private companies operate six facilities throughout the state. While the majority of state inmates remain housed in public facilities, Mississippi utilizes private prisons more than any other state per capita.

Mississippi also has two training schools for juvenile offenders who are adjudicated delinquent by the youth court. Juveniles may be held in the training school until their twentieth birthday. Columbia Training School in Marion County is authorized to house female offenders and younger males. The Mississippi Youth Correctional Complex, more commonly known as Oakley, is located in Raymond, in Hinds County, and houses older males. In addition, a private juvenile facility was established in 2001 in Walnut Grove. Operated by Cornell Companies, this facility is authorized to house approximately one thousand juvenile offenders.

Jails and Prisons

Jasper County

Located in southeastern Mississippi, Jasper County’s lands have a long Native American history. Red Shoe, an eighteenth-century Choctaw chief and important leader in negotiations with the Chickasaw, English, and French, was from the area that became Jasper. The county was officially established from Jones and Wayne Counties in 1833 and is named for Sgt. William Jasper, a Revolutionary War hero. Jasper’s two county seats are Bay Springs and Paulding, which is named for another Revolutionary War figure, John Paulding. Just four years after founding the county, Jasper’s leaders established the publication that eventually became the state’s preeminent newspaper, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger.

In its early years Jasper had a substantial majority of free people relative to its slave population. By 1860 both the free and slave populations had nearly tripled, reaching 6,458 and 4,549, respectively. Like most Mississippi counties, antebellum Jasper was largely agricultural: the county’s first census in 1840 shows only 40 people working in commerce and manufacturing. Jasper’s farms practiced mixed agriculture, concentrating on corn, livestock, and sweet potatoes more than cotton.

In 1880, 251 of the county’s citizens identified as Native Americans, one of the largest such populations in Mississippi. The county’s population had increased to 15,394 by the turn of the century, with whites comprising a slight majority. Farming experiences differed markedly along racial lines: while 80 percent of white farming families owned their land, only a third of the African American farmers did so, with the rest working as either sharecroppers or tenants. Several books by Mississippi historian and memoirist S. G. Thigpen, born in Jasper County in 1890, detail rural life in South Mississippi during this era.

Jasper County has been home to a variety of churchgoing populations. In the 1830s a group of Irish settlers there founded the state’s second Catholic parish. Thirty years later, only five counties had more churches than did Jasper, and most of its congregations were Methodist or Baptist. The Southern Minstrel, a popular nineteenth-century shape-note compendium compiled and edited by Lazarus Jones, had roots in Jasper County. The religious census of 1916 shows Missionary Baptists as the county’s largest denomination, followed by the Methodist Episcopal Church; the Methodist Episcopal Church, South; the Southern Baptist Convention; and the Presbyterian Church.

By 1930 Jasper’s population had reached 18,634. Nonagricultural work opportunities were clearly on the rise, as the county’s industrial workforce, primarily laboring in timber, had grown to 400. While Jasper remained a largely agricultural county with more than three thousand farms, the majority of its farmers were now tenants.

The population declined slightly over the next three decades, falling to just under 17,000 in 1960. Jasper’s population was roughly split between white and black residents but also included a significant number of South Asian immigrants. The county’s agricultural sector, focused on corn and cattle, now employed only about half of Jasper’s workforce. The county’s more than three hundred thousand acres of commercial forest contributed to employment opportunities as well, and many of the county’s other laborers worked in either machinery or furniture production.

Since the 1960s, the Jasper County economy has benefited from significant natural gas and petroleum reserves. In 2010 Jasper produced more gasoline and oil than any other county in Mississippi. The 2010 census showed that the majority of Jasper’s 17,062 citizens were African American and that the county’s population had shown no significant change in size since 1960.

Jasper County

Jefferson County

Originally named Pickering County, Jefferson County was one of Mississippi’s first counties and was established on 2 April 1799 by the proclamation of Mississippi’s first territorial governor, Winthrop Sargent. On 11 January 1802 Gov. C. C. Claiborne divided Pickering into Claiborne and Jefferson Counties. Jefferson County was named for Pres. Thomas Jefferson. The county seat is Fayette.

Though never as large as Adams County immediately to its south, Jefferson County was home to numerous influential Mississippi residents. Families from the Carolinas, Virginia, and Maryland settled in the area as early as 1768. One of their descendants, Thomas Maston Green, served as the second delegate to Congress from the territory. The family’s home, the Green Mansion, near Cole Creek, allegedly hosted Gen. Andrew Jackson’s 1791 wedding. Early political figures such as Cowles Mead, a delegate to the Mississippi assembly in 1807, and Cato West, a delegate to the 1817 constitutional convention, lived in Jefferson County. Rush Nutt developed the Petit Gulf cottonseed on his plantation outside Rodney.

Many first settlers to the area traveled by the Natchez Trace, a public road that ran north from Natchez through Jefferson County to Cumberland, Tennessee. Samuel Mason, a member of the Mason and Harp Gang, which was accused of attacking and robbing travelers along the Trace, was killed in 1802 and his head was delivered to Jefferson County for a reward of two thousand dollars. His killers were identified as members of another violent gang, and both were hanged in Greenville.

In 1820 Jefferson had a population of 6,822, making it the fourth-largest county in the young state. Throughout the county’s antebellum history, most people living in Jefferson County were slaves. By 1830 the number of slaves increased to 69 percent of the population, and ten years later, 9,146 of Jefferson’s 11,650 people were slaves. On the eve of the Civil War, only 19 percent of the county’s 15,000 residents were free people. In its early years Jefferson County landowners concentrated on plantation agriculture, raising substantial quantities of cotton, vegetables, and livestock. A small manufacturing industry emerged around 1860, when three Fayette establishments employed 27 men making carriages, saddles, and harnesses.

In 1880 only 36 percent of the county’s farmers owned their land. As in many counties with high percentages of tenants and sharecroppers, the farms in Jefferson County were divided up into small units, averaging sixty-one acres, well below the state average. In addition, sixteen manufacturing companies in Jefferson employed forty-five men and one woman.

Jefferson County stands out as one of the few counties without a Baptist congregation during the antebellum period. In 1860 the county had ten Methodist churches, six Presbyterian churches, and one Episcopal church. Over time the Baptist church developed an influential presence in Jefferson County, and by 1916 the Missionary Baptists stood among the largest religious groups. The Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and the African Methodist Episcopal Church were also significant in the county. The first racially integrated Methodist church in Mississippi, Union Church, is located in Jefferson County. Other notable firsts in Jefferson County included the state’s first agent for the Negro Extension Service, M. M. Hubert, and the first publication of the Mississippi White Ribbon, a newspaper run by Prohibition leader Harriet Kells.

Unique not only for its religious profile but also for its immigrant population, Jefferson County witnessed an influx of German, Irish, and English families around 1880. African Americans now made up the majority of the 17,314 people living in the area; by 1900, 81 percent of the residents were black. At the turn of twentieth century only 7 percent of Jefferson’s African American farmers owned land, compared to 54 percent of the county’s white famers. These percentages altered only slightly after a sharp decline in population in the 1930s. Tenancy dominated Jefferson County in the depression era: among the county’s 14,291 residents, 6 percent of black farmers owned land, as did 37 percent of white farmers.

Like many parts of Mississippi, Jefferson County experienced population decreases beginning in the mid-twentieth century. By 1960 just over ten thousand people, three-quarters of them African Americans, lived in Jefferson County. Despite a declining agricultural economy, the county relied on corn, winter wheat, soy, and livestock production. A small furniture industry also provided employment, as did a few wells that produced petroleum and natural gas. Through the 1970s Jefferson County ranked among the lowest in the state in per capita income. At the beginning of the decade, fewer than 20 percent of county’s residents had graduated from high school.

In 1969 Fayette elected civil rights activist and businessman Charles Evers as mayor, making him Mississippi’s first African American mayor after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Prior to his election, Evers led civil rights boycotts in Natchez from 1965 to 1966 and in Fayette in 1966. With Evers in office, Fayette hosted the first Southern Black Mayors Conference. Evers ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1971 but returned to Fayette and won a second term as mayor.

As of 2010, Jefferson County had 7,726 residents, 85.6 percent of them African Americans.

Jefferson County

Jefferson Davis County

Named for the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis County was created in 1906 from parts of Covington and Lawrence Counties. The county is located in the south-central part of the state, and the seat is Prentiss.

In the 1910 census, the county’s population totaled 12,860 and was 53 percent African American and 47 percent white. About 60 percent of all farming families owned their land, while the rest worked as tenants. White farmers were slightly more likely to own their land than were African American farmers.

In 1907 Bertha and Jonas Johnson established Prentiss Normal and Industrial Institute in Jefferson Davis County. Founded on principles Bertha Johnson had learned at the Tuskegee Institute, the school initially emphasized agricultural and vocational training, later added a high school and junior college, and supported at least one Rosenwald building. Among the leading individuals who attended Prentiss Normal and Industrial prior to its closure in 1989 was religious leader and activist Dolphus Weary.

In 1930 Jefferson Davis County had a population of 14,281, including 7,901 African Americans and 6,380 whites. A rural and agricultural county, Jefferson Davis County had no urban centers and just seven people born outside the United States. Of the county’s 2,958 farms, 40 percent were run by owners—tenants worked the rest. Farmers grew more corn than other crops, and the county’s nine manufacturing establishments employed 77 workers. Both of those numbers were among the lowest in the state. In 1934 Jefferson Davis County became one of the first areas to gain power via the Tennessee Valley Authority.

The religious census of 1916 found that most of Jefferson Davis County’s church members were either Baptists or Methodists. About two-thirds of all church members belonged to the Missionary Baptist or Southern Baptist Churches, and the other largest groups were the Methodist Episcopal Church, South; the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church; and the Roman Catholic Church.

From 1930 to 1960 the population declined slightly to 13,540, and Jefferson Davis County continued to have a small African American majority. Agricultural employment dropped from 2,030 in 1960 to 200 in 1980. Major crops included soybeans, cotton, and corn. Even in 1960 the county had relatively little industry, employing 457 people in some small furniture and clothing factories. In 1960 about 34 percent of the county’s workers were employed in agriculture, and just 13 percent worked in industry. Seven gas wells promised profits.

Notable people from Jefferson Davis County include professional basketballer Al Jefferson. Steve McNair, a National Football League player who attended Alcorn State University and was selected to the Pro Bowl three times, is buried in Prentiss.

Unlike most counties in southern Mississippi, Jefferson Davis County’s 2010 population was predominantly African American and had remained relatively stable in size since 1960. In 2010 the county’s population of 12,487 was 60 percent African American and 38.7 percent white.

Jefferson Davis County

Jews

Jews have never made up as much as 1 percent of Mississippi’s population. Yet despite their small numbers, Jews have had a significant impact on life in the state.

Jews have lived in Mississippi since the eighteenth century, though the first significant Jewish community was not established until the 1800s in Natchez. The first Jewish religious service was reportedly held in Natchez in 1800. The state’s oldest congregations are B’nai Israel, formed in Natchez in 1840, and Anshe Chesed, formed in Vicksburg in 1841.

During the nineteenth century, Jewish immigrants from the German states and Alsace settled in Mississippi. Late in that century and early in the next they were joined by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, many of whom initially worked as traveling peddlers. Since most Jews had been legally prevented from owning land in Europe, they had no experience with farming, and most had supported themselves through business ownership. When they came to the United States, they drew on this entrepreneurial experience and became involved in commerce, traveling from town to town to sell supplies to farmers and their families.

After these peddlers, most of them young single men, saved enough money, they opened stores in the towns through which they had traveled. As Mississippi and the rest of the South began to move toward a capitalist, commercial economy in the wake of the Civil War, merchants played an essential role in linking southern farmers to the national market. In towns throughout Mississippi main streets were dominated by Jewish merchants. The most notable success was Stein Mart, now a national department store chain, which had its roots in a dry goods store founded by Russian Jewish immigrant Sam Stein in 1908 in Greenville.

This economic role brought great opportunity as well as real challenges. Since laws prevented Jewish merchants from opening their stores on Sunday, most had no choice but to work on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath. It was also very difficult to follow Jewish dietary restrictions in the absence of a ready supply of kosher meat. Mississippi Jews adapted their traditional religious practices to fit their new environment.

For the most part, Jews have enjoyed acceptance in Mississippi, in part because they quickly assimilated to southern culture. While remaining faithful to their unique religion and culture, southern Jews have worked to lessen the barriers and differences between themselves and their Gentile neighbors. Many Jews have held positions of civic leadership, including serving as mayors of Natchez, Meridian, Vicksburg, and Rolling Fork. They have embraced the cultural values of the South, for better or worse. More than two hundred Mississippi Jews fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War, and even Jews who had not even been in the United States at the time of the war later celebrated Confederate Memorial Day. Many embraced the symbolism and mythology of the Old South. Jane Wexler, a Jewish woman whose mother was one of the founders of the Natchez Pilgrimage organization, was the queen of the Pilgrimage in 1932. During the civil rights movement many Jews shared the prejudices of their white non-Jewish neighbors, although others, inspired by Jewish values, spoke out in favor of racial equality and integration.

Indeed, anti-Semitism was most pronounced during the struggle over civil rights. In 1967 the Ku Klux Klan bombed Jackson’s Temple Beth Israel and the home of its rabbi, Perry Nussbaum, who supported integration. Several months later the Klan bombed Temple Beth Israel in Meridian. The incidents galvanized much of the local non-Jewish community to denounce these violent acts.

Although Mississippi Jews worked hard to fit in, they also sought to maintain their distinct identity. Jewish parents encouraged their children to marry other Jews, a difficult task in towns with only a few Jewish families. As a result, Mississippi Jews built statewide and regional social networks to ensure that their children had access to Jewish peers. Utica’s Henry S. Jacobs Camp, founded in 1970, has become one of the most significant Jewish experiences for young Jews in Mississippi and the surrounding areas.

Mississippi’s Jewish population has declined from more than four thousand in 1968 to perhaps fifteen hundred after the turn of the twenty-first century. The children of the Jewish merchants who settled in Mississippi attended college, became professionals, and had little interest in taking over the family business. The decline of Mississippi’s rural economy and the rise of national retail chains have also pushed Mississippi Jews to such booming Sunbelt cities as Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston. The Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience, with branches in Utica and Natchez, was created in 1986 to ensure that the legacy of Mississippi Jews lives on even if their numbers continue to decline.

Jews

Johnson, Paul B., Jr.

When Paul Burney Johnson Jr. was inaugurated as Mississippi’s fifty-fourth governor on 21 January 1964, he became the only son of a Mississippi governor to ascend to the state’s highest office. “Little Paul,” as he was fondly known among his supporters, was born in Hattiesburg on 23 January 1916. He earned bachelor’s and law degrees from the University of Mississippi and married Dorothy Power in 1941 at the Governor’s Mansion.

In August 1947, shortly after his discharge from the Marine Corps, Johnson ran in the special election to fill the unexpired term of Sen. Theodore Bilbo but was defeated by John C. Stennis. Later that year Johnson ran for the governorship, losing in the Democratic primary. He again ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1951 and in 1955. In 1959 Johnson was elected lieutenant governor in the first primary.

He was serving in that office in 1962, when James Meredith attempted to integrate the University of Mississippi. Johnson supported Gov. Ross Barnett’s defiance of the US Supreme Court. On one occasion Johnson stood in the middle of University Avenue and personally blocked Meredith’s entrance onto the campus. From that incident came the slogan Johnson used in his 1963 campaign for the governorship, “Stand Tall with Paul.” He defeated J. P. Coleman in a runoff election.

In his inaugural address Governor Johnson encouraged the people of Mississippi to accept the changes that were occurring throughout the South and the nation and pledged that law and order would prevail in Mississippi. He urged people not to “fight a rear guard defense of yesterday” but to conduct “an all out assault on our share of tomorrow.”

During Johnson’s administration Mississippi reached a milestone in its economic development. In May 1965 the number of Mississippians employed in industry exceeded the number of agricultural workers for the first time in the state’s history.

In 1967, while he held the office of governor, Johnson ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor. He then returned to his law practice in Hattiesburg and eventually assumed the role of an elder statesman in Mississippi politics. Johnson died at his home in Hattiesburg on 14 October 1985.

Johnson, Paul B., Jr.

Johnson, Paul B., Sr.

During his unsuccessful 1931 and 1935 races for the Mississippi governorship, Paul Burney Johnson Sr. called himself the Champion of the Runt Pig People, and in his winning 1939 campaign he promised to bring New Deal measures to the state. In supporting government programs for the poor and unemployed, Johnson explained that he was trying to give the common people their fair share of the nation’s wealth, pledging, “I will never balance the budget at the expense of suffering humanity.”

Johnson was born into a poor farm family, and he readily identified with Mississippi’s “redneck” dirt farmers, sharecroppers, and day laborers. When he became a lawyer he vowed to “save a little from everything I made.” He saved some of bills he received as payment for his first law case for the rest of his life.

Born in Hillsboro in Scott County on 23 March 1880, Johnson studied law at Millsaps College and opened a successful law practice in Hattiesburg in 1903. After a four-year term as city judge, he was appointed a judge of the 12th Circuit, and he was subsequently elected to the court in 1911 and 1915.

In 1918 Johnson defeated Theodore Bilbo in the contest to represent Mississippi’s 6th District in the US House of Representatives. After serving three terms in Congress, Johnson did not seek reelection and began to pursue his lifelong dream of becoming governor of Mississippi. After two unsuccessful campaigns, Johnson achieved his dream in 1939 and was inaugurated on 16 January 1940.

Johnson was skeptical of the Balance Agriculture with Industry (BAWI) program and took steps to curtail industrial expansion in Mississippi. His legislative program emphasized more direct measures to increase the purchasing power of the state’s poor and unemployed workers. Among his two most important achievements were an increase in pensions for senior citizens and a law providing free textbooks for schoolchildren. Both measures provoked controversy: in particular, opponents of free textbooks accused Johnson of socializing Mississippi and claimed that the state’s involvement in the textbook business would undermine the free enterprise system.

Johnson was ill during much of his administration, and the long and bitter struggle over the textbook bill put an enormous strain on him and his family. His health declined rapidly in late 1943, and Gov. Johnson died on 26 December. Paul B. Johnson State Park in Hattiesburg is named in his honor.

Johnson, Paul B., Sr.

Jones County

Founded in 1826 from portions of Covington and Wayne Counties, Jones County is located in southern Mississippi’s Piney Woods region. The Leaf River traverses Jones’s western region from north to south, while Tallahoma Creek wends its way through the county’s eastern section. In the 1820s and 1830s the lands now incorporated into Jones County were ceded to the United States by the Choctaw Indians through the Treaty of Mount Dexter, the Treaty of Doak’s Stand, and the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. The county is named for Revolutionary War hero John Paul Jones. Its two seats are Laurel and Ellisville.

An economic depression contributed to emigration from Jones County during its early years. Antebellum Jones remained sparsely populated, reporting only 1,309 free people and 161 slaves in its first census in 1830. By 1860 the population was growing again, and the population had climbed to 2,916 whites and 407 slaves (12 percent), the smallest number and percentage in the state.

As in other Piney Woods counties, economic activity in Jones did not revolve around agriculture, and the county was among the lowest in Mississippi in raising cotton, corn, and cattle during the antebellum period. Its residents owned considerably more hogs than average, and Jones ranked eleventh in the state in rice production. In 1860 the county’s industrial workforce included only nineteen people working in flour or lumber mills.

Jones County is most famous for the story of the Free State of Jones. The county was the site of considerable dissent before and during the Civil War. While it is unclear whether Jones ever officially declared that it had seceded from Mississippi or the Confederate States of America, the Knight Company of deserters stubbornly resisted the Confederacy’s efforts to disperse, arrest, and even execute some of the participants. Generations of debates have occurred over the legacy of Newt Knight and his group, who are variously considered heroic defenders of local control who seceded from the secessionists, thuggish outlaws, or mavericks who defied all rules, including the racial conventions of marriage. The tale has been dramatized in a 2016 movie, The Free State of Jones.

Fifteen years after the end of the Civil War, Jones County’s population had increased only slightly to 3,828. Still rural and agricultural, with only four manufacturing firms, Jones was a rare Mississippi county that produced little corn or cotton. By contrast, Jones was among the top counties in the state in growing rice and rearing sheep. In 1880 Jones had the state’s smallest African American community, comprising only 9.4 percent of the population.

Jones’s population grew dramatically at the end of the nineteenth century, reaching 17,846 in 1900, with African Americans accounting for more than a quarter of residents. The county’s rate of landownership was relatively high, as 79 percent of white farmers and 65 percent of black farmers owned the land they worked. Jones had a growing industrial economy, with fifty-four establishments employing 1,148 workers. The Eastman-Gardiner timber company and mill, headquartered in Laurel, grew quickly in the late 1800s and by the early 1900s became one of Mississippi’s largest firms. In 1907 the Gilchrist-Fordry Company began similar work in the Laurel area, with a huge mill and substantial timber acreage.

On the eve of the Civil War, Jones had eighteen churches—eleven Methodist, six Baptist, and one Presbyterian. A half century later, most of Jones County churchgoers were either Southern Baptists or Missionary Baptists.

The county’s population continued its impressive expansion during the early twentieth century. By 1930 Jones was home to 41,492 people, with whites outnumbering African Americans almost three to one. Landownership in the county had declined during the previous three decades, and as the Great Depression set in, 54 percent of white farmers and 26 percent of African American farmers owned their land. However, the county’s industrial sector had grown substantially, employing 4,037 workers, the most in Mississippi. The majority of these laborers worked in large sawmills and pulp mills. Laurel was also home to Masonite, a product developed by William H. Mason that turned young trees into fiberboard. Increased job opportunities in manufacturing attracted the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which had some success organizing the county’s workforce.

In the 1940s surveys in Jones County resulted in the discovery of oil. In 1944 the Helen Morrison Well in neighboring Jasper County became the area’s first productive well, and by the end of that year Jones County led the state in oil production.

Beginning in the 1920s Jones County became an important location for the arts. In 1923 the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art was established in Laurel. It features an exciting combination of American, European, and Japanese art and is currently the state’s oldest art museum. In 1922 Laurel teacher Ernestine Clayton Deavours edited and published Mississippi Poets, the first substantial literary anthology of Mississippi writers. Born in Laurel in 1927, opera singer Leontyne Price began her musical career in her hometown schools and churches before becoming one of the world’s leading opera singers in the 1950s and breaking numerous racial barriers. Author Carolyn Bennett Patterson, National Geographic ’s first female editor, was born in Laurel in 1921.

By 1960 Jones’s population had increased to almost sixty thousand people, with whites holding a three-quarters majority. Industry maintained its strong presence in the county, and many workers were employed in construction and retail. Livestock, soybeans, corn, and oats dominated the agricultural sector. The county also had numerous oil wells and almost three hundred thousand acres of commercial timberland.

Jones County is associated with several important events and figures in Mississippi’s turbulent twentieth-century racial history. In 1945 Willie McGee, an African American, was convicted of raping a white woman in Laurel. McGee claimed the relationship was consensual, and his multiple trials attracted international intention, with critics seeing his conviction and 1951 execution as a form of legal lynching. In 1955 Jones County Junior College played a football game against a Compton Community College team that included African American players, defying the state law barring all-white teams from competing against racially integrated squads. In 1966 Sam Bowers, a Laurel businessman and leader of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, murdered civil rights activist Vernon Dahmer. After four mistrials in the 1960s, Bowers was finally convicted of the crime in 1998.

Like most counties in the southern part of the state, Jones County’s 2010 population of 67,761 was predominantly white. However, the county was also home to a Latino minority (primarily Mexicans from Veracruz, Chiapas, and Oaxaca) as well as a small but growing South Asian community. As in neighboring Jasper, Jefferson Davis, Lamar, and Forrest Counties, Jones’s African American minority had also shown a significant proportional increase.

Jones County

Judiciary

The Mississippi judiciary is a four-tiered system composed of trial and appellate courts. The Mississippi Constitution created four courts, including the Supreme Court of Mississippi, the circuit courts, chancery courts, and justice courts. The constitution provides that the legislature may create and establish inferior courts as necessary. The four tiers of the judicial structure include the courts of limited jurisdiction, courts of general jurisdiction, the intermediate appellate court, and the court of last resort.

Courts of limited jurisdiction include municipal courts, justice courts, and county courts. These courts have concurrent jurisdiction over civil and criminal matters, and appeals from these courts may be made to the circuit or chancery court.

Municipal courts are widely referred to as city or police courts. Municipal courts exist in all cities, towns, and villages with populations greater than ten thousand. In 2016 there were 226 municipal courts in Mississippi. Municipal courts hear cases involving violations of municipal ordinances, misdemeanor criminal offenses, and traffic violations that occur within the city limits. In limited cases, the municipal court may serve as the juvenile court for the jurisdiction. Municipal court judges are attorneys appointed by municipal authorities—typically, the mayor or the city council. Municipal court judgeships are considered part-time positions, and most municipal judges also maintain active law practices.

The justice court is the only court of limited jurisdiction created by the Mississippi Constitution of 1890. While the constitution originally granted justice courts jurisdiction over civil matters in excess of five hundred dollars, the legislature has modified the jurisdictional amount of justice courts to include civil actions under thirty-five hundred dollars. Justice courts also have limited jurisdiction over certain criminal matters. Typically, justice courts adjudicate misdemeanor criminal offenses, including traffic offenses that occur in the county; conduct initial and preliminary hearings in felony cases; make bail decisions; and entertain requests for search and arrest warrants. Justice court judges are elected to four-year terms via partisan elections. Qualifications include state and county residency, a high school diploma or general equivalency diploma, and, once elected, completion of annual legal training provided by the Mississippi Judicial College. As of 2016 there were 197 judges presiding over 83 Justice Courts.

County courts are authorized by the legislature and are required in counties with populations greater than fifty thousand and optional in all other counties. Mississippi currently has twenty-one county courts, with thirty county court judges. They have jurisdiction over a variety of civil and criminal matters, including misdemeanor criminal offenses as well as noncapital felony cases transferred by the circuit court. County courts also have jurisdiction over civil matters that involve amounts less than two hundred thousand dollars and have exclusive jurisdiction over matters involving eminent domain, the partition of personal property, and unlawful entry and detainer.

In addition, county courts function as youth courts. In counties that lack county courts, the chancery or family court serves as the youth court. In Mississippi, youth courts hear matters involving juveniles including but not limited to delinquency cases, cases of abuse and neglect, dependency cases, and cases involving children in need of supervision. The youth court is a civil court whose primary focus is the protection of the best interest of the child.

Mississippi currently has twenty-one county court judges. To qualify as a county court judge, individuals must be at least twenty-six years of age, residents of the state, and practicing attorneys for five years. Candidates must meet all voter eligibility requirements and cannot have been convicted of certain felonies. County court judges serve four-year terms in office.

The Mississippi Constitution of 1890 created two courts of general jurisdiction, circuit and chancery courts. The state currently has twenty-two circuit court districts. Circuit courts are authorized to hear civil matters with two hundred dollars or more in controversy. As such, they have considerable concurrent jurisdiction with the justice and county courts. Circuit courts also hear all criminal cases involving adults charged with felony offenses. Moreover, circuit courts possess appellate jurisdiction over appeals from justice or municipal courts and certain administrative proceedings. Mississippi currently has fifty-three circuit court judges. Candidates for circuit court judge must be at least twenty-six years of age, residents of the state, and practicing attorneys for five years.

Chancery courts are courts of equity created by the Mississippi Constitution of 1890. Chancery courts have jurisdiction over cases involving matters in equity, divorce and alimony, testamentary and of administration, minors’ business, idiocy and lunacy, certain real estate actions, and a variety of other actions. Mississippi has twenty chancery court districts and forty-nine chancery court judges. Like county and circuit court judges, chancellors must be at least twenty-six years of age, residents of the state, and practicing attorneys for five years. In addition, candidates seeking the office of chancery court judge must meet all voter eligibility requirements and cannot have been convicted of certain felonies. Chancery judges serve four-year terms in office.

In 1993 the legislature created the Court of Appeals to serve as the intermediate appellate court for the state. While all appeals proceed directly to the Supreme Court of Mississippi, the Court of Appeals is authorized to hear cases assigned by the Supreme Court. Decisions handed down by the Court of Appeals may be reviewed by the Supreme Court if a party files a petition for writ of certiorari. However, the decision to grant or deny the petition is discretionary, and the Supreme Court does not choose to hear all cases. The Court of Appeals is composed of ten judges who serve eight-year terms following nonpartisan and staggered elections in five districts. Candidates for the Court of Appeals must possess the same qualifications as individuals seeking election to the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court of Mississippi (the court of last resort) is the only appellate court created by the Mississippi Constitution. While it is authorized to assign cases to the Court of Appeals, state law requires the Supreme Court to retain cases involving the death penalty, election contests, utility rate regulation, and public bond issues as well as cases in which a lower court has held a statute unconstitutional. In addition, the Supreme Court will retain cases involving fundamental and urgent issues of broad public importance; cases involving the constitutionality of a statute, ordinance, court rule, or administrative rule or regulation; and cases involving inconsistency or conflict between the decisions rendered by the Court of Appeals and Supreme Court. In addition to appellate jurisdiction, the Supreme Court of Mississippi is responsible for rules involving trials and appeals. The rule-making power of the Supreme Court has resulted in the Mississippi Rules of Civil Procedure, Mississippi Rules of Evidence, Mississippi Rules of Appellate Procedure, Mississippi Uniform Rules of Circuit and County Court Practice, Mississippi Uniform Chancery Court Rules, and Uniform Rules of Procedure for Justice Court. The Supreme Court is also the final arbiter of complaints regarding the conduct and performance of judges throughout the state.

The Supreme Court has nine sitting justices who serve eight-year terms following nonpartisan elections. Three justices are chosen from each of three Supreme Court districts—the Northern District, the Central District, and the Southern District. Justices must be at least thirty years of age, be state residents for at least five years, be practicing attorneys for five years prior to service, meet all voter eligibility requirements, and must not have been convicted of certain felonies.

Judiciary

Kemper County

Located east of Jackson, along the Alabama-Mississippi border, Kemper County was founded on 23 December 1833. The Tombigbee River crosses Kemper in the east, and the Chickasawhay River wends its way through the county’s southern region. The lands now incorporated into Kemper were ceded to the United States by the Choctaw Tribe under the 1830 Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. The county is named for Reuben, Nathan, and Samuel Kemper, a trio of brothers who fought under Gen. Andrew Jackson in the War of 1812. De Kalb, the county’s seat, is named for Revolutionary War general Baron Johann de Kalb.

Kemper County emerged in the 1830s as a rapidly growing part of eastern Mississippi. In the 1840 census, the county reported 4,623 free people and 3,040 slaves; twenty years later the county’s population neared twelve thousand and was about half free and half slave. Kemper’s farms and plantations practiced mixed agriculture, concentrating on cotton, corn, sweet potatoes, and livestock. John J. Pettus, Mississippi’s governor during the Civil War, hailed from Kemper. Though no battles took place in the county, it was subject to a number of raids by US troops, and exceptionally high numbers of Kemper citizens fought as Confederate soldiers.

By 1880 Kemper had grown to 15,719 people, with African Americans slightly outnumbering whites. The county also had a small Native American population as well as forty-one foreign-born residents. Agriculture was typical of Mississippi in both the size of Kemper’s farms and the percentage of farm ownership. Industry was slow to develop in the county, and its twenty manufacturing establishments employed only twenty-nine men.

By the late nineteenth century the county was known as Bloody Kemper because of its high homicide rate during the Reconstruction era. The most notorious example of county’s postbellum hostilities was the Chisholm Massacre. Political conflicts between Democrats and Republicans led to the 1875 murder of Republican sheriff W. W. Chisholm, his family, and a number of African Americans. A mysterious series of murders in the 1890s by a Kemper County doctor helped to seal the county’s violent reputation.

In 1900 Kemper was home to 20,492 people, about half of them African American. Although Kemper remained primarily agricultural, it had forty-seven manufacturing establishments employing almost a hundred workers. Only a quarter of Kemper’s African American farmers owned their land, while more than two-thirds of white farmers did so.

On the eve of the Civil War, Kemper County had forty-two churches, the fifth-highest number in the state. Most were either Baptist or Methodist. By 1916 most of Kemper’s church members were Baptist, with those belonging to Missionary Baptist and Southern Baptist congregations comprising well over half of the county’s churchgoing population. Most of Kemper’s remaining congregants were either Methodist or Presbyterian.

By 1930 Kemper’s population had increased slightly to about twenty-two thousand, more than half of them African Americans. The county’s industrial sector had undergone significant expansion, employing almost a thousand workers. The largest industrial employer was the Sumter Lumber Company in Electric Mills, which was unique both for its tremendous size and for its use of electric rather than steam power. Only 37 percent of the county’s farmers owned their land as the Great Depression set in.

Over the next thirty years Kemper’s population decreased dramatically, falling to 12,277 in 1960. Kemper was home to a large Choctaw community. A majority of the labor force was employed in agriculture, with fewer than five hundred manufacturing workers, almost all of them in furniture production. Most of the county’s farmland was devoted to corn, cotton, cattle, and soybeans. Kemper was one of the poorest Mississippi counties throughout the 1980s and ranked last in the state in per capita income in both 1960 and 1970.

John C. Stennis was born in De Kalb in 1901 and went on to represent Mississippi in the US Senate from 1947 to 1989.

By 2010 Kemper’s population had declined to 10,456, and the county was one of very few in east-central Mississippi with an African American majority.

Kemper County

Ku Klux Klan during the Civil Rights Period

Across the South, one product of the 1954 Brown school desegregation decision was the revitalization of militant segregationist groups, including more than a dozen competing Ku Klux Klan (KKK) organizations. In Mississippi, however, staunch support for the segregationist status quo by elected officeholders and a thriving network of Citizens’ Councils meant that the Klan’s brand of vigilante politics had little appeal among Jim Crow supporters. Not until 1964, in the face of escalating civil rights activity, did any Klan group mobilize a significant following in the state. But before declining sharply in the late 1960s, Mississippi’s Klan membership displayed shocking brutality, perpetrating hundreds of burnings, bombings, and other violent acts, including at least ten murders.

The civil-rights-era Klan’s first move into Mississippi occurred in the fall of 1963, when an organizer for the Louisiana-based Original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan arrived in Natchez, where he recruited approximately three hundred Mississippians to his organization. Infighting soon resulted in the expulsion of Original Knights state officer Douglas Byrd, who promptly recruited two-thirds of the group’s Mississippi membership into a new organization, the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. In April 1964 Sam Holloway Bowers, a forty-year-old World War II veteran, assumed leadership of the White Knights, transforming it into a militant and highly secretive organization dedicated to a brand of Christian patriotism that viewed the encroaching civil rights threat as a Jewish-communist conspiracy against sovereign white Mississippians.

The influx of civil rights workers associated with the 1964 Freedom Summer voter registration project undertaken by the Council of Federated Organizations increased the urgency of the White Knights’ mission. Membership in the Klan grew rapidly, peaking at an estimated six thousand members spread over fifty-two “klaverns” (chapters) statewide. Bowers was clear that the group would use “force and violence when considered necessary,” and throughout that summer the White Knights engaged in hundreds of acts of intimidation, including the burning of forty-four black churches and the killing of civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner in Neshoba County. Those crimes became one of that summer’s biggest media stories, and subsequent pressure exerted by the council and its allies resulted in a large-scale investigation of the Klan by the FBI.

The controversy also provided an opening for a rival Klan organization, the United Klans of America (UKA), to begin a Mississippi recruiting campaign. The UKA was headed by Robert Shelton, a talented organizer who had built his operation into the largest KKK outfit in the nation, with hundreds of klaverns spread across the South. Unlike the secretive White Knights, the UKA hosted large open rallies and cross burnings to recruit members and publicly at least eschewed the sort of violence associated with Bowers.

The UKA had first entered Mississippi in the spring of 1964 with the establishment of klaverns in McComb and Natchez, taking members primarily from the White Knights. During the summer of 1965, Shelton embarked on an ambitious string of public rallies, several of which drew audiences in the thousands, leading to the formation of seventy-four additional UKA klaverns across the state. By 1966 membership in the White Knights had been reduced to a few hundred, while several times that number had joined the UKA.

But the fortunes of both Klan organizations soon declined. Continued violence perpetrated by the White Knights—including the 1966 killing of Vernon Dahmer, a Forrest County leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and a later bombing campaign targeting Jews in Jackson and Meridian—sharply eroded the Klan’s public appeal. Gov. Paul Johnson referred to Dahmer’s killers as “vicious and morally bankrupt criminals,” and district attorneys and juries became less reluctant to indict and convict Klan adherents. In addition, federal action—including a congressional investigation and a highly successful FBI campaign to infiltrate and neutralize the Klan—sapped the KKK’s resources. Organizational strife cut into membership as well: amid accusations of financial improprieties, Shelton expelled the state’s UKA officers in 1966.

By the close of 1968, both the White Knights and the UKA were shells of their former selves. Despite sporadic attempts by Shelton to revive his organization with early 1970s recruiting drives in McComb and elsewhere, the Klan made headlines primarily in the courtroom. Bowers and seven other Klansmen served prison time after a 1967 trial for the Freedom Summer murders. Bowers also weathered four mistrials in the Dahmer killing before finally being convicted of murder and arson in 1998. He died in prison in 2006.

Edgar Ray Killen, a central player in the Freedom Summer murder conspiracy, was found guilty of manslaughter in 2005. Two years later, another former White Knights member, James Ford Seale, was convicted of kidnapping and conspiracy in the 1964 murders of Charles Moore and Henry Dee, two young black men who were abducted, beaten, and dropped into the Mississippi River amid unfounded fears that “Black Muslims” had been stockpiling weapons around Natchez. Still more trials could result from a renewed emphasis on FBI investigation of civil rights cold cases, further cementing the brutal legacy of the state’s civil-rights-era KKK.

Ku Klux Klan during the Civil Rights Period

Lafayette County

Site of the University of Mississippi and the home of William Faulkner and the subject of much of his work, Lafayette County has since the antebellum period been the educational and literary center of northern Mississippi.

Named for the Marquis de Lafayette, the county was founded in 1836, shortly after treaties forced most of the native Chickasaw population to leave Mississippi. In 1840 the new county had a population of 3,689 free people and 2,842 slaves. According to the census, 162 people worked in commerce and manufacturing. Thomas Dudley Isom, member of a firm that traded with the Chickasaw and later a medical doctor, suggested naming the local town Oxford as a way to attract the state university, which state officials began discussing in the 1840s. The strategy worked, and university was founded in 1844 and opened its doors for classes in 1848; the country’s fourth public law school opened there just nine years later. Southwestern humor author Augustus Baldwin Longstreet and noted scientist Frederick Augustus Barnard were among the school’s early chancellors.

By 1860 Lafayette County’s population had increased to 8,906 free people and 7,129 slaves. As in most of north-central Mississippi (east of the Delta but west of hillier country), the county’s farms and plantations concentrated on corn (ranking sixteenth among the state’s counties) rather than on cotton (twenty-fifth). The county was home to thirty-two churches: twelve Methodist, eight Baptist, six Presbyterian, five Cumberland Presbyterian, and one Episcopalian.

Part of Oxford was burned during the Civil War, and the University of Mississippi closed when most of its students left to join the Confederacy. In the 1880s the university recovered slowly. Sarah McGehee Isom became Mississippi’s first female university professor when she was hired to teach elocution in 1885. The state’s first medical school opened in Oxford as part of the University of Mississippi in 1903.

Lafayette County’s population continued to grow in the postbellum period, reaching 21,671 in 1880 and remaining evenly divided between African Americans and whites. Lafayette had 108 foreign-born residents (primarily from England, Ireland, and Germany), a higher number than most Mississippi counties. The county’s agriculture continued to mix cotton, corn, and livestock, and owners cultivated about 62 percent of the farms. Lafayette ranked eleventh among the state’s counties in number of mules: quipped Oxford’s most famous native, William Faulkner, whose stories relied on the county scenes and characters as background, “A mule will labor willingly and patiently for ten years for the privilege of kicking you once.”

Lafayette County grew little in the late 1800s. When Faulkner was born in 1897, the county’s population had grown by just five hundred since 1880. Industry employed 110 people, among them 8 women. Outside Oxford, in life as in Faulkner’s fiction, agriculture dominated. About half of all white farmers owned their land, compared to only about one-fifth of black farmers. Most African Americans made their living as sharecroppers and tenants. Southern and Missionary Baptists, Methodists (both Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and Colored Methodist Episcopal), and Presbyterians were the largest religious groups in the early twentieth century.

When Faulkner wrote his major works in the late 1920s and 1930s, Oxford had relatively few other artists, though his mother was a painter and his great-grandfather had been a novelist. Faulkner created a set of images, stories, and characters that continues to dominate thinking about Mississippi and the South. During his lifetime, the number of artists, writers, and other creative thinkers who lived in Oxford increased dramatically. Howard Odum, who went on to a career as a prominent sociologist, studied classics at the University of Mississippi and spent a great deal of time recording African American musicians. Arthur Palmer Hudson served as Lafayette County’s school superintendent before becoming a leading University of Mississippi folklorist. John Faulkner was a significant writer whose works for some time outsold those of his brother. In the visual arts, Theora Hamblett made paintings based on her dreams and observations, and Sulton Rogers, born in 1922, whittled wooden images of scenes from the Bible as well as from his nightmares. John McCrady made Lafayette County the subject of many of his greatest paintings. Political figure Ellen Woodward was born in Oxford, as was Arthur Guyton, professor of physiology and author of the major textbook in his field.

The county’s population remained steady at about twenty thousand in the early twentieth century. In 1930, 59 percent of the population was white, 41 percent was African American, and one person was identified as “other.” Still rural with a small population of factory workers, Lafayette County at the time of the Great Depression had an economy dominated by agricultural tenancy, with only one-third of farmers owning their land.

In 1960 Lafayette County was home to 21,355 people, of whom two-thirds were whites and one-third were African Americans. Agriculture remained the county’s primary employer, with corn, soybeans, livestock, and cotton the major crops. Education was the second-highest employer, and about 10 percent of laborers worked in manufacturing.

The University of Mississippi was still a small institution in 1962 when James Meredith applied to become the first African American to enroll. His attempt resulted in a riot in which two people died as well as in shame and negative publicity for the university. University figures who tried to open up the university to both African American students and to a broader spirit of criticism included history professor James Silver, whose 1964 book, Mississippi: The Closed Society, criticized policies of the university and more broadly the state. While some students and alumni embraced Confederate imagery, the university, starting in the 1970s, began making significant efforts to study the South as part of a broader set of improvements.

Beginning in the 1970s authors Willie Morris and Barry Hannah, who wrote while teaching at the University of Mississippi, and Larry Brown, an Oxford-born writer who lived in rural Tula, added to the town’s reputation as a place that valued creativity, especially on topics central to Mississippi life. Novelist Cynthia Shearer lived in Oxford for nineteen years, and Dean Faulkner Wells and her husband, Larry Wells, started Yoknapatawpha Press to publish southern writers. Less famous Lafayette County natives have included Naomi Sims, born in Oxford in 1948 and sometimes called the first African American supermodel, and Philip Cohran, an Oxford-born jazz musician who helped establish the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians in Chicago. Notable athletes at the university have included football stars Archie Manning, Deuce McAllister, Eli Manning, and Michael Oher (subject of the 2007 book and Academy Award–winning 2009 movie, The Blind Side ) and basketball stars Jennifer Gillom and Peggie Gillom-Granderson from the Lafayette County community of Abbeville. Major scholars in recent decades have included folklorist William Ferris, a Mississippi native who served as director of the university’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture from 1978 to 1998, and slavery historian Winthrop Jordan. In the 1990s Lafayette County’s Fat Possum record label began recording North Mississippi blues, often in innovative ways.

In 1980 Lafayette County’s population was 31,030; over the next thirty years, that number grew to more than 47,000. Like many counties in North Mississippi, Lafayette was predominantly white in 2010 (72 percent), with a sizable African American population (24 percent). In the twenty-first century the county was also home to small but growing Hispanic/Latino and Asian populations, each making up about 2 percent of county residents.

Lafayette County

Lamar County

Located in southeastern Mississippi and named for congressman, secretary of the interior, and US Supreme Court justice Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, Lamar County was founded in 1904. While for much of its history the county has been rural, the northeastern part of the county has become part of the Hattiesburg metropolitan area. The Wolf River flows through Lamar County. The county seat is Purvis; other towns include Lumberton and Sumrall.

Southeastern Mississippi was a prominent area for the timber industry, which, along with the expanded railroad system, brought people to the area in the late 1800s. In the 1910 census, Lamar County had a population of 11,741. Seventy-eight percent of the county’s farmers owned their own farms, while the remainder were tenants or sharecroppers. In 1930 Lamar County’s population was 12,848 and was 78 percent white. As in many parts of the state, Baptists and Methodists dominated church life in Lamar County.

Lamar County’s population changed very little through 1960, though the concentration on agriculture and timber had given way to a more diverse economy. In a county of 13,675 residents, only 14 percent of working people made their living in agriculture. Twice that number were employed in manufacturing, primarily in the timber, furniture, and clothing industries, and Lamar County was one of the Mississippi’s leading producers of petroleum, ranking fifth in the state’s mineral wells and with three functioning oil wells. The Baxterville Field, where oil was discovered on the border between Lamar and Marion Counties, was one of the state’s earliest successful wells.

Notable events in Lamar County’s history include a major tornado that struck Purvis on 24 April 1908, killing eighty-three people and destroying the railroad depot and other structures. In 1964 and 1966 the US Department of Energy and the Advanced Projects Research Agency conducted underground nuclear detonations at the Tatum Salt Dome, an endeavor known as Project Dribble. Journalist and novelist James H. Street was born in Lumberton. Lillian McMurry was born in Purvis and went on to become an important figure in the blues, owning Trumpet Records and recording musicians in Jackson.

Significant population growth began in the 1970s, and by 1980 Lamar County had a population of almost 24,000, 50 percent more than in 1960. By 2010, like many Southeast Mississippi counties, Lamar County had a majority white population and a small but significant Hispanic/Latino minority: Lamar’s population of 55,658 was 77 percent white, 20 percent African American, and 2 percent Latino/Hispanic. With a 300 percent increase in size since 1960, the county’s population had undergone the third-largest proportional expansion in the state during this period.

Lamar County

Lamar, L. Q. C.

Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar is one of only two men in history to serve in the US president’s cabinet, in both the US Senate and the US House of Representatives, and on the US Supreme Court. He is also the only Mississippian ever to serve on the Court. In his Pulitzer Prize–winning book, Profiles in Courage, John F. Kennedy featured Lamar and seven other prominent American leaders, among them John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, and Sam Houston. Lamar was a national figure with celebrity appeal, considered by many to be one of the greatest speakers of the nineteenth century. His efforts to promote national reconciliation after the Civil War included an eloquent eulogy for Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, a Radical Republican, and Lamar’s transformation from a slave owner and reluctant secessionist to a defender of black civil rights and education is one of the great American stories of personal redemption.

L. Q. C. Lamar, the fourth of eight children of Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar and Sarah Williamson Bird Lamar, was born in Putnam County, Georgia, on 17 September 1825. His uncle, Mirabeau B. Lamar, served as president of the Republic of Texas. Lamar graduated from Emory College, where he met his future father-in-law and mentor, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, then serving as the school’s president. Lamar married Virginia Longstreet in 1847, and they moved to Oxford soon after her father became president of the University of Mississippi.

A lawyer and professor at the university, Lamar first won election as to the US Congress in 1857. Sometimes mistakenly referred to as a fire-eater because of his impassioned speeches defending the South’s point of view, Lamar knew the destructive consequences of secession and advised Mississippi’s governor and the rest of the state’s congressional delegation against it. Nevertheless, he resigned from Congress in 1860 after secession became inevitable. Expressing concern that the more radical elements supporting secession might experiment with new models of government, Lamar assumed responsibility for drafting Mississippi’s ordinance of secession.

During the Civil War Lamar served as a colonel of the 19th Mississippi Infantry and earned praise for heroism under fire at the Battle of Williamsburg before resigning because of poor health. Lamar subsequently served as Confederate minister to Russia and special envoy to France and England and as a judge advocate for the Confederacy and witnessed Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.

In 1872 Lamar became the first former Confederate and Democrat from Mississippi elected to Congress; five years later he was elected to the Senate. Lamar promoted reconciliation through important symbolic actions such as his famous eulogy of Sumner, negotiated the Compromise of 1877, and was the only southerner to support a pension for an ailing and broke Ulysses Grant, positions that at times invoked the wrath of constituents still bitter over losing loved ones and homes in the war. But Lamar also encouraged the South to accept the new social realities by taking the extraordinary step of publicly encouraging the appointment of a black cabinet member (though almost a century passed before an African American would gain that distinction). In addition, Lamar defended black voting rights in general and specifically opposed James Z. George’s 1890 push for a new state constitution with the express purpose of disenfranchising blacks. Lamar also joined a few other southerners in supporting direct federal aid to local public schools, emphasizing the benefits for the former slaves. These positions were quite radical for a leading white southern politician of the time. Responding to frequent yellow fever epidemics, Lamar broke with convention again by introducing bills giving the federal government responsibility for public health instead of relying on the various state health boards, efforts that eventually led to the creation of what is now the US Public Health Service.

In 1884, when Grover Cleveland became the first Democratic president since the Civil War, he appointed Lamar secretary of the interior. While in office, Lamar introduced a distinctly more progressive policy of relations with American Indians and fought to protect their lands from homesteading. His environmental policies, such as protecting Yellowstone National Park, were enlightened for the time and helped prepare the way for the first national conservation policy under Theodore Roosevelt a few years later. In 1888 Cleveland named the Mississippian to serve on the US Supreme Court.

Lamar died on 23 January 1893 and is buried in St. Peter’s Cemetery in Oxford. His home in Oxford has been restored and is open to the public as a museum.

In the 1970s a group of southern writers, politicians, business leaders, and journalists, including Willie Morris and William Winter, created the L. Q. C. Lamar Society, which sought to improve race relations and encourage economic development. The group’s founders declared that Lamar’s “struggle for reconciliation between the races and the regions of the country in the divisive 1870s is worthy of emulation by his fellow Southerners in the 1970s.”

Lamar, L. Q. C.

Lauderdale County

Founded in 1833 and named for Col. James Lauderdale, a US military officer killed during the War of 1812, Lauderdale County is located in eastern Mississippi, on the Alabama border. The Choctaw traditionally inhabited the area that now makes up the county; the United States took possession of the land under the terms of the 1830 Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. Home of Meridian, a large and active railroad city that serves as the county seat, Lauderdale County may be best known as the home of country musician Jimmie Rodgers. Other towns in the county include Marion and Russell. Okatibbee Lake is located within the county, as is Meridian Naval Air Station.

In its first census in 1840, Lauderdale’s population consisted of 4,005 free people and 1,353 slaves (25 percent). By 1860 the free population had grown to 8,225, while the county had 5,088 slaves (38 percent). The county’s farms and plantations practiced mixed agriculture, growing cotton and corn and raising livestock. Lauderdale ranked in the top ten of the state’s counties in growing rice and sweet potatoes. The county’s businesses employed 1,000 industrial workers, most of them at lumber mills. In 1860 Lauderdale County had thirty-one churches—seventeen Baptist, twelve Methodist, and two Presbyterian. In February 1864 Union forces led by Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman entered Meridian, destroying property and railroad infrastructure.

By 1880 the population had increased, primarily because the number of African Americans had more than doubled to account for 54 percent of the county’s 21,501 people. Lauderdale County farmers continued to practice mixed agriculture, growing cotton, grains, rice, and sweet potatoes as well as raising livestock.

In 1888 the National Farmers’ Alliance held its first meeting in Mississippi in Meridian. The Daughters of the Confederacy first gathered in Meridian in 1893, the year before the national United Daughters of the Confederacy formed. In 1897 the Mississippi Woman Suffrage Association formed in Meridian, with Nellie Nugent Somerville and Belle Kearney serving as its first officers.

With the growing city of Meridian, Lauderdale County stood out as unique in its number of industrial establishments and workers. In 1880 it ranked fourth in the state in industrial production, with forty-three manufacturing firms and 373 industrial workers, including 18 women and 11 children. With the exception of the Gulf Coast counties, Lauderdale also had a higher number of immigrants than most of Mississippi, with 203 foreign-born residents, mostly from Ireland and Germany. In 1870 one of those immigrants, Felix Weidmann, opened a restaurant that continues to serve customers today.

By 1900 Lauderdale County had grown dramatically. Its population of 38,150 ranked fifth in the state. African Americans and whites each made up about half of the population, and Lauderdale had more immigrants and residents born to immigrant parents than most Mississippi counties. In 1900 Lauderdale led the state in the number of manufacturing establishments (194) and the number of industrial workers (1,639, more than 1,400 of them men), and it ranked second only to Jackson County in the amount of capital invested in industry. About two-thirds of white farming families owned their land, twice the rate for black farming families. Missionary Baptists and Southern Baptists made up about half of all churchgoers, with various groups of Methodists and Presbyterians constituting most of the rest.

Transportation was key to Meridian’s growth and character. Jimmie Rodgers’s first nickname was the Singing Brakeman because of his experience on trains. The son of a railroad worker, Rodgers, born in Meridian in 1897, worked on and then sang about trains and eventually took on the persona of the rambler who always dreamed of home. Meridian became the home of Mississippi air transportation in 1935, when an impressive stunt by pilots Al and Fred Key inspired the building of Mississippi’s first airport, Key Field. Four years later, the Mississippi National Guard organized an air squadron at the site, and during World War II the army had a pilot training program at Key Field.

By 1930 Lauderdale’s population had grown to 52,748 and was about 60 percent white. Lauderdale was more densely populated than most other counties, and Meridian was the state’s largest city. The county’s 65 manufacturing establishments employed 1,674 workers. The county had substantial ethnic diversity, with numerous residents from Palestine and Syria, Russia, Iceland, England, and Greece.

Lauderdale’s population continued to grow in the mid-twentieth century, and by 1960 the county was home to 67,119 people, about two-thirds of them whites. Lauderdale County was also home to 15 Native Americans. The county ranked in the top five in the state in population, population density, per capita income, and the percentage of the population with a high school education. About 18 percent of Lauderdale’s workforce had jobs in industry, primarily furniture, food, apparel, and textiles, and a large number of people worked in hospitals. The county no longer had an agricultural economy: only 4 percent of its workers were employed in agriculture, primarily growing corn and raising livestock. More than 2,800 people, most of them women, were employed in personal service.

Organized civil rights efforts in Lauderdale County began with Charles R. Darden of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, who became the organization’s state president in 1955 and led school desegregation efforts in Meridian. In 1961 Meridian native Clarie Collins Harvey organized Womanpower Unlimited in Jackson and led and participated in numerous other organized campaigns. In 1963 Congress of Racial Equality activist James Chaney worked with Michael and Rita Schwerner to set up community centers in Meridian; in 1964 Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and fellow activist Andrew Goodman were murdered in Neshoba County. In the summer of 1964 a Freedom Schools convention met in Meridian.

Other notable people from Lauderdale County include many in creative professions. Novelist Edwin Granberry and Barry Hannah were born in Meridian, though Granberry grew up in Florida and Hannah was raised in Clinton. Actresses Diane Ladd, born in 1932, and Sela Ward, born in 1956, grew up in Meridian. Architect Samuel Mockbee grew up in Meridian and became a leading force in new architectural design to address the needs of low-income people. Musician Pat Sansone, best known for his work as a member of the band Wilco, is from Meridian.

Lauderdale’s population spiked between 1960 to 2010, growing by nearly ten thousand in the 1970s alone. In 2010 the county’s population was 80,261, of which 54 percent were white, 43 percent were African American, and the remaining 3 percent were primarily Asian or American Indian.

Lauderdale County

Lawrence County

Located in south-central Mississippi and founded in 1814, Lawrence County is named after naval officer James Lawrence, known for his famous last words, “Don’t give up the ship!” during a battle during the War of 1812. The two primary towns in Lawrence County are the county seat, Monticello, and New Hebron. In the 1820 census, Lawrence had 3,925 free people and 991 slaves. Seventy people worked in commerce and manufacturing, ranking Lawrence fourth among Mississippi’s seventeen counties.

In 1840 the county still had a majority of free people, but the ratio had narrowed, with 3,648 free people and 2,272 slaves. Monticello, which had once briefly served as the capital of the Mississippi Territory, was a steamboat stop on the Pearl River, and Lawrence County had ten sawmills, as many as any county in Mississippi. Farmer Charles Lynch became a judge and then a state senator; in 1835 he became the state’s governor.

By 1860 Lawrence County was home to 5,517 free people and 3,696 slaves. The county’s farms and plantations grew a mixture of products, including cotton, corn, and other food crops. Yet Lawrence farmers concentrated more heavily on livestock than did their counterparts in other counties. The county’s businesses employed 45 industrial workers, most of them in lumber mills. Lawrence had twenty churches: fourteen Baptist and six Methodist. Among the county’s most noted natives, historian Franklin Riley was born in Lawrence County in 1868.

In 1880 Lawrence continued to have a fairly small population of 9,420, with a small increase in both the African American and white populations. Lawrence had 1,256 farms, 906 of them cultivated by their owners. The county’s farmers grew less cotton than most of the state, concentrating instead on livestock as well as corn and other grains, including rice. Lawrence County ranked third in Mississippi in the production of rice. Industry remained small, with only fourteen firms.

Between 1880 and 1900 the county’s population increased by a third, to 15,103. For the first time, African Americans made up half of Lawrence’s population. Industry was growing, but it remained small, with forty-three companies employing 77 workers. Slightly more than half of all farmers owned their own land, with more whites and fewer blacks owning their farms.

In 1916 five-sixths of all the county’s churchgoers were Baptists, either in the Southern Baptist Convention or the National Baptist Convention. Most of the remaining church members were Methodists.

Lawrence’s population began to decrease in the early twentieth century. In 1930 the county was home to 12,471 people, 62 percent of them whites. Even by Mississippi standards, Lawrence was sparsely populated, and agriculture remained the county’s primary economic activity.

Religious leader and activist John Perkins was born in New Hebron in 1930. Perkins said the killing of his brother, Clyde, by a New Hebron official led him to leave the state, though he later returned to take up a ministry of action and reconciliation as founder of Voice of Calvary Ministry. Thomas Jefferson Young, author of the successful novel A Good Man, grew up in Oma and returned there in retirement. Earl W. Bascom, the Father of Modern Rodeo, worked on the Hickman Ranch in Arm. Educator Rod Paige, secretary of education in the George H. W. Bush administration, was born in Monticello in 1933.

By 1960 Lawrence County’s population had declined to just over 10,000 people. About a quarter of the county’s workers were employed in agriculture, emphasizing corn, soybeans, and livestock, while 29 percent of its workers had jobs in industry, especially furniture, timber, and apparel. From 1960 to 1980 the population increased slightly to 12,518.

Lawrence County’s population grew to 13,258 in 2000 but dropped to 12,292 over he next decade. Like many counties in southern Mississippi, Lawrence County’s 2010 population was predominantly white, with a substantial number of African Americans and a small but significant Hispanic/Latino minority.

Lawrence County

Leake County

Located in the center of Mississippi, Leake County was founded in 1833 with a small population of free people and slaves. Named for antebellum governor Walter Leake, the county is located between Attala and Scott Counties to the north and south and Madison and Neshoba Counties to the west and east. A portion of the Natchez Trace Parkway runs through Leake County. The county seat is Carthage, and other towns include Edinburg, Thomastown, and Walnut Grove.

In 1840 Leake’s population consisted of 1,620 free people and 542 slaves. Twenty years later slaves made up a third of the county’s population, which had grown to 6,268 free people and 3,056 slaves. Leake’s farms and plantations practiced mixed agriculture, concentrating on both cash crops and food crops for home use. Leake had very few industrial laborers, with just nineteen people working in lumber mills and other small industries. Of Leake’s twenty-five churches in 1860, twelve were Baptist, ten were Methodist, and single Lutheran, Union, and Cumberland Presbyterian congregations existed.

In 1880 Leake remained an agricultural county. Its farmers practiced mixed agriculture, concentrating especially on dairy farming. The county ranked second in the state in the production of milk. The population was 13,146, including 8,104 whites, 4,660 African Americans, and 382 Choctaw—the second-highest number of Native Americans in the state.

By 1900 Leake County had a population of 17,360, of whom 6,231 were African American. Leake had little industrial growth, with just 69 men and no women or children working in manufacturing.

Leake County played a role in the rise of string band music in the early 1900s with the success of the Leake County Revelers and other groups. Carthage was the home of author Katherine Bellamann, born in 1877.

By 1930 Leake had 21,803 residents, with whites outnumbering African Americans by an almost two-to-one ratio and with 297 Choctaw. Still a completely rural county, Leake had almost four thousand farms, half of them operated by tenants.

Over the next three decades, Leake’s population declined to 18,660, with whites accounting for 56 percent of residents, African Americans for 41 percent, and Native Americans for 3 percent in 1960. Leake County had a large number of agricultural workers, employed primarily in raising corn and livestock; the 15 percent of its workers employed in manufacturing worked mostly in the apparel industry. Population figures remained steady until the twenty-first century.

Important figures in Mississippi’s civil rights history had roots in Leake County. Winson and Dovie Hudson grew up in Harmony and spent much of their lives working with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to address issues of equal opportunity in voting and education. Ross Barnett, governor from 1961 to 1964 and one of the state’s most influential opponents of the civil rights movement, was born and raised in the Leake County community of Standing Pine.

Leake County has produced some very successful sports figures. Sue Gunter, born in 1939 in Walnut Grove, contributed to changes in women’s basketball, including its development as an Olympic sport and as a major part of college athletics. Deuce McAllister grew up in Lena and went on to excel at football for the University of Mississippi and the New Orleans Saints.

Leake County has been in the news in recent years, both as the center of Operation Pretense, an investigation of corruption among local governments that began in Carthage in the 1980s, and for the opening of a private juvenile prison in Walnut Grove in 2001.

From 2000 to 2010 Leake County’s population increased from 20,940 to 23,805. Like many central Mississippi counties, Leake County had a white majority, while African Americans made up 40 percent of the population and Choctaw accounted for 6 percent, making it one of the state’s most significant Native American minorities (along with neighboring Neshoba and Newton Counties). A small but significant Guatemalan and Mexican minority had also emerged in Leake.

Leake County

Leake County Revelers

The Leake County Revelers were an old-time string band from the 1920s and 1930s. Its members were Will Gilmer (1897–1960), fiddle; R. O. Moseley (1884–1931), mandolo (a banjo-mandolin hybrid); Jim Wolverton (1895–1969), five-string banjo; and Dallas Jones (1889–1985), guitar. Only Wolverton was actually from Leake County. All the other members lived in or near Sebastapol in Scott County.

The band formed in 1926 and went on to record forty-four 78s for OKeh and Columbia Records between 1927 and 1930. The band does not seem to have toured or recorded as widely as contemporaries such as Narmour and Smith, who recorded as far afield as New York and San Antonio; most of the Revelers’ recordings were made in Atlanta and New Orleans.

Despite remaining close to home, the Revelers were probably the most sophisticated and distinct of all the era’s old-time string bands. Discovered by H. C. Speir, a Jackson record store owner and talent scout better known for finding blues artists, the Revelers played tunes with relaxed, easy tempos and complex vocal arrangements. This style set their recordings apart from other string band 78s of the era, which tend toward raucous breakdowns and field-holler-style singing. In addition to such standards as “Leather Britches” and “Listen to the Mockingbird,” they recorded an extensive array of ragtime blues, vaudeville tunes, and waltzes.

Gilmer, the most restless and best-traveled of the Revelers, spent time in Texas, where he learned “Wednesday Night Waltz,” a compelling but oddball tune that includes sections in both waltz and breakdown timing. It became the Revelers’ best-selling record, topping 195,000 copies sold by 1931, and one of the best-selling string band recordings of all time. Their works have been rereleased by Document and County Sales (and included in many compilation packages), and they have a large audience even today. Contemporary bands play “Monkey in a Dog Cart” and other Revelers’ tunes as part of a general revival of Mississippi fiddle tunes.

In the 1930s the Revelers were recruited to play at whistle stops and schoolhouses as part of one of Huey Long’s Louisiana gubernatorial campaigns. Frank Buckley Walker, a talent scout for Columbia Records, remembered, “They would attract the crowd, and when they had the crowd there, Huey used to speak to them about how wonderful a governor he’d make and he was elected hands down. But it was really the Leake County Revelers that won the election.”

Under the name Leake County String Band, descendants of the band members provided music for the 1976 movie Ode to Billie Joe.

Leake County Revelers

Lee County

Known to many as the county where Elvis Presley grew up and made his first music, Lee County in northeastern Mississippi has a long history of events central to story of the state. In one legend explaining the story of the Chickasaw, members of the tribe wandered from far in the West and chose to settle in “old fields” west of what became Tupelo. The area became a main location for the Chickasaw, and the crucial 1736 Battle of Ackia took place there. The county seat is Tupelo, while other communities include Plantersville, Saltillo, Shannon, Baldwyn, and Verona.

As part of Itawamba and Pontotoc Counties, the area became a growing farming area in the 1830s after the removal of most Chickasaw. Civil War military forces moved through the area in 1862, prior to the Battle of Iuka, and returned in 1864 as part of movements that led to the Battle of Brice’s Cross Roads near Baldwyn.

Lee County was formed during Reconstruction and was named after Robert E. Lee. It was from the start a sizable county, with a population of 15,955 in its first census in 1870 and 20,470 in 1880. About a third of its population was African American, and in 1880 Lee had about 100 people born outside the country, most of them from Ireland. Owners cultivated 61 percent of the county’s farms, practicing mixed agriculture with grains, cotton, and livestock. The county particularly concentrated on the production of butter (ranking third in the state) and orchard products (eighth). Northeastern Mississippi has a reputation as an area for yeoman farmers, but by 1880 Tupelo already had thirty-seven manufacturing establishments, employing sixty-two workers.

In 1900 Lee’s population remained steady at 21,956, with whites accounting for about 60 percent of residents and African Americans for the remainder. It remained an agricultural county, with thirty-five hundred farms. Forty-four percent of all white farmers owned the land they farmed, while only 9 percent of the African American farmers did so. Industry continued to increase in importance, and by 1900, 175 industrial workers, all but 9 of them men, were employed at seventy-five firms. Lee County was home to fifty-seven immigrants, most of them from Ireland and Germany.

In the 1916 religious census the churches of Lee County, as in much of Mississippi, were mostly Methodist and Baptist. The leading denominations were the Missionary Baptists; the Methodist Episcopal Church, South; the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church; and the Southern Baptists; with smaller but substantial numbers in the Methodist Episcopal Church and the Presbyterian Church.

By 1930 Lee County’s population had grown to 35,313 and was just over two-thirds white. Tenants worked more than 70 percent of the county’s 5,289 farms. Lee County was home to thirty-two manufacturing establishments with more than nine hundred workers, many of them women employed in garment factories, and Tupelo had grown to more than six thousand people, making Lee one Mississippi’s more densely populated counties.

Lee County’s most famous resident was Elvis Aron Presley, born in 1935. Before he moved with his parents to Memphis in 1948, the young Presley sang in an Assemblies of God church, performed at the local fair, and had some experience with the county’s African American population. The small shotgun house where he was born is now a major tourist attraction. Other creative individuals from Lee County include fiddler Hoyt Ming, Lawrence Welk show singer Guy Hovis, and Sweet Potato Queen author Jill Connor Browne. Internationally acclaimed painter Sam Gilliam was born in Tupelo in 1933.

The New Deal brought a new and important series of relationships between the federal government and Lee County. Tupelo became famous in 1934 as the first city to receive power through the Tennessee Valley Authority. That year, Pres. Franklin Roosevelt and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt visited the city for the opening of the Tupelo Homesteads, a twenty-five-building planned community for people displaced from their homes by the economic changes of the Great Depression. The buildings are now connected to the Tupelo’s welcome center for the Natchez Trace Parkway.

In the 1930s George McLean bought the Tupelo Journal and started a campaign for economic and community development that involved improved education, new industry that would pay wages that were high by Mississippi standards, and greater cooperation between rural and urban areas. Those points later became central to the concept of the Tupelo Miracle, a period of economic and educational improvement.

By 1960 Lee’s population had topped forty thousand and the county ranked in the state’s top ten in population and population density. Lee had the fourth-highest number of industrial workers in Mississippi, with more than twelve hundred women and four hundred men working in the apparel industry and many others working in food and furniture industries. About 15 percent of the county’s workers were employed in agriculture, primarily producing soybeans and corn and raising cattle. Population growth continued, and by 1980 Lee County had 57,061 residents; two decades later, the population had boomed to 75,755.

Recent developments in Lee County include the growth of a tourist industry related to Elvis Presley and the increasing influence of the Tupelo-based American Family Association, a group that supports conservative religious causes.

Like many counties in northeastern Mississippi, in 2010 Lee County had a significant white majority, an African American minority, and a small but growing Hispanic/Latino community. Lee County nearly doubled between 1960 and 2010, and its population of 82,910 made it one of the state’s largest counties. In addition, it had Mississippi’s fourth-highest per capita income.

Lee County

Leflore County

Located in the Mississippi Delta, Leflore County was formed during Reconstruction from portions of Carroll and Sunflower Counties. The Tallahatchie and Yalobusha Rivers meet in Greenwood, the seat of Leflore County, to form the Yazoo River. The county was named for Choctaw leader Greenwood LeFlore.

Leflore began as a cotton-growing area with high numbers of African Americans working as tenant farmers. In its first census in 1880, 78 percent of the county’s 10,246 residents were African Americans, far higher than the state average of 57 percent. Leflore was also home to 16 Native Americans and 84 foreign-born immigrants. Two-thirds of the county’s farmers were renters or sharecroppers. As in most plantation areas operated by tenants, those farms concentrated on cotton, by far the most abundant crop.

Leflore’s population more than doubled from 1880 to 1900 as African Americans moved to the area in search of economic opportunity. In 1900 the proportion of African Americans had risen to 88 percent, with whites accounting for fewer than 3,000 of the county’s 23,834 people. The county was also home to a small group of German and Russian immigrants. Leflore was a cotton-growing powerhouse using sharecroppers and tenant farmers. Only 5 percent of the county’s four thousand African American farmers owned their land, while 42 percent of the 271 white farmers did so. A growing manufacturing base employed 363 men and no women. Leflore County was home to substantial Colored Farmers’ Alliance activity, led by organizer Oliver Cromwell in the late 1880s.

In 1916, Leflore’s largest religious group was the Missionary Baptists. In fact, Leflore’s more than eight thousand Missionary Baptists gave it the fourth-highest concentration in the state. The county also had a substantial number of Methodists (divided among four denominations) and smaller numbers of Southern Baptists, Presbyterians, Catholics, and Episcopalians.

In 1930 Leflore County was remarkable because of the number of African Americans growing cotton as tenant farmers. Leflore was home to more than eight thousand farms, 95 percent of them operated by tenant farmers—the highest percentage in the state. Leflore had a total population of 53,506, fourth-highest in the state, including 40,884 African Americans (76 percent). Leflore had a substantial population born outside the United States, with 57 natives of Italy, 41 from Russia, 38 from Palestine and Syria, and 23 from Greece. An unknown number of migrant workers from Mexico worked in Leflore and other Delta counties in the 1920s and 1930s. The county had the third-highest population density in Mississippi. The city of Greenwood, with about 8,000 residents, was the business center for the county, and Leflore had 589 industrial workers.

A variety of creative individuals grew up Leflore County. Blues musician B. B. King was born Riley B. King outside Itta Bena and Berclair in 1925. Soul blues singer Denise LaSalle (Ora Denise Allen) was born in Leflore in 1939, and blues performer Furry Lewis was born in Greenwood in 1899. As a child, singer Bobbie Gentry, famous for the song “Ode to Billie Joe,” lived with her family on a farm outside Greenwood. Blues legend Robert Johnson died in Greenwood in 1938.

Numerous writers spent their childhoods in the area and went on to use Leflore County as setting and subject for their work. Lewis “Buddy” Nordan grew up in Itta Bena and wrote about the town in numerous works of fiction. Mary Craig Kimbrough Sinclair’s family had homes in Greenwood and on the Gulf Coast, and she detailed her youth and her life with Upton Sinclair in a 1957 memoir, Southern Belle. Donna Tartt, author of several novels, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Goldfinch (2013), was born in Greenwood in 1963. Agricultural scholar Dorothy Dickins, who spent most of her career in Starkville, grew up in Money. Actress Carrie Nye was born in Greenwood. Basketball star Lusia Harris Stewart grew up in Minter City and gained acclaim playing at Delta State in the 1970s before representing the United States in the Pan American and Olympic Games.

Mississippi Vocational College opened in Itta Bena in 1950 as a segregated institution for African Americans. It changed its name in 1962 to Mississippi Valley State College and in 1974 became a university. A small public school, it is best known to sports fans as the alma mater of National Football League star Jerry Rice, who played there in the 1980s.

By 1960 Leflore’s population had begun to shrink. Of the county’s 47,142 residents, 64 percent were African American, 35 percent were white, and nearly 1 percent were Chinese. About a third of the employed in Leflore County worked in agriculture. The county ranked third in Mississippi in the production of soybeans, fourth in rice, and fifth in cotton. The prominence of cotton led to the creation of Greenwood’s Cottonlandia Museum, which in 2012 became the Museum of the Mississippi Delta. Though manufacturing remained a small part of the economy, a substantial number of women worked in the clothing industry.

The county was significant in several ways during the civil rights years. Teenager Emmett Till was murdered in 1955 after white supremacists overheard remarks he made at a grocery store in the Leflore County community of Money. Robert “Tut” Patterson was working in Leflore in 1954 when he helped form the first Citizens’ Council in the Sunflower County town of Indianola. In 1963 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee workers began organizing in Leflore, and Greenwood civil rights workers declared 25 March 1964 Freedom Day, with numerous demonstrators attempting to register to vote. Civil rights activists Amzie Moore, Hollis Watkins, Lawrence Guyot, Bob Zellner, and Willie Peacock worked in Leflore County. Both James Bevel and Marion Barry were born in Itta Bena in 1936, Laura McGhee and her children lived in the community of Browning, and Greenwood native Endesha Ida Mae Holland detailed her youth and her turn toward activism in a 1997 memoir, From the Mississippi Delta.

The population decline that began in the mid-twentieth century has persisted into the twenty-first. Greenwood experienced an economic resurgence when Viking Range started building kitchen appliances there in the 1980s. Nevertheless, Leflore lost 31.4 percent of its residents between 1960 and 2010. In 2000, the county had 37,947 residents, but ten years later, that number had fallen to 32,317: 72 percent of those inhabitants were African American, 25 percent were white, and 2.3 percent were Hispanic/Latino. Catfish farming began in the county in the 1970s and by 2007 provided 786 jobs.

Leflore County

Lincoln County

Lincoln County in southern Mississippi was formed in 1870, during the brief period of Republican Reconstruction, and was named after Abraham Lincoln. Brookhaven serves as the county seat, and smaller communities include Ruth, East Lincoln, Auburn, and Bogue Chitto. In the 1870 census, Lincoln had a population of 10,184, a number that grew to 13,547 (including 7,701 whites) ten years later. Lincoln’s farmers grew relatively small amounts of cotton and ranked in the bottom quarter in most areas of farm production but had Mississippi’s eighth-largest rice harvest. Landowners cultivated about 63 percent of Lincoln County’s farms. In 1880 Lincoln had a small but growing manufacturing industry, with twenty-five establishments employing 132 workers. The county ranked ninth in the value of manufactured goods produced.

In 1900 Lincoln had a population of 21,552. The county’s eighty-nine manufacturing establishments employed 997 workers, nearly all of them men working in the timber industry. As in most of Mississippi, far more white farmers (72 percent) owned their land than did African American farmers (44 percent).

About half of the thirteen thousand Lincoln County churchgoers recorded in the 1916 religious census were Southern Baptists. The rest belonged to churches of the National Baptist Convention and the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, with the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Methodist Episcopal Church, and Church of Christ each having about six hundred members. Lincoln County had the state’s second-highest Church of Christ membership. Constructed in 1896, Brookhaven’s Temple B’nai Sholom served the area’s Jewish residents until 2009.

Brookhaven has a long history as an educational center. Methodists established Whitworth College in 1859, and it continued to teach Mississippi women until 1964. Annie Coleman Peyton graduated from Whitworth in 1872 and taught there briefly before working for the establishment of Mississippi Industrial Institute and College (now Mississippi University for Women) in Columbus, the state’s first public college for women. Susie Powell spent her childhood in Brookhaven and attended Whitworth College before going on to a career in home demonstration work. Through Powell’s efforts at Whitworth, Lincoln County became home to Mississippi’s first canning clubs. Copiah-Lincoln Community College was founded in 1928. Today, Lincoln is home to the Mississippi School for the Arts, which moved into the buildings on the old Whitworth campus.

Brookhaven has also produced several important writers. Author and artist Charles Henri Ford was born there in 1913, and author Martha Lacy Hall, a native of nearby Pike County, attended Whitworth College. Brookhaven’s Cid Ricketts Sumner, born in 1890, was a popular mid-twentieth-century author whose novels became the basis for the movies Pinky (1949) and Tammy and the Bachelor (1957).

By 1930 Lincoln had a population of 26,357 (including 36 natives of Italy) and was 64 percent white. About five thousand Lincoln County residents lived in the growing city of Brookhaven, and almost a thousand people worked in industry. Still, farming dominated, with thirty-six hundred farms divided evenly between owners and tenants. The county’s farmers grew considerably more corn than cotton or other crops.

In 1960 Lincoln’s population remained virtually unchanged, though the percentage of African Americans had dropped from 36 to 31. At least two important figures in Mississippi’s civil rights struggle and its opposition were Lincoln County natives. Hollis Watkins grew up on a farm on the edge of Lincoln and Pike Counties before becoming an activist in McComb as a teenager and then going on to work for numerous civil rights causes. Judge Tom Brady gained fame as the author of a short publication, Black Monday, a condemnation of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision primarily on constitutional grounds.

As in many southern Mississippi counties, Lincoln County’s 2010 population remained predominantly white and had grown over the last half of the twentieth century, gaining more than eight thousand people since 1960. Among Lincoln’s 34,869 residents, 68.4 percent were whites and 30 percent were African Americans.

Lincoln County

Lowndes County

Located in eastern Mississippi on the Alabama border, Lowndes County was formed in 1830 out of a portion of Monroe County and was named after congressman William Lowndes. Columbus serves as the county seat. Artesia, Caledonia, and Mayhew are other towns in the county.

In its first census in 1830, Lowndes County had a small population of 2,109 free people and 1,065 slaves. It grew dramatically in the next decade and by 1840 had the state’s sixth-largest population. In 1840 Lowndes had 5,742 free people and a substantial slave majority of 8,771.

By 1860 Lowndes had Mississippi’s fourth-largest population, with 6,895 free persons and 16,730 slaves (71 percent). Lowndes was a prosperous agricultural area. Its farms and plantations grew the third-most corn and fourth-most cotton in Mississippi, and the county ranked twelfth in the value of its livestock. In addition, Lowndes County’s 335 industrial workers ranked fourth in the state. More than a hundred of those men were employed in blacksmithing, brickwork, lumber mill work, and carpentry—all jobs indicative of a growing area. Author Joseph Beckham Cobb, best known for Mississippi Scenes, lived in Columbus from 1844 until his death in 1858.

In 1860 Lowndes County had thirty-two churches, among them six Presbyterian churches and four Cumberland Presbyterian churches, giving the county more of a Presbyterian concentration than most of the rest of the state. It was also home to twelve Baptist, eight Methodist, and two Christian churches.

Columbus was an important site for Civil War leadership, transportation, production, and memory. Confederate generals William Barksdale, William Edwin Baldwin, and Jacob Hunter Sharp all spent considerable time in Lowndes County. As a railroad center, Columbus was the location of the Briarfield Arsenal, one of the major facilities supplying weapons to the Confederacy. Lowndes County was briefly home to the Mississippi legislature, which met in Columbus after Union forces took Jackson. In 1866 three women put flowers on the graves of numerous Confederate and Union soldiers at Columbus’s Friendship Cemetery, and it subsequently became known as the site of the first Decoration Day.

In 1870 Lowndes County had the second-highest population in the state. A decade later the population had grown to 28,244 despite the fact that a portion of the county became part of Clay County in 1872. African Americans made up a substantial majority of Lowndes’s population. Lowndes remained a very productive agricultural county: its farmers grew the third-most corn in the state, ranked fifteenth in cotton, and had the eighth-most mules. Lowndes, like many black-majority counties, had high rates of tenancy and low rates of farm owning. Landowners cultivated only 37 percent of the county’s farms, a figure well below the state average. While 505 of the 713 white farmers were owners (71 percent), only 195 of the 2,754 African American farmers owned their land (7 percent). The county’s manufacturing firms employed the fifth-most industrial workers in the state, and Lowndes had a particularly high number of foreign-born residents, many of them from Germany.

The Industrial Institute and College for the Education of White Girls of the State of Mississippi, the nation’s first public university for women, opened in Columbus in 1884 after years of lobbying efforts led by educators Sallie Eola Reneau, Olivia Valentine Hastings, and Annie Coleman Peyton. Over the following century, changes in the name and mission of the school marked changes in Mississippi education. In 1920 it became the Mississippi State College for Women, reflecting the broad educational and curricular goals of the institution. In 1966 the college accepted its first black students, and in 1974 it became Mississippi University for Women. Eight years later, as a result of Hogan v. Mississippi University for Women, the school admitted its first men. Among the notable and dedicated faculty members have been Emma Ody Pohl, physical education professor from 1907 to 1955; literature professor Pauline Orr, who taught from the 1880s to 1913; and Bridget Smith Pieschel, an English professor who has served as director of the school’s Center for Women’s Research and Public Policy since 2005 and who helped to establish an oral history program to study Mississippi women. Alumnae of the institution include artists Valerie Jaudon and Eugenia Summer, home demonstration leader Dorothy Dickins, actress Ruth Ford, educator Blanche Colton Williams, scientist Elizabeth Lee Hazen, novelist Alice Walworth Graham, author, scholar, and editor Patti Carr Black, and legal figures Helen Carloss and Lenore Prather.

As in most of Mississippi, various groups of Baptists and Methodists made up the majority of Lowndes County’s church members in the early twentieth century. The largest groups were the Missionary Baptists; members of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South; and members of the Southern Baptist Convention. The Methodist Episcopal Church, Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, and Presbyterian Church of the United States also had substantial memberships.

Numerous creative individuals were born or grew up in Lowndes County. Thomas Williams III was born in 1911 in Columbus, where his grandfather, Walter Dakin, was a minister at the Episcopal Church. After changing his name to Tennessee Williams, he went on to become one of America’s greatest playwrights. Blues musician Big Joe Williams, born in 1903, grew up in the western Lowndes community of Crawford. Folklorist Newbell Niles Puckett, author of Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro (1926), photographer Marion Gaines, and baseball broadcaster Red Barber grew up in Lowndes County.

In the early 1900s the Lowndes County population remained substantial, increasing slightly to 29,987 by 1930, when African Americans accounted for almost 60 percent of residents. Columbus had a population of 10,501, but the county’s economy still concentrated on agriculture, with more than thirty-five hundred farms. Seventy-three percent of Lowndes County’s farmers were tenants, and their interests were divided among cattle, hogs, corn, cotton, and forage crops.

Lowndes County’s population jumped to 46,639 by 1960. It ranked fifth in the state in per capita income and near the top in population density and the percentage of its residents who had finished high school. As the home of the Mississippi University for Women, it employed more than one thousand people in education. Twenty-two percent of workers were employed in industry, including in electrical equipment, metalwork, and apparel. Farmers comprised 12 percent of the labor force, concentrating on soybeans, corn, livestock, and some cotton.

In recent years, Columbus has been notable as the home of documentary photographer Birney Imes and for Genesis Press, one of the nation’s leading publishers of books by and about African Americans. In 1988 Columbus became the site of the new Mississippi School of Mathematics and Science, which attracts students from throughout the state.

Like most counties in eastern Mississippi, Lowndes County grew between 1960 and 2000, when its population reached 61,586, before declining slightly to 59,779 a decade later. As in neighboring Oktibbeha and Noxubee Counties, the white proportion of the county had increased over the previous half century, and by 2010 just over half of Lowndes’s population was white, African Americans made up more than 40 percent of residents, and Hispanics represented a small but growing minority.

Lowndes County

Lynching and Mob Violence

In Mississippi, lynching—an extralegal, often ritualized execution for alleged crimes—and other forms of mob violence were inextricably linked with racial domination. From the dawn of the Civil War to the civil rights movement in the 1960s, white Mississippians attempted to preserve white supremacy through racial murder and terror.

Although mob violence occurred in antebellum Mississippi, it was not an interracial phenomenon. White cotton planters frequently used limited forms of coercive violence to enforce the labor discipline of their African American slaves, but most victims of vigilantism were white. Only during the Civil War did lynching and mob violence begin to be directed toward the black population, and African Americans became the prime targets for mob attacks after 1865, reflecting white southerners’ determination to maintain social, economic, and political control. During Reconstruction, vigilante groups such as the Ku Klux Klan intimidated, tortured, and murdered hundreds of African Americans in Mississippi as well as in other states of the former Confederacy.

Despite federal legislation that outlawed the Klan, mob violence against blacks continued unabated after the end of Reconstruction in 1877. In the 1880s lynching emerged as the dominant method to enforce the region’s racial hierarchies. White southerners of all classes participated in these public rituals of murder, which turned increasingly barbaric in the ensuing decades. In many cases, hundreds of spectators watched as white men tortured, mutilated, and finally killed the black victims. Most were hanged, though others were burned alive or died in a hail of bullets. Many whites justified these heinous crimes as necessary to protect their wives and daughters against “black beast rapists.” Yet few of the victims, most of whom were young men, were actually accused of interracial rape. More often, this charge served as a pretext for punishing violations of the region’s racial etiquette.

Lynchings took place in rural areas of Mississippi as well as in cities such as Hattiesburg, Meridian, and Natchez. Because lynchings were not recorded until the 1890s, the real number of victims will never be known. Conservative estimates put the number at 476 victims (including 24 whites) in Mississippi between 1889 and 1945—almost 13 percent of the 3,786 lynchings in the United States during that period and the highest total of any state. White southerners’ support for this brutal vigilantism was almost unanimous, reflecting their belief that lynching was a legitimate form of informal law enforcement. Police officers, too, condoned the violence, and white newspapers frequently commended the murderers. And local, state, and federal officials made no effort to stop the violence, forcing African Americans to protect themselves. Blacks occasionally repelled white mobs with gunfire, but resistance was difficult. Supported by local police and state militia, heavily armed white mobs crushed most black protection efforts and brutally retaliated against the defenders.

In the mid-1930s the number of lynchings in the South began to decline, and Mississippi saw almost no incidents of mob violence against blacks between 1940 and 1945. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and other antilynching groups launched publicity campaigns that brought the prospect of federal intervention and changed public opinion. In addition, the increasing mechanization of the region’s cotton plantations reduced the need for a submissive African American labor force and thus undermined the socioeconomic roots of lynching.

But these changes did not bring an end to white violence. Rather, racial murder became an increasingly secret and covert affair that could generate national indignation if the incident became publicly known. In 1955, for example, white men beat and shot black teenager Emmett Till after he allegedly whistled at a white woman in Money, a small town in the Mississippi Delta, dumping his body in the Tallahatchie River. In stark contrast to earlier lynchings, the Till case made front-page news across the nation, leading to the indictment (though not the prosecution) of the killers.

Mob violence and extralegal killings persisted into the 1960s in Mississippi. In 1962 several thousand whites rioted on the campus of the University of Mississippi in Oxford when James Meredith attempted to integrate the all-white school. Voter registration drives in rural areas of the state also ran into violent resistance, especially from the revived Ku Klux Klan. Although concerned about the region’s rampant lawlessness, the federal government refused to protect civil rights activists until 1965, when officials began taking legal action against white extremists and attempting to disrupt the Ku Klux Klan. In addition, African Americans organized informal defense groups across the state, guarding their own communities. By the late 1960s, Mississippi’s traditional forms of lynching and mob violence had ceased to exist.

Lynching and Mob Violence

Mabus, Ray

Although Ray Mabus was the youngest governor in America at the time of his inauguration on 12 January 1988, he had already accumulated an impressive record of public service and academic achievements. Mabus had earned three degrees: a bachelor of arts from the University of Mississippi, a master’s from Johns Hopkins in political science, and a law degree from Harvard. He had received two distinguished academic awards—a Fulbright Scholarship and a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship—and had traveled widely throughout Europe, the Middle East, Russia, and Latin America.

In addition to a two-year tour of duty in the US Navy aboard a guided-missile cruiser, Mabus had also served as a law clerk for the US 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, as a congressional aid, and as legal counsel to a subcommittee of the House Agriculture Committee. As legal counsel to Gov. William Winter, Mabus was instrumental in the drafting and passage of the Education Reform Act of 1982, a stricter law against driving under the influence of alcohol, and an open-records law.

Raymond Edwin Mabus was born in Starkville, Mississippi, on 11 October 1948 and grew up in Ackerman. His father, Raymond Mabus, was a hardware store owner turned timber businessman, while his mother, Lucille Curtis Mabus, was a former basketball coach. Mabus attended public school in Ackerman before enrolling at the University of Mississippi.

In 1983 he undertook his first campaign for public office, winning election as state auditor and becoming a highly visible and at times controversial public figure. A Democrat, he vigorously enforced the state’s financial documentation laws and held public officials to a strict accounting for the expenditure of state funds. Mabus’s investigations of the finances of county officials led to Operation Pretense, an FBI investigation that resulted in the indictment of fifty-seven county officials. In 1988, just before he turned forty, Mabus ran for governor, using the campaign slogan “Mississippi Will Never Be Last Again” and defeating Republican Jack Reed in the general election.

Soon after his inauguration, Mabus presented a comprehensive and ambitious legislative package to the state legislature. Among his most significant achievements were a teacher pay raise that temporarily brought Mississippi teachers up to the southeastern average, a reorganization of the executive branch (although it was less comprehensive than he had proposed), and a law providing for the unit system of county government. His proposals for educational reform, which he pushed in regular legislative sessions and in a special session, were not enacted, in part because he did not want to raise taxes to fund new programs.

The 1987 gubernatorial succession amendment made Mabus eligible for a second term, and he sought to become the first Mississippi governor to serve two successive terms in more than one hundred years. However, he lost to Republican Kirk Fordice in the 1991 general election, clearly illustrating the decline of Mississippi Democrats’ traditional political dominance.

Pres. Bill Clinton appointed Mabus as US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, a position he held from 1994 to 1996. He also served the executive branch as secretary of the navy under Pres. Barack Obama (2009–17).

Mabus, Ray

Madison County

Formed in 1828 from a part of Yazoo County, Madison County takes its name from Pres. James Madison. Located in central Mississippi, Madison County began as a growing frontier area with a substantial slave population. Now part of the Jackson metropolitan area, it borders the Ross C. Barnett Reservoir and contains a portion of the Natchez Trace Parkway. Madison County towns include Camden, Farmhaven, Madison, Ridgeland, and Flora, and Canton serves as the county seat.

In the 1830 census, Madison County’s population consisted of 2,806 free people and 2,167 slaves. Ten years later, as a cotton-producing area, Madison’s free population had increased to 3,997, while its slave population had mushroomed to 11,533—third-most among the state’s counties. The growing county also had a small but substantial nonagricultural population, with 253 people working in commerce and manufacturing.

By 1860 the free population had reached 5,260, while the slave population had nearly doubled again to 18,118, a number that trailed only Hinds County. With 77 percent of its residents enslaved, Madison ranked tenth among Mississippi’s sixty counties. Madison’s soil and labor force were extraordinarily productive, ranking third in the state in growing corn, fourth in cotton, fifth in Irish potatoes, and first in sweet potatoes. The county had only 169 industrial workers, most of them employed in small mills and blacksmith shops.

In 1860 Madison County’s thirty-nine churches ranked it fourth in Mississippi, and the variety of denominations was greater than in most of the state. Madison was home to fourteen Methodist churches, eleven Baptist churches, six Presbyterian congregations, three Episcopalian houses of worship, two Cumberland Presbyterian churches, two Catholic churches, and one Christian church.

Madison County’s population remained roughly the same in the decades after the war, with 19,907 African Americans and 5,946 whites in 1880. The county continued to practice mixed agriculture, with substantial concentrations of cotton, corn, and sweet potatoes. Madison ranked sixth in the state in the number of hogs. Like many black-majority counties, Madison County had a high number of tenant farmers and relatively few landowning farmers (28 percent).

By 1900 Madison’s population numbered 32,493, of whom 25,918 (79 percent) were African American. Madison County had almost 200 immigrants, mostly from England, Germany, and Ireland. While still rural, Madison had 260 industrial workers. About half of Madison County’s 11,000 church members were Baptists, most of them either Missionary Baptists or Southern Baptists. The county was also home to about 3,500 Methodists, most of them in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church or the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. With more than 800 Catholics, the seventh-highest number in Mississippi, and close to 500 Presbyterians, Madison maintained a greater variety of churches than much of the state. The German community in Gluckstadt was largely Catholic.

Madison County native Belle Kearney was born in 1863 and attended Canton Ladies Academy before emerging as a leader in Mississippi movements for temperance and woman suffrage. In the twentieth century, members of the powerful Hederman family owned and ran the Madison County Herald.

By 1930 Canton was a growing town of 3,252, but the large county continued to have an agricultural economy, with well over six thousand farms, more than 80 percent of them operated by tenant farmers. Major crops included cotton, corn, and cattle.

The Canton civil rights movement began with efforts at voter registration in the 1950s and picked up strength when the Congress of Racial Equality, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and eventually the Council of Federated Organizations addressed issues of voting, segregation, education, and violence. These groups organized a boycott, a Freedom House, and a Freedom School. Activists faced violence during the Freedom Summer of 1964 and again in 1966 during the March against Fear. Madison County landowner and businessman C. O. Chinn was a relentless organizer whose courage Anne Moody documented in Coming of Age in Mississippi, and Canton native Annie Devine was one of the organizers of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

By 1960 Madison County’s population had declined slightly to 32,904 but remained overwhelmingly African American (72 percent). Despite growing economic diversity, the county remained an agricultural center, with more than 36 percent of workers employed in agriculture. Madison County farms grew the third-most corn in Mississippi and produced substantial amounts of livestock, cotton, oats, and soybeans. Manufacturing workers, especially in furniture and wood products, accounted for 17 percent of the labor force. Madison County was also home to two oil wells. By 1980 the county’s population had increased to 41,613.

In 2010 Madison County, like many of its neighbors, had a white majority and a small but significant Hispanic minority, primarily from Mexico. With 95,203 people, the county had grown 190 percent since 1960, one of the state’s greatest proportional increases during this period, and had become among the largest in Mississippi. As in neighboring Hinds County, Madison had developed a small Asian population.

In the twenty-first century, Madison County has one of Mississippi’s lowest poverty rates and highest rates of per capita income, in large part as a consequence of the 2002 opening of a major Nissan plant.

Madison County

Marion County

Located in southern Mississippi, Marion County was formed in 1811. Named after Gen. Francis Marion, the county borders Louisiana to the south. Columbia serves as the county seat. In 1816 the Pearl River Convention assembled in Marion County to debate the conditions under which Mississippi would enter the Union as a new state. The convention met at the home of Rev. John Ford, twenty miles south of Columbia, in a house that had served as an inn and military post. Six years later, Columbia was the state’s temporary capital for the inauguration of Gov. Walter Leake.

Marion County’s population remained relatively small throughout the antebellum period. In its first census, in 1820, it had 1,884 free people and 1,232 slaves. By 1840 Marion County had grown slightly, with 2,121 free people and 1,709 slaves.

In 1860, though much of Mississippi grew dramatically, the population of Marion County remained small—just 2,501 free people and 2,183 slaves. Like many southern Mississippi counties, Marion ranked low in various categories related to agricultural production, including total value of farmland, production of cotton, and production of corn. The county had just eight churches—four Methodist and four Baptist.

By 1880 Marion County was home to 6,901 people, with virtually all of its population growth occurring among white residents. Marion County retained its low rankings in the value of farmland and in cotton production but produced the second-highest amounts of rice and sheep in the state. A total of 84.5 percent of Marion County’s farmers owned their own farms, a figure far higher than most parts of Mississippi. With its emphasis on smaller farming, Marion County became one of the centers of the state’s Populist movement.

In 1900 Marion County’s population was 13,501 and was approximately two-thirds white. Marion County remained notable for its high number of landowners—more than 80 percent of white farm families and almost 60 percent of African American farm families owned their land. The county’s forty-three manufacturing establishments employed 258 men and 2 women. The timber industry accounted for most of the industrial growth.

In the 1916 religious census, more than two-thirds of Marion County’s churchgoers were Baptists, with Southern Baptists making up about half of the county’s church members and Missionary Baptists making up another quarter. A substantial number of county residents also belonged to the Methodist Episcopal Church and Methodist Episcopal Church, South.

Two of the state’s most prominent twentieth-century architects designed buildings in Marion County. A. Hays Town designed the Lampton House in Columbia, and his partner, N. W. Overstreet, designed Columbia High School.

By 1930 Marion County’s population increased to almost 20,000 even though the county had lost some of its land to other counties. Whites made up almost two-thirds of Marion’s population. Outside the growing town of Columbia (population 4,833), Marion continued to have an agricultural economy, with farm owners slightly outnumbering tenants. The county’s manufacturing establishments employed 755 industrial workers. In 1945 oil was discovered on the Marion-Lamar County line.

The most famous native of Marion County is likely football star Walter Payton (1954–99). Payton was a running back at Jefferson High School and Jackson State University before playing for the National Football League’s Chicago Bears and ultimately ending up in the league’s Hall of Fame. Another Marion County native, Dolphus Weary, born in Sandy Hook in 1946, played important roles in the Voice of Calvary ministry and Mission Mississippi.

Population growth continued in the mid-twentieth century, and by 1960 Marion County was home to 23,293 people. A quarter of Marion’s workers were employed in manufacturing, where there was a mixture of furniture and wood products, textiles, and apparel. Sixteen percent of the county’s employees worked in mixed agriculture, concentrating on livestock, corn, and soybeans. Natural gas and petroleum also remained part of Marion County’s economy.

By 2010, as in most southern Mississippi counties, Marion’s population was predominantly white and had grown slightly over the preceding half century, increasing from 23,293 in 1960 to 27,088 in 2010.

Marion County

Marshall County

Founded in 1836, Marshall County borders Tennessee and was named for Supreme Court justice John Marshall. The county seat is Holly Springs, and other communities include Byhalia, Potts Camp, Red Banks, and Chulahoma. Marshall County is home to the Holly Springs National Forest.

This northern Mississippi county was an economic powerhouse in the antebellum years, with large populations of slaves and free people, considerable agricultural productivity, and a growing number of commercial and industrial workers. In its first census in 1840, Marshall County had a population of 9,266 free people and 8,260 slaves. Its total population of 17,526 ranked third among Mississippi’s counties, and it ranked first in the number of free people. In 1840 Marshall County ranked fourth in the state, with 349 commercial and manufacturing workers.

Marshall County continued to grow through the antebellum period and by 1860 trailed only Hinds County in population, with the increase coming primarily in the number of slaves. Marshall was home to 11,384 free people and 17,439 slaves. Like most areas with substantial numbers of slaves, Marshall County grew a large amount of cotton, ranking sixth in the state. Yet unlike most northern Mississippi areas, it also concentrated on food production. In 1860 the county ranked second in the state in the value of its livestock, sixth in corn, second in peas and beans, eighth in sweet potatoes, and first in Irish potatoes. In 1860 the county’s businesses employed the state’s third-most industrial workers (338), many of them in railroads and construction.

The county had fifty-six churches in 1860, tying it for second in the state. Thirty-two of the churches were Methodist, eleven were Baptist, five were Presbyterian, three were Cumberland Presbyterian, and three were Episcopalian. The county also had a Union church and a Catholic church. Marshall was an antebellum educational leader, hosting several small colleges, including Chalmers Institute (later the University of Holly Springs), the Holly Springs Female Collegiate Institute, Franklin Female College, and North Mississippi Presbyterian College.

Marshall County was home, at least for short periods, to a substantial number of Confederate military leaders or their families, and it became the site of considerable Civil War military action. Before he was a Confederate general, Claudius Wistar Sears taught math and then served as president at St. Thomas’s Hall, a military academy in Holly Springs. Samuel Benton was a teacher, lawyer, and political figure in Holly Springs before joining the Confederacy and rising to the rank of general. The families of Confederate generals Daniel Govan, Edward Cary Walthall, and James Chalmers all spent time in Marshall County.

As a railroad center, Holly Springs played an important role in the Civil War. In 1862 Union forces built a large new supply depot there. A December 1862 strike led by Confederate general Earl Van Dorn destroyed the depot, captured more than a thousand Union soldiers, and temporarily delayed Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s plans to take Vicksburg. Nonetheless, Holly Springs remained under Union control for the majority of the war.

In the 1870s parts of Marshall County were incorporated in Benton and Tate Counties. Nevertheless, Marshall remained one of Mississippi’s largest counties, with 29,330 people in the 1880 census. About two-thirds of the county’s residents were African American. Marshall remained a productive agricultural center, ranking second in Mississippi in corn, eighth in cotton, fourth in wheat and potatoes, eleventh in cattle, and twelfth in swine. The majority of the farms were run by tenants, and only 46 percent of the farms were cultivated by their owners. Marshall also ranked tenth in the value of manufacturing products and was home to 195 foreign-born residents, most of them from Ireland and Germany.

Postbellum Marshall County became an exciting center of African American educational and religious activity. In 1866 a combination of former slaves and the Freedman’s Aid Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church formed Shaw School, which later became Shaw University and then Rust University. A public institution, Mississippi State Normal School, opened in 1870 to teach African American teachers, though it closed because of pressure from white politicians in 1904. The following year, Elias Cottrell, a bishop in the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church who had been born into slavery in the Marshall County community of Old Hudsonville, helped found Mississippi Industrial College in Holly Springs.

Two women born and raised in Holly Springs in the nineteenth century became important cultural figures. Ida B. Wells (1862–1931) attended Shaw College before becoming a journalist, popular author, and speaker. A civil rights activist and a leading opponent of lynching, Wells published a pamphlet, Southern Horrors, and a memoir, Crusade for Justice. Katharine Sherwood Bonner McDowell (1849–83) also became a writer, publishing works including the novel Like unto Like under the name Sherwood Bonner.

In 1900 Marshall County had a population of 26,764. As in much of Mississippi, white and black farmers had dramatically different experiences. Only 11 percent of African American farmers owned their land, while 56 percent of white farmers did so. With Holly Springs as a railroad center, Marshall County had 161 industrial workers.

In the early twentieth century, Methodists and Baptists accounted for all but about 700 of the county’s 12,800 church members, with various Methodist groups slightly outnumbering the Baptists. As the home of Rust College and several denominational leaders, Marshall County also had 3,300 members of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, the highest number in Mississippi.

Marshall County’s population declined slowly in the early 1900s, and the county lost its place near the top of state rankings in agricultural production. By 1930 Marshall was home to 17,770 African Americans, 7,093 whites, and 6 persons whom the census listed as “other.” The number of industrial workers declined to 78, and agricultural tenancy came to dominate farm life, as only 24 percent of farms were run by their owners.

One of many creative Marshall County natives, Rufus Thomas (1917–2001), was born in the small community of Cayce and made his fame as a showman and musician in Memphis. Rural Marshall County has been crucial to the hill country blues and was the home of R. L. Burnside (1926–2005), Junior Kimbrough (1930–98), and several important places to play and hear the music. Other writers and artists with roots in the area include Margaree King Mitchell, who was born in Holly Springs in 1953 and is perhaps best known for children’s books that involve issues of race in twentieth-century Mississippi, and Kate Freeman Clark (1875–1957), whose paintings now reside in the Kate Freeman Clark Gallery in her native Holly Springs. William Faulkner died in a Byhalia institution in 1962.

Among the many important figures to attend Rust College in the twentieth century were Jackson State University leader Leslie Burl McLemore, who helped start Rust’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Wiley College president Matthew Dogan; legal figure Perry Howard; opera singer Ruby Elzy; country musician O. B. McClinton; and civil rights activist Willie Peacock.

Marshall County’s population remained near 25,000 between 1930 and 1970 before increasing to 29,296 by 1980. In the 1960s agriculture remained central to Marshall’s economy, with 43 percent of the county’s workers employed growing corn, cotton, and soybeans or raising cattle and hogs. Twelve percent of the county’s workers were employed in industry, and a great percentage of employed women worked in household service.

Tourism is important to Marshall County, which showcases its unique historic homes and relies on music events and other festivals; a pilgrimage; and the Ida B. Wells-Barnett Museum. Prior to its closure in 2014, Paul MacLeod’s shrine to Elvis Presley, Graceland Too, and the colorful MacLeod himself attracted visitors to Holly Springs.

As in many northern Mississippi counties, Marshall County’s 2010 population included a small but significant Hispanic/Latino minority and had increased over the previous half century. Its 37,144 residents were nearly equally divided between African Americans and whites.

Marshall County

McComb Civil Rights Movement

Located in Pike County, in southwestern Mississippi, McComb was founded in 1872 as a repair station for the Illinois Central Railroad. From its inception, McComb was segregated by railroad tracks and was the site of labor unrest, particularly conflicts over unionized African American labor. When workers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) arrived in 1961, McComb had approximately 13,000 residents (9,000 whites and 4,000 blacks) but no more than 250 black registered voters. Voter registration efforts, however, began long before SNCC workers arrived. As early as 1928, residents sought to register voters via the McComb Independent Lodge of the Benevolent Elks. Nathaniel and Napoleon Lewis, sons of one of the lodge’s founders, continued their father’s efforts by testifying at the 1946 Bilbo hearings in Jackson and creating the Pike County Voters’ League.

Founded in 1944, McComb’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) became quite active in the 1950s. After the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, chapter president C. C. Bryant and Webb Owens recruited new members, several of whom proved instrumental in McComb’s civil rights struggle. In 1957 representatives from the chapter went to Washington, D.C., to testify in favor of the Civil Rights Act. With the help of Medgar Evers, Bryant founded a youth group to protest police brutality and to study black literature. Bryant also owned a barbershop that functioned as a center of information for the black community. Increased white violence and intimidation caused the McComb NAACP chapter and its activities to become covert.

With NAACP efforts somewhat thwarted, Bryant read in Jet magazine that SNCC’s Bob Moses was coming to Mississippi to organize voter registration efforts and asked him to come to McComb, which thus became the site of one of Mississippi’s first organized large-scale civil rights efforts. Indeed, SNCC workers used their experiences in McComb to organize communities across the entire southeastern United States.

Bryant’s invitation caused Moses to scrap his original plan to begin work in Cleveland and go to McComb. After the 1961 Freedom Rides, Moses moved in with the Bryants and set up a SNCC office. Owens and another local NAACP officer, Jerry Gibson, helped Moses canvas neighborhoods, and Owens persuaded the local community to donate money for SNCC’s operation. Such local involvement proved integral to SNCC’s success, and Moses capitalized on the leadership in the community, relying on residents to support and protect him as he set up SNCC’s voter registration school.

With backing from local NAACP leaders, SNCC workers encouraged residents to go to Magnolia, the county seat, to take the voting test. On 7 August 1961 the first voter registration class was held in the Masonic Temple, above the Burglund Supermarket, owned by Pete Lewis. About twenty-five people attended the first classes, but only four took the test, and the white registrar accepted only two.

As part of another SNCC initiative, Charles Sherrod and Marion Barry conducted nonviolence workshops for high school students. Two of the first attendees, Hollis Watkins and Curtis Hayes, staged a sit-in at Woolworth’s in August 1961. After their arrest on charges of disturbing the peace, Hayes and Watkins, along with Emma Bell, Bobby Talbert, and Ike Lewis, became full-time SNCC workers.

Several days after the Woolworth’s sit-in, more than two hundred black McComb residents attended a SNCC a mass meeting where Rev. James Bevel spoke on nonviolent direct action. The following day, several students, including fifteen-year-old Brenda Travis, sat in at the Greyhound bus station and were expelled from Burglund High, McComb’s public African American high school. A few weeks later, on 25 September, Herbert Lee of Amite County was shot and killed by a white state legislator, E. H. Hurst, near Liberty for helping register voters. Hurst was absolved on grounds of self-defense. Just a week after the murder, the Burglund students were released from jail, but principal Commodore Dewey Higgins refused to readmit them.

On 4 October 1961 more than a hundred Burglund students marched to protest Lee’s murder and the expulsion of their classmates. SNCC workers joined the students, who congregated on the steps of McComb’s City Hall to pray. When the protesters refused to leave, they were arrested and charged with disturbing the peace; all those who were over age eighteen also faced charges of contributing to the delinquency of minors. The SNCC workers were beaten by police while FBI agents took notes, and Travis, who was on probation, received an indeterminate sentence in a juvenile detention center in Oakley.

After the march to City Hall, Burglund High’s principal asked students to pledge not to participate in demonstrations and demanded that they return to school or be expelled. On 16 October 1961 more than one hundred students arrived at the school to turn in their books. SNCC workers then opened the Nonviolent High of Pike County, where the students took classes until the SNCC workers were tried, convicted, and jailed for several months. St. Paul United Methodist Church and the Masonic Temple housed the freedom school until the students began attending Campbell Junior College in Jackson.

Despite pleas from the US Justice Department not to send any more workers to McComb because of dangerous levels of violence, SNCC returned to McComb in the fall of 1963 for a Freedom Vote campaign, and in 1964 the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) selected McComb as one of its Freedom Summer sites. Movement workers often met in the Summit Street District, an area of African American businesses, at Holmes Pool Hall and Holmes Chicken Shack, and SNCC established a freedom house complex. McComb residents formed housing and food committees to support COFO workers and to buy a plot of land for the Martin Luther King Memorial Center, a community center that still operates today.

White resistance intensified over the Freedom Summer. McComb’s mayor, Gordon Burt Jr., served as county chair for the Citizens’ Council, and police chief George Guy led a local branch of the Americans for the Preservation of the White Race. Numerous black homes and businesses were bombed, with targets chosen without regard for whether their owners supported the movement.

The first Freedom Day occurred in mid-August 1964, just a week after the Klan burned crosses in front of the homes of two white movement supporters. Libby Price, a white woman who opened her home to movement activists and helped set up the freedom house, was threatened so often that she moved to Jackson, and Red and Malva Heffner, whose daughter was the reigning Miss Mississippi, were harassed to the point that they also left McComb.

With the escalation in violence, black residents often took turns guarding each other’s houses at night, and churches temporarily closed their doors to the movement. Aylene Quin opened her restaurant in the Summit Street District so that business leaders could meet secretly with COFO workers. On 30 August 1964 her café was raided by police, and when a bomb exploded at her home on 20 September, local police claimed that she had done it herself. The bombing occurred while Quin’s two young children slept, and black residents armed themselves and waited at Quin’s home until she returned from a Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party meeting in Jackson. COFO and SNCC workers, including Joe Martin, frantically worked to defuse the situation, but over the next several days, police jailed numerous black residents and movement workers. Twenty-four people ultimately were charged with “criminal syndicalism.”

Quin, Matti Dillon, and Ora Bryant went to the White House to report to Pres. Lyndon Johnson about conditions in McComb and to request that he send federal troops. Putting McComb into the national media, they held a press conference and met with several members of Congress. In October the New York Times published an editorial describing the violence and stigmatizing the town. With his town in the national spotlight, Oliver Emmerich, the editor of the McComb Enterprise-Journal, finally broke white McComb’s silence, publishing an editorial on the negative effects of white terrorism, and he and several other white residents met with the Justice Department officials. The committee recommended that prominent white citizens sign a statement calling for law and order.

When news of the statement circulated, the head of Mississippi’s highway patrol, T. B. Birdsong, met with Gov. Paul Johnson, Pike County district attorney Joseph Pigott, and all of the McComb and Pike County elected officials. After Johnson threatened to bring in the National Guard before federal troops could arrive, local officials promised to defuse the situation. In less than twenty-four hours the first Klansmen suspected of bombings were arrested, and within a week eleven men were in custody on charges of attempted arson and bombing. In late October, however, the charges were dropped, and the same day that the bombers were released, thirteen COFO workers were arrested on charges of operating a food-handling establishment without a permit. In addition, opponents of the movement vandalized the McComb Enterprise-Journal ’s office and burned a cross in Emmerich’s front yard.

On 18 November 1964 the Enterprise-Journal published the statement by McComb’s white residents and the state NAACP tested the new Civil Rights Act. With local and state police as well as FBI agents watching, Charles Evers led a group of twenty activists that included Bryant, Ernest Nobles, and several other black McComb residents that desegregated McComb’s Holiday Inn, Continental Motel, Palace Theater, Trailways Bus Station, and Woolworth’s lunch counter.

While white residents and FBI agents thought the McComb movement would be over by the end of 1964, numerous SNCC workers stayed, and local people remained active. In 2006 McComb High School hosted “McComb Legacies: Reclaiming Our Past for a Brighter Future: A Civil Rights Summit Honoring C. C. Bryant.” Involving the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation and members of the McComb community, the McComb Legacies program has gone on to provide “middle and high school youth with the opportunity to learn about, document, and share their local civil rights movement and labor history.” The project’s activities have included compiling oral histories of the movement, developing a civil rights driving tour, and creating a website.

McComb Civil Rights Movement

Meridian Campaign

After the successful conclusion of the Vicksburg Campaign, Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman did not want to sit idle waiting for weather sufficient to support the upcoming spring campaign. Instead, he developed a plan to raid Meridian, about 150 miles from Vicksburg, and return in time to be ready for future operations. The Meridian Campaign not only succeeded in and of itself but also constituted an excellent proving ground for Sherman’s later March to the Sea.

Meridian was a key strategic point, lying roughly halfway between the Mississippi capital of Jackson and the cannon foundry and manufacturing center of Selma, Alabama. Meridian served as a storage and distribution center not just for the industrial products of Selma but also for grain and cattle from the fertile Black Prairie region just to the north. It also had a hospital on the edge of town, a prison, and the headquarters for several military ordnance, quartermaster, and paymaster activities. But what made Meridian most important was its location at the junction of the Mobile and Ohio Railroad and the Southern Railroad. On 3 February 1864 Sherman began his campaign against this tempting target “to break up the enemy’s railroads at and about Meridian, and to do the enemy as much damage as possible in the month of February, and to be prepared by the 1st of March to assist General [Nathaniel] Banks in a similar dash at the Red River country.”

Sherman knew that his success depended on speed. He would travel light, ordering, “Not a tent will be carried, from the commander-in-chief down.” He explained, “The expedition is one of celerity and all things must tend to that.” In spite of his overriding concern for speed, Sherman would not compromise in the size of his force. His army consisted of four divisions—two from Maj. Gen. James B. McPherson’s corps at Vicksburg and two from Maj. Gen. Stephen Hurlbut’s at Memphis—for a total of twenty thousand infantry plus some five thousand attached cavalry and artillery. Sherman’s Confederate adversary, Lt. Gen. Leonidas Polk, mustered a force just half that size, and his men were widely scattered, with a division each at Canton and Brandon and cavalry spread between Yazoo City and Jackson.

Polk was also handicapped by Sherman’s effective deceptions, which led Polk to believe that the Union general’s true objective was Mobile, Alabama. Sherman further played on Polk’s fears for the safety of Mobile by having Gen. Nathaniel Banks, commander of the Department of the Gulf at New Orleans, conduct naval maneuvers and foraging operations designed to “keep up the delusion of an attack on Mobile and the Alabama River.” By threatening Polk with feints, Sherman forced the Confederates to retain forces at Mobile that could have protected Meridian.

Sherman began his march from camps outside Vicksburg, with McPherson and Hurlbut advancing in separate columns to facilitate both speed and foraging. Confederate resistance was light, and Sherman refused to be distracted by minor skirmishes. By 9 February he was in Morton, having covered more than half the distance from Vicksburg to Meridian in less than a week. There he spent several hours tearing up the railroad track, using the usual method of burning crossties to heat the rails and then bending the metal into useless configurations dubbed “Sherman’s neckties.”

At Lake Station on 11 February Sherman destroyed “the railroad buildings, machine-shops, turning-table, several cars, and one locomotive.” By midafternoon on 14 February, his lead elements were in Meridian. By then, Confederate resistance had evaporated. Sherman had also ordered Brig. Gen. William Sooy Smith to move his large cavalry force from Memphis southeast to arrive at Meridian by 10 February. A combination of a slow start and the efforts of Confederate cavalryman Nathan Bedford Forrest prevented Smith from accomplishing his mission, and he was forced to return to Memphis. Although this frustrated Sherman, it did not deter him from his objective of destroying Meridian.

For five days Sherman dispersed detachments in four directions with instructions to “do the enemy as much damage as possible.” McPherson went to the south and west and destroyed 55 miles of railroad, 53 bridges, 6,075 feet of trestlework, 19 locomotives, 28 steam cars, and 3 steam sawmills. Hurlbut went north and east and wrecked 60 miles of railroad, 1 locomotive, and 8 bridges. Sherman reported, “10,000 men worked hard and with a will in that work of destruction, with axes, crowbars, and with fire, and I have no hesitation in pronouncing the work as well done. Meridian, with its depots, store-houses, arsenal, hospitals, offices, hotels, and cantonments no longer exists.” His work done, Sherman returned to Vicksburg on 28 February.

Considered in a vacuum, the Meridian Campaign was a huge success, but its effects stretched far beyond the Confederate war materiel Sherman laid to waste in Mississippi. Meridian served as small-scale rehearsal for Sherman’s later March to the Sea. Meridian showed Sherman that he could march through Confederate territory, destroy Confederate war-making infrastructure and will, and all the while live off the land. This larger impact marks the Meridian Campaign as an important milestone in the evolution of strategy and the Civil War’s relentless advance toward total war.

Meridian Campaign

Mississippi Burning

The plot of Alan Parker’s 1988 film, Mississippi Burning, is drawn from the 1964 disappearance of civil rights workers Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who were white northerners, and James Chaney, a black native of Meridian, Mississippi. The three activists were working to register African American voters in Meridian as part of the Freedom Summer project. On the night of 16–17 June, members of the Ku Klux Klan burned a church in Longdale, where activists planned to open a freedom school. On 21 June Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney drove to see the burned-out church but disappeared outside Philadelphia on their way back to Meridian. FBI agents began investigating the disappearances the next day. On 4 August the bodies of the three men were found buried in an earthen dam.

In Mississippi Burning, Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe portray fictional FBI agents who set out to find the murderers of the three activists. After realizing that the local people will not cooperate with the investigation—the whites apathetic and the blacks scared—the agents use blackmail and intimidation to persuade some KKK members to confess their involvement and implicate others. Although suspenseful and powerful in the film, these extralegal measures, including a scene in which a fictional black FBI agent holds a knife to a white man, were fabrications. Intimidation was minimally used in the actual investigation.

Hackman’s and Dafoe’s characters have opposite personalities and ideologies but eventually develop a friendship and mutual respect for each other. Various other characters make brief appearances that add a bit of romance, intrigue, and turmoil to the story—the villainous deputy (Brad Dourif), his decent yet misguided wife (Frances McDormand), and a brave black boy who endures much racism and emotional harm (Darius McCrary). These characters are loosely based on real people but are included primarily to give depth to the film.

Mississippi Burning hit theaters in December 1988 and grossed more than $34.6 million during its run. It received six Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director. The film won an Oscar for Best Cinematography. However, historians and civil rights groups criticized the movie, primarily on the grounds that it portrayed African Americans as passive bystanders while the white FBI agents swooped in and saved the day. Writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, Vernon Jarrett commented, “The film treats some of the most heroic people in black history as mere props in a morality play.” Parker countered that white FBI agents had to be the heroes in the film to secure box-office popularity in 1988.

Mississippi Burning

Mississippi College School of Law

Mississippi College School of Law (MCSOL) is located in downtown Jackson near the State Capitol, federal and state courts, and major law firms. The school has built a reputation for excellence in both practical and theoretical legal education.

MCSOL began as the Jackson School of Law, a part-time institution founded in 1930. Mississippi College acquired the school in 1975, moved it to the college’s campus in Clinton, and instituted a full-time program. In 1980 the law school moved back to Jackson to its current location on Griffith Street, and in 2007 MCSOL completed an ambitious construction and renovation project to expand the campus. The law school is accredited by the American Bar Association, and its graduates may take the bar examination in all fifty states.

MCSOL’s downtown location offers students access to the capital city’s resources. Students may supplement classroom learning by interacting with local attorneys and judges. Students also have opportunities for externships and clerkships with private law firms, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations.

MCSOL offers options outside of the traditional law school experience, including a program that allows students simultaneously to earn law degrees and master’s degrees in business administration by enrolling for one extra semester. The school also offers an executive law school program, various certificate programs, and master of laws programs.

MCSOL offers students the opportunity to participate in numerous clinical experiences: the Adoption Legal Clinic, Child Advocacy in Youth Court Clinic, Child Advocacy in Chancery Court Clinic, Mission First Legal Aid Clinic, and HIV and the Law. These clinics offer students the opportunity to gain real-world legal experience by interacting with judges, practicing attorneys, and members of the public who may not otherwise have access to legal services.

Mississippi College School of Law

Mississippi Is This America?

“Mississippi—Is This America? (1962–1964)” is the title of the fifth episode of the first part of the documentary series Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1985 (1987). The series, created and produced by Henry Hampton and narrated by Julian Bond, explores the history of the US civil rights movement between 1954 and 1965. Topics highlighted in the episode include the formation of the South’s first White Citizens’ Council; the 1963 assassination of Medgar Evers; the 1964 Freedom Summer; Bob Moses’s role in organizing a massive voter registration drive and establishing freedom schools; the 1964 murders of activists Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner; and Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

The title of the episode is a rhetorical question that can be understood on multiple levels. It stresses the idea that Mississippi was a racist violent place and the absolute antithesis of America. The question also suggests that while the state was the most regionally distinctive in the South, its problems constituted a matter of national concern. Footage shows Pres. John F. Kennedy admonishing the nation that “it is not enough to pin the blame on others, to say it is the problem of one section of the country or another”; rather, everyone must take responsibility. Finally, the episode demonstrates that black Mississippians and their allies very much believed that Mississippi was a part of the United States and were willing to fight for their rights as American citizens in the face of persistent violence. The documentary shows Hamer speaking at the Democratic National Convention, asking the same question of the American public: “I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off of their hooks because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings in America?”

The episode begins with Roy Wilkins, executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, announcing, “There is no state with a record that approaches that of Mississippi in inhumanity, murder, and brutality and racial hatred. It is absolutely at the bottom of the list.” Viewers later learn that Wilkins’s assessment represented a response to the disappearance and murder of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner. Wilkins also asserts, “We view this as a cold, brutal, deliberate killing in a savage, uncivilized state; the most savage uncivilized state in the entire fifty states.” The bulk of the episode underscores the ferocious commitment to violence evidenced by most of Mississippi’s white population. The stories of Evers’s assassination and the discovery of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner’s bodies buried in an earthen dam incorporate emotional footage from the victims’ families. More than twenty years later, Myrlie Evers, Medgar’s widow, recalled how danger “was simply in the air”: “you knew something was going to happen.” When Medgar Evers arrived at home, the family heard gunfire outside, and the children immediately “fell to the floor as he had taught them to do.” Then she opened the door, discovered her husband bleeding in the driveway, and began to scream at the neighbors. The narrator then explains how “civil rights leaders and sympathetic whites traveled to the South to see firsthand the state called the ‘closed society,’” invoking the title of a book by James Silver that coincidentally was published on the day Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner disappeared. The film uses the metaphor of the closed society, in which white Mississippians defend white supremacy against any social change at all costs, to underscore the conviction that Mississippi’s violence was the most virulent in the South.

The idea of Mississippi exceptionalism juxtaposed with the democratic ideals of American equality not only permits the filmmakers to highlight the state as a vulgar, sadistic society but also allows them to hold the nation responsible. Broadly speaking, Mississippi can be seen as a reflection of America’s bigotry and tolerance of inequality. The documentary shows footage of Dave Dennis, a member of Congress of Racial Equality who lent his vehicle to the three murdered civil rights activists, offering a passionate yet defiant eulogy at Chaney’s funeral: “I not only blame the people who pulled the trigger or did the beating or dug the hole with the shovel . . . but I blame the people in Washington D.C. This is our country, too.”

Mississippi Is This America?

Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission

On 17 May 1954—soon known to many white southerners as Black Monday—the US Supreme Court issued its Brown v. Board of Education decision, which did away with the idea of “separate but equal” racially segregated schools. Some white southerners, including many in Mississippi, resented the end of their cherished and supposedly divinely ordained “southern way of life” and resorted to violence to defend the region’s racial status quo. Others resurrected interposition, a nineteenth-century doctrine under which the state had a right to “interpose” its sovereignty to protect citizens from federal actions that the state deemed unconstitutional, even though the US Supreme Court had rejected that theory a century earlier.

An overwhelming mood of defiance of the federal government dominated the 1956 state legislative session, which featured a parade of bills and resolutions designed to protect Mississippi’s racial customs. On 29 February the legislature unanimously passed an “interposition resolution” that declared the Brown decision “invalid.” The same day, lawmakers created the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission “to do and perform any and all acts and things deemed necessary and proper to protect the sovereignty of the state of Mississippi” from “encroachment . . . by the Federal Government or any branch, department or agency thereof.” A tax-supported state agency that was part of the executive branch, the Sovereignty Commission included the governor (who also served as chair), the lieutenant governor, the Speaker of the House, the attorney general, two state senators, three state representatives, and three citizens.

Neither the word segregation nor the word integration appeared in the carefully crafted legislation, but federal “encroachment” meant “forced racial integration,” and the Sovereignty Commission soon became identified as Mississippi’s segregation watchdog agency. With the aura of sophistication and respectability emanating from the word sovereignty, the commission was expected to maintain segregation and to wreck the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and other civil rights organizations in Mississippi.

Under the administration of Gov. James P. Coleman (1956–60), the commission took a muted approach, comparing itself to the FBI, “during times of war seeking out intelligence information about the enemy and what the enemy proposes to do.” By the fall of 1957, the public relations department had sent more than two hundred thousand pamphlets and other forms of direct mail to newspaper editors, television stations, and state lawmakers above the Mason-Dixon Line, trying to convince northerners that resistance to the Brown decision resulted not from racism but from principled objections to constitutional violations. At the same time, the Sovereignty Commission used paid and unpaid informants throughout the state to keep the NAACP and the Mississippi Progressive Voters’ League under surveillance. By the summer of 1959, these informants and agency investigators had enabled the Sovereignty Commission to accumulate more than four thousand index cards and several hundred investigative files containing baseless rumors, random information, and bizarre details. The commission also paid members of the state’s African American community, including H. H. Humes, editor of the Greenville Delta Leader, to oppose integration.

In 1959 Ross R. Barnett won election to the Mississippi governorship after a campaign in which he promised to preserve rigid racial segregation. Reflecting his more confrontational approach, the Sovereignty Commission became more aggressive in the early summer of 1960. Erle E. Johnston, director of the agency’s public relations branch, organized a speakers bureau program. More than 100 Sovereignty Commission members, state officials, legislators, judges, attorneys, newspaper editors, and businesspeople delivered approximately 120 addresses in northern and western states, painting a rosy picture of the state’s race relations and attempting to raise alarm about federal actions. In addition, the Sovereignty Commission sponsored a film, Message from Mississippi, that similarly extolled the benefits of segregation. Also on Barnett’s watch, the Sovereignty Commission’s investigators embarked on a broadly defined “subversive hunt” as Mississippi’s white power structure defined civil rights movement leaders, activists, and sympathizers as subversives for their opposition to racial conformity. During the final two years of Barnett’s administration, after the 1962 University of Mississippi desegregation crisis, the Sovereignty Commission became involved in a number of bizarre incidents, including inspections of allegedly “integrated” outdoor toilets on construction sites and investigations of suspected cases of miscegenation.

Under Barnett’s successor, Gov. Paul B. Johnson (1964–68), the Sovereignty Commission’s role changed again, in part as a consequence of increasing violence and incidents such as the murders of NAACP leader Medgar Evers in 1963 and of civil rights activists Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner in 1964. The Sovereignty Commission began investigating the activities of such unreconstructed white supremacist groups as the Ku Klux Klan and the Americans for the Preservation of the White Race as a way of distancing the agency from openly violent organizations. However, the commission continued its work against the civil rights movement—for example, via the Mississippi Negro Citizenship Association, a Sovereignty Commission creation that sought to co-opt the “thinking Negroes of Mississippi” and blunt the work of the Council of Federated Organizations and other more radical groups. Johnson’s successor, Gov. John Bell Williams (1968–72), dismantled the agency’s public relations functions and concentrated its resources on investigating anti–Vietnam War demonstrators, black nationalists, and campus radicals.

On 17 April 1973, true to a vow he made during his gubernatorial campaign, Gov. William L. Waller vetoed the Sovereignty Commission’s annual appropriation bill, bringing the agency’s activities to a close. The 1956 act that had created the Sovereignty Commission remained on the state’s law books until 1977, when the legislature abolished the agency and voted to seal its official records until 2027. Shortly thereafter, the American Civil Liberties Union initiated a legal effort to open the records to the public. Twenty-one years later, those efforts began to reach fruition with the release of the first commission records, and in 2002 all of the agency’s documents were made available via the Mississippi Department of Archives and History’s Sovereignty Commission Online website.

Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission

Monroe County

The area that became Monroe County has evidence of the earliest human activity in the Mississippi area. The Hester Site, an archaeological site just west of Amory, is the location of apparent Paleo-Indian activity dating to about ten thousand years ago. The area was important in much of Native American history, including some Choctaw movements during the Chickasaw War in the 1730s. In the 1800s it became an important plantation area. The county seat is Aberdeen, located on the banks of the Tombigbee River.

Located in northeastern Mississippi, just south of the hilliest areas of the state, Monroe County was founded in 1821. In its first census in 1830, Monroe’s population consisted of 2,918 free people and 943 slaves. By 1840 both populations had increased dramatically, to 5,167 free people and 4,083 slaves.

By 1860 Monroe had 12,279 slaves and 8,554 free people. In the late antebellum period, it was an agricultural powerhouse, ranking high among the state’s counties in corn (fourth), cotton (seventh), sweet potatoes (second), and livestock (eleventh). The county’s 120 industrial employees worked in small lumber mills, cotton gins, and businesses making carriages and saddles. In the late antebellum period, Monroe County had one of the largest populations in Mississippi. In 1860 Monroe was home to twenty-five churches—fifteen Methodist churches, seven Baptist churches, and single Presbyterian, Christian, and Episcopalian churches.

In 1872 part of Monroe County became part of Clay County. Despite this loss of territory and population, Monroe continued to grow and by 1880 was home to 28,553 people—18,001 African Americans and 10,551 whites. The county’s farmers ranked first in the state in the production of corn and wheat, second in hay and tobacco, and third in livestock. Owners cultivated 46.5 percent of the farms, while tenants and sharecroppers ran the rest.

Some of Mississippi’s most important political figures and political action had roots in Monroe County. Reuben Davis, an Aberdeen lawyer, was an impassioned supporter of secession and an opponent of Republicans during and after Reconstruction. Samuel Gholson, a supporter of secession and later a Confederate general, served in the state legislature and supported the overturning of Republican authority. Monroe County’s postwar Ku Klux Klan committed a notorious political murder, killing Jack Dupree, an African American leader of the Republican Party.

In 1880 Monroe County had fifty-three manufacturing establishments, but most were small, and they employed only one hundred men, four women, and nine children. The county was home to 134 immigrants, most of them from Germany, Ireland, and Sweden.

By 1900 the Monroe County population had grown to 31,216, and manufacturing employed more than 500 workers. While 59 percent of the county’s white farmers owned their land, only 8 percent of African American farmers did so.

About half of the Monroe County church members counted in the 1916 religious census were Baptists, with Missionary Baptists standing out as the largest group. Methodists, especially the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and Methodist Episcopal Church, had substantial numbers as well, and the county was home to Mississippi’s largest groups in the Stone-Campbell traditions—the Disciples of Christ and Churches of Christ.

Monroe County’s notable figures include F. S. McKnight, Felix Underwood, and Lucille Bogan. McKnight ran a photography studio in Aberdeen for more than thirty years, and his work documented the life of the community. Underwood, born in Nettleton in 1882, became a doctor and leader in reforming Mississippi’s public health system. Bogan, a blues singer, was born in Amory in 1897.

By 1930 Monroe County’s population had reached 36,141, with about 20,000 whites. Aberdeen was a growing town with more than 6,000 people, and the county had more than 400 industrial workers. Still, agriculture remained the central feature of the county’s economy. Tenants worked 68 percent of county farms, emphasizing corn followed by cotton and livestock.

After more than twenty years of effort, Mississippi’s oil and gas industry began when the Carter No. 1 well east of Amory started yielding gas in 1926. Monroe County also became the home of one of the state’s first cooperative electric power associations.

In 1960 Monroe County’s population had dropped below thirty-four thousand residents, about two-thirds of them white and one-third African American. Monroe was one of eastern Mississippi’s leading manufacturing centers, with 32 percent of the county’s workforce employed in manufacturing, including almost two thousand women in the apparel industry. Monroe County had by far the state’s largest number of apparel workers. Agriculture remained crucial to Monroe’s economy, with nearly 18 percent of the county’s workers growing soybeans, corn, cotton, and wheat and raising livestock. By 1980 the population had increased to 36,404, slightly higher than its 1930 numbers.

As in many of its neighboring counties, Monroe County’s 2010 population was predominantly white and had shown no significant change in size since 1960. The county’s 36,989 residents represented only a slight increase over 1900.

Monroe County

Montgomery County

Located in central Mississippi, Montgomery County was founded in 1871 from parts of Carroll and Choctaw Counties. In its first census in 1880, Montgomery was evenly divided between white (6,671) and African American (6,677) residents. Focused on agricultural production, the county’s farmers grew cotton and grains and raised livestock. Montgomery County had the third-most cattle in the state. Unlike many Mississippi counties in the postwar years, Montgomery’s farms were run overwhelmingly by owners (about 73 percent) rather than by tenants or sharecroppers.

Montgomery County was one of the centers of Mississippi Populist activity in the late 1880s. In 1888 the Mississippi Farmers’ Alliance started a cooperative store in Winona, the county seat, to make it easier for its members to market their crops and buy affordable goods.

In 1900 the county’s population of 16,536 had a slight African American majority. It also had a growing industrial workforce of more than 200 individuals. Two-thirds of all white farm families owned their land, while only one-fifth of black farmers did so.

By 1930 Montgomery County’s population had declined to 15,009. Whites made up 56 percent of this total, while African Americans comprised 44 percent. Montgomery remained an agricultural county, and tenancy rather than sharecropping had become common for both black and white farmers. Alongside agricultural labor, thirty-four industrial firms employed 343 people. The 1930 census was the first in which Winona was classified as a city, with slightly over 2,500 people.

More than 90 percent of Montgomery County’s church members in the 1916 religious census belonged to either Baptist or Methodist churches. The largest groups were the Missionary Baptists and the Methodist Episcopal Church, South.

Notable individuals associated with Montgomery County include bluesman B. B. King (born Riley King), who spent a great deal of his childhood in Kilmichael. Roebuck “Pops” Staples, another famous blues musician, was born near Kilmichael but grew up in the Delta before leading his family band, the Staples Singers, to success in the 1960s and 1970s. Other notable residents of Montgomery County have included A. Boyd Campbell, a state and national leader in the Chamber of Commerce, and George McLean, a journalist and community development leader in Tupelo, both of whom were born in Winona. Civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer was born in Montgomery County, though she spent most of her life in the Mississippi Delta. In 1963 she and other Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee workers were returning from a conference when she was put in a Winona jail and severely beaten.

In 1960 Montgomery County’s population had declined to 13,320, with whites continuing to make up a small majority of the residents. About 24 percent of Montgomery’s working people were employed in agriculture, primarily raising corn, cotton, soybeans, and livestock, while 23 percent worked in manufacturing, specifically in the apparel and furniture industries.

By 2010 whites comprised 53 percent of Montgomery County’s population. The total population, which had dropped by about 18 percent since 1960, was 10,925 in 2010.

Montgomery County

Murphree, Dennis

Dennis Herron Murphree served as Mississippi’s governor on two separate occasions but was never elected to the office. Murphree won the position of lieutenant governor in 1923, 1931, and 1939 and held the post when two of the state’s chief executives died—Henry Whitfield in 1927 and Paul B. Johnson Sr. in 1943. Murphree ran for governor as the incumbent in 1927 but lost, as he did when he ran while holding the lieutenant governorship in 1935 and 1943.

Murphree was born in Calhoun County on 6 January 1886. At age twenty-five he was elected to represent his home county in the state legislature, winning reelection in 1915 and 1919. As a legislator and later as governor, Murphree was one of the state’s strongest advocates of the “pay-as-you-go” system of state finances, and he was instrumental in passing the law requiring Mississippi to balance its budget.

During his first term as lieutenant governor, Murphree and several businessmen, educators, and other leaders developed the “Know Mississippi Better” train. From 1925 to 1948 the specially equipped train traveled through three hundred cities in forty-seven states, Canada, and Mexico, showcasing Mississippi products and resources and advertising the state.

Shortly before Whitfield’s death, Murphree announced that he would seek reelection as lieutenant governor. However, after he ascended to the governorship, his friends and supporters convinced him not to seek the state’s second-highest office while holding its highest office, so he chose to run for governor but lost to Theodore Bilbo.

Murphree won another term as lieutenant governor in 1931 and again tried for the governorship in 1935, finishing third in the Democratic primary behind Johnson and Hugh L. White, who won the runoff and the office. Four years later, Murphree retook the post of lieutenant governor, positioning himself for another bid for the state’s top office. However, he came in third in the 1943 Democratic primary, trailing Martin S. Conner and Thomas L. Bailey, who took the runoff on 24 August and the general election the following November.

However, Johnson, the incumbent governor, died on 26 December, leaving Murphree to serve the remainder of the term until Bailey’s inauguration on 18 January 1944. Murphree then retired from public life, and he died in Jackson on 9 February 1949.

Murphree, Dennis

Musgrove, Ronnie

After serving in the Mississippi State Senate from 1988 to 1996 and as lieutenant governor from 1996 to 2000, Democrat Ronnie Musgrove was elected governor under circumstances unique in Mississippi history. Under the 1890 state constitution, because neither Musgrove nor any other gubernatorial candidate received a majority of the votes cast in the November 1999 general election, the legislature elected the governor. And in a special vote on 4 January 2000, legislators elected Musgrove.

Born in the Tocowa Community in Panola County on 29 July 1956, David Ronald Musgrove earned degrees from Northwest Mississippi Junior College, the University of Mississippi, and the University of Mississippi Law School. In 1980 he was elected president of the law school student body.

Musgrove, a member of the Mississippi and American Trial Lawyers Associations, served as president of the Panola County and Tri-County Bar Association and on the Board of Directors of the Mississippi Young Lawyers Association. He was selected for membership in the Inns of Court in 1988 and two years later was elected to the Board of Bar Commissioners of the Mississippi State Bar Association. In 1995 Musgrove was inducted as a fellow in the Mississippi Bar Foundation.

In 1998 Musgrove served as chair of the National Conference of Lieutenant Governors. During his term as governor, he served on the Executive Committee of the Southern Regional Education Board, the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards, the National Assessment Governing Board, the National Board of Directors of Jobs for America’s Graduates, and the Executive Committee of the Democratic Governors Association. In addition he chaired the Southern States Energy Board and the Executive Committee of the National Governors Association.

Musgrove won the close election over Republican Mike Parker by emphasizing his work as lieutenant governor and in part because of divisions in the Republican Party. He ran as a conservative on fiscal and social issues, and his time as governor generally revealed this conservative perspective. His term included a special legislative session to enact tort reform, and Musgrove helped persuade the Nissan Motor Company to build a large facility in Mississippi. However, during a period of increasing Republican popularity, Musgrove supported efforts to remove the image of the Confederate battle flag from the state flag. He ran for reelection in 2003, but challenger Haley Barbour used his political and business experience, along with Musgrove’s support for changing the flag, to win the office.

Since 2004 Musgrove has practiced law, worked as a political consultant, and taught classes at the University of Mississippi and at the Mississippi College School of Law. In 2008 he ran for the US Senate but lost to incumbent Roger Wicker.

Musgrove, Ronnie

Mushrooms

Anyone who travels through Mississippi, from coastal Ocean Springs to the extreme northern city of Olive Branch, from the Mississippi River on the west to the Alabama border to the east, can find mushrooms or similar fungi. At some point in the year, mushrooms—both poisonous and nonpoisonous—are present in each county.

Fungi occupy their own exclusive niche in the biological system of classification of living organisms. They are a separate kingdom, similar to the plant and animal kingdoms. Like plants, fungi produce spores, and at one time fungi were classified as plants. Mushrooms, however, lack chlorophyll and also have no true roots, stems, leaves, flowers, or seeds, features that eventually led to their classification as their own kingdom. Unlike most plants, which have chlorophyll and can manufacture their own food, mushrooms cannot live independently and must absorb food from the surrounding medium—usually rotting wood, soil, leaf mold, or similar substrates. The ubiquitous nature of the Fungi (the mushroom group name) is equaled somewhat by the bacteria and other microorganisms.

Many mushrooms have received monikers motivated by the finders’ first impressions—Devil’s Snuffbox, Hen-of-the-Woods, Wolf’s Milk Slime, Death Angel, Giant Stinkhorn, all of which exist in Mississippi. Some mushrooms found in the southern part of the state may not grow in the north and vice versa, but common varieties such as Boletes, Russulas, Amanitas, Agaricus, Lactarius, and Armillaria, exist in both areas and most points in between.

Mushrooms have recently experienced a culinary renaissance, with an increasingly diverse array of forms and species available at restaurants and in grocery stores. Most of these mushrooms are commercially grown for the market and are sold both fresh and preserved.

Many Mississippi localities have edible fungi that can be found at or near the same sites year after year. One popular but not abundant mushroom, the morel, can be used in almost any culinary undertaking. Orange-yellow chanterelles often abound in patches. Some members of the genus Boletus are most desirable, as are some Agaricus, Lactarius, and Russula.

Roughly a dozen mushrooms found in Mississippi produce chemical toxins or poisons. One of the more deadly of these is the genus Amanita. Ironically, most members of this genus are very attractive. The Destroying Angel, Amanita caesarea (Caesar’s mushroom), is a brilliant orange, yellow, and red, and its caps are speckled with scales or tissue flakes.

Mushrooms