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Natchez Civil Rights Movement

The civil rights movement came later in Natchez than in many of Mississippi’s other towns and cities but had moments of drama and violence, made demands with clarity and conviction, and ended with considerable success. After George Metcalf, the president of the Natchez chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), survived a nearly fatal car bombing, Natchez’s African American community began a boycott of white-owned businesses that ended late in 1965 with an agreement that stood as a rather dramatic success in mid-1960s Mississippi.

A group of leaders had started the city’s chapter of the NAACP in the 1940s and sustained it through the 1950s and early 1960s. Male and female church leaders and owners of businesses such as funeral homes, groceries, and the African American newspaper, the Bluff City Bulletin, made up much of the early NAACP membership. Activists called for legal and political equality, job training, and improvements in education.

On 27 August 1965 Metcalfe, a union member who worked at Armstrong Tire and Rubber, was seriously injured when his car exploded at the Armstrong plant. The longtime NAACP leader had already been in the news twice that week, once for appearing at a school board meeting to ask that Natchez implement the Supreme Court’s decade-old Brown v. Board of Education decision by desegregating its schools, once for leading a boycott against the Jitney Jungle stores owned by Mayor John Nosser.

The assault on Metcalfe inspired the local civil rights community to call in statewide leaders, especially NAACP field secretary Charles Evers, and the group quickly issued a list of demands: the Board of Aldermen should denounce the Ku Klux Klan and the Citizens’ Council; the police should end acts of brutality and offer protection for African American funerals; the school board should immediately desegregate the schools; the welfare and social security offices should stop withholding or threatening to withhold checks from people involved in protests; store employees should use the courtesy titles Mr., Mrs., and Miss when dealing with all customers; and stores should hire more African American employees. In addition, the city should hire African Americans, desegregate swimming pools and parks, appoint African Americans to the school board, equalize services such as sewers and street sweeping in all neighborhoods, enact new housing standards to govern relations between landlords and renters, and guarantee that all citizens could engage in free speech and political protest without the fear of arrest.

At least two groups of activists were at work in Natchez—the NAACP, which continued to call for discussions with the Natchez aldermen, and younger protesters, including Dorie Ladner, Rudy Shields, and Chuck McDew from the Council of Federated Organizations, who combined voter registration with marching, picketing, and other forms of direct action. Both groups called on African Americans in Natchez and Adams County to boycott white-owned businesses until the city complied with the activists’ demands. The mayor and aldermen, who had long envisioned Natchez as an exceptionally peaceful community, called for calm and planned negotiations with protest leaders but stressed that they would not negotiate under the threat of violence. Scattered violence, especially bombings and rock-throwing incidents, and fears that it would escalate inspired Gov. Paul Johnson to send six units of the Mississippi National Guard to the city—the first time the state had used the Guard since the fall of 1962 at the University of Mississippi.

Street picketing continued in September and October 1965, with dozens of protesters arrested every day for parading without a permit. The city’s jail overflowed, and city police started sending some prisoners to Parchman Prison.

In October and again in early December, protest leaders Evers, minister Shead Baldwin, and businessman Archie Curtis met with the Natchez aldermen. The first meeting failed when city officials declared that many of the protest demands fell outside their control, so the boycott continued, with African Americans staying away from the downtown shopping area. Many Natchez whites wanted to crush the boycott and its leaders, whom they labeled “outside agitators.” At a November meeting of about 175 businesspeople affiliated with the Chamber of Commerce, some white leaders suggested firing all African Americans, including household workers, who participated in the boycott. Another group that started in Natchez, the Americans for the Preservation of the White Race, condemned the protests and called for Mississippi and Louisiana whites to take part in a “buy-in” campaign to shop in Natchez that would counteract the boycott. Many business leaders, however, wanted the protests to end and hoped to restore what they could of the small city’s peaceful reputation.

At the beginning of December 1965, city officials met again with protest leaders. On 4 December, the Natchez Democrat announced, “Agreement Reached Ending Negro Boycott in Natchez.” The story detailed the city’s plans to meet the demands point by point. According to Evers, “Everything we asked for we have gotten concessions on, and then some.”

The end of the boycott certainly did not resolve all civil rights issues in the area. The NAACP and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee continued to disagree over protest strategy. Americans for the Preservation of the White Race took their buy-in strategy to nearby Fayette. Violence returned to Natchez in 1967 when NAACP member Wharlest Jackson was killed in a car bombing shortly after he had been promoted to a job once open only to whites at Armstrong Tire and Rubber. Still, the Natchez movement stands as a success in the sense that activists made specific demands with the support of the African American community and local authorities eventually agreed to meet those demands.

Natchez Civil Rights Movement

Natchez Slave Market

In the late eighteenth century, slave auctions and sales in Natchez took place at the landing along the Mississippi River known as Under-the-Hill. For the most part, slaves sent to Natchez arrived in New Orleans and were transported upriver, though slaves reached town overland as well.

By the 1790s the center of the trade in humans began shifting away from the river, and after an 1833 city ordinance barred the sale of slaves within city limits, the market moved to the Forks of the Road, the intersection of Washington Road/Natchez Trace (today’s D’Evereaux Drive), Old Courthouse Road (Liberty Road), and St. Catherine Street at the northwest edge of town. Reasons for the move are varied and could be related to the town’s concern with presenting a genteel appearance (the market’s original name, Niggerville, may have been changed to a geographic descriptor because of such concerns) or to residents’ fears that keeping slave pens in the raucous Under-the-Hill neighborhood was exceedingly dangerous. A more direct reason for the move was that Isaac Franklin of the slave-trading firm Franklin and Armfield managed his company from this location.

The growing profit potential of cotton as well as the decline in tobacco production helped to shift the center of slavery away from the Upper South states of Virginia and Maryland toward Mississippi and Louisiana. These shifts, along with the end of US importation of slaves, increased the value of those born in the United States and created an almost boundless market for enslaved men and women in the Old Southwest. As a result of these large-scale economic and demographic changes and the efforts of Franklin and Armfield, Natchez became the second-largest slave market in the United States, trailing only New Orleans.

By the antebellum period, slaves made their way overland to the Forks of the Road as part of coffles traveling from Virginia to Tennessee and then along the Natchez Trace. The journey was brutal. Usually taking place in the late summer and early fall under the presumption that cooler temperatures would have produced illness, the enslaved were manacled, chained, and forcibly marched to their destination under the watchful eyes of drivers on horseback. In the 1830s Franklin and Armfield began sending slaves via ship from Virginia to New Orleans and then upriver via steamboats equipped to hold between 75 and 150 slaves. Shipments to New Orleans could contain nearly 400 slaves, and by 1835 these ships were leaving Virginia every two weeks.

While Joseph Holt Ingraham famously described the market at the Forks of the Road as an orderly place where content, well-dressed, well-fed slaves were marketed, such outward appearances belied the conditions the enslaved endured. William Wells Brown, an enslaved man who made several trips to Natchez before escaping to freedom, indicated that slaves at the market were not as well treated as slave traders presented to their potential clients. Measles, cholera, and other diseases killed slaves confined to coffles and pens waiting to be sold, and traders concerned themselves with the health of slaves only when it might harm profits. Traders hoped to unload diseased slaves to unsuspecting purchasers. Moreover, as Rice Ballard, a partner of Franklin and Armfield, wrote, “The more Negroes lost in that country, the more will be wanting if they have the means of procuring them.” In other words, slaves killed by epidemics might cause short-term losses for the company but might also increase the value of the survivors.

The most despicable aspect of the trade at the Forks of the Road was the treatment of “fancy maids”—attractive, young female slaves. These girls and women, usually of mixed race, were essentially marketed as sexual slaves, and they commanded the highest prices. Franklin and Armfield’s partners frequently wrote to one another of their sexual exploits with these girls as well as their profitability, demonstrating perhaps that planters and slave traders were not so different in their desires.

Though the enslaved rarely receive much discussion in tours of Natchez, the Forks of the Road and the men, women, and children bought and sold there have recently been acknowledged by local activists with a monument presenting the history of the market.

Natchez Slave Market

Neshoba County

Located in east-central Mississippi, Neshoba County was founded in 1833. Its name comes from a Choctaw word meaning “wolf.” The county may be best known for three things: (1) the notorious murders of three civil rights workers in 1964, (2) the presence and prominence of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, and (3) a county fair popular far beyond the county’s borders.

After its founding, Neshoba County almost doubled in population during each decade in the antebellum period. In its first census in 1840, only 1,693 free people and 744 slaves lived in Neshoba County. By 1850 the population had increased to 4,729, including 3,393 free people and 1,335 slaves. Ten years later, Neshoba County’s population had risen to 6,131 free people and 2,212 slaves (26 percent of the total). Antebellum Neshoba was not a large producer of agricultural goods, but it ranked considerably higher in the value of its livestock. The county had 49 industrial workers, most of whom worked at four lumber mills.

Neshoba’s 1880 population of 8,741 had grown little since the antebellum period. Neshoba County’s 418-person Choctaw community gave it the state’s largest Native American contingent and the highest percentage (about 5 percent) of Native American residents. Owners rather than tenants ran 82 percent of the county’s farms and concentrated more on corn, swine, and sheep than on cotton. Neshoba remained a farm economy, with only 23 people working in industry.

Between 1880 and 1900 the county’s population grew by about 50 percent to 12,726. The rates of landowning for both black and white farmers were higher than state averages, with 77 percent of white farmers and 43 percent of black farmers owning their land. In 1900 Neshoba had only 23 industrial workers and the lowest total manufacturing wages in the state.

In 1891, with the organization of the Neshoba County Fair, the county became a central location for annual visits and campaign speeches. In the twentieth century the fair became famous for unique cabins that housed generations of families and friends visiting the area.

Methodists and Baptists made up more than three-quarters of the county’s church members in the early twentieth century. The Southern Baptist Convention and Methodist Episcopal Church, South were the largest religious groups, while Catholics accounted for about 7 percent of churchgoers.

By 1930 Neshoba’s population had risen to 26,691, including 20,516 whites, 5,469 African Americans, and 695 Native Americans. Despite having the eleventh-most industrial workers in Mississippi (1,080 people), Neshoba remained an agricultural county with more than 4,600 farms evenly divided between those run by owners and those operated by tenants.

The Choctaw Fair began in the Pearl River community in 1949 and has subsequently become a major gathering of both Choctaw and nonnative people. At the fair, numerous events celebrate Choctaw culture through food and sports. In addition, the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians has aggressively recruited industry since the late 1970s and has run successful casinos since the 1990s. The Mississippi Band has also become one of the state’s major employers and runs a school system where more than 1,500 students learn the Choctaw language as part of their education.

Between 1930 and 1960 Neshoba’s population declined to 20,927. Whites made up 72 percent of the population, with African Americans totaling 22 percent and the Choctaw 6 percent. Farmers made up about 26 percent of the workforce, while manufacturing provided another quarter of all jobs. The majority of industrial workers produced either clothing or furniture. Farming concentrated first on corn, then cotton and soybeans.

In 1956 Charles Evers organized the Philadelphia chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and by the early 1960s Neshoba County had an active civil rights movement. In June 1964 three movement workers—Meridian native James Chaney and New Yorkers Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman—disappeared while investigating the burning of Mount Zion Methodist Church outside Philadelphia in retaliation for the church’s support for civil rights efforts. The three men were later found dead, and their murders attracted national condemnation and a long series of investigations that finally ended with the conviction of Edgar Ray Killen for manslaughter in 2005. The movie Mississippi Burning (1988) offered a fictionalized version of these events.

Marcus Dupree was a football star at Philadelphia High School before playing at the University of Oklahoma and in the United States Football League and National Football League. Willie Morris’s 1983 book, The Courting of Marcus Dupree, details how Dupree’s talent helped to smooth over racial divisions and brought football scouts to rural Mississippi.

Race relations in the county again received more national attention and criticism when presidential candidate Ronald Reagan made a 3 August 1980 stop at the Neshoba County Fair, where he attracted attention and controversy for using the language of states’ rights.

Between 1960 and 2010 Neshoba County’s population increased by nearly 42 percent, reaching 29,676. Whites made up a majority of the population, African Americans comprised a substantial minority, and the Choctaw minority showed significant growth.

Neshoba County

Neshoba County Fair

The Neshoba County Fair is one of Mississippi’s most notable social, political, and cultural institutions. A true campground fair, the event has been held annually (except for an interruption during World War II) since 1891. Located eight miles southwest of the county seat, Philadelphia, the fair features political oratory, late-night gospel singing, popular musical acts, a triathlon, livestock and produce exhibitions, a midway with games and carnival food, a beauty contest, mule racing, and the only legal horseracing in the state. The fair’s patrons and admirers praise the sense of community and nostalgia that the event embodies. Indeed, the fair represents nothing so much as an annual weeklong family reunion for thousands of Neshoba County residents, their kin, and their friends.

The fairgrounds resemble a small Mississippi town, with neighborhoods such as Happy Hollow and Sunset Strip, streets, and even a post office, all fanning out from centrally located Founder’s Square. The most distinctive feature of the fair is the cabins, now numbering more than six hundred, in which thousands of people live for a week in late July each year. These magnificent specimens of vernacular architecture are decorated and feature such names as The Fox Den, Green Acres, and Ye Old King’s Kastle. Traditionally, these two- and three-story structures have been self-consciously spartan, in keeping with the fair’s early history as a camp meeting; some early cabins were log houses. Cabin owners have more recently installed air-conditioning and even Mississippi-manufactured Viking ranges. Almost all of the cabins feature broad front porches and balconies that allow for long afternoons and evenings of visiting with family and friends. Most cabins display some signs of life twenty-four hours a day. Upstairs, one typically finds row upon row of bunk beds. Most of the cabins are decorated with family names and even family trees; state, national, and Confederate flags; and banners declaring allegiance to one of the state’s universities. And while Neshoba is a dry county, alcohol is in plentiful if discreet supply in many cabins.

The Neshoba County Fair traces its origins to 1889 and to Patron’s Union meetings and other fairs in surrounding counties and communities. Fairgoers and their families initially traveled the red clay roads to the fair in ox-drawn wagons, camping at night in makeshift shelters. In 1891 nine men formed the Neshoba County Stock and Agricultural Fair Association. With an initial tract of 20 acres, the Fair Association began construction of a pavilion and later a hotel. Fairgoers soon began building the cabins that make the fairgrounds so distinctive. Early fairs featured the sorts of exhibitions of livestock, agricultural products, and handcrafts common at county fairs across the South. Incorporated under state law in 1933, the Neshoba County Fair, unlike other state and county fairs, was and remains a private, nonprofit corporation owned by local stockholders. The Fair Association still owns all 150 acres on which the cabins stand and must approve any sale, transfer, or significant alteration to any cabin.

For the past one hundred years the fair has played an important role in Mississippi politics. Governors since Anselm McLaurin (1896–1900) have spoken at the fair, as has practically every serious candidate for state and local office, including constable and supervisor. In recent decades the fair has even drawn the occasional presidential candidate, including such figures as Jack Kemp, Michael Dukakis, John Glenn, and Ronald Reagan. Would-be officeholders have long enjoyed the opportunity to woo the very large (by Mississippi standards) and politically savvy crowds. Unlike many state and county fairs, Neshoba’s is held in late July, not at harvest time. Mississippi’s primary elections are held in August, which gave candidates the chance to brave the heat and the dust (or mud) and reach voters before the election that mattered most when Mississippi was a one-party state. For most of the twentieth century the vast majority of dozens of candidates who spoke at the fair each year were Democrats, though Republican hopefuls are now in the majority and receive the warmest welcome, a change that reflects broader currents in Mississippi and southern politics.

As with almost any Mississippi institution, the fair carries its own history of race. In the 1950s and 1960s politicians speaking at the fair strove to outdo each other in claiming the power to defend the state’s “traditional way of life” from the menaces of the federal government and outside agitators. Ross Barnett became a fair favorite in the years after he served as governor. The old ways of speaking about race have disappeared from the fair, and Mississippi politicians today sometimes use the fair’s Neshoba County setting to point to the recent successful prosecutions of civil rights era killers as evidence of the state’s movement away from the old days.

The cabins, the food, and the political speaking all contribute to the unique sense of place and community that makes the Neshoba County Fair “Mississippi’s Giant Houseparty” for its patrons.

Neshoba County Fair

Neshoba County Murders

On the night of 21 June 1964 three civil rights workers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—disappeared in Neshoba County. Federal law enforcement officials were called in to search for the missing men. That effort and the investigation that continued after their bodies were found forty-four days later focused national attention on the county and the state. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) labeled the case “Mississippi Burning.”

Lawrence Rainey had been elected sheriff of Neshoba County in 1963. Rainey, previously a police officer in Canton and Philadelphia, had campaigned with the promise to “take care of things,” a phrase white residents of Neshoba County understood to mean preserving white supremacy. Black residents interpreted those words to mean that law enforcement officials would escalate the level of violence against black citizens. Soon after Rainey became sheriff, Cecil Price, who had worked with Rainey in Canton, was hired as a deputy and quickly gained a reputation for being hard on blacks. Within his first year on the job, two black residents were killed while Price was arresting them.

During the “Freedom Summer” of 1964, civil rights workers traveled to Mississippi from across the country to help African Americans register to vote. An umbrella organization, the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), was created to coordinate actions by various civil rights groups and opened a headquarters in Meridian, near Neshoba County. On 21 June three men met at the office: Goodman, a twenty-year-old history major from Queens College in New York; Michael Schwerner, a twenty-four-year-old graduate of Cornell University; and James Chaney, a twenty-one-year-old civil rights activist from Lauderdale County. The three men left Meridian for Sandstown, a community in eastern Neshoba County, where the Mount Zion Church had recently been burned because it was to be the home of a freedom school. Schwerner told others at the office that if he, Goodman, and Chaney were not back by 4:00 p.m., COFO should “start trying to locate us.”

After visiting the church, the activists got into their car and decided to drive back to Meridian via Philadelphia, which they thought would be the fastest route. However, their station wagon got a flat tire near Philadelphia, and Deputy Price stopped the vehicle at around 3:00. He arrested Chaney, the driver, for speeding and held Schwerner and Goodman for questioning. Price released the men from jail at about 10:30 that night. COFO leaders had already begun to search, but when they called the Neshoba County Jail, they were falsely told that Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner were not there.

On 22 June COFO told the media about the missing men, sparking demands for a federal effort to find them. The FBI sent special agent John Proctor into Neshoba County to see if local law enforcement was involved in the disappearance. Proctor initially found no evidence of illegal activity on the part of local law enforcement, and white Neshoba residents began claiming that COFO had filed the missing persons’ case to gain sympathy and financial support. However, within forty-eight hours Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner’s station wagon was found in a swamp about twenty-seven miles from where Price told the FBI he had last seen the vehicle.

Over the next six weeks, 150 FBI agents scoured Mississippi for the men. US Navy divers brought in to assist the effort found the bodies of eight other African Americans—three civil rights activists, plus five men who were never identified. On 4 August FBI agents found the bodies of the three missing men inside an earthen dam in the southwestern corner of Neshoba County.

While Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner were being held in the Neshoba County Jail, Klansmen had been assembling. As the three activists attempted to leave the county after their release from the jail, Price stopped them again after a high-speed chase, and Klansmen took them to an isolated area, tortured Chaney, shot all three men, and buried them in the dam. Motivated by a large reward offered by the FBI, one of the conspirators had told agents where the bodies could be found.

Several months later, after Mississippi officials showed little interest in prosecuting the perpetrators, the federal government charged eighteen men with conspiring to violate Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner’s civil rights. Seven were found guilty and sentenced to prison terms ranging from three to ten years. Deputy Price and Sam Bowers, imperial wizard of the White Knights of the East Mississippi Ku Klux Klan, received the longest sentences, though no one served more than six years. Eight defendants, including Sheriff Rainey, were acquitted, and the jury hung on the guilt or innocence of three others, including Edgar Ray Killen.

After the 1967 election, Philadelphia’s board of aldermen experienced a complete turnover, Rainey and Price left law enforcement, and school integration in Neshoba County occurred smoothly and without major incident. Whites generally sought to put the case into the past and avoid revisiting it. Nevertheless, memories lingered, and a 1988 film, Mississippi Burning, offered a fictionalized version of the events. Inspired by the movie, Jackson Clarion-Ledger investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell began looking into various civil rights–era cold cases, and his work, along with that of a biracial local group known as the Philadelphia Coalition, and an Illinois high school teacher and three of his students, led the State of Mississippi to bring charges against Killen. Although the jury declined to convict him of murder, on 21 June 2005, exactly forty-one years after the crime, it did find him guilty on three counts of manslaughter for recruiting the mob that carried out the killings. He received the maximum punishment on each count—twenty years imprisonment.

Neshoba County Murders

Newton County

The area in east-central Mississippi that became Newton County had a substantial Choctaw population that moved west in the 1830s as part of policies of Indian Removal. Reportedly named after Isaac Newton, the county was formed from the southern part of Neshoba County in 1836. Its county seat is Decatur. In the frontier period, Newton County was a small but growing community with a large majority of free people. In the 1840 census, Newton had 1,980 free people and 454 slaves, one of the smallest slave populations in the state.

By 1860 Newton’s population had increased to 6,131 free people and 2,212 slaves (approximately 35 percent of the total). Despite its small size, Newton ranked thirty-sixth among the state’s sixty counties in cotton production. Among Newton County’s twelve churches, five were Baptist, five were Methodist, and two were Presbyterian.

By 1880 the county had grown to 13,436 people, with substantial increases in the numbers of both African Americans and whites. Newton was also home to 322 Choctaws, the third-highest Native American population in the state. Newton’s postbellum farmers practiced mixed agriculture, concentrating on corn and other grains rather than on cotton. Owners cultivated about 73 percent of the county’s 1,493 farms, a figure well above the state average, while tenants and sharecroppers farmed the rest.

Population growth continued in the late 1800s, and by 1900 Newton’s population totaled about 20,000. Of the county’s white farmers, 72 percent owned their own land, compared to just 27 percent of the African American farmers. Manufacturing was increasing, with 63 firms employing 172 industrial workers, all but 3 of them male. One of the first four agricultural experiment stations in Mississippi started in Newton County.

The religious census of 1916 showed that Baptists—almost evenly divided between Southern Baptists and Missionary Baptists—made up 70 percent of all church members in Newton County. Methodists and Presbyterians accounted for most of the remainder. Notable events in the county’s religious life included the 1908 establishment of Clarke Memorial College, a Baptist institution as well as a state singing convention for gospel musicians that took place in Newton in 1934.

Civil rights leaders Charles and Medgar Evers were born in Decatur in the 1920s and attended Newton Vocational School. Eugenia Summer, born in Newton in 1923, taught at Mississippi University for Women and was a noted artist.

In 1930 Newton’s population grew to almost 23,000. The county’s farms were divided evenly between those run by owners and those operated by tenants. Corn and livestock were the primary agricultural products, followed by cotton and swine. Newton County’s twenty industrial establishments employed 434 people.

The county’s population declined to 19,517 in 1960, with whites making up two-thirds of residents, African Americans 32 percent, and Native Americans 2 percent. About a quarter of the county’s workforce labored in industry. Both men and women worked in apparel factories, while furniture production primarily employed men. Another quarter of the workforce raised livestock and mixed crops. Newton’s population remained steady through the 1980s.

Like many counties in central Mississippi, Newton’s population has remained relatively stable in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In 2010 Newton County was home to 21,720 people, 63.2 percent of them white, 30 percent of them African American, and 5 percent of them Native American.

Newton County

Nursing

Nursing practice and the people who provide care vary from generation to generation depending on society’s needs and situations. The history of nursing in Mississippi may be divided into two large chapters, each covering a century of change.

The initial chapter may be described as the pretraining period for nurses. From the early antebellum period until the 1898 opening of the first nurses’ training program in Natchez, Mississippians had extensive need for nursing care. Nurses fell into two categories, domestic and community. Domestic nurses practiced within families in times of illness, injury, or epidemic. All women were considered nurses. Their cookbooks and marriage and home medical guides were filled with sick diets, cures, and home remedies. Slaves or hired servants might assume the role of sick nurse. Families tended to provide all care when sickness struck. Domestic nurses often remain obscured in the shadows of history because their service was personal. Their practice consisted of following orders when a physician could be summoned or relying on home and folk remedies when a doctor’s care was not available.

Community nurses, conversely, served people outside of the home during times of crisis. Community nurses might list themselves in local business directories or answer calls for volunteers during epidemics. The records of the great epidemics in the 1800s list many nurses who volunteered or were paid to serve during outbreaks of yellow fever and other communicable diseases. Community nursing practices were shaped by current medical practices. For example, in the early years of the century, yellow fever victims were given no fluids but were purged, bled, blistered, and cupped as the fever developed. Nurses were expected to provide all care to patients without removing any of the bedclothes piled high even in summer in an attempt to break the fever. By the end of the century, there was less purging and blistering, and patients were given mustard baths, allowed to drink iced champagne if available, and given other fluids.

Surviving public records reveal that nursing in the community, especially during fever outbreaks, was a field dominated by African Americans, both male and female. Doctors and patients strongly preferred black nurses, believing them better suited for this type of difficult work. In addition, hiring black nurses cost less than hiring white ones.

Training programs for nurses began in the state a full twenty-five years after they were established in the northern states. In the North, the years after the Civil War were marked by movements that called for hospital reform, leading to early training programs for nurses. In Mississippi, however, former hospital matrons were coping with the problems of Reconstruction and crises from annual disease outbreaks. The state had few physicians ready to build hospitals, and limited public resources slowed the growth of a health system that would require nurses. Large family networks, the rural nature of the state, and the home focus of medical care also limited the need for trained nurses.

The second chapter in Mississippi’s nursing history opened with the creation of the nursing program at Natchez Charity Hospital in 1898. Trained nurses had to be brought to the state from other regions to lead the initial efforts. Hospitals and training programs grew rapidly between 1900 and 1920, when more than forty facilities were established. Students learned cooking, sanitary measures, and caring for equipment. They worked twelve-hour days and sporadically attended classes in the evenings. They had a half a day a week off for religious services and another partial day off to deal with personal issues.

The early hospital-trained nurses had vision and courage that came from the difficulties of their educational process. Just ten nurses from this first generation met at the Natchez Hospital in June 1911 to establish the Mississippi State Association of Graduate Nurses. They approved a code of ethics, made organizational plans, and set out to persuade the legislature to require licensing of nurses, a goal that was reached with the creation of the Mississippi Board of Nurse Examiners in 1914. Two years later the first examination was held, and the state had its first registered nurses.

The First World War stimulated interest in the field because of public image of war nursing. During the Great Depression years hospitals reduced student numbers to cut costs and hired graduates who would work for room and board, leading to the development of the idea of the staff nurse. During the Second World War the innovative cadet nursing program again stimulated nursing school enrollments, but a severe shortage followed during the 1950s as nurses left practice to marry and start families. Most of Mississippi’s registered nurses graduated from hospital diploma programs and were competent and hardworking, but the profession continued to advocate the creation of higher education programs in nursing. In 1948 the School of Nursing opened at the University of Mississippi, and the state’s first associate degree nursing program opened nine years later at Northeast Mississippi Junior College in Booneville.

In the final years of the twentieth century the profession’s focus shifted from educational change to the rapidly changing practice environment and expanding roles of the nurse. When the century opened, nurses were not considered skilled enough to manage even clinical thermometers, which remained a tool for doctors alone. By the end of the century nurses were certified to start IVs, administer medications, and resuscitate patients. With the development of nurse practitioners, advanced practice became part of the mainstream in nursing education and practice.

Nursing

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

O Brother, Where Art Thou? denotes two early twenty-first-century mass media phenomena: a film by Joel and Ethan Coen and its influential roots-music soundtrack.

O Brother, Where Art Thou? denotes two early twenty-first-century mass media phenomena: a film by Joel and Ethan Coen and its influential roots-music soundtrack. The title comes from Preston Sturges’s classic 1941 film, Sullivan’s Travels, in which it is the name of the social allegory that fictional filmmaker John L. Sullivan wishes to make to redeem a career he thinks he has wasted on light comedies.

In the 2000 film Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney) and two associates escape a 1937 Mississippi chain gang and struggle to return to excavate buried treasure on McGill’s farm before a Tennessee Valley Authority dam project floods it. Like Sullivan’s Travels, the movie follows the picaresque format of the road picture. The fugitives crisscross Mississippi at an impossible pace, make a hit recording, and alter the course of a gubernatorial campaign in which the “reform” candidate is climactically revealed to be a Klansman.

Like most Coen films, O Brother, Where Art Thou? brims with allusion. As most of the film’s promotional materials proclaimed, the plot—though much less than that of James Joyce’s Ulysses —is based on events of the first and greatest road saga, the Odyssey. John Goodman plays Cyclops, a one-eyed Bible salesman; three washerwomen singing by a stream are the Sirens; joyful southern evangelicals getting baptized in a river are the Lotus Eaters; and McGill struggles to reach his wife, Penny, in fictional Ithaca, Mississippi. Yet more complex cinematic and literary allusions abound as well. The dance of the Klansmen is lifted from the Wizard of Oz. The title is taken from Sturges’s dark satire about the relation between the literally unwashed masses (represented in the Coens’ film by any number of Mississippians) and the mass media they consume (represented here by radio, which incumbent governor Pappy O’Daniel calls “mass communicatin”). Near movie’s end, McGill floats on a coffin à la Herman Melville’s Ishmael.

Yet despite the film’s superficially comic tone, McGill’s closing prophecy that rural electrification will mean “out with the old spiritual mumbo-jumbo, the superstitions, and the backward ways” and the appearance in the South of “a veritable Age of Reason—like the one they had in France” employs a dramatic irony so heavy that in 2000 it verged on pathos. Though the depression setting softens the satire of the South, the film nods as much to contemporary events as to literature and film. At least since Barton Fink (1991), the Coen brothers have dramatized tensions and complicities between intellectuals and a mindless mob portrayed with a touch of Nazi imagery. Raised in an observant Jewish home, the Coens wrote the screenplay immediately after the Southern Baptist Convention (the Lotus Eaters) had called for the conversion of the Jews. The chief Klan character disparages Jews and lauds “heritage” and the Confederate flag, which were sources of debate in several southern states—including Mississippi—at the time of the film’s composition and remain so today. McGill’s representative rural southern sidekicks, Pete (John Turturro) and Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson), are two of the stupidest characters ever put on film, and the forward-looking McGill repeatedly explodes when confronted by other characters’ torpor and stubborn backwardness. Clooney delivers his lines in a fast-talking Kentucky accent based on his uncle’s, while Turturro, Nelson, and most of the other supporting actors strive for more Mississippian cadences and inflections.

This contrast is most evident in the film’s music. The escapees’ band, the Soggy Bottom Boys (a nod to Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs’s Foggy Mountain Boys), makes its name bringing Appalachian “hillbilly” music to notoriously unmountainous Mississippi. The Coens have called the film “a valentine to the music”—but none of it comes from Mississippi. Even the lone real-life bluesman who appears in the film, Chris Thomas King, hails from Baton Rouge. The bulk of the film’s old-timey soundtrack is performed by bluegrass and alt-country musicians and the black Nashville gospel group the Fairfield Four. If the film satirizes the mores of the Lower South, its soundtrack unambivalently lauds the music of the Upper. Effectively launched by a concert at the Ryman Auditorium in May 2000—before the film was released in the United States—the soundtrack went on to sell nearly eight million copies by 2015. Famously, it did so without the benefit of airplay on mainstream country music radio. Down from the Mountain, D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary film of the Ryman concert, was released in theaters and on DVD in 2001. The documentary’s soundtrack became another recording, its musicians toured nationally, and dozens more spinoff records were released. Bluegrass acts saw increased music sales and concert attendance as the genre succeeded the Cuban music of 1997’s Buena Vista Social Club as the nation’s “authentic” alternative music du jour.

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Oktibbeha County

Like many other Mississippi counties, Oktibbeha County was formed in 1833 from lands ceded to the United States by the Choctaw Nation in 1830. The name is said to have come from the words okti abeha bok, meaning “ice, there in the creek.” The county is the site of multiple Choctaw burial sites. Native American artifacts more than two thousand years old have been discovered near Choctaw mounds just east of Starkville, the county seat.

Located in northeastern Mississippi, Oktibbeha began as a profitable agricultural county with success in corn crops and orchard products. Although livestock did not dominate Oktibbeha’s industry, the prairie grasses and ample supply of water from the Noxubee River made the county conducive to raising cattle, mules, and horses. By the 1920s Oktibbeha became Mississippi’s main dairy producer, and the region was known as the Milk Pitcher of the South.

In 1840 Oktibbeha had 2,197 enslaved residents and 2,079 free people. The county witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of slaves in the late antebellum period, and by 1860 the county’s 7,631 slaves comprised 59 percent of the population of 12,977. Oktibbeha lost some of its territory and population with the establishment of Clay County to the north in 1872 and of Sumner County to the northwest two years later.

According to some evidence, the first church services held in the county occurred in 1835, led by Horatio Baldwell, a Presbyterian minister. Over time, Baptist churches came to dominate Oktibbeha’s religious organizations, and by 1860 Oktibbeha had thirteen Baptist churches, eleven Methodist churches, five Presbyterian congregations, and two Cumberland Presbyterian congregations.

In response to lobbying by white farmers in the Grange, the state founded Mississippi Agricultural and Mechanical College in Starkville in 1878, bringing significant changes to the community. Mississippi A&M was the state’s first land-grant college, created with Morrill Act funds, which allowed states to sell federal land to establish institutions for higher education. Classes began at the “people’s college” in 1880, though women were not admitted until half a century later.

Another major contribution to the farming industry in Oktibbeha County was the opening of the state’s first agricultural experiment station in 1888. The stations served as teaching centers where Mississippi farmers could learn new ways of selecting seed and plowing, planting, and rotating crops. In 1908 the boll weevil destroyed Mississippi’s cotton crop, and A&M extension services received funds to work to prevent similar devastations. With the help of the US Department of Agriculture and the Hatch Act of 1914, new extension agents were hired to travel throughout the state and demonstrate productive farming techniques. For more than a century, the extension services have conducted and published research on significant subjects in Mississippi agriculture—the boll weevil, dairy farming, catfish, soybeans, forestry, kudzu. The extension agents and home demonstration researchers funded by the Hatch Act operated out of offices in Starkville and maintained close connections to the university. Some prominent scholars and faculty members from this era include Dorothy Dickins, a leader in home economics research, and David Phares, author of The Farmers Book of Grasses and Other Forage Plants.

In 1900 Oktibbeha’s population topped twenty thousand, with African Americans accounting for almost two-thirds of the total. The county had a small but growing industrial sector, with 106 employees. Only 10 percent of Oktibbeha’s 3,115 African American farmers owned their land, compared to more than two-thirds of white farmers. In 1916 the majority of Oktibbeha churchgoers attended Missionary Baptist and Southern Baptist services, while many others joined Methodist Episcopal and Methodist Episcopal Church, South congregations.

In the 1930s Oktibbeha’s population declined slightly to 19,119 (11,367 African Americans and 7,752 whites). The growing college town of Starkville had a population of almost 2,600. The county’s businesses employed almost 400 workers, and Starkville’s dairy condensery (which opened in 1926) and other factories expanded manufacturing employment in the region. Agriculture remained the center of Oktibbeha’s economy, with two-thirds of the 2,827 farms run by tenant farmers.

Mississippi A&M became Mississippi State College in 1932 and Mississippi State University in 1957. The school’s notable graduates have included agricultural reformer Cully Cobb; political figures John Stennis, Sonny Montgomery, and Sharion Aycock; novelists John Grisham, Louis Nordan, and Thomas Hal Phillips; food writer Craig Claiborne; children’s author Laurie Parker; chair maker Greg Harkins; and longtime coaches Ron Polk (baseball) and Babe McCarthy (basketball). Famous Mississippi State athletes include basketball stars Bailey Howell, Jeff Malone, and Erick Dampier; football stars Eric Moulds and D. D. Lewis; and Major League Baseball players Will Clark, Rafael Palmeiro, and Jonathan Papelbon. In 1965 Mississippi State University admitted its first African American student, Richard Holmes.

Among notable Starkville natives not associated with Mississippi State University are James “Cool Papa” Bell, a Negro League baseball star, and National Football League Hall of Fame receiver Jerry Rice, who was born in Starkville and grew up in Crawford.

By midcentury, Oktibbeha County’s workers relied a great deal on Mississippi State University and other schools. In 1960 more than seventeen hundred county residents earned their living in education, giving Oktibbeha the state’s fourth-highest percentage of people with high school and college degrees. With the growth of the university and concerns connected to it, Oktibbeha County’s population soared to 36,018 by 1980.

In 2010 Oktibbeha County’s population reached 47,671 and was 59 percent white, 36.6 percent African American, and 2.4 percent Asian and Asian American, making Oktibbeha one of six counties in Mississippi with significant Asian populations.

Oktibbeha County

Panic of 1837

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Americans used the word panic to describe an economic depression. Because they associated depressions with banking crises, they evocatively labeled severe financial downturns panics and captured the popular response to currency restriction and bank closings. The Panic of 1837 signaled the start of the country’s worst depression in the nineteenth century, which wreaked havoc in Mississippi for almost ten years.

During the scant two decades that separated Mississippi’s entrance into the Union and the panic, the state grew at a remarkable pace. The development of the cotton gin and, more important, the hybridization of several varieties of cottonseed prompted East Coast residents to migrate to the southwestern frontier. Many veterans of the War of 1812 received land grants, which they exercised on the vast public domain of Mississippi. Statehood in 1817 encouraged more migrants to turn southwest, since the Union’s familiar protections and stability were now available.

But substantial growth in the state awaited the Removal of Native Americans from the vast central portion of the state. When Choctaw Removal began in 1830, white settlers traveling with their slaves flooded into the middle third of Mississippi, and when the US government removed the Chickasaw from their ancestral home later in the decade, white migration shifted to the upper third of the state. This era has been labeled the Flush Times in antebellum Mississippi.

Between 1830 and 1835 the state grew exponentially, and thirty new counties were created from Indian cession lands. As potential farmers flowed into the public domain, they brought with them a desire for land and the need for capital. But Mississippi had few banks, and for much of the first twenty years of statehood, only the Bank of the State of Mississippi stood ready to lend money. To meet the credit crisis, Mississippi chartered twenty-seven banks between 1832 and 1837. Waterworks, railroads, and insurance companies received legislative charters to function as banks. They could accept deposits and issue currency. To meet the demand for credit, these banks freely printed currency notes, frequently without the gold and silver (specie) needed to back the paper money.

Inflationary currency policy caused notes issued by most Mississippi banks to be severely discounted when not exchanged at the issuing bank. Essentially then, banks in Mississippi produced a currency that met local demand but lacked credibility outside the immediate community. By itself, the currency policy of state-chartered banks was not conducive to long-term prosperity, but the international flow of specie and federal policy hastened the demise of the Flush Times.

In the mid-1830s the international flow of gold and silver began to shift away from the United States. Great Britain had traditionally been a primary customer for American raw materials (including cotton) and supplied the United States with specie in exchange. However, in the 1830s, the British government and entrepreneurs looked to Southeast Asia for new products to buy—tea and opium. The diminution in the US specie supply rapidly became evident.

In 1836 Pres. Andrew Jackson sought to shore up the federal government’s supply of specie by issuing his Specie Circular Act of 1836, which required that all debts owed to the United States be paid in gold or silver. The regulation placed a premium on gold and silver for all manner of financial transactions. Mississippians turned to their local banks to exchange currency for specie but discovered that they had none to back the notes, and banks begin closing almost as rapidly as they opened. Currency, once readily available for conducting everyday transactions, suddenly became scarce.

Owners of businesses and farmers found themselves hopelessly in debt and unable to buy or sell goods. Official statistics about the depth of the depression are unavailable, but its effects remained evident as late as 1845. Jehu Amaziah Orr, who traveled from Jackson into northeastern Mississippi, noted countless abandoned plantations, which he described as “bits of wreckage and flotsam” that marked “the unseen graves of those who have perished there.” Courts routinely seized property, and to escape bankruptcy proceedings debtors packed their households and fled to Texas in the middle of the night, a practice so common that another resident referred to Texas as “the stronghold of evil-doers.”

The Panic of 1837 devastated Mississippi’s economy. Perhaps more important, political debate over the causes of and cure for the panic led to the development of a competitive two-party political system dominated by discussion of economic issues.

Panic of 1837

Panola County

Panola County, located in northwest Mississippi in the Mississippi Delta, was established in 1836. According to oral tradition, its name comes from an Indian term for cotton. Its county seat is Batesville, with other notable towns including Como, Crenshaw, and Sardis. Shortly after its establishment, the 1840 census found that Panola County had slightly more slaves than free people (2,415 to 2,242). Part of an agricultural economy, antebellum Panola County had no industrial or manufacturing workers.

By 1860 the growing county had 5,237 free people and 8,557 slaves. Farmers raised cotton, corn, and livestock, and Panola County ranked seventh among the state’s counties in growing potatoes. Only twelve people were employed by manufacturers. Thirteen of the county’s twenty-seven churches were Methodist, seven were Baptist, four were Presbyterian, and three were Cumberland Presbyterian.

African Americans moved to Panola and other Mississippi Delta counties in great numbers after emancipation with the hope of finding and working available land. Despite losing part of its territory to Quitman County in 1877, Panola grew to 28,352 people by 1880, with two-thirds of them African Americans. Many had moved to Mississippi from other parts of the South. Only two counties produced more cotton than Panola did, and it ranked second in the number of cattle and eighth in the production of corn. Forty-six percent of the county’s farms were run by their owners, with the rest operated by tenants and sharecroppers. Panola’s thirty-one manufacturing establishments, all located in Batesville, employed seventy men and three children.

Between 1880 and 1900 Panola’s population remained stable. Small-scale manufacturing was rapidly increasing, with eighty-five establishments employing 110 workers. Only 16 percent of black farmers owned their own land, while 47 percent of white farmers did so.

Early in the twentieth century, Panola County’s Methodists and Baptists comprised more than 90 percent of all church members. The largest groups were the Missionary Baptists (more than five thousand), the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (more than three thousand), the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church (more than two thousand), and the Southern Baptists (about sixteen hundred). Panola County also had many small but substantial groups of Presbyterians and Church of Christ members.

In 1930 Panola was home to 28,648 people, including almost 18,000 African Americans (63 percent of the population). Like several Delta counties, Panola had a low number of industrial workers—just 123. Almost 80 percent of its farms were operated by tenants, and cotton was the primary crop, followed by corn and forage crops.

Ties to the federal government brought changes to Panola County in the 1930s and 1940s. During World War II, Camp Como housed Italian and German prisoners of war. A more lasting change came with the construction of Sardis Lake, a US Army Corps of Engineers flood-control reservoir that was designed both to protect Delta agricultural land from flooding and to provide an important source for recreation, including fishing.

Though the county’s overall population numbers remained stable, in 1960 whites accounted for 44 percent of residents while the African American population declined to 56 percent. Panola remained agricultural, ranking near the top of Mississippi’s counties in growing corn and soybeans and high in the production of cotton and livestock. Textile work was the primary form of industry, and manufacturing jobs made up about 12 percent of the county’s employment.

Panola County has been the home of some uniquely creative citizens. The state’s first home demonstration agent, Susie Powell, was born in Batesville. Writer and critic Stark Young was born in Como in 1881. In the 1920s blues singer Jessie Mae Hemphill grew up near the Tate County line. Poet James Seay was born in rural Panola County in 1939. Mississippi Fred McDowell played most of his career around Como, where folklorist Alan Lomax recorded him in 1959. Hip-hop artist Soulja Boy was born in Batesville. Panola County is also the home of the Como Opera Guild and the Panola Playhouse.

In 2010, like many northern Mississippi counties, Panola County’s population was growing: its 34,707 residents constituted an increase of about 20 percent over the previous half century. The county’s racial profile shifted over this period, with whites accounting for 49.4 percent of the population and African Americans for 48.6 percent, while most of the remainder were Latinos.

Panola County

Parchman Prison

Officially known as the Mississippi State Penitentiary, Parchman Prison is one of three state prisons administered by the Mississippi Department of Corrections. Located in rural Sunflower County, it is the oldest and largest of the state’s adult penal institutions, consisting of some eighteen thousand acres of bottomland in the Yazoo Delta on which are situated eighteen housing units with a bed capacity of 5,768. Staffed by more than 1,700 employees, the penitentiary incarcerates felons of all security classifications, including males under sentence of death, and is the site at which the State of Mississippi carries out capital punishment.

With the exception of its vast acreage, far-flung physical plant, and token tribute to the ideal of penal farming, Parchman is nowadays unremarkable among American prisons, reflecting the homogenized “justice model” of criminal corrections the federal judiciary imposed during the 1970–80s. The Mississippi State Penitentiary, in fact, was the target of one such important ruling. In 1972 the US District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi found in Gates v. Collier that the institution was in violation of the First, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments. In the words of the presiding judge, subsequent judicial oversight transformed it from “a very backward, shabby, trusty-run plantation, to a modern operation.”

The prison today consists of grim structures surrounded by razor wire rising ominously from the flatlands. There are few reminders of when the institution’s land was cultivated for cotton, when convicts “under the gun” dragged their burlap sacks along the sweltering floor of the Yazoo Delta, and when “Parchman Farm” was a focus in the fiction of William Faulkner and Eudora Welty and was lamented in the music of Leadbelly, Muddy Waters, Bukka White, and a host of other blues artists.

Both the legend and actual life and labor at the penal farm were influenced profoundly by slavery, Jim Crow, and the agricultural poverty and dependence of the sharecropping system. One could argue, however, that Parchman Farm had ameliorating features that accrued to the advantage of black (if not white) convicts and that by some standards—financial productivity, rates of escape and recidivism, and absence of riots—it was also a very effective penal institution. Therein lies a paradox, and it has recently inspired lively debate among not only litigators but also historians, criminologists, journalists, and prison administrators.

The story of Parchman begins in 1900, when the state of Mississippi, following the example of the Carolinas, embraced the ideal of penal farming on public lands and concluded the first of a series of land deals delivering acreage in Sunflower County to the state’s troubled penal system. Among the lands purchased was the “old Parchman place,” a large tract that once had been owned by a prominent county family, whose patriarch, J. M. Parchman, came with the deal as the first warden.

In establishing the penal farm, state actors considered the existence of a large and rapidly growing African American convict population and the unrealized public revenues of a brutal policy that since the Civil War had delivered the captive labor of black convicts to private business interests. The idea was to terminate a scheme of penology that might well have been worse than slavery and to generate revenues for the public weal.

In 1904 Parchman Farm became the pet project of Gov. James K. Vardaman, Mississippi’s “White Chief,” who regarded the undeveloped penal farm as a possible solution to the problem of what he called “criminal negroes” who were migrating to the state’s cities, seeking “a way to live without honest toil,” and menacing “the safety of the white man’s home.” Vardaman exploited racial fears and his virtual stranglehold on Mississippi politics to carry his plan to fruition. In 1912 the chair of a visiting legislative committee expressed astonishment: “Think of 16,000 acres of land stretching out before us as level as a floor and as fertile as the Valley of the Nile, in the very finest state of cultivation,” he wrote in his official report, adding that Mississippi now had “one of the best, if not the best, Penitentiary systems in the United States.” By the end of 1914 Parchman Farm was the hub of a huge, self-sufficient plantation system, with five penal farms and two lime plants situated on 23,910 acres.

The penitentiary was organized on principles that were consistent with what had been the ideal of large-scale southern agriculture for well over a century. Front Camp, on the easternmost part of the plantation, was the axis on which everything turned. There, a central administration coordinated purchasing, allocated labor and other resources, received and processed raw cotton, and conducted sales. In 1917 Front Camp had a barnlike administration building; a pretentious “Big House” for the “super” (superintendent); a number of shabby cottages inhabited by subordinates and their families; a guesthouse, at which visiting politicians and other favored parties drank and caroused in splendid isolation; a hospital of sorts; and a rather sad chapel for employees. Immediately outside the front gate, to which nothing resembling walls or fences was attached, was a railroad depot, Parchman Station, and across the tracks were a cotton gin and warehouses.

West of Front Camp were Parchman’s field camps—the equivalents of what were known as working plantations in free-world agriculture—and to each of them was allocated acreage for the cultivation of the cash crop, cotton, and truck crops for the sustenance of the convicts. The field camps were widely dispersed over the sprawling acreage, facilitating the proper classification of “gunmen” (convicts under the gun) and confining trouble to defensible space. Field camps were equipped with “cages”—dormitories resembling military barracks—and each was supervised by a white sergeant whom the black convicts dubbed “da Main Mos’ Man.” Camp sergeants were assisted by “drivers”—white men who supervised and literally drove gunmen in the cotton rows. Black gunmen assigned them the title Cap’n. Dressed in baggy “ring-a-rounds” (uniforms with horizontal stripes), the gunmen rose before dawn, rode mules to the fields, and worked under the guns of trusties in tight files known as “long lines” until dusk, helped along by the rhythmic chants of fellow convict “callers.” Scattered about the plantation were specialized units that housed convict carpenters, convict brick masons, and others who maintained the physical plant as well as a wide assortment of plants and shops where convicts performed services. Parchman had a canning plant, a dairy, a laundry, a newspaper, and a picture show. The facility also had a women’s camp, where sewing machines hummed, producing uniforms and crude suits of clothing distributed to convicts at the time of release.

Early in the twentieth century, the state’s satellite penal farms were important pieces of the puzzle. The largest of them, the unit in Quitman County known as Lambert, absorbed whatever surplus convicts Parchman could not accommodate. The others—Oakley Farm in Hinds County, Belmont Farm in Holmes County, and Rankin County Farm—housed convicts who were judged too young, too old, too sick, or too white and socially prominent for the rigors of Parchman.

At midcentury Parchman was notable for a number of reasons, not the least of which was its size. Six full miles separated Front Camp from the back side of the penitentiary, and within the grounds were forty-six square miles of cultivated bottomland. The prison was also unique among American prisons because of its financial productivity, functioning as what one observer described as a “profit-making machine” and providing the State of Mississippi with its greatest source of income other than tax revenues. But Parchman’s most remarkable feature was its racial orientation. It was, simply put, an African American institution: the language, the music, the food, the labor, and the recreation all were distinctly African American. American penologists dubbed it the “Mississippi System.”

Whites accounted for no more than about 25 percent of Parchman’s convicts before 1972, much less earlier in the century: in the words of one employee, the white boys were “incidental.” That, to be sure, was not a coincidence. Vardaman, Parchman Farm’s philosophical and political architect, had designed the prison to be an African American institution. The goal, expressed very explicitly by the White Chief, was to inculcate among the felonious members of the black underclass habits and expectations of work that might make them responsible citizens within the confines of the state’s racial caste system.

A succession of superintendents contended that the only problematic convicts at Parchman were white men and, finding their presence at odds with the institution’s mission, did everything imaginable to get rid of them. In 1916, when the Columbia Training School was established, the penitentiary’s staff happily bid adieu to most of the white males under age eighteen. That left a large number of troublesome white men under the age of twenty-five, but they were foisted on Oakley Farm in the 1920s amid much high-sounding talk of salvaging youth gone wrong. Then, during the early 1940s, Superintendent Lowery Love began construction on but never completed a special unit for those he discreetly termed “hardened criminals”—unmanageable convicts in the white camps. In 1953, when Superintendent Marvin Wiggins reluctantly began construction on Parchman’s maximum security unit, “Little Alcatraz,” he did so because of chaos in the white cages and much bad press.

Every convict, black or white, began his sentence to “penal servitude” in Parchman’s cotton rows. There, amid searing heat and choking yellow dust, many white gunmen faltered or flat-out rebelled, whereas the majority of the black gunmen worked through the tasks of hoeing or picking. Black gunmen were encouraged to make their quotas in the rows via a series of calculated incentives, the most effective of which was the prospect of a little time with “Rosie” (convict jargon for women, but in this case specifically a prostitute) after weighing up on Saturday. Prison administration considered the ready availability of recreational sex perfectly consistent with the black man’s normal lifestyle and thus a necessary inducement for hard work. The flip side of this racial profiling mandated that white convicts had to go without. Other incentives offered solely to black convicts early on included a ration of moonshine, which was produced at the camp stills by smiling “hooch-boys,” and visitation privileges. Visitation brought black families to Front Camp on Sundays, often aboard the fabled Midnight Special, a train chartered by the state that traveled the Yellow Dog Line through the little towns of the Delta. The train, marked by its headlight, arrived at Parchman Station before dawn and was memorialized by some of the blues artists who also served as inmates. The conjugal relations allowed during “mama’s visit”—a first in American prisons—were celebrated as well.

The penitentiary was presided over by a large and almost exclusively African American force of trusties, whose elevated status was confirmed by their “up-and-downs” (uniforms with vertical stripes). These men provided security, serving quite effectively as “shooters” in the fields, where their lethal marksmanship felled more than one “rabbit in the row” (a would-be escapee). The trusties presided as bosses in the black cages as well, allied with the white sergeants and drivers in maintaining order. The trusties commanded a convict hierarchy and at times maintained the status quo by whipping recalcitrant black gunmen with their sergeant’s “strop.” Perhaps nothing says more about the Mississippi System than this ritual. While the white sergeants readily applied “Black Annie” in the white cages, where convict leadership was often counterproductive, they rarely did so in the black cages, where virtually everything was done to acknowledge and support the ascendancy of a functional prison social hierarchy. Indeed, black “cagebosses” and “canteen-men”—the white sergeants’ “Main Mos’ Snitches”—were often quite influential in the delivery of the greatest incentives of all: furloughs, suspended sentences, and even pardons.

Black men also served as middle managers in virtually all of the penitentiary’s plants and shops, supervising apprentices of their race, and managed the homes of the white employees, directing domestic staffs composed of convict underlings and caring very attentively for children. But the “Main Mos’ Trusties” were the graying black men at Front Camp. They had considerable influence, keeping the penitentiary’s financial records, allocating precious resources, and coordinating almost everything with the blessings of the super. The slow but steady evolution of these distinctly functional internal arrangements ultimately changed the nature of the institution.

The advent of parole in 1944 and probation in 1956 resulted in the departure of the penitentiary’s senior black trusties. Accompanying the resulting erosion of management and security during the 1950s, a substantial and progressive increase in the number of white commitments posed insurmountable difficulties. The solution adopted by the legislature—the construction of a maximum-security unit and the placement of a gas chamber within it—only compounded the problem by changing the penitentiary’s social chemistry. At about the same time, Mississippi’s cotton economy collapsed, producing financial deficits at Parchman, inspiring free-world complaints about the ruinous effect of convict labor on the private sector, and resulting in a decline in legislative appropriations, the degeneration of the physical plant, and mounting fiscal difficulties.

The state placed Freedom Riders in the sweltering cells of Little Alcatraz in 1961, drawing attention to the facility. Frustrated white sergeants reacted with a number of atrocities, producing unprecedented political and legal pressure from new foes, including the US 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which reminded penal administrators that they dealt with human beings, “not dumb driven cattle.”

The penitentiary was also hamstrung by a woeful void in leadership in Jackson, where state politicians condemned the federal government and never seemed to understand that a faltering penal institution patterned after an antebellum slave plantation simply would not do. Old Parchman Farm was dead in the water when Nazareth Gates and his fellow inmate-plaintiffs filed suit in US District Court in 1972: far from destroying the old penal farm, the federal judge merely presided over the institution’s autopsy while attempting to chart a course for a future that even now remains uncertain.

Parchman Prison

Paternalism

Paternalism is a term used to describe the relatively humane system or method of governance and management of individuals and societies through the guise of a father’s benevolence toward his children. This benevolent manner, however, can mask the male’s real underlying desire and intent to dominate, often characterized by intrusive and controlling behavior. The term is often used interchangeably with patriarchy. The meanings of the two words are nuanced, however, and ultimately differ. Patriarchy in its purest sense denotes absolute male authority, wherein unconditional power resides with the male head of household. The patriarchal system is thought to be paternalistic when male patriarchs exercise their absolute authority constrained by a sense of affection, compassion, and noblesse oblige toward their dependents—women, children, enslaved and free workers, and members of the larger community.

For the South, the relationship between enslaved people and the men who owned them, according to historian Eugene D. Genovese (the scholar most associated with this perspective), involved a complex set of reciprocal arrangements between masters and slaves, commonly held assumptions about what to expect, and clear constraints on the treatment of enslaved people. The end result was a social order governed by an overall paternalistic ethos. Other factors that influenced the emergence of the South’s paternalistic society included the importance of kinship relations, especially in an agrarian society; the racial assumption of the supremacy of all whites over blacks regardless of class; the cultural acceptance of the subordination of all females, children, and slaves by white men, who expected deference and faithful service; a feudal sense of honor and a dreaded fear of dishonor as a valid state of mind; an evangelical yet conservative and patriarchal religious belief that defends racial slavery; an economic- and class-based system dependent on racial slavery as its mooring; and the social expectations of a largely rural and rigidly hierarchical social order. The paternalistic rules that culturally governed the exercise of authority by white male slaveholders over almost all others in society were, it is argued, codified in law and institutionalized in custom over time.

Historians disagree about the extent to which the term paternalism describes the antebellum South. Some contend, for example, that the term’s usefulness depends on what part of the South is studied. The time period can also make a difference. Perhaps, some argue, the idea holds more validity for the Upper South and less for the Lower South. As planters (patriarchs) moved westward (that is, to the Mississippi frontier) in the 1820s, they may have lost their commitment to the gentler, kinship-enforced version of paternalism and regressed to a more tyrannical form of absolute patriarchal authority over their families and slaves. Nevertheless, over time, this form of domination marked by a sense of constraint and deference (paternalism) softened the more brutal aspects of patriarchy and helped to enlarge the arena in which servile and subordinate people participated in shaping their own lives.

Paternalism

Pearl River County

Founded in 1890 from parts of Hancock and Marion Counties, Pearl River County initially had a population of just 2,957, the smallest in the state. This small and sparsely populated county in the Piney Woods grew with the timber industry in South Mississippi.

By 1900 Pearl River County’s population had reached 6,697, with whites making up 73 percent. Only two counties had fewer acres of improved farmland. Among farmers, 84 percent of whites and 69 percent of African Americans owned their land. The county had 77 tenant farmers, the lowest number in the state except for the three counties on the Gulf Coast.

The timber industry and related economic activities were far more important than agriculture. For a small county, early Pearl River had a great deal of industry. In fact, by 1900 Pearl River had about 700 industrial employees working at thirty-two establishments, and Picayune, Pearl River County’s largest community, had become a railroad center for the South Mississippi timber industry. The Rosa timber mill, a small operation in the nineteenth century, became a major employer when L. O. Crosby Sr. and his colleagues organized the Goodyear Yellow Pine Company in 1916. The mill later expanded to become part of Crosby Forest Products. Pearl River County wood products became popular for construction throughout the country, while the Crosby family expanded into other enterprises and into local leadership.

According to the 1916 religious census, Southern Baptists made up more than two-thirds of all church members in Pearl River County, with almost all other churchgoers attending Methodist or Missionary Baptist congregations.

The county’s population grew along with the timber industry, tripling between 1900 and 1930 to 22,411. About three-quarters of the residents were white. Almost 5,000 people lived in Picayune. Pearl River County had twenty-two manufacturing establishments employing 2,254 people, the state’s third-largest number of industrial workers. Agriculture remained secondary to timber, and Pearl River was one of only six Mississippi counties where more than 70 percent of all farmers owned their land.

Theodore Bilbo, one of Mississippi’s most aggressive advocates of using racial segregation and disfranchisement to protect the privileges of white residents, grew up in the county seat of Poplarville. He died in 1947 while under US Senate investigation for using his influence to finance his new home there. In 1959 Pearl River County became the center of national attention and scrutiny when Mack Charles Parker, a young African American male, was lynched after being accused of rape.

Pearl River County has also been the home of notable writers and storytellers. Novelist James Street grew up in Lumberton and wrote numerous books set in the Piney Woods. In the 1910s S. G. Thigpen Jr. became a Picayune store owner and author, writing stories about rural life in Mississippi collected in books such as Work and Play in Grandpa’s Day. Born in Picayune in 1943, literary scholar Noel Polk was an important editor and interpreter of the works of Eudora Welty and William Faulkner. He taught at the University of Southern Mississippi and Mississippi State University. His memoir, Outside the Southern Myth, recalled his early years in Pearl River County. In addition, television star Gerald McRaney spent much of his childhood in Picayune, and in the 1980s the Pinecote Pavilion, designed by architect E. Fay Jones, opened at the Crosby Arboretum in Picayune.

In 1960 Pearl River County had a population of 22,411, with whites comprising 77 percent of the total. The county continued to rank high in the amount of commercial timberland. About a third of Pearl River’s workers were employed in manufacturing, particularly in furniture, timber, and apparel, while about 7 percent worked in agriculture. After two decades of substantial growth, Pearl River’s population reached approximately 34,000 in 1980.

Pearl River County, like many counties in southeast Mississippi, has continued to grow, and in 2010 it was predominantly white and had a small but significant Hispanic/Latino minority. Indeed, with a 150 percent increase in size since 1960, the county’s population had undergone one of the largest expansions in the state.

Pearl River County

Perry County

Located in the Piney Woods of southeastern Mississippi, Perry County was established in 1820. Named after US Navy commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, its county seat is New August (formerly Augusta). Other notable towns include Beaumont and Richton.

Perry County began with a small population of free people (1,546) and a very small population of slaves (491). Most people worked in agriculture, and just 12 were employed in commerce and manufacturing. The county’s population remained virtually the same through 1840, when the census counted 1,435 free people and 454 slaves.

The population increased through the antebellum period, but Perry County never experienced the dramatic growth common in many Mississippi counties. In 1860, 1,868 free people and 738 slaves lived in the county. At 72 percent, Perry County had the eleventh-highest percentage of free persons in the state. In 1857 famous outlaw James Copeland was hanged near Augusta.

As a small county in the Piney Woods, Perry ranked low in most agricultural categories. In 1860 its farms ranked fifty-fifth among Mississippi’s sixty counties in total value, and the county ranked in the bottom ten in the state for its livestock, cotton, and corn. It was, however, Mississippi’s second-highest producer of rice. Its people remained extremely agricultural, with only four residents working in industry—making leather, boots, and shoes. In 1860 the small county was home to five Baptist churches, four Methodist churches, and two Presbyterian churches.

By 1880 Perry County’s population had increased to 3,427, with the 2,357 white residents accounting for 69 percent of the population. Unlike most of Mississippi, Perry County had little experience with sharecropping and tenancy: more than 90 percent of the county’s farms were cultivated by their owners. Perry continued to rank near the bottom of Mississippi’s counties in farm value and production of cotton and corn, but it again ranked first in rice production.

Between 1880 and 1900 Perry’s population mushroomed to 14,682 but remained about two-thirds white. In addition, farm owning rather than tenancy remained the norm. The most dramatic economic change in the late 1800s was the rapid increase in industrial workers. By 1900, Perry ranked near the top of Mississippi counties with 842 industrial workers, most of them in timber.

The creation of Forrest County in 1908 siphoned off some of Perry County’s territory and population, and in 1930 it had 8,197 residents. As in previous years, about one-third were African American. Perhaps the most unusual feature of Perry’s demography was its sparse population: it had the fewest people per square mile in Mississippi. More a logging than farming county, Perry had a particularly high percentage of wooded land. Landownership rates for farmers remained high—68 percent.

As part of the New Deal, the US government’s Division of Subsistence Homesteads attempted to create several farm communities, and the Richton community in Perry County was the only such project ever completed. During World War II, Richton became the site of a camp for prisoners of war. The town is also home to the Mississippi Pecan Festival.

Perry County’s population increased to 8,745 in 1960 and was 72 percent white. Perry continued to have a great deal of commercial forestland, so timber and furniture made up the majority of its industrial work. While more than a quarter of the county’s workers were employed in furniture, timber, and apparel, 19 percent were employed in agriculture, primarily raising corn, soybeans, and livestock. By 1980 the county’s population neared 10,000.

Like most southeastern Mississippi counties, Perry County remained predominantly white and continued to grow through 2010, when it had a population of 12,250.

Perry County

Pig Law

On 5 April 1876, in its first session after the end of Mississippi’s Reconstruction government, the state legislature revised the state’s criminal code. The new law lowered the dollar threshold for what constituted grand larceny, an offense punishable by up to five years in prison, from twenty-five dollars to ten dollars. More drastic still, the law provided that stealing “any hog, pig, shoat, cow, calf, yearling, steer, bull, sheep, lamb, goat or kid, of the value of one dollar or more” would be punished as grand larceny. This provision gave the statute its common name, the Pig Law; made the law notorious; and earned it a prominent place in the mythology of Mississippi backwardness.

The law was blatantly racist in its targeting of cattle and swine theft, because such stealing was stereotypically considered “Negro” behavior, and whites owned the preponderance of cattle and swine. Mississippi legislators sought to protect white property down to the most insignificant monetary value while denying basic civil liberties to blacks.

Yet contrary to the claims of several influential historians, the law had a negligible effect on the size of the state’s convict population. In 1947 Millsaps College historian Vernon Lane Wharton argued that the Pig Law caused the prison population to quadruple, that the law made the convict lease system a big business in the state, and that the law’s repeal (which he misdated to 1887) immediately resulted in a decline in the prison population and thus led to the demise of convict leasing. Although many southern historians, including Fletcher M. Green, David M. Oshinsky, and C. Vann Woodward, accepted Wharton’s claims, they suffered from serious logical and factual errors. First, Wharton based his sweeping conclusions on an extremely short-term correlation derived from mismatched data sources. Because there is always a lag time between a law’s passage and its effects in law enforcement, courts, and prisons, it is most implausible that a law passed in 1876 could quadruple the prison population by 1877. Increases in the convict population between 1874 and 1877 resulted primarily from other factors (most likely an 1875 law that legalized convict subleasing). Moreover, to support his hypothesis about a causal relation between this specific law and a rise in convict population, Wharton would have had to provide evidence that any population growth consisted chiefly of persons sentenced for grand larceny, but he did not furnish any crime or sentencing data on the issue. Moreover, data show that the convict population declined by half during the relatively brief period that the Pig Law was in effect—from 1,003 convicts in 1877 to 752 by 1883 to 499 in 1888, when the law was repealed. Finally, contrary to Wharton’s argument, Mississippi did not abolish convict leasing until 1907, nineteen years after the Pig Law’s repeal.

The evidence, then, points to a narrative that runs directly counter to the one put forth by Wharton: Mississippi’s convict population declined while the Pig Law was in effect but climbed steeply after its repeal. The Pig Law has little social historical significance related to its effect on Mississippi’s convict population but is more important for cultural historical purposes as a component of the lore concerning Mississippi’s retrograde racial and social arrangements.

Pig Law

Pike County

Located in southern Mississippi, along the Louisiana border, Pike County was one of Mississippi’s original counties. Established in 1815, the county was named after explorer and US Army officer Zebulon Pike. Its county seat is Magnolia, and other towns include McComb, Osyka, and Summit.

By 1820 the county’s population consisted of 3,444 free people and 994 slaves. Agriculture dominated the economy, though 55 people worked in commerce and industry. Over the next few decades, Pike County’s population grew, primarily through an increase in the number of slaves. Pike had 3,777 free people and 2,374 slaves in 1840; those numbers had grown to 6,200 and 4,935, respectively, by 1860. Pike County’s farms raised cotton, livestock, and corn, ranking in the middle in all categories. It ranked fourth in rice production and eighth in orchard production. Forty-one men worked in twelve industrial firms, which concentrated on lumber, leather, and saddles. Typical of most Mississippi counties, Pike County had twelve Baptist churches, eleven Methodist churches, and two Presbyterian churches.

The county’s population increased dramatically after the Civil War, with 8,572 white residents, 8,112 African American residents, and 4 Native American residents in 1880. Pike remained an agricultural county, with 1,471 farms, 73 percent of them cultivated by their owners. Pike also ranked high in its production of molasses, rice, and potatoes. In contrast, the county ranked relatively low in cotton production. The lumber industry in southern Mississippi became increasingly important in the late 1880s, and in 1881 the first railroad built just for hauling timber began operating in Pike County. As a railroad hub, Pike County (especially McComb) attracted immigrants: most of its nearly 500 foreign-born residents came from Germany, Ireland, England, Sweden, and Scotland.

The population continued to increase, and by 1900 Pike County was home to 27,545 people, roughly half of them African Americans. With McComb as a railroad center, Pike was quickly becoming an industrial center for South Mississippi. In 1900 the county had 1,233 industrial workers, all but 47 of them men. Pike County employers paid the third-highest industrial wages in Mississippi. McComb was home to one of Mississippi’s first railroad workers’ unions. The census recorded 288 foreign-born residents in Pike County (the eighth most in the state). Most of the immigrants were German and English, with smaller numbers of Irish-, Italian-, and Swedish-born residents. Forty-three percent of African American farmers owned their land, as did 77 percent of white farmers.

In Pike County as in much of Mississippi, Baptists accounted for the largest number of churchgoers in the early twentieth century. According to the 1916 religious census, Missionary Baptists (more than six thousand members) and Southern Baptists (more than four thousand) constituted better than two-thirds of the county’s churchgoers. The Methodist Episcopal Church, South was the third-largest group, followed by Catholics, whose seven-hundred-plus members constituted an unusually high number for Mississippi.

The area was also home to a number of educational leaders. Eva Gordon, principal of the African American schools of Pike’s county seat, Magnolia, in the 1910s and 1920s, built up schools using the Rosenwald Fund. Gladys Noel Bates, an educator who became a civil rights activist, was born in McComb in 1920. McComb’s Vernor Smith Holmes, a member of the Board of Trustees of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning as well as a surgeon, consistently called for responsible and fair education for all state residents. Willie “Rat” McGowen, a successful basketball coach at Alcorn State University, grew up in McComb.

A handful of artists grew up in Pike County, especially in Summit. Painter and art teacher Marie Hull was a founding member and early president of the Mississippi Art Association in the 1910s. Bess Dawson, Halcyone Barnes, and Ruth Holmes made up the Summit Three, a group active in the Mississippi Art Colony in the 1940s. Much later, self-taught artist Loy Allen Bowlin of McComb constructed unique works using sequins and rhinestones to cover his home and car. Musician Bo Diddley (Otha Ellas Bates) was born in McComb in 1946 before moving with his family to Chicago.

By 1930 Pike County had grown to more than 32,000 people, with whites slightly outnumbering African Americans. It was among the state’s most densely populated counties. McComb had become a city, with more than 10,000 people, and 1,825 men and women worked in industrial jobs, the fifth-highest total in Mississippi. In 1930 Pike was home to a small but significant number of immigrants from Italy, Palestine and Syria, England, and Sweden as well as to a much larger number of people whose parents had been born outside the United States.

Pike’s population growth slowed but continued through the mid-twentieth century. In 1960 Pike County had a population of 35,063, with 56 percent of those residents whites. More than 20 percent of its workers had jobs in industry, primarily furniture and timber, apparel, and food. In addition, Pike County had two functioning oil wells. Just 8 percent of Pike’s workers were employed in agriculture, and corn, soybeans, and livestock were their primary concerns.

McComb became a center of civil rights activism, some notable opposition to the civil rights movement, and some significant civil rights era writing. Pike County was home to an active chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People led by C. C. Bryant, a group of Congress of Racial Equality activists, and a combination of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee workers from outside Mississippi and some newly inspired young people in Pike County. Teenaged protesters Brenda Travis, Hollis Watkins, and Joe Martin emerged from school protests, and Robert Moses, James Bevel, Lawrence Guyot, and Marion Barry were among the many activists who went to McComb to support voting rights and other activism. Activists opened Nonviolent High, a freedom school for students who had been kicked out of local schools for protesting segregation. Pike County farmer and activist Herbert Lee was murdered in 1961, and many other activists endured beatings, intimidation, and arrest.

Two powerful Pike County editors, Oliver Emmerich of McComb and Mary Cain of Summit, worked on opposite sides of civil rights issues, with Emmerich criticizing the Citizens’ Council and Cain condemning the federal government. Delta editor Hodding Carter’s 1965 book, Why the Heffners Left McComb, told the story of apparent moderates who had to leave the area.

Pike County’s racial profile shifted during the last half of the twentieth century, and by 2010 African Americans accounted for 51 percent of the population. Like many southern Mississippi counties, Pike’s population had increased since 1960, growing by 15 percent to a total of 40,404.

Pike County

Pontotoc County

The 1832 Treaty of Pontotoc Creek gave Pontotoc County a permanent place in the history of US-Chickasaw relations. The land around Pontotoc, in northeastern Mississippi, had for generations been one of the centers of Chickasaw life and consequently became a point of contention when white settlers wanted to move into the area. The Treaty of Pontotoc Creek led to at least three major developments: (1) widespread Chickasaw movement out of Mississippi, (2) rapid purchases of northwestern Mississippi public land by speculators, and (3) new migration into the area by whites and their slaves.

Pontotoc County was founded in 1837 and three years later had a small population of 2,898 free people and 1,593 slaves. The county was heavily agricultural, with only 31 people working in manufacturing.

By 1860 Pontotoc had become Mississippi’s ninth-largest county, with a population of 14,517 free people and 7,596 slaves. As in many northern Mississippi counties, Pontotoc’s residents concentrated on production for home consumption rather than for markets. The county ranked seventh in the state in Irish potatoes, eighth in corn, ninth in livestock, and twenty-first in cotton, the state’s leading cash crop. In 1860, 86 people worked in manufacturing, making leather, lumber, saddles, and carriages. That year, Pontotoc had fifty-six churches, among them twenty-five Baptist, sixteen Methodist, seven Cumberland Presbyterian, six Presbyterian, one Episcopal, and one Christian.

The Civil War saw significant fighting in Pontotoc County. Confederate troops moved through in December 1862 as part of Gen. Earl Van Dorn’s raid on Union supplies in Holly Springs. In late April 1863 Union colonel Ben Grierson led a destructive raid through Pontotoc County and other parts of northern and central Mississippi, hoping to divert Confederate forces from Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s assault on Vicksburg. Pontotoc native Belle Edmondson, a Confederate supporter, smuggled goods and news through Union lines.

In 1870 sections of Pontotoc County became part of Union County, resulting in a decline in Pontotoc’s population to 13,858 by 1880. The county remained agricultural, with more than two thousand farms and only 35 people employed in industry. Sixty percent of the county’s farms were cultivated by their owners. Pontotoc ranked highly in the production of wheat and corn but lower in cotton production.

In 1900 Pontotoc’s population had rebounded to 18,274, with whites comprising three-quarters of residents. About half of the county’s 2,535 white farmers owned their land, more than twice the 21 percent rate for its 833 black farmers. Pontotoc had an unusually high number of white tenant farmers—about 1,200. The county continued to have limited manufacturing activity, with only 55 industrial workers.

Churchgoing in Pontotoc County resembled that in much of northeastern Mississippi, with members primarily in the Southern Baptist Church, Missionary Baptist Church, and the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. The Colored Methodist Episcopal Church and the Presbyterian Church United States had substantially smaller numbers.

Pontotoc’s population increased slowly to about 22,000 in 1930. Whites comprised 81 percent of that total. The county remained essentially rural, with only 59 industrial workers. Most of the county’s 4,381 farms grew corn, and 63 percent were operated by tenant farmers. Beginning in 1934, Pontotoc received power through the Tennessee Valley Authority, one of the first Mississippi localities to do so.

An intriguing range of creative individuals grew up in Pontotoc County during the twentieth century. Opera singer Ruby Elzy, famous for her performances in Porgy and Bess, was born in Pontotoc in 1908. Born in 1922, novelist Borden Deal used his Pontotoc County roots in many of his works, including Dunbar’s Cove, a novel about the Tennessee Valley Authority. Artist M. B. Mayfield was born in Ecru in 1923. Born in 1939, musician Delaney Bramlett grew up in Pontotoc County. Pontotoc County was also the early home of both Gladys Smith Presley, the mother of Elvis Presley, and US senator Thad Cochran, born into a family of teachers in 1937.

Pontotoc County’s population declined to 17,232 in 1960. While the county still depended more on agriculture than most of the state, with 31 percent of its workers employed raising corn, cotton, soybeans, and livestock, industry had become crucial. In 1960 one-fourth of Pontotoc’s workforce had jobs in industry, especially apparel, furniture, and timber. The county began growing again, and the population neared 21,000 in 1980.

In a 1996 case, Herdahl v. Pontotoc County School District, judges ruled that the county schools could not hold public prayers over the intercom.

In 2010 Pontotoc’s population, like that of many other counties in northern Mississippi, had grown substantially over the previous half century, reaching 29,957. White residents accounted for 80 percent of Pontotoc’s population, African Americans for 14 percent, and Hispanics for 6 percent, one of Mississippi’s largest Latino communities.

Pontotoc County

Poor People’s Campaign

A mule train beginning in Marks, Mississippi, was one of the more dramatic features of the Poor People’s Campaign. In January 1968, with the civil rights movement losing steam, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. unveiled a new strategy to leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC): the Poor People’s Campaign would work for the passage of laws to provide jobs and better wages for all people, thus breaking the cycle of poverty.

King and other leaders imagined that the Poor People’s Campaign would begin in five major urban areas with rampant inner-city poverty. Poor people from each city would ride in covered wagons pulled by mules to Washington, D.C., and live in a tent city there, disrupting daily life until their demands were met. Marian Wright Edelman convinced Sen. Robert Kennedy to travel through the Mississippi Delta region as well, and Kennedy suggested to King that the Poor People’s Campaign should also include representatives from the Delta. King planned to have the mule train portion of the Poor People’s March on Washington begin in Marks and arrive in Washington on 2 May.

On 4 April 1968, just before the march was to start, King was assassinated. After taking a bit of time to regroup, SCLC leaders decided to continue with the plan. In early May Rev. James Bevel and other SCLC activists left Memphis for Marks, where Mayor Howard C. Langford promised to help find housing for the people gathering to begin the march. Residents of Marks secured mules and wagons. Willie Bolden, an SCLC field worker from Marks, served as wagon master, with responsibility for making sure people and animals were taken care of and reached their destination in safety and good health.

On 13 May 1968 the mule train left Marks and headed to Washington, D.C., via Birmingham and Atlanta. Participants encountered myriad challenges, including the daily upkeep and needs of both humans and animals. Marchers frequently encountered low-level harassment, such as passersby honking cars horns to scare the mules, and occasionally faced larger barriers. On 14 June in Douglasville, Georgia, state troopers stopped march participants attempting to use Interstate 20. The marchers persevered, finally reaching Atlanta long after they were already supposed to be in Washington. SCLC leaders then decided to purchase train tickets for both marchers and mules.

The mule train participants did not arrive in Washington until around 25 June 1968, missing the Solidarity Day march to the Washington Monument held on 19 June. Marchers briefly joined other residents of Resurrection City, and residents of Marks were some of the last participants to leave.

Poor People’s Campaign

Population Trends

Not surprisingly, Mississippi’s population has reflected the major developments in the state’s history. Using figures from the US Census is complicated and at times frustrating, because census takers had different questions and standards at different times. Still, statistics show the broad trends of Mississippi life, with dramatic increases in population in periods of agricultural prosperity or when land or new employment became available and declines during times of economic difficulty. Three trends stand out in the state’s population centers. First, Hinds County emerged early as a population center and remained one. Second, the other population centers shifted from southwestern Mississippi to northern Mississippi in the mid-1800s, to the Mississippi Delta in the late 1800s, and to the Mississippi Gulf Coast beginning the mid-1900s. Third, the emergence of DeSoto County, just south of Memphis, Tennessee, as the state’s third-largest county in 2010 may reflect the beginning of another trend.

Historians estimate that about 19,000 Indians, primarily Choctaw and Chickasaw, lived in Mississippi Territory at the time of the American Revolution. Early in Euro-American settlement, the population counted by US officials—free and enslaved persons but not Indians—was concentrated in the southwestern part of the area that is now Mississippi. The first census, conducted in 1792, found 4,706 whites and African Americans in the Natchez District. In 1817, when Mississippi became a state, almost 47,000 people lived there, 21,440 of them enslaved.

The most dramatic gains in population took place in the 1830s and 1840s. By the mid-1800s the free and slave population had spread across much of the state, Hinds County had emerged as a growing population center, and North Mississippi counties such as Marshall, Monroe, Lowndes, and Tishomingo had large populations. The great majority of the native populations had been forced west.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s African American migration made Delta counties—Washington, Yazoo, and eventually Bolivar and Sunflower—among the state’s most populated places. Three significant migrations of African Americans occurred. First, African Americans from Mississippi and other states moved into the Delta counties. Then, in the 1910s, outmigration during the first Great Migration resulted in the state’s first net decrease in population. And more dramatically, migration to the northern and western states in the 1940s and 1950s during the Second Great Migration shrank Mississippi’s population.

New chances for employment during and after World War II encouraged rapid population growth on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and Harrison and Jackson Counties have been among the most heavily populated parts of the state since the 1950s. In 2010 an influx of people to northern Mississippi made DeSoto the state’s third-most-populous county while most other counties in the rural Mississippi Delta, including Washington, Bolivar, Coahoma, Sunflower, and Humphreys, continued to see significant declines in population. Since the Second Great Migration began, most of these counties have lost more than half of their total population, the combined result of scarce employment opportunities and the gravitation of the younger population to urban areas.

Population Trends

Port Gibson and Claiborne County Civil Rights Movement

When Nate Jones returned to Claiborne County after serving in the US Navy during World War II, he had experienced “a little taste of freedom” and was determined to join the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and register to vote. While still overseas, he urged his wife, Julia, to pay his poll tax. Though she abandoned the attempt after a black friend warned her about possible retaliation, the Joneses saved enough money during the war to purchase a farm near Alcorn College. In the early 1950s the small Claiborne County NAACP branch, founded in the 1940s by Ernest Jones (no relation), began a limited, word-of-mouth recruitment campaign that reached Nate and Julia Jones through a neighboring farmer. They immediately joined and initiated their own quiet recruiting despite the ever-present possibility of violent and economic repercussions. Julia Jones recalled being afraid when her husband picked up their annual membership cards at Collins Barbershop. Every year, she immediately burned the cards.

In the early 1960s state NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee activist Bob Moses encouraged Nate Jones’s interest in registering to vote, holding two workshops on the subject at the Port Gibson Masonic Temple. Despite implicit white threats and repeated rejections, Jones and a handful of other local NAACP activists returned to the registrar’s office again and again. They ultimately shared their experiences with US Justice Department lawyers, who filed suit against the Claiborne County registrar as part of a broader 1962 voter registration lawsuit, U.S. v. Mississippi.

With Evers’s 1963 assassination and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s 1962 decision to focus on the Mississippi Delta, the movement appeared to bypass Claiborne County. Moreover, J. D. Boyd, president of the historically black Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College, aggressively blocked movement involvement by faculty, staff, and students, cutting off an important potential source of support. Despite the difficulties, Nate Jones and others remained determined, and in late 1965, when Medgar Evers’s successor as NAACP field secretary, his brother, Charles, initiated high-profile campaigns in nearby communities, they were ready to take a public stand.

Charles Evers began focusing on Southwest Mississippi after a Klan shooting in Natchez. On the verge of being fired after several years of contentious relations with his New York bosses, Evers sought to solidify his personal power and the NAACP’s organizational prestige by taking advantage of the newly passed Voting Rights Act, the area’s high percentage of voting-age African Americans, and the lack of organizational competition. Evers’s success in Port Gibson and nearby communities, along with the accompanying positive national media attention, secured his job.

Evers relied heavily on freelance community organizer Rudy Shields, who came to Mississippi from Chicago and quickly earned a reputation for effectiveness, dedication, and fearlessness. In late 1965 and early 1966, Shields began organizing the Port Gibson movement, working closely with longtime underground NAACP members including Nate Jones as well as activist women and high school students. Together they rejuvenated and expanded the NAACP branch, which quickly grew to seventeen hundred members (more than 40 percent of them blacks over age twenty-one), and spearheaded an extensive campaign that increased the number of registered African American voters from a handful in late 1965 to more than twenty-six hundred (a decisive electoral majority) by May 1966. By early March of that year, with Evers as the featured speaker, weekly mass meetings and marches drew hundreds of enthusiastic participants, and Evers initiated protest marches aimed both at Alcorn College’s substandard resources (a result of Mississippi’s Jim Crow higher education policies) and at Boyd’s heavy-handed, dictatorial policies, which, among other things, isolated the campus from civil rights activism. The Alcorn protests culminated on 4 and 5 April as thousands of African Americans from Claiborne and adjacent Jefferson County gathered near campus. While lawyers battled in court over whether protesters could march on campus, large numbers of lawmen blocked the protesters from entering the college grounds. After two days of peaceful rallies, police officials gave demonstrators one minute to disperse before wading into the crowd with billy clubs and tear gas. Despite considerable national media attention and years of related legal action, this police riot essentially ended the Alcorn protests.

A few days earlier, on 1 April, the Port Gibson NAACP had initiated a boycott against white merchants after several weeks of unsuccessful negotiations with white business and civic leaders. The black community had issued more than twenty demands, including the immediate desegregation of public accommodations (as mandated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964); the addition of blacks to community boards and juries and hiring of blacks as policemen, sheriff’s deputies, and local business and government officials; and the extension of courtesy titles such as Mr. and Mrs. to African Americans. Though the boycott received widespread support from African Americans, Evers, Shields, and their allies also used peer pressure and coercion to ensure almost 100 percent compliance. After a ten-month standoff, during which time several white merchants went out of business rather than negotiate with African Americans, most merchants agreed to use courtesy titles and hire African American clerks in exchange for an end to the boycott. Those who refused remained targets of an ongoing selective-buying campaign.

By this time, the local movement was looking to the 1967 countywide elections, hoping to translate the overwhelming black population majority into political power. Despite significant white resistance, Claiborne County blacks were more successful than most across the state, electing four blacks to political office, including Geneva Collins as chancery clerk and William Matt Ross to the powerful board of supervisors. By 1975 blacks won twenty-three of thirty-two county elective offices, including a majority on the board of supervisors and every countywide position except sheriff. The Claiborne County movement’s political accomplishments reflected Evers’s popularity as a political boss as well as Shields’s grassroots organizing skill. A generation of skilled local activists mentored by Shields continued organizing after he moved on to other Mississippi communities.

The 1967 boycott settlement and elections brought the mass movement phase of the Claiborne County movement to an end. However, conflicts between African Americans and whites persisted as the former sought to achieve full citizenship rights and the latter clung to inherited power. For example, white officials turned down millions of dollars in federal funding rather than use it to improve public services for African Americans and allow a related annexation that could strengthen black voting power in Port Gibson. Similarly, white leaders turned African Americans away from white churches, removed drugstore seating rather than integrate, and fled the public schools when the US Supreme Court required a single, integrated system. In April 1969 a white police officer with a reputation for racist violence shot and killed an unarmed African American man on his front porch. Blacks reacted by reinstating the boycott against all-white merchants. White merchants, encouraged and supported by the Citizens’ Council, responded by filing suit against the NAACP and more than one hundred Claiborne County African Americans, seeking immediate injunctive relief and more than $3.5 million in damages. The case, Claiborne Hardware, et al., v. NAACP, et al., spent thirteen years winding its way through the state and federal court systems. In 1976 the Mississippi Supreme Court awarded the merchants more than $1 million in damages; six years later, the US Supreme Court unanimously reversed the decision, affirming protesters’ right to use economic boycotts for political goals.

The Claiborne County movement is best known for the boycott and related litigation and for its association with Charles Evers. It is, however, probably most important for what it reveals about the ways that African Americans challenged entrenched white power—through voter registration, boycotts, aggressive armed self-defense, and the persistent, determined insistence that whites treat them as equals—and the ways whites clung to power and privilege. In many ways, the movement was a struggle over power and was largely the work of long-term local activists like Nate Jones, who, in the words of NAACP president James Dorsey, “fought for those things that are right, those things that are good and those things that are just.”

Port Gibson and Claiborne County Civil Rights Movement

Poverty Rate, Twenty-First Century

Ranking first among the nation’s fifty states is usually a matter of much celebration. But not when the issue is poverty. Mississippi has the highest percentage of residents living below the poverty line. Though the state has made important advances in job creation and expansion, improved education, strengthened the quality of the available health care, and accelerated the adoption of information technologies by public and private sector entities, these positive changes have not translated into substantial declines in Mississippi’s poverty rate. In 2014 21.5 percent of Mississippians remained poor, a figure that represents more than 623,000 people and is significantly higher than the 14.8 percent recorded for the nation as a whole. And poverty rates are much higher among Mississippi’s African American, Latino, and Native American communities than among whites and Asian Americans.

A logical beginning point for the discussion of poverty is to specify the manner in which poverty is measured in the United States. While one could assume that the cost of living in Mississippi would be quite different from that of California or New York, the reality is that the process for determining poverty rates for individuals and households is identical in all forty-eight contiguous states. Poverty thresholds represent the amount of “money income” needed to support families whose members are of different ages and of various sizes. Money income includes earnings, unemployment compensation, workers’ compensation, social security, Supplemental Security Income, public assistance, veterans’ payments, survivor benefits, pension or retirement income, interest, dividends, rents, royalties, income from estates, trusts, educational assistance, alimony, child support, assistance from outside the household, and other miscellaneous sources. It does not include noncash benefits such as food stamps, Medicaid, and housing assistance. Poverty thresholds are set at three times the cost of a minimally adequate diet. Families whose pretax money income falls below the poverty threshold are considered poor. Poverty thresholds represent key pieces of data employed by the US Census Bureau to estimate poverty levels among a variety of populations (such as the elderly, children under eighteen years old, women, or racial/ethnic minorities). Table 1 illustrates 2012 poverty thresholds for families of various sizes.

Poverty rates can vary significantly when examined by key demographic and geographic factors. Race, age, family structure and composition, educational attainment, and place of residence are important attributes that affect the chances that persons or families will find themselves falling below the poverty line. Table 2 highlights the 2014 poverty rates for demographic groups in Mississippi. As the table illustrates, race clearly plays a role in poverty: African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans are more likely to live in poverty. In addition, children, women, and people who lack high school diplomas also have higher poverty rates.

Area of residence also plays a role in the likelihood of poverty. As table 3 shows, poverty rates for Mississippi counties in 2014 ranged from 9.9 percent (DeSoto County) to 47.9 percent (Jefferson County). Poverty rates are higher in the Delta counties and in the Mississippi River counties south of Vicksburg. Rural counties also have higher poverty rates than metropolitan areas.

Given the entrenched nature of poverty in Mississippi, finding the right mix of solutions to reduce the number of people and families in poverty poses a daunting challenge. The numerous strategies for alleviating poverty include investing in education, enhancing workforce skills, improving child care and transportation support, diversifying local economies, and developing regional collaboration among local governments.

Poverty Rate, Twenty-First Century

Poverty, Antebellum White

One of the enduring images of the Old South is of the southern poor white. Commentators, writers, and historians have used “poor whites” as caricatures. Southern literature and historiography present powerful and divergent images of poor whites as everything from a dissolute and lazy underclass to the respectable “plain folk” of the Old South. Antebellum Mississippi (as well as the rest of the South) clearly had the latter and no doubt had the former, but these images do very little to help us understand the reality of white poverty at the time.

Antebellum Mississippi had only limited poverty, in part as a consequence of the newness of Euro-American settlement in the area—less than fifty years. As a rural, agrarian state, antebellum Mississippi did not experience significant urbanization, industrialization, and immigration, the prime contributors to poverty in nineteenth-century America. The poor were often mobile and thus invisible to the historical record. Regardless, antebellum Mississippi had no distinct poor white class; rather, individual Mississippians were poor. Their lives were obscure in the extreme but doubtless full of struggle and hardship. According to John Munn, a New Yorker who lived in Mississippi for fifteen years, “It is a remarkable feature of the society in the slave states, that a poor man—that is an object of charity—is seldom or ever seen, the sight of squalid poverty is rarely experienced.”

An understanding of poverty and the identification of the poor in the decade before the Civil War can be gleaned from manuscript census returns, tax records, board of police records, and anecdotal fragments from personal journals, letters, newspaper articles, and court records. These documents suggest that poverty was the condition of persisting propertylessness. Land or other forms of personal property were essential for economic and social success, and the absence of property signaled socioeconomic failure. Studies of adult males with stable residences in central Mississippi between 1850 and 1860 suggest that the acquisition of real and personal property was the norm. The small percentage of adult men who failed to acquire property can be considered poor.

A survey of propertyless workers in antebellum Mississippi also reveals the array of low-status jobs that sustained poorer Mississippians. Some scholars suggest that slavery degraded all labor, black and white, but most southerners labored hard and productively throughout their lives. Poorer Mississippians worked as teamsters transporting cotton. Ditchers (mostly Irish immigrants) drained swamps and built levees to open lands to farming. Woodcutters supplied steamships on the Mississippi River. Charcoal burners labored in the Piney Woods. Draymen moved cargo on the wharfs at Natchez. Others worked as shingle makers, raftsmen, herders, hunters, or fishermen. Most poor Mississippians were tenants or farm laborers. Some were squatters on small subsistence farms. While many in antebellum Mississippi held menial jobs and were propertyless at times during their lives, persistence in these conditions was uncommon. All evidence suggests that those who were poor struggled but functioned and participated in the state’s economic, political, and social life.

The best suggestion of real poverty in antebellum Mississippi comes from the evidence on paupers—the public dependents who received poor relief from Mississippi counties. For some, age or calamity created a poverty that became destitution. For those who could not sustain themselves, state law obliged county boards of police to serve as the “overseers of the poor.” This system of poor relief provided generously for those few people deemed the “deserving poor.” Census data from 1850 and 1860 record only 297 individuals receiving some form of public support as paupers. Almost half were elderly, while the rest were orphans, widows, disabled persons, and single women—people who lacked family to take responsibility for them.

Poverty, Antebellum White

Prentiss County

By the time Prentiss County was founded in northeastern Mississippi in 1870, the area had already seen a number of important historical events. Home to the Chickasaw and formed from Tishomingo County land, Prentiss County was the site of the ferry business operated by George Colbert (Tootemastubbe), a powerful Chickasaw leader in the early 1800s. The county was named for lawyer and politician Seargent Smith Prentiss, and the county seat is Booneville.

In June 1864 Union and Confederate troops met near Baldwyn in the Battle of Brice’s Cross Roads. There, Union forces attempted to stop Confederate troops led by Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest from leading attacks on Union supplies and transportation facilities. The battle caused the deaths of more than two thousand Union soldiers and was a victory for Forrest’s troops. Citizens of Prentiss County later played important roles in remembering the Civil War, first when locals made the unique decision to rebury Confederate dead in a special cemetery in Booneville and later when women in Baldwyn organized one of Mississippi’s first chapters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1894.

Prentiss County began as an agricultural county with an 1880 population of 12,158. About 80 percent of the residents were white. Its farmers practiced mixed agriculture, concentrating on grains, livestock, cotton, and tobacco. Its twenty-four manufacturing firms were small and employed just thirty-eight men.

By 1900 Prentiss County was home to 15,788 people. Industrial growth was substantial, with fifty establishments employing 143 workers. As in much of Mississippi, a substantial difference existed between the landownership rate for white farmers (about 50 percent) and the rate for their African American counterparts (11 percent).

In the early twentieth century, Baptists and Methodists made up more than 90 percent of Prentiss County’s church members. In the 1916 religious census, the largest groups of churchgoers belonged to the Methodist Episcopal Church, South; the Southern Baptist Convention; the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church; and the Missionary Baptists.

By 1930 the Prentiss County population had reached 19,265. Like much of northeastern Mississippi, Prentiss County was overwhelmingly white (87 percent). The census counted only two immigrants—one each from Scotland and England. The county had no urban population, and almost two-thirds of the county’s 3,713 farms were operated by tenants. Corn and cattle were the most important farm products. Prentiss was one of the early counties to receive power through the Tennessee Valley Authority.

In 1929 the Mississippi State Medical Association inaugurated publication of a journal, Mississippi Doctor, in Booneville. In 1948 Northeast Mississippi Junior College was founded in Booneville, and in 1957 it began offering the state’s first associate degree in nursing.

Notable natives of Prentiss County include Elijah Pierce and Orma Rinehart “Hack” Smith. Born near Baldwyn in 1892, Pierce became an extraordinary sculptor who used wood to create artworks with religious themes. Smith, born in Booneville in 1904, became a US district judge who oversaw cases involving the integration of Mississippi’s schools.

Between 1930 and 1960 Prentiss County’s population declined to 17,949, with whites continuing to make up close to 90 percent of county residents. By 1960 more than 30 percent of the workforce was employed in manufacturing, with most women making clothing and men building furniture and harvesting timber. Agriculture accounted for a quarter of the county’s workers, who raised corn, soybeans, and livestock. By 1980 the population had risen to 24,025.

In 2010 Prentiss, like most northeastern Mississippi counties, remained predominantly white and growing, with a population of 25,276.

Prentiss County

Quitman County

Quitman County was established in 1877 from parts of four other Delta counties: Tallahatchie, Tunica, Panola, and Coahoma. The bill to establish Quitman County was introduced by Leopold Marks, a Jewish state legislator, for whom the county seat is named. The county itself was named for Mississippi governor John A. Quitman.

In the 1880 census, Quitman County was home to 815 African Americans and 592 whites. The county had sixty-two farms and plantations with an average size of 417 acres, a figure far higher than the Mississippi average of 156 acres. Quitman County farmers grew cotton and grain and raised livestock. Leopold Marks allowed the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad to come through his plantation free of charge to encourage growth in the area.

By 1900 Quitman County’s population had reached 5,435 and was 77 percent African American. Only 9 percent of the 812 African American farmers owned their land, while about one-third of white farmers did so. Quitman had the fewest industrial workers of any Mississippi county.

The 1916 religious census counted thirty-six hundred Missionary Baptists, a historically African American group, and no more than five hundred members of any of the county’s other significant groups, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and the Southern Baptists.

Quitman County’s population grew steadily in the early twentieth century. Its 1930 population of 25,304 was 69 percent African American. The county had no urban center and only twenty-seven industrial workers. In Quitman and six other Delta counties, tenants operated more than 90 percent of all farms. Cotton was the dominant crop. In the 1920s and 1930s Quitman County had several of Mississippi’s first aerial crop dusting services, which worked for large landowners. Ninety-two percent of Quitman’s farms were smaller than fifty acres, far higher than the state average of 72 percent.

Charley Pride, one of the first African American stars of country music, was born in 1938 in the Quitman County community of Sledge. Johnnie Billington, born in Crowder in 1935, performed with numerous blues musicians before returning to the Delta and setting up programs to teach the blues to children. Blues musicians Earl Hooker and Albert “Sunnyland Slim” Luandrew were born in Quitman County and moved north to Chicago.

By 1960, following the Great Migration from the Mississippi Delta, Quitman’s population had declined to 21,019 but remained about two-thirds African American. Quitman also had a small population of Chinese immigrants. County farmers produced the sixth-most cotton and soybeans in the state, and almost 60 percent of the county’s workers were employed in agriculture. The small but growing industrial workforce concentrated on furniture and timber products. The county had clear educational problems, as Quitman residents trailed all but one other county with just 6.7 median years of education.

During the 1960s Quitman County was a noted site of both rural poverty and organized efforts to fight that poverty. In 1967 activist Marian Wright arranged for Sen. Robert Kennedy to tour Quitman to see the seriousness of poverty in the Delta. Martin Luther King Jr.’s final civil rights initiative, the Poor People’s Campaign, in which residents formed a mule train to travel to Washington, D.C., to demand better jobs and wages, began in Marks in 1968.

As in most of the rest of the Delta, Quitman County’s population declined over the second half of the twentieth century but remained predominantly African American. According to the 2010 census, Quitman had just 8,223 residents, a decrease of more than 60 percent over the preceding half century.

Quitman County

Rankin County

Founded 1828, Rankin County is located in central Mississippi and was formed from part of Hinds County. Named for political figure Christopher Rankin, the county is located on Pearl River. Its county seat is Brandon, and other communities and towns include Flowood, Pearl, Richland, Florence, Pelahatchie, and Puckett. Two important Mississippi institutions, the Piney Woods Country Life School and the Mississippi State Hospital at Whitfield, are located in Rankin County. Perhaps just as important is the county’s recent shift away from agriculture to become a highly populated suburban area.

In its first census in 1830, the small county had only 1,697 free people and 386 slaves. It grew quickly and by 1840 had 2,780 free people and 1,851 slaves. The population continued to increasing, reaching 13,635 in 1860, when 52 percent of residents were enslaved.

The county’s farmers practiced mixed agriculture, growing cotton, corn, rice, and potatoes and raising substantial numbers of livestock. The county’s thirteen lumber mills, thirteen flour mills, and handful of other enterprises employed a total of 120 men and 1 woman. Of the county’s eighteen churches in 1860, eleven were Baptist, six were Methodist, and one was a Christian Church.

The stories of two lawyers help tell the county’s history. Brandon attorney Robert Lowry (1829–1910) became a Confederate brigadier general, a state legislator, and ultimately the governor of Mississippi from 1882 to 1890. Samuel Alfred Beadle (1857–1932) was born a slave in Georgia, moved to Rankin County, received legal training, and in 1884 became one of the few African Americans in the state with a law license. Beadle later moved to Jackson to practice law and to write fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

Rankin County’s population increased to 16,752 in 1880 and to almost 21,000 two decades later. The county remained primarily agricultural, and African Americans made up about 60 percent of the population. More than 70 percent of the 1,436 white farmers owned their land, nearly three times the rate for the county’s 1,962 black farmers. Industry grew slowly, with forty-four establishments employing eighty-four workers in 1900. In 1909 Laurence C. Jones started the Piney Woods School, an experimental institution near the Simpson County line that continues to educate students more than a century later.

According to the religious census of 1916, three-quarters of Rankin County’s church members were Baptists, divided almost evenly between Missionary and Southern Baptists. The other leading group was Methodists, most of them members of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South.

Among the wide range of creative individuals who grew up in Rankin County were musician and instrument maker Otha Turner, born in 1908; blues musician Elmore James, born in 1918 near Richland; and football star Frank “Bruiser” Kinard, born in 1914 in Pelahatchie. All developed their talents outside Rankin County.

In the early twentieth century, Rankin County’s population steadied at around 20,000, with African Americans accounting for about 55 percent of that total. By 1930 the county had 973 industrial workers. Despite its location adjacent to Hinds County, with its urban center of Jackson, Rankin had no urban population. Instead, its primary economic activity remained farming, with both tenants and landowners raising cattle, corn, and cotton.

In the 1920s the state moved the Mississippi State Insane Asylum from Jackson to Rankin County and renamed the town where it was located in honor of Rankin native Henry Whitfield, who served as governor from 1924 to 1926.

Between 1930 and 1960 Rankin County’s population increased to 34,322, with the number of African American residents declining while the number of whites more than doubled to account for 63 percent of the total. In 1960 nearly a quarter of Rankin’s workers were employed in industry, primarily furniture and timber, and more than 1,000 of the county’s residents worked in hospitals and health care. The once agricultural county still had farmers, but by 1960 they comprised just 13 percent of Rankin’s workforce. The population continued to increase, reaching almost 44,000 in 1970 and topping 69,000 a decade later.

Brandon native Mary Ann Mobley became Miss America in 1959 and went on to a career as a singer and actress. In 1978 Barney McKee, then director of the University Press of Mississippi, and his wife, Gwen McKee, started Brandon’s Quail Ridge Press, which initially published Mississippi cookbooks and has since expanded.

Rankin County’s 2010 population of 115,327 represented an increase of 312 percent since 1960, the second-highest growth in Mississippi over the period. Overwhelmingly white, the county had an African American population of just under 20 percent of the total and a small but significant Hispanic/Latino minority.

Rankin County

Religion and the Civil Rights Movement

Religion gave many African Americans, among them Fannie Lou Hamer, the inspiration and strength to participate in the civil rights movement, and the movement often organized through the church. Nevertheless, the institutional black church and its leaders generally stood back from the movement, particularly before its enlargement in the early 1960s. In both rural and urban Mississippi, prominent whites made donations to the churches of more amenable African American preachers and gave such clergymen prestige by recognizing them as black community leaders. A few African American ministers, most notably Greenville’s H. H. Humes, the president of the 387,000-member General Missionary Baptist State Convention, accepted payment from the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission as informants. While few black clergymen endorsed Jim Crow, pragmatism made most pastors wary of challenging it. Often dependent on whites for day jobs, ministers were reluctant to risk their incomes and their physical safety as well as that of their churches. Predominantly rural, Mississippi lacked a cadre of urban-based activist clergymen. In more prestigious churches, economically insecure middle-class blacks constrained ministers who might otherwise have supported the movement.

Although small in number, a few clergymen, such as R. L. T. Smith of Jackson, Aaron Johnson of Greenwood, and Tougaloo College chaplain William A. Bender, were active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which expanded in post–World War II Mississippi. Belzoni minister George W. Lee, a vice president of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership and an NAACP member, was shot and killed in 1955 for encouraging black voter registration.

Most of Mississippi’s white clergymen and laypeople favored segregation. The national Episcopalian, Methodist, Southern Presbyterian, and Southern Baptist denominations supported the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, but their Mississippi branches, except for the Episcopalian Church, refused to follow them. Several prominent Baptist and Presbyterian state leaders condemned their denominational bodies for endorsing Brown, and many Protestant churches adopted segregationist resolutions, in some cases claiming biblical justification. Laypeople also organized segregationist pressure groups. Within a year of issuing a January 1963 statement that opposed racial discrimination, all but seven of the twenty-eight young white Methodist signatories had left their pulpits under pressure. Although the Catholic Church was nominally integrated, Bishop Richard O. Gerow, like most other moderate church leaders in Mississippi, remained silent about segregation.

In the early 1960s, activists in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality, many of them black southerners, recruited movement participants through church networks in which women played a major role. Congregants sometimes pressured resistant ministers and members to open their churches to the movement. Bishop Charles F. Golden of the Nashville-Carolina Area in the Methodist Church’s all-black Central Jurisdiction directed Mississippi’s black Methodist churches to allow civil rights meetings. In 1963 black churches and ministers played a crucial role in protests in Jackson.

African American churches, within and outside the movement, suffered racist attacks across Mississippi, especially during the 1964 Freedom Summer Project. Although the state’s leading denominations formed a biracial Committee of Concern that helped rebuild forty-two black churches, white denominations opposed the Delta Ministry, a long-term civil rights project begun by the National Council of Churches in 1964. More black churches became open to the movement, but their ministers remained cautious. However in Greenwood, Rev. William Wallace of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, Rev. M. J. Black of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and Father Nathaniel Machesky, a white Catholic priest, led a mostly successful boycott in the late 1960s. In 1969 black and white religious leaders formed the Mississippi Religious Leadership Conference and called for acceptance of imminent public school desegregation.

Religion and the Civil Rights Movement

Republic of New Afrika

A black separatist organization, the Republic of New Afrika (RNA), was born in March 1968, when five hundred black nationalists met in Detroit. The RNA’s avowed purpose was to culturally and literally separate African Americans from mainstream American culture and to set up a new nation consisting of five states in the South—Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina.

The 1968 Detroit conference chose outspoken black nationalist Robert Williams to serve as the RNA’s provisional president. As head of the Monroe, North Carolina, chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, he had advised his constituency to use weapons to defend themselves against racial violence. Williams had fled the United States in 1961 following allegations that he had kidnapped and robbed a white couple. After several years of self-imposed exile in Cuba and China, Williams returned to the United States.

His tenure as RNA president was short. Brothers Richard and Milton Henry took over the group and opted to begin RNA operations in Mississippi. Richard Henry became president of the new nation and changed his name to Imari Abubakari Obadele to symbolize his ancestral affinity with the African diaspora; Milton took the name Gaidi Obadele. As the leaders of the RNA the Obadeles requested that the US government cede the states of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina to the organization, along with four hundred billion dollars in reparations. Although Imari Obadele personally delivered his demands in a memorandum to the US State Department, his efforts were never acknowledged. Undaunted, he and the RNA purchased twenty acres of land from Lofton Mason in Bolton, Mississippi, and named the parcel El Malik, in honor of El-Hajj Malik El Shabazz (Malcolm X).

Since the US government refused to acknowledge the RNA’s demands, the group began to organize a plebiscite. The RNA anticipated an overwhelming vote in favor of separation and planned to use the vote as leverage in its effort to secure the desired territory. Leaders noted that most African Americans lived in the South and chose to start work in Mississippi because African Americans constituted 40 percent of the state’s population. The RNA believed that if its government became functional, African Americans would migrate south from the northern United States and provide a large black vote in support of the proposed plebiscite. If the plebiscite did not succeed, the RNA and its military wing, the Black Legion, anticipated fighting a guerrilla war against the US government until the group garnered international support for its cause.

In Mississippi, the RNA made a number of converts and was growing increasingly popular, but authorities soon began to resist. The City of Jackson and the Federal Bureau of Investigation began surveillance of the organization, culminating in an early morning raid on 18 August 1971 by local and federal authorities on the RNA’s main compound. The resulting shootout left one Jackson police officer dead and two federal agents wounded. Eleven members of the RNA were subsequently indicted on charges of murder. Several of the defendants, including Imari Obadele, were convicted on the murder charges and sentenced to life in prison. With their leaders incarcerated, members of the RNA began to campaign for their freedom, banding together with other nationalistic groups.

The RNA’s separatist movement was never fully realized, and the government against which members fought quelled their dreams of nationhood.

Republic of New Afrika

Scott County

Scott County was founded in 1833 and named for Gov. Abram M. Scott. Forest is the county seat, and other communities include Morton, Sebastopol, and Lake. In its first census in 1840, the central Mississippi county had one of the state’s smallest populations, with 1,191 free people and 462 slaves.

By 1860 Scott County recorded 5,180 free people and 2,959 slaves. Still relatively small, it ranked in the bottom third of Mississippi counties for agricultural production. The county’s five lumber mills employed thirty-one industrial workers. The county also had fourteen churches—eight Baptist, four Methodist, and the state’s only two Lutheran churches.

By 1880 Scott County was home to 10,845 people: 6,633 whites, 4,132 African Americans, and 80 Native Americans. Landowners cultivated 61 percent of the county’s farms, and few of the county’s residents worked in industry.

Scott County’s population continued to grow, and by 1900 it had 14,316 residents. A majority of Scott’s farmers owned their land, though 68 percent of white farmers did so, compared to just 47 percent of African American farmers. Industrial establishments employed fifty-nine workers, all but two of them male. According to the 1916 religious census, most county residents were Missionary Baptists, Southern Baptists, or members of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South.

By 1930 Scott County’s population topped 20,000, with whites accounting for 60 percent of residents. The county’s sixteen manufacturing establishments, including some lumber mills, employed more than 900 workers, and Scott’s 3,540 farms were run by a combination of tenant farmers (52 percent) and owners (48 percent). Bienville National Forest, established in 1936, provided 178,000 acres of land for fishing, hiking, and camping.

Blues musician Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup was born in Forest in 1905. Crudup became known as the Father of Rock and Roll after three of his songs were recorded by Elvis Presley in the 1950s. Born in Morton in 1968, Angela Boyd moved to California after graduating from high school and pursued a career in R&B music and dance under the name B Angie B, later collaborating with pop star MC Hammer.

Scott County’s population grew only slightly in the mid-twentieth century. In 1960 whites made up 62 percent of the residents, and African Americans 38 percent. The county was also home to 46 Native Americans. About 30 percent of the county’s workers remained employed in agriculture, primarily raising corn, soybeans, and livestock, and 20 percent worked in manufacturing, especially food products.

Two important figures in Mississippi’s political and legal responses to the civil rights movement came from Scott County. Erle Johnston moved to Forest to work for the Scott County Times, a newspaper he later purchased. In the early 1960s he served as the public relations director for the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, the spying and propaganda organization that sought to discredit civil rights activists. Johnston and his wife, Fay, continued to work at the newspaper, and he served as mayor of Forest in the 1980s. US district judge Sidney Carr Mize, born in Scott County in 1888, ruled in Meredith v. Fair (1962) that the University of Mississippi had not discriminated against James Meredith because of issues of race. That decision was soon overturned.

In the 1970s B. C. Rogers Poultry in Morton began hiring Mexican and Mexican American workers for its plant. Those workers did not remain at B. C. Rogers, in part because efforts to organize a union failed, but other employers began to recruit Hispanic workers. Like many counties in central Mississippi, in 2010 Scott County had a small white majority and a significant African American minority and had shown an overall increase in size since 1960. The county’s large Hispanic/Latino minority accounted for nearly 11 percent of the 28,315 residents.

Scott County

Sharkey County

Sharkey County is likely known most for the origins of the teddy bear and the birth of Muddy Waters. Yet the county has a long history of human settlement dating at least to the Middle Woodland period. An early indicator of settlement is the Little Spanish Fort, a ceremonial site built of earth, six feet high and two thousand feet in diameter. It, along with related Yazoo Basin sites, provides a way to understand a roughly two-thousand-year-old culture.

Part of the Lower Mississippi Delta, the region that became Sharkey County was a river area that in the early to mid-1800s concentrated on cotton, slavery, and relatively little else. Founded in 1876 from parts of Issaquena, Warren, and Washington Counties, Sharkey County began as an area with large numbers of African Americans and a high concentration of cotton on large plantations. In the county’s first census in 1880, 4,893 African Americans made up 77 percent of Sharkey’s population. The average farm size of 540 acres was among the largest in the state. The 1880 census recorded no manufacturing activity. The county was named for judge and governor William L. Sharkey. Its county seat is Rolling Fork, and communities include Anguilla and Cary.

Like much of the Delta, Sharkey County grew dramatically in the late 1800s. By 1900 the county had 12,178 residents, 88 percent of them African Americans. Sharkey was a rural county dominated by tenancy and sharecropping. Though whites made up a small percentage of the population, more whites than African Americans owned land. Ninety of the county’s 222 white farmers (41 percent) owned their land, while only 73 of 1,821 black farmers (4 percent) did so. Agriculture that used tenant farmers and sharecroppers usually produced large numbers of farmers and small farm sizes, and in 1900 the average Sharkey County farm was only fifty-five acres. Industry was growing slowly, with forty-nine firms employing sixty-two workers.

According to the 1916 religious census, 80 percent of Sharkey County church members belonged to Missionary Baptist congregations. Other groups were the African Methodist Episcopal Church; the Methodist Episcopal Church, South; the Southern Baptist Convention; and the Presbyterian Church, U.S.

Bears roamed the much of the wooded areas of the Mississippi Delta, attracting fascination and sport from visiting hunters. In 1902 Pres. Theodore Roosevelt traveled to Sharkey County to hunt bears. Holt Collier, an extraordinary hunter and guide, secured one bear, and some guides tied it to a tree. However, Roosevelt refused to shoot the bear because he considered those circumstances unsportsmanlike, and the incident inspired a political cartoon by Clifford Berryman in the Washington Post. Morris Michtom saw this cartoon and designed a toy, “Teddy’s Bear.” Sharkey County now sponsors an annual festival, the Great Delta Bear Affair.

Bluesman McKinley Morganfield was born in 1913 and grew up in Rolling Fork before moving farther north, first in Mississippi, and then to Chicago. Under the name Muddy Waters, he changed the blues world with a new style associated with the electric guitar. Gospel singer Willie Mae Ford Smith was born in Rolling Fork in 1904 and like Muddy Waters traveled widely before and during her musical career. Herman Dennis, a unique artist and minister born in Rolling Fork in 1919, created Margaret’s Grocery, an environmental work of art near Vicksburg.

The community of Panther Burn (or perhaps its name) continues to fascinate musicians and authors. Tav Falco has a Memphis-based band called Panther Burns, Mississippi musician Jimmy Phillips wrote a song called “Panther Burn,” and experimental jazz band Curlew also has a song titled “Panther Burn.” The movie Blues Brothers 2000 mentions the tiny community. In 2009 Roosevelt Wright Jr. published The Children of Panther Burn, a work of historical fiction.

By 1930 Sharkey’s population of roughly 14,000 was about 78 percent African American. Sharkey’s population was completely rural, with little manufacturing and an economy that concentrated on cotton. Sharkey was one of seven counties in which tenant farmers operated at least 90 percent of the farms, and African Americans comprised almost 90 percent of those tenant farmers.

The Mississippi Delta experienced significant population declines from the 1930s through the 1950s, and by 1960 Sharkey County had just 10,738 residents, 70 percent of them African Americans. The county also had a small Chinese population. Agriculture continued to dominate the economy, with 57 percent of Sharkey’s working people involved in farming, primarily growing cotton, wheat, soybeans, and oats. The relatively small numbers who were employed in manufacturing—about 7 percent—worked in textiles. In 1970, Sharkey County’s population again fell below 10,000.

The Sharkey County civil rights movement has not attracted great attention from scholars. Issaquena County activist Unita Blackwell filed suit so her son, Jeremiah, could attend integrated schools in Rolling Fork, and the county had a civil rights boycott in 1964.

Like many Mississippi Delta counties, Sharkey’s 2010 population was predominantly African American and had declined over the preceding sixty years. Indeed, the county’s population had experienced one of the greatest proportional decreases in the state, shrinking by more than 50 percent and making Sharkey the second-smallest county in Mississippi, with only 4,916 people.

Sharkey County

Simpson County

Simpson County, founded in 1824, is located in south-central Mississippi and is named for Josiah Simpson, a judge and political figure in early Mississippi. Mendenhall is the county seat, and other communities include Magee, D’Lo, and Braxton. Prior to 1840, slaves constituted less than one-third of the county’s population.

A small county on the northern side of the Piney Woods area, antebellum Simpson ranked in the bottom quarter of the state’s counties in all forms of agricultural production. Antebellum political leader Franklin Plummer, a lawyer and education supporter by the 1820s, got his start in politics when he was elected to the Mississippi legislature in 1826. By 1860 the county’s population included 2,324 slaves and 3,756 free people, and the county had eleven Baptist churches and eight Methodist congregations.

Simpson County’s population reached 8,008 by 1880. Nearly 85 percent of its farms were cultivated by their owners, who concentrated more on livestock than on cotton, grains, or other crops. Manufacturing was slow to develop, with only eleven men and two children recorded as working in industry.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Simpson County’s population had increased to 12,800, with African Americans accounting for 39 percent of the total. As in many Mississippi counties, African Americans were less likely to own land than whites: while about three-quarters of Simpson’s white farmers owned their land, only 43 percent of black farmers did so. Simpson had a small but growing industrial force, with twenty-seven establishments employing seventy-eight workers, all of them male.

More than three-quarters of all churchgoers in early twentieth-century Simpson County were Baptists—primarily members of the Southern Baptist Convention, with substantial numbers of Missionary Baptists as well. Among the remainder, the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church predominated.

By 1930 Simpson County’s population had increased to 20,000, with whites outnumbering African Americans by about two to one. In a dramatic change from the late 1800s, about half of the farms were operated by tenants. The number of industrial workers, most of them in the timber industry, reached 800. From 1918 to the 1950s Magee was home of the Mississippi State Tuberculosis Sanatorium.

Writer Patrick Smith was born in Mendenhall in 1927, and he grew up and spent part of his adult life in Simpson County. Smith’s first work, The River Is Home (1953), told stories of people living along the Pearl River.

The county’s population remained stable through the mid-twentieth century, and as of 1960, Simpson had far more agricultural workers (27 percent of the workforce) than industrial workers (16 percent). Most of the manufacturing growth came in the apparel industry.

In 1961 John Perkins founded the Voice of Calvary Ministries, an ambitious effort to integrate religious life with educational and economic programs. Perkins, who detailed the murder of his brother and other parts of his life in works such as Let Justice Roll Down (1976), became a force in the civil rights movement. In the 1970s Dolphus Weary joined Perkins and others in the ministry, which eventually moved to Jackson.

Like many southern Mississippi counties, Simpson County’s 2010 population was predominantly white and had grown since 1960, reaching 27,503. Sixty-three percent of residents were white and 35 percent were African American. The county also had a small Hispanic population and handfuls of Native American and Asian residents.

Simpson County

Slave Codes

Like other southern territories and states, Mississippi adopted strict laws to govern the conduct of slaves. Mississippi built on the statutes previously implemented by slaveholding colonies, which codified and promoted white supremacy as they struggled to define the legal status of slaves. Beginning with the creation of the Mississippi Territory in 1798, the Mississippi slave codes became harsher, though some slaves found legal protection through the courts.

The territorial and state legislatures responded to persistent slave resistance and threats of insurrection with more severe codes. Revising an 1805 law that assured that “no cruel or unusual punishment shall be inflicted on any slave within this territory,” an 1807 measure stipulated that fugitive slaves “be burned in the hand by the sheriff in open court,” and any slave who presented false testimony should receive thirty-nine lashes and have an ear nailed to a pillory for an hour and then cut off. In 1812, on the heels of a slave rebellion in Louisiana, speculation mounted that slaves might use the war with Britain to revolt against their masters, prompting the territorial legislature to place the slave patrols under the supervision of the militia and to streamline the process of trying slaves charged with capital offenses. A three-judge panel would now hear a trial without presentment or indictment, and all participants found guilty in a conspiracy to rebel, murder, or assault a white person would face hanging. Following the 1831 Nat Turner rebellion in Virginia, Mississippi required free blacks to “remove or quit the state,” although the 1860 census listed nearly eight hundred free black residents.

After 1814 the territorial legislature moved to limit punishments for various offenses. Thirty-nine lashes became the standard consequence for a slave caught attending a literacy class or engaging in petty theft. Slaves received the same punishment for possessing a firearm or ammunition without a license from the justice of the peace. Assault and battery of a white person carried a penalty of one hundred lashes. The state gave judges full discretion regarding slaves found guilty of “riots, routs, affrays, unlawful assemblies, trespasses, malicious mischief, seditious speeches, or abusive, provoking or insulting language to any person not being a negro or mulatto person.” The list of capital offenses included such crimes as arson, rape, grand larceny, and murder. The Mississippi slave code of 1857—the last of the antebellum codes—contained twenty-five offenses that could result in the death penalty. Unlike in noncapital offenses, however, state law mandated that slaves receive legal counsel in capital cases. If found guilty, slaves could appeal to the High Court of Errors and Appeals, which at times overturned convictions. Between 1843 and 1861, the High Court reversed or remanded five out of thirteen convictions of slaves who murdered or attempted to murder white individuals.

While owners and overseers maintained their own regulations and punishments, the state and municipalities issued codes to restrict the mobility of slaves when outside their masters’ sight. Slaves throughout Mississippi needed written passes when off their masters’ property. Any slave found without a pass went before the local judge and received up to twenty lashes. A slave who tried to purchase or sell anything without the master’s permission could receive up to thirty lashes. The gathering together of slaves, particularly for worship, necessitated the presence of at least two reputable white people. Codes prohibited slaves or free blacks from performing the functions of a minister unless the services took place on the master’s property. The issue of slaves coming to town on Sundays was a continual problem for the white residents of Woodville, who passed a series of laws in the 1830s and 1840s to try to curtail the mass congregations. Courthouse bells rang at four o’clock in Natchez and nine o’clock in Grenada to clear the towns of slaves on the Sabbath.

The Civil War brought freedom to slaves, but the 1865 legislature passed a series of new laws designed to maintain the subordinate status of black Mississippians. Like slave codes, the new Black Codes restricted the rights and conduct of citizens based on race. The codes prohibited former slaves from renting or leasing land outside of a town and allowed justices of the peace to capture “vagrants” and hire them out. One provision even stipulated that the penal and criminal laws already in effect—that is, the 1857 slave codes—were now “reenacted, and declared to be in full force and effect, against freedmen, free negroes and mulattoes.” The Mississippi legislature did not repeal the slave code of 1857 and all the Black Codes until 1870.

Slave Codes

Slave Communities

Slavery undermined all ties between slaves, yet slaves in Mississippi, as elsewhere, formed many communities—communities of work, kinship, struggle, religious fellowship, to name but a few. These communities, in turn, were grounded in neighborhoods. Neighborhoods were a geographic terrain—a place marked by boundaries and a state of mind that mapped an imagined community. The geographic boundaries of neighborhood varied from a single plantation in frontier regions to adjoining farms and plantations in more populous areas, with enslaved men and women extending ties of work, family, resistance, and religion across slaveholders’ property lines. The slave population increased sixfold (from 32,814 to 195,211) as planters poured into the state between 1820 and 1840. By then, slaves accounted for more than half the population (52 percent).

The social ingenuity of slaves made work an exercise in community building. Under an exacting system of labor that kept them under the scrutiny of slaveholders from sunup to sundown, slaves managed to forge communities of house servants and field laborers. Coordinating work in the field—opening the ground, planting seeds, and covering them, for example—required plow and hoe gangs to work together on tasks, the pace of their labor, and their bodily movements. Where the sexual division of labor assigned men and women to separate tasks or field gangs, bondpeople formed communities of gender. Women formed bonds of affinity while making or washing clothes. Men honed their sense of manhood in work—for example, hoisting a four-hundred-pound bale onto a wagon—even if there were women on virtually every plantation who picked as much cotton as any man. When gangs left the fields, they often went to work for themselves. In the evenings, on Saturday afternoons, and on Sundays, they performed paid overwork for owners, made handicrafts, tended gardens, and raised surpluses. Some of their earnings went to purchase goods that enlivened sociability—tobacco, whiskey, or clothes for parties or Sunday wear. While labor kept most slaves at home, some worked to create communities beyond the plantation. Unsupervised teamsters carted plantation produce between town and country and camped together at night. Men and women made neighborhood ties doing paid labor on adjoining plantations and mending fences and roads. Slaves worked hard to turn the centripetal effects of labor into a centrifugal force making neighborhoods.

Kinship simultaneously marked enslaved people’s most intimate circle of community and engendered larger communities. Owners sold slaves as punishment or to repay debts, bequeathed them at death or on the marriage of planters’ children. Yet most slaves probably lived in nuclear families—in a cabin with husband and wife, parents and children. Many lived in extended families—in the same cabin or on the same plantation with family members of three generations (grandparents, parents, children) or bilateral kin (adult siblings, nieces, nephews, cousins). These family ties were sustained by reproductive labor, obligations of solidarity, and subtle practices of recognition and honor. Family members took meals together, worked garden plots, pooled earnings and property, and bequeathed and inherited property. Nurses, midwives, healers, and the women who received their ministrations formed close circles. As slaves took spouses, reared children, and otherwise cultivated bonds of kinship on adjoining places, they multiplied and deepened ties to other families in the neighborhood.

Family ties were undergirded by a range of intimate relations, mediated by neighborhood communities. In the absence of legal recognition of marriage between slaves, men and women were compelled to lend permanence to their bonds by informal modes of recognition. Couples in the early stages of their relationship were said to be “taking up,” while slaves distinguished between spouses in terms of “living together” and “marriage,” which was reserved for couples united in weddings. Slaves exalted weddings because the ceremonies gave bonds between spouses the imprimatur of owners, fellow slaves, and neighborhoods. Names routinely provided a method of marking family ties. Many families used the surnames of their parents, not of their current owners. Neighbors, in turn, acknowledged family ties by using these surnames for cohabiting and married couples alike. Slaves used terms of kinship such as “Aunt” and “Uncle” as terms of address for people unrelated by direct descent. Thus, slaves relied on neighborhood communities to shore up their most intimate relations and kinship to incorporate newcomers into neighborhoods.

Slaves also formed communities in everyday socializing of all sorts. In off hours, they went visiting in the quarters and on adjoining plantations; from time to time, especially before and after the cotton-picking season, slaves held clandestine dances, balls, weddings, and other “big times.” Slaves also assembled for religious purposes, attending church in town or more commonly in the neighborhood. Slaves often convened to hear white missionaries as well as slave preachers and held their own meetings at night. Men and women courted, conspired, displayed finery and other property, and made reputations as cooks, dancers, and fiddlers as well as in verbal arts, singing, preaching, and storytelling. As neighbors told stories of their pasts, their exploits, and their struggles and gossiped about couples, friends, and kinfolk, they gave voice to expectations and the common sense of their neighborhood. Convening in the quarters and the yard, in hollows, ravines, and woods, slaves carved out neighborhood places and sites of neighborhood memory. As they did the work of putting on these affairs, clearing underbrush for a hush arbor or a dance floor, cooking food, playing instruments, keeping lookout, they laid the groundwork for others to reciprocate and to do it all again. Social occasions offered moments when slaves, by word and deed, could consolidate and extend the bonds holding neighborhood communities together.

Slave communities were necessarily communities of struggle. Slaves’ status as human property challenged every enduring tie. Increases in burdens of labor obliged work groups to pull together against new demands and exacting discipline. Women banded together in struggles particular to them, and so did men. Women battled slaveholders who exploited them sexually, whereas men were especially prone to run away and often did so together. Men and women contended to keep up kinship ties and for access to adjoining plantations. The pass system, which slaveholders employed to regulate mobility they could not wholly prevent, reflected slaves’ success in their campaign to claim a neighborhood terrain. In many neighborhoods, husbands and wives belonging to different owners extracted standing passes to spend three nights together each week. By the same token, slaves forged neighborhoods into a terrain of struggle. Men and women enlisted allies in the neighborhood when running away, stealing, conspiring to lay out, or hiding property. Making neighborhoods a terrain of solidarity also separated insiders from outsiders. Slaves often captured runaways from outside the neighborhood. In the spring of 1861 rebels in southern Adams County along Second Creek recruited men to strike slaveholders in the neighborhood, but some slaves rejected entreaties from recruiters outside their neighborhood. Defining neighborhood as a terrain of solidarity also drew a boundary between communities.

Slaves formed multiple, overlapping, mutually reinforcing communities. They identified with different communities in different ways at different times. Migrants had deep attachments to families in the Upper South yet formed new families in Mississippi. Patterns of work, family obligation, and struggle sorted out communities of women and men. Religious communities transcended boundaries of time and space whenever slaves felt close to God. Neighborhoods were hardly slaves’ only community but had pride of place as the everyday nexus of communities. These communities coexisted but by no means did so seamlessly. Conflicting individual interests, conflicting loyalties to multiple communities, and the constraints of neighborhood grounds pulled enslaved men and women in different directions. Yet the communities slaves created, in their multiplicity, flexibility, and durability, gave order to slave society, undercut owners’ supposed mastery, and even subverted slavery itself. With emancipation, freedpeople began defining freedom by building on the foundation of communities built in slavery.

Slave Communities

Slave Patrols

Mississippi’s slave patrol system served as an important mechanism for the white population to control the movement of slaves and prevent insurrections. Groups of four to five white men, consisting of both slaveholders and nonslaveholders, were assigned to patrol an area in their county called a beat. These men, led by a captain of the patrol, walked or rode horses through the beat, looking for slaves out at night without passes from their owners. Patrollers also had the right to enter a slave owner’s property and inspect the slave quarters for weapons or illegal assemblies of slaves. Mississippi law authorized patrollers to act as judge and jury, meting out an immediate punishment of up to thirty-nine lashes with a whip. Any fugitive slaves captured by the patrol were supposed to be brought before a justice of the peace for confinement, and the patrol received up to six dollars per captured runaway slave.

The Mississippi slave patrol system originated within the state militia. Local militia commanders assigned the captains of patrols, who were then responsible for assembling the patrols from among the members of the militia. In 1831 Mississippi changed the law to allow towns to form their own systems of slave patrols. Towns faced a different set of circumstances than did rural areas, since slaves often congregated in towns on weekends and thus had the opportunity to collude in their efforts to resist slavery. Two years later, Mississippi decentralized the slave patrol system by shifting control from the state militia to the county police boards, thereby allowing local authorities to modify the patrols to meet local needs.

Although the slave patrol system looked potent on paper, it proved quite ineffective and inefficient. The duty generally offered no reward for patrollers and was considered an onerous and dull task to be avoided in most circumstances. Mississippi law allowed assigned patrollers to send substitutes to fulfill their obligation of service, which required that they patrol once every two weeks—or more often if the police board saw a need. Nearly all patrols operated on weekend nights, when most owners granted slaves free time to visit spouses and neighbors. Since patrols usually operated only twice a month, slaves had numerous opportunities to evade the patrols. A slave’s perception that the patrols operated effectively and with extreme violence was the real power behind the patrols. Former slave testimony often recalled “paddyrollers” as a terrifying presence around plantation areas, harassing slaves traveling at night and disrupting their social gatherings. Other former slaves, however, recalled the patrollers as comically inept and easily foiled. The slave patrol’s strength, therefore, rested in its symbolic power to intimidate slaves and control the night. Slave owners had no other institutional mechanism to police their slaves at night.

With the rise in sectional tensions prior to the onset of the Civil War, local authorities increased the size and frequency of slave patrols to quell potential revolts. Some communities also formed extralegal organizations to monitor slave activities. Historians have suggested that the practices used by the slave patrols to intimidate the slave population—which constituted a majority in many areas—led to the development of similar night-riding groups during Reconstruction, including the Ku Klux Klan, although establishing the connections has proven difficult because of a lack of records.

Slave Patrols

Slave Revolts

Mississippi experienced only one actual slave revolt, but on several occasions, planters uncovered conspiracies to revolt. The infrequency of slave insurrections in Mississippi, as in the rest of the South, stems from the fact that the likelihood of success was usually limited, making slaves unwilling to take the risk. Indeed, conspiracies seem to have occurred only when instability in the white community suggested to slaves that rebellion might succeed.

Mississippi’s only outright rebellion coincided with the Natchez Uprising of 1730, in which Natchez Indians and allied slaves took up arms against French settlers, killing all men. In a subsequent raid on Natchez led by Choctaw allied with the French, African slaves again took up arms, holding off the Choctaw long enough to allow the Natchez to evacuate the town. While in many ways this incident falls outside the mold of slave insurrection and conspiracy, it is instructive because the weakness of French colonizers and the proximity of Natchez allies rendered the chances of success worth the risk of rebellion.

More than forty years later, in the summer of 1776, slaves on the plantation of William Dunbar were discovered plotting insurrection. This incident fits more closely the pattern of slave insurrection conspiracies in Mississippi. As a result of the isolation of Dunbar’s plantation, the masters lacked strength in numbers. Dunbar and his fellow planters formed a committee to try the slaves, convicted and hanged the alleged organizers, and then pooled resources to compensate Dunbar for the value of the executed slaves.

In 1814 slaves in the Natchez region were discovered to be conspiring to ally with Creek and French attackers during the War of 1812. This incident also matches the pattern of slave insurrections, as planters generally had grown more harsh in their treatment of slaves following the introduction of cotton. In Natchez, the slaves outnumbered the masters. Another contributing factor was internal division over the war and the rumored threat of an invasion. Slaves likely believed that a divided and outnumbered master class would be overthrown and that invaders and Indian allies would grant freedom. Once again, planters formed a committee to try and punish the organizers.

Another alleged conspiracy was discovered in Livingston, Mississippi, in 1835. Livingston was located in the frontier regions of recently opened lands that formerly had been controlled by Choctaw. Slaves outnumbered masters, and as a result of patterns of slave migration, the slave community was likely stronger and more cohesive than the planter community, which was made up of recent migrants from disparate places of origin. The conspiracy was uncovered at the same time that the outlaw John Murrell hysteria hit the region, although it is unclear how or whether the two events were related. Once again, a committee was formed to try and punish the conspirators. As with other such incidents, the Livingston uprising came after planters introduced harsher working conditions—forcing slaves to simultaneously cultivate cotton and build plantations—and the planters were outnumbered and isolated and had not yet developed a cohesive society.

Mississippi’s last known slave conspiracy occurred in 1861, just as the Civil War began, in the Second Creek region near Natchez. Slaves knew that the planters were divided over the issue of war and heard rumors that Union troops would soon invade. When the conspiracy was uncovered, planters again formed a committee and interrogated and punished the conspirators, killing several of them.

Despite the differences between these incidents, several common threads connect them. First, all occurred in areas where the slaves outnumbered the masters. Second, most conspiracies occurred at times when the planters either were isolated or did not present a united front to their slaves. Third, the conspiracies occurred either in isolated frontier regions (Dunbar’s plantation and Livingston) or amid widespread rumors of invasion (the British in 1814, Union forces in 1861). This evidence leads to the reasonable conclusion that for slaves to believe that insurrection had a chance at succeeding, they needed to outnumber masters, needed to know that masters would be unable to call in additional help, and needed an escape route (unsettled lands or with encroaching enemies). Despite the harshness of slavery in Mississippi, slaves did not often organize rebellions because the conditions indicating likely success were rare. Conversely, when those conditions existed, Mississippi’s slaves did conspire to revolt.

Slave Revolts

Slave Trade

In 1820, Mississippi had 33,000 slaves; forty years later, that number had mushroomed to about 437,000, giving the state the country’s largest slave population. While new births accounted for much of that increase, the trade in slaves became a crucial part of Mississippians’ social and economic life. As historian Charles S. Sydnor wrote, “Few, if any, southern States received as many slaves and exported as few.”

Slave sales were painful events. They could be humiliating, since humans were treated as livestock and inspected for their physical features. Being sold also meant the possibility of separation from family and community members as well as the possibility if not likelihood of overwork, illness, and physical punishment.

The US Constitution outlawed the international slave trade nine years before Mississippi became a state, so Mississippians who wanted to buy slaves had to do so from sources inside the United States. The trade in slaves of African birth or ancestry was clearly established in Natchez by the 1700s. In 1810 a notice in a Natchez newspaper advertised “twenty likely Virginia born slaves . . . for sale cheaper than has been sold here in years.”

By far the largest and most permanent slave market in the state was located at the Forks of the Road in Natchez. Virginia slave trader Isaac Franklin and his nephew, John Armfield, owned the market at the intersection of two major roads near downtown Natchez. At the height of the trade, their slave pens held between six hundred and eight hundred slaves at one time, and some observers said that Natchez slave traders sold more than a thousand slaves each year.

Vicksburg, Jackson, Aberdeen, Crystal Springs, Woodville, and other towns and cities had smaller and sometimes impermanent slave markets. Some traveling slave traders liked to do their business in or near taverns. Many Mississippi slave dealers were affiliated with large firms with offices in New Orleans; Alexandria, Virginia; and other cities. Slave dealers regularly advertised in Mississippi newspapers.

Traders transported slaves to Mississippi in various ways. Slaves were bound together with chains and forced to walk in groups called coffles. The trip by foot from the East Coast to Mississippi, often down the Natchez Trace from Nashville, could take seven to eight weeks. Other slave traders transported their slaves by water, either from the Ohio River and down the Mississippi, or by ship around Florida, through New Orleans, and up the Mississippi River. Being “sold down the river”—meaning the Mississippi River—was one of the worst threats slave owners in the Upper South and East could make to their slaves.

Many sales and trades of slaves took place in settings smaller than the well-known slave pens of Natchez. Sheriffs frequently sold slaves at courthouses when conducting probate proceedings to dispose of other property belonging to deceased people. Also, many individual slave owners sold slaves to acquaintances. According to historian Steven Deyle, “Despite the tendency of both popular culture and most historians to equate the domestic trade with the interregional trade, the overwhelming majority of enslaved people who were sold never passed through the hands of a professional slave trader nor spent a day in a large New Orleans slave depot. They were sold locally, by one owner to another or by nearby country courts.”

From 1833 through 1845, selling slaves was officially illegal in Mississippi. The Constitutional Convention of 1832 prohibited “the introduction of slaves into the state as merchandize, or for sale.” Slave traders and buyers consistently broke or ignored the law, so the legislature passed a new law that imposed penalties for bringing slaves into the state for sale. The official reasons for the ban on slave trading were that Mississippi legislators disliked slave traders’ reputation for cruelty and dishonesty and feared the growth of huge slave majorities. Many Mississippians, especially in Natchez, also believed that slave traders brought unhealthy chattel. The more specific but usually unstated reason was that elite Mississippians, like many powerful southerners, were frightened by Nat Turner’s 1831 uprising in Virginia and wanted to protect the state from slaves who might rebel. Lawmakers required slave owners to demonstrate that slaves to be sold had good character—that is, that they had never participated in a rebellions.

Despite the laws, slave trading continued, and the law expired in 1845, making the slave trade again legal. In fact, in the 1850s a handful of leading slave owners discussed the possibility of reopening the African slave trade.

Slave traders had a dubious reputation among slave owners in Mississippi, in part because traders often moved around but also—and more important—because their role in the process made clear the contradictions involved in seeing human beings as property. Some Mississippi slave owners imagined themselves as kind, paternalistic figures who would never break up slave families, while slave traders routinely broke up families. Some Mississippians blamed all societal problems—illness, family breakup, abuse—on the slave traders and more generally on the slave trade while claiming to practice a more humane form of slavery.

Most slave traders bought slaves in the summer and sold them from winter through early spring, when slave owners were planning or beginning new work. The prices of slaves rose and fell with the price of cotton. Slave prices were low after the Panic of 1837 and were at their highest during the cotton boom of the 1850s. The most expensive slaves—young, healthy males—cost about eighteen hundred dollars in the 1850s, with other slaves costing less.

The slave markets ended with the Civil War and emancipation. Union soldiers, many of them offended by the markets themselves, blocked off Mississippi’s slave- trading networks from eastern suppliers early in the Civil War.

Slave Trade

Slavery and Agriculture

Slavery in Mississippi was inextricably intertwined with agriculture—primarily cotton production. The invention of the cotton gin in the 1790s coincided with the transfer of Mississippi to the United States and the establishment of a territorial government. In the early years of the territorial era, the work patterns associated with cotton production were developed and implemented, and cotton production changed only minimally over the remainder of the antebellum era.

Agricultural slaves in Mississippi were also involved in production of other crops, especially corn and vegetables to provide food supplies for the plantations, but those crops were produced only as the rhythms of cotton production allowed. Planters could make the most money growing cotton and consequently purchased food so that they could focus their slave labor on the most lucrative crop.

Cotton production involved the development of the gang system of labor, which differed from earlier slave regimes. Gangs of slaves worked their way through the fields, plowing, thinning, hoeing, chopping, picking, or whatever else the day’s assignment might be. The gang system provided far less individual autonomy than the task system employed in other regions, under which slaves were assigned a set amount of work that could be completed at a pace defined by the individual. White overseers or slave supervisors watched over the labor gangs to make sure the work proceeded as scheduled. The enforcement of the pace of work—often through public whippings of slaves whose efforts lagged behind the others—introduced a regular element of cruelty to the gang labor system.

Because one of the most significant aspects of cotton production—the removal of the seeds from the lint—is mechanized and must occur after the crop is harvested, nearly year-round labor was involved. In the early years of cotton production, this change resulted in significant acts of resistance against the new machinery, and gin fires seemed to occur regularly at the height of the harvesting and ginning season. From the 1830s onward, however, the cotton gin became normalized as a piece of plantation equipment and was less commonly the target of slave sabotage. By the 1830s the only downtime in the cotton-production cycle was a brief period between the end of harvest and the preparation of fields for the next year’s crop.

The success of cotton slavery in Mississippi is best illustrated by its rapid expansion from river towns into the interior of the state. During the mid-1790s the first crops were grown primarily in the Natchez region, but by the 1830s the center of cotton production had moved to the center of the state, and planters flocked with their slaves to lands previously controlled by Choctaw and Chickasaw. Few urban centers developed because the state’s greatest opportunities for wealth lay in the countryside.

Slavery and Agriculture

Slavery and Settlement

Land and slaves were the foundation of the settlement of Mississippi, the heart of antebellum America’s Cotton Kingdom. In 1817, when Mississippi earned statehood, its population of European and African descent was concentrated in the Natchez District, the core of colonial settlement in the eighteenth century, and almost the entire non-Indian population lived in the southern portion of the state. A succession of treaties between the United States and the Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians between 1801 and 1832, culminating in the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek (1830) and the Treaty of Pontotoc (1832), dispossessed Mississippi’s indigenous nations of almost all of their lands. As twenty thousand Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians were removed from Mississippi in the 1830s, the federal government surveyed the newly acquired land and converted it to salable real estate, opening millions of acres in central and northern Mississippi to agricultural development. Combined with high cotton prices, the sale of these federal lands generated “flush times” in Mississippi between 1816 and 1819 and again between 1833 and 1837, but the collapse of cotton prices at the end of each boom left many Mississippi landowners struggling with debt. Migration to newly opened areas shifted the center of gravity of Mississippi’s population away from the colonial core of settlement. The five southwestern counties comprising the heart of the old Natchez District (Adams, Amite, Franklin, Jefferson, and Wilkinson), harbored more than half the state’s non-Indian population in 1820 but accounted for less than 10 percent of the state’s population in 1860.

The high cost and sickly reputation of land in Mississippi’s fertile floodplain contributed to different patterns of settlement in the western and eastern regions of the state. Large cotton plantations characterized the western counties, where the Mississippi River’s alluvial soils attracted wealthy slave owners willing to pay top dollar for the richest cotton-producing lands. The counties of the Natchez District and the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta boasted many of the wealthiest planters and some of the highest proportions of enslaved people (often more than two-thirds) in the United States. In contrast, the eastern counties tended to attract small planters and farmers in search of relatively inexpensive land. These counties were more likely to have white majorities. Enslaved people accounted for less than 30 percent of the population in the southeastern Piney Woods counties of Jackson, Harrison, Greene, and Perry and the hilly northeastern counties of Tishomingo, Itawamba, and Tippah. The plantation-oriented counties of the Upper Tombigbee River Basin (Noxubee, Lowndes, and Monroe) were an important exception to this regional pattern. Most of Mississippi’s white households did not have slaves in 1860, and plantation households (conventionally defined as those with twenty or more slaves) constituted a minority of all white households with slaves.

Where did Mississippians come from before the Civil War? According to the 1850 census, more than half of the state’s roughly 296,000 white inhabitants came from elsewhere in the United States—most from other southern states. Less than 10,000 had been born in northern states or outside the country. The same census did not enumerate slaves’ nativity, but few would have been born in Africa or the Caribbean because of the prohibition on foreign slave importation into the Mississippi Territory enacted by Congress in 1798 and strengthened by the 1808 ban on importing slaves into the United States. Historian Michael Tadman has estimated that 235,000 slaves were taken to Mississippi from other slave states between 1820 and 1860, some in the company of migrating owners and others ensnared by the interstate slave trade to be sold at venues such as the Forks of the Road market in Natchez. The movement of slaves to Mississippi peaked in the booming 1830s, when more than 100,000 slaves may have entered the state. In every decade except the 1840s, the slave population grew faster than the free population: on the eve of the Civil War, 55 percent of the state’s population was enslaved. “We repose on a volcano,” warned a Vicksburg newspaper in 1831.

Mississippi’s mix of frontier free-for-all and plantation society was highly combustible. One revealing episode occurred in west-central Mississippi in the summer of 1835, when rumors of banditry, slave insurrection, and covert abolitionism rocked Madison County. The panicked response of a local vigilance committee left at least seven white men dead and several others banished. An unknown though certainly larger number of slaves were also executed for their real or imagined participation in the rumored uprising. The panic rippled through the state. In Vicksburg, several gamblers and slaves were hanged after clashing with local citizens. Such proceedings exposed deep fears of social disorder among Mississippi’s white elites. They resorted to force when necessary to establish order and protect slavery, but more effective than force in the long run was the emergence of institutions that “civilized” the frontier, including courts, churches, and schools. Historians have often emphasized the rampant materialism that characterized the southern frontier in the first half of the nineteenth century, but Mississippi’s history is unfathomable without recognizing that along with all that cotton, the seeds of Mississippi’s evangelical religious traditions were sown in camp meetings and revivals and the secret brush arbors of slaves.

Mississippi’s ancient landscape underwent a profound ecological transformation in the early nineteenth century. Slaves and small farmers drained swamps, cleared canebrakes, and carved fields out of the forest. The dedication of tremendously fertile lands to cotton catapulted Mississippi into the leading ranks of the world’s cotton producers. Its bumper cotton crop for 1859–60 exceeded 1.2 million bales, more than any other state. While the people of Mississippi remained predominantly rural and agricultural, the cotton economy inserted them into the transatlantic Industrial Revolution and made them dependent on the world market, a power beyond their grasp and control.

Slavery and Settlement

Slavery and Subsistence Economy

Enslaved African Americans working and living on Mississippi’s plantations faced conditions of abject poverty. Food rations provided by owners often did not provide enough calories or variety. In most cases, it was cheaper for slave owners to allow the slaves to raise and acquire their own food than to provide full rations. Within this economic context, slaves overcame nutritional deficits by supplementing their diets with food resources they acquired themselves. Their primary methods included tending their own gardens, raising their own livestock, and hunting, fishing, and gathering wild food resources. Slaves practiced these subsistence activities not only to supplement rationed food but also to participate in a trade network with their self-acquired goods and to achieve some autonomy in their lives.

Accounts by former slaves provide some of the most direct evidence regarding the subsistence economy practiced within the slave quarters. Former slaves who were interviewed in the 1930s through the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) provided rich detail regarding the subsistence economy. Charlie Davenport, a former slave from Natchez, recounted that “almost every slave had his own little garden patch and was allowed to cook out of it.” Most of the upkeep in the gardens was carried out on Saturdays and/or Sundays, which were free days on many plantations. Favorite garden items mentioned in the WPA accounts included corn, sweet potatoes, onions, squash, and collard greens. The WPA accounts provide additional information regarding other subsistence practices, including hunting, fishing, and collecting. Favorite game included deer, rabbits, opossums, raccoons, wild turkeys, and rattlesnakes. Davenport also mentioned collecting dewberries and persimmons for wine and gathering black walnuts and storing them under the cabins to dry.

A number of archaeological investigations at antebellum plantations throughout the South have confirmed that slave owners often permitted their slaves to tend gardens and raise livestock within the slave quarters area of plantations and to hunt, fish, and gather wild food resources. Evidence shows that slaves cultivated small garden plots adjacent to their cabins and kept livestock in small pens. A variety of fruits and vegetables were grown in the gardens, including beans, peas, collard greens, corn, squash and pumpkins, onions, okra, potatoes (including sweet potatoes), watermelons, and muskmelons. Poultry were the most common livestock raised by slaves, though many also raised pigs and goats. Archaeological evidence indicates that slaves harvested a wide range of wild species. At Saragossa Plantation near Natchez, bones of wild animals discovered within the slave quarters area indicated that slaves there regularly hunted and fished for wild food, including opossum, deer, turtle, gar, sucker, and catfish.

The WPA slave narratives offer evidence that the food resources grown, raised, hunted, fished, and gathered by the slaves provided a basis on which they entered an informal market economy. Many sold surplus food goods to their masters, to overseers, or at markets and were allowed to keep the proceeds of their sales, which they used to purchase other goods. Former Mississippi slave Pete Franks reported saving ten dollars from selling vegetables grown in his garden, which he used to buy “lots of pretties.”

For many slaves, exercising self-sufficiency through subsistence activities was a way to work for their own interests. Tending their gardens, raising their livestock, and fishing, hunting, and gathering wild resources undoubtedly allowed slaves to feel some control in their lives and were likely precious occupations and pastimes.

Slavery and Subsistence Economy

Slavery, Arguments for

The proslavery argument refers to the defense of chattel slavery that emerged in the late eighteenth century and became more popular in the nineteenth century. Planters, newspaper editors, ministers, lawyers, politicians, economists, sociologists, and other writers drew from a variety of sources and approaches to justify the existence of slavery. Proslavery writers used religion, politics, racial superiority, political economy, climate, classical and contemporary philosophy, history, and natural and biological sciences to shape their arguments. Proslavery literature came in a variety of forms, including newspaper editorials, books, religious tracts, journal articles, and political speeches.

In the late antebellum era, proslavery ideology emerged in the southern states as a challenge to the growing abolitionist movement in the North. In countering the abolitionist movement, the proslavery argument changed from defending slavery as a necessary evil to depicting it as a positive good. Writers such as James Henry Hammond, Edmund Ruffin, George Fitzhugh, and Mississippian Henry Hughes argued that slavery as a social, economic, and labor system was superior to the free-labor economy found in Europe and the northeastern United States.

Because of its emergence as a slave state in the early antebellum era, Mississippi’s political culture aligned with the major proslavery arguments. The state’s Hughes and Matthew Estes articulated the major themes of the argument: the biblical defense of slavery, the existence of and need for a permanent laboring class, the inefficiency of free labor, and the superior standard of living experienced southern black slaves. Hughes developed his argument through an elaborate description and definition of sociology in his Treatise on Sociology (1854). He argued that slavery (warranteeism) existed in all social organizations and that slaves constituted the southern states’ mudsill class. Estes’s Defence of Negro Slavery (1846) concentrated mostly on the biblical defense of slavery, the history of the slave trade, African slavery, the inferiority of Africans, and the necessity of slavery to maintain white supremacy.

Slavery, Arguments for

Slavery, Colonial

Colonial slavery in Mississippi can be divided into two distinct phases: the French era (ca. 1720–31) and the British-Spanish era (ca. 1770–95). In the intervening decades, no colonial power had a significant presence of slaves in the region.

French colonists first arrived in Natchez for permanent settlement in 1702 but did not attempt to introduce slavery until roughly 1720. The French settled alongside the Natchez Indians in an uneasy truce. French settlers imported slaves from the Senegambia region of West Africa, and the slave population in Natchez reached approximately two hundred. Significant research suggests that most of the slaves were of Bambarra ethnicity and therefore had a great deal of ethnic and linguistic unity, which would serve them well in establishing a slave community. The leadership of the French settlement, by contrast, was poorly organized, and colonists relied heavily on slave labor for their survival. Efforts to produce a tobacco crop failed in the early 1720s, but by mid-decade a regular tobacco crop was under way. The instability of French-Natchez relations, coupled with the poor organization and leadership of the French colony, led to widespread discontent among the slave population. When Natchez leaders resolved in 1729 to rise up and drive out French colonists, slaves cooperated in varying degrees, either standing by or actively supporting the attack. In the ensuing war, the French allied with the nearby Choctaw, while the Natchez allied with the African slaves. The conflict destroyed both the French and Natchez settlements, and French colonial planners abandoned efforts to establish permanent settlements in the Natchez region.

British colonizers arrived in the Natchez region in the late 1760s and came from virtually every one of the thirteen eastern seaboard colonies. Many brought slaves with them, while others stopped along the way in the Caribbean islands or in New Orleans to purchase slaves. In this sense, the settlers of British Natchez saw a tight connection between slavery and the colony’s success. Because of the diversity of origins of the slave population, British planters established a more unified front than the slaves. A slave community nonetheless emerged through creolization, or cultural mixing and adaptation to new surroundings. Throughout the 1770s slaves primarily produced lumber and timber products while clearing land for future cultivation. Subsequent staple crops included unsuccessful attempts to produce indigo and tobacco during the 1770s and 1780s. Throughout this era, the planters depended on favorable British and Spanish trade policies to market their products. When the region was transferred to Spain after the American Revolution, the planters continued to rely on mercantilistic Spanish trade policies to access faraway markets for their tobacco and lumber. Spanish trade monopolies for tobacco and British bounties for indigo made these products successful, and when these protections were taken away, the markets dried up. For these reasons, the economics of colonial slavery in Mississippi were extremely unstable.

Mississippi’s colonial era ended in 1795 with the transfer of Spanish authority over West Florida to the United States. This change coincided with the introduction of the cotton gin, which transformed the economics of slavery in Mississippi during the territorial and early statehood years.

Slavery, Colonial

Slavery, Native American

Mississippi was at the height of its Indian slave trade in the last quarter of the seventeenth and first quarter of the eighteenth century, though natives continued to be enslaved in significant numbers afterwards. Slavery also existed in the pre-European contact period, when Native Americans of the Southeast often made captives of their enemies. Typically, adult male captives were ritualistically tortured, while adult females and children were kept as slaves, though they could eventually be assimilated or exchanged to their natal communities. Precontact slaves performed labor in native communities but were neither captured nor kept for economic purposes. Captives were taken for revenge—as compensation for tribe members who had been killed or captured. Slaves were considered nonpersons with no connection to the captor community, a potent reminder of the importance of kinship in these societies. Since southeastern Indians considered people lost to captivity to be dead, released captives/slaves had to go through ceremonies of rebirth to rejoin their natal communities.

The capture of slaves took on new meaning after the arrival of the English on the Atlantic coast of Virginia and South Carolina. The English viewed slaves as commodities to be bought and sold. They acquired captives from Indians in exchange for European goods, such as weapons, metal tools, cookware, textiles, and alcohol. Europeans employed Indian slaves as laborers—farm/plantation workers, domestics, and even artisans. The Virginians and Carolinians kept some of the Indians they purchased but sold most in the Atlantic slave trade, to the Caribbean sugar colonies, and to northern cities such as New York, Boston, and Providence.

The initial raiding for slaves in Mississippi came from Indians to the east who traded with Virginia. The raiders came down the Ohio River into the Mississippi country. In addition, the Westo, an Iroquoian people from New York who migrated to Virginia and established trade relations before moving to the Savannah River, raided the native peoples of the South Atlantic coast. Contemporaries believed that the Westo conducted raids as far west as the Chickasaw in Mississippi. The Westo inaugurated a massive slave trade in the South, particularly after the establishment of the Carolina colony in 1670, but found themselves enslaved and eliminated as a people by the Carolinians and their native slaving allies.

More than one hundred Carolinian traders lived in native villages to spur Indians to raid for slaves, then purchased the captives and transported them to Charles Town (later Charleston), South Carolina. In the east, Carolina’s main slaving allies were the Savannah, the Yamasee, and the peoples who coalesced in Alabama and Georgia into the Creek Confederacy. These Indians, sometimes with their English allies, decimated thousands of native peoples in Florida and Georgia. The Creek also attacked Mississippi’s Choctaw, who simultaneously were coalescing as a new nation, formed in part to resist the slaving. The main slave raiders in Mississippi, however, were the Chickasaw. From their base in northern Mississippi, the Chickasaw raided across the Mississippi River into Arkansas and down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. Their slaving created many refugee communities along the Gulf Coast, which the French labeled the Petit Nations. The Chickasaw also conducted slaving in central Mississippi among the Choctaw. All told, between fifteen hundred and twenty-five hundred Choctaw were enslaved, as well as one thousand to three thousand other Indians of the Lower Mississippi Valley and another one thousand to two thousand Arkansas, Taensa, and Tunica, who lived and hunted on both sides of the Mississippi River above the Natchez and below the Wabash River.

The French settled permanently in the Lower Mississippi River Valley beginning in 1699 at Mobile and later at New Orleans and at small outposts throughout the South. They tried to end the slaving wars, particularly the Chickasaw (as well as Creek) attacks on the Choctaw, and hoped to unite the Indians against the English. For their part, the English organized massive raids against the Choctaw, especially in 1706 and 1711–12, as a means to reduce French power but mostly to obtain slaves. The French failed to end hostilities between the Chickasaw and Choctaw, largely as a result of the Choctaw refusal to forgive the Chickasaw for their slaving. The French did not oppose the enslavement of Native Americans but rather sought to imitate the English in Carolina and build a plantation society capitalized by the capture and sale of Indian slaves. They generally kept as slaves those brought to them from beyond the Southeast, particularly from the North and West. But they also enslaved Indians in Mississippi. The expansion of French agricultural interests in Mississippi led to warfare with the Natchez over control of the valuable land in the environs of modern-day Natchez. In the Natchez War of 1729–33, the French enslaved many Natchez, most of whom had been captured by the Choctaw. The French sold the Natchez to buyers in the West Indies. Even after the end of the great slaving wars of the Southeast, French settlers continued to purchase Indian slaves brought to them from the Southwest and the Missouri Country, such as Apache and Sioux.

British enslavement of Native Americans in the Southeast declined significantly after the Yamasee War of 1715, when many southern Indians, including the Chickasaw, killed the Carolina traders. Although the Chickasaw and Creek rarely again went on slaving raids to provide captives for the English, the slaving had created endemic hostilities that continued for at least two generations in Mississippi, pitting Chickasaw against Choctaw and Creek against Choctaw. In other words, the warfare continued, although capturing slaves for sale to the Europeans was no longer the goal. The slaving wars eliminated many Indian peoples from Mississippi and the surrounding region while forcing many refugees to join the Choctaw, Chickasaw, or Creek or move west into Louisiana and Texas.

Slavery, Native American

Slaves, Runaway

Running away served as one of the most pervasive methods of resisting slavery throughout the Americas, although many runaways never gained their freedom. Slaves in Mississippi, as elsewhere in the United States, had few destinations where slavery did not exist.

In the eighteenth century, enslaved Africans and African Americans who ran away faced bleak prospects. Native American nations in Mississippi did not offer havens, for they might reenslave runaways, return them to their owners, or sell them to new owners. Escape via the Mississippi River was dangerous both because of the nature of the river itself and the potential for recapture. Even though Natchez and other towns lacked newspapers to publicize runaways prior to late in the century, owners did post notices at the riverfront to alert travelers. In addition, plantations were isolated, presenting difficulties for those who absconded into the woods. In later periods and other locations runaways bound for free territory might have found temporary solace or rations from slave communities, but those communities could be difficult to locate in eighteenth-century Mississippi.

Most runaways left for short periods and then returned to their owners. Abdul-Rahman Ibrahima took flight from a farm near Natchez in 1788 but found it difficult to survive and reluctantly returned. His experience was shared by most runaways in North America, where escaped slaves had difficulty living on their own as fugitives. Some Brazilian and Caribbean slaves who fled eluded recapture by joining maroon communities (groups of slaves who had run away and lived together in unsettled areas), but such communities existed only rarely in what would become the United States as a result of population densities and well-armed local white authorities.

Slave owners applied inconsistent punishment to these short-term runaways. Ibrahima’s owner, Thomas Foster, apparently did not punish him for running away. William Dunbar seems to have expected slaves to run away after being “corrected” with the whip but expressed surprise when they left for reasons other than those related to direct physical attack. When two enslaved women ran away from Dunbar’s plantation in 1776, he punished one with twenty-five lashes but offered no reprimand for the other. When two men left his plantation shortly thereafter, Dunbar supposed they had gotten lost in the woods and believed it to be his good fortune when they were returned by a neighbor. By the next year, Dunbar’s surprise turned to outrage, and he ordered five hundred lashes for each of two slaves captured after leaving his plantation without permission. For their part, slave owners tended to view flight as an expression of ungratefulness and thoughtless action. Despite Dunbar’s confusion about why slaves ran away, they almost always did so when whites infringed on accepted household, farm, or plantation practices.

By the nineteenth century, free territories in the North offered additional incentives to leave the slave South, but the difficulties remained. Along with evading slave catchers and patrols, runaways could not always count on the help or sympathy of others who were enslaved. The fabled Underground Railroad was not available for all, especially residents of Mississippi and other Deep South states, where the journey to free territory meant passing through several other slave states. Slaves certainly worked together to resist white authority, but choosing to flee a plantation or to aid those who did so was primarily an individual decision. As a result of the danger and difficulty, running away was almost always a solitary venture, usually undertaken by young men who did not tell others for fear of damaging the chances of success.

As the Union Army moved through the South during the Civil War, running away became easier but still could result in uncertainty. As a part of Pres. Abraham Lincoln’s attempt to prevent the Border South from seceding, he initially ordered commanders in the field to return runaways to their masters unless they were “in rebellion.” By the summer of 1862 Congress had passed two Confiscation Acts that allowed Union troops to seize southerners’ property, including slaves, who were often referred to as “contrabands.” During that summer, former slaves could be employed by the US military. The practice of running away did not end until December 1865, when the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment formally ended slavery in the United States.

Slaves, Runaway

Smith County

Founded in 1833, Smith County, a small county on the edge of the Piney Woods region in south-central Mississippi, was named for Maj. David Smith, a hero of the American Revolution who later settled in Mississippi. The seat of Smith County is Raleigh, while other communities include Mize and Taylorsville. In the 1840 census, Smith County had three times as many free people (1,542) as slaves (419). By 1860 the population had increased substantially, reaching 5,443 free people and 2,195 slaves.

Antebellum Smith County ranked in the bottom quarter of the state’s counties in most forms of agricultural production. However, the county was decidedly agricultural in 1860, with only twenty-five people working in industry—primarily the county’s three lumber mills. That year, Smith County had twenty-three churches: ten Baptist, nine Methodist, one Presbyterian, and three Lutheran.

In the 1850s William Harris Hardy founded a school and began practicing law in and around Raleigh. He organized a Confederate military company, the Smith County Defenders, in 1861. He later became an aide to Gen. James Smith before pursuing a postbellum career as political figure, judge, and the founder of several South Mississippi towns, including Hattiesburg. Confederate general and Mississippi governor Robert Lowry also spent several years practicing law in antebellum Smith County. Raleigh suffered considerable destruction in 1863 when Union forces led by Benjamin Grierson led a raid through northeastern and central Mississippi, destroying transportation facilities and capturing weapons and soldiers.

In the postbellum period, Smith County experienced relatively little population change. In 1880 the county had 8,088 residents, 6,452 of whom were white. Landowners cultivated 88 percent of working farms, so the county had few tenants and sharecroppers. Smith remained low in state rankings in the production of cotton and corn, but its residents ranked in the middle of the state in raising livestock.

By 1900 the county’s population had grown to 13,055, with whites accounting for most of the population. Three-quarters of Smith’s white farmers and almost half of its black farmers owned their land. Industry was emerging slowly, with just fifty-seven workers in 1900.

According to the religious census of 1916, more than two-thirds of all church members in Smith County belonged to the Southern Baptist Convention. In fact, Smith had the second-highest number of Southern Baptists in the state. Others with substantial memberships included the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and the Missionary Baptists.

Smith County’s population grew slowly in the early 1900s, exceeding 18,000 by 1930. Smith continued to have a large white majority, with whites comprising 81 percent of the population. Smith County had no urban center and few industrial workers. In contrast to late-nineteenth-century trends, by the early 1900s half of the county’s 3,277 farms were operated by tenants.

By 1960 the county’s population had declined to 14,303 and was 77 percent white. About half of Smith County’s working people made their living in agriculture. Smith had a high number of hogs, while its farmers grew substantial amounts of corn, soybeans, and cotton. Almost 20 percent of the county’s workers had manufacturing jobs, primarily in the apparel industry. With ten oil wells, Smith County ranked second in oil production. In the twenty-first century Smith County became one of Mississippi’s leading producers of poultry.

Prentiss Walker, who in 1964 became the first Republican elected to the US House of Representatives from Mississippi in the twentieth century, was born in Taylorsville. Walker gave up his House seat after only one term and was unable to reclaim it in later elections. Other notable people from Taylorsville include National Football League players Jason Campbell and Eugene Sims.

In 2010 whites made up about three-quarters of Smith County’s population, which had increased to 16,182.

Smith County

Starkville City Jail

They’re bound to get you.

’Cause they got a curfew.

And you go to the Starkville City jail.

—Johnny Cash (1932–2003)

Johnny Cash wrote “Starkville City Jail” after his arrest in the small Mississippi town on 11 May 1965. Cash had played two shows on the campus of Mississippi State University (at the animal husbandry building and the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity house) the preceding evening, and at about five o’clock in the morning, police arrested him for picking flowers.

Cash played the song during a February 1969 concert at California’s San Quentin prison that was recorded and released the following June as an album, Johnny Cash at San Quentin. As with much of Cash’s music, “Starkville City Jail” evokes an image familiar to his fans—that of the Man in Black, hardened by years of drinking and drug abuse (which likely played a role in the actions leading to his arrest)—and offers a peek into rural life and its struggles.

Listeners not familiar with Cash’s past might categorize “Starkville City Jail” as a protest song—a one-man indictment of small-town government rules and restrictions. Indeed, the image of Starkville suggested in Cash’s song seems consistent with negative public perceptions of Mississippi. However, Mississippi’s recognition of its troubled past and the state’s continued attempts to move beyond that past echo Cash’s struggles to overcome his drug and alcohol addictions.

Starkville City Jail

Stone County

Founded in 1916, Stone County is located in South Mississippi, near the Gulf Coast. In the early twentieth century, Stone County had one of the lowest populations in the state—just 5,704 people in 1930. Whites made up three-quarters of this total, and African Americans made up one quarter. Communities include the county seat, Wiggins, and Perkinston.

Unlike much of the rest of Mississippi, agriculture did not dominate the economy of Stone County, which had the second-lowest percentage of land in farms in the state. As in other areas along or near the Gulf Coast but unlike most counties in Mississippi, tenancy was only a small component of Stone County agriculture. Instead, owners operated 78 percent of the county’s 678 farms, more than twice the state average of 30 percent. It was one of the few counties in Mississippi with several canneries, and the timber industry was an important part of the economy.

According to the religious census reports of 1926 and 1936, Baptists and Methodists were the largest religious groups in Stone County, as in much of Mississippi. Uniquely, however, most of the county’s church members belonged to churches of the American Baptist Association, a group of Landmark Baptists who had rejected the Southern Baptist Convention.

Baseball Hall of Famer Dizzy Dean spent much of his life after baseball in Wiggins. Actor Anthony Herrera, known for his television work on As the World Turns, was born in Wiggins in 1944. Notable persons who studied at Perkinston Junior College include astronaut Fred Haise, labor leader Claude Ramsay, and Gulf Coast restaurateur Mary Mahoney.

By 1960 Stone County’s population had increased to 7,013. In addition to a low percentage of people involved in agriculture, Stone had a particularly low population density. A great deal of county land was commercial forestland, and a high percentage of its workers were employed either in timber or food processing.

Like many counties in southeast Mississippi, by 2010 Stone County had a large white majority. The population had topped 17,000 after increasing by more than 10 percent over each of the preceding five decades. Its overall 150 percent increase since 1960 represented one of the largest population expansions in the state.

Stone County

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

In the midst of the civil rights sit-ins of 1960, Ella Baker organized a conference for student activists at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, with money appropriated by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Out of the Shaw University conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced Snick ) formed to coordinate the student sit-in movement. The organization elected Marion Barry as its first chair—a position that Chuck McDew, John Lewis, and Stokely Carmichael later occupied. Baker initially served as an adviser to the group, but she encouraged the students to assume leadership of the organization rather than to rely on older activists.

The organization’s purpose, as its founding members conceptualized it, was to challenge segregation through nonviolent direct action—a strategy employed by Gandhi in India. Some older civil rights groups, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the SCLC, considered that approach too confrontational. SNCC’s founders also argued that a localized, participatory model would be more politically effective than the “top-down” approach embraced by other groups. SNCC organizers embraced an egalitarian, antihierarchical approach to grassroots organizing.

Shortly after its formation, SNCC established its national office in Atlanta, in a room rented by the SCLC, and began printing a newsletter, the Student Voice. In 1961 the organization redirected its focus away from college campuses and toward the rural communities of the Deep South, targeting southwestern Georgia and western Mississippi. The director of SNCC activities in Mississippi, Bob Moses, immediately began capitalizing on the networks older civil rights workers had already established. SNCC’s organizing depended a great deal on the networking of Mississippi natives, especially Amzie Moore, Clyde Kennard, Vernon Dahmer, Medgar Evers, and C. C. Bryant. When organizing Mississippi communities, Moses typically established connections through local NAACP leaders and then cultivated a local leadership among young people and others who were not highly regarded by the older networks. Moses’s first trip to Mississippi occurred in the summer of 1960, when he was trying to recruit people for an October conference. He met Moore, to whom Baker sent an introduction. Moore attended the conference and formally invited the organization to come to Mississippi.

Other activists briefly worked in Mississippi when SNCC became involved in the Congress of Racial Equality’s Freedom Rides in the summer of 1961. After the first attempt to ride from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans was stopped in Birmingham, Diane Nash and other student organizers in Nashville joined the Riders, who began flooding into Jackson to crowd the jails. By the end of the summer, 328 riders had been arrested in Jackson, and the jails were so crowded that Gov. Ross Barnett sent the Riders to Parchman Prison.

Because of the violence that met the Freedom Riders, the Kennedy administration began urging SNCC organizers to focus on voter registration, which the administration mistakenly believed would generate less violent resistance than the efforts to desegregate public transit. The administration promised organizers federal protection while they worked in Mississippi. SNCC almost split over the shift, with some members believing that registration would not entail enough direct action. Members ultimately decided to work on both fronts, though the two wings quickly merged into one in Mississippi.

During the summer of 1961, at the same time as the Freedom Rides, Bryant invited Moses to begin voter registration work in Pike County, in the southwestern part of the state, where both the Klan and the NAACP were active. Moses believed that SNCC’s main task in Mississippi was to develop local, indigenous leadership, and he saw voter registration as way to increase political involvement. While SNCC often operated on a small budget, its work was possible because of the support local residents provided, including food and shelter.

In Pike County, Moses began organizing high school students, who then went house to house to spread word about the movement. In August the first voter registration school was opened. The direct-action wing began holding workshops on nonviolent resistance, and sit-ins began. Two local students who later became SNCC field secretaries, Hollis Watkins and Curtis Hayes, staged the first sit-in of the Pike County nonviolent movement at the local Woolworth’s. Students also organized and led a march to the McComb City Hall to protest Brenda Travis’s expulsion from school and Herbert Lee’s murder.

After hearing about SNCC’s activities in Pike County, residents in other counties began requesting that SNCC expand its work into their areas. SNCC field secretaries duplicated Moses’s strategies in Hattiesburg, Holly Springs, Canton, Natchez, Ruleville, Drew, Liberty, Clarksdale, Greenwood, and other communities. In 1962 SNCC workers also went to Jackson to campaign on behalf of R. L. Smith, the first African American to run for Congress from Mississippi since Reconstruction. Watkins and Hayes left Pike County for Hattiesburg, where they helped Dahmer start a voter registration drive.

During SNCC’s expansion, a number of native Mississippians began working as field secretaries and organizers. By 1963 SNCC had twenty field secretaries in Mississippi, and seventeen—including Lawrence Guyot, June Jordan, Charles McLaurin, Sam Block, and Fannie Lou Hamer—were natives of the state. Many attended SNCC’s Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, to learn voter registration techniques and then came home to apply what they learned. Native Mississippians accomplished much of SNCC’s work in the state, and many assumed leadership roles in the organization. Watkins and Hamer were elected to SNCC’s executive committee and were among the most ardent proponents of SNCC’s strategy of developing local, indigenous leadership.

Guyot directed the Freedom Summer Project in 1963 and was elected chair of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), which SNCC formed in 1964 to facilitate African American political participation and to challenge the seating of five Mississippi Representatives in the US House. Hamer was elected the MFDP’s vice chair, and McLaurin was chosen as part of its delegation to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

By 1964 most SNCC workers had left the more rural areas for the cities, and after building up local leadership, SNCC began focusing on issues other than community organizing. In 1966 only seventeen SNCC workers remained in Mississippi, and most of them worked in the Jackson area. That same year, SNCC’s executive committee voted to expel all white members, and several native Mississippians resigned in protest. In addition, tensions had arisen between SNCC and the MFDP, which felt that SNCC’s Atlanta office was not providing enough support to the movement in Mississippi.

While SNCC’s official activity in the state steadily decreased after 1963, the local leadership remained politically active, and more than half a century later, many native Mississippians who started out with SNCC continue to work for social justice both within and outside of the state.

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

Sunflower County

Perhaps most famous as the home of Parchman Prison, Fannie Lou Hamer, Archie Manning, and various blues musicians and sites, Sunflower County has played a major role in many of the most dramatic and revealing developments in the history of the Mississippi Delta. Sunflower County was founded in 1844 and named for the Sunflower River. Its county seat is Indianola, and other communities include Drew, Inverness, Moorhead, Parchman, and Ruleville.

In its first census in 1850, the sparsely populated county had a total of 1,162 residents, including 754 slaves and 348 free people. Over the next decade the free population increased somewhat to 1,102, while the slave population increased dramatically to 3,917. Sunflower was very much a plantation county, with its agriculture concentrating on cotton far more than other crops.

In 1871 part of Sunflower County became a section of Leflore County. Early in the postbellum period, it remained a lightly populated county with an African American majority. In 1880 African Americans accounted for 2,867 of Sunflower’s 4,661 people. Unlike many areas with African American majorities, most Sunflower County farms were cultivated by their owners rather than by sharecroppers or other tenants. Farmers continued to concentrate on cotton but also grew grains and raised livestock in substantial numbers. The average size of Sunflower County farms was 293 acres, well above the state average.

Sunflower County experienced an extraordinary population increase in the late 1880s and by 1900 was home to 16,000 people, three-quarters of them African American. Only 8 percent of the county’s 2,172 black farmers owned their land, and Sunflower had more than 2,000 African American tenant farmers and sharecroppers. As in other Delta counties dominated by tenancy, farms were now small, averaging just forty-five acres, barely half the state average of eighty-three acres. In contrast, 40 percent of Sunflower’s 533 white farmers were landowners. Sunflower had a small but growing industrial population, with 57 workers, as well as a burgeoning immigrant population of 96, most of them Germans and Poles.

In 1904 the State of Mississippi established a prison, Parchman Farm, on twenty thousand acres in Sunflower County. Parchman quickly became one of Mississippi’s largest plantations and was a penal facility for thousands of male convicts, the large majority of them African Americans, who were put to work in agriculture and prison upkeep. Parchman became legendary for many reasons, including its status as a plantation, its place in blues lyrics and experiences, its policies regarding physical punishment and spousal visitation, and the imprisonment of numerous civil rights activists in the 1960s.

In the early twentieth century 7,800 of Sunflower County’s 13,000 church members belonged to Missionary Baptist congregations. Likely the most famous Baptist leader from Sunflower County was Rev. C. L. Franklin (father of Aretha Franklin), who became nationally known for his work in Memphis, Buffalo, and Detroit. Three Methodist groups—the African Methodist Episcopal Church; the Methodist Episcopal Church, South; and the Methodist Episcopal Church—had more than 800 members each, as did the Southern Baptists. Sunflower County also had the second-highest number of Disciples of Christ members (287) in Mississippi.

In the early twentieth century Sunflower was a place of dramatic extremes. Its 1930 population of more than 66,000 was the third-highest in Mississippi, and its African American population of 46,646 was the highest in the state. Sunflower trailed only Hinds County in population density. The county’s economy continued to focus on agriculture. Sunflower had 12,374 farms (again, the second-most in the state), 94 percent of them run by tenant farmers. Farmers in Sunflower and Bolivar Counties grew the most cotton, and an extraordinary 98 percent of Sunflower’s land was farmland, substantially higher than the state average of 66 percent. The county also ranked third in the amount of rice produced and was home to a number of Russian, Italian, and Chinese immigrants.

Scholars know a great deal about depression-era Sunflower County because of two thorough sociological works, Hortense Powdermaker’s After Freedom: A Cultural Study in the Deep South and John Dollard’s Caste and Class in a Southern Town. Both studied everyday life in great detail, with particular emphasis on issues of race and class.

The phrase Going Where the Southern Cross the Dog dates to the roots of the music that became known as the blues. It refers to a place in Moorhead where the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley rail line intersected with the Southern line. Perhaps even more revealing about Sunflower County’s place in the blues is Dockery Plantation, famous as the home of Charley Patton. Other blues musicians with Sunflower County connections include Patton associate Willie Brown, who worked as a sharecropper on a Sunflower plantation; Little Milton, born on a plantation outside Inverness; and Albert King and B. B. King, both from Indianola, which today is the home of the B. B. King Museum.

As in much of the Delta, Sunflower County’s population declined dramatically in the mid-twentieth century. Between 1930 and 1960 Sunflower lost nearly one-third of its residents, and the population fell to 45,750. Three-quarters of those who departed were African Americans. Agriculture remained the primary economic pursuit, with almost half of the county’s working people employed in farming. Sunflower County ranked first in cotton production, second in soybeans, third in rice, and fifth in wheat. About 7 percent of the employed people worked in industry, primarily men in textile work, and Sunflower had an unusually high number of people working in hospitals and health care. Sunflower County ranked high among Mississippi counties in the number of residents with less than five years of education.

Sunflower County produced both important civil rights activists and some of their most prominent opponents. At the instigation of founder Robert “Tut” Patterson, Indianola was the home of the first chapter of the Citizens’ Council, and Doddsville was the plantation home of Sen. James O. Eastland, a powerful opponent of civil rights efforts. In the 1950s Clinton Battle reinvigorated the county’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In the 1960s Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee efforts at voter registration ushered plantation timekeeper Fannie Lou Hamer into her role as an influential spokesperson for the civil rights movement when she was fired after trying to register to vote. Her stirring address to the 1964 Democratic National Convention introduced many people to Sunflower County. In Drew, Mae Bertha Carter worked to integrate public education by sending her children to all-white schools. Charles McLaurin moved to the area in the 1960s as a young activist and has remained a community activist and leader.

Other important figures with roots in Sunflower County include college and professional football star Archie Manning, who grew up in Drew; influential New York Times food writer Craig Claiborne; and writer Steve Yarbrough, who has set many of his novels and short stories in the Mississippi Delta.

Like many Mississippi Delta counties, Sunflower County remained predominantly African American in 2010. The county’s population of 29,024 represented a decline of more than one-third over the preceding half century.

Sunflower County

Sunflower County Civil Rights Movement

The African American people of Sunflower County waged at least three distinct if closely related civil rights movements in the last half of the twentieth century. Each responded to a unique set of concerns, each developed its own indigenous set of leaders, and each strengthened community institutions. The most significant of these movements elevated sharecropper Fannie Lou Hamer to national prominence and brought national attention to Sunflower County.

The first black freedom movement in Sunflower revolved around Dr. Clinton Battle, a gifted physician who resurrected the county’s moribund chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1951 and encouraged more than one hundred blacks in the county seat of Indianola to register to vote for the first time. The NAACP chapter was vibrant enough that it was chosen to host the annual meeting of the Mississippi State Conference of Branches in 1953. However, Battle’s organizing was crushed by another advocacy group that originated in Indianola, the Citizens’ Council. Using tactics that won the Citizens’ Council the nickname of the “white-collar Klan,” the group convinced NAACP members to renounce their membership and end their activism. Working in close cooperation with law enforcement authorities, the council drove Battle from the state in 1957, ending this period of community mobilization.

Battle’s movement drew support from all classes in the African American community of Indianola and outlying communities, but it was led by members of the black middle class. In comparison, the movement that developed in Ruleville, roughly twenty miles north of Indianola, beginning in 1962 was a poor people’s movement. Members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), including Charles Cobb of Washington, D.C., and Charles McLaurin of Jackson, moved into Ruleville in the summer of 1962 to build support for a voter registration campaign and to help local people develop the leadership skills they would need to solve the problems they faced. Sunflower County blacks worked in an economy based solely on the production of cotton and owned few of the fields. They lived in a black-majority society based on the core concepts of white supremacy and racial segregation and a political order that denied them the right to vote. In other words, the problems facing them were many and complicated, so for the SNCC strategy to bear fruit, it would have to develop sustainable institutions that could succeed only over the long term.

Fortunately for Cobb, McLaurin, and others, William Chapel Missionary Baptist Church was willing to provide them with a home base, and a critical mass of devoted local freedom fighters developed. Chief among them was Hamer, who in short order demonstrated phenomenal abilities to define the systemic obstacles that black Sunflower Countians faced in terms they could all understand, to convince others to join her in dangerous civil rights work, and to embarrass her opponents. Hamer personified SNCC’s motto, “Let the People Decide.” She began her long and difficult journey as a civil rights worker when she and seventeen others went to Indianola with McLaurin to attempt to register to vote in August 1962. She returned home to Ruleville to learn that the owner of the plantation on which she and her family sharecropped had demanded that she either revoke her application for voter registration or leave the plantation. She left. Before the year ended Hamer had become a SNCC spokesperson, raising money for the organization on a national speaking and singing tour. In 1963, while returning from a citizenship education workshop in South Carolina, she and several compatriots were jailed in Winona, Mississippi, for violating local segregation statutes. Hamer was severely beaten in jail; she carried the physical and emotional scars for the rest of her life, but she used the experience to rally support for her movement.

In 1964 Hamer’s home served as a headquarters for the volunteers in Sunflower County’s Freedom Summer project, which received a disproportionate amount of national attention because of Hamer’s growing stature and because of its proximity to US senator James O. Eastland’s plantation in nearby Doddsville. At the end of the summer Hamer led a group of black Sunflower Countians who had joined the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, where they attempted to unseat Mississippi’s all-white delegation. At the convention Hamer testified in front of a national television audience about the Winona beating and other injustices she had suffered in Sunflower. “All of this is on account of we want to register, to become first-class citizens,” she said. The challenge failed, but Hamer and others focused national attention on the problem of voter registration of black southerners. The US Congress passed the Voting Rights Act the following year.

Hamer’s movement found it difficult to sustain its momentum after 1965. The steady work of voter registration continued, but so did violence against black activists, and years would pass before African Americans achieved proportionate voting strength in the county and elected their own representatives. Hamer died in 1977 believing that most of her battles had been fought in vain. Arguably the most impossible nut for Hamer and others to crack was the creation of equal educational opportunities for black students. Sunflower County schools never truly desegregated. As soon as a federal court ordered the county’s schools to integrate—more than fifteen years after the US Supreme Court’s initial Brown decision—white families enrolled their children in all-white private academies. Yet local whites dominated local school boards and held the highest administrative positions in schools throughout the county at least into the 1980s.

The Carter family of Drew, in the northern part of Sunflower County, first challenged the so-called freedom of choice plans that kept their district schools segregated by race in 1965. Sharecroppers Matthew and Mae Bertha Carter persevered through economic intimidation, threats, and nighttime drive-by shootings into their home to send ten children through previously all-white Drew schools, seven of whom continued their education at the University of Mississippi. Blacks in Indianola challenged white domination of the nearly all-black school system in 1986, creating the third of Sunflower County’s three major civil rights movements. Calling themselves Concerned Citizens, Indianola blacks launched an economic boycott of downtown merchants when the school board hired a white superintendent over an African American candidate whose qualifications were demonstrably superior. Concerned Citizens drew on lessons learned from the two previous Sunflower County movements and forced the Indianola school board to hire the group’s preferred candidate, Dr. Robert Merritt. In so doing they realized the three movements’ shared goal of self-determination. Blacks in Sunflower County finally won seats at the table where important decisions affecting them were made.

Sunflower County Civil Rights Movement

Tallahatchie County

Founded in 1833 and named for a Choctaw word roughly meaning “river of rocks,” Tallahatchie County is located in the Mississippi Delta. The county has two seats, Charleston and Sumner. Other Tallahatchie communities include Glendora and Tutwiler. In the 1840 census, Tallahatchie was a small but growing plantation county with a population of 1,591 slaves and 1,394 free persons. All of the county’s workers were employed in agriculture.

By 1860 the county’s population had grown to 5,054 slaves and 2,836 free people. Tallahatchie’s commitment to plantation crops showed in its concentration on cotton. It ranked in the upper half of the state’s counties in cotton production despite its small population. In 1860, 23 people worked in industry, almost all of them in lumberyards, and the county had ten churches: five Methodist, three Presbyterian, and two Baptist.

In 1877 part of Tallahatchie County became a section of Quitman County. Nonetheless, Tallahatchie County experienced a substantial population increase, with a population of 10,926 in 1880. African Americans made up nearly 62 percent of all residents, and as in many counties with African American majorities, sharecroppers and other tenants, rather than farm owners, did most of the farming. Tallahatchie’s farm population concentrated on cotton but also grew corn and potatoes and raised livestock. In 1880 the county had fifteen manufacturing firms, which employed thirty-five men. Residents of Sumner suffered from river flooding from 1882–84, traveling by boat to nearby Webb for supplies.

From 1880 to 1900 Tallahatchie County’s population nearly doubled to 19,600, and about two-thirds of the residents were African Americans. Tallahatchie was very much a farming county, and as in much of Mississippi, dramatic differences existed between the percentage of African American farmers who owned their land (192 of 2,262, or 8 percent) and the percentage of white farmers who did so (490 of 1,027, or 48 percent). Tallahatchie County was home to 98 industrial workers, all but one of them male, and 59 immigrants.

In the early twentieth century about half of Tallahatchie County’s church members were Baptists—most of them Missionary Baptists. Methodists, especially the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, accounted for more than a third of the county’s churchgoers, while substantial numbers of Southern Baptists were also present.

Tallahatchie County played an important role in Mississippi music. At the Tutwiler railroad station, W. C. Handy first encountered the “strangest music I ever heard”—the blues. Sonny Boy Williamson II (Aleck Miller) was born between Tutwiler and Glendora, and old-time country musicians Narmour and Smith, though not from Tallahatchie County, recorded three songs named after one of the county seats: “Charleston #1,” “Charleston #2,” and “Charleston #3.”

The Tallahatchie County courthouse in Sumner was built in 1903 and destroyed by fire in 1908; its records were destroyed in another fire a year later. The rebuilt Sumner courthouse became a focus of national attention during the 1955 trial and acquittal of Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam for murdering Emmett Till.

Tallahatchie County’s population increased substantially in the early twentieth century, topping 35,000 by 1930. African Americans continued to outnumber whites by a ratio of about two to one. Charleston had more than 3,000 residents. Despite the 400 or so industrial workers, Tallahatchie, like most of the Mississippi Delta, remained dominated by agriculture. Tenant farmers operated 88 percent of county farms, and cotton was by far the leading agricultural product. Tallahatchie County native Jamie Whitten, a longtime member of the US Congress, was one of the leading backers of agricultural policies that supported the goals of Delta planters.

Several individuals important to the civil rights movement were natives of Tallahatchie County. Mamie Till-Mobley, mother of Emmett Till, grew up in Webb before moving to Chicago and returned to Tallahatchie for the trial of the men accused of killing her son. Vera Pigee grew up in Tallahatchie County before moving to Coahoma County and becoming an important leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

The county’s population declined sharply in the mid-twentieth century, and by 1960 Tallahatchie was home to just 24,081 people. African Americans comprised 64 percent of the population, whites accounted for 35 percent, and the remainder were Chinese and Native Americans. Tallahatchie remained an agricultural county, with 61 percent of its workers engaged in farming—the third-highest percentage in the state. Farms concentrated on soybeans and cotton as well as wheat, corn, and livestock. Six percent of the workforce was employed in industry, primarily in making apparel.

Tallahatchie has been the home of some uniquely creative people. Actor Morgan Freeman grew up in Charleston and in 2008 supplied resources and inspiration for his hometown high school to desegregate its senior prom, an event featured in the 2009 film Prom Night in Mississippi. Sumner native William Eggleston helped revolutionize both the techniques and subject matter of American photography. Patti Carr Black, longtime director of the Mississippi State Historical Museum and author or editor of numerous books on Mississippi arts and culture, grew up in Sumner. The Tutwiler Quilters emerged in the 1980s as a combination of long traditions of quilting and new efforts to use quilts as a way to support the health and well-being of women in the county.

Like many Delta counties in Mississippi, Tallahatchie County’s 2010 population was predominantly African American and had declined over the last half of the twentieth century. Fifty-six percent of the 15,378 residents were African American, 39 percent were white, and about 6 percent were Hispanic/Latino.

Tallahatchie County

Tate County

Situated in the northwestern part of the state, thirty miles south of Memphis, Tate County was organized in 1873 and is named for Col. T. S. Tate, a member of an area family. It was formed from the quickly growing northern Mississippi Delta counties of Tunica, DeSoto, and Marshall. Like many nearby Delta counties in the postbellum period, Tate experienced an agricultural boom. By the time of the 1880 census, it ranked tenth in the state in growing corn, twelfth in cotton, twelfth in the number of mules, and thirteenth in the number of hogs. Because of its successful agricultural production and the presence of a local train station, the county seat, Senatobia, functioned as a shipping point for large quantities of cotton, corn, and other agricultural products. According to the 1880 US Census, Tate County was to home 18,721 residents.

Sharecroppers and tenants cultivated the majority of the Tate County farms, which focused on cotton production. In 1880 owners cultivated about 40 percent of the farms, while sharecroppers and other tenants ran the remainder. Residents had few other employment options, with only nineteen manufacturing firms employing 70 men and 11 women.

By 1900 the population had grown to 20,618, 60 percent of them African American. The county continued to rely heavily on cotton and other agricultural production. Only 4 percent of the county’s 2,206 black farmers owned their land, compared to more than a third of the white farmers. Tate’s nonagricultural workforce remained small but had grown to 136 employees at sixty-nine establishments.

In the 1916 religious census more than 60 percent of Tate County’s 12,000 church members identified as Baptists, including 4,300 Missionary Baptists. Members of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South; Colored Methodist Episcopal Church; and African Methodist Episcopal Church accounted for most of the rest of the county’s residents, while Tate County had the state’s largest Church of Christ membership (695).

Tate’s population declined to 17,671 in 1930, with African Americans continuing to account for 60 percent of residents. The economy remained dependent on agricultural production, primarily cotton. Tenant farmers operated 81 percent of the county’s four thousand farms.

Tate County is watered by surrounding rivers and tributary creeks. The Coldwater River runs along the northern and western border, while Senatobia, Arkabutla, Hickahala, Jim Wolf, Bear Trail, and Strayhorn Creeks dot the county’s landscape. The abundant water supply contributes to Tate’s rich agricultural production but has also made the area susceptible to flooding. In 1942 the US Army Corps of Engineers built Arkabutla Lake to limit flooding in the Delta region. It now provides recreational opportunities for a large population.

Tate County has an intriguing and creative musical history. Coldwater was one of Mississippi’s first communities to host a radio station, and numerous well-known Mississippi musicians are associated with Tate. Blues performer Jessie Mae Hemphill was born near the Tate and Panola County line. As a child Otha Turner moved with his family to the Tate County community of Gravel Springs, where he stayed for most of his life, playing instruments he built himself. Country musician O. B. McClinton was born in Senatobia in 1940, and bluesman R. L. Burnside spent much of his childhood in Tate County.

Memphis-born writer Joan Williams had grandparents in Arkabutla, and she used Tate County as the model for parts of her fiction. Historian Dumas Malone, best known for his multivolume biography of Thomas Jefferson, was born in Coldwater. Actor James Earl Jones was born in Arkabutla in 1931 and lived there until the age of five, when his family moved to Michigan. Northwest Community College opened in Senatobia in 1928 and now enrolls more than seven thousand students each year.

Unlike other parts of the Mississippi Delta, Tate did not experience a significant population loss in the second half of the twentieth century, though the county’s demographics changed significantly. In 1960 Tate County was home to 18,138 people, 58 percent of them African American. Almost half of Tate’s working people were employed in agriculture, with cotton, corn, and soybeans as the primary crops. About 10 percent of the county’s workers had jobs in industry, mostly in apparel factories.

Tate County’s population grew by nearly 60 percent between 1960 and 2010, reaching 28,996. By 2010 67 percent of Tate’s population was white, while 30 percent was African American, and 2 percent was Hispanic/Latino.

Tate County

Till-Mobley, Mamie

Mamie Elizabeth Carthan was born on 23 November 1921 in Webb, Mississippi. In January 1924 her mother, Alma Smith Carthan, took her north to the Chicago suburb of Argo, where they reunited with the girl’s father, Willy Nash Carthan. In 1940 Mamie Carthan became the fourth black graduate of Argo Community High School and the first to graduate at the top of her class. She went on to work with the Social Security Administration and for the US Air Force.

Carthan married Louis Till on 14 October 1940 and gave birth to her only biological child, Emmett Louis Till, on 25 July 1941. By the following year she had separated from her husband, who was convicted of rape and murder while serving in the US Army in Italy and executed in 1945. She was married to Pink Bradley (1951–53) and later Gene Mobley (1957–2000).

On 31 August 1955 Emmett Till’s bludgeoned body was found in Mississippi’s Tallahatchie River. After her son’s body was returned to Chicago, Bradley insisted that the casket be opened. After carefully inspecting the body and confirming that it was her son, she decided to let the world see the results of this lynching by holding an open-casket viewing at Chicago’s Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ. So enormous was the outpouring of public sympathy and support that Till’s burial had to be delayed for four days: as many as one hundred thousand people came to the church to view the body. Media outlets from around the world covered her son’s death, and Bradley authorized the publication of photographs of her son’s body in Jet magazine and the Crisis, the journal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

On 20 September 1955 Bradley traveled to Sumner, Mississippi, to testify in the trial of her son’s accused murderers, J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant. Refused a room at the segregated hotel in Sumner and forced to view the trial from the segregated seating reserved for the black press, Bradley nevertheless delivered poignant testimony confirming the identity of the body. Despite her efforts, along with those of several other witnesses who provided damning evidence against the accused, an all-white male jury acquitted the defendants after deliberating for just sixty-seven minutes.

Bradley continued to press for justice, writing letters to Pres. Dwight Eisenhower and speaking under the auspices of the NAACP and various labor unions. Miscommunication and financial disagreements strained her relationship with the NAACP by November 1955, and executive secretary Roy Wilkins dropped her from subsequent speaking engagements.

Bradley dedicated the remainder of her life to helping children and preserving her son’s memory. She graduated from the Chicago Teachers College in 1956 and taught in Chicago’s public schools until her 1983 retirement. Till-Mobley also earned a master’s degree in administration and supervision from Loyola University in Chicago, and in 1973 she founded the Emmett Till Players, a group of student actors devoted to educating the masses about the civil rights movement. Throughout her life Till-Mobley spoke out against acts of injustice across the country, including the 1998 lynching of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas. She died on 6 January 2003, just prior to the release of a book she authored with Christopher Benson, Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America. In large part as a result of her efforts, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reopened the Till case in 2004, though no further prosecutions occurred, and in 2005 Congress passed antilynching legislation and called on the Bureau to investigate cold cases from the civil rights era. Today, streets, bridges, highways, schools, placards, statues, and legislation honor her son’s memory.

Till-Mobley, Mamie

Tippah County

Established after the 1832 Chickasaw land cession, Tippah County was created from land that included portions of Benton, Union, Alcorn, and Prentiss Counties. Tippah is located in northeastern Mississippi, on the Tennessee border. The name Tippah is said to have come from a Chickasaw word meaning “cut off.” The county seat is Ripley.

In the 1840 census, Tippah’s population consisted of 7,310 free people (the second-most in the state) and 2,134 slaves. Early residents included farmers, planters, and merchants who settled near waterways throughout the county. Tippah is surrounded by rivers, including the Tallahatchie and Tippah Rivers to the west and south and the West Hatchie and Hatchie Rivers to the east and north. Because of these rivers and nearby limestone, Tippah County’s soil was ripe for agricultural development, specifically food crops. This appealed to hill country farmers, who grew fruits and vegetables for home consumption more than cash crops such as cotton. Tippah residents also concentrated more than most Mississippians on raising livestock.

In 1860 the county ranked tenth in the state in the value of its livestock, sixth in sweet potatoes, and fourteenth in corn but only twenty-third in the value of its cotton. The county’s 129 industrial workers were employed in a variety of jobs, primarily at Tippah’s twenty lumber mills and twenty-one flour mills. The county had grown substantially and had 16,219 free persons and 6,331 slaves. Tippah also had seventy-two churches, including twenty-six Methodist churches, twenty-four Baptist congregations, eight Cumberland Presbyterian houses of worship, seven Union churches, four Christian churches, and three Presbyterian congregations.

After the Civil War, Tippah County’s population declined as a consequence of the creation of nearby Benton and Union Counties, which absorbed much of Tippah’s population. By 1880 Tippah had just 12,867 residents, 76 percent of them white. As in much of northeastern Mississippi, a substantial majority of farmers owned their land. Most farmers continued to concentrate on grains and tobacco. Tippah residents grew by far the most tobacco in the state.

In 1900 Tippah remained an agricultural economy, with just 71 industrial workers. During this period the majority of white farmers (56 percent) owned their land, though just 20 percent of the 422 African American farmers did so. Between 1880 and 1900 the population grew by a mere 116 people.

In 1873 Gen. Mark Perrin Lowrey established an all-female Southern Baptist institution, Blue Mountain College, in Tippah County. The first faculty members included Lowrey’s two daughters, Modena and Margaret. Modena Lowrey Berry, known as Mother, became the dominant personality of Blue Mountain and worked for the school for sixty-one years. Blue Mountain College students of note have included Carolyn Bennett Patterson, who went on to become a writer and editor for National Geographic, and artist Dusti Bongé.

In 1916 Baptists accounted for more than half of Tippah County’s 5,400 church members, with the majority belonging to the Southern Baptist Convention. The Methodist Episcopal Church, South also made up a large portion of Tippah’s religious population.

By 1930 Tippah’s population had topped 18,000. About 80 percent of the population was white, with African Americans making up 20 percent. Though farm-owning yeomen had dominated agriculture in the nineteenth century, farmers now operated only 41 percent of the farms. Small sawmills employed 114 industrial workers. The county had a tiny population of foreign-born residents—one immigrant born in Russia and one born in Iceland.

Among the notable residents of Tippah County were activist and editor Ida B. Wells, born in 1862, who spent part of her childhood in the area, and members of the well-known Falkner family. Ripley’s William Clark Falkner was a novelist, business leader, and military figure whose story was important in the mind of his great-grandson, William Faulkner. Donald Wildmon, the Methodist preacher who started his political activism by protesting sexual and secular content on television and then established the American Family Association in Tupelo, grew up in Tippah County. Ripley native Philip Gibbs was killed in the 1970 Jackson State University shootings. Ripley is also home to the First Monday Trade Day, an event that began in 1893 and continues as a popular spot for buying, selling, and bargaining over a variety of goods.

From 1930 to 1960 the county’s population decreased by more than 3,000. Whites accounted for 82 percent of Tippah’s 15,000 people in 1960. Farmers, who comprised more than a third of the county’s working people, concentrated on corn and hogs, the old standards of a yeoman economy. County farmers raised the second-most corn and third-most hogs in Mississippi as well as soybeans and cotton. Almost a quarter of Tippah’s workers were employed in manufacturing, especially in apparel factories.

Like nearly all of the counties in northeastern Mississippi, in 2010 the population in Tippah County was predominantly white, included a small but significant Hispanic/Latino minority, and had grown by almost 50 percent between 1960 and 2010, when it reached 22,232. Whites comprised 80 percent of residents, African Americans 16 percent, and Hispanics/Latinos 4 percent.

Tippah County

Tishomingo County

Founded in 1836, Tishomingo County is located in the northeastern corner of Mississippi, sharing borders with Tennessee and Alabama. Tishomingo sits at the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains and is the site where the Natchez Trace crosses into the state. The highest point in Mississippi, Woodall Mountain, is located in Tishomingo’s county seat, Iuka. Geographically, Tishomingo shares more in common with southern parts of Tennessee than with most of the rest of Mississippi. The county is named for a leader of the Chickasaw, the indigenous population that inhabited the area prior to 1832.

In 1840, when the first census was recorded, 6,681 people lived in Tishomingo County. It had the highest percentage of free people of any county in Mississippi—87 percent. During this period, Tishomingo and Itawamba were the only two counties in which slaves comprised less than 20 percent of the population.

In 1860 Tishomingo trailed only Hinds and Marshall Counties in total population, and slaves comprised just 20.6 percent of residents. With an economy based on smaller farms, Tishomingo County produced far more corn, wheat, and tobacco and grew far more livestock than most counties in Mississippi, but it ranked low in the production of cotton. Perhaps the most striking feature of Tishomingo’s economy lay in its eighty-seven manufacturing establishments, by far the largest number in Mississippi. Tishomingo’s firms employed 477 men and 15 women, also the most in the state. The great majority of those employees worked in the lumber industry. Blacksmithing ranked second, and women found manufacturing employment in the production of cotton cloth. Tishomingo also had a substantial immigrant population of 277, the tenth-highest in Mississippi.

As in much of antebellum Mississippi, Baptists and Methodists dominated the religious landscape of Tishomingo County, which in 1860 was home to fifteen Methodist, eleven Baptist, and three Cumberland Presbyterian churches.

Civil War forces battled twice near Iuka in 1862. Attractive and important to the military because of railroad crossings in Corinth in Alcorn County, Tishomingo witnessed its first combat after the Battle of Shiloh, across the Tennessee border. In the spring of 1862 Federal forces took over the area, though Confederate forces led by Earl Van Dorn experienced some success moving back into the county. Major battles in early October of that year proved disastrous for the Confederacy. Ulysses Grant led more than twenty-three thousand US troops into Tishomingo County and defeated twenty-two thousand Confederate forces, with a total of seven thousand casualties.

Tishomingo County was divided during the Civil War, with both supporters and opponents of the Confederacy. Residents expressed significant Unionist sentiment before the war, and Judge Robert Hill served the county during the Civil War without joining the Confederacy. He called for biracial voting after the war and was appointed a federal judge by Pres. Andrew Johnson. However, Tishomingo also had one of the more active postbellum Ku Klux Klan chapters.

In 1880 Tishomingo’s population of 8,774 was 87 percent white. With the state’s timber industry migrating to southern Mississippi, Tishomingo witnessed a diminishing industrial workforce, though it continued to have large numbers of farm owners. More than three-quarters of Tishomingo’s 1,078 farmers owned their land, and production concentrated mainly on tobacco.

In 1900 Tishomingo County had a population of 10,124 and was 90 percent white. While much of Mississippi shifted to tenancy and sharecropping, about two-thirds of Tishomingo farmers were landowners. As in other areas in which sharecropping and tenancy did not dominate, the average farm size in Tishomingo was far larger than the state average. The area remained largely agricultural, with only 43 industrial workers, all but one of them male. According to the 1916 census of religion, the Methodist Episcopal Church, South was the county’s largest church group, followed by the Southern Baptist Convention, the National Baptist Convention, and—relatively rare for Mississippi—the Churches of Christ.

Tishomingo’s population rose steadily in the early twentieth century, reaching 16,000 by 1930. Whites continued to comprise a large majority of residents, at 94 percent. Shifts in industrial labor paralleled changes in Tishomingo’s agricultural economy. Tishomingo’s industrial force increased rapidly, with fifty-eight establishments, including many small sawmills, employing 457 workers. While industrial employment increased, landownership for farmers declined. In a county that had long been a yeoman area rooted in farm ownership, only 46 percent of farms were run by their owners in 1930. All but 4 percent of the county’s 1,284 tenant farmers were white.

In 1933 the US Congress established the Tennessee Valley Authority to develop low-cost electricity programs. Tishomingo County was one of the first counties in the state to receive power generated by what became the largest public power provider in the United States. It was also the beneficiary of another New Deal initiative, the Civilian Conservation Corps, which built Tishomingo Park in the mid-1930s.

Between 1930 and 1960 Tishomingo’s population declined by about 2,000 to 13,889 people—13,210 whites, 677 African Americans, and 2 Native Americans. About 35 percent of the county’s workers had employment in industry, and about 20 percent worked in agriculture. By 1980 the population had exceeded 18,000.

The Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway opened in 1985 after years of political debate and tensions over the environmental consequences of its construction. The new passage between the two major rivers dramatically increased commercial trafficking in the region and provided employment for nearby residents. Other major industrial development plans for Tishomingo proved less successful. Funding for the Yellow Creek Nuclear Power Plant was canceled in the 1980s, and an effort to build rocket motors for NASA failed in the 1990s.

As in most northeastern Mississippi counties, Tishomingo County was predominantly white in 2010 and had shown an overall increase in size since 1960, growing by about 40 percent to 19,593. The population was 94.5 percent white, 2.6 percent African American, and 2.8 percent Hispanic/Latino.

Tishomingo County

Tunica County

Tunica County was established in 1840, close to three hundred years after Hernando de Soto traveled through the area. Both the county and county seat (also Tunica) are named for the Tunica Indian word meaning “the people.” The county was established with a tiny population of 821, of whom 30 percent were enslaved. By 1860 the free population remained small—just 883 people—though the slave population had increased to 3,483. With slaves making up almost 80 percent of residents, Tunica County had one of the highest percentages of slaves in Mississippi.

Located in the Delta in northwestern Mississippi, the county developed an agricultural economy based on cotton and large-scale slavery. Its agriculture mixed cotton with corn and livestock, and despite its small population the county ranked eighteenth in the state in the value of its agricultural property. In 1860, Tunica had only four churches, all of them Methodist, the fewest in the state, and had no manufacturing establishments or persons employed in manufacturing.

In the postbellum period, large numbers of African Americans moved into the northern Delta. Despite losing part of its territory and population to Tate County in 1873 and Quitman County in 1877, Tunica’s 1880 population rose to 8,461, and 85 percent of residents were African American, the third-highest proportion in the state. Sharecroppers and tenants cultivated about three-quarters of the county’s farms. As in most counties dominated by tenant labor, Tunica produced far more cotton than corn or livestock. According to the 1880 census, Tunica County remained extraordinarily agricultural, with just one manufacturing firm employing three people.

Tunica County’s population almost doubled between 1880 and 1900, reaching 16,479. The vast majority of residents—14,914—were African Americans, and most made their living in agriculture as tenants and sharecroppers. Only 6 percent of the 2,713 black farmers owned their land, while more than a third of white farmers did so. As in other areas dominated by tenancy, farms were small, and the primary crop was cotton. The county had 125 industrial workers and a small but growing immigrant population of 47, most of them from Germany, Ireland, or China.

In the early twentieth century, 70 percent of the county’s church members belonged to Missionary Baptist groups, while 20 percent worshipped at Colored Methodist Episcopal churches.

By 1930 Tunica County’s population had increased to 21,233 and remained overwhelmingly (86 percent) African American. As in much of the Delta, tenant farmers predominated, operating 94 percent of all county farms. Tunica’s agriculture concentrated on cotton as well as corn and hogs.

Highway 61, sometimes called the Blues Highway, runs through Tunica County. Blues performer James Cotton, born in 1935, grew up outside of the city of Tunica, and bluesman Son House lived and worked on nearby plantations. Harold “Hardface” Clayton, an African American businessman born in Tunica in 1916, ran a number of small businesses in the city. He found success and fame through his gambling establishments long before the growth of casinos in the region and was celebrated for hosting blues musicians in his cafés and bars.

By 1960 Tunica had experienced a sharp decline in population and employment opportunities that led to severe poverty. The county had just 16,826 residents, 80 percent of them African American. Agricultural workers made up two-thirds of Tunica County’s workers, tying Issaquena County for the highest percentage in Mississippi. Cotton continued to lead crop production, with soybeans and wheat increasing in importance. Only 4 percent of Tunica County’s workers held jobs in industry.

In the 1960s Tunica contained the state’s highest percentage of people with fewer than five years of education and the lowest percentage of people who had completed high school. Tunica County was one of the poorest counties in the United States, and its population continued to decline in the 1970s and 1980s.

Tunica has experienced some economic improvements since the 1990s, though their effects have often been uneven. Casino gambling has provided some benefits for Tunica’s communities. In addition, improved roads, new government spending, and a new airport created opportunities for economic growth. Nevertheless, Tunica County’s population decreased further between 1960 and 2010, when it had 10,778 residents. As in neighboring DeSoto, Tate, and Panola Counties, the white proportion of Tunica County’s population grew during this period, though African Americans remained a substantial majority and a Hispanic/Latino minority emerged. African Americans accounted for 73.5 percent of Tunica County’s residents, while 23.7 percent were white, and 2.3 percent were Hispanic/Latino.

Tunica County

Union County

Founded in 1870, Union County was formed from sections of Tippah and Pontotoc Counties, with some land added from Lee County in 1874. The county received its name during Reconstruction, after the Union of the United States. Union is located in northeastern Mississippi, a region once populated by the Chickasaw. Ingomar Mound, located five miles south of New Albany, the county seat, was built more than two thousand years ago by early indigenous people and used by the Chickasaw for ceremonial purposes.

Like most counties in northeastern Mississippi, Union relied on an agricultural economy and concentrated on grains far more than cotton in the late nineteenth century. In 1880 Union County farmers grew the fifth-most wheat in the state and thirteenth-most corn but ranked forty-fifth in the production of cotton. Around 60 percent of Union farmers cultivated their own land. Union’s population numbered 13,030, the large majority of them white, and included 20 foreign-born residents.

By 1900 Union had grown to 16,522 people. As in much of Mississippi, whites and African Americans had widely divergent rates of landowning. While 46 percent of the county’s 2,305 white farmers owned their land, only 14 percent of the 590 black farmers did so, with the rest working as tenants and sharecroppers. Union County had forty-five manufacturing establishments employing ninety-four workers, all but one of them male.

Mirroring other counties in the region, the Baptists dominated religion in Union. According to the religious census of 1916, Missionary Baptists and Southern Baptists were by far the largest groups in the county, followed by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South.

Author William Faulkner was born in New Albany in 1897. He moved with his family to Oxford in 1902, and he based his fictional Yoknapatawpha County on Union, Tippah, Marshall, Panola, and Lafayette Counties. Author Borden Deal also spent part of his youth in Union County. Sam Mosley and Bob Johnson formed the popular Mosley and Johnson blues band in New Albany in 1967 and played together until Johnson’s death in 1998.

By 1930 Union County’s population had increased to 21,268, with whites outnumbering African Americans by a ratio of about four to one. New Albany had grown to 2,500 people, and the county had 250 industrial workers. In 1948 Morris Futorian, the Father of the Furniture Industry in Mississippi, opened a factory that initially employed 55 people. As in most other areas of northeastern Mississippi, Union County’s predominance of family-owned farms had given way to an economy in which 62 percent of farms were run by tenants. Corn and cattle remained the dominant agricultural pursuits.

The county’s population declined to just under 19,000 in 1960: 82 percent of those residents were white. About a quarter of Union County’s working people held jobs in industry, with men working in furniture and timber and both women and men working in the apparel industry. Agriculture accounted for 28 percent of the workforce, with corn, soybeans, and livestock dominating.

As in most counties in northeastern Mississippi, Union County’s 2010 population was predominantly white (81 percent), included a small but significant Hispanic/Latino minority (4.5 percent), and had increased over the preceding half century (to 27,134). The 2010 opening of a large Toyota plant in the community of Blue Springs spurred significant new economic activity.

Union County

University of Mississippi School of Law

On 27 February 1854 the Mississippi legislature created a “professorship of governmental science and law” at the University of Mississippi. The act was passed at the urging of the Mississippi bar, whose members were concerned about confusion regarding just what laws and legal systems were in force in a state where US law, traditions of Native American law, the civil law systems of both France and Spain, and English common law were all a part of the past and present legal system. In addition, many Mississippi leaders had real concern that young Mississippians who went away to study in law in the northern states might pick up “troubling” ideas about the institution of slavery. At the time, only three US public universities—Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania—had law programs.

On 2 October 1857 the seven members of the first law class at the University of Mississippi assembled in a classroom with Prof. William Forbes Stearns. In spring of that year, the legislature had passed an act granting immediate admission to the state bar to any graduate of the university’s law program. For a while, the apprenticeship system, in which one read law in the law office of a member of the bar and then gained bar admission by taking an oral examination administered by a state judge, remained the usual way to gain entrance into the legal profession. However, by 1861 65 of the university’s 170 law students had won admission to the bar by earning a bachelor of laws degree.

When the university reopened after the Civil War, Prof. L. Q. C. Lamar taught the law department’s students, most of whom were Confederate veterans, from 1866 to 1870. In 1887 Lamar became the first former university law professor appointed to serve on the US Supreme Court. The department closed again from 1874 to 1877 because of a drastic drop in the university’s student enrollment caused by Reconstruction. In 1911 what was by then called the School of Law moved into its own campus building, Lamar Hall (now Ventress Hall). Within the next decade, the School of Law’s faculty included the dean of law and a law professor as well as a few assistant professors recruited on a part-time basis from among local attorneys, and a few women began to enroll as students. In 1921 the degree program was expanded from two to three years. In 1928 the first volume of the Mississippi Law Journal was published.

The law school received accreditation from the American Association of Law Schools in 1922 but lost it in December 1930, partly because Lamar Hall was too small to house the student body and faculty and to accommodate an adequate law library but primarily because Gov. Theodore G. Bilbo had pressured the university’s board of trustees to fire Dean Thomas Kimbrough and two other law professors who had opposed the governor politically. The school regained accreditation just two years later after the dean and the professors were rehired and the law school moved into a spacious new building on campus known today as Farley Hall. The number of students and faculty declined again during World War II but rebounded to record levels after veterans returned and enrolled.

During the 1960s the School of Law admitted the first African American students, and in 1967 future Mississippi Supreme Court justice Reuben V. Anderson became the school’s first African American graduate. The first African American faculty member, A C Wharton, joined the school on a part-time basis in 1974. And in 1970 Catherine V. Sullivan became the first woman to teach full-time on the faculty. In 1973 the school was renamed the University of Mississippi Law Center, and five years later it moved to a new location next to its former building. It moved to its current location in 2011, when it became the Robert C. Khayat Law Center. Today, the Law Center has some five hundred students and a forty-member faculty and houses the Mississippi Judicial College, the Mississippi Law Research Institute, the National Sea Grant Law Center, the Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Legal Program, the Center for Continuing Legal Education, the Business Law Institute, and the National Center for Remote Sensing, Air, and Space Law.

University of Mississippi School of Law

University of Southern Mississippi

Located in Hattiesburg, the University of Southern Mississippi (USM) is a comprehensive doctoral and research university. It is a nationally recognized institution, offering undergraduate and graduate degree programs in a variety of disciplines and serving approximately sixteen thousand students.

The seeds of USM were sown as early as 1877, when the movement to establish a state teachers college began. After two normal college bills failed to pass the state legislature, T. P. Scott, a member of the Mississippi Teachers Association and head of schools in Brookhaven, launched a publicity campaign. The campaign reached fruition when House Bill 204 was signed into law on 30 March 1910. With that event, Mississippi Normal College became the first state-supported school for teacher training. Forrest County and the city of Hattiesburg issued bonds for $250,000 to build the school on 120 acres of land donated by A. A. Montague, T. E. Ross, and H. A. Camp. The classroom doors opened on 18 September 1912, and the school welcomed a total of 876 students during its inaugural year.

Joseph Anderson Cook served as the school’s first president, persevering through a flu epidemic, World War I, and marauding goats on campus. In those first years, the school awarded both two-term certificates and six-term diplomas. The first baccalaureate degree was awarded in 1922 to Biloxi native Kathryn Swetman.

After a change of name to State Teachers College in 1924, a demonstration school was constructed on the campus in 1927 for the training of student teachers. In 1929 the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools accredited the school for the first time. The school offered extension courses in several counties and built a solid music program.

No longer strictly a teachers college, the school changed its name again in 1940, becoming Mississippi Southern College. It gained nationwide recognition through its Pride of Mississippi Marching Band and its athletic programs. On 27 February 1962 it officially became the University of Southern Mississippi. The first African American students were admitted in 1965. As the twentieth century gave way to the twenty-first, USM consisted of five colleges and offered online classes as an alternative to some traditional classes. USM now sees itself as “a national university for South Mississippi and the Gulf States.” Notable centers on its campuses include the Center for International Education, the Polymer Science Institute, and the Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage.

Among the many notable USM alumni are political figures Evelyn Gandy and Phil Bryant; musician Jimmy Buffett; chef Cat Cora; football stars Brett Favre, Sammy Winder, and Ray Guy; and broadcast journalists Chuck Scarborough and Kathleen Koch.

As early as 1947 USM had a presence on the Gulf Coast through classes organized at the Methodist Campgrounds in Biloxi. As need for the classes grew, they moved to Mary L. Michael Junior High School in 1958 and then to Keesler Air Force Base in 1964. Class offerings were then expanded to include more teaching sites in Harrison and Jackson Counties, and in 1972 USM Gulf Coast was established on the Long Beach site that had formerly housed Gulf Park College for Women. The university was officially named a dual-campus system in 1998 but the coastal campus offered only junior- and senior-level courses until 2002, when the Mississippi Supreme Court granted permission for freshman- and sophomore-level classes to be held there. In addition to the Long Beach campus and teaching centers on Keesler Air Force Base and at the Stennis Space Center, USM now offers classes at several other coastal locations, including the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory, the J. L. Scott Marine Education Center and Aquarium, and the Hydrographic Science Research Center. In 2013 Rodney D. Bennett became USM’s first African American president.

University of Southern Mississippi

Vardaman, James K.

In 1903, for the first time, the people of Mississippi nominated the candidates for all public offices, from the governor down to the local constable, via a popular primary election. The first governor chosen under this new system was James Kimble Vardaman, an effective campaigner who was known fondly by his followers as the White Chief.

Vardaman, who was born in Jackson County, Texas, on 26 July 1861, was reared in Yalobusha County, Mississippi. After reading law, he was admitted to the bar and began practicing in Winona in 1882. Vardaman also edited the Winona Advance. He moved to Greenwood in 1890 to edit the Greenwood Enterprise, and in 1896 he founded the Greenwood Commonwealth. His first love was politics, however, and beginning in 1890 he represented LeFlore County in the State House of Representatives, becoming Speaker in 1894.

After the United States declared war on Spain in 1898, Vardaman enlisted in the army, eventually rising to the rank of colonel. He was stationed in Santiago, Cuba, from August 1898 to May 1899.

Vardaman sought to become the Democratic Party’s gubernatorial candidate in 1895 and again in 1899, but party leaders refused to give him the nomination. After those disappointing losses, Vardaman became a supporter of the popular primary law. In Mississippi’s first primary election he defeated Frank Critz and Edmond F. Noel, the author of the primary law. Vardaman, who took office on 19 January 1904, was the first governor inaugurated in the New Capitol.

As governor, Vardaman advocated government regulation of large corporations. He led the fight against the convict lease system, under which state prisoners were leased to planters and railroad companies as laborers, and he led the effort to make Parchman the state’s central prison. He also strongly favored a child labor law. Governor Vardaman is best remembered, however, for his extreme views on race. He did not support public education for African Americans beyond the most basic moral instruction and vocational training because he believed that they should remain in economic servitude and that education was unnecessary for the kind of work they would do. He recommended the closing of black public schools; vetoed state funding for Mississippi Normal Institute, a college for African American teachers; and urged the repeal of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which gave African Americans the right to vote and hold office. Vardaman also supported the efforts to segregate Mississippi’s streetcars, and he made numerous remarks supporting the necessity of lynching. He repeatedly mocked Pres. Theodore Roosevelt and the Republican Party for appointing African Americans to jobs in the federal government.

In the third year of his term as governor, Vardaman ran for the US Senate but was defeated by John Sharp Williams. After leaving the governor’s office, Vardaman edited a newspaper in Jackson and prepared for another bid for the Senate. He won election in 1912 and as a senator played an instrumental role in the passage of a federal law restricting employment of young children. However, his strong opposition to America’s entry into World War I and to Pres. Woodrow Wilson led to his defeat for reelection in 1918. After another unsuccessful bid for the Senate in 1922, Vardaman moved to Alabama where he lived until his death on 25 June 1930. The town of Vardaman in Calhoun County is named in his honor.

Vardaman, James K.

Waller, William Lowe

In the early 1970s, after the civil rights movement had brought enormous changes to the South, a group of young and progressive southern governors attracted national attention. Among them were Dale Bumpers of Arkansas, Reubin Askew of Florida, Jimmy Carter of Georgia, and William Waller of Mississippi. Waller was elected at a crucial time in the state’s history, and his constructive leadership helped chart a new direction for Mississippi.

Waller, who was born in Lafayette County, Mississippi, on 21 October 1926, attended the public schools in the Black Jack community of Panola County and graduated from Oxford High School. After earning his bachelor of arts at Memphis State University and his law degree from the University of Mississippi, Waller established a law practice in Jackson. After serving as an intelligence officer during the Korean War, Waller was elected district attorney for the 7th Judicial District in 1959 and reelected in 1963. His most famous case was the Medgar Evers assassination, in which his vigorous prosecution earned commendations and was often cited as an indication of the changing attitudes of Mississippi’s public officials (although two all-white juries deadlocked and refused to convict Byron De La Beckwith at the time).

After an unsuccessful bid for governor in 1967, Waller was elected to the state’s highest office four years later. In the Democratic primary, Waller offered himself as a critic of the “Capitol Street Gang”—the lawyers, banks, and corporations that held most of the influence and power in the state. In the general election Waller defeated independent Charles Evers, the brother of Medgar Evers and the first black Mississippian to run for governor.

One of the most important accomplishments of Waller’s administration was the removal of tax-collecting responsibilities from the county sheriff’s duties. The creation of a separate office to collect taxes, combined with a provision that allowed sheriffs to succeed themselves, improved the quality of law enforcement in Mississippi and professionalized the office of sheriff. Waller also integrated the highway patrol and appointed blacks to boards, commissions, and other state agencies. For the first time in almost a century African Americans participated in affairs of state.

Under the leadership of Mississippi’s First Lady, Carroll Overton Waller, the state’s historic Governor’s Mansion was saved from near collapse. Carroll Waller, who referred to the 130-year-old building as the Home of Our Heritage, presided over the mansion’s restoration to its original 1842 design. In 1975, after completion of the three-and-a-half-year restoration, the Governor’s Mansion was designated a National Historic Landmark.

After leaving office, Waller resumed his law practice in Jackson. He lost elections for US Senate in 1978 and the governorship in 1987. Waller published a memoir, Straight Ahead, in 2007 and died on 30 November 2011.

Waller, William Lowe

Walthall County

Walthall County, located in southern Mississippi, in the longleaf pine belt on the Louisiana border, developed out of sections of Pike and Marion Counties in 1914, making it of one the newest counties in the state. Its name derives from the Confederate general and US senator Edward Cary Walthall. The county seat is Tylertown.

In the 1920 census, Walthall had 13,455 residents, including 7,789 whites and 5,666 African Americans. Walthall depended on agriculture for economic growth, focusing first on cotton and later on cattle. In the first decade of the county’s existence, 55 percent of Walthall farmers owned their land.

In 1930 Walthall County’s population grew to 13,871, with white residents only slightly outnumbering African Americans. Walthall was very much a rural county, with no urban population and only 80 industrial workers in eight manufacturing establishments. Tenant farmers operated more than half of Walthall’s thirty-four-hundred farms. Like many South Mississippi counties, Walthall farmers concentrated first on dairy cattle, then corn, swine, and cotton. Walthall had a very small immigrant population—one person from England, one from France, and two from Greece.

Born in Tylertown in 1931, Paul Pittman became publisher of the Tylertown Times in 1957 and continued in that role until his death in 1983. Pittman also helped establish the county’s first radio station, WTYL, and took part in Democratic Party politics.

African Americans in Walthall County have a long history of establishing community organizations—initially churches and schools, a chapter of the Universal Negro Improvement Association in the 1920s and 1930s, and an active chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People that challenged local segregated schools immediately after the US Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. C. C. Bryant, an important community activist and civil rights organizer in Pike County in the 1950s and 1960s, was born in Walthall County in 1917.

Two figures important in changing Mississippi education spent significant time in Walthall County. Cleopatra Thompson, a professor at Jackson State from the 1940s through the 1970s, spent part of her early career teaching at the Walthall County Training School. Surgeon Verner Smith Holmes grew up in Walthall County and went on to become a member of the Board of Trustees of the State Institutions of Higher Learning, opposing Gov. Ross Barnett’s efforts to prevent the desegregation of the University of Mississippi in 1962.

Walthall County’s population remained stable through the 1950s, though the nature of employment shifted. While jobs in agriculture declined, manufacturing employment rose. By 1960 22 percent of all workers in Walthall County held industrial jobs, mostly in the apparel industry, and 35 percent worked in agriculture. In 1960, 13,761 people called Walthall County home.

Like most counties in southern Mississippi, Walthall County’s 2010 population was predominantly white and had grown slowly since the 1960s. The county’s population of 15,443 was 53.4 percent white and 44.5 percent African Americans.

Walthall County

Warren County

Warren County, perhaps best known for the significance of the Siege of Vicksburg during the Civil War, was one of Mississippi’s original counties. Located on the bluffs above the Mississippi River in the southwestern part of the state, Warren County lies due west of Jackson. To paraphrase a famous statement by Mississippi writer David Cohn, the Delta starts in Memphis and ends in Vicksburg, the Warren County seat. Before European contact, the area that became Warren County was home to mound-building people with connections up and down the river. The French negotiated with small numbers of Tunica and other Native American groups when establishing a small settlement, Fort St. Pierre, in 1719. They abandoned the fort after the Natchez War in the 1730s.

The county formed in 1809 and was named for Revolutionary War general Joseph Warren. In 1820 Warren County had a population of 1,406 free persons and 1,287 slaves. Like most frontier societies, Warren was overwhelmingly agricultural, with just 37 manufacturing workers. Cattle were important in early Warren County, and cotton was becoming the area’s dominant crop. By 1830 Warren County had a population of 7,861, including 4,483 slaves, the state’s fourth-highest total.

Vicksburg developed quickly into Mississippi’s second-largest community, trailing only Natchez. By 1840 Warren had, by standards of antebellum Mississippi, an urbanizing population. Its total of 15,820 people ranked fourth in the state. About two-thirds of residents were slaves, and Vicksburg had a large slave market. As a river town engaged in considerable commerce, Vicksburg, a popular steamboat stop, had far more people employed in trade (289) than any other Mississippi county, and its 472 manufacturing workers also outnumbered any other county in the state. Free African Americans tended to congregate in Vicksburg and other river towns, and Warren was one of only three counties in Mississippi with more than one hundred free African Americans.

By 1860 Warren County’s population had grown to 20,696, including 13,763 slaves. The number of free African Americans had declined to 37. The county’s twenty-four manufacturing establishments employed 477 people, including 245 men working on steamboats and others making boots, shoes, and clothing and dealing with lumber and shingles. The county’s 1,041 foreign-born residents, many of them Irish and Italian, ranked second-most in the state behind Adams County.

Agriculture thrived in Warren County on the eve of the Civil War, with slaves comprising two-thirds of the population. Warren ranked thirteenth in the state in the production of cotton, first in orchard products, and second in potatoes but near the bottom in corn.

In 1860 Warren County was home to eighteen churches: eight Methodist, six Baptist, two Episcopal, and single Catholic and Presbyterian churches. A Catholic group, the Sisters of Mercy, began a unique educational and religious mission in Vicksburg in 1860. Mississippi’s second Jewish congregation started in Vicksburg in 1841. Prominent Mississippians from antebellum Warren County included Jefferson Davis, a planter and West Point–trained military leader who served as a US congressman, head of the War Department, and a US senator before becoming president of the Confederate States of America. Alexander McNutt, Mississippi governor and author of stories about the southwestern frontier, was a Warren County planter. Henry Stuart Foote served Mississippi in the US Senate and as governor.

Vicksburg, sometimes called the Gibraltar of the Confederacy, was crucial to Civil War military strategy. As early as 1861 Abraham Lincoln said, “Vicksburg is the key.” Union attempts to take Vicksburg failed in the summer of 1862, in part because of the difficulties of geography, with the city resting high above the river, and in part because of the success of the CSS Arkansas, a Confederate ironclad. Late that year, Union general Ulysses S. Grant started planning another, more sustained effort to take Vicksburg that included building a canal so that troops could move beyond the range of Confederate guns; complicated efforts to surround the city; and the gathering of a large force. A series of battles led Grant’s troops to the outskirts of Vicksburg, where Confederates led by John C. Pemberton held out from May until 3 July 1863, when they surrendered. Union troops entered the city on Independence Day.

As a consequence of its military importance and of the sacrifices made by so many people, Vicksburg became a symbolic center for memorializing Civil War soldiers. Efforts to honor soldiers began when the federal government created a national cemetery for Union soldiers in Vicksburg in 1865. A broad area known as Soldiers’ Rest is the largest Confederate burial ground in Mississippi. In the 1890s women in Vicksburg started one of the first chapters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and in 1899 Congress established the Vicksburg National Military Park, with more than 1,300 monuments commemorating specific moments in the Vicksburg Campaign.

Warren County became one of the key areas for contests over the meanings of freedom during and after the war. Vicksburg was home of one of the larger camps for escaped slaves, called contraband by Union forces, and Grant’s troops included some of the first African American soldiers to fight in Mississippi. During Reconstruction, some whites in Vicksburg formed the Mississippi White Line, which opposed African American voting and office-holding through violence and other intimidation. And Warren County natives Isaiah Montgomery, Joshua Montgomery, and Benjamin Green, all of whom were former slaves from the Davis Bend plantation, became leaders in the all-black settlement at Mound Bayou in the 1880s.

After the Civil War, Warren remained one of Mississippi’s largest counties, with a population smaller than only Hinds and Yazoo. While the number of whites in the county increased steadily, the number of African Americans increased dramatically, and in 1880 22,516 of the 31,238 residents (72 percent) were African American. With 1,105 foreign-born people, Warren had by far the state’s largest population of immigrants, including more than 400 natives of Ireland and almost 400 Germans as well as smaller but significant numbers of natives of England, Scotland, and France.

Like most of Mississippi, postbellum Warren County remained heavily agricultural. Its farmers ranked twelfth in the state in producing cotton and much lower in most other categories. Yet part of what distinguished the county was its 59 manufacturing establishments, employing 315 men, 17 children, and no women—the third-most industrial workers in the state. In 1880 Warren ranked second in the state in total industrial production, trailing only Copiah County.

By 1900 Warren County had 40,912 residents, three-quarters of them African American. The county’s 1,490 industrial workers were the second-most in the state, with the second-highest total industrial wages. Only 72 of those workers were women. The Knights of Labor had some successes organizing Warren County lumber workers in the late 1800s, mounting one major strike in 1887 and playing a role in Vicksburg politics. Nearly 800 foreign-born men and women lived in the county, most of them from Germany and Ireland, with other groups coming from Italy, England, and Sweden. A small but significant group of Syrians and Lebanese lived in Vicksburg. Outside Vicksburg, the county remained heavily agricultural, with more than 4,000 farms. Only 181 of the 3,481 African American farmers owned their land, compared to 313 of the 577 white farmers. Warren had one of the highest numbers of sharecroppers and tenants in the state.

Religious census reports for 1916 and 1926 show the distinctiveness of Warren County. Its largest group were Missionary Baptists, and its second-largest was the Roman Catholic Church. Warren had the third-highest number of Catholics in Mississippi, trailing only the coastal counties of Harrison and Hancock. Other large groups included the Methodist Episcopal Church, South; the African Methodist Episcopal Church; the Southern Baptists; the Episcopalians; and the Presbyterians. Joseph Brunini, born in Vicksburg in 1909, became an important Catholic bishop in Mississippi.

Warren County has produced an impressive array of visual artists. Andrew Bucci, born in Vicksburg in 1923, studied with Mississippi’s Marie Hull and achieved renown as a painter. Carver Victor “Hickory Stick Vic” Bobb and quilter Martha Skelton, an Oklahoma native, did their work in Warren County, and in the 1970s self-taught artist Earl Simmons began Earl’s Art Shop in Bovina. In the 1980s H. D. Dennis turned his wife’s business outside Vicksburg into a singular work of art, Margaret’s Grocery. William Ferris, a scholar of folk traditions in music, speech, and visual art, grew up outside Vicksburg, and innovative fashion designer Patrick Kelly was born in Vicksburg in 1954.

Numerous innovators in literature, film, and music also have roots in Warren County. Ellen Gilchrist, author of poetry and novels such as In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, was born in Vicksburg. One of the early leaders of silent film, actor and director Larry Semon, was born in Vicksburg in 1889. Actress Beah Richards, born in 1926, had a long and impressive career as an actress, while filmmaker Charles Burnett, best known for such unconventional films as Killer of Sheep, was born in Vicksburg in 1944. Playwright Mart Crowley, another Vicksburg native, is most famous for his long-running Broadway play, Boys in the Band. Chicago blues musicians Willie Dixon and Walter Barnes had roots in Vicksburg, and the Red Tops, led by Walter Osborne, operated from Vicksburg from the 1950s to the 1970s.

By 1930 Warren County had a population of 35,785, including 22,943 urban residents and 12,842 rural residents, making it one of only six Mississippi counties where most of the population did not live on farms. African Americans comprised 58 percent of the population. Warren County’s 1,685 industrial workers ranked fifth in the state. Outside Vicksburg, the county remained heavily agricultural, with three-quarters of its 2,604 farms operated by tenants, most of them African American. Compared to most Mississippi counties, Warren had a substantial degree of ethnic diversity, with more than 400 people born outside the United States and more than 1,500 people with parents born abroad. The largest of those groups were Palestinian and Syrian, followed by Italians, Russians, and Czechs.

By the mid-twentieth century, like other counties with urban centers, Warren County experienced a population increase, growing to 42,206 people by 1960. In a significant change from 1930, 53 percent of the residents were white. Warren County ranked in the top 10 counties in Mississippi in per capita income. About 20 percent of the county’s workers were employed in manufacturing—furniture and timber, machinery, transportation equipment, and food products. More people (1,200) worked in health care than in agriculture (900).

Warren County’s civil rights movement stretches as far back as 1918, when Vicksburg’s African Americans established the state’s first chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Though that chapter disbanded, Vicksburg was one of the first places where African Americans demanded school desegregation immediately after the US Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. In 1964 civil rights activists in the county began publishing the Vicksburg Citizens’ Appeal, which emphasized news about the African American freedom struggle. Civil rights figures with roots in Vicksburg included Ed King, a chaplain at Tougaloo College and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s candidate for lieutenant governor, and Jackson State University educator Jane McAllister.

The county’s population exceeded 50,000 for the first time in 1980, and in 1991 Vicksburg builder Kirk Fordice became Mississippi’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction. Tourism, related especially to the Civil War, antebellum homes, and casino gambling, has become an important part of Vicksburg life. Unlike most of the counties along the Mississippi River, the county’s 2010 population of 48,733 was predominantly white and had grown significantly during the last half of the twentieth century.

Warren County

Washington County

Washington County was founded in 1827 and named for George Washington. It is located in the Mississippi Delta region, bordering the Mississippi River. Greenville, the county seat, has long been the Delta’s largest city, and other communities include Leland, Hollandale, Arcola, and Metcalfe. For much of its history Washington’s economic and social life has been intertwined with the history of cotton production.

The area that became Washington County was the site of ancient mound-building people. The Winterville Mounds, located north of Greenville, originally consisted of twenty-three mounds arranged around a single mound more than fifty feet high, though some of the mounds have now been leveled.

In the 1830 census Washington County had 792 free persons and 1,184 slaves. By 1840 Washington had 660 free people and 6,627 slaves, establishing its identity as a Delta plantation county with a large slave majority. According to the census, the county had no manufacturing, but its steamboat stop brought people to Greenville and sent cotton to markets. Ten years later the county had even fewer free residents—546 whites and 7 free African Americans—and its slave population had increased to 7,836, giving the county the state’s highest percentage of slaves (93.4 percent). Washington County had no public schools and only two churches but had the highest value of farm property and third-highest agricultural production in the state. On the eve of the Civil War, Washington County’s population was 15,679, with 14,467 of those residents enslaved.

Washington County mushroomed after the war, with an 1880 population of 25,367. The county had 21,861 African Americans, 3,478 whites, and 28 Chinese. With African Americans comprising 86.2 percent of the population, Washington County continued to have the state’s largest African American majority. The county had only 454 farms, among the fewest in the state, but the average farm size of 404 acres was near the top, and its farm property ranked second in total value. Washington County led Mississippi in cotton production. Washington’s farmers grew substantial amounts of corn and potatoes and had a large number of mules, but the county ranked low in most other forms of agricultural production. Washington County also began to develop some manufacturing establishments, with nine firms employing 122 men, 3 women, and 62 children. In addition to the Chinese, the county’s foreign-born population of 367 consisted largely of natives of Germany and Ireland.

In 1900 Washington County was home to 49,216 people, the second-highest population in Mississippi, with 44,143 African Americans (90 percent), 57 Chinese, and 5,016 whites. Washington’s 6,407 tenant farmers and sharecroppers were by far the most in the state. Only 4 percent of the county’s 6,525 African American farmers and 38 percent of the 328 white farmers owned their land. Cotton dominated the economy, and as in other areas with high numbers of tenants, the average farm size of less than forty acres was exceptionally low.

Washington County had 578 women and just 14 men working in manufacturing jobs. The county also had a relatively large number of residents born outside the United States, with more than 500 immigrants, including people from Italy, Germany, China, Russia, and Austria. . In keeping with its large African American population, Missionary Baptist and African Methodist Episcopal churches dominated, but its ethnic diversity meant that the county also had more Jewish and Catholic residents than did most parts of Mississippi. Two notable institutions began life in Greenville in 1903: the Stein Mart department store chain originated with a store operated by Russian immigrant Sam Stein, and Doe’s Eat Place started as a grocery run by Italian immigrant Carmel Signa.

Washington County’s population changed relatively little in the early twentieth century, and the county remained one of the most densely populated in the state. Like other Delta counties, it had a substantial African American majority, though the white population increased in the 1910s and 1920s. In 1930 the county’s 54,310 residents included 444 who were born outside the United States—primarily in Italy, Palestine, Syria, and Russia. Greenville’s population topped 11,000, and Washington County businesses employed almost 1,400 industrial workers, ninth most in the state. Washington County had a cannery, the most cottonseed oil mills in Mississippi, and several of the state’s largest hardwood sawmills. Still, Washington remained very much a cotton-growing county and was one of seven Mississippi counties in which more than 90 percent of all farms were operated by tenants.

Washington County was the site of a great deal of experimentation with large-scale agriculture. Leroy Percy and other large planters tried various forms of labor organizing, including importing Italian farmworkers and employing Mexican migrant workers. Leland was home to one of the earliest commercial crop-dusting operations. The Delta Branch Experiment Station was founded at Stoneville to improve cotton production, first by combating the boll weevil. In 1948 agricultural experimentation in Stoneville led to major expansion in rice cultivation in the Delta.

The Delta Council organized in 1935 in Stoneville and sought to improve agriculture, economic development, health, education, and ties to the federal government. It attracted a combination of plantation owners, educators, and business leaders, and it helped set national agricultural policy when it helped form the National Cotton Council,.

The Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927 devastated Washington County, with flood conditions lasting four months and causing loss of life, homes, and crops. A levee north of Greenville broke, inundating two million acres in the Delta. City leaders organized a mass evacuation of white women and children to Vicksburg and Memphis, and a relief committee led by William Alexander Percy established a refugee camp that was inhabited largely by African American tenant farmer families. Area white planters, fearful of the loss of labor if an exodus of black farmworkers occurred, barred any opportunities for evacuation. Approximately 7,500 African Americans were stranded in tents on the levee, with men compelled to labor in poor conditions for no pay. Reports of this confinement, squalid conditions, and increasing tensions reached a national audience, and US secretary of commerce Herbert Hoover dispatched an investigative committee to the county. The disaster subsequently became one factor that prompted the growing migration of blacks to northern cities.

In politics, Washington County leaders tended toward the conservatism of plantation owners, but there was room for creativity. For example, Leroy Percy condemned the Ku Klux Klan as supporters of violence and anarchy during a 1922 election, and Clarke Reed helped build Mississippi’s modern Republican Party beginning in the late 1960s. Washington County has also had a long history of women in politics. Nellie Nugent Somerville, born in 1863 in Greenville, was the state’s leading proponent of woman suffrage, and she became the first woman elected to the state legislature. Her daughter, Lucy Somerville Howorth, became a lawyer and a force in Democratic Party politics in the 1930s and 1940s. Zelma Wells Price served the county for ten years as a legislator and became Mississippi’s first female judge.

Washington County has also been home to some of Mississippi’s most creative writers and artists. Many of them knew and learned from each other, while others became writers outside existing literary circles. Writers who knew and learned from each other included William Alexander Percy, Shelby Foote, and David Cohn. Percy, author of Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son, analyzed what he described as the decline of plantation traditions in the early twentieth-century South with the rise of mechanization and mass media, the outmigration of so many people, and the development of popular politics. Foote began his writing career as a novelist before turning his talents to a long narrative of the Civil War. A storekeeper’s son with affinities with the planter elite, Cohn offered a unique perspective on African American culture in the Delta with God Shakes Creation. Percy protégé Leon Z. Koury, born in 1909 to Syrian immigrants who became Greenville grocers, became a sculptor and painter as well as a leader in the local art scene for three decades. Koury, in turn, mentored Greenville-born sculptor William N. Beckwith.

Outside the Greenville literary circle, Jim Henson became an American children’s television and film pioneer with his Muppet characters. Novelist William Alexander Attaway, born in Greenville in 1911, set much of his work, including his best-known novel, Blood on the Forge, in the African American migration away from the South. Famous for a series of books about African American small-town life, Glen Allan native Clifton Taulbert, born in 1945, developed the concept of the “porch people”—adults who set community standards high and looked after everyone’s children. Authors raised in Greenville include Angela Jackson, who has written poetry, drama, and fiction; poet-translator Brooks Haxton; novelist Beverly Lowry; and essayist Julia Reed. Charles Bell wrote in numerous genres, including a long and creative history of world culture. Artists Valerie Jaudon and P. Sanders McNeal grew up in Greenville, and self-taught artist and musician James “Son Ford” Thomas lived in Leland.

By 1960 Washington County’s population had increased to 79,638, the third-highest in Mississippi, and the county had the state’s third-highest population density. However, population growth was driven primarily by white movement to Greenville, and African Americans now accounted for just 54 percent of the population. Washington County also had 264 Chinese residents (160 men and 104 women) and 48 Mexicans. Unlike most Delta counties, Washington had an average per capita income that ranked among the highest in the state. About 16 percent of the county’s workers were employed in industry—primarily construction, furniture, food production, and textile work. More than 800 residents were employed in hospitals and health care, and 3,100 of the county’s women worked in personal service jobs. As in previous decades, Washington ranked high in the state in the production of cotton (fourth), soybeans (fourth), oats (first), and rice (third), and 20 percent of its workers were employed in agriculture.

Two famous moments in the civil rights movement took place in Washington County in 1966. In January some out-of-work farm laborers, in a partnership with the Delta Ministry, took over the buildings of the Greenville Air Base, renamed it Freedom Village, and called on the federal government to address problems of poverty, hunger, and poor education. Late in the year, the phrase Black Power came to prominence in Washington County when Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) and others first began using it during the March against Fear initiated by James Meredith.

Greenville’s two major newspapers had unique perspectives on civil rights activities. The Delta Leader, under editor H. H. Humes, was a conservative African American newspaper that advocated personal uplift rather than activism. The Delta Democrat-Times, edited by Hodding Carter II and Betty Werlein Carter, criticized numerous expressions of white supremacy, from Theodore Bilbo to massive resistance, a stance that provoked threats and condemnation from many members of the area’s elite. In 1978 a nonprofit group, Mississippi Action for Community Education, started the Mississippi Delta Blues and Heritage Festival on the site of the Freedom Village protest. Washington County was the home of blues performers Richard Hacksaw Harney, Tyrone Davis, and Eddie Cusic, and the Greenville Chamber of Commerce produced a record of the songs of the mockingbird, Mississippi’s state bird.

As in many Delta counties, Washington County’s 2010 population remained predominantly African American but had decreased significantly since 1960. With just 51,137 people, Washington had lost 35 percent of its population over the preceding half century.

Washington County

Wayne County

One of Mississippi’s first counties, Wayne County was founded in 1809 and was named for US Army general Anthony Wayne. It is located along the Alabama border in southeastern Mississippi. The Leaf and Chickasawhay Rivers run parallel through the county and provide the area with outdoor recreational activities and an attractive landscape. The county seat is Waynesboro.

In 1820 Wayne County was a fairly small agricultural area with more than twice as many free people (2,258) as slaves (1,065). Wayne County relied very little on manufacturing, employing only 12 workers in commerce and 6 in manufacturing. Unlike some parts of southern Mississippi, Wayne did not attract widespread settlement in the antebellum period. In 1840 the county was home to 1,141 free people and 979 slaves; twenty years later, the population remained small—1,744 free people (including just 7 born outside the United States) and 1,947 slaves.

Despite its small size, Wayne County produced its share of notable residents. Waynesboro’s Powhatan Ellis served as a representative, US senator, and Mississippi Supreme Court justice. George Strother Gaines, a planter and trader who helped negotiate the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek with the Choctaw in 1830, spent much of his time in Wayne County, where he owned land and slaves.

Antebellum Wayne County ranked near the bottom of Mississippi’s counties in the value of its farms and in its livestock, cotton, and corn. The county had twelve Methodist churches, three Baptist congregations, and three Presbyterian houses of worship.

Postbellum Wayne County grew substantially, with 8,741 residents, 57 percent of them white, in 1880. Still largely agricultural, Wayne continued to rank near the bottom of the state’s counties in growing both corn and cotton but had reached the middle rank in the production of molasses, rice, and sweet potatoes and in the number of livestock, especially sheep. In 1880 Wayne County ranked third in the production of wool. Wayne continued to attract relatively few foreign-born immigrants but had a small but growing manufacturing sector, with twenty-four firms employing 108 people.

By 1900 Wayne County was home to 12,539 people, 60 percent of them white. Three-quarters of white farmers owned the land they worked, while just under half of African American farmers did so. Wayne’s industrial workforce had increased substantially, with 352 men and 6 women employed in manufacturing. The dramatic growth of the timber industry accounted for most of the area’s industrial development.

Wayne County’s population stayed constant at around 15,000 from 1900 to 1930 and was about two-thirds white. In 1930 Wayne County had 514 industrial workers, many of them employed at a cannery or small sawmills. Despite the development of Eucutta Fields, the first successful oil field in eastern Mississippi, the area continued to rely on agriculture—mainly cattle, swine, and corn. In 1930 far more of Wayne County’s farmers (55 percent) owned their farms than the state average (30 percent). Like many southern Mississippi counties, Wayne was sparsely populated, with the sixth-lowest population density in the state.

By 1960 the county’s population had increased slightly to 16,258. Wayne’s manufacturing industry expanded, providing about 11 percent of the county’s workers with jobs, mostly in the furniture and clothing industries. Thirty percent of the residents still worked in agriculture. The major enterprises consisted of corn, livestock, and soybeans, but trees dominated the county’s agriculture. In 1960 Wayne County had the most commercial forestland in Mississippi.

Wayne’s population jumped to 19,135 people in 1980. As in most southeastern Mississippi counties, Wayne County’s 2010 population was predominantly white and had grown significantly since 1960. Among Wayne’s 20,747 residents in 2010, 59 percent were white and 39 percent were African American, while the county had small Asian and Hispanic/Latino populations.

Wayne County

Webster County

Sumner County in central Mississippi was formed in 1874. By 1890 the county was renamed in honor of US secretary of state Daniel Webster, in keeping with neighboring Clay and Calhoun Counties, which also were named for 1830s political heroes. Walthall is the county seat, and other communities include Eupora, Maben, and Mathiston.

In 1880 Sumner County had a population of 9,534. Three-quarters of its residents were white, and just 8 had been born outside the United States. Of the county’s 1,410 farmers, 72 percent owned their land, a figure far higher than the Mississippi average of 56 percent. The county’s nine industrial establishments employed just 22 people.

In 1900 Webster County was home to 13,619 people, 70 percent of them white. Webster was primarily an agricultural county, with just 100 men and 5 women working in industry. Among the county’s farmers, 61 percent of whites owned their land, while only 31 percent of African Americans did so. The turn-of-the century Populist movement had greater success in Webster County than in most of the rest of Mississippi.

According to the 1916 religious census, Southern Baptists accounted for half of Webster County’s churchgoers, while Missionary Baptists constituted another substantial group. The county also had a significant number of members of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Webster County was home of one of the state’s earliest Sacred Harp singing conventions.

Webster County’s population declined in the early twentieth century, falling to just over 12,000 people by 1930. Nearly 80 percent of residents were white. Webster had 313 industrial workers, but farming remained the basis of the county’s economy. More than half of the 2,429 farms were operated by tenant farmers, who primarily raised cotton and livestock.

State political leader Thomas L. Bailey was born and raised in Webster County before moving to Lauderdale County. He served in the state legislature for more than twenty years before becoming governor in 1944.

Two important Mississippi artists grew up in Webster County. Ethel Wright Mohamed was born near Eupora in 1908. After she and her husband moved to Belzoni, she became an artist, using embroidery to tell stories about Mississippi life. William Dunlap, a painter and sculptor, grew up in Webster County and maintains a studio in Mathiston.

By 1960 the county’s population had fallen to 10,580. More than a third of Webster’s working people remained employed in agriculture, now mixing cotton and corn with soybeans. About a quarter of the workers had jobs in manufacturing, primarily in the textile and furniture industries.

Like many of its neighboring counties in central Mississippi, Webster County’s 2010 population was predominantly white and had remained about the same size since 1960.

Webster County

Welfare Reform, 1990s

In August 1996 the federal government replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), ending the sixty-year entitlement of poor families with children to cash assistance. In so doing, Congress and Pres. Bill Clinton followed a path cut by a number of states, including Mississippi, which during the early 1990s had begun to retool their welfare systems into “workfare.”

Welfare reform constructed a new social contract between recipients of public assistance and the state. Whereas the AFDC program entitled all families with children and incomes below a state-determined threshold to welfare, TANF mandated that adult recipients work in exchange for receiving assistance. It also set a five-year lifetime limit on family receipt of welfare. Further, reform transformed the structure of the welfare system from a federal-state match grant into a block grant under which states were allowed to reduce spending on welfare by up to 25 percent and granted the option to apply funds to purposes other than supporting low-income families’ transitions to work. The amount of each state’s annual TANF grant was determined by the state’s historical levels of spending on welfare and job training. Because Mississippi had always spent very little, its annual block grant of approximately eighty-six million dollars was significantly below the national median.

The reform process had begun in Mississippi with the 1992 election of Republican governor Kirk Fordice, who had made the issue a central plank of his platform. Most fundamentally, welfare reform in Mississippi was marked by a “get tough” attitude toward recipients, who were expected to make a transition to self-sufficiency with minimal state support. The program emphasized reducing the size of the state welfare caseload and thus state spending on welfare services. The state first consolidated authority over the Department of Human Services, which was responsible for the administration of welfare, under the governor’s office. Then, in December 1994, the state implemented a pilot welfare reform program, New Directions, in some counties. New Directions made access to public assistance and support services contingent on a recipient finding a job or participating in state-subsidized “work activities” such as community service. The program imposed the nation’s harshest sanctions on recipients who failed to complete work requirements, including loss of the family’s entire welfare and food stamps grants. This punitive orientation reflected the administration’s belief that adult welfare recipients lacked motivation to work and had become dependent on welfare.

The federal government’s 1996 overhaul of the national welfare system reflected Mississippi’s approach—mandatory work requirements, sanctions, and time limits. Perhaps the major impact of federal reform in Mississippi was that it led to the implementation of New Directions throughout the state before it was fully prepared to do so. As the state that offered the lowest welfare payments in the nation—a family of three was eligible for a maximum AFDC grant of $120 per month—and that had a workforce development system oriented more toward obtaining federal funds than providing comprehensive services, Mississippi lacked both the fiscal and institutional capacity to support transitions to work. At the same time, however, the federal law subjected state leaders to tough new performance benchmarks, tying federal funds to either supporting TANF recipients’ participation in “work activities” or significantly reducing the caseload. Insofar as the costs of providing single mothers with child care and other services needed to sustain employment were effectively prohibitive, Mississippi, like other low-benefit southern states, pursued a strategy of caseload reduction. Between 1996 and 2006 the number of Mississippi families receiving assistance fell from approximately 44,000 to just over 12,000, a decline of roughly 73 percent.

While many state and federal officials point to caseload decline as an unqualified indicator of successful reform, many critical studies argue that Mississippi did not improve its welfare system as much as it severely restricted access to assistance. The program’s “work-first” orientation, combined with Govorner Fordice’s privatization of the delivery system, produced what a Rockefeller Institute report characterized as a system-wide collapse of accountability between 1996 and 1998 accompanied by inadequate service provision and incidents of client abuse. More generally, studies indicate that the caseload decline was achieved through administrative methods designed to deter eligible families from going on welfare and to push others out of the program without providing costly transitional services. One analysis of the status of those who left the program showed that only 18 percent found jobs, while 64 percent returned to TANF within five years. Another study found that only 10 percent of children whose parents left the program were covered by employer-provided health plans, while another 44 percent continued to receive government-funded health insurance.

In sum, Mississippi’s high rates of working poverty, illiteracy, and unwed births, combined with its historical aversion to funding work support services, made it one of the most challenging contexts in which to reform welfare. Observers agree that if Mississippi is to develop an effective welfare-to-work system, the state will need to significantly increase its investments in human capital and support services, including child care, job training and placement, education, and transportation. President Clinton envisioned welfare reform as forging a new social contract under which families who “worked hard and played by the rules” would be rewarded with access to a new array of work support services. For a variety of reasons, Mississippi and the federal government have largely failed to fulfill their responsibilities under that contract.

Mark H. Harvey

Florida Atlantic University

David A. Breaux, Christopher M. Duncan, C. Denise Keller, and John C. Morris, Public Administration Review (January–February 2002); Center for Law and Social Policy website, www.clasp.org; Jocelyn Guyer, Health Care after Welfare: An Update of Findings from State Leaver Studies (2000); Gretchen C. Kirby, L. Jerome Gallagher, LaDonna Pavetti, Milda Saunders, and Tennille Smith, Income Support and Social Services for Low-Income People in Mississippi (1 December 1998), Urban Institute website, www.urban.org; Mississippi Department of Human Services, Monthly Statistical Report: Economic Assistance Programs (2006); Domenico Parisi, Deborah A. Harris, Steven Michael Grice, Michael Taquino, and Duane A. Gill, Journal of Poverty (2005); Domenico Parisi, Diane K. McLaughlin, Steven Michael Grice, and Michael Taquino, Social Science Quarterly (2006); Kathleen Pickering, Mark H. Harvey, Gene F. Summers, and David Mushinski, Welfare Reform in Persistent Rural Poverty: Dreams, Disenchantments, and Diversity (2006).

Welfare Reform, 1990s

Welty, Eudora

Eudora Alice Welty was born on 13 April 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi, and lived there for her entire life save for college studies, sojourns of one to six months in New York and San Francisco, and writing residencies at Breadloaf, Yaddo, and Bryn Mawr and Smith Colleges. Her father, Christian Welty, president of the Lamar Life Insurance Company, was a man of progressive ideas who encouraged his employees and family to travel and thereby gain a broader perspective and empathy for others. Eudora’s mother, Chestina Andrews Welty, was a teacher from the mountains of West Virginia who taught her daughter and her two younger brothers, Edward and Walter, to love reading.

After attending Jefferson Davis Elementary School across from her home on Congress Street in Jackson, Eudora Welty moved on to Central High School. When she was sixteen, her family moved to the house at 1119 Pinehurst Street, across from Belhaven College, where she lived for the rest of her life. While in high school, she contributed drawings to the Memphis Commercial Appeal children’s pages, won awards for a drawing and a poem published in St. Nicholas Magazine, and contributed graphic designs and satire to her high school yearbooks. To the Golden Gate and Back Again, a 1924 souvenir booklet commemorating a Lamar Life Insurance Company rail journey from Memphis to California on which Eudora was her father’s guest, includes five humorous drawings by Welty and a concluding spoof addressed to “Mr. Wealty,” presumably by the young wordsmith.

Welty graduated from high school in 1925 and enrolled at the Mississippi State College for Women (now Mississippi State University for Women). After two years there, during which time she drew and wrote for school publications, she moved on to the University of Wisconsin at Madison, receiving her degree in English literature in 1929. She spent the following year in Jackson, writing a few pieces for the Jackson Daily News but failing to find steady work with publishers or journals. In the fall of 1930, Welty moved to New York City and studied advertising at the Columbia School of Business until the fall of 1931, returning to her family’s Pinehurst Street home when her father became ill and died in September.

Welty subsequently worked at numerous writing jobs. She served as the editor of Lamar Life Radio News, the society columnist for the Memphis Commercial Appeal (1933–35), a researcher for the Mississippi Advertising Commission, and a junior publicity agent for the Works Progress Administration, a position that called for her to travel throughout the state. On those trips, she took numerous photographs of places and people that were later collected and published in One Time, One Place: Mississippi in the Depression: A Snapshot Album (1971), Twenty Photographs (1980), In Black and White (1985), Photographs (1989), Country Churchyards (2000), and Eudora Welty as Photographer (2009). The images illustrate Welty’s interest in human dignity. Small exhibitions of her photographs took place in Raleigh and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, at the behest of her Jackson friend Frank Lyell and in New York at Lugene Optics. Passionate Observer: Eudora Welty among Artists of the Thirties (2002) places Welty’s photographs in the context of local and national painters and photographers, revealing Welty’s talents and synchronicities with successful and trained artists.

In 1936 “Death of a Traveling Salesman” became Welty’s first published story, appearing in Manuscript. This and other stories in little magazines and regional journals led Diarmuid Russell of a newly founded literary agency, Russell and Volkening, to offer to be Welty’s literary agent. Others who nurtured Welty’s career included Katherine Anne Porter; Albert Erskine, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn Warren, the editors of Southern Review; Mary Louise Aswell of Harper’s Bazaar; and William Maxwell of the New Yorker.

Twelve of Welty’s forty-one collected stories garnered individual prizes. With humor, irony, compassion, A Curtain of Green and Other Stories (1941) and The Wide Net and Other Stories (1943) illustrate Mississippi during the Great Depression, using a variety of settings, themes, and conflicts. Her next collection, The Golden Apples (1949), is unified by the Natchez Trace setting and the theme of love and separateness. A nine-story composite set in fictional Morgana, Mississippi, and in San Francisco, the volume is Welty’s most modernist work and is rightly acclaimed as her finest achievement. The Bride of the Innisfallen (1955), Welty’s most varied story collection, features stories set in Louisiana, Mississippi, Italy, and Ireland. Some are contemporary, others take place during the Civil War, and others occur in mythic time. In addition, some are ghost stories, some feature modern angst, and some offer memory puzzles. Two stories written in the 1960s that illustrate public and private racial violence and ethics (“Where Is the Voice Coming From?” and “The Demonstrators”) are included in Collected Stories (1980). Among the best known and most frequently anthologized of Welty’s stories are “Why I Live at the P.O.,” “A Worn Path,” and “Petrified Man.” “Powerhouse,” prompted by a Fats Waller concert in Jackson, is considered one of the finest American jazz stories.

Welty wrote about her youth, education, reading, and family relationships in “Personal and Occasional Pieces” in The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews (1978); in her memoir, One Writer’s Beginnings (1984); and in her Pulitzer Prize–winning autobiographical novel, The Optimist’s Daughter (1972).

Welty published two novellas, both of which were adapted for the stage: The Robber Bridegroom (1942, musical drama by Alfred Uhry and Robert Alderman, 1976) and The Ponder Heart (1954, stage adaptation by Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodorov, 1956). Although Welty felt most pleased with her talents as a short story writer, her three novels were experimental for their day, and as complex and stylistically challenging as any of their contemporaries: Delta Wedding (1946), Losing Battles (1970), and The Optimist’s Daughter. All three novels are set in Mississippi, but their themes—the unremitting power of the past and of complex mysteries of human relationships—are universal.

The majority of Welty’s nonfiction is collected in The Eye of the Story and A Writer’s Eye: Collected Book Reviews (1994). She wrote essays on writers Jane Austen, Willa Cather, Anton Chekov, Henry Green, and Katherine Anne Porter and contributed significant critical commentary on Elizabeth Bowen, William Faulkner, E. M. Forster, and Virginia Woolf in book reviews and in occasional speeches and comments. Her essays about the craft of writing are also collected in On Writing (2002). Occasions: Selected Writings (2009) contains more than sixty previously uncollected pieces from magazines, journals, newsletters, and newspapers.

Welty’s talent and importance as a major American writer were recognized both nationally and internationally during her lifetime. In addition to the Pulitzer and short story awards, Welty received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Howells Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal for Fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres and a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. Her work has been translated into more than fifteen languages. In 1998 Welty was the first living writer to have her canon published by the Library of America ( Complete Novels and Stories, Essays, and Memoir ).

In her home state, Welty edited Mississippi Women’s War Bond News, contributed a preface for the Jackson Junior League Cookbook, wrote letters to the editors of the Jackson newspapers, helped to found and guide the city’s New Stage Theatre, campaigned for her choice of political candidates, worked on behalf of the racial integration of Millsaps College, and supported education and arts efforts.

At her death on 23 July 2001, Welty bequeathed the Pinehurst Street house to the State of Mississippi, and the Mississippi Department of Archives and History now operates it as a museum with the assistance of the Eudora Welty Foundation, created in 1999 to “fund educational and research activities and to develop programs that will enhance Eudora Welty’s legacy and ensure that her work continues to be recognized as among the greatest in American literature.” In addition, the Eudora Welty Society sponsors scholarly panels and awards designed “to foster scholarship and academic community among Welty scholars.”

Welty, Eudora

White Flight

The term white flight involves residential choice, urban and suburban life, and issues of local government. In Mississippi most forms of white flight are related to schools. The first major movement toward public schools in Mississippi started in 1868, when the state founded an education department and established a school district for each county as well as for each city with a population over five thousand. For the next century, each school district maintained segregated schools. During the Jim Crow period, white schools had better facilities and better funding.

The US Supreme Court’s rulings in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), US v. Hinds (1969), and Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education (1969) forced schools to desegregate. In the late 1960s and early 1970s some white Mississippians (particularly those in districts that had even numbers of white and black students or that had black majorities) decided they did not want their children going to school with black students. White parents removed their children from the public schools across the state but especially did so in the Delta and the Black Belt. At Durant Elementary in Holmes County, for example, 160 of 165 white students failed to show up for class after desegregation in 1965. While many similar examples existed across the state, only a small percentage of all students left Mississippi’s public school systems in the 1960s.

Some parents decided to homeschool their children, while others moved their children to private schools. Prior to 1954, the state had only three non-church-run private schools. By 1966, however, the state had 121 private schools, a number that jumped to 236 in 1970. These schools, many of which were propped up by the White Citizens’ Councils or local churches, were dubbed white flight schools. In February 1970 all but a few white students left the public schools in Tunica, and most began attending one of three private schools established by local churches. In Indianola, 241 white students left the Indianola Public School District for a private school established by the Baptist and Methodist churches. In 1970 whites in the town of Drew established an academy at the National Guard Armory.

A second type of white flight involved movement to suburbs with separate school systems. As schools integrated, some white families chose to move to school districts with fewer African American students, generally leaving city districts for adjacent county districts. In Milliken v. Bradley (1974) the US Supreme Court ruled that states could not force integration across school district lines. In Mississippi, the ruling prompted whites to leave Jackson for suburbs such as Clinton, Brandon, and Madison and to leave Meridian for Lauderdale County. Southaven, Mississippi, founded in 1980 with a population of about sixteen thousand, attracted whites fleeing Memphis, Tennessee, and by the twenty-first century had more than forty thousand people.

White flight led to dramatic changes in the school populations of some towns and small cities in the 1970s and 1980s after federal courts mandated that neighborhood schools be desegregated. For example, in the two years after Laurel desegregated its neighborhood schools in 1976, the city lost more than eight hundred students. While the number of black students in Laurel remained the same, whites dropped from a 53 percent majority to a 25 percent minority. Similarly, more than four thousand white students left Columbus Municipal Schools between the mid-1970s and 1995, and white students went from 43 percent of Hattiesburg students in 1987 to 23 percent after a ruling there. Many of these students moved to Lamar County, where large subdivisions began springing up in Petal and the Oak Grove community.

Census data clearly demonstrate these mass movements. In 1960, prior to any school desegregation, Jackson had roughly 144,000 residents, 64 percent of whom were white. By 1990 Jackson’s population had ballooned to 196,637 but was only 44 percent white, meaning an overall decrease of about 6,000 white residents. Over the next decade, Jackson suffered a net loss of a little over 12,000 people, but the city’s white population decreased by almost 35,000. By contrast, Clinton, a suburb of Jackson, had 3,500 residents in 1960 but by 1990 had a population of nearly 22,000, and 82 percent of Clintonians were white. In 2010, 79.4 percent of Jackson’s 173,514 residents were African American, while 33.9 percent of Clinton’s 25,216 residents were African American.

As cities lose people, they lose tax dollars. To recover the revenue lost from white flight, some cities have raised taxes, trimmed municipal budgets, and cut government funding. As city services decline, other residents with the means to do so—often white residents—move away, creating a vicious cycle.

White flight is a national phenomenon, prevalent in many cities throughout the United States, and not all cities in Mississippi have experienced white flight. Tupelo, for example, has experienced constant growth without a major loss in white population.

White Flight

White Leagues

The White Leagues emerged in the late Reconstruction South with the avowed purpose of overthrowing Republican governments and restoring white supremacy. Considered by both contemporaries and historians as the armed wing of the Democratic Party in the Deep South, they were committed to using violence to reverse the course of Reconstruction by removing Republican leaders from office. They first appeared in Louisiana during the late summer of 1874. In Mississippi, opponents of Radical Reconstruction also formed White Leagues or similar groups known as White Lines.

The earliest harbinger of the White Leagues and White Lines were the White Men’s Clubs that formed across Mississippi in 1870. The depression of 1873, which destabilized Republican governance, and the rise of more aggressive black Republican leaders dedicated to obtaining civil rights created a political landscape conducive to the emergence of White Leagues. Conservative white Democrats became more anxious and more determined to stop what they saw as a trend toward “Africanization.” The Mississippi White Line first arose in Vicksburg during the August elections of 1874. White dissidents formed a People’s or White Man’s Party that patrolled the streets, intimidating black voters. The gang forced black sheriff Peter Crosby and his board of supervisors to leave their offices. Planters in the countryside surrounding Vicksburg formed White Leagues to rid their region of “all bad and leading negroes . . . and controlling more strictly our tenants and other hands.” Pitched battles between White Liners and Crosby’s black supporters resulted in hundreds of black deaths. Gov. Adelbert Ames ultimately requested the assistance of federal troops, who restored Crosby to office in January 1875.

White Leagues could be found throughout Mississippi, though they were especially active in Yazoo, Claiborne, Noxubee, Hinds, and other counties with large numbers of African Americans. Leagues were often filled with young Confederate veterans, and the movement had a strong martial element. Each unit had its own flags, military regalia, and often cannons. Unlike the Ku Klux Klan earlier in Reconstruction, which terrorized African Americans and white Republicans through nocturnal raids, the White Leagues and White Lines operated openly. Editors and their newspapers often played a key role in organizing and leading White Leagues. Such newspapers as the Pascagoula Star, Vicksburg Herald, and the Beauregard and Wesson Times actively supported White League ideas and activities.

The White Leagues targeted Republican leaders for assassination, denied employment to blacks who voted with the Republican Party, and ostracized white Republicans. Armed White Leaguers killed blacks at a Republican rally in Clinton on 4 September 1875. In Kemper County white Republican sheriff W. W. Chisolm and his young son and daughter were essentially lynched by a White League crowd. These actions and others hastened the collapse of Radical Reconstruction. In 1875 Pres. Ulysses S. Grant admitted his weariness of “these annual autumnal outbreaks in the South.” A northern public increasingly preoccupied with class conflict, tired from decades of sectional strife, and uncertain about the federal government’s role in protecting the black civil rights followed the Grant administration in its retreat from Reconstruction.

White Leagues

White Primary

More than eighty years after the end of slavery, African Americans in Mississippi remained unable to redeem their constitutional promise of equal access to the franchise, in large part as a consequence of the Democratic Party rules that prevented blacks from voting in party primaries. The party argued that as a private organization, it had the right to determine who could participate in intraparty elections. However, in Mississippi and other one-party southern states, the Democratic primary effectively constituted the election, since no viable competitor would appear on the general election ballot. As a result, the party’s “white primaries” meant that African American voters had no say in choosing representatives.

Mississippi adopted a primary election system in 1902, replacing the earlier convention/caucus system for choosing party candidates. Although the primary initially was not restricted to white voters, efforts to exclude blacks soon developed. Historian C. Vann Woodward has suggested that the exclusion of African American voters from the Democratic rolls in the South stemmed from attempts to heal divisions between white Democrats and Populists that emerged during the economic hard times of the 1890s: “The only formula powerful enough to accomplish that was the magical formula of white supremacy, applied . . . without any lingering resistance of Northern liberalism, or fear of any further check from a defunct Southern Populism.” With its 1890 constitution, Mississippi became the first state to formally adopt provisions denying blacks the ballot, including poll tax and literacy qualifications. Because some African Americans could still qualify to vote, the white primary became the last means of disqualifying them.

Prior to the late 1930s the white primary was largely unnecessary, as almost all of the South’s black voters were registered as Republicans. But Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal began to bring African American voters into the Democratic fold, forcing southern party leaders to find ways to exclude blacks from party affairs. While the Fifteenth Amendment prevented African Americans from being denied access to the ballot, southern states enacted legislation recognizing political parties as private organizations, and the parties then contended that they could regulate participation in their internal elections in any way they saw fit.

Beginning in the 1920s, a series of US Supreme Court cases invalidated the white primary. Nixon v. Herndon (1924) held unconstitutional a Texas statute explicitly prohibiting African Americans from voting in primaries. United States v. Classic (1941) held that Congress had the power to protect the right to vote in primary elections. And in 1944’s Smith v. Allwright, the Court held that in light of the state’s role in regulating elections, discrimination by a political party was equivalent to discrimination by the state.

Although the Smith decision explicitly invalidated the white primary, Mississippi and other Deep South states continued to deny African Americans the franchise. Democratic Party officials painted the decision as an issue of states’ rights, and the intent to maintain a white primary remained clear: “We still have a few state’s rights left, and one of those rights is to have Democratic primaries and say who shall vote in them,” Mississippi Democratic Party chair Herbert Holmes told the Boston Daily Globe after the Smith decision. State and Democratic Party officials required voters to swear allegiance to the party platform, which was openly segregationist; continued to impose poll taxes; and administered literacy tests in ways that were subjective, asking would-be African American registrants questions such as “How many bubbles in a bar of soap?” and then denying applications on the grounds that the questions had been answered incorrectly.

Both the State of Mississippi and the Mississippi Democratic Party continued to prevent most African Americans from voting until the mid-1960s, when the Twenty-Fourth Amendment (1964) banned poll taxes and the Voting Rights Act (1965) banned the use of literacy tests and provided for federal oversight of voter registration in areas where less than 50 percent of the nonwhite population had registered to vote. Whereas only 5 percent of Mississippi’s eligible African Americans had registered to vote in 1960, that number topped 70 percent a decade later, and African Americans accounted for 30 percent of the state’s total registrants.

White Primary

White, Hugh Lawson

Hugh Lawson White was perhaps the wealthiest man to hold the office of governor in the state’s history, certainly in modern times. An industrialist and lumberman, White was also among the oldest men elected governor. When he was elected to a second term in 1951, White was seventy-one years old and weighed 270 pounds. He often boasted of his voracious appetite.

Born near McComb on 19 August 1881, White was elected mayor of Columbia in 1926 and served until his election as governor in 1935. During the early stages of the Great Depression, White persuaded the Reliance Manufacturing Company to open a plant in Columbia, providing jobs that lessened the effects of the depression in the city. In 1935 White campaigned on a pledge to attract new industry to Mississippi and to do for the whole state what he had done for Columbia and Marion County.

During White’s first administration the state adopted the Balance Agriculture with Industry (BAWI) program and offered economic incentives to new industries locating in Mississippi. The program encouraged training of workers, building or buying structures for new factories, and allowing local governments to pass bonds to attract new industry. BAWI established the state’s first industrial commission. White also initiated the first long-range highway construction program, which increased the number of miles of paved highways in Mississippi from 922 in 1936 to more than 4,000 in 1940. The state highway patrol was organized and the homestead exemption law was also passed.

White served as Mississippi lieutenant governor from 1944 to 1946, becoming governor after Thomas Bailey died in office. He was elected governor in his own right in 1947. During White’s administration Mississippi initiated a massive school consolidation program. In November 1953, a month before the US Supreme Court was to hear arguments in the Brown v. Board of Education case, White called a special session of the legislature in a belated effort to equalize the state’s racially segregated school systems in hopes that the Court would not overturn the “separate but equal” doctrine. After May 1954, when the US Supreme Court declared segregated schools unconstitutional, White attempted unsuccessfully to persuade Mississippi’s African American leaders to accept equal but segregated schools rather than pushing for desegregation. For most of the remainder of his term, White focused on preventing or postponing public school integration, and to that end he oversaw the creation of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission. The Citizens’ Council, a private organization that worked closely with the Sovereignty Commission, was also founded during White’s administration.

After leaving the governor’s office, White returned to private business. He died on 19 September 1965. The seven-thousand-acre Hugh L. White Game Reserve (also known as the Marion County Wildlife Management Area) and the Hugh White State Park near Grenada are named in his honor.

White, Hugh Lawson

Williams, John Bell

John Bell Williams’s political career took an unusual route to the office of governor. Most politicians first run for state or local office and then use those offices to launch a national career. Williams took the opposite approach, serving in the US Congress for more than twenty years prior to his election as Mississippi’s governor in 1967.

Williams, who was born in Raymond, Mississippi, on 4 December 1918, graduated from Hinds Junior College and then attended the University of Mississippi. After receiving a degree from the Jackson School of Law, Williams was admitted to the bar and opened a law office in Raymond in 1940. Williams served in the US Army Air Corps as a pilot during World War II but left active service after losing the lower part of his left arm in a 1944 bomber crash. On 12 October of that year, he married Elizabeth Ann Wells, who had also served in the military as a commissioned officer in the Women’s Army Corps.

After holding the post of Hinds County prosecuting attorney from 1944 to 1946, Williams won election to the US House of Representatives, becoming the youngest member of Congress in the state’s history at age twenty-seven. He remained in Congress until January 1968, championing states’ rights and racial segregation. Shortly after the US Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, Williams made a dramatic speech on the floor of the House of Representatives during which he criticized the decision on constitutional, educational, and cultural grounds, describing desegregated schools as sites of anarchy. Over the next several years Williams became increasingly alienated from the national Democratic Party. In 1964 he publicly endorsed Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater and helped raise funds for his campaign in Mississippi. Goldwater received 87.1 percent of the state’s presidential vote.

Because of Williams’s support for the Republican candidate and his fund-raising activities, the national Democratic Party expelled him in 1965. Two years later he ran for the governorship as a “Mississippi Democrat.” Criticizing his opponents as “ready to surrender to the Great Society” programs of Lyndon Johnson’s administration, Williams offered his candidacy as the best way to protect Mississippi from racial desegregation. Williams defeated a large field of candidates, including former governor Ross Barnett and future governors William Waller and William Winter, in the Democratic primaries and cruised to an easy victory over Republican Rubel L. Phillips in the November general election. Williams was inaugurated on 16 January 1968.

Despite Williams’s pledges to preserve segregation, the most sweeping integration in Mississippi history occurred during his administration. A federal court did away with the state’s dual segregated public school system and replaced it with a unified integrated system in the spring of 1970. Williams did not resist the court order.

Williams left office in 1972 and resumed his law practice in Raymond, continuing it until his death on 25 March 1983. The John Bell Williams Wildlife Management Area in Itawamba and Prentiss Counties is named in his honor.

Williams, John Bell

Wingate, Henry T.

Born on 6 January 1947 in Jackson, Mississippi, Henry Travillion Wingate displayed his leadership potential while at Brinkley Junior-Senior High School, where he was active in school government and athletics as well as in the fight against racial injustice. Wingate integrated the Paramount movie theater and the main branch of the Jackson public library and was the first person of color to purchase a train ticket at the previously all-white train depot. He suffered injuries and was arrested while taking part in a student protest march in downtown Jackson.

Wingate earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy of religion from Grinnell College in 1969 and a degree from Yale Law School three years later. While at Yale, Wingate was a member of the Black Law Students Union and the Trial Advocacy Team, and after his first year, he received a fellowship from the Law Students Civil Rights Research Council to intern with a southern civil rights organization. Wingate became the first fellow to choose an assignment in Mississippi, working with attorney Mel Leventhal, who had been fighting on behalf of civil rights in Jackson since 1965.

After graduation, Wingate worked first for private attorneys and then with Jackson’s Community Legal Aid while awaiting the start of his military career as judge advocate with the US Navy Reserve. On active duty from 1973 to 1976, he was the Navy’s only African American judge advocate from 1973 to 1975. As a lieutenant with the US Navy Legal Services Office, he served as a criminal trial attorney and senior assistant defense counsel. Judge Wingate began doing criminal defense in 1973 and moved to criminal prosecution from 1974 to 1976. From 1976 to 1980 Wingate served as a special assistant attorney general with the State of Mississippi. He then spent four years as assistant district attorney for the 7th District Circuit Court District (Hinds and Yazoo Counties), the first African American to hold such a full-time position. In February 1984 Wingate became assistant US attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi, prosecuting violations of federal criminal laws, including narcotics offenses, official corruption, white-collar crimes, and violent crimes. In this capacity, he spearheaded Operation Pretense, a corruption investigation that ultimately ensnared fifty-six Mississippi county supervisors.

After Wingate had served for a year in the US attorney’s office, Sen. Thad Cochran recommended him to sit on the US District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi. Pres. Ronald Reagan nominated Wingate to the post, and after US Senate confirmation, he was sworn in on 19 October 1985. One of only eight African Americans among Reagan’s three hundred judicial appointees, Wingate became the first African American appointed to a life-tenured federal judgeship in Mississippi. In 2003 Wingate became the court’s chief judge. He has served on the 5th Circuit Judicial Council and as president of the District Court Judges Association for the 5th Circuit.

Wingate remains active in community affairs, serving on a number of civic boards and as an adjunct professor at the Mississippi College School of Law. He is a prolific public speaker on the subjects of judicial administration, professional development, personal development for youth, racial reconciliation, and the Bible. He created the Court-Watch Program, which educates youth and adults about courts and the law, provides gospel performances for the incarcerated, and offers guidance on taking the Law School Aptitude Test.

Wingate, Henry T.

Winston County

Located in central Mississippi, Winston County is named for Col. Louis Winston, a Natchez lawyer. The county seat is Louisville. Winston was founded in 1833 as part of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, which forced Choctaw tribes to leave Mississippi for Oklahoma. Winston County is the site of one of Mississippi’s most important ancient places, Nanih Waiya, a mound that two well-known Choctaw myths associate with the founding of the tribe. Likely built in the Middle Woodland period sometime between the year 0 and AD 300, the mound gained new importance in the 1800s, when Greenwood LeFlore used it as a site for tribal assemblies. In August 2008 the Mississippi legislature returned Nanih Waiya to the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians.

The 1840 census counted 4,650 people living in Winston County, 34 percent of them slaves, a figure well below the state average of 52 percent. The people of Winston County worked mostly in agriculture, producing cotton and corn and raising livestock. Whereas only 2 people worked in industry and commerce in 1840, that number had risen to 50 a decade later.

By 1860, Winston County had 9,811 residents, 43 percent of whom were enslaved. The county’s thirty-one churches included fourteen Methodist houses of worship, ten Baptist congregations, six Presbyterian churches, and Mississippi’s only Universalist church.

In 1874 a section of Winston County became Choctaw County, but the change did not greatly affect the county’s growth. In 1880 Winston was home to 10,087 people, with whites making up 61 percent of the population. Most of the remainder were African American, although the county had a small Native American population. Small farming continued to dominate, with most farmers practicing mixed agriculture and concentrating on corn and other grains, cotton, and livestock. Eighty percent of farmers owned their land. The importance of small farming was evident in county politics, as a high percentage of voters supported Populist candidates over the next two decades.

At the turn of the century, Winston County remained an agricultural and rural county, with no urban center and only 36 industrial workers, all of them male. Winston had the state’s fourth-lowest total industrial wages. Among white farmers, 73 percent owned their land, while only 41 percent of African American farmers did so.

Well-known historian Thomas D. Clark was born in Louisville in 1903. During his long tenure at the University of Kentucky, Clark was lauded both for his work as a southern historian and for preserving printed documents. Louisville is also well known for Stewart Pottery, which continues a family lineage of folk potters that dates back to the mid-1800s.

Winston County doubled in size between 1880 and 1930, reaching 21,239 residents, 62 percent of whom were white. The county’s businesses employed 840 industrial workers, many of them in sawmills, a creamery, and an ice cream factory. About half of Winston’s thirty-four hundred farms were operated by tenants, with corn and cattle the primary products and cotton secondary.

Winston County’s population declined by about 2,000 between 1930 and 1960, falling to 19,246. Whites accounted for 56 percent of the residents, African Americans 43 percent, and Native Americans 1 percent. A quarter of Winston’s working people now found employment in manufacturing, primarily the furniture and apparel industries.

Like many central Mississippi counties, Winston County was predominantly white in 2010 and had shown little change in size over the last half century, with a population of 19,198. However, African Americans now comprised more than 45 percent of residents.

Winston County

Winter, William Forrest

For all of William Winter’s many contributions to the state of Mississippi, he will be most remembered for the Education Reform Act of 1982, which was passed after Govorner Winter called a tense and controversial special session of the legislature. With the exception of that measure, which generated intense debate at the time but is now widely considered a model of progressive educational legislation, Winter’s administration was marked by an efficiency and a lack of controversy rarely seen in Mississippi politics.

Winter was born in Grenada on 21 February 1923. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Mississippi in 1943 and then joined the US Army, serving as an infantryman in the Philippines during World War II. He subsequently enrolled in the University of Mississippi Law School, graduating first in his class in 1949. In 1947, while still in school, Winter was elected to the Mississippi House of Representatives, and he won reelection in 1951 and 1955. In 1950–51 he served as a legislative assistant to US senator John Stennis.

Winter conducted his first statewide campaign in 1959, winning election to the post of tax collector and remaining in office until 1964, when the position was abolished on his recommendation. He was then elected state treasurer. Following an unsuccessful race for governor in 1967, Winter was elected lieutenant governor in 1971. He tried again for the state’s highest office in 1975, when the Democratic nomination went to Cliff Finch, and in 1979, when he finally succeeded.

Winter had made education reform a centerpiece of his campaign, and during the first year of his term, he asked the legislature to set up a committee to study the needs of Mississippi’s schools. The committee recommended the passage of a compulsory attendance law, increased education funding, the establishment of a lay board of education, and state-supported kindergartens. But the legislature refused to pass the reform measure during its regular 1982 session. In response, the governor, several of his aides, and First Lady Elise Varner Winter undertook a grassroots campaign designed to drum up public support for reform and increase pressure on the legislature to act. The campaign included more than 450 speeches and public appearances around the state.

In mid-November, Winter called a special session of the legislature to begin on 6 December. The only item on the agenda would be education reform, and the public relations campaign had made sure that Mississippians would be watching. After two weeks of debate, legislators passed the bill. The Education Reform Act of 1982 is considered the most significant educational legislation enacted in Mississippi since the establishment of its public school system in 1870.

Winter left the Governor’s Mansion in January 1984 and made one more bid for public office, losing to incumbent Thad Cochran in that year’s election for the US Senate. Winter returned to practicing law in Jackson, though he continued his public service through a variety of civic organizations. He has held office in state and national mental health organizations and has served as president of the board of trustees of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, as a trustee of Belhaven College and Columbia Seminary, and as president of the Mississippi Historical Society and the University of Mississippi Alumni Association. He participated in Pres. Bill Clinton’s Initiative on Race and taught for a semester at the University of Mississippi Law School.

The William Winter Professorship of History at the University of Mississippi has been endowed in his honor, and the Institute for Racial Reconciliation and the building that houses the Mississippi Department of Archives and History bear his name. While serving as lieutenant governor, William Winter received the Margaret Dixon Freedom of Information Award from the Louisiana-Mississippi Associated Press for his continuing support for the opening of the political process to both the general public and to the press. In 2008 the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum bestowed its Profile in Courage Award on Winter in recognition of his efforts to advance education and racial reconciliation.

Winter, William Forrest

WLBT-TV and Civil Rights

WLBT-TV in Jackson was the first television station ever to lose its Federal Communication Commission (FCC) license—primarily for its racist defense of segregation. Individual activists and the state chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had pressured WLBT for years to allow black Mississippians’ response time under the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine, which required local stations to offer airtime for opposing views on controversial issues.

WLBT’s transgressions were many. In the fall of 1955 Thurgood Marshall, NAACP lawyer and future US Supreme Court justice, appeared on an NBC news program to discuss the implications of the Court’s 1954 and 1955 Brown v. Board of Education decisions, which declared segregated schools unconstitutional. Marshall had argued the cases before the Court. WLBT interrupted the broadcast and instead aired a slide that read, “Sorry, Cable Trouble from New York.” General manager Fred Beard explained that he had broken off the program “because the TV networks were overloading the circuits with Negro propaganda.” WLBT’s reporters frequently used the terms nigger and nigra on air, and the station interrupted the evening news, the Huntley-Brinkley Report, when the program turned to the civil rights movement. The station routinely voiced opposition to desegregation through news commentaries or by granting airtime to segregation’s advocates and ran ads from the Citizens’ Councils, a bastion of Deep South massive resistance. Year after year, the station refused African Americans’ requests for equal time to respond. WLBT’s exclusion of black Mississippians from local television was nearly total during the 1950s, but during the following decade, the civil rights movement’s national visibility and influence meant change.

Local black pressure and FCC warnings had two positive effects in 1962–63. When African American minister Robert L. T. Smith ran for Congress against segregationist representative John Bell Williams, WLBT sold Smith thirty minutes of airtime. An even more dramatic exception to the station’s routine occurred in May 1963, when Medgar Evers, field secretary of the Mississippi chapter of the NAACP, appeared on air after formally requesting time to respond to Jackson mayor Allen Thompson’s rejection of desegregation. Speaking calmly, and eloquently, Evers declared, “Whether Jackson and the state choose change or not, the years of change are upon us. In the racial picture things will never be as they once were. History has reached a turning point.” Three weeks later, Byron De La Beckwith assassinated Evers.

Evers’s sense that change was in the air was widely shared. In 1963 national media covered the civil rights movement’s protests in Birmingham, Alabama, and the March on Washington. NBC preempted regular programming for a groundbreaking three-hour documentary, The American Revolution of 1963, which detailed civil rights activism. When the network coverage turned to white violence against peaceful civil rights protesters at a Jackson lunch counter, WLBT ran “Sorry, Cable Trouble” across its screen. Ironically, it had filmed the incident.

WLBT was in many ways typical of southern stations. The owners and managers of southern network affiliates resented network news programs’ sympathetic portrayal of the civil rights movement and presented protesters in a negative light. However, the depth of WLBT’s commitment to massive resistance made it extreme. WLBT did not carry network news magazines because they might occasionally cover the civil rights movement, instead running syndicated shows that equated the civil rights movement with communism. WLBT also carried the Citizens’ Council Forum, a syndicated series of fifteen-minute interviews with segregationists.

The Fairness Doctrine made a station’s obligation to serve the local community explicit. About half of WLBT’s viewing area was black, making it an excellent test case. Could African Americans force evenhanded treatment under the Fairness Doctrine? WLBT’s license had been renewed in 1959 with only perfunctory consideration of local concerns. In 1963 the Office of Communication of the United Church of Christ (UCC) offered help to local activists who sought to challenge WLBT’s violations of the Fairness Doctrine. Rev. Everett Parker, who had left behind a career in radio and advertising to attend the University of Chicago’s divinity school, headed the church’s effort. He met with Aaron Henry, state NAACP president, and A. D. Beittel, president of Tougaloo College. With the threat of violent reprisal hanging over their heads, they gathered local complaints regarding WLBT for a formal petition to the FCC opposing the renewal of WLBT’s license.

When WLBT sought to renew its license in 1964, the UCC and local activists submitted their petition. A divided FCC stuck to a narrow bureaucratic interpretation of the Fairness Doctrine, granting WLBT a one-year conditional renewal without holding a hearing. Dissatisfied, the UCC and its Mississippi allies took the case to the Court of Appeals, which ruled against WLBT. The court declared that the FCC had to allow local viewers to make their case against the license renewal because viewers had “standing” based on their interests as consumers.

The hearing did not occur until 1968. WLBT hired as its lawyer Paul Porter, a former chair of the FCC. Acknowledging some faults, Porter argued that WLBT had mended its ways by hiring a new general manager and allowing black ministers to broadcast devotional services. He insisted that the most egregious accusations were “unsubstantiated.” The FCC agreed, awarding a three-year license renewal. The UCC and its local allies again challenged the decision, and in 1971 the court reversed the FCC’s license renewal, forcing the sale of the station. These court decisions meant that citizens who had previously been excluded from the process could pressure local stations to deal fairly with their community. The national shift toward a conservative mood, however, meant deregulation in the 1980s and abandonment of this pressure to serve the public interest.

WLBT-TV and Civil Rights

Wright, Fielding L.

When the Democratic Party nominated Harry S. Truman and adopted a strong civil rights platform in 1948, southern Democrats organized the States’ Rights Democratic Party, popularly known as the Dixiecrats. The party nominated J. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina for president and Gov. Fielding L. Wright of Mississippi for vice president. Thurmond and Wright carried four southern states but failed in their effort to throw the presidential election into the US House of Representatives. The organization of the Dixiecrat Party offered an early indication, however, that white southerners would resist changes in race relations.

Fielding Lewis Wright was born in Rolling Fork, Mississippi, on 16 May 1895 to Frances Foote Clements Wright and Henry James Wright, members of a politically active family. After serving in World War I, Fielding Wright returned to Mississippi vowing that he would never become a “dang politician.” He played semipro baseball for a time before studying law at the University of Alabama and reading law with an uncle, and he then opened a law office in Rolling Fork. He turned down several opportunities to seek public office but finally ran for and won a seat in the State Senate in 1928. Four years later he was elected to the Mississippi House of Representatives, where he served until 1940. During his second term, he was elected Speaker of the House, and he used that position to strongly support industrial development and highway construction. He tended to identify with Delta planters and South Mississippi oil companies.

In 1943 Wright was elected lieutenant governor. Because Mississippi’s lieutenant governor serves as the presiding officer of the State Senate, Wright became one of only two men in the twentieth century to chair both houses of the Mississippi legislature. When Gov. Thomas Lowry Bailey died on 2 November 1946, Wright ascended to the state’s top office. Wright then won a full term in the following year’s gubernatorial election, parlaying his opposition to civil rights and support for states’ rights into a rare first-primary victory over four opponents.

Consistently referring to his supporters as “true Democrats” and “true Jacksonian Democrats,” Wright led statewide and regional efforts to oppose Truman’s civil rights platform. Speaking at his 1948 gubernatorial inauguration, he threatened to leave the Democratic Party if it continued to support African American rights, and he encouraged others to join him. He became a leader in the movement to form a southern Democratic Party, proposing and then leading the group’s first meeting, which took place in Jackson in the spring of 1948. Wright was a prominent figure in the Dixiecrats’ July convention in Birmingham, along with Thurmond, Frank Dixon of Alabama, and Mississippi senators James Eastland and John Stennis and representatives John Bell Williams and William Colmer. Mississippi voters then gave the States’ Rights Democrats a large majority in the 1948 presidential election.

Wright’s term as governor expired in 1952, when he opened a Jackson law office. He made one last unsuccessful bid for the governorship in 1955 and continued practicing law until his death in Jackson on 4 May 1956.

Wright, Fielding L.

Yalobusha County

Located in north-central Mississippi, Yalobusha County was founded in 1833. Named after the Yalobusha River, the county has two seats, Water Valley and Coffeeville. In its first census in 1840, Yalobusha County had a population of 12,248, with 56 percent of residents free and 44 percent enslaved. With 195 people working in industry, the new county had Mississippi’s fifth-highest number of manufacturing employees.

By 1860 Yalobusha County’s population had topped 16,000, and 56 percent of residents were enslaved. Yalobusha’s farms and plantations practiced mixed agriculture, concentrating on corn, livestock, and cotton. Likely because it was a railroad center, Yalobusha attracted a large number of immigrants. In 1860 the county was home to 345 foreign-born free people, the second-highest number in Mississippi. Most were German, English, and Irish.

As in much of Mississippi, Methodists and Baptists dominated religious life in 1860. The county had fifteen Baptist congregations, thirteen Methodist churches, and eight Presbyterian churches.

Coffeeville was the site of Civil War fighting in 1862, when Confederate forces led by William Edwin Baldwin clashed with Union troops under Ulysses S. Grant. After the war, Mississippi military and political leaders Edward Cary Walthall and L. Q. C. Lamar had a law practice for a time in Coffeeville.

The population remained steady in the early postbellum period, and in 1880 African Americans made up a small majority of Yalobusha’s 15,649 people. About half of the county’s farmers owned their land, and while manufacturing employed only 44 residents, the railroad became crucial to county life. The first labor union in the state, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, organized in Water Valley in 1869, and famed railroad martyr Casey Jones belonged to a Water Valley union. In the 1870s more than 400 Swedish immigrants lived in Yalobusha County, most of them working for the railroads.

In 1900 Yalobusha County was home to 19,742 people, with African Americans slightly outnumbering whites. The county had a substantial industrial workforce of 420 men and 54 women employed by 57 establishments. As in many parts of Mississippi, most white farmers (just over half) owned their land, while most black farmers (81 percent) worked as tenants and sharecroppers. In the 1930s boosters in Water Valley claimed the town as the Watermelon Capital of the World, and the town hosts an annual Watermelon Festival.

Three writers of note grew up in Yalobusha County in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Historian Dunbar Rowland, born in the small town of Oakland in 1864, became the first director of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in 1902 and continued in the position until his death in 1937. He wrote and edited numerous works, including a two-volume history of the state published in 1925. Poet and novelist Hubert Creekmore was born in Water Valley in 1907, attended the University of Mississippi in the 1920s, and set much of his work in Mississippi. Journalist Minnie Brewer was born in Water Valley, though her family moved to Clarksdale during her childhood.

Yalobusha’s population declined slightly in the early twentieth century, falling to 17,750 by 1930. Whites outnumbered African Americans by about 1,200. Despite the increasing size of Coffeeville, the county retained its agricultural economy with 2,710 farms, two-thirds of them run by tenant farmers.

The county’s population declined more dramatically in the mid-twentieth century and by 1960 was just 12,502. Almost a third of the working population had jobs in agriculture, and about 15 percent worked in manufacturing, especially in the apparel industry.

By 2010, Yalobusha County, like many nearby counties in north-central Mississippi, had a predominantly white population and had shown no significant change in size since 1960. An arts community developed in Water Valley, in part as a result of Fat Possum Records, a creative blues studio founded in the 1990s. In 2010 the county had 12,678 residents.

Yalobusha County

Yarbrough, Steve

Though he has lived most of his adult life outside Mississippi, Steve Yarbrough and his fiction have deep roots in the Magnolia State. Born in Indianola on 29 August 1956 to John and Earlene Yarbrough, he attended local schools and then enrolled at the University of Mississippi, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1979 and a master’s degree in 1981. He earned a master of fine arts degree from the University of Arkansas in 1984 and taught at Virginia Tech for four years before moving to California State University at Fresno, where he held an endowed professorship in creative writing.

Yarbrough began publishing short stories in such journals such as the Missouri Review and Southern Review in 1982. He subsequently published three collections of stories, Family Men (1990), Mississippi History (1994), and Veneer (1998). He received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1994, and “The Rest of Her Life” was included in the Best American Short Stories of 1999. That year he published The Oxygen Man, a novel that earned Yarbrough several significant awards. Alfred A. Knopf published Yarbrough’s next novels, Visible Spirits (2001) and Prisoners of War (2004). He has also published creative nonfiction, reviewed books and music for the Oxford American and other periodicals, and written screenplays.

A wide-ranging imagination and a willingness to tackle difficult subjects set Yarbrough apart from many of his peers. Almost all his fiction is set in the Mississippi Delta, and he has written masterfully about the physical and metaphorical changes in the Delta landscape, race and racism, and family members struggling to coexist. Like William Faulkner, he often employs alternating points of view, with two characters, Daze and Ned Rose, in The Oxygen Man and upward of ten in Visible Spirits. In Visible Spirits and Prisoners of War he visits historical periods beyond his own. Yarbrough admits the influence of such popular fiction writers as Graham Greene, who likely provided a model for the taut, suspenseful plots found in Yarbrough’s fiction, especially the inexorable movement toward The Oxygen Man ’s violent crisis. His straightforward prose runs counter to the lush stylings of Faulkner; Yarbrough calls less attention to language and more to characters, each of whom—whether sharecroppers or bankers, men or women, children or parents, blacks or whites—he humanizes with a unique depth.

Yarbrough has published four additional novels: The End of California (2006), Safe from the Neighbors (2010), The Realm of Last Chances (2013), and The Unmade World (2018), and a nonfiction work, Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show (2017). He won the Richard Wright Award for Literary Excellence in 2010.

In 2009 Yarborough left California to teach in the master of fine arts program at Emerson College. Despite his travels, his fiction has rarely strayed far from the Delta, which Yarbrough claims is “limitless. I could tell any story I wanted and set it there.”

Yarbrough, Steve

Yazoo County

Located on the edge of the Mississippi Delta, Yazoo County was established in 1832. Its county seat is Yazoo City, and other towns include Bentonia, Eden, and Satartia. Prior to the county’s formal establishment, Yazoo conducted its first census in 1830 and found a population of 6,550, 37 percent of them slaves. Yazoo’s population grew to 10,000 in 1840, with 70 percent of that number enslaved. Yazoo County’s economy centered on cotton production.

By the late antebellum period, Yazoo County had become an agricultural powerhouse. In 1860 its population of 22,373 was the fifth highest in the state. Yazoo had more enslaved persons (16,716) than all but two other counties, and slaves accounted for three-quarters of the county’s total population. In 1860 the economic value of Yazoo farms was the highest of all Mississippi counties, in large part because of its cotton production and the value of its livestock. It ranked ninth in the state in corn production and fourth in sweet potatoes. That year, Yazoo County had a single manufacturing establishment, which employed three men in the leather industry. The religious census of 1860 counted twenty-nine churches in Yazoo County: fifteen Methodist, seven Baptist, three Episcopalian, three Presbyterian, and one Catholic.

The Civil War and Reconstruction had a tremendous impact on Yazoo County. Early in the war, the CSS Arkansas, a 165-foot-long ironclad warship, was built in Yazoo City. After Union forces took Jackson in 1863, various Confederate forces regrouped and reorganized in Yazoo City; among those who did so were the African American troops in the 3rd Regiment Cavalry who fought near Yazoo City. Following the war, White Leagues (organizations that used extralegal means, including violence, to oppose Republican politicians) were especially powerful in Yazoo County. Those opposed by the White Leagues included Republican politician Albert Talmon Morgan, who faced condemnation as a carpetbagger. Facing considerable opposition in the early 1870s, he finally fled Mississippi and wrote Yazoo; or, On the Picket Line of Freedom in the South.

Like many Delta counties, Yazoo’s population grew substantially in the postbellum years, becoming the second-most-populated county in Mississippi, behind only Hinds. In 1880 Yazoo’s population had grown to 33,845, including more than 25,000 African Americans. It continued to rank highly in agricultural production, with the highest value of farm property and livestock in Mississippi, the second largest cotton crop, the most mules, the second-most hogs, and the sixth-highest production of corn. Manufacturing was also becoming prominent, with twenty-six establishments employing 129 men, 2 women, and 6 children.

In 1900 Yazoo County’s population of 43,948 ranked third in the state. A total of 77 percent of residents were African American, while 23 percent were white. Cotton and tenancy dominated. Yazoo County had the second-most tenant farmers and sharecroppers in the state. Only 6 percent of the 5,291 black farmers owned the land they farmed, compared to 45 percent of the 1,450 white farmers. Yazoo County also had a growing industrial workforce, with 400 employees, almost all male, working at 127 manufacturing establishments. The county had an immigrant population of about 200, mostly Germans and Irish, and Yazoo City had a small but substantial Lebanese and Syrian community. As in much of Mississippi, the largest religious groups were Baptists and Methodists.

In the early twentieth century Yazoo remained a large county, though its population was slowly declining. In 1930 Yazoo was home to 37,262 persons, two-thirds of them African American. Twenty-two establishments, including a number of hardwood sawmills, employed almost 500 industrial workers. As in most of the Delta, Yazoo’s farmers emphasized cotton, followed by cattle and corn. Tenants accounted for 84 percent of all farmers.

Several important institutions had their roots in Yazoo County. In the 1920s Julius Zeller, a Yazoo City state senator, brought to the state the idea of junior colleges. Taborian Hospital, one of Mississippi’s first hospitals for African Americans, funded by the Knights and Daughters of Tabor, opened in 1928, predating a larger Taborian hospital in Mound Bayou by more than a decade. Yazoo County native Ruby Stutts Lyells, an educational activist and librarian, spent years working to improve libraries for Mississippi’s African Americans.

Yazoo’s population declined by about 6,000 between 1930 and 1960, leaving the county with about 31,000 residents. African Americans now comprised 59 percent of the population. Yazoo remained a great producer of agricultural goods, and agriculture employed about a third of the county’s workers. In 1960 Yazoo farms raised the most livestock in the state, the seventh-most cotton and wheat, and the twelfth-most soybeans. Yazoo County’s industrial establishments now specialized in apparel and chemicals rather than timber, and the county had four functioning oil wells. Mississippi’s first discovery of oil took place at Tinsley Field outside Yazoo City.

Some noted Mississippians of arts and letters grew up in Yazoo County. In 1844, at the age of twenty, Ethelbert Barksdale began his journalistic career by editing the Yazoo City Democrat. Willie Morris detailed life in and around Yazoo City in North toward Home, his 1967 memoir, which discussed his love-hate relationship with the city. Morris also wrote about his hometown in Yazoo, his 1971 discussion of school desegregation, and in numerous works of fiction and autobiography. Blues singer Skip James grew up on a plantation near Bentonia. Blues musician and sculptor James “Son” Thomas was born near Eden in 1926. Storyteller Jerry Clower was born in South Mississippi and gained fame for his stories after moving to Yazoo City to take a job with the Mississippi Chemical Corporation. Today, Yazoo City has an annual Jerry Clower Festival. Quilter Pecolia Warner learned her art from family members in Bentonia, and her quilting niece, Sarah Mary Taylor, grew up in the Yazoo County community of Anding.

In 1955 Yazoo City’s African Americans met powerful opposition when they sought to integrate the city’s schools after the US Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision. John Satterfield, an attorney and leader in efforts to use lobbying and the law to oppose desegregation, became a key figure in Coordinating Committee for Fundamental American Freedoms, a conservative group organized in 1963.

Yazoo County has been the home of several important figures in Mississippi political history. Born in 1864, US senator John Sharp Williams grew up on Cedar Grove, a Yazoo County plantation. Two-term governor and Republican political leader Haley Barbour was born in Yazoo City in 1945, and Democratic representative and US secretary of agriculture Mike Espy was born in Yazoo in 1953.

Like most Delta counties in Mississippi, Yazoo County’s 2010 population of 28,088 was predominantly African American and had decreased by about 11 percent since 1960. In addition to its large white minority, the county had a small Latino population.

Yazoo County