🎸Mississippi

The Magnolia State

Mississippi takes its name from the great river that forms its western boundary — an Ojibwe word meaning "great river." The state is the Deep South at its most concentrated: cotton plantations, civil rights struggle, and the birthplace of the blues. Mississippi's contribution to American music and literature is vastly disproportionate to its size and population.

King Cotton

Mississippi became a state in 1817 just as the cotton gin was transforming the South. By 1860, Mississippi was among the richest states per capita in the Union — wealth built almost entirely on enslaved labor growing cotton on delta plantations. The state seceded in January 1861, the second state to do so after South Carolina. Jefferson Davis, a Mississippi senator, became president of the Confederacy.

The Blues

The blues was born in the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Musicians like Robert Johnson, Son House, Muddy Waters, and B.B. King shaped the form. The junction of Highways 49 and 61 in Clarksdale is legendary as the "crossroads" where Robert Johnson supposedly sold his soul to the devil for his guitar skills. The blues then migrated north with the Great Migration and gave birth to rock and roll.

Civil Rights Crucible

Mississippi was the most violent state in the Civil Rights Movement. Medgar Evers, the NAACP field secretary for Mississippi, was assassinated outside his Jackson home in 1963. The Freedom Summer of 1964 brought hundreds of Northern volunteers to register Black voters; three of them — James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner — were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Neshoba County. The state was the last to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment — in 1995 — and didn't certify the ratification until 2013.

Southern Literature

Mississippi has produced an astonishing share of American literature. William Faulkner of Oxford won the 1949 Nobel Prize and set most of his fiction in fictional Yoknapatawpha County, modeled on his home. Eudora Welty of Jackson won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Richard Wright, born in Natchez, wrote Native Son and Black Boy. Tennessee Williams was born in Columbus.

Mississippi Facts

• Mississippi's name has four vowels: four i's, zero y's, and its spelling is a childhood mnemonic staple.
• Elvis Presley was born in Tupelo in 1935; Oprah Winfrey was born in Kosciusko in 1954.
• The Teddy Bear was named after a Mississippi hunting trip by President Theodore Roosevelt.
• Biloxi was founded by the French in 1699, making it one of the oldest continuously occupied European settlements in the United States.
• Coca-Cola was first bottled in Vicksburg in 1894.

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