Mississippi

• 1. Introduction

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  Mississippi sits at the southern edge of the American interior, a state whose name comes from an Ojibwe word meaning "great river." That river defines its western boundary, shaped its economy, caused its floods, and gave the state its identity. On the 10th of December 1817, Mississippi became the 20th state admitted to the Union. Less than half a century later, it declared secession. By 1860-55 percent of the people living within its borders were enslaved. Before the Civil War, it ranked as the fifth-wealthiest state in the nation. Today it holds the lowest per-capita income of all fifty states. This documentary follows the forces that made Mississippi rich, then devastated it, then left it grappling with challenges in health, education, and economic opportunity that persist to the present day. The questions are not simple: How did a state so fertile become so poor? What did the Civil Rights movement actually accomplish on its home ground? And what does it mean that Mississippi, a place associated with the worst of American racial history, now leads the nation in the proportion of African American residents?

• 2. Before Europeans Arrived

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  Near 9500 BC, Paleo-Indians arrived in what is now the American South, hunting megafauna that would go extinct at the end of the Pleistocene. Their distant descendants, the peoples of the Mississippian culture, built their largest and most complex earthworks beginning around 950 AD. These mounds expressed a cosmology of political and religious concepts, and they still stand throughout the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys today. The Mississippian peoples maintained a trading network that stretched from the Great Lakes to the Gulf Coast. Their descendant tribes in the Southeast include the Chickasaw and Choctaw. Other tribes who lived within the territory that became Mississippi include the Natchez, the Yazoo, and the Biloxi, whose names colonists preserved in local towns and waterways. The first major European expedition into this territory was that of the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto, who passed through the northeastern part of the state in 1540. In April 1699, French colonists established the first European settlement at Fort Maurepas, built near present-day Ocean Springs on the Gulf Coast and settled by Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville. The French founded Natchez on the Mississippi River in 1716, naming it Fort Rosalie; it became the dominant town and trading post of the region. Under French and then Spanish colonial rule, European men formed interracial relationships with enslaved and free women of African descent, producing a class of free people of color known as gens de couleur libres. These multiracial families sometimes received property settlements and educations from European fathers, forming what the source describes as a third class between Europeans and enslaved Africans in the settlements.

• 3. Cotton, Slavery, and Secession

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  When Mississippi became a state in 1817, its first governor was David Holmes, and the land was still occupied as ancestral territory by Choctaw, Natchez, Houma, Creek, and Chickasaw peoples. The removal of Native peoples from that land proceeded through a series of treaties and federal acts. On the 27th of September 1830, the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek was signed between the U.S. Government and the Choctaw. The Choctaw agreed to sell their traditional homelands in Mississippi and Alabama in exchange for compensation and removal to Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma. Today their descendants include approximately 9,500 persons identifying as Choctaw, concentrated in Neshoba, Newton, Leake, and Jones counties; the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians reorganized in the 20th century and is a federally recognized tribe. The land opened by these removals fed a cotton economy that grew astonishing in scale. During the 1850s, when cotton was king, plantation owners in the Delta and Black Belt regions accumulated wealth from the fertility of the soil, the high price of cotton on international markets, and the labor of enslaved people they held as property. By 1860, the enslaved African American population numbered 436,631, representing 55 percent of the state's total of 791,305 persons. Fewer than 1,000 were free people of color. Mississippi was the nation's top cotton-producing state, and assessed property valuation exceeded $500 million, of which $218 million, representing 43 percent, was the estimated value of human beings held as slaves. On the 9th of January 1861, Mississippi became the second state to declare secession from the Union. It was among the first six states to secede, and those six shared one defining characteristic: the highest numbers of enslaved people in the nation.

• 4. War and Its Wreckage

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  More than 80,000 Mississippians fought for the Confederate Army during the Civil War. Around 17,000 Black and 545 white Mississippians served in the Union Army. In the northeastern corner of the state and in Jones County, pockets of Unionism formed; Newton Knight organized a revolt there known as the Free State of Jones. Union General Ulysses S. Grant's long siege of Vicksburg finally secured Union control of the Mississippi River in 1863. By the time the war ended, 30,000 Mississippi soldiers, mostly white, had died from wounds and disease, and many more were left crippled. The economic ruin ran deep: in 1860, total assessed property value had been more than $500 million. By 1870, total assets had collapsed to roughly $177 million. A cotton crop of 565,000 bales in 1870 was still less than half the prewar output. Among the things that made rebuilding so difficult was the physical damage to the river infrastructure. Levees that had been damaged during the fighting were repeatedly overwhelmed by major floods in 1865, 1867, 1874, and 1882. During Reconstruction, the constitutional convention of 1868 sent delegates both black and white to frame a new state constitution. Seventeen of the hundred delegates were African American, representing 32 counties that held Black majorities. The convention established universal suffrage, abolished property qualifications for voting and for holding office, created the state's first public school system, and forbade race distinctions in the possession and inheritance of property. Mississippi was restored to the Union on the 23rd of February 1870. In the years immediately following, Black farmers in the Delta bottomlands achieved unusually high rates of land ownership. By around the start of the 20th century, two-thirds of the farm owners in the Delta were African American, a striking reversal from the slave era that would prove tragically short-lived.

• 5. Disenfranchisement and the Long Suppression

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  Democrats regained control of the Mississippi state legislature in 1875 after a year of organized violence against Black voters, including attacks in at least 15 known events in cities across the state. Armed white paramilitary groups such as the Red Shirts killed at least 150 Black Mississippians, with other estimates placing the total twice as high. The strategy was explicit and deliberate; it was called the Mississippi Plan, and other southern states adopted it as a template. By 1890, white legislators passed a new state constitution specifically, in the words of Democratic governor James K. Vardaman, to eliminate Black citizens from politics. It erected barriers to voter registration that swept an estimated 100,000 Black and 50,000 white men from the voter rolls within a few years. Cotton prices fell through the decades following the Civil War. Many African American farmers who had gained land during Reconstruction became overextended with debt and were ultimately forced to sell. By 1910, a majority of Black farmers in the Delta had lost their land and become sharecroppers. The boll weevil destroyed cotton crops, and severe flooding in 1912 and 1913 created crisis conditions. Starting around 1913, tens of thousands of Black Americans left Mississippi for northern industrial cities in what became known as the Great Migration. In 1923, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People stated publicly that, in Mississippi, a Black person's life could be taken with impunity at any time. Mississippi became a dry state in 1908 by act of the state legislature, and it remained legally dry until a local option bill passed in 1966, making it one of the last holdouts of Prohibition.

• 6. Civil Rights on Home Ground

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  In 1954, Mississippi created the State Sovereignty Commission, a tax-supported agency chaired by the governor. It claimed to work for the state's image, but in practice it spied on activists and passed information to White Citizens' Councils, which had formed across the state to resist school integration following the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. In the summer of 1964, students and organizers from across the country came to Mississippi to register Black voters and establish Freedom Schools. Chapters of the Ku Klux Klan and their sympathizers responded with violence, most notably the murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner during the Freedom Summer campaign. Those killings became a catalyst for Congressional passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Following the passage of federal civil rights legislation in 1964 and 1965, Black candidates ran in the 1967 state and local elections. Teacher Robert G. Clark of Holmes County became the first African American elected to the State House since Reconstruction. He was repeatedly reelected into the 21st century and eventually served three terms as Speaker of the House. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, established to challenge the all-white Democratic Party, fielded candidates in that same 1967 election. In 1966, the state was the last in the nation to officially repeal statewide Prohibition of alcohol. Before that repeal, Mississippi had taxed the illegal alcohol brought in by bootleggers. The state's symbolic ratifications of civil rights milestones came slowly: Mississippi ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, granting women the right to vote, in March 1984, more than six decades after it took effect nationally in 1920. It symbolically ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, which had abolished slavery in 1865, only in 1995. On the 30th of June 2020, Governor Tate Reeves signed a law officially retiring the state's second flag, which had featured the Confederate battle flag, making Mississippi the last state to remove that symbol as an official emblem.

• 7. Land, Music, and Enduring Identity

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  Mississippi is almost entirely within the east Gulf Coastal Plain, a region of lowland plains and low hills. Its highest point is Woodall Mountain, at 807 feet above sea level in the northeastern part of the state. The Mississippi Delta in the northwest is not a river delta in the geographical sense but a section of the Mississippi Alluvial Plain, narrow in the south and widening north of Vicksburg, built from centuries of silt deposited by the river's floods. The state is heavily forested, with over half its area covered by wild or cultivated trees. It has one of the richest fish faunas in the United States, with 204 native fish species, and is home to 63 crayfish species, at least 17 of them found nowhere else on earth. Mississippi produces more than half of the country's farm-raised catfish and is a top producer of sweet potatoes, cotton, and pulpwood. On the 17th of August 1969, Category 5 Hurricane Camille struck the Mississippi coast, killing 248 people and causing $1.5 billion in damage in 1969 dollars. Hurricane Katrina in 2005, though a Category 3 storm at final landfall, caused even greater destruction across the entire 90 miles of Gulf Coast. Both storms caused nearly total storm surge destruction of structures in and around Gulfport, Biloxi, and Pascagoula. Against this backdrop of repeated catastrophe, Mississippi's cultural contribution to American life has been out of proportion to its size and wealth. Blues, gospel, country, jazz, and rock and roll were all invented, promoted, or heavily developed by Mississippi musicians, many of them African American and most from the Mississippi Delta. Those musicians carried their music north to Chicago, where it became the heart of that city's jazz and blues tradition. The legislature's 1990 decision to legalize casino gambling along the Mississippi River and Gulf Coast opened another economic chapter: Tunica became the third-largest gaming area in the United States, and before Hurricane Katrina, Mississippi ranked second nationally in gambling revenue, behind only Nevada.