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Published: August 2000
Emblems, banners, standards, and flags are an ancient tradition that date from the early Roman Empire.
Published: September 2002
The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission was created in March 1956 by an act of the Mississippi Legislature. It came in the wake of the May 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka public school desegregation ruling by the U. S. Supreme Court.
Published: December 2007
When Mississippi became a United States territory in 1798, its first government was made up of a territorial governor, a secretary to the governor, and three judges. Washington, Mississippi, served as the territorial capital.
Published: September 2009
The history of Mississippi’s capitals and capitols involves several towns and nearly a dozen buildings. Throughout Mississippi’s territorial period and well into its statehood, choosing a permanent capital and securing adequate meeting space for government officials were constant struggles.
Return to About the Mississippi Constitution of 1890
Published: December 2003
Abram Scott was involved in two of the three closest elections for governor in Mississippi’s history. In 1831 he defeated Hiram G. Runnels by 247 votes, and two years later he lost to Runnels by 558 votes.
Published: August 2000
The six southern states of South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Florida met February 4, 1861, in convention at Montgomery, Alabama, and established the Confederate States of America.
Published: October 2011
Electric power has been called “man’s most useful servant.” It heats and cools homes and businesses, cooks and preserves food, illuminates a dark room or street, and powers machinery, televisions, electronics, and transportation.
Published: November 2008
The land that became the state of Mississippi had been claimed by European powers for nearly a century prior to it first coming under American jurisdiction.
Published: February 2009
Mississippi public schools underwent a dramatic change in 1970. After sixteen years of delays and token desegregation after U. S.
Published: August 2000
Constitutions embody the basic laws and organizations of governments. Constitutions may be written or accepted by tradition. For example, the Constitution of the United States is a written document that spells out the organization and powers of the federal government.
Published: October 2004
The first known execution by the State of Mississippi was July 16, 1818, in Adams County with the hanging of George H. Harman, a White male, for “stealing a Negro.” Since then, the state has conducted 810 known executions.
Return to When Youth Protest: The Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, 1955-1970
Margaret Walk
Published: June 2005
The president of the United States addressed the nation and called for war. Tyrants, he said, could not be allowed to destroy the bonds of civilization by engaging in inhumane and immoral actions that oppressed their own people and threatened their neighbors.
Published: January 2017
Three weeks before Christmas of 1903, J. R. Climer of Madison County, Mississippi, became the first resident of the Jefferson Davis Soldier Home, Beauvoir — Mississippi’s home for Confederate veterans and their wives and widows on the Mississippi Gulf Coast in Biloxi.
Published: February 2008
“Southern blacks not only out-sang, out-marched, and out-prayed their oppressors, but they also out-thought them.”
Adam Fairclough, historian
Published: September 2009
During his twenty-eight-year public career, Hubert Durrett Stephens was a Mississippi district attorney, a United States congressman and senator, and a member of the board of directors of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.
Published: December 2005
L. Q. C. Lamar is perhaps Mississippi’s most noted nineteenth century statesman. He was the first person, and one of only two in American history (the other was South Carolina’s James Byrnes in the twentieth century), to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives, the U. S.
Published: February 2013
Inauspicious beginnings
On February 23, 1894, the Pascagoula Democrat-Star, in its “State News Boiled Down” section, listed news from across the state alerting readers to items like public resignations and appointments, legislative actions, warnings of floods, and new businesse
Published: February 2022
In the early twentieth century, Black people in Mississippi who aimed to exercise their rights as citizens of the United States had few allies.
Published: October 2019
In May 1954, the United States Supreme Court announced in a unanimous decision that segregation—the practice of separating Black and White students, by law, within the public school system—was unconstitutional. That decision, Brown v.
Published: May 2008
The service of African Americans with the Confederate army during the American Civil War has long intrigued historians and Civil War buffs. Were these men soldiers or servants? Did they get shot?
Published: January 2009
United States Senator John Sharp Williams, of Yazoo County, Mississippi, launched his political career in 1892, when he defeated a Populist opponent in his congressional district and entered the United States House of Representatives the following year.
Published: December 2003
When Colonel Ridgley C. Powers was discharged from the United States Army in December 1865, he decided to remain in Mississippi rather than return to his native state of Ohio. He purchased some land in Noxubee County near Shuqualak and soon became a successful planter.