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Published: August 2006
The ferocity of Hurricane Katrina etched the date August 29, 2005, in the minds of everyone who experienced it. South Mississippians, and the thousands of people from across the country who came to their aid, are forever shaped by the disaster and its aftermath.
Return to When Youth Protest: The Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, 1955-1970
Margaret Walk
Published: August 2023
In the aftermath of the Civil War, White Southerners rewrote history in an attempt to vindicate their violent rebellion against the United States. They developed and promoted an ideology known as the Lost Cause.
Published: April 2011
In 1949, political scientist V. O. Key suggested that “insofar as any geographical division remains within the politics of [Mississippi] it falls along the line that separates the delta and the hills.” By the time Key thus defined the state’s political line of demarcation, James O.
Published: August 2017
Burnita Shelton was one of six children, and the only daughter, born on December 28, 1894, to Burnell Shelton and Lora Drew (Barlow) Shelton. She was part of an educated, civic-minded family.
Published: September 2004
In his first campaign for any public office in 1991, Kirk Fordice was elected Mississippi’s first Republican governor in 118 years. In his successful campaign for re-election in 1995, he became the first Mississippi governor to succeed himself in more than a century.
Published: January 2004
In 1903, the people of Mississippi nominated the candidates for all public offices, from the governor down to the local constable, in a popular primary election. The first governor elected under Mississippi’s new primary law was James K.
Overview
Muddy Waters (born McKinley Morganfield) grew up in the Mississippi Delta, yet h
Published: December 2003
When Alexander G. McNutt was inaugurated governor in January 1838, Mississippi was entering a period of severe economic depression that lasted through both of his two terms.
Published: December 2003
After Governor John Isaac Guion vacated the office of governor November 4, 1851, Mississippi was without a chief executive for twenty days.
Published: August 2005
When Mississippi faced tough economic and social problems after the Great Depression and World War II, Owen Cooper challenged Mississippians to band together and successfully solve them.
Published: December 2003
James L. Alcorn was Mississippi’s first elected Republican governor. Alcorn had previously served in the state legislature of Kentucky and Mississippi, and had risen to the rank of general in the Confederate military service during the Civil War.
Published: December 2003
Governor Albert Gallatin Brown was Mississippi’s youngest and perhaps its most popular antebellum governor.
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 2016
In 2015, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) designated Mississippi State University (MSU) as host of the National Center of Excellence for Unmanned Aircraft Systems.
Published: January 2004
Dennis Murphree was governor of Mississippi on two separate occasions but was never elected to the office. In 1927 while serving as lieutenant governor, he became governor following the death of Henry Whitfield, and in 1943, he again succeeded to the office upon the death of Paul B.
Published: February 2010
Public schooling in Mississippi did not become commonplace until after the American Civil War. After the United States Supreme Court decided in its 1896 Plessy v.
Published: December 2003
Although his term began January 7, 1822, Governor Leake did not deliver his inaugural address until June 24 because the capital city was being relocated from Natchez. When he finally gave his address, the capital was temporarily situated at Columbia in Marion County.
Published: December 2003
Anselm McLaurin, the oldest of eight brothers and the father of ten children, was the last Confederate veteran to be elected governor of Mississippi. At the age of sixteen, he enlisted in the Third Mississippi Artillery and became well-known for his daring and bravery during the Civil War.
Published: February 2003
In the decades prior to the American Civil War, market places where enslaved Africans were bought and sold could be found in every town of any size in Mississippi. Natchez was unquestionably the state’s most active slave trading city, although substantial slave markets existed at Aberdeen,
Published: January 2014
While serving as attorney general of the state of Mississippi in the early 1980s, Bill Allain filed a suit asking the Mississippi Supreme Court to separate the functions of the executive and legislative branches of state government, especially in the budgetary process.
Published: December 2003
Known to his friends and followers as “Johnny McRae of Chickasawhay,” Governor John J. McRae sailed his steamer Triumph up and down the Chickasawhay River “as if it were the Mississippi itself.” McRae was a folk hero and was extremely popular with the people of Mississippi.
Published: January 2004
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. Better known as “Dixiecrats,” the Southern Democrats nominated Governor Fielding L.