African American

The American Civil Rights Movement in the late 1950s and 1960s represents a pivotal event in world history. The positive changes it brought to voting and civil rights continue to be felt throughout the United States and much of the world. Although this struggle for Black equality was fought on hundreds of different “battlefields” throughout the United States, many observers at the time described the state of Mississippi as the most racist and violent.

“When nobody else is moving and the students are moving, they are the leadership for everybody.”

From the time of their first arrival in Natchez, enslaved people resisted bondage. Slavery existed in Natchez beginning in 1719 and continued through French, British, Spanish, and finally American rule. Then, in 1863 in the midst of the Civil War, U. S. President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and in 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery.

The Political Life of Isaiah T. Montgomery

Isaiah T. Montgomery might be called Mississippi’s Booker T. Washington. Though Montgomery was not as famous or as influential, his life and work in many other respects closely paralleled that of the great educator at Tuskegee Institute, a college for Black people in Alabama.

The Life and Times of Isaiah T. Montgomery

Isaiah Thornton Montgomery was born enslaved on May 21, 1847, at Hurricane Plantation on Davis Bend, now Davis Island, below Vicksburg, Mississippi. This large and fertile estate near the Mississippi River was one of several Davis Bend plantations owned by Joseph E. Davis, elder brother of Jefferson Davis, the future president of the Confederate States of America.

Mississippi became a major theatre of struggle during the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-20th century because of its resistance to equal rights for its Black citizens. Between 1952 and 1963, Medgar Wiley Evers was perhaps the state’s most impassioned activist, orator, and visionary for change. He fought for equality and fought against brutality.

When young civil rights workers arrived in Ruleville in the Mississippi Delta in 1962, they were looking for local Black people who could help convince their neighbors to register to vote. They found forty-four-year-old Fannie Lou Hamer.

Ida Bell Wells (1862-1931), one of the most important civil rights advocates of the 19th century, was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, just before the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. She was the first child of James Wells, an apprentice carpenter, and Elizabeth Warrenton, a cook.

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, Crystal Springs, Vicksburg, Woodville, and Jackson.

During its first half century as a territory and state (1810-1860), Mississippi was an agrarian-frontier society. Its population was made up of four groups: Native Americans, White people, enslaved people, and free Black people. All four groups were present in Mississippi from its territorial beginnings.¹