Civil War & Reconstruction
The First Black Legislators in Mississippi
In 2022, more than fifty African Americans were serving in the Mississippi State Legislature, carrying on the legacy of the first Black men who served there in 1870. Mississippi’s first Black legislators were farmers and lawyers, barbers and blacksmiths, teachers and ministers. Some had always known freedom, while others were born into slavery. Some were highly educated elsewhere, and others had never been taught to read because the law in Mississippi forbade it. Many came to Mississippi to help build a more just government, and many were driven out by violence only a few years later.
Mississippi's Forgotten Soldiers: Women in the Ranks during the Civil War
Mississippi’s Civil War chronicle includes such notable generals as Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman, Joseph E. Johnston, and John C. Pemberton, as well as the thousands of common men they commanded. Surprisingly, an untold number of daring women joined them on battlefields across the state, even though societal standards of the time forbade them to do so.
Mississippi's Forgotten Soldiers: Women in the Ranks during the Civil War Lesson Plan
Teaching Levels
Grades 7 through 9
Curricular Connections
2018 Mississippi College-and Career-Readiness Standards for the Social Studies
Jefferson Davis Soldier Home - Beauvoir
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. Climer was a Tennessean by birth and a veteran of Company A of the Madison Light Artillery that fought in General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia at some of the most famous battles of the American Civil War. When the war began, Climer was a tombstone agent in Canton.
Sarah Dickey: Indomitable Mississippi Educator Lesson Plan
Overview
Sarah Dickey was a young women in her twenties when she was sent on a mission by the United Brethren Church to Vicksburg, Mississippi. Between 1863 and 1865, she helped operate a school in Vicksburg for newly emancipated slaves. It was during this time that Dickey realized her life’s calling – to teach African American children during one of the most turbulent times in American history. After the war, she enrolled at Mount Holyoke, a female college in Massachusetts known for training teachers.
Sarah Dickey: Indomitable Mississippi Educator
During Reconstruction, one of the most turbulent periods for race relations in the state’s history, Sarah Ann Dickey, a White female teacher from the North, became a pioneer by providing education to newly freed enslaved people in Mississippi. Dickey worked tirelessly and determinedly to improve the lives of the most vulnerable population group in the state, African American women and children. She believed that by educating Black women and training them to become teachers, dual paths of security and opportunity could be established for all freedmen.