If asked to name the most famous, the most successful baseball pitchers in history, most sports enthusiasts would name Christy Mathewson, Walter Johnson, Cy Young, Bob Feller, Whitey Ford, Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson, Roger Clemens . . .
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.
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.”
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.
Mississippi has produced more world-class writers than other states in the South and among them is Richard Nathaniel Wright, an internationally acclaimed African American novelist and social critic. Wright, the son of a sharecropper father and a high-school-teacher mother, was born September 4, 1908, on a Mississippi plantation some twenty miles from Natchez.
The music called the blues that emerged from Mississippi has shaped the development of popular music in this country and around the world.
Turn on the radio. You might pick up some rock with some tough guitar riffs – or some rap. But put on Robert Johnson’s recording of “I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom,” and you’ll hear it all – set down in the 1930s by a man who combined elements of the music he heard with the genius that he got from God knows where – maybe the devil, if you want to believe the legend.
Mississippi is properly famous as the home of the blues and of the first star of rock and roll. It is also the home of Jimmie Rodgers, described by many as “The Father of Country Music.” Rodgers had two other nicknames during his career, “The Singing Brakeman,” which referred to his work on trains, and “America’s Blue Yodeler,” which described one of his distinctive contributions to country music.
Elvis Presley was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, on January 8, 1935, in a two-room shotgun house in East Tupelo, then a separate municipality that some called the “roughest town in north Mississippi.” Though poor, Elvis’s parents, Gladys and Vernon Presley, were not unlike many others in Mississippi at that time, for the country was in the midst of the Great Depression. The unemployment rate in the United States in 1935 was 20.1 percent.