In the 20th century, Mississippi legislators were twice called upon to act on two constitutional amendments that had major implications for American women. The first for their consideration was the woman suffrage amendment which was ratified in 1920 and became the Nineteenth Amendment.
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. The court ruled that laws enforcing segregated schools were unconstitutional and called for desegregation of schools “with all deliberate speed.”
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. Whether the need was for rural hospitals and affordable health insurance, production of a fertilizer that increased crop yield for a hungry world, better race relations, or spreading Southern Baptist missions around the globe, Cooper repeatedly led Mississippians to work together and make the seemingly impossible possible.
World War II was truly a world war. All of the major countries and a large number of small nations were drawn into the fight. Even countries that tried to remain neutral found themselves in the conflict either by conquest or by being in the path of the campaigns of the major powers. For example, in 1940, more than a year before the United States entered the war, the major powers — Britain, Italy, and Germany — fought important battles in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya in North Africa.
For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, Mississippi was an overwhelmingly agricultural state. While farming provided a route to economic success for many White Mississippians, a number of White people could always be found at the bottom of the agricultural ladder, working as tenant farmers or sharecroppers, a status more typically associated with Black Mississippians in the century after the American Civil War.
By 1932 the Great Depression had the country in its relentless grip and most Americans believed that something was very wrong.
Farm-raised catfish is the largest aquaculture industry in the United States. In 2005, the U.S. catfish industry produced 600 million pounds of catfish from 165,000 pond water acres. The farm-raised catfish industry at $450 million in annual production value has the highest economic value of any aquaculture industry in the United States. The next highest valued aquaculture industry in the country is trout, valued at $74 million in annual production.
Haley Barbour was elected governor on November 4, 2003, in the largest voter turnout in Mississippi history, up to that time. He made history again in 2007 when he became only the second governor since Reconstruction to be re-elected to a second consecutive term – a 1987 state constitutional amendment allowed a governor to serve two consecutive terms. The first was Kirk Fordice, who was elected in 1991 and in 1995.
Following eight years in the Mississippi Senate, from 1988 to 1996, and a four-year term as lieutenant governor, Ronnie Musgrove was elected governor under circumstances unique in Mississippi history. Because neither Musgrove nor any other gubernatorial candidate received a majority of the votes cast in the November 1999 general election, the Mississippi Legislature was required by the state’s 1890 Constitution to elect the governor. In a special vote on January 4, 2000, the Mississippi Legislature elected Musgrove as the state’s sixty-second governor.
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.