African American

Cool Papa Bell

Theme and Time Period

Cool Papa Bell is considered to be the fastest man ever to play professional baseball. His achievements, in the Negro Leagues and in Latin America, earned his induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, in 1974. His Hall of Fame plaque reads in part, “… Contemporaries rated him fastest man on the base paths.”

Confederate Treatment Of A Black Union Soldier

Theme and Time Period

Return to Mississippi Soldiers in the Civil War

 

Head Quarters Post
Vidalia La. July, 29, 1964
Commanding Officer
Confederate Forces
Trinity La.

Sir:

In the skirmish on the 22nd inst. a colored soldier by the name of Wilson Woods, Corporal A. Company 6th U. S. C. Arty. was captured by the Confederate forces. I have since learned that he was seriously wounded.

David "Boo" Ferriss: A Baseball Great Lesson Plan

OVERVIEW

At all levels of athletic competition, Mississippian Boo Ferriss serves as an inspiration to all athletes.  A pitcher for the Boston Red Sox in the 1940s, Ferriss suffered a career-ending injury in 1947 and served a brief period as a professional baseball coach for the Red Sox. Boo Ferriss then returned to his native state. In 1959, he became the athletic director and head baseball coach at Delta State University.  It was here in the Mississippi Delta that he launched one of the most successful baseball programs in the state.

Medgar Evers and the Origins of the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi Lesson Plan

OVERVIEW

Anthropologist Margaret Mead once argued against the improbability of one person bringing about major changes in society. Rather, she asserted, one person’s dedication and commitment was normally the only way change would come. Few would argue that Mississippi became a vastly different state as the result of the life and work of Medgar Wiley Evers, a pioneer in the state’s Civil Rights Movement.

Free Black People in Antebellum Mississippi Lesson Plan

OVERVIEW

With the exception of a brief mention and reference to William Johnson, the free barber of Natchez, very little attention is given by Social Studies texts to free Black people in pre-Civil War Mississippi. In this lesson, students will become acquainted with the free Black population of Mississippi, the prevailing attitudes of slaveholders toward this class, and the efforts of the American and Mississippi Colonization Societies to resettle the free individuals in Africa.

Students will be expected to answer these questions:

B.B. King, King of the Blues Lesson Plan

OVERVIEW

In this lesson, students will explore the life and work of “the most popular and influential blues guitarist of the last three decades,” according to Robert Palmer, author of Deep Blues, (p. 178). The life of Riley B. “B.B.” King is, in many ways, reflective of the early hard lives of most Delta blues musicians. No study of Mississippi’s rich cultural history is complete without including the Delta blues and its practitioners, now studied, sung, and imitated around the world.

The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission: An Agency History

Theme and Time Period

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.”

About the Mississippi Constitution of 1890

Theme and Time Period

Reconstruction in Mississippi ended in 1875, and many White Mississippians were determined to remove Black Mississippians from politics. In the summer of 1890, specially elected delegates to a constitutional convention gathered in Jackson in today's Old Capitol. All but one of the delegates were White.