Mississippi is a state located in the Deep South of the United States. Jackson is the state capital and largest city.
The state's name comes from the Mississippi River, which flows along its western boundary, and takes its name from the Ojibwe word misi-ziibi ("Great River").
The state is heavily forested, and produces a majority of American catfish.
Mississippi is also known for its state symbol, the Magnolia.
Geography
Mississippi is bordered on the north by Tennessee, on the east by Alabama, on the south by Louisiana and a narrow coast on the Gulf of Mexico, and on the west, across the Mississippi River, by Louisiana and Arkansas.
Major rivers in Mississippi, apart from its namesake, include the Big Black River, the Pearl River, the Yazoo, the Pascagoula, and the Tombigbee.
Major lakes include Ross Barnett Reservoir, Arkabutla Lake, Sardis Lake and Grenada Lake.
The state of Mississippi is entirely composed of lowlands, the highest point being Woodall Mountain, in the the foothills of the Cumberland Mountains, only 806 feet (246 m) above sea level. The lowest point is sea level at the Gulf coast.
The Mean Elevation in the state is 300 feet (91 m) above sea level.
Most of Mississippi is part of the East Gulf Coastal Plain. The Coastal Plain is generally composed of low hills, such as the Pine Hills in the south and the North Central Hills. The Pontotoc Ridge and the Fall Line Hills in the northeast have somewhat higher elevations.
Yellow-brown loess soil is found in the western parts of the state. The northeast is a region of fertile black earth that extends into the Alabama Black Belt.
The coastline includes large bays at Bay St. Louis, Biloxi and Pascagoula.
It is separated from the Gulf of Mexico proper by the shallow Mississippi Sound, which is partially sheltered by Petit Bois Island, Horn Island, East and West Ship Islands, Deer Island, Round Island and Cat Island.
The northwest remainder of the state is made up of a section of the Mississippi Alluvial Plain, also known as the Mississippi Delta. The Mississippi Alluvial Plain is narrow in the south and widens north of Vicksburg.
The region has rich soil, partly made up of silt which had been regularly deposited by the floodwaters of the Mississippi River.
Areas under the management of the National Park Service include:
Brices Cross Roads National Battlefield Site near Baldwyn
Gulf Islands National Seashore
Natchez National Historical Park in Natchez
Natchez Trace Parkway
Tupelo National Battlefield in Tupelo
Vicksburg National Military Park and Cemtary in Vicksburg.
Climate
Mississippi has a hot humid subtropical climate with long summers and short, mild winters.
Temperatures average about 82 °F (about 28 °C) in July and about 48 °F (about 9 °C) in January. The temperature varies little statewide in the summer, but in winter the region near Mississippi Sound is significantly warmer than the inland portion of the state.
The recorded temperature in Mississippi has ranged from -19 °F (-28.3 °C), in 1966, at Corinth in the northeast, to 115 °F (46.1 °C), in 1930, at Holly Springs in the north. Yearly precipitation generally increases from north to south, with the regions closer to the Gulf being the most humid. Thus, Clarksdale, in the northwest, gets about 50 inches (about 1,270 mm) of precipitation annually and Biloxi, in the south, about 61 inches (about 1,550 mm).
Small amounts of snow fall in northern and central Mississippi, although snow is not unheard of around the southern part of the state.
In the late summer and the fall, the state (especially the southern part) is often affected by hurricanes moving north from the Gulf of Mexico, and occasionally impacted by major hurricanes, which can be quite devastating in coastal communities.
Thunderstorms are common in Mississippi, especially in the southern part of the state. On average, Mississippi has around 27 tornadoes annually with the northern part of the state more vulnerable earlier in the year and the southern part more vulnerable later in the year.
History
Mississippi was part of the Mississippian culture in the early part of the 2nd millennium AD; descendant Native American tribes include the Chickasaw and Choctaw. Other tribes who inhabited the territory of Mississippi (and whose names became those of local towns) include the Natchez, the Yazoo, and the Biloxi.
The first major European expedition into the territory that became Mississippi was that of Hernando de Soto, who passed through in 1540. The first settlement was Fort Maurepas (also known as Old Biloxi) at Ocean Springs, settled by Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville in April 1699.
In 1716, Natchez was founded on the Mississippi River (as Fort Rosalie); it became the dominant town and trading post of the area.
After spending some time under Spanish, British, and French nominal jurisdiction, the Mississippi area was deeded to the British after the French and Indian War under the terms of the Treaty of Paris (1763).
The Mississippi Territory was organized on April 7, 1798, from territory ceded by Georgia and South Carolina. It was later twice expanded to include disputed territory claimed by both the U.S. and Spain.
Land was purchased (generally through unequal treaties) from Native American tribes from 1800 to about 1830.
Mississippi was the 20th state admitted to the Union, on December 10, 1817.
When cotton was king during the 1850s, Mississippi plantation owners—especially those of the Delta and Black Belt regions—became increasingly wealthy due to the high fertility of the soil, the high price of cotton on the international market, and their assets in slaves.
The planters' dependence on hundreds of thousands of slaves for labor, and the severe wealth imbalances among whites played heavy roles in both state politics and in the support for secession.
By 1860 the enslaved population numbered 436,631 or 55% of the state's total of 791,305. There were fewer than 1000 free people of color.
The relatively low population of the state before the Civil War reflected the fact that much of the state was still wilderness and needed more settlers for development.
Mississippi was the second state to secede from the Union as one of the Confederate States of America on January 9, 1861. During the Civil War the Confederate States were defeated.
During Reconstruction the first constitutional convention in 1868 framed a constitution whose major elements would last for 22 years.
The convention was the first political organization to include colored representatives, 17 among the 100 members. Although 32 counties had Negro majorities, they elected whites as well as Negroes to represent them. The convention adopted universal suffrage; did away with property qualifications for suffrage or for office, which benefited poor whites, too; provided for the state's first public school system; forbade race distinctions in the possession and inheritance of property; and prohibited limiting of civil rights in travel.
Under the terms of Reconstruction, Mississippi was readmitted to the Union on February 23, 1870.
While Mississippi typified the Deep South in passing Jim Crow laws in the early 20th century, its history was more complex than just discrimination. Because the Mississippi Delta contained so much fertile bottomland which had not been farmed, after the Civil War African Americans achieved unusually high rates of land ownership in bottomland areas away from the riverfronts.
Also, tens of thousands of immigrants were attracted to the Delta. In the 1870s and 1880s, many black farmers succeeded in gaining ownership of land.
By the turn of the century, two-thirds of the farmers (in numbers) in Mississippi who owned land in the Delta were African American and seemed headed for having a stake in the future.
Their clearing and development of the land made it valuable. Many were able to keep going through the difficult years of falling cotton prices by extending their debts.
Cotton prices fell throughout the decades following the Civil War. As another agricultural depression lowered cotton prices into the 1890s, however, numerous African American farmers finally had to sell their land to pay off debts and lost the land they had put so much labor into.
Disfranchisement of African Americans at the turn of the century, a series of increasingly restrictive racial segregation laws enacted during the first part of the 20th century, increased lynchings, failure of the cotton crops due to boll weevil infestation, and successive severe flooding in 1912 and 1913 resulted in thousands of African Americans leaving Mississippi to migrate north starting during World War I.
With the Great Migration, they left a society that had been steadily closing off opportunity. With control of the ballot box and more access to credit, white planters expanded their ownership of Delta backcountry and could take advantage of new railroads.
By 1910 a majority of black farmers in the Delta were sharecroppers, and by 1920, the third generation after freedom, African Americans were mostly landless laborers facing inescapable poverty.
Most migrants from Mississippi took the trains north to Chicago.
Another wave of migration started in the 1940's. Almost half a million people left Mississippi in the second migration, three-quarters of them black.
Mississippi generated rich, quintessentially American music traditions: gospel music, country music, jazz, blues, and rock and roll, all were invented, promulgated, or heavily developed by Mississippi musicians, and most came from the Mississippi Delta.
Many musicians carried their music north to Chicago, where it became part of that city's jazz and blues.
The state's complex history has generated great storytellers. Mississippi is noted for award-winning twentieth-century authors native to or associated with the state, including Nobel Prize-winner William Faulkner, playwright Tennessee Williams, Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, Ellen Douglas, Walker Percy, Willie Morris, historian Shelby Foote, Margaret Walker, Ellen Gilchrist, Alice Walker, and playwright Beth Henley.
Mississippi was a center of activity during the African-American Civil Rights Movement.
Students and community organizers from across the country came to help register voters and establish Freedom Schools. Resistance and harsh attitudes of many white politicians (including the creation of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission), the participation of Mississippians in the White Citizens' Councils, and the violent tactics of the Ku Klux Klan and its sympathizers, gained Mississippi a reputation in the 1960s as a reactionary state.
In 1966 the state was the last to repeal prohibition of alcohol.
In 1995 it symbolically adopted the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery.
These amendments were still in effect in Mississippi even before their ratification there.
On August 17, 1969, Category 5 Hurricane Camille hit the Mississippi coast, killing 248 people and causing US$1.5 billion in damage (1969 dollars).
On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina, though a Category 3 storm upon final landfall, caused even greater destruction across the entire 90 miles (145 km) of Mississippi Gulf Coast from Louisiana to Alabama.
On August 30, 2007, a report by the United States Census Bureau indicated that Mississippi is the poorest state in the country.
Many white cotton farmers have large, mechanized plantations, some of which receive extensive Federal subsidies, yet many African Americans still live as poor, rural, landless laborers. The state had a median household income of $34,473.
Economy
The Bureau of Economic Analysis estimates that Mississippi's total state product in 2006 was $84 billion.
Per capita personal income in 2006 was only $26,908, the lowest per capita personal income of any state, but the state also has the nation's lowest living costs.
Although the state has one of the lowest per capita income rates in the United States, Mississippians consistently rank as one of the highest per capita in charitable contributions.
Before the Civil War, Mississippi was the fifth-wealthiest state in the nation.
Slaves were then counted as property and the rise in the cotton markets since the 1840s had increased their value. A majority - 55 percent - of the population of Mississippi was enslaved in 1860.
Largely due to the domination of the plantation economy, focused on the production of one agricultural good, cotton, the state was slow to use its wealth to invest in infrastructure such as public schools, roads and railroads. Industrialization also did not spread from northern climates until the late 20th century.
The planter aristocracy, the elite of antebellum Mississippi, kept the tax structure low for themselves and made private improvements. The most successful planters, such as Confederate President Jefferson Davis, owned riverside properties along the Mississippi River.
During the Civil War, 30,000 Mississippi men were killed, and many more were left crippled and wounded. Changes to the labor structure and an agricultural depression throughout the South caused severe losses in wealth.
In 1860 assessed valuation of property in Mississippi had been more than $500 million of which $218 million (43 percent) was estimated as the value of slaves. By 1870, total assets had decreased in value to roughly $177 million.
Poor whites and landless freed blacks suffered the most from the depression that followed the Civil War. The constitutional convention of early 1868 appointed a committee to recommend what was needed for relief of the state and its citizens. The committee found severe destitution among the laboring classes.
It took years for the state to rebuild levees damaged in battles. The upset of the commodity system impoverished the state after the war. By 1868 an increased cotton crop began to show possibilities for free labor in the state, but the crop of 565,000 bales produced in 1870 was still less than half of prewar figures.
By 1900, two-thirds of farm owners in Mississippi were blacks, but two decades later the majority of African Americans were sharecroppers. The low prices of cotton into the 1890s meant that more than a generation of African Americans lost the result of their labor when they had to sell off their farms to pay off accumulated debts.
Mississippi's rank as one of the poorest states is related to its dependence on cotton agriculture before and after the Civil War, late development of its frontier bottomlands in the Mississippi Delta, repeated natural disasters of flooding in the late 19th and early 20th century requiring massive capital investment in levees, heavy capital investment to ditch and drain the bottomlands, and slow development of railroads to link bottomland towns and river cities.
The 1890 constitution discouraged industry, a legacy that would slow the state's progress for years.
From Democratic militias and groups such as the White Camellia terrorizing African American Republicans to take political control in the 1870s, to the legislature passing segregation and disfranchisement legislation, the state refused for years to build human capital by fully educating all its citizens.
In addition, the reliance on agriculture grew increasingly costly as the state suffered loss of crops due to the devastation of the boll weevil in the early 20th century, devastating floods in 1912-1913 and 1927, collapse of cotton prices after 1920, and drought in 1930.
It was not until 1884, after the flood of 1882, that the state created the Mississippi-Yazoo Delta District Levee Board and started successfully achieving longer term plans for levees in the upper Delta.
Despite the state's building and reinforcing levees for years, the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 broke through and caused massive flooding of 27,000 square miles (70,000 km²) throughout the Delta and millions of dollars in property damages. With the Depression coming so soon after the flood, the state suffered badly during those years.
Tens of thousands of people migrated north for jobs and chances to live as full citizens.
The legislature's 1990 decision to legalize casino gambling along the Mississippi River and the Gulf Coast has led to economic gains for the state. An estimated $500,000 per day in tax revenue was lost following Hurricane Katrina's severe damage to several coastal casinos in August 2005.
Gambling towns in Mississippi include the Gulf Coast towns of Bay St. Louis, Gulfport and Biloxi, and the Mississippi River towns of Tunica (the third largest gaming area in the United States), Greenville, Vicksburg and Natchez.
Before Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, Mississippi was the second largest gambling state in the Union, after Nevada and ahead of New Jersey.
On October 17, 2005, Governor Haley Barbour signed a bill into law that now allows casinos in Hancock and Harrison counties to rebuild on land (but within 800 feet (240 m) of the water).
The only exception is in Harrison County, where the new law states that casinos can be built to the southern boundary of U.S. Route 90.
Mississippi collects personal income tax in three tax brackets, ranging from 3% to 5%. The retail sales tax rate in Mississippi is 7%. Additional local sales taxes also are collected.
For purposes of assessment for ad valorem taxes, taxable property is divided into five classes. |
