Mississippi gave America the blues — born in the Delta from the grief and grit of the cotton system. Robert Johnson met something at the crossroads. Muddy Waters left Clarksdale for Chicago. B.B. King carried the sound to the world. Faulkner mapped Yoknapatawpha from a courthouse in Oxford. Medgar Evers was assassinated in Jackson; Emmett Till was murdered in Money. The Magnolia State is the poorest by spreadsheet — and the richest by every measure that doesn’t fit on one.
Mississippi runs from the Tennessee River hills of the northeast to the Gulf Coast barrier islands in the south. The Delta — the flat alluvial plain between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers — fills the northwest. The Piney Woods cover the southeast. Its 82 counties span the full range.
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The Natchez, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Biloxi peoples inhabited Mississippi’s varied landscapes for millennia before Hernando de Soto’s expedition of 1540 brought disease and destruction. The French established Fort Maurepas on the Gulf Coast in 1699 — the first permanent European settlement in the lower Mississippi Valley — and founded Natchez in 1716. Control passed to Britain in 1763 and then to the United States after the Revolution, though Spain contested the border for years.
Mississippi entered the Union on December 10, 1817 as the twentieth state. Cotton and enslaved labor transformed the Delta into one of the wealthiest agricultural regions on earth. By 1860, Mississippi had more millionaires per capita than any other state, their fortunes built entirely on the labor of people they owned. The state voted to secede in January 1861 and provided Confederate President Jefferson Davis, who had represented Mississippi in the U.S. Senate.
Reconstruction produced brief Black political leadership — Mississippi sent the first two Black U.S. senators, Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce — before violent white supremacist campaigns dismantled every gain. The Delta sharecropping system replaced slavery in practice if not in name, trapping generations in debt peonage on the same land their ancestors had worked. The Great Migration beginning around 1910 sent hundreds of thousands of Black Mississippians north to Chicago, Detroit, and beyond, carrying the blues with them.
The blues was born in the Delta from the convergence of African musical traditions, field hollers, and the particular grief of the Mississippi experience. Robert Johnson sold his soul at the crossroads. Muddy Waters left Clarksdale for Chicago and invented electric blues. B.B. King learned guitar in Indianola and named it Lucille. The music that became rock and roll, soul, and rhythm and blues traces its DNA directly to this flat, cotton-growing county between the rivers.
The Civil Rights Movement met its most violent resistance in Mississippi. Emmett Till was murdered in Money in 1955. Medgar Evers was assassinated in Jackson in 1963. Freedom Riders were beaten in McComb. The 1964 Freedom Summer project sent volunteers to register Black voters and three workers — Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner — were murdered by Klansmen with police assistance in Neshoba County. Each atrocity brought national attention and eventually forced change. Today Mississippi grapples honestly and unevenly with this history, and the Mississippi Blues Trail marks more than 200 sites where the music was made.
Hernando de Soto crosses into Mississippi, encountering the Chickasaw and Natchez nations. His expedition introduces epidemic disease that kills a large share of the native population within a generation.
Iberville establishes Fort Maurepas on the Gulf Coast near present-day Ocean Springs — the first permanent European settlement in the lower Mississippi Valley.
Mississippi enters the Union on December 10 as the twentieth state. Jackson becomes the capital in 1822, named for Andrew Jackson who had recently defeated the Creek and Seminole nations to open the land.
Mississippi votes to secede on January 9, 1861 — the second state to leave the Union. Jefferson Davis, a Mississippi planter and senator, becomes President of the Confederacy.
Grant’s 47-day siege of Vicksburg ends on July 4. The fall of the Confederate fortress gives the Union control of the Mississippi River and splits the Confederacy in two.
W.C. Handy hears a slide guitar player at a Tutwiler train station playing something he’d never heard — Delta blues. Within a decade he’s publishing the genre and the world begins to change.
Emmett Till, 14, is abducted and murdered in Money, Mississippi. His mother’s decision to hold an open-casket funeral — showing the world what they did to her son — galvanizes the Civil Rights Movement.
James Meredith integrates the University of Mississippi under federal marshals. Two people are killed in the riots. Kennedy federalizes the Mississippi National Guard.
SNCC and CORE launch Freedom Summer to register Black voters. Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner are murdered by Klansmen with Neshoba County sheriff’s complicity. Their deaths accelerate the Civil Rights Act.
Byron De La Beckwith is finally convicted for the 1963 assassination of Medgar Evers — 31 years after two hung juries set him free. Mississippi begins its long, unfinished reckoning.
Real Mississippi people who have placed their names — and their stories — into the hex grid. Each square mile, a chapter.
My grandmother Etta was born in Jackson in 1924 to parents who had come up from Mississippi three years earlier as part of what they used to...
View StoryMy husband Michael was an EMT with the Jackson Fire Department for nineteen years. We met in 1992 at a barbecue at my brother's house — he w...
View StoryMy mother grew up in Jackson during the Great Depression. They were poor in a way that is hard to explain now — real hunger, real cold, real...
View StoryI came out to my parents in 1991, in a kitchen in Jackson, and my father did not speak to me for nine years. He died in 2007. We had reconci...
View StoryMy grandmother used to make pierogi every Christmas Eve in her kitchen in Jackson. She would sit at the round table, four hours straight, fo...
View StoryMy grandfather came to Mississippi in 1953 with nothing but a suitcase and a job offer at the steel mill in Jackson. He worked there for for...
View Story
From Robert Johnson’s crossroads at Clarksdale to Faulkner’s Oxford, from the Gulf shrimp boats at Pass Christian to Medgar Evers’s Jackson and Emmett Till’s Money — eighty-two counties of the state that taught America how to sing, how to write, and how to remember. Pick your hex, sign your name to the long verse.
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