Mississippi

On December 10, 1817, Mississippi became the twentieth state admitted into the Union. Located in the eastern southcentral United States, the state is bordered by Alabama , Louisiana , Arkansas , and Tennessee . It is the thirty-second largest state with a total area of 47,689 square miles (123,514 square kilometers).

The first Spanish explorers arrived in what is present-day Mississippi in the early sixteenth century and found approximately thirty thousand Native Americans divided into fifteen tribes. By the time the French settled in 1699, only three large tribes remained: Natchez, Chickasaw, and Choctaw.

The Mississippi Territory was organized in 1798. It was large enough that Congress decided to organize the eastern half as the Alabama Territory in 1817. The western half became the state of Mississippi.

Mississippi was the second Southern state to secede from the Union after Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865; served 1861–65) was elected president. (See Secession .) Nearly thirty thousand of the seventy-eight thousand Mississippians who fought in the American Civil War (1861–65) died.

Although the Civil War brought freedom to the state's slaves, white Mississippians continued to discriminate against African Americans through segregation laws and customs. The state's agricultural economy was dominated by cotton and tenant farming, and there was little opportunity for landless African American farm workers. Between 1883 and 1959, 538 African Americans were lynched (tortured and hanged) in Mississippi, more than in any other state.

The Great Depression (1929–41) hit the state hard; cotton sank to five cents per pound in 1932, and one-fourth of the state's farmland was taken for nonpayment of taxes. World War II (1939–45) stimulated industrial growth, and by the early 1980s, Mississippi's economy had become one of industry.

Mississippi was one of the main sites of social turmoil throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, due primarily to the civil rights movement . By end of the 1960s, manufacturing surpassed farming as a way of life. This occured because residents accepted low wages and did little to organize formal labor unions. The garment, textile, and wood-products industries were traditionally low paying anyway. Despite the introduction of casino gambling in 1992, Mississippi remains a poor state. In 2004, it ranked fifty-first among the fifty states and the District of Columbia with a per person income of $24,518. The national average at that time was $33,050.

Mississippi was home to 2.9 million people in 2006. The population was 60.8 percent white, 36.5 percent African American. The capital city of Jackson had an estimated population in 2005 of 177,977, which was larger than any other city in the state. Of the state's population, 27 percent of residents are between the ages of twenty-five and forty-four; 26 percent are under the age of eighteen.