Ted Ownby

In 1933, the first year of the Franklin Roosevelt administration, the New Deal dramatically changed the nature of Mississippi agriculture…

Mississippi was one of several states where the efforts of agricultural reformers led to the passage of the Smith-Lever Act…

Started in May 1963 by nine white men at a gas station outside Natchez, Americans for the Preservation of the…

Armstrong Tire and Rubber became Mississippi’s first tire manufacturer when it opened a plant in Natchez in 1939 as part…

Women from eight southern states met in Atlanta in 1930 to form the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention…

Mississippians have written some of the world’s most powerful autobiographies. Reasons for the popularity of autobiography are numerous. Many Mississippians…

Walter “Brother” Barnes was a popular bandleader from the late 1920s until his death. A clarinetist, conductor, and tour organizer…

Like most other sports played in Mississippi, basketball sometimes seems a minor sport compared to football. Since the mid-twentieth century…

James “Cool Papa” Bell was by all accounts the fastest and one of the best baseball players in the Negro…

Born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1928, Lerone Bennett Jr. was one of the most prolific authors describing African American history…

Civil rights activist Unita Blackwell has had a fascinating life at the intersection of local politics and national and international…

Mississippi has long been home to important and popular writers, but until recently it has not been a central location…

Boycotts consist of withholding business or involvement as a form of protest. Mississippians frequently used boycotts as political tools in…

The career of Owen H. Brooks dramatizes some of the main directions the Mississippi civil rights movement took during and…

In 1968 twenty-six-year-old Flonzie Brown Goodloe won a close victory in the race to become Madison County election commissioner, thereby…

Blanche Kelso Bruce, a Reconstruction-era senator from Mississippi, was born a slave in Virginia in 1841. He went to Missouri…

Curtis Conway Bryant was born in Walthall County on 15 January 1917 and lived most of his life in McComb.…

Almost immediately after emancipation, African American and white members of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (MECS) began working to form…

Maude Schuyler Clay is a photographer who has published three books and had multiple exhibits of images of the Mississippi…

A field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Charlie Cobb was one of the committed student activists from…

A leading agricultural administrator and educator, Cully Cobb was born on a farm in Giles County, Tennessee, in 1884. Cobb…

A prolific nonfiction writer born in the Mississippi Delta, David L. Cohn was the son of a Polish-born Jewish immigrant…

Jazz musician and composer Kelan Philip Cohran played and taught music, primarily in Chicago, since the 1950s. He was best…

Jackson native Catherine “Cat” Cora is a popular chef who has worked in television, written cookbooks, and opened restaurants in…

Corn, though never closely identified with Mississippi, has played an important role throughout the state’s history, first as the crop…

Connie Curry played important roles in Mississippi twice, first as a civil rights activist in the mid-1960s and since the…

A group of Delta planters started meeting in the years after the 1927 Mississippi River Flood to coordinate their efforts…

Dorothy Dickins was a scientist, an author, and a leader of home demonstration efforts in Mississippi. First employed by the…

The Dixiecrat movement was a short-lived effort by conservative white Democrats to pressure the national Democratic Party to give up…

Located in Sunflower County a few miles southeast of Cleveland, Dockery Farms was a large cotton-growing plantation that started in…

An influential art critic, Louis Dollarhide taught English at Mississippi College and the University of Mississippi from the 1950s through…

Children’s rights activist and lawyer Marian Wright Edelman spent about five eventful years in Mississippi working on a variety of…

Belle Edmondson is famous for smuggling goods and information through Union lines around Memphis during the Civil War. Born into…

Teddy Edwards was one of the few successful jazz musicians from Mississippi. Living and playing mostly in Los Angeles, he…

Emancipation in Mississippi constituted a multistep process involving decisions and actions by the slaves themselves, the changing policies of the…

J. Oliver Emmerich is best known as one of a handful of white Mississippi editors who publicized and criticized the…

Filipinos constitute a small but increasingly significant minority group on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Filipino immigrants have a relatively short…

Inspired by and part of the civil rights movement, the Free Southern Theater started at Tougaloo College in Jackson in…

Discrimination, segregation, and violence in Mississippi became subjects of national fascination during the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project. One of the…

Horace S. Fulkerson was born in 1818 in Kentucky and moved to Rodney, Mississippi, in 1836. He became deputy US…

Born in Kosciusko, Mississippi, in 1849, Charles Galloway became a bishop in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South and one of…

General stores were vital to economic and social life in rural Mississippi from the early 1800s through the early 1900s.…

Until recently most of Mississippi’s golf courses were small concerns. Many were country club courses, racially segregated and open only…

The Good Roads Movement began in the early 1900s as an effort to enhance the quality of rural life, allowing…

For most of its history, Mississippi had few Greek immigrants. In 1910 the US census recorded only 117 people of…

Since his first book was published in 1989, John Grisham has been one of America’s most popular novelists. Grisham has…

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