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

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…

Born in 1939 in Walnut Grove in Leake County, Sue Gunter witnessed and contributed to major transformations in American women’s…

A native of Parkersburg, West Virginia, Frank Hains became important to Mississippi arts in the 1950s as the arts editor…

A physician from McComb, Verner Smith Holmes was appointed to the Board of Trustees of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher…

William Henry Holtzclaw, a student and follower of Booker T. Washington, was the founder and leader of Utica Normal and…

Henry Hughes wrote one book, Treatise on Sociology, Theoretical and Practical. Published in 1854, that book was significant as one…

Hired to teach elocution at the University of Mississippi in 1885, Sarah “Sallie” Isom was the first woman in the…

The pastor at the First Christian Church in Greenwood in the 1950s and 1960s, Aaron Johnson was one of the…

Journalist Erle E. Johnston Jr. gained his greatest fame as director of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission. Born on 10…

A native of Iowa, Grace M. Allen first met Laurence Clifton Jones at a church in Iowa City when both…

Laurence Clifton Jones was the founder of and a major figure in the Piney Woods Country Life School, an ambitious…

Harriet Kells helped establish the first chapter of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in Mississippi and served as editor…

A group of current and former college and university students started the Kudzu newspaper in Jackson in 1968, at the…

From 1945 to 1961 Howard Langfitt was in charge of agricultural programming at WJDX radio and then WLBT television in…

Herbert Lee was an early martyr in the Mississippi civil rights movement. A land-owning dairy farmer with nine children, Lee,…

Writer, translator, and activist Muna Lee was born in Raymond, Mississippi, on 29 January 1895 to Mary Maud Lee and…

When nine students from Tougaloo College considered a location for a civil rights protest in 1961, they concluded that sitting…

Emma Knowlton Lytle’s work as a filmmaker and artist was rooted on Perthshire plantation in Bolivar County. Born in 1911,…

Burnita Shelton Matthews was a lawyer committed to women’s rights in the law and the political system who became an…

Jane Ellen McAllister was a leader in African American teacher education at Jackson State College and other institutions. She was…

Richard Aubrey McLemore was a historian who taught and served as president at two Mississippi institutions, directed the Mississippi Department…

Neil McMillen taught history at the University of Southern Mississippi from 1969 until his retirement in 2001. A native of…

Scholars and other observers have long used the Great Migration to refer to a significant movement of African Americans from…

Mississippi Action for Progress (MAP) was founded in 1966 to receive federal funds to run Head Start programs. It challenged…

The Mississippi Freedom Labor Union (MFLU) was a short-lived agricultural union that formed in the Bolivar County town of Shaw…

Industrial operations in the antebellum South tended to be small affairs that primarily served local markets. In the 1850s, however,…

The Mississippi State Normal School for Colored Youth, generally called State Normal and located in Holly Springs, educated African American…

In 1963 a small group of white Mississippi women concerned about violence and the possible closing of public schools began…

The civil rights movement came later in Natchez than in many of Mississippi’s other towns and cities but had moments…

An old argument, often identified with political scientist V. O. Key Jr., divided Mississippi society and politics in the early…

As a child in Kosciusko, Mississippi, Carolyn Bennett read Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes. She…

LeRoy Percy is the rare Mississippian who may be best known for his tombstone: a bronze statue of a stoic…

Described by historian John Hebron Moore as “Mississippi’s foremost agricultural authority of the 1840s and 1850s,” Martin W. Philips owned…

No US presidents are natives of Mississippi, but one, James K. Polk, owned substantial property in the state. Polk was…

Not surprisingly, Mississippi’s population has reflected the major developments in the state’s history. Using figures from the US Census is…

Presbyterians have made up a small but important part of the religious landscape of what is now Mississippi since early…

Zelma Price was a member of the state legislature from Washington County and the first female judge in Mississippi. She…

Prior to the US Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, Mississippi had only three non-church-run private schools.…

Efforts to limit or prohibit the sale of alcohol have a long and complex history in Mississippi. It passed its…

In the mid-1960s several popular musicians wrote protest songs that condemned Mississippi racism and violence as problems that all Americans…

It is no coincidence that the first efforts to build railroads in Mississippi began in the early 1830s, shortly after…

Clayton Rand was the editor of several Mississippi newspapers and author of a range of books, including an autobiographical account…

Jacob Lorenzo Reddix served as president of Jackson State College from its founding in 1940 until 1967. Reddix was born…

A native of Greenville, Julia Reed is a well-known journalist, commentator, and humorist. She is a contributing editor for Elle…

The Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL) was organized in Mound Bayou in 1951 and worked as a Mississippi civil…

Until the twenty-first century, Mississippi had rarely played a major role in national discussions about reproductive rights. But in 2011,…

Cleophus Robinson left Mississippi as a teenager after working in the cotton fields outside his hometown of Canton. He carried…

Jimmie Rodgers, described by many as the Father of Country Music, had two other nicknames during his career: the Singing…

Civil rights activist John R. Salter Jr., who later changed his name to Hunter Gray, lived and worked in Jackson…

Born in Bolton, Mississippi, on 26 September 1931, to an Episcopal minister and his wife, Clifton Farr Sessions graduated from…

The marriage of a Mississippi woman born into wealth and privilege to a major socialist writer led to an intriguing…

In 1820, Mississippi had 33,000 slaves; forty years later, that number had mushroomed to about 437,000, giving the state the…

Wadada Leo Smith is a jazz trumpeter and composer who has been an innovator in free, experimental, and avant-garde jazz…

James Smylie was born in 1780 in Richmond County, North Carolina, and attended David Caldwell’s Log College, an institution that…

E. W. Steptoe, born on 14 February 1907, was the founder and head of the National Association for the Advancement…

Born in New Orleans on 16 October 1870, Alfred Holt Stone at various times was a planter, lawyer, scholar, legislator,…

Born on 16 September 1919 in Yazoo City, Mississippi, Emmett J. Stringer became a dentist and leader of the National…

Compared to southern states such as Georgia and the Carolinas, Mississippi’s textile mill history was slow and somewhat erratic. Only…

A teenaged civil rights activist, Brenda Travis dramatized both the demands for change and some of the tensions within the…

Born and raised in DeLisle, Mississippi, along the Gulf Coast, Jesmyn Ward has become a leading American writer on issues…

Methodist minister Donald Wildmon founded the American Family Association and its predecessor, the National Federation of Decency, as part an…

Born in Jackson on 4 December 1955, singer Cassandra Wilson has developed a style and repertoire that defy conventional descriptions.…

Sammy Winder was a star running back for the University of Southern Mississippi before playing for nine seasons in the…

In 1969 Billie Jean Young heard Fannie Lou Hamer give a talk in Tuskegee, Alabama. Ever since, Young has dedicated…