Mississippi

The poorest state and the one with the largest Black population share, where the cotton economy was most complete and its consequences longest. The Choctaw and Chickasaw were removed in the 1830s under treaties that opened the delta, and cotton planted on that alluvial soil made Mississippi one of the wealthiest places in the country by 1860, measured by the value of property that included human beings - enslaved people were a majority of the population. It seceded second, in January 1861, and its declaration named slavery in its first substantive sentence. After the war Reconstruction briefly produced the country's first Black senators, Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce, before the 1890 constitution's poll tax and literacy tests removed Black voters almost entirely for seventy years. Sharecropping replaced slavery as the labour system. The Great Migration took hundreds of thousands north, carrying delta blues to Chicago. The murders of Emmett Till in 1955 and of civil rights workers at Philadelphia in 1964, and the Freedom Summer voter drives, made the state the movement's hardest ground. It removed the Confederate emblem from its flag in 2020. Jackson is the capital. Faulkner and Welty both wrote from here. The state takes its name from the river, from an Ojibwe word for great river. Its delta is not the river's actual delta but the floodplain upstream. Vicksburg's fall in July 1863 split the Confederacy. The state has the highest share of Black residents in the country. Elvis Presley was born at Tupelo. The state has more churches per head than any other.

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