100 Fun Facts About Mississippi

When Mississippi became a state in 1817, the eastern half of its territory became which future state?

Alabama was split off under pressure from Southern politicians who wanted two slave states rather than one: dividing the territory meant four new senators for the region instead of two.

Mississippi's capital is named after which future U.S. president, honoured there years before he took office?

Andrew Jackson was still famous as the victor of the Battle of New Orleans when the new capital took his name in 1821. The site had been a trading post called LeFleur's Bluff.

The name Mississippi comes from Ojibwe words, misi-ziibi, that describe the river as what?

Great river is the usual rendering: mshi, 'big', and ziibi, 'river'. Missionaries first met the river far upstream, which is why a waterway ending at the Gulf carries a name from the Great Lakes country.

Mississippi has long led the nation in farming which pond-raised fish?

Catfish ponds cover so much of the Delta that a governor named Belzoni the Farm-Raised Catfish Capital of the World in 1976. The state grows more than half of America's farmed supply.

In 1860, which other state besides Mississippi had an enslaved majority?

South Carolina, at 57%, and Mississippi, at 55%, stood alone in the 1860 census. Cotton had made Mississippi the nation's top producer, on the labour of more than 436,000 enslaved people.

Coca-Cola was first bottled by a candy merchant in which Mississippi river town?

Vicksburg confectioner Joseph Biedenharn bottled the fountain drink so that he could deliver it to customers out in the countryside. Until then it was sold only at soda fountains.

The teddy bear takes its name from an incident on a 1902 hunting trip in Mississippi involving which president?

Theodore Roosevelt refused to shoot a bear that his guides had cornered and tied to a tree. A Washington Post cartoon of the scene inspired a Brooklyn shopkeeper to sell 'Teddy's bear'.

Which root beer brand, owned by Coca-Cola since 1995, was first bottled on the Mississippi Gulf Coast?

Barq's has New Orleans roots, but it is a Mississippi drink: Edward Barq, a native of that city, created it at the bottling works he opened on the coast.

Elvis Presley was born in which Mississippi town?

Tupelo was home until Elvis was 13, when the Presleys moved to Memphis. Six years later he walked into Sun Records there and began his recording career.

Which Mississippi native created Kermit the Frog?

Jim Henson, born in Greenville and partly raised in nearby Leland, made the first Kermit from his mother's old spring coat, with a halved ping-pong ball for the eyes.

Which talk-show host was born in Kosciusko, Mississippi, in 1954?

Oprah Winfrey's birth certificate reads Orpah, after a figure in the Book of Ruth. People kept mispronouncing it, and Oprah stuck.

Which Nobel-winning novelist set most of his books in Yoknapatawpha, a fictional Mississippi county?

William Faulkner modelled it on the Lafayette County country around his home, and for Absalom, Absalom! he drew a map of the county himself.

Which Mississippi-born writer won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for The Optimist's Daughter?

Eudora Welty also gave her name to software: the 1990s email program Eudora was named in her honour, after her short story 'Why I Live at the P.O.'

Which playwright, born in Columbus, Mississippi, in 1911, wrote A Streetcar Named Desire?

Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams and took his professional name around 1939, as a nod to his Southern accent and roots.

Which author of Native Son was born on a plantation in southwest Mississippi in 1908?

Richard Wright left the Jim Crow South for Chicago at 19 and later turned his Mississippi childhood into the 1945 memoir Black Boy.

Emmett Till was visiting relatives near which Delta town when he was murdered in 1955?

Money is where the 14-year-old from Chicago was accused of flirting with a white shopkeeper. His mother insisted on an open-casket funeral, and tens of thousands came to see what had been done to him.

Which NAACP field secretary was shot dead in the driveway of his Mississippi home in June 1963?

Medgar Evers's killer, Byron De La Beckwith, went free in 1964 after two trials ended in hung juries. He was finally convicted at a third trial in 1994.

Whose enrolment as the first Black student at Ole Miss in 1962 set off a deadly riot?

James Meredith, an Air Force veteran, registered under the guard of federal marshals after a night of rioting that left two people dead. He graduated the following year.

What was the main goal of the 1964 Freedom Summer campaign in Mississippi?

To register Black voters statewide, hundreds of mostly white Northern students came south that June. Within a week three of the campaign's workers had been murdered, and the whole country was watching.

The Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi surrendered to Grant on which 1863 date, the day after Gettysburg?

July 4 gave the Union a double celebration. Once a second river fortress fell five days later, the whole Mississippi was in Union hands and the Confederacy was cut in two.

The 444-mile national parkway running from southwest Mississippi to Nashville follows which historic trail?

The Natchez Trace was the way home for 'Kaintuck' boatmen: after floating their goods down the Mississippi on flatboats, they left the boats behind and walked north along it.

Which pop star was born in McComb, Mississippi, in 1981?

Britney Spears grew up in Kentwood, Louisiana. At eight she was turned away from The Mickey Mouse Club as too young; at eleven she joined its cast.

In November 2020, who approved the design of Mississippi's new state flag by a margin of almost three to one?

The state's voters backed it with 73% in a referendum. A commission had chosen the design from more than 2,000 public submissions after lawmakers retired the flag with the Confederate emblem.

What flower is at the centre of the Mississippi flag adopted in January 2021?

A magnolia sits inside a ring of twenty white stars, one for Mississippi's place as the twentieth state, completed by a gold star for its Native American peoples.

What were Ole Miss's sports teams called immediately before they became the Rebels in 1936?

The Mississippi Flood won a naming contest in 1929, but memories of the Great Flood of 1927 made it an unhappy choice. A second contest in the student newspaper produced 'Rebels'.

Which mascot did Ole Miss introduce on the field in 2018, replacing the Rebel Black Bear?

Tony the Landshark was named for Tony Fein, the linebacker who started the Ole Miss defence's 'Landshark' celebration in 2008.

What is the trophy in the Ole Miss vs. Mississippi State rivalry game called?

The Golden Egg was introduced in 1927 to keep the peace: a year earlier, Ole Miss fans had tried to tear down the goalposts after ending a long losing streak, and fights broke out.

What noisy object do Mississippi State fans famously ring at games?

Cowbells were banned by the SEC as artificial noisemakers from 1974, so State fans smuggled them in by the thousands until the conference finally relented in 2010.

Which Delta bluesman, born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, was said to have sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads?

Robert Johnson recorded just 29 songs, at two sessions in Texas, and died at 27 in 1938 with only a small following. Wider fame came with a reissue album in 1961.

Which blues guitarist, born near Itta Bena, Mississippi, in 1925, named his guitars Lucille?

B.B. King ran back into a burning Arkansas dance hall to save his guitar. The blaze had started when two men fought over a woman named Lucille, so he gave her name to the guitar.

Which bluesman was first recorded by Alan Lomax on Stovall Plantation, Mississippi, in 1941 before electrifying Chicago blues?

Muddy Waters said that hearing his own voice played back that afternoon convinced him he sounded as good as any record. Two years later he left the plantation for Chicago.

Which blues singer died in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1937 after a car crash on Highway 61?

Bessie Smith was taken to the town's Black hospital and died there that morning. The building later became the Riverside Hotel, now a marked stop on the Mississippi Blues Trail.

Which Meridian, Mississippi, railroad man became the 'Father of Country Music'?

Jimmie Rodgers turned to music after tuberculosis forced him off the railroad. At his final session in 1933 he rested on a cot between takes, and he died within two days.

Which NFL quarterback was born in Gulfport and raised in Kiln, Mississippi?

Brett Favre's only scholarship offer came from Southern Miss, which wanted him as a defensive back. He began as its seventh-string quarterback and went on to start 297 straight NFL games.

Jerry Rice set his college receiving records at which small Mississippi school in Itta Bena?

Mississippi Valley State paired Rice with quarterback Willie Totten in an attack nicknamed 'The Satellite Express'. He credited his hands to catching bricks for his bricklayer father.

Walter Payton, 'Sweetness', starred in college for which Mississippi university?

Jackson State won him away from Kansas State, where he had first committed, because his older brother Eddie was already playing football there.

Which Pascagoula shipyard, Mississippi's largest manufacturing employer, builds U.S. Navy warships?

Ingalls Shipbuilding, founded in 1938, built the destroyer USS Cole. After a suicide bombing blew a hole in its hull in 2000, the ship was carried home to the same yard for repair.

Which NASA centre in south Mississippi test-fired the Saturn V stages for Apollo?

Stennis Space Center stands in Hancock County on a site picked partly for its water access: the huge Saturn V stages arrived by barge, along canals linked to the Pearl River.

Jefferson Davis spent his last years at Beauvoir, an estate in which Gulf Coast city?

Biloxi's Beauvoir belonged to Sarah Dorsey, a family friend who invited him in 1877 when he wanted a quiet place to write. In a cottage on the grounds he produced The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government.

What destroyed the Mississippi mansion whose 23 columns survive as Windsor Ruins?

A fire, blamed on a guest's dropped cigarette, destroyed a mansion that had come through the Civil War intact, partly by serving as a Union hospital.

Which European power built Fort Maurepas on the Mississippi coast in 1699, the first European settlement in the future state?

France sent the Canadian-born Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville to secure the mouth of the Mississippi. His fort at present-day Ocean Springs briefly served as the first capital of colonial Louisiana.

Which Spanish explorer crossed northeast Mississippi in 1540–41 and reached the Mississippi River?

Hernando de Soto made heavy demands of the Chickasaw, who answered with a sudden attack on his camp. He died beside the river a year later, and his men buried him in it.

The 1830 treaty that forced the Choctaw to give up their Mississippi homelands was signed where?

Dancing Rabbit Creek produced the first treaty carried out under the Indian Removal Act. The Choctaw who chose to stay behind are the forebears of today's Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians.

Mississippi's 1990 casino law required casinos to be built where?

On the water: casinos had to float, as barges or boats on the Mississippi River or the Gulf, until Hurricane Katrina wrecked the coastal ones and a 2005 law let them rebuild on land.

Which English university city gave its name to the Mississippi town founded in 1837 that became home to Ole Miss?

Oxford was named with a purpose: its founders hoped the borrowed name would help them land the planned state university. It worked, and Ole Miss opened there in 1848.

Fannie Lou Hamer was vice-chair of which group she represented at the 1964 national convention?

The Freedom Democratic Party challenged the seating of Mississippi's all-white delegation. Offered two token at-large seats as a compromise, its delegates refused.

Which Latin American dish became a staple of the Mississippi Delta, sold on street corners and mapped on its own food trail?

Hot tamales became the Delta's own: spicier than the Mexican kind and made with plain cornmeal instead of masa. No two makers agree on the recipe.

Which Category 5 hurricane devastated the Mississippi Gulf Coast in August 1969, 36 years before Katrina?

Camille destroyed every wind gauge in its path, so its peak winds, about 175 mph, had to be worked out afterwards.

Which Asian American community has run small-town grocery stores in the Mississippi Delta since the late 1800s?

Chinese Americans were first brought in as plantation labour after the Civil War. When that experiment failed they opened groceries, and one Delta family's school case reached the Supreme Court in 1927.

Which four-word phrase did Mississippi's 2020 flag law require on every proposed design?

In God We Trust was one of the law's two conditions; the other was no Confederate battle flag. Lawmakers acted days after the NCAA barred the state from hosting championship events under the old flag.

Mississippi voted in 1995 to ratify which constitutional amendment, a vote not officially certified until 2013?

The Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery, was rejected by Mississippi's legislature in December 1865. Its eventual approval made ratification unanimous among the states that existed back then.

Mississippi was the last state in the nation to lift its ban on what, holding out until 1966?

Alcohol in the form of hard liquor stayed illegal across Mississippi for 33 years after national Prohibition ended, though beer was allowed from 1934. The 1966 law replaced the statewide ban with county votes, so some places stayed dry.

Surgeons at the University of Mississippi performed the world's first human transplant of which organ in 1963?

Lung transplant pioneer James Hardy led the operation, and his patient lived for 18 days. Seven months later Hardy placed a chimpanzee's heart in a dying man, another world first.

Which household cleaner was invented in Mississippi by Harry Cole in 1929 and became a national bestseller in the 1950s?

Pine-Sol got its cleaning power from oil made from old yellow pine stumps once thought worthless. By 2016 the bottles on store shelves no longer contained any pine oil.

Which holiday do some credit to women in Columbus, Mississippi, who decorated Confederate and Union graves in 1866?

Memorial Day, first known as Decoration Day, has many claimed birthplaces. The four Columbus women chose to honor the enemy dead buried beside their own, a gesture of reconciliation.

What did two fishermen from Pascagoula, Mississippi, tell the sheriff had happened to them one night in October 1973?

An alien abduction was the story Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker brought to the sheriff's office that night. Hickson went on to become a UFO celebrity who appeared on national television.

Which Oscar-winning actor became a co-owner of the Ground Zero Blues Club, opened in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 2001?

Morgan Freeman's club takes its name from Clarksdale's reputation as ground zero for the blues. It fills a rough old grocery building that had stood vacant for 30 years.

Which NSYNC singer, raised in Clinton, Mississippi, trained as a cosmonaut in Russia in 2002 hoping to fly to space?

Lance Bass was certified by both NASA and the Russian space program, then lost his seat on a Soyuz capsule when his financial sponsors backed out.

Which gooey chocolate dessert is named for its resemblance to the dark banks of the Mississippi River?

Mud pie, in full Mississippi mud pie, piles chocolate sauce, brownie and custard on a crumbly chocolate crust. Its earliest known mention in print dates only from 1975.

Which Star Wars villain was voiced by James Earl Jones, who was born in Arkabutla, Mississippi, in 1931?

Darth Vader's voice belonged to a man who barely spoke for years as a boy because of a severe stutter. An English teacher drew him out of his silence by having him read poetry aloud.

Which songbird, also the state bird of Texas and Tennessee, is Mississippi's official state bird?

Mockingbird songs borrow from other birds and even from electronic noises, and studies show the birds can tell individual people apart.

Which animal, whose scientific name ends in mississippiensis, is the state reptile of Mississippi and Florida?

American alligator numbers were so thinned by hunting that the species was listed as endangered in 1967. Protection worked, and it came off the list in 1987.

By 1860, Mississippi was the top producer in the United States of which crop, worked largely by enslaved people?

Cotton shaped who lived in Mississippi: by 1860 enslaved people made up 55% of the population. The state seceded the following January.

Which state sits across the Mississippi River from Greenville, Mississippi, linked by a cable-stayed bridge since 2010?

Arkansas is reached by the four-lane Greenville Bridge. It replaced a narrow 1940 crossing near a sharp river bend that barges and towboats kept hitting.

The fertile plain known as the Mississippi Delta lies between the Mississippi River and which other river?

Yazoo and Mississippi silt built the Delta's deep soil over thousands of years. The name misleads: the Mississippi River's real mouth lies some 300 miles to the south, in Louisiana.

Which strip of sand off the Mississippi coast, home to Fort Massachusetts, was cut in two by a 1969 hurricane?

Ship Island stayed in two pieces for half a century after the storm's waves tore an inlet through it. Army engineers finished the first stage of rejoining the halves in 2019.

Near Flora, Mississippi, visitors walk among fir and maple logs that turned to what over 30 million years ago?

Stone replaced the wood after the logs washed down an ancient river channel and were buried in sand and clay. The site became a National Natural Landmark in 1965.

Which nickname for Mississippi appeared as the slogan on its first graphic license plates, issued from 1976?

Hospitality State plates won the collectors' Plate of the Year award for 1977, the first time Mississippi had earned that honor.

Kosciusko, Mississippi, is named for a general of the American Revolution who came from which European country?

Poland's Tadeusz Kościuszko served with the Continental Army, and the town dropped its old name, Red Bud Springs, to honor him. The spelling was simplified along the way.

A wildlife refuge set up near Gautier, Mississippi, in 1975 protects an endangered local subspecies of which tall bird?

Sandhill crane pairs of the Mississippi subspecies depend on wet coastal savanna, a habitat that has almost vanished. The refuge guards more than 19,000 acres of it.

Which 1988 Gene Hackman film dramatizes the FBI's hunt for the killers of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County?

Mississippi Burning earned seven Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, and won for its cinematography. The script moved the 1964 case to an invented county.

Which Kathryn Stockett novel set in early-1960s Mississippi was turned down by 60 literary agents?

The Help took Stockett five years to write, then spent more than 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and sold seven million copies by 2011.

Which thriller author spent seven years in the Mississippi House of Representatives before The Firm made him famous?

John Grisham served from 1983 to 1990 while practicing criminal law. The Firm went on to sell more than seven million copies and became a Tom Cruise film.

Which actor leads three convicts escaping a Mississippi chain gang in the Coen brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou?

George Clooney mimed his songs in the film, with bluegrass musician Dan Tyminski supplying the singing voice. The soundtrack won the Grammy for Album of the Year in 2002.

Which actor played Newton Knight, who led a Mississippi revolt against the Confederacy, in the film Free State of Jones?

Matthew McConaughey's character was a real Southern Unionist whose armed revolt in Jones County held out through the Civil War.

Which singer of Margaritaville was born in Pascagoula, Mississippi, on Christmas Day in 1946?

Jimmy Buffett came by his love of the sea early: his grandfather was a steamship captain from Newfoundland and his father a marine engineer and sailor.

Which country star, raised in the tiny town of Star, Mississippi, crossed over to pop with the 1999 album Breathe?

Faith Hill was adopted as an infant and brought up in Star by Edna and Ted Perry. Breathe became one of the best-selling country albums of all time and earned three Grammys.

Which rock band from Escatawpa, Mississippi, reached number three on the Hot 100 with its debut single, Kryptonite?

3 Doors Down began with Brad Arnold both singing lead and playing the drums. The debut album, The Better Life, was certified seven times platinum.

Which soul singer, born a minister's son in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1931, wrote A Change Is Gonna Come?

Sam Cooke was born Samuel Cook and added the final letter as he launched his solo career, to mark a fresh start. He was shot dead at a Los Angeles motel in 1964, aged 33.

Which country star, a sharecropper's son from Sledge, Mississippi, played Negro league baseball before turning to music?

Charley Pride pitched for the Memphis Red Sox, then was named the Country Music Association's Entertainer of the Year in 1971. He joined the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2000.

Which Mississippi minister became the first African American in the U.S. Congress when he entered the Senate in 1870?

Hiram Revels had recruited two regiments of Black soldiers in the Civil War and served as a chaplain. After the Senate he became the first president of what is now Alcorn State University.

Which journalist and NAACP co-founder, famed for exposing lynching, was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi?

Ida B. Wells lost both parents to yellow fever at 16 and kept her siblings together by teaching school. In 2020 she was honored with a posthumous Pulitzer Prize citation for her reporting.

Which Native nation gave up the last of its northern Mississippi homeland in an 1832 treaty signed at Pontotoc?

Chickasaw leaders ceded more than six million acres on the understanding that money from its sale would go to the nation. Removal to present-day Oklahoma began in 1837.

Which traditional sport has a World Series hosted by the Mississippi Band of Choctaw in Philadelphia, Mississippi?

Stickball players carry two sticks each and may never touch the ball with their hands. Elders once arranged games as a way to settle disputes without violence.

Folk hero Casey Jones died at Vaughan, Mississippi, in 1900 while driving a passenger express for which railroad?

Illinois Central engineer Jones slowed his late-running express enough that he was the only person killed when it hit a stalled freight train. A ballad soon made him famous.

What made the 1889 Sullivan–Kilrain title fight at Richburg, Mississippi, the last of its kind in heavyweight boxing?

It was bare-knuckle boxing's final heavyweight title bout. Some 3,000 fans rode special trains to a site kept secret until the last moment, and John L. Sullivan won in round 75.

The campus speed limit at Ole Miss is 18 miles per hour in honor of which quarterback's retired jersey number?

Archie Manning wore 18 for the Rebels before a long NFL career spent mostly with the New Orleans Saints. His sons Peyton and Eli both became NFL quarterbacks too.

Which offensive tackle, whose early life was told in The Blind Side, played college football for the Ole Miss Rebels?

Michael Oher was a unanimous All-American for Ole Miss in 2008, then a first-round draft pick who won a Super Bowl ring with the Baltimore Ravens.

Which Apollo 13 lunar module pilot was born and raised on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi?

Fred Haise was due to become the sixth person to walk on the Moon before the landing was called off on the way there. He later flew five Space Shuttle landing tests in 1977.

Which telecom giant, once based in Clinton, Mississippi, filed for bankruptcy in 2002 after an accounting scandal?

WorldCom grew by buying rivals until it was America's second-largest long-distance carrier, behind only AT&T. Several executives were later convicted of inflating its assets.

Which Mississippi town is home to most of the house restorations by Ben and Erin Napier on HGTV's Home Town?

Laurel became the husband-and-wife team's on-screen workshop when the series premiered in January 2016, produced by a Canadian company.

Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi, has an unofficial mascot in boxing gloves known as the Fighting what?

Okra with a fierce scowl was embraced by the student body in the late 1980s. Officially the teams are the Statesmen, a nod to the legislator who brought the school to Cleveland.

In 1982 Congress named Mississippi's capital the official American home of an Olympic-style contest in which art form?

Ballet dancers from around the world compete there for medals every four years. The contest began in Varna, Bulgaria, in 1964 and first came to America in 1979.

Which mayonnaise-and-chili dip first appeared in the Greek restaurants of Mississippi's capital?

Comeback sauce was first served over iceberg lettuce or on saltine crackers before it became a dip for fried food. It is little known outside the South.

The slugburger of Corinth, Mississippi, is said to be named after slang for a fake coin the size of which real one?

A nickel was what the burger first cost, and a slug was a metal disc that worked in vending machines in its place. The patties were stretched with potato flakes and flour.

Which novelist, born in Greenwood, Mississippi, and raised in Grenada, won a Pulitzer Prize for The Goldfinch?

Donna Tartt memorized long A. A. Milne poems as a child, and her mother was such a keen reader that she read while driving. Tartt's first novel, The Secret History, appeared in 1992.

Which novelist from DeLisle, Mississippi, won National Book Awards for Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing?

Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones follows a family facing Hurricane Katrina. Her parents had brought her back to DeLisle, their own hometown, when she was three.

Which Greenville, Mississippi, writer became a household name as a storyteller in Ken Burns's series The Civil War?

Shelby Foote wrote everything by hand with a nib pen, including his three-volume narrative history of the war. He thought of himself mainly as a novelist.

Which Mississippi-born soprano drew an ovation of over half an hour at her Metropolitan Opera debut in Il trovatore?

Leontyne Price became the first African-American soprano to win international acclaim, and she was especially celebrated in the title role of Verdi's Aida.

Which summit near Iuka, in the Appalachian foothills, is the highest natural point in Mississippi at just 806 feet?

Woodall Mountain is crowned by a survey marker and three radio towers. A steep, rocky, unpaved road about a mile long leads to the summit.