Mississippi Trivia
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100 free Mississippi trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
50 free Mississippi trivia questions with answers. Mississippi bottled the first Coca-Cola, named the teddy bear, gave the world Elvis, Kermit, Oprah, Faulkner and the blues, and was the last state to take the Confederate emblem off its flag. This Mississippi trivia quiz covers all of it: statehood and secession, Jackson and Vicksburg, the Delta and its cotton, catfish and casinos, Natchez and the Trace, the Gulf Coast and Katrina. The people are here too: Robert Johnson, B.B. King and Muddy Waters; Jimmie Rodgers; Faulkner, Welty, Tennessee Williams and Richard Wright; Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, James Meredith, Fannie Lou Hamer and Freedom Summer; Brett Favre, Jerry Rice and Walter Payton; and the Egg Bowl, cowbells and a landshark. Roughly a third of the questions are for anyone who has driven Highway 61, a third for Mississippians, and the rest for those who know how many columns still stand at Windsor. Every answer is checked against a cited source shown under the question.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01When Mississippi became a state in 1817, the eastern half of its territory became which future state?
Alabama
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.
Q 02Mississippi's capital is named after which future U.S. president, honoured there years before he took office?
Andrew Jackson
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.
Q 03The name Mississippi comes from Ojibwe words, misi-ziibi, that describe the river as what?
Great river
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.
Q 04Mississippi has long led the nation in farming which pond-raised fish?
Catfish
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.
Q 05In 1860, which other state besides Mississippi had an enslaved majority?
South Carolina
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.
Q 06Coca-Cola was first bottled by a candy merchant in which Mississippi river town?
Vicksburg
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.
Q 07The teddy bear takes its name from an incident on a 1902 hunting trip in Mississippi involving which president?
Theodore Roosevelt
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'.
Q 08Which root beer brand, owned by Coca-Cola since 1995, was first bottled on the Mississippi Gulf Coast?
Barq's
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.
Q 09Elvis Presley was born in which Mississippi town?
Tupelo
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.
Q 10Which Mississippi native created Kermit the Frog?
Jim Henson
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.
Q 11Which talk-show host was born in Kosciusko, Mississippi, in 1954?
Oprah Winfrey
Oprah Winfrey's birth certificate reads Orpah, after a figure in the Book of Ruth. People kept mispronouncing it, and Oprah stuck.
Q 12Which Nobel-winning novelist set most of his books in Yoknapatawpha, a fictional Mississippi county?
William Faulkner
William Faulkner modelled it on the Lafayette County country around his home, and for Absalom, Absalom! he drew a map of the county himself.
Q 13Which Mississippi-born writer won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for The Optimist's Daughter?
Eudora Welty
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.'
Q 21The 444-mile national parkway running from southwest Mississippi to Nashville follows which historic trail?
The Natchez Trace
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.
Q 22Which pop star was born in McComb, Mississippi, in 1981?
Britney Spears
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.
Q 23In November 2020, who approved the design of Mississippi's new state flag by a margin of almost three to one?
The state's voters
Q 14Which playwright, born in Columbus, Mississippi, in 1911, wrote A Streetcar Named Desire?
Tennessee Williams
Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams and took his professional name around 1939, as a nod to his Southern accent and roots.
Q 15Which author of Native Son was born on a plantation in southwest Mississippi in 1908?
Richard Wright
Richard Wright left the Jim Crow South for Chicago at 19 and later turned his Mississippi childhood into the 1945 memoir Black Boy.
Q 16Emmett Till was visiting relatives near which Delta town when he was murdered in 1955?
Money
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.
Q 17Which NAACP field secretary was shot dead in the driveway of his Mississippi home in June 1963?
Medgar Evers
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.
Q 18Whose enrolment as the first Black student at Ole Miss in 1962 set off a deadly riot?
James Meredith
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.
Q 19What was the main goal of the 1964 Freedom Summer campaign in Mississippi?
To register Black voters statewide
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.
Q 20The Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi surrendered to Grant on which 1863 date, the day after Gettysburg?
July 4
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 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.
Q 24What flower is at the centre of the Mississippi flag adopted in January 2021?
A magnolia
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.
Q 25What were Ole Miss's sports teams called immediately before they became the Rebels in 1936?
The Mississippi Flood
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'.
Q 26Which mascot did Ole Miss introduce on the field in 2018, replacing the Rebel Black Bear?
Tony the Landshark
Tony the Landshark was named for Tony Fein, the linebacker who started the Ole Miss defence's 'Landshark' celebration in 2008.
Q 27What is the trophy in the Ole Miss vs. Mississippi State rivalry game called?
The Golden Egg
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.
Q 28What noisy object do Mississippi State fans famously ring at games?
Cowbells
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.
Q 29Which Delta bluesman, born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, was said to have sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads?
Robert Johnson
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.
Q 30Which blues guitarist, born near Itta Bena, Mississippi, in 1925, named his guitars Lucille?
B.B. King
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.