20th Century

Grown under a sharecropping system, cotton no longer made Mississippi prosperous. In the hill country the white farmers, derisively called “rednecks" or “peckerwoods," became as impoverished as the black sharecroppers.

In the early 1900's more than half of Mississippi's population was black, but blacks were denied the vote by rigid application of a literacy-test requirement in the 1890 constitution. One of the state's most successful political leaders was Theodore Bilbo (1877-1947), who ran for office on a platform of white supremacy. He served twice as governor before being sent to the U.S. Senate in 1934, where he remained until his death.

By 1960 blacks no longer made up the majority of adults of voting age, but a movement to register blacks for voting met with uniform resistance. In 1962 a federal court ordered the University of Mississippi to enroll James Meredith as its first black student. Defiance of the order was led by Governor Ross Barnett, and serious rioting broke out at the university. Federal troops were needed to help Meredith enter the university. Other racial violence included the murder in 1963 of civil rights leader Medgar Evers, and in 1964 of three civil rights workers.

In the mid-1960's, the participation of blacks in politics increased. In 1969 Charles Evers, Medgar's brother, was elected mayor of Fayette—the first black mayor of a biracial Mississippi town since Reconstruction. Also in the late 1960's, white opposition to public school integration led to racial disturbances. By the early 1970's, court-ordered desegregation of public schools at all levels was under way.

In 1969, the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians opened a construction company to build homes for tribe members. This greatly increased the wealth of the group and made this band one of the top employers in the state.

In the late 1980's, legislation was enacted to reform county government and increase funds for education. Voters elected the first Republican governor since Reconstruction, Kirk Fordice, in 1991.

In the early 2000s, the design of the state flag, adopted in 1894, became a topic of controversy because a corner displayed the Civil War emblem of the Confederate States; African-Americans and others objected because of the symbolism associated with slavery. A governor-appointed commission proposed a new design, but in 2001 voters rejected the new design in favor of the 1894 version.

Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf coast in 2005 and caused severe damage. Especially hard hit was the area around Biloxi and Gulfport.