Promise and Peril, 1903–1927
In August 1939, seventy-seven-year-old Susie V. Powell reminisced about rural life in the early 1900s. In 1910 Mississippi was overwhelmingly rural, she noted, with the majority of Mississippians living on the land or in small towns dependent upon agriculture. She explained that the care of the farm family, plus maintaining the house and garden, was generally the domain of the homemaker, who completed chores in a difficult work environment: few farms had running water, much less electricity, to ease the endless drudgery of housework.
The Great Flood of 1927 unleashed a spring season of catastrophic events along the banks of the Mississippi River. A weather system that stalled over the Midwestern states in the fall of 1926 brought untold amounts of water to the Upper Mississippi River region. The region’s burgeoning tributaries caused the Mississippi River to overflow in eleven states from Illinois to Louisiana.
For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, Mississippi was an overwhelmingly agricultural state. While farming provided a route to economic success for many White Mississippians, a number of White people could always be found at the bottom of the agricultural ladder, working as tenant farmers or sharecroppers, a status more typically associated with Black Mississippians in the century after the American Civil War.
- Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
- The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article
- This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.
—full text, the Equal Rights Amendment
Between 1890 and 1927 the Grand Opera House in Meridian, Mississippi, provided east Mississippi and west Alabama with varied entertainment, ranging from operas in a variety of languages to theatrical entertainment and minstrel shows. This long-closed opera house, with its High Victorian architectural style, re-opened in September 2006.
When the Democratic Party nominated Harry S. Truman and adopted a strong civil rights platform in 1948, Southern Democrats organized the States’ Rights Democratic Party. Better known as “Dixiecrats,” the Southern Democrats nominated Governor Fielding L. Wright of Mississippi for vice-president and Governor J. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina for president. Thurmond and Wright carried only four southern states and failed in their effort to throw the presidential election into the U. S. House of Representatives.
Before his election to the state's highest office in 1943, Thomas L. Bailey served twenty-four years in the Mississippi House of Representatives. For twelve years, he was Speaker of the House. Bailey was a member of a small but powerful group of lawmakers known as The Big Four, which included Walter Sillers, Joseph George, and Laurence Kennedy. The members of The Big Four held key committee chairmanships in the state House of Representatives and virtually controlled the flow of legislation during the two to three decades they were in power.
During the depths of the worst depression in American history, Martin S. Conner was inaugurated governor of Mississippi on January 19, 1932. “We assume our duties,” he said, “when men are shaken with doubt and with fear, and many are wondering if our very civilization is about to crumble.”
Governor Conner inherited a bankrupt treasury and a $13 million deficit. At age forty-one, Martin Conner was one of the state’s youngest governors, but few had entered the office better trained or with more experience in public service.
Dennis Murphree was governor of Mississippi on two separate occasions but was never elected to the office. In 1927 while serving as lieutenant governor, he became governor following the death of Henry Whitfield, and in 1943, he again succeeded to the office upon the death of Paul B. Johnson, Sr.
Although Henry Lewis Whitfield served in the state’s highest office, he is perhaps best known for his career in public education and his many contributions to the development of Mississippi’s public school system. While still a student at Mississippi College, Whitfield began his teaching career at age sixteen. Because of his limited financial resources, Whitfield never had the opportunity to attend school two years in succession and it took him ten years to earn his bachelor’s degree.
