Forging Ahead, 1946–Present

World War II was truly a world war. All of the major countries and a large number of small nations were drawn into the fight. Even countries that tried to remain neutral found themselves in the conflict either by conquest or by being in the path of the campaigns of the major powers. For example, in 1940, more than a year before the United States entered the war, the major powers — Britain, Italy, and Germany — fought important battles in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya in North Africa.

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.

By 1932 the Great Depression had the country in its relentless grip and most Americans believed that something was very wrong.

Farm-raised catfish is the largest aquaculture industry in the United States. In 2005, the U.S. catfish industry produced 600 million pounds of catfish from 165,000 pond water acres. The farm-raised catfish industry at $450 million in annual production value has the highest economic value of any aquaculture industry in the United States. The next highest valued aquaculture industry in the country is trout, valued at $74 million in annual production.

Haley Barbour was elected governor on November 4, 2003, in the largest voter turnout in Mississippi history, up to that time. He made history again in 2007 when he became only the second governor since Reconstruction to be re-elected to a second consecutive term – a 1987 state constitutional amendment allowed a governor to serve two consecutive terms. The first was Kirk Fordice, who was elected in 1991 and in 1995.

Following eight years in the Mississippi Senate, from 1988 to 1996, and a four-year term as lieutenant governor, Ronnie Musgrove was elected governor under circumstances unique in Mississippi history. Because neither Musgrove nor any other gubernatorial candidate received a majority of the votes cast in the November 1999 general election, the Mississippi Legislature was required by the state’s 1890 Constitution to elect the governor. In a special vote on January 4, 2000, the Mississippi Legislature elected Musgrove as the state’s sixty-second governor.

In his first campaign for any public office in 1991, Kirk Fordice was elected Mississippi’s first Republican governor in 118 years. In his successful campaign for re-election in 1995, he became the first Mississippi governor to succeed himself in more than a century.

Although Ray Mabus was the youngest governor in America at the time of his inauguration on January 12, 1988, he had accumulated an impressive record of public service and academic achievements.

While serving as attorney general of the state of Mississippi in the early 1980s, Bill Allain filed a suit asking the Mississippi Supreme Court to separate the functions of the executive and legislative branches of state government, especially in the budgetary process. Prior to that suit, members of the Mississippi Legislature served on boards, commissions, and agencies in the executive branch. Attorney General Allain asserted that Mississippi’s 1890 Constitution required a separation of powers and that legislative officials could not serve in the executive branch.

For all of William Winter’s many contributions to the state of Mississippi, he will best be remembered for the Education Reform Act of 1982. After the legislature failed to enact his educational reforms during the regular session in 1982, Governor Winter called a special session. Under the authority given him by the state’s 1890 Constitution, Governor Winter restricted the legislation that could be introduced in that special session to education bills.