Mississippi

Burdened with a tragic history, Mississippi has famously lagged behind the other states in just about every leading indicator. Yet there are signs the state is coming into its own in the post-civil-rights-movement era. This green land was settled in a rush in Jacksonian America, mostly by small farmers heading west from Georgia and south from Tennessee, and also by a few big planters who made and sometimes lost vast fortunes, built grand mansions, and sent their sons to fight in the Civil War. For a century afterward, as planters and engineers drained the Delta lands, Mississippi, with its racial segregation, subsistence farmers and sharecroppers, and low wages, lived apart from most of America. Faulkner’s Mississippi never knew the Homestead Act, giant factories, the rushes of immigration, or the rise of the suburbs that characterized most of 20th-century America. Mississippi didn’t develop great cities: Its two commercial metropolises—Memphis, Tenn., and New Orleans—lay just outside its borders.. But if the state did not excel at commerce, it did produce great art. Mississippi gave us the blues and Elvis Presley. It gave the world writers William Faulkner and Eudora Welty, Walker Percy and Shelby Foote. The state with the lowest literacy rate has also produced the most Pulitzer Prize winners for literature. Their work was informed by a sense of the tragic that is missing or forgotten in most of America, where life is a triumphant sales pitch or a labor-saving invention. For years, no other state had such a painful contrast between image and reality, between an ideal sincerely strived for and the tawdry facts of everyday life. Magnolia trees on the lawns of antebellum mansions, golden-haired women in white dresses on the veranda, faithful black servants and retainers. This was once the ideal. And behind it stood loose-jointed frame houses and unpainted back-country stores, cabins without plumbing and poor white crossroads clustered with advertising signs hanging askew. As David Sansing wrote, “We at one time have the scent of magnolias and the smell of burning crosses.”

Today, Mississippi still ranks 49th or 50th on many quality-of-life scales, but the gulf between the state and the rest of America has narrowed enormously. In 1940, Mississippi had an economy based on low-wage, subsistence or sharecropper agriculture and a system of racial segregation often enforced by violence. If history is, as Sir Henry Maine wrote, the story of the progress from status to contract, then old Mississippi was still at the beginning, for status—race—meant just about everything. In the years since, Mississippi has moved, not always willingly, from status to contract in its economy and in its race relations. Per capita income in Mississippi was 36% of the national average in 1940; in 1990 it was 67% and in 2008 it was 74%, still well below average but, given the lower cost of living here, a level recognizably American. Unlike New Orleans in neighboring Louisiana, the state quickly got up off the ground to start rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005. Mississippians of 50 years ago would be astonished by the physical comforts and mechanical marvels their grandchildren take for granted: Nearly every classroom in the state is air-conditioned and is being wired for the Internet.

The elder generation would be astonished as well by relations between whites and blacks, who make up 37% of the population, the highest of any state. As Mississippi native and columnist William Raspberry wrote in The Washington Post, “There is an easiness to relationships, a mutual respect and a willingness to move beyond race that, quite frankly, didn’t exist during my years in the state. Mississippi is finally a good place to be.” Forty years ago, blacks held no public offices in Mississippi. Now the state has more black elected officials than any other, with 27 black chairmen of state House committees. An African-American state senator from Tishomingo County in the far northeast part of the state was elected from a rural district that is 87% white. Voters have elected black mayors in Vicksburg, Jackson, Hattiesburg, Greenville, and Natchez. That’s not to say the race issue has disappeared. It is still uncomfortably present in Mississippi elections. And as recently as 2001, 65% of voters chose to retain the Confederate battle cross—a symbol offensive to many African-Americans—in the state flag.. Yet Mississippi seems intent on moving forward rather than backward. Prosecutors have hunted down the Ku Klux Klan members who killed civil-rights activists in the 1960s. One was convicted in 2005 and another charged in 2007. Republican Gov. Haley Barbour signed bills authorizing a civil-rights curriculum in public schools and a civil-rights museum in Jackson. The Jackson airport is named for movement leader Medgar Evers. Ole Miss, which was integrated under force of arms in 1962, hosted Barack Obama, an African-American Democrat, and John McCain, a Republican who has Mississippi ancestors, for a presidential debate in September 2008.

Mississippi’s economy once depended on cotton, but no longer. Manufacturing jobs have declined here, as elsewhere, in recent years, but northeast Mississippi around Tupelo remains the center of the nation’s upholstered furniture industry and is the site of a $1.3 billion plant where workers will start assembling Priuses in 2010 (after the state offered Toyota $296 million in incentives). Growth has also been rapid around the $1.4 billion Nissan auto plant that opened in 2003 in Canton, just north of Jackson, attracted by $363 million in state aid and incentives. The factory, which builds 278,000 vehicles a year, provides 4,000 jobs and nearby suppliers employ thousands more. Highland Colony Parkway, heading north from Jackson in Madison County, and Lakeland Drive, heading east into Rankin County, anchor boom areas. Even more rapid growth has come in the DeSoto County suburbs of Memphis, just a few miles south of Elvis Presley’s estate, Graceland. Population growth has been concentrated in these areas and also in inland counties as people after Hurricane Katrina drove them from the coast. Other sources of growth: Northrop Grumman’s huge shipyard in former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott’s hometown of Pascagoula; the Richton salt dome, which is being developed for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve at a cost of $1 billion; General Electric’s engine plant in Batesville; and a $175 million steel plant in Amory. Then there is gambling. Mississippi approved gambling in 1990, and in 1992, riverboat and dockside casinos started to open. Big gambling companies built some 29 casinos, nine in once-impoverished Tunica County, just south of Memphis, 12 on the Gulf Coast, and the rest scattered along the Mississippi River, all technically on boats and barges but tied to land. Mississippi is now No. 3 among states in gambling revenue, behind Nevada and New Jersey. The industry has produced thousands of service jobs at above-average wages, and some $500 million in state revenues a year.

To be sure, Katrina was a huge setback for Mississippi. The main force of the August 29, 2005, hurricane was directed at the state’s Hancock County, not New Orleans; the Mississippi towns of Waveland, Bay St. Louis, and Pass Christian were totally wiped out. In a few hours, waves up to 55 feet high destroyed one-quarter of the structures in Biloxi and Gulfport. The homes of Democratic U.S. Rep. Gene Taylor in Bay St. Louis, and Lott in Pascagoula, the latter more than a century old, were swept away, as were many houses a quarter-mile from the Gulf. Floodwaters swept 10 miles inland. Some casinos were destroyed and others severely damaged. Federal emergency plans rest on the assumption that local officials and first responders will cope for the first three days, but Katrina left city halls without power and roads to hospitals blocked by fallen trees. In Mississippi, first responders went to work in spite of those obstacles, pulling 24-hour shifts. Barbour quickly took charge. Biloxi Mayor A.J. Holloway later described his city’s response. “Our people have been good, too. You know, they shed some tears, work a little bit, cry again, and go back to work. We’re not sitting on our behinds and waiting for someone to give us a hand.”

Lawsuits brought against State Farm for denying hurricane-related claims were eventually settled in August 2008, when the insurer paid out $74 million. The Mississippi congressional delegation secured generous federal money to help with the recovery; it did not hurt that Republican Sen. Thad Cochran was chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Barbour administered grants and low-interest loans to home and business owners who suffered uninsured losses, even as the Federal Emergency Management Agency shelled out $1.8 billion for National Flood Insurance Program claims. Barbour was criticized for his decision to spend $600 million in federal housing funds to restore and expand the port of Gulfport, which resulted in Chiquita entering into a long-term lease for its port facilities. A lawsuit was filed to halt the project in December 2008. With the closed casinos costing the state $500,000 a day in tax revenue, the state House and Senate changed the gambling law to allow casinos to be built on land within 800 feet of the shore. By 2007, the casinos were back in business, but the following year, gambling revenue fell 3% on the Gulf Coast and 8% on the riverboats. It turns out that gambling in Mississippi, as in Nevada, is not recession-proof. In March 2009 the governor signed a bill for a 30% sales tax rebate for casino developers who developed golf courses, hotels, convention facilities, and other non-gambling activities. Gambling was not the only part of Mississippi’s economy hurt by the recession. Factories closed and in February 2009, unemployment reached 9%.

Politically, Mississippi is increasingly a Republican state, carried by Republicans in the last seven presidential elections. But Democrats have shown some signs of life. Republicans have held both U.S. Senate seats since the retirement of Democrat John Stennis in 1988. But after Barbour appointed U.S. Rep. Roger Wicker, a Republican, to fill Lott’s seat, Democrat Travis Childers won the May 2008 special election to fill Wicker’s 1st District House seat. That left Mississippi with a 3-1 Democratic House delegation, with Bennie Thompson safe in the black-majority 2nd District and conservative Democrat Gene Taylor holding on to the heavily Republican Gulf Coast district he first won in 1989. When Wicker ran for the remainder of Lott’s term in November 2008, he was held to 55%-45% by former Democratic governor Ronnie Musgrove.

At the state level, the pattern is mixed. In 2003, Musgrove lost his re-election bid to Barbour, who returned to Yazoo City from a Washington lobbying practice and a stint as Republican National Chairman. Barbour’s surefooted response to Katrina, in contrast with that of Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, a Democrat, boosted his poll ratings. Going into the 2007 election, Barbour took credit for converting a $700 million deficit to a $70 million surplus and for boosting test scores in Mississippi public schools. He beat Democrat John Arthur Eaves by a solid 58%-42%. Republicans Phil Bryant and Delbert Hosemann were elected lieutenant governor and secretary of state, respectively, by similar margins. Over Barbour’s years in office, Republicans narrowed the Democratic edge in the state Senate to 27-25, but Democrats maintained a solid 74-48 edge in the state House.