MISSISSIPPI
State Profile
The following data and information about this state is taken from the 2006 Almanac of American Politics. The 2006 Almanac can be ordered online, or by phone at 1-800-356-4838.

State At A Glance  •  Key Elected Officials  •  Political History & Analysis

“Today Mississippi still ranks 50th on many scales, but the gulf between Mississippi and the rest of America has narrowed enormously.”

At A Glance

• Size: 48,430 square miles
• Population in 2000: 2,844,658; 48.8% urban; 51.2% rural
• Population in 1990: 2,573,216
• Population Change: Up 10.5% 1990-2000; Up 2.1% 1980-1990
• Population Rank: 31st of 50; 1.0% of total U.S. population
• Most Populous Cities: Jackson (179,599); Gulfport (71,810); Biloxi (48,972); Hattiesburg (46,664); Meridian (39,559)
• Registered Voters: No party registration
• State Senate: 28 D 24 R
• State House: 73 D 46 R
• State Legislative Term Limits: No

Key Elected Officials

• Gov. Haley Barbour (R)
• Sen. Thad Cochran (R)
• Sen. Trent Lott (R)
• Representatives: (2 D, 2 R):

Roger Wicker   (R-01) Bennie Thompson   (D-02)

Chip Pickering   (R-03)

Gene Taylor   (D-04)

About Mississippi

Mississippi bears the weight of a tragic history as it takes quickening steps toward the future. 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 industrial farmers 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, the giant factories, the rushes of immigration, the rise of suburbs that were the indispensable backdrop of most of 20th century American life. Mississippi never developed great cities--its two commercial metropolises are just outside its borders, Memphis and New Orleans. But if it did not excel at commerce, it did produce great art. Mississippi gave us the music of the blues and Elvis Presley. It gave the world William Faulkner and Eudora Welty, Walker Percy and Shelby Foote. Their work was informed by a sense of the tragic missing or forgotten in most of America, where life is a triumphant sales pitch or a labor-saving invention.

Mississippi has made much progress in the last three decades, but the past still hangs heavy. 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 young 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 indoor plumbing and poor white crossroads clustered with askew advertising signs. This is a state, writes David Sansing, with ''two souls, two hearts, two minds. We have the highest rate of illiteracy and the largest number of Pulitzer Prize winners in literature. We at one time have the scent of magnolias and the smell of burning crosses.'' Mississippi for years ranked 50th, often a very low 50th, among states in income, literacy, health and education levels, despite the best efforts of civic, political and business leaders. As Faulkner said of his state, "You don't love because: you love despite."

Today Mississippi still ranks 50th on many scales, but the gulf between Mississippi 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 enforced often 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 race relations. Per capita income in Mississippi was 36% of the national average in 1940; in 1990 it was 67% and in 2003 it was 74%, well below average but, given the lower cost of living here, a level recognizably American. In the 1990s incomes increased smartly and poverty declined. Most Mississippians of 50 years ago would be astonished by the physical comforts and mechanical marvels their grandchildren take for granted today: Nearly every classroom in the state is air-conditioned and is being wired to the Internet. They would be astonished as well by relations between blacks and whites. As The Washington Post's William Raspberry, a Mississippi native, wrote, "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; in 2005, the state had more black elected officials than any other, and 11 of 52 state senators and 36 of 122 state representatives were black. The Mississippi traditions of friendliness and courtesy seem to be trumping the historical tradition of racism: Mississippi may rank 50th in incomes, but it ranks number one in per capita charitable giving. Not everyone agrees that the state has moved forward: in 2003, after failing to defeat incumbent Republican Lieutenant Governor Amy Tuck, who is white, Democratic challenger Barbara Blackmon, an African-American state senator, said, "if my skin pigmentation were different, I would be the lieutenant governor of this state."

One way Mississippi has improved is in education. Governor William Winter, elected in 1979, finally made kindergarten mandatory and raised the dropout age to 14; Governor Ray Mabus, elected in 1987, also made major changes. But the uncomfortable fact is that most high taxpayers are white and most public school children are black, because many white children attend private academies. About 40% of state spending goes to education, but those who oppose higher spending or taxes can point to the fact that there is no demonstrated correlation between higher spending and improved test scores and learning. But test scores are rising and dropout rates are falling. Another way Mississippi has improved is by encouraging small businesses and service industry. The number of manufacturing jobs here has dropped since 1990, but the number of service jobs increased even more, and the new jobs tended to pay higher wages.

One big driver of growth has been gambling. Mississippi approved riverboat gambling in 1989, and Mississippi now has 29 casinos, 12 on the Gulf Coast and 9 in once-impoverished Tunica County, just south of Memphis, and the rest scattered along the Mississippi River with one inland. Mississippi is number three in gambling revenues, behind Nevada and New Jersey; gambling has produced 40,000 service jobs, at above-average wages. But this is not an unalloyed good. The original riverboats Mark Twain described in Life on the Mississippi were working vehicles, sooty and dangerous, taking chances on the treacherous river, but their captains showed how hard work could get people ahead. Mississippi's riverboat casinos are a form of entertainment, a diversion from gainful economic activity, which teaches the lesson that getting ahead depends on luck rather than talent and hard work.

But Mississippi has other sources of growth. It is home to the nation's second largest furniture industry, around Tupelo, and there has been rapid growth on the highway corridor from Tupelo northwest through Ole Miss's Oxford to the fast-growing suburbs of DeSoto County just south of Memphis. Growth has also been rapid around the $1.4 billion Nissan auto plant opened in May 2003 in Canton, just north of Jackson, attracted by $363 million in state aid and incentives, with 5,000 jobs and thousands more from nearby suppliers. I-55 heading north from Jackson in Madison County and Lakeland Drive heading east into Rankin County have become boom areas. And the Gulf Coast is prospering not only because of casinos but also because of the giant Northrop Grumman shipyard in Senator Trent Lott's hometown of Pascagoula.

Mississippi also seems to be casting aside the get-rich-quick mindset that was apparent so long in its courtrooms. By 2002 the state had become a trial lawyer's paradise, with seven product liability judgments of $100 million or more in six years; medical malpractice lawsuits raised insurance premiums so much that 73 doctors left the state, an obstetric clinic in the Delta closed down temporarily and there was only one neurosurgeon left on the Gulf Coast. Hundreds of cases were brought in tiny, impoverished Jefferson County where juries awarded huge judgments; there were more plaintiffs in court than the county had people. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce ran full-page ads in Mississippi newspapers calling for change, and Democratic Governor Ronnie Musgrove, though supported by trial lawyers, called a special session of the legislature in September 2002 which placed some limits on medical malpractice and product liability cases and on forum-shopping. In November 2002, a pro-plaintiff Supreme Court justice was ousted by the voters. In 2003 Republican Haley Barbour made tort law a major issue in his campaign against Musgrove and won 53%-46%. Barbour called a special session in May 2004 and in June signed a bill capping pain and suffering damages generally to $1 million and to $500,000 in medical malpractice cases, further limiting forum-shopping and protecting "innocent sellers" of faulty products. "I want to tell job creators across America that our scales of justice are now in balance," Barbour said. "It is time for them to come and take another look at Mississippi as a place to locate."

Politically, Mississippi is a conservative state, carried by Republicans in the last seven presidential elections. Republicans have held both U.S. Senate seats since John Stennis retired in 1988 and have generally done well in House elections. But Mississippi Democrats with good old boy personas can be competitive. Democrat Gene Taylor was elected to the heavily Republican Gulf Coast House seat in 1989 and has won by wide margins ever since. But conservative change came in 2003. Lieutenant Governor Amy Tuck, who presides over the Senate, switched to the Republican party in December 2002. Tim Ford, Speaker of the House for 16 years, retired. And Barbour, RNC chairman from 1993 to 1997 and a successful Washington lobbyist, returned home to Yazoo City and won a convincing victory for governor. There has been change too in Mississippi's attitude toward its past. In an April 2001 referendum voters chose by a 65%-35% margin to retain the Confederate battle cross in the state flag and rejected a new design produced by a commission headed by former Governor William Winter. But there was a different response when Winter sounded a call for justice in June 2004 in Neshoba County, where three civil rights workers were murdered in the summer of 1964. Haley Barbour attended and all agreed that an oral history of race relations in Neshoba County should be compiled and that justice still had to be done on the 1964 murders; in June 2005, one of the killers was convicted of manslaughter.