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In the 21st century, about one-third of Mississippi's African American population resides in the Delta, which has many black-majority state legislative districts. Much of the Delta is included in Mississippi's 2nd congressional district , represented by Democrat Bennie Thompson .
The Mississippi Delta region has had the most segregated schools-- and for the longest time—of any part of the United States. As recently as the 2016–2017 school year, East Side High School in Cleveland, Mississippi , was practically all black: 359 of 360 students were African-American.
Amzie Moore (September 23, 1911 – February 1, 1982) was an African-American civil rights leader and entrepreneur in the Mississippi Delta. He helped pead voter registration efforts. His former home is a Mississippi Landmark. A historical marker commemorates its history. It is now a museum and interpretive center.
The late 1800s and early 1900s in the Mississippi Delta showed both frontier influence and actions directed at repressing African Americans. After the Civil War, 90% of the Delta was still undeveloped. Both whites and African Americans migrated there for a chance to buy land in the backcountry.
In 1910, African Americans constituted the majority of the population of South Carolina and Mississippi, and more than 40% in Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas; by 1970, only in Mississippi did the African-American population constitute more than 30% of the state's total.
Because the Mississippi Delta contained so much fertile bottomland away from the river settlements, African Americans achieved unusually high rates of land ownership from 1870 to 1900. Two-thirds of the independent farmers in the Delta were black.
Emmett Louis Till (July 25, 1941 – August 28, 1955) was an African American teenager who was abducted, tortured, and lynched in Mississippi in 1955 after being accused of offending a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, in her family's grocery store.
Freedom Summer, also known as the Freedom Summer Project or the Mississippi Summer Project, was a volunteer campaign in the United States launched in June 1964 to attempt to register as many African-American voters as possible in Mississippi. Blacks had been restricted from voting since the turn of the century due to barriers to voter ...
In Mississippi, many of the segregation academies were first established in the black-majority Mississippi Delta region in northwestern Mississippi. The Delta has historically had a very large majority-black population, related to the history of the use of slave labor on cotton plantations .
The Mississippi Freedom Project ( MFP) is an archive of oral histories collected by the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida. The ongoing project contains 100+ interviews online and focuses on interviews with civil rights veterans and notable residents of the Mississippi Delta. The collection centers on activism and ...