1882 Quote by Ta-Nehisi Coates

I did not believe what I was told about being poor and black and female in Mississippi in 1954.

— Oprah Winfrey

“Mississippi used to be able to do whatever it wanted to do, until the United States found out about it. And now that Mississippi…

— John Pritchard

Coming from the '50s, things were very violent. We were still being lynched. If I drove down through the South with my mother, I…

— Pam Grier

“Things have come a long way in Mississippi. That’s the usual shorthand. Perhaps nowhere else in America has made more progress in its race…

— Richard Grant

The Mississippi of 1920 was an exceptionally dangerous place for Black people. But my grandfather deeply believed in helping create opportunities to African-Americans to…

— Mike Espy

“Atrocities, including the lynching of more than five hundred Mississippi Negroes—more than any other state—were ennobled as righteous. Lynching went unpunished, murder was “self-defense,”…

— Bruce Watson

“It is as if we have reentered the past and are living in a second Nadir: It seems the rate of police killings now…

— Jesmyn Ward

“When a congressional committee reported in February on the Mississippi bloodshed, it concluded that the nation had arrived at a crossroads and “must either…

— Ron Chernow

“In the South it was feared that immigrants did not have the correct racial attitudes: five Italians were lynched, in Tallulah, Louisiana, for associating…

— Hugh Brogan

“They all followed Mississippi’s example, instituting race-veiled voting restrictions, from literacy tests to poll taxes, that would purge their voting rolls of the remaining…

— Ibram X. Kendi

You can tell this by the program the federal government had to train 2,400 tractor drivers. They would have trained Negro and white together,…

— Fannie Lou Hamer

It was very clear to me in 1965, in Mississippi, that, as a lawyer, I could get people into schools, desegregate the schools, but…

— Marian Wright Edelman