MSMississippi Famous People

Kosciusko, population 7,000, sent out two people who changed the country

James Meredith was born in Kosciusko in 1933. In September 1962 he became the first Black student to enrol at the University of Mississippi, and it took federal marshals, a night of rioting that left two dead, and roughly 30,000 troops to put him in a classroom. He graduated in 1963. Oprah Winfrey was born in the same small town in central Mississippi on 29 January 1954 and spent her first years on her grandmother's farm without running water.

Medgar Evers was born in Decatur in 1925, served in the Normandy campaign, was refused admission to the Ole Miss law school, and became the state's first NAACP field secretary. He was shot in his own driveway in Jackson on 12 June 1963. His killer was tried twice to hung juries in 1964 and convicted in 1994. Fannie Lou Hamer, born in Montgomery County in 1917 as the twentieth child of sharecroppers, was picking cotton at six and had no idea Black citizens could register to vote until she was 44. She testified before the credentials committee at the 1964 Democratic convention in Atlantic City, and the networks cut away because the president called an impromptu press conference to stop them broadcasting her.

The blues was assembled within an hour's drive of Clarksdale

Charley Patton worked the Dockery Farms plantation near Cleveland from around 1900 and taught or influenced most of the men who followed. Robert Johnson was born in Hazlehurst in 1911, recorded 29 songs in two sessions in Texas hotel rooms, and died near Greenwood in 1938 at 27, leaving a crossroads legend that has outlived every fact about him. Muddy Waters grew up on Stovall Plantation outside Clarksdale, where Alan Lomax recorded him for the Library of Congress in 1941. He left for Chicago in 1943 and plugged in.

Riley B. King was born near Berclair in 1925, drove a tractor in Indianola, and became B. B. King, playing over 300 nights a year into his seventies. Chester Burnett, born at White Station in 1910, became Howlin' Wolf. Bo Diddley was born in McComb in 1928. Ike Turner was born in Clarksdale in 1931 and his band cut "Rocket 88" in 1951, often called the first rock and roll record. Sam Cooke was also born in Clarksdale, in 1931, and left as an infant for Chicago.

Tupelo, Meridian and the rest of the American songbook

Elvis Presley was born on 8 January 1935 in a two room shotgun house in East Tupelo that his father Vernon had built for about 180 dollars in borrowed money. His twin brother was stillborn. The family lost the house when Elvis was three and moved to Memphis in 1948. Jimmie Rodgers was born in Meridian in 1897, worked the railroads until tuberculosis stopped him, and recorded the sides that got him named the first inductee into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1961.

Mississippi also produced Leontyne Price, born in Laurel in 1927, who sang 42 minutes of applause out of a Met audience after "Il Trovatore" in 1961, and Tammy Wynette, born near Tremont in 1942, who was working as a hairdresser at 23. Faith Hill was born in Jackson in 1967 and raised in Star.

Faulkner's invented county, Welty's real house

William Faulkner was born in New Albany in 1897, bought a rundown house in Oxford he named Rowan Oak, and set most of his novels in Yoknapatawpha County, a fictional version of the county he lived in, complete with a hand-drawn map he labelled sole owner and proprietor. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949. Eudora Welty was born in Jackson in 1909 and lived in the same Pinehurst Street house for over seventy years, taking photographs for the Works Progress Administration before the fiction that won her the Pulitzer in 1973.

Tennessee Williams was born in Columbus in 1911, in the rectory where his grandfather was the Episcopal priest, and picked up the state nickname at university long after leaving. Richard Wright was born on a plantation near Roxie in 1908 and turned the experience into "Black Boy." Shelby Foote was born in Greenville in 1916 and spent twenty years on his Civil War narrative. John Grisham was born in Arkansas but raised in Southaven, where he served in the state legislature while writing his first novel before dawn.

No US president, but one Confederate one

No president of the United States has been born in Mississippi. The state's presidential figure is Jefferson Davis, and he was born in Fairview, Kentucky, in June 1808, about eight months before Abraham Lincoln was born a hundred or so miles away in the same state. Davis was raised on his brother's plantation in Wilkinson County, represented Mississippi in both houses of Congress, served as secretary of war, and led the Confederacy from 1861 to 1865. His last home, Beauvoir, still stands on the beach at Biloxi.

The state also seated the first two Black members of the US Senate. Hiram Revels took the seat in February 1870, filling the term Davis had vacated, and Blanche Bruce served a full term from 1875 to 1881. No Black senator would be elected anywhere in the country for the next 85 years.

Kermit came from a creek in Leland

Jim Henson was born in Greenville in 1936 and spent his childhood in Leland on the banks of Deer Creek, where he later said he first paid attention to frogs. Morgan Freeman was born in Memphis but raised in Charleston, Mississippi, and moved back to the Delta as an adult. Walter Payton was born in Columbia in 1953 and went to Jackson State because the major programmes were not recruiting him. Jerry Rice was born in Starkville in 1962, the son of a bricklayer, and played at Mississippi Valley State. Brett Favre grew up in Kiln and Archie Manning in Drew, though Archie's sons were born in New Orleans. Cool Papa Bell, born in Starkville in 1903, was reputedly the fastest man in the Negro leagues.

Mississippi and its neighbours