Mississippi entered the United States as the 20th state, carved from territory ceded by Native American nations including the Choctaw and Chickasaw. Its plantation economy, built on cotton and enslaved labor, expanded rapidly in subsequent decades, making it one of the wealthiest states per capita among white planters before the Civil War. Mississippi would later become a flashpoint in the Civil War and, a century afterward, the civil rights movement.
Statehood came to Mississippi through displacement. The fertile land granted to the new state had belonged for generations to the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations, who were pressured through treaties and later forced removal to cede millions of acres to American settlers eager to grow cotton in the rich delta soil.
The cotton boom that followed transformed Mississippi into one of the wealthiest states in the antebellum South, wealth built entirely on the forced labor of enslaved Black Americans, who by 1860 made up the majority of the state's population. This dependence on slavery made Mississippi among the first states to secede from the Union in January 1861.
A century later, Mississippi became a central battleground of the civil rights movement, the site of Emmett Till's murder, the assassination of Medgar Evers, and Freedom Summer's voter registration drives, a legacy that traces directly back to the plantation economy established in the decades following statehood.