A Mississippi Family

Growing up, Molly Walling could not fathom the source of the dark and intense discomfort in her family home. Then in 2006 she discovered her father’s complicity in the murder of two black men on December 12, 1946, in Anguilla, deep in the Mississippi Delta. Death in the Delta tells the story of one woman’s search for the truth behind a closely held, sixty-year old family secret. Though the author’s mother and father decided that they would protect their three children from that past, its effect was profound. When the story of a fatal shoot-out surfaced, apprehension turned into a devouring need to know. Each of Walling’s trips from North Carolina to the Delta brought unsettling and unexpected clues. After a hearing before an all-white grand jury, her father’s case was not prosecuted. Indeed, it appeared as if the incident never occurred, and he resumed his life as a small-town newspaper editor. Yet family members of one of the victims tell her their stories. A ninety-three-year-old black historian and witness gives context and advice. A county attorney suggests her family’s history of commingling with black women was at the heart of the deadly confrontation. Firsthand the author recognizes how privilege, entitlement, and racial bias in a wealthy, landed southern family resulted in a deadly abuse of power followed by a stifling, decades-long cover up. Death in the Delta is a deeply personal account of a quest to confront a terrible legacy. Against the advice and warnings of family, Walling exposes her father’s guilty agency in the deaths of Simon Toombs and David Jones. She also exposes his gift as a writer and creative thinker. The author, grappling with wrenching issues of family and honor, was long conflicted about making this story public. But her mission became one of hope that confronting the truth might somehow move others toward healing and reconciliation.

From a plantation ledger, an abandoned graveyard, a fragile manuscript, and old newspapers, author Mary Helen Griffin Halloran has raised the bones of her ancestors and made them come alive in this memoir that traces the history of five generations of her Mississippi family. In A Mississippi Family, Halloran has painted a backdrop to the life the family lived. The story begins with the life and times of three men: Jonas Griffin (17621815), his son Francis Griffin (1800-1865), and his son Judge John Bettis Griffin (18261903). It ends with portraits of two remarkable women, Judge Johns daughters, Mary Lane Griffin (18581942) and Helen Knight Griffin (18641949). The stories of these five people, whose fates and values shaped the lives of their children, capture the early history of the Mississippi Delta, Warren and Washington Counties, and the town of Greenville. Telling tales of river journeys and life on southern plantations, Hallorans meticulous research has provided a record of her fascinating family saga at a crucial period in the history of the county, state, and nation.

The family roots of thousands of Americans begin with those French men and women who came, willingly or not, to settle La Nouvelle France and La Louisiane. While A Mississippi First Family: The Sauciers from 1603 to 1865 is about a particular family, in a larger sense it is about all those who have left a known world behind to make a life for themselves in an unknown world. Though the lives of ordinary people go unrecorded, this lack does not discount their importance. Great men may dream dreams, but ordinary men are needed to carry them out. The story of the Sauciers begins with Charles Saucier, organist to Louis XIV, King of France. His son, Louis Charles, sailed to the wilds of Canada in 1665 where he sired the Canadian branch of the family. Jean Baptiste Saucier, Louis Charles' younger son, one of sixty Canadians under the leadership of Pierre le Moyne, Sieur d'Iberville, founder of La Louisiane, arrived on the Mississippi Gulf Coast in 1699 to help establish the French there ahead of the hated British. Eventually, he married Gabrielle Savary, one of the Pelican Girls, sent by King Louis to wed the Canadians. Together they became pillars of Colonial Mobile and started a branch of the family whose descendants would settle along the Mississippi Gulf Coast and in Alabama, Louisiana, Illinois and Missouri. Their southern beginning in Old Mobile, called the first American city because its boundaries were not enclosed by a wall, a change that marks the beginning of the modern in this country, ranks this site, some have said, as being one of the most important in the region and in our nation.

Recipient of the 2018 Special Achievement Award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters and Recipient of a 2018 Heritage Award for Education from the Mississippi Heritage Trust The perfect book for every Mississippian who cares about the state, this is a mammoth collaboration in which thirty subject editors suggested topics, over seven hundred scholars wrote entries, and countless individuals made suggestions. The volume will appeal to anyone who wants to know more about Mississippi and the people who call it home. The book will be especially helpful to students, teachers, and scholars researching, writing about, or otherwise discovering the state, past and present. The volume contains entries on every county, every governor, and numerous musicians, writers, artists, and activists. Each entry provides an authoritative but accessible introduction to the topic discussed. The Mississippi Encyclopedia also features long essays on agriculture, archaeology, the civil rights movement, the Civil War, drama, education, the environment, ethnicity, fiction, folklife, foodways, geography, industry and industrial workers, law, medicine, music, myths and representations, Native Americans, nonfiction, poetry, politics and government, the press, religion, social and economic history, sports, and visual art. It includes solid, clear information in a single volume, offering with clarity and scholarship a breadth of topics unavailable anywhere else. This book also includes many surprises readers can only find by browsing.

In summer 2006, the Commission on Recovery, Rebuilding, and Renewal asked the RAND Gulf States Policy Institute to describe the state of the pre-Hurricane Katrina housing markets in Mississippi's three coastal counties, to estimate the damage the storm did to their housing markets, to describe the status of the recovery effort, and to identify problems that might inhibit it. This report publishes the findings.

Follows the adventures of Minn, a three-legged snapping turtle, as she slowly makes her way from her birthplace at the headwaters of the Mississippi River to the mouth of river on the Gulf of Mexico.

As tensions mounted before Freedom Summer, one organization tackled the divide by opening lines of communication at the request of local women: Wednesdays in Mississippi (WIMS). Employing an unusual and deliberately feminine approach, WIMS brought interracial, interfaith teams of northern middle-aged, middle- and upper-class women to Mississippi to meet with their southern counterparts. Sponsored by the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), WIMS operated on the belief that the northern participants’ gender, age, and class would serve as an entrée to southerners who had dismissed other civil rights activists as radicals. The WIMS teams’ respectable appearance and quiet approach enabled them to build understanding across race, region, and religion where other overtures had failed. The only civil rights program created for women by women as part of a national organization, WIMS offers a new paradigm through which to study civil rights activism, challenging the stereotype of Freedom Summer activists as young student radicals and demonstrating the effectiveness of the subtle approach taken by “proper ladies.” The book delves into the motivations for women’s civil rights activism and the role religion played in influencing supporters and opponents of the civil rights movement. Lastly, it confirms that the NCNW actively worked for integration and black voting rights while also addressing education, poverty, hunger, housing, and employment as civil rights issues. After successful efforts in 1964 and 1965, WIMS became Workshops in Mississippi, which strived to alleviate the specific needs of poor women. Projects that grew from these efforts still operate today.