As of 2008, Mississippi has an estimated population of 2,938,618. Mississippi's population has the largest proportion of African Americans of any U.S. state, currently nearly 37%.
The 2000 Census reported Mississippi's population as 2,844,658 [2]. The center of population of Mississippi is located in Leake County, in the town of Lena.
The Census Bureau considers race and Hispanic ethnicity to be two separate categories. These data, however, are only for non-Hispanic members of each group: non-Hispanic Whites, non-Hispanic Blacks, etc. For more information on race and the Census, see here.
On September 27, 1830, the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek was signed between the U.S. Government and Native American Choctaws. The Choctaws agreed to selling their traditional homelands in Mississippi and Alabama with just compensation, which opened it up for European-American immigrant settlement. Article 14 in the treaty allowed the Choctaws to remain in the state of Mississippi and to become the first major non-European ethnic group to become U.S. citizens. Today approximately 9,500 Choctaws live in Neshoba, Newton, Leake, and Jones counties. Federally recognized tribes include the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians.
Until the 1930s, African Americans made up a majority of Mississippians. Due to the Great Migration, when more than 360,000 African Americans left the state during the 1940s and after to leave segregation and disfranchisement, and for better economic opportunities in the northern and western states, Mississippi's African-American population declined.
The state has the highest proportion of African Americans in the nation. Recently, the African-American percentage of population has begun to increase due mainly to a higher birth rate than the state average. Due to patterns of settlement, in many of Mississippi's public school districts, a majority of students are of African descent. [3] African Americans are the majority ethnic group in the northwestern Yazoo Delta and the southwestern and the central parts of the state, chiefly areas where the group owned land as farmers or worked on cotton plantations and farms.
According to the 2000 census, the largest ancestries are:
People of French Creole ancestry form the largest demographic group in Hancock County on the Gulf Coast. The African-American; Choctaw, mostly in Neshoba County; and Chinese-American segments of the population are also almost entirely native born.
Although some ethnic Chinese were recruited as indentured laborers from Cuba during the 1870s and later 19th c., the majority immigrated directly from China to Mississippi between 1910–1930. They were recruited as laborers. While planters first made arrangements with the Chinese for sharecropping, most Chinese soon left that work. Many became small merchants and especially grocers in towns throughout the Delta.
According to recent statistics, Mississippi leads the country in the rate of increase of immigrants, but that is compared to years when it attracted no immigrants. Most recent immigrants are Hispanic from Mexico, Central and South America.
For three years in a row, more than 30 percent of Mississippi's residents have been classified as obese. The state's pronounced poverty leads to poor nutrition habits. In a 2006 study, 22.8 percent of the state's children were classified as obese. Mississippi had the highest rate of obesity of any U.S. state from 2005-2008 and also ranks first in the nation for high blood pressure, diabetes, and adult inactivity. In a 2008 study of African American women, contributing risk factors were shown to be: lack of knowledge about body mass index (BMI), dietary behavior, physical activity and lack of social support, defined as motivation and encouragement by friends. A 2002 report on African American adolescents noted a 1999 survey which suggests that a third of children were obese, with higher ratios for those in the Delta.
The study stressed that "obesity starts in early childhood extending into the adolescent years and then possibly into adulthood". It noted impediments to needed behavioral modification included the Delta likely being "the most underserved region in the state" with African Americans the major ethnic group; lack of accessibility and availability of medical care; and an estimated 60% of residents living below the poverty level. Additional risk factors were that most schools had no physical education curriculum and nutrition education is not emphasized. Previous intervention strategies may have been largely ineffective due to not being culturally sensitive or practical. A 2006 survey found nearly 95 percent of Mississippi adults considered childhood obesity to be a serious problem.
Under French and Spanish rule beginning in the 1600s, many settlers of present-day Mississippi were Roman Catholics. In the early 1800s, Mississippi began attracting many Protestant evangelicals such as Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists, who would eventually become the majority by the twentieth century. In 2000 the Southern Baptist Convention was the largest religious denomination in the state with 916,440 adherents, followed by the United Methodist Church with 240,576, and the Roman Catholic Church with 115,760. Members of the latter church are often concentrated in areas still influenced by the former French and Spanish rule, especially along the Gulf Coast and other southern counties of the state.
The dramatic shift in religion can be attributed to several Protestant groups seeking to question the authority of the established Catholic Church during the era known as the Great Revival in the early 1800s. These groups attracted the "plain folk" in the area by reaching out to all members of society, especially those most alienated from elite culture, such as women and African Americans. Because the evangelical groups opposed slavery and promoted spiritual equality, biracial churches were founded in large numbers during this era. This led to increased mingling between whites and blacks, which many in the segregated society opposed. Husbands and slave owners in particular were opposed to the evangelical groups because of their radical positions on women's rights and the institution of slavery. In the 1830s, when the state's economy was booming, many Mississippians associated with the evangelicals began to acquire better jobs and higher social positions; some even became slave owners themselves. With the influx of wealthier, higher-class whites, churches began to abandon their spiritual equality mantra and eventually split because of racial tensions. Whites were focused on maintaining the social segregation present in society at the time while blacks sought to continue with the spiritual equality message that had originally attracted them. Churches grew more and more divided in the following years. When several states in The North began to outlaw slavery, southern white churches felt the need to secede from the Union, which was one of the causes of the American Civil War.
In the post-war years religion became very popular in the state and the rest of the Southeastern United States, leading some to deem the region the "Bible Belt". Churchgoers prescribed to the Social Gospel movement, which attempted to apply Christian ethics to political situations of the day. By the early 1900s, racial tensions had grown because of several laws approved by whites, and the African-American philosophy of spiritual equality had begun resonating with the population. African-American Baptist churches had grown to include more than twice the number of members as white Baptist churches. The African-American call for social equality resonated throughout the Great Depression in the 1930s and World War II in the 1940s; members of Mississippi society began to speak out against racial injustices such as the Jim Crow Laws. The American Civil Rights Movement had many roots in religion; both sides cited religious reasons for their viewpoints. The end of racial segregation led to the reintegration of some churches, but most still today remain all black or all white. Since the 1970s, fundamentalist conservative churches have grown rapidly, fueling Mississippi's conservative political trends.
Other religions have also existed in Mississippi, though not as large in number. In 2000, the largest denomination described as something different than Protestant or Catholic was The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints with 12,992 adherents. Other notable denominations include Muslims with 3,919 adherents in the state, Jews with 1,400 adherents, and Bahá'í with 811 adherents.
The 2000 United States census counted 4,774 same-sex unmarried-partner households in Mississippi. Of these households, 41% contained at least one child. South Dakota and Utah were the only other states in which 40 percent or more of same-sex couple households had at least one child living in the household. Mississippi also has the largest percentage of African-American same-sex couples among total households. The state capital, Jackson, ranks tenth in the nation in concentration of African-American same-sex couples. The state also ranks fifth in the nation in the percentage of Hispanic same-sex couples among all Hispanic households and ninth in the highest concentration of same-sex couples who are seniors.
In 2004, Mississippi voters approved a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage and prohibiting Mississippi from recognizing same-sex marriages performed elsewhere. The amendment passed 86% to 14%, the largest margin in any state.
Mississippi is served by eight interstate highways:
and fourteen main U.S. Routes:
as well as a system of State Highways.
For more information, visit the Mississippi Department of Transportation website.
Amtrak provides scheduled passenger service along two routes, the Crescent and City of New Orleans.
All but one of the United States Class I railroads serve Mississippi (the sole exception is the Union Pacific):