mississippi

Growing up as a Black girl in Mississippi in the 1940s and 1950s.

Racial tensions erupt in Clanton, Mississippi, after African-American Vietnam veteran Carl Lee Hailey kills the white men who raped his ten-year-old daughter and lawyer Jake Brigance tries to get him acquitted.

Simeon Wright, the cousin of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African-American who was beaten and killed in 1955 for whistling at a white woman, reflects on what it was like to grow up in Mississippi during the 1940s and 1950s, reveals details about the night Emmett was kidnapped, and reflects on how the crime and trial affected his family and the community.

The shaky marriage between Henry McAllan and his city-bred wife Laura becomes even more unstable when his brother Jamie returns from World War II in 1946 to help work the family's miserable cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta, along with his comrade-in-arms Ronsel Jackson, the oldest son of local sharecroppers, who soon learns that his heroics in battle mean nothing in the Jim Crow south.

Jesmyn Ward, a prize-winning author, delves into her upbringing in rural Mississippi and examines how poverty and racism contributed to the deaths of five young men in her life.

A woman who has left the South returns when her father is dying. After his death, she and her silly young stepmother go back to the small Mississippi town where she grew up.

Lee Wagstaff, the daughter of a sharecropper in the Depression-era town of Charon, Mississippi, sets off into a dangerous, parallel world, accompanied by the kind, blues-singing swamp monster Bayou, in search of her friend Lily Westmoreland who has been kidnapped by the evil Bog--a crime for which Lee's father stands accused.

A bildungsroman of an African-American boy in 1930s-40s Mississippi who experiences the violent consequences of racism and sexual repression while coping with his strained relationship with his father.

Collection of black-and-white photographs taken in Mississippi during the depression.