A Mississippi historian chronicles the rise and fall of The Magnolia State’s moonshine empire in this revealing true crime history. For most states, the repeal of prohibition meant a return to legally drunken normalcy, but not so in Mississippi. The state had gone dry more than a decade before the rest of the nation. In that time, a lucrative black market for moonshine and bonded liquor became a way of life for many Mississippians. By the time Prohibition was lifted, bootleggers and state politicians were unwilling to give up their hold on the sale of alcohol. For nearly sixty years, Mississippi was known as the "wettest dry state in the country." Until statewide prohibition was finally repealed in 1966, illegal booze fueled a corrupt political machine that intimidated journalists who dared to speak against it and fixed juries that threatened its interests. Author and native Mississippian Janice Branch Tracy offers an intimate and authoritative look inside Mississippi Moonshine Politics.

James L. Robertson focuses on folk encountering their constitutions and laws, in their courthouses and country stores, and in their daily lives, animating otherwise dry and inaccessible parchments. Robertson begins at statehood and continues through war and depression, well into the 1940s. He tells of slaves petitioning for freedom, populist sentiments fueling abnegation of the rule of law, the state’s many schemes for enticing Yankee capital to lift a people from poverty, and its sometimes tragic, always colorful romance with whiskey after the demise of national Prohibition. Each story is sprinkled with fascinating but heretofore unearthed facts and circumstances. Robertson delves into the prejudices and practices of the times, local landscapes, and daily life and its dependence on our social compact. He offers the unique perspective of a judge, lawyer, scholar, and history buff, each role having tempered the lessons of the others. He focuses on a people, enriching encounters most know little about. Tales of understanding and humanity covering 130 years of heroes, rascals, and ordinary folk—with a bundle of engaging surprises—leave the reader pretty sure there’s nothing quite like Mississippi history told by a sage observer.

What's the real meaning of juke joint? Explore these special places for a special brand of the blues. Juke joint - two words often used, often abused. They convey an inherent promise of something real, edgy, from another time. All juke joints are blues clubs, but not all blues clubs are jukes. Here, artist recollections and insights delve below the murky surface to tell the tales, canonize the characters and explain the special brand of blues bottled in these quasi-legal establishments. Author Roger Stolle works from the inside to educate and entertain with a mix of history, anecdote and discovery. It's a wild ride.

Dwelling along the Mississippi River, the Tennessee state line, the Tenn-Tom Waterway, and the Gulf of Mexico are a trove of characters with fascinating lives and histories. In Rowdy Boundaries: True Mississippi Tales from Natchez to Noxubee, author James L. Robertson weaves these stories to reveal a tapestry of Mississippi’s border counties and the towns and people that occupy them. From his unique vantage as a former Mississippi Supreme Court justice and seasoned lawyer, he documents the legal, geographical, and biographical tales revealed during his journeys along and within the state lines. The volume features the true stories of musicians, authors, portrait painters, and football players, as well as political activists, educators, politicians, and judges. Also featured are tributes to noteworthy newspaper editors and columnists for their many contributions over the years. Robertson covers pivotal moments in Mississippi history, including the Mississippi Married Women’s Property Act of 1839, the development of Chinese culture in the Mississippi Delta, and 1964 Freedom Summer. He does not shy away from the tragedies of the past, discussing lynchings and murders that still haunt the state today. From ghost towns in Jefferson County to the Slugburger Festival in Corinth, stopping en route for a mint julep in Columbus, Robertson puts a human face on Mississippi history and tells a good yarn along the way.

She was born the 20th child in a family that had lived in the Mississippi Delta for generations, first as enslaved people and then as sharecroppers. She left school at 12 to pick cotton, as those before her had done, in a world in which white supremacy was an unassailable citadel. She was subjected without her consent to an operation that deprived her of children. And she was denied the most basic of all rights in Americathe right to cast a ballotin a state in which Blacks constituted nearly half the population. And so Fannie Lou Hamer lifted up her voice. Starting in the early 1960s and until her death in 1977, she was an irresistible force, not merely joining the swelling wave of change brought by civil rights but keeping it in motion. Working with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which recruited her to help with voter-registration drives, Hamer became a community organizer, women's rights activist, and co-founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. She summoned and used what she had against the citadelher anger, her courage, her faith in the Bible, and her conviction that hearts could be won over and injustice overcome. She used her brutal beating at the hands of Mississippi police, an ordeal from which she never fully recovered, as the basis of a televised speech at the 1964 Democratic Convention, a speech that the mainstream partyincluding its standard-bearer, President Lyndon Johnsontried to contain. But Fannie Lou Hamer would not be held back. For those whose lives she touched and transformed, for those who heard and followed her voice, she was the embodiment of protest, perseverance, and, most of all, the potential for revolutionary change. Kate Clifford Larson's biography of Fannie Lou Hamer is the most complete ever written, drawing on recently declassified sources on both Hamer and the civil rights movement, including unredacted FBI and Department of Justice files. It also makes full use of interviews with Civil Rights activists conducted by the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress, and Democratic National Committee archives, in addition to extensive conversations with Hamer's family and with those with whom she worked most closely. Stirring, immersive, and authoritative, Walk with Me does justice to Fannie Lou Hamer's life, capturing in full the spirit, and the voice, that led the fight for freedom and equality in America at its critical moment.

Chiefly extracts from Mississippi newspapers, July 1964-May 1965.