Fannie Lou Hamer was a civil rights activist who helped African Americans register to vote and who co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

Medgar Evers was a civil rights activist who organized voter-registration efforts, demonstrations and boycotts of companies that practiced discrimination.

Jazz and blues vocalist Bessie Smith's powerful, soulful voice won her countless fans and earned her the title "Empress of the Blues."

William Faulkner was a Nobel Prize–winning novelist of the American South who wrote challenging prose and created the fictional Yoknapatawpha County. He is best known for such novels as 'The Sound and the Fury' and 'As I Lay Dying.'

Newton Knight, a white Mississippi farmer, led armed opposition to the Confederacy during the U.S. Civil War, creating “The Free State of Jones,” a county which supported the Union in the war.

Margaret Taylor is best known as the wife of Zachary Taylor, the 12th President of the United States.

John Kennedy Toole wrote the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel 'A Confederacy of Dunces' before committing suicide at age 31.

The brutal abduction and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till on August 28, 1955, galvanized the emerging Civil Rights Movement.

Andrew Goodman was one of the three civil rights workers slain in Mississippi in June 1964.

James Chaney was one of three civil rights workers killed in Mississippi in 1964. This tragedy inspired the 1988 film ‘Mississippi Burning.’

Civil rights worker Michael Schwerner, along with James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, were killed because of their activism during Mississippi’s Freedom Summer in 1964. Their murders helped to galvanize the Civil Rights Movement and support for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Byron De La Beckwith killed civil rights activist Medgar Evers in 1963. After two trials had hung juries in 1964, he was finally convicted of the crime in 1994.

Short-story writer and novelist Eudora Welty’s work focuses on the regional manners of people inhabiting a small Mississippi town that resembles her birthplace.

Hiram R. Revels is the first African American to serve in the United States Senate.

Casey Jones was a railroad engineer known for his speed who died in 1900, when he collided with another train. He was immortalized as an American folk hero with the release of Wallace Saunders's song "The Ballad of Casey Jones."

Musician Robert Johnson is best known as one of the greatest blues performers of all time, a recognition that came largely after his death at age 27.

Mississippi blues guitarist and singer Charley Patton is remembered as the "Father of the Delta Blues." He played with guitarist Willie Brown, and the Chatmons.