Part of a roof lays in front of a home, destroyed by a powerful tornado in Defiance, Missouri on Sunday, December 12, 2021. A tornado hit the small town west of St. Louis on Friday, December 10, 2021, destroying 25 homes and killing one.
Credit: © Bill Greenblatt, UPI/Alamy Images

Devastating tornadoes tore through Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, and Tennessee on Friday, Dec. 10, 2021. At least 22 tornadoes were reported throughout the 6 states. The storm started with a powerful thunderstorm, which meteorologists believe generated the tornadoes. The largest of the tornadoes broke United States history as the longest tornado. From touch down to the point where the tornado picked back up, the tornado measured 227 miles (365 kilometers).

Most of the destruction occurred in western Kentucky. Although tornadoes can occur any time of the year, they are more common in spring and summer. Tornadoes rarely form in Kentucky in the month of December. In Mayfield, Kentucky, a tornado hit a candle factory where 110 people were working the night shift. The building collapsed in the storm. Reports show eight people from the factory were killed in the storm and six people are still missing. At least 64 people have been confirmed dead in Kentucky with more than 105 people still missing. Rescue efforts are still underway to locate missing people. On Sunday, President Joe Biden approved Kentucky’s request for assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

More than a dozen people were killed from the storms in Illinois, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Missouri. The storms hit an Amazon warehouse in Illinois, killing six people. One tornado tore through a nursing home in Arkansas, killing one resident. Rescue workers and family members are still searching for missing people throughout the wreckage. Thousands of businesses, houses, and schools have been damaged. Across the affected states, more than 50,000 people have been without electricity since the storm Friday night. Rescue efforts have been complicated because many power lines and cell towers were damaged in the storms.

Mississippi’s new state flag
Credit: © Dromara, Shutterstock

During the 2020 election, people across the United States voted for local, state, and national officials. But voters in Mississippi got to vote on a fairly unique proposition as well—the design of a new state flag. In June 2020, the state Legislature passed—and Governor Tate Reeves signed—a bill to remove and replace the state flag. The old flag, adopted in 1894, featured a replica of the Confederate battle emblem used during the American Civil War (1861-1865). Many people consider the emblem to be a symbol of slavery and oppression. The Legislature’s measure called for a commission to adopt a new design that omitted Confederate symbols and included the words “In God We Trust.”  Mississippians voted to accept the new design in a November referendum (vote of approval).

Mississippi’s new flag features a white magnolia blossom on a blue backdrop with red and gold stripes on either side of the flower. The magnolia is the state flower, as well as the state tree. “In God We Trust” is written below the flower. Twenty stars representing Mississippi’s status as the 20th state in the Union surround the flower. One gold star represents Mississippi’s Native American tribes.

The move comes at a time when protests of racial injustice and the legacy of slavery and white supremacy have captured the nation’s attention. This summer, hundreds of thousands of people throughout the United States (and even around the world) took to the streets to demonstrate against racism and the police use of force against African Americans, including the killings of George Floyd and others. Protesters urged city officials—in Mississippi and throughout the United States—to remove statues of such Confederate leaders as Robert E. Lee, the general who commanded the Confederate Army in the Civil War. Protesters also encouraged the removal of a variety of Confederate-related symbols, such as the emblem on the Mississippi flag. Displays of the emblem were also banned at NASCAR races and other events.

This year was not the first time a new Mississippi flag has been proposed. In 2001, Governor Ronnie Musgrove appointed a commission to propose a new design for the state’s flag. That design featured a circle of stars, representing Mississippi’s Native American tribes. Later in the year, two-thirds of Mississippi voters rejected the new design and chose to keep the old flag. Mississippi’s flag remained a source of controversy through the early 2000′s, leading a number of organizations and corporations to decline to hold events in the state or open facilities there. The new design officially becomes law in 2021.

December 8, 2017

Mississippi’s bicentenary takes place this Sunday, on Dec. 10, 2017. Throughout the year, bicentennial celebrations and local events commemorated Mississippi’s entrance to the Union as the 20th state in 1817. To mark the anniversary weekend in December 2017, two new museums opened to much fanfare in Jackson, the state capital: the Museum of Mississippi History and the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum.

Jackson is Mississippi’s capital and largest city. Known as the Crossroads of the South, it serves as a center of commerce, industry, and transportation. Credit: © John Elk III, Alamy Images

Mississippi has a long and sometimes troubled history. In the 1500’s and 1600’s, Spanish and French explorers encountered the Native Americans of the region—often with tragic results. The Mississippi area came under British control in 1763, Spanish control in 1781, and eventually American control in the mid-1780’s and early 1790’s. The Congress of the United States organized the Mississippi Territory in 1798, with Natchez as the capital. Winthrop Sargent became the first governor of the new territory. Adding bits of land at a time, the Mississippi Territory extended over all present-day Alabama and Mississippi by 1812.

Click to view larger image
Mississippi. Credit: WORLD BOOK map

In 1817, Congress carved Alabama from the Mississippi Territory, and on December 10, Mississippi became the 20th state. The first Mississippi state governor, David Holmes, had been territorial governor since 1809. The state capital bounced between Columbia, Natchez, and Washington until landing for good at Jackson in 1822.

Mississippi, a state that allowed slavery, seceded from the Union in 1861 and fought with the Confederacy during the American Civil War (1861-1865). Mississippi reentered the Union in 1870, but racial strife in the state continued for another 100 years.

January 23, 2017

Tornadoes swept through parts of the southeastern United States over the weekend, killing 20 people and injuring and displacing many others. Most of the deaths—15 of them—occurred in the state of Georgia. Four others were killed in Mississippi and one person died in northern Florida. The tornadoes erupted from a violent storm front that also hit the states of Louisiana, Alabama, and South Carolina.

This satellite image shows the strong storm front over the southeastern United States on Jan. 22, 2017. The storm killed 20 people in 3 different states. Credit: NASA/NOAA/GOES

The storm hit first in Louisiana early on Saturday, January 21, as severe weather damaged homes and caused injuries around the north-central city of Natchitoches. The storm then roared into southern Mississippi, where predawn tornadoes killed four people in the city of Hattiesburg.

Tornadoes touched down as the storm passed through Alabama, but the full wrath of the storm hit southern Georgia on Sunday, January 22. Tornadoes ripped in a northeasterly direction through southern Brooks, Cook, and Berrien counties, killing 11 people and devastating parts of several communities. Four other people died in tornadoes near the city of Albany in southwestern Dougherty County, and one person was killed in northern Florida’s Columbia County. Tornadoes also touched down as the storm front crossed South Carolina.

The powerful southern storm prompted the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Storm Prediction Center to issue a rare “high risk” severe weather outlook early Sunday—the first such “high risk” day since June 2014 when storms raked through Nebraska, Iowa, and Missouri.

June 22, 2016

Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party supporters demonstrate outside the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Some hold portraits of slain civil rights workers James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner.
Credit: Library of Congress

On June 20, after an investigation that continued for more than half a century, federal and Mississippi authorities officially closed the books on one of the most heinous, racially motivated criminal cases in the history of the United States civil rights movement. Known as the “Freedom Summer” murder case or the “Mississippi Burning” murder case, it was notable as the first successful federal prosecution of a civil rights case in Mississippi. Outrage over the case helped gain passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In June 1964, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, two white civil rights volunteers from New York City, and James Chaney, a black volunteer from Meridian, Mississippi, were working together in Meridian as part of the “Freedom Summer” campaign to help African Americans register to vote. The campaign was organized primarily by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a civil rights organization. At that time, many Southern States had used various methods to deprive blacks of their voting rights. On June 21, the three men were on their way to investigate the burning of an African American church in Neshoba County when they were taken into custody for speeding by a sheriff deputy. After the men were released from county jail in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a Ku Klux Klan mob followed their car, forced it off the road, and shot the men to death. The volunteers’ station wagon was found three days later. Initially classified as a missing persons case, the men’s disappearance sparked national outrage and an investigation led by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The FBI found the bodies of the three men 44 days later, buried in an earthen dam.

In 1967, 18 men were tried on federal civil rights charges in the case. An all-white jury convicted seven of them of violating the civil rights of the Freedom Summer volunteers. At the time, no federal murder statutes existed, and the state never brought charges. None of the convicted men served more than six years in prison. The plot leader, Edgar Ray Killen, a Baptist minister, avoided a trial due to a hung jury. Killen was finally convicted in a 2005 trial based on new evidence unveiled in 2000. He was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 60 years in prison, where he remains today at age 91.

In 2010, federal authorities reopened the investigation in search of evidence to allow them to convict the remaining suspects. However, that investigation came to a halt 18 months ago after a witness backed out at the last minute after pledging to sign a sworn statement that would have implicated a suspect, according to Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood.

Monday’s decision means that no other suspects in the case will be prosecuted. “It has been a thorough and complete investigation,” Hood said. “I am convinced that during the last 52 years, investigators have done everything possible under the law to find those responsible and hold them accountable; however, we have determined that there is no likelihood of any additional convictions… Our state and our entire nation are a much better place because of the work of those three young men and others in 1964 who only wanted to ensure that the rights and freedoms promised in our Constitution were afforded to every single one of us in Mississippi.” In 2014, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner Presidential Medals of Freedom.

Other World Book articles

• Evers, Medgar
• Freedom riders
• Meredith, James

April 29, 2014

An outbreak of severe weather spawned multiple tornadoes over the last two days that left at least 30 people dead in the South and Midwest United States. Slowly moving west to east, the massive storm system cut a swath of destruction from Oklahoma to Alabama. At least 13 tornado-related deaths were reported yesterday in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama. The greatest damage yesterday was in Louisville, Mississippi, where a twister flattened a mobile home park, leveled substantial brick structures, and took the roof off a medical center. Six people were killed in Louisville and surrounding Winston County. In Tupelo, in northeastern Mississippi, another tornado severely damaged every building in a two-block area.

On Sunday, April 27, the same storm system generated tornadoes that left 17 people dead in Arkansas, Iowa, and Oklahoma. At least 15 people were killed when a single half-mile-wide funnel left an 80-mile- (130-kilometer-) long trail of destruction through the suburbs of Little Rock, Arkansas.

A tornado is a rapidly rotating column of air that can develop under a large, anvil-shaped thundercloud. First, a dark wall cloud forms underneath the thundercloud. In most cases, a twisting, funnel-shaped cloud then descends from the wall cloud and touches the ground. Almost all tornadoes in the Northern Hemisphere rotate as shown in the diagram—counterclockwise when viewed from above.  (World Book illustration by Bruce Kerr)

Meteorologists predicted today that the storm system could bring more violent weather to the South. National Weather Service forecasters are warning residents of northern and central Georgia of a threat of tornadoes.

Additional World Book articles:

• Tornado Alley
• Twisted: More Terrible Tornadoes (a special report)
• Weather 1925 (a Back in Time article)
• Weather 2011 (a Back in Time article)
• Weather 2013 (a Back in Time article)