Mississippi runs on two coasts most coverage flattens into one story. Jackson is the seat of state government and home to the University of Mississippi Medical Center, the state's only academic medical center, alongside Jackson State University and C Spire, the state's largest homegrown telecom -- and it carries the weight of the civil rights movement's hardest ground: Medgar Evers led the state's NAACP from Jackson until his assassination in 1963, and Freedom Summer's 1964 voter-registration campaign made Mississippi the movement's most violently contested state. The Gulf Coast runs on real industrial anchors and real cultural and tourism ones, all at once: Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula is the largest manufacturing employer in the state, over 11,000 workers building Navy destroyers and Coast Guard cutters in the state with the highest concentration of shipbuilding jobs in the country; NASA's Stennis Space Center in Hancock County is the nation's lead center for rocket propulsion testing, still firing engines for the modern Artemis program; Biloxi has run its own Mardi Gras since 1908, a French Catholic tradition transplanted onto the coast generations before Louisiana's version dominated the national image of it, including its own real, separate integration history, with the Vernon Gilbert Colored Elks Lodge sponsoring Biloxi's African-American King Zulu parades from the late 1930s through 1948; and the Coast has run a real dockside-casino economy since Mississippi legalized gaming in 1990 -- the Isle of Capri became the state's first dockside casino in August 1992, and Beau Rivage's 32-story tower, opened in 1999, is still the tallest building in the state. Government and civil rights history in one city, naval shipbuilding, rocket testing, Carnival culture, and casino gaming in the other -- all Mississippi, at the same time.
Region Stats
Total firms
41
VC / investors
0
Companies
27
Schools
14
Known For
Shipbuilding & Stennis
State Government
Civil Rights
