page_title: History of Mississippi
section_title: World War II
hierarchical_section_title: History of Mississippi / World War II
caption_attribution_description: cotton price in Mississippi 1911-2001
context_page_description: The history of the state of Mississippi extends to thousands of years of indigenous peoples. Evidence of their cultures has been found largely through archeological excavations, as well as existing remains of earthwork mounds built thousands of years ago. Native American traditions were kept through oral histories; the Europeans recorded accounts of historic peoples they encountered. Since the late 20th century, there have been increased studies of the Native American tribes and reliance on their oral histories to document their cultures. Their accounts have been correlated with evidence of natural events.
  The first European explorers to settle in the area of the present-day state were French colonists, and later some Spanish and English, particularly along the Gulf Coast. Euro-Americans did not enter the territory in great number until the early nineteenth century, and then they brought many enslaved Afro-Americans with them to serve as laborers to develop cotton plantations along major riverfronts. Through the 1830s, the federal government forced most of the native Choctaw and Chickasaw people west of the Mississippi River.
context_section_description: The war years brought prosperity as cotton prices soared and new war installations paid high wages. Many blacks headed to northern and western cities, particularly in California, as part of the second and larger wave of the Great Migration. White farmers often headed to southern factory towns. Young men, white and black, were equally subject to the draft, but farmers were often exempt on occupational grounds. The World War II era marked a transition from labor-intensive agriculture to mechanized farming in the Delta region of Mississippi. Federal farm payments and improvements in mechanical cotton pickers made modernization economically possible by 1940, but most planters feared loss of racial and social control and simply shifted their workers from sharecropping to wage labor. As workers left the farm for military service or defense jobs, farm wages rose. By 1944, wages had tripled. In 1945 the newly established Delta War Wage Board provided planters temporary relief by setting a maximum wage for farm workers, but President Harry S. Truman lifted wartime economic controls in 1946.
  Beginning in the 1930s, the ravages of the boll weevil and federal crop restrictions and conservation programs encouraged many farmers to turn from cotton farming to growing other crops, such as soybeans; to sowing grasses for livestock; and to planting trees for timber. Agricultural productivity increased, and the soils were improved by crop rotation, strip planting, terracing, contour plowing, and the use of improved fertilizers, insecticides, and seeds. After 1945, farm mechanization advanced rapidly, especially in the Cotton Belt, and small farms were consolidated, as small farmers who could not afford the new machinery and sharecroppers left the land. Planters rapidly mechanized. It took only a few operators of cotton-picking machines to do the work of hundreds of laborers. The sharecroppers could find no other work, and this system collapsed after they moved to the cities in the North and West. By 1950 whites were a majority of the population statewide and in every region outside the Delta.
caption: Before 1945, times were good when the price of cotton was above 20 cents.
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