Mississippi leads the nation. That’s not a typographical error. And it’s not just a gotcha phrase, preparing the reader for learning that Mississippi leads the nation on all sorts of negative things.
Once upon a time, that was true, and in some respects it still is. Mississippi has the lowest or nearly the lowest income levels of any state.
It’s been lagging in population growth over the last decade and in the longer term. Mississippi topped the 2-million mark in 1930, and it got within 18,000 of the 3-million mark in 2018, 88 years later, but it has fallen by 55,000 since.
Mississippi has long been the state with the highest percentage of black residents, and black people have had, on average, lower incomes and educational achievement by various measures than others.
Thus, not much notice was taken in 2011, nearly a decade after passage of the bipartisan No…
