As a result of the slaves' labor, the Delta became the richest cotton-farming ... bale and we had to pick hard in order to have money to buy food during that season," said Mississippi State ...

had to do with the use of ladybugs to eat the boll weevils that threatened to swallow his cotton crop during the 1950s. (Courtesy of unsplash) ...

In the low hills of Grenada, Montgomery, and Yalobusha counties, Bailey & Sons Farms—6,000 acres of cotton and 1,500 acres of pine timber—runs along bluffs overlooking the Mississippi Delta.

Sixty years ago, in 1964, the matron of modest means from the Mississippi delta region took a bold ... By age 6, she was picking cotton. She dropped out of school by the time she was 12 years ...

Fannie Lou Hamer was born in 1917, the 20th child of Lou Ella and James Lee Townsend, sharecroppers east of the Mississippi Delta ... she was picking hundreds of pounds of cotton a day.