 Mississippi is a state located in the Southern United States. Jackson is the state capital and largest city, with a population of around 175,000 people. The state overall has a population of around 3 million people. Mississippi is the 32nd most extensive and the 31st most populous of the 50 United States. The state is heavily forested outside of the Mississippi Delta area. Its riverfront areas were cleared for cotton cultivation in the antebellum era, but the bottomlands were cleared mostly by freedmen after the war. Blacks made up two-thirds of the property owners in the Delta by the end of the 19th century, but timber and railroad companies acquired much of the land. Clearing altered the ecology of the Delta, increasing the severity of flooding along the Mississippi. Much land is now held by agribusinesses. A largely rural state with agricultural areas dominated by industrial farms, Mississippi is ranked low or last among the states in such measures as health, educational attainment, and median household income. The state's catfish aquaculture farms produce the majority of farm-raised catfish consumed in the United States. Since the 1930s and the Great Migration, Mississippi has been majority white, albeit with the highest percentage of black residents of any U.S. state. From the early 19th century to that period, it was majority black, a population composed largely of African-American slaves before the American Civil War. In the first half of the 20th century, a total of nearly 400,000 rural blacks left the state for work and opportunities in northern and midwestern cities, with another wave of migration around World War II to West Coast cities. In 2010, 37% of Mississippians were African-Americans, the highest percentage of African Americans in a U.S. state. African Americans are still a majority in many counties of the Mississippi-Yazoo Delta, an area of historic settlement during the plantation era. Since 2011 Mississippi has been ranked the most religious state in the country. Pictures  A Mississippi welcome sign  A Mississippi population density map  Statistics Population Statistics
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