Philadelphia, Mississippi
city in Mississippi, USA
Philadelphia is a city in and the county seat of Neshoba County, Mississippi, United States. The population was 7,118 at the 2020 census.
History
Philadelphia is incorporated as a municipality; it was given its current name, after Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1903, two years before the railroad brought new opportunities and prosperity to the town. The history of the town and its influences—social, political and economic—can be seen in the many points of interest within and beyond the city limits. These range from the large ceremonial Indian mound and cave at Nanih Waiya, built approximately 1,700 years ago and sacred to the Choctaw; to the still thriving Williams Brothers Store, a true old-fashioned general store founded in 1907 and featured in National Geographic in 1937 as a source of anything from "horse collars to straw hats."
Murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner
In the mid-20th century, Mississippi was a battleground of the civil rights movement as, like other states of the South, it had long disfranchised blacks and subjected them to racial segregation and Jim Crow laws. Philadelphia in June 1964 was the scene of the murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, a 21-year-old black man from Meridian, Mississippi; Andrew Goodman, a 20-year-old Jewish anthropology student from New York City; and Michael Schwerner, a 24-year-old Jewish CORE organizer and former social worker, also from New York. Their deaths demonstrated the risks that civil rights workers took to secure the constitutional rights of African Americans.
Ku Klux Klan members (including Cecil Price, a deputy sheriff of Neshoba County) released the three young men from jail, took them to an isolated spot, and killed them, then buried them in an earthen dam. It was some time after they disappeared before the bodies were discovered, as a result of an FBI investigation and national media attention. The national outrage over their deaths helped procure support for Congressional passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The public source identifies “Philadelphia, Mississippi” as city in Mississippi, USA. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Philadelphia, Mississippi and city.
Why this record matters
A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Philadelphia, Mississippi”, the useful work is to connect “city in Mississippi, USA” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
The strongest evidence will usually combine a dated visual record with documents produced by the authority responsible for the place. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q935334. VIAF identifies the subject as 136061390. The Library of Congress control number is n82047520. Authority coordinates are 32.774, -89.113. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2020, 1903, 1907 and 1937.
A single description cannot reconcile every naming convention, rebuilding phase or administrative transfer associated with a place. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Treat names, boundaries and functions as historically changeable. Maps, plans, inventories and administrative records can clarify what the place meant at different dates.
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Three-step research path
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Philadelphia, Mississippi” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.