Happy Arab-American Heritage Month! Did you know that members of the Arab ethnic group began immigrating to Mississippi in the 1870s? These people were mainly Christians from Lebanon and Syria and settled in Jackson, Meridian, railroad towns, and along the Mississippi River. According to the US Census, nearly 2,000 Arabs and people of Arab descent lived in Mississippi by the year 1930. Yalla Vote, a part of the Arab American Institute, estimates that over 11,000 Arab-Americans currently live in our state.
If you're curious about specific contributions to our state, here are just a few extraordinary Arab-Mississippians:
- John J. Nosser was born in Lebanon in 1899 and immigrated to Mississippi at the young age of 20. He owned several grocery stores in Natchez and was the mayor from 1962 to 1968. During his time in office, both his home and his businesses were bombed by the KKK. Nosser reached an agreement with NAACP Field Director Charles Evers in 1965 that ended a boycott of merchants in Natchez, paving the way for an integrated society. In 1967, he eulogized murdered civil rights activist Wharlest Jackson, saying, "Before we lacked the courage to speak. Now we don't care. We have to."
- Robert Khayat was born in Moss Point in 1938. Both of his parents were Lebanese. He played football while attending the University of Mississippi and later attended Yale for a law degree. Khayat played several years of professional football with Washington's team and was included on the 1960 Pro Bowl team. He was appointed chancellor of the University of Mississippi in 1995, a position he held until his retirement in 2009. You can read more about him in his books The Education of a Lifetime and 60: A Year of Sports, Race & Politics.
- While not of Arab descent herself, Ethel Wright Mohamed married Syrian-American Hassan Mohamed at the age of eighteen. The pair raised eight children in Belzoni, where Hassan ran a store. When her husband died in 1965 after forty-one years of marriage, Ethel
turned to embroidering scenes and stories from her life and her
husband's. Included in these were depictions of the Mohamed family farm and Arabic folk tales. Her work, which she initially hid, is on permanent exhibition at the Smithsonian. She received the Governor’s Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in the Arts in 1991. You can read more about her in My Life in Pictures and Ethel Wright Mohamed.
To delve further into the specifically Lebanese experience in Mississippi, be sure to watch James G. Thomas's History is Lunch presentation called Mississippi Mahjar. You can also attend the annual Lebanese dinner at St. George's in Vicksburg every February. If you're interested in learning more about people of Arab descent and their experiences in Mississippi, check out the oral history project featuring the Delta-Lebanese at the Southern Foodways Alliance. (Fun fact: Ethel Wright Mohamed's daughter Carol, curator of the Ethel Wright Mohamed Stitchery Museum, is featured in one of these interviews!)
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