On April 20, 2022, Thomas Michael Kersen presented “Communes and Counterculture in the Magnolia State” as part of the History Is Lunch series.
Although it is rarely discussed, Mississippi has a rich and varied countercultural history, especially in its intentional communities—more popularly known as communes. In the 1820s Joseph E. Davis, the older brother of Confederate States of America president Jefferson Davis, experimented with the utopian ideas of Robert Owen at Davis Bend, which became the town of Mound Bayou. The socialist Grander Age Colony was founded on the gulf coast in the late nineteenth century, while the twentieth century saw the establishment of intentional communities such as a single-tax colony modeled after Fairhope in Wall Hill and the rural cooperatives Delta Farm and Providence Farm.
“In the late 1960s, people living in cooperatives in Aberdeen, Canton, and Hattiesburg earned money by making items for sale at the Liberty House in the state capital of Jackson,” Kersen said. “Those handmade Mississippi goods were also sold as far away as the Liberty House store in New York City’s Greenwich Village.”
Other Mississippi intentional communities, such as Ovett’s Camp Sister Spirit and Govinda Gardens/New Talavan in Carriere, have continued into the twenty-first century.
Thomas Michael Kersen is associate professor of sociology at Jackson State University. A retired Army medical service corps officer, he earned his BA in sociology from Arkansas Tech University, his MS in sociology from the University of Central Arkansas, and his PhD in sociology from Mississippi State University. Kersen is the former two-term president of the Alabama-Mississippi Sociological Association. His first book, Where Misfits Fit: Counterculture and Influence in the Ozarks, was published by the University Press of Mississippi and won the Mid-South Sociological Association’s Stanford M. Lyman Distinguished Book Award in 2021. As a teenager, Kersen lived in a commune in the Arkansas Ozarks.
History Is Lunch is sponsored by the John and Lucy Shackelford Charitable Fund of the Community Foundation for Mississippi. The weekly lecture series of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History explores different aspects of the state's past. The hour-long programs are held in the Craig H. Neilsen Auditorium of the Museum of Mississippi History and Mississippi Civil Rights Museum building at 222 North Street in Jackson.
