Almost 70 percent of U.S. ag exports travel the upper Mississippi River and the Illinois waterway system.

My mother a teacher encouraged me to use my creativity as an actual way to make a living and my father a Mississippi physician did two things. First he taught me that all human beings should be treated equally because no one is better than anyone else and he never pressured me to become a doctor.

In Mississippi you don't admit that you're gay. It's just an awkward thing down South which is sad.

Since I was a kid I've had an absolute obsession with particular kinds of American music. Mississippi Delta blues of the Thirties Chicago blues of the Fifties West Coast music of the mid-Sixties - but I'd never really touched on dark Americana.

The attorney general would call at 5 o'clock in the evening and say: 'Tomorrow morning we are going to try to integrate the University of Mississippi. Get us a memo on what we're likely to do and what we can do if the governor sends the National Guard there.'

My mom's collard greens. No one else in the world can make them like hers. I'm not just saying that because she's my mom. She's got some Mississippi secret. I could seriously eat them every day.

I'm floored that the House leadership would turn its back on job creation for Mississippians.

As founder and co-chair of the upper Mississippi River Congressional task force I have long sought to preserve the river's health and historical multiple uses including as a natural waterway and a home to wildlife for the benefit of future generations of Americans.

Finally the ecological health of the Mississippi River and its economic importance to the many people that make their living or seek their recreation is based on a healthy river system.

It was very clear to me in 1965 in Mississippi that as a lawyer I could get people into schools desegregate the schools but if they were kicked off the plantations - and if they didn't have food didn't have jobs didn't have health care didn't have the means to exercise those civil rights we were not going to have success.

When I was growing up in Mississippi - it was good Southern food... but I also grew up with a Greek family when other kids were eating fried okra we were eating steamed artichokes. So I think it played a big part in my healthy cooking.

Mississippi Mermaid was a very special experience because we only had the dialogues for the scenes we were shooting the night before.

The Klan had used fear intimidation and murder to brutally oppress over African-Americans who sought justice and equality and it sought to respond to the young workers of the civil rights movement in Mississippi in the same way.

Freedom Summer the massive voter education project in Mississippi was 1964. I graduated from high school in 1965. So becoming active was almost a rite of passage.

We're first on executions. We're 49th in funding public education. We're in a race with Mississippi for the bottom and we're winning.

Baseball is the president tossing out the first ball of the season. And a scrubby schoolboy playing catch with his dad on a Mississippi farm.

The next thing I wrote was in a writing class at night school. It was about a poor woman who worked at a dime store and who was all alone for Christmas in Laurel Mississippi.

Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three and soon discovered there was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi.