[2] The song captures Simone's response to the racially motivated murders of Emmett Till and Medgar Evers in Mississippi, and the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four black children.

The song begins jauntily, with a show tune feel, but demonstrates its political focus early on with its refrain: "Alabama's got me so upset, Tennessee's made me lose my rest, and everybody knows about Mississippi goddam."

Sister Sadie, a Black Woman who is portrayed as strong and who doesn’t express her anger or pain, is a character in Mark Twain's novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

[6] Miami University musicology professor Tammy Kernodle explains: "In Mississippi Goddam, we have Nina Simone pulling from the past and invoking it in the present, but also speaking to what is yet to come if America does not enact real social change.

[10] Simone performed the song in front of thousands of people at the end of the Selma to Montgomery marches when she and other black activists, including Sammy Davis Jr., James Baldwin and Harry Belafonte crossed police lines.

First Amendment scholar Ronald Collins felt that Steve Allen, the "famed host of a nationally syndicated TV variety program ... was one of the few who then dared to provide a forum for those with dissident views."

Therefore, when Nina Simone "joined Allen at the desk before [the] song, he told her he wanted her to sing 'Mississippi Goddam' because he knew it would provoke a lively discussion about censorship."