Hanging out with Peyton Manning at the Neshoba County Fair that started in 1889. #MakeAmericaGreatAgain #Trump2016 pic.twitter.com/90lKiPfH4y — Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) July 26, 2016

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It’s a picture, not necessarily an endorsement, but there’s Peyton Manning, conservative and former Denver Broncos quarterback, mugging with Donald Trump Jr. at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia — not home of the Democratic National Convention this week, but the town of 7,500 in east Mississippi.

Manning donated to the presidential campaign of Jeb Bush, a bitter rival to Trump, but the signal-caller has reportedly played golf with the New York billionaire, and Trump said he was pulling for the Broncos in the Super Bowl this year, because he’s a friend of Manning’s.

Neshoba County has layers of history and significance in business and politics: some of it good, some of it bad and some of it you can make up in your own mind.

On Aug. 3, 1980, Ronald Reagan gave a campaign speech on “states’ rights” at the Neshoba County Fair, which historians view as a seminal moment in Republicans taking the South from Democrats. It echoed a then-not-so-distant time when George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door at the University of Alabama not to hurt African-Americans, he said, but to stand up to federal judges who forced desegregation on Southern states. How do I know this? I grew up in Alabama in the aftermath of the civil rights era. I covered politics and civil rights in Mississippi. I’ve attended the Neshoba County Fair, a beloved spectacle held since 1889 in the dead of the Deep South summer, when the heat drives workers from the field to a welcome break before the fall harvest.

I once wrote a story for the Biloxi Sun-Herald about the monuments of history that tower over Neshoba County. One was Reagan. Another was Freedom Summer, 1964, when three civil rights workers were killed by Klansmen in Neshoba County, drawing the nation’s outrage to help spur passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. I’ve walked every known step of that crime scene, from the site of the fire-bombed church that James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman came to inspect to the farm where they were found buried in an earthen dam.

I am possibly the last reporter who tried to interview Cecil Price, the Neshoba County deputy who released the three to the Klan and was one of the few who served time for the murders. The attempted interview did not go well. Less than a month later Price died after he fell from a forklift and fractured his skull.

Neshoba County also is home to one of America’s greatest business success stories, the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians.

Once among the poorest inhabitants of the state, which is really saying something in Mississippi, the tribe today is one of the state’s largest employers with more than $500 million in economic development projects and a $100 million annual payroll in manufacturing and tourism, as well as tribal education, health care and public safety. The diamond in the tribe’s crown is Pearl River Resort, with beautiful, busy, profitable casinos, a water park, fancy restaurants, a hotel and a championship golf course.

I knew the late Chief Phillip Martin personally, and he joked about “running out of Indians” for his many diverse enterprises. Indeed, the tribe today says half its workforce is non-Indian. Martin died in 2010 and the New York Times reported he “guided his tribe from grinding poverty in the red clay hills of east central Mississippi to become proprietor of one of the state’s leading business empires.”

In 2011, Phyliss J. Anderson was sworn in as the tribe’s first elected female chief.

Given Donald Trump’s problems in the casino business, maybe the family could spend some time on the reservation in Neshoba County instead of hanging out with The Sheriff.