OurTupelo

NEW ORLEANS – Notes and quotes from the Sugar Bowl:

The biggest news of Sugar Bowl Media Day Tuesday was splendid news for Ole Miss football fans.

All American running back Kewan Lacy pronounced himself “ready to go” for Thursday’s Sugar Bowl match with Georgia, and his coach, Pete Golding, confirmed Lacy’s status, saying, “I couldn’t agree with him more!”

“I am excited to watch (Lacy) got out and play and play really well,” Golding said.

Lacy has been one of the nation’s top rushers all season long for the 12-1 Rebels, running for 1,366 yards and 21 touchdowns on 273 carries. He suffered a shoulder injury in the Rebels’ first-round playoff victory over Tulane, which he called “just a little stinger in my AC joint.”

Georgia held Lacy to a season low 31 yards on 12 carries in the Bulldogs’ 43-35 victory at Athens, Georgia, on Oct. 18. Lacy did score two touchdowns, but Georgia, which never punted, came from behind in the fourth quarter to hand the Rebels their only regular season defeat.

Asked to compare Georgia’s defense with others he has faced, Lacy said, “Yeah. I’ll just say, they have more, bigger people.”

“But it’s football at the end of the day and it’s not about size,” Lacy said. “It’s about doing our job. I just feel like if we just go out and do our job, it’s going to be a great outcome.”

***

Meanwhile, Georgia’s injury report was mixed. The Bulldogs will be without starting defensive end Gabe Harris, who suffers from a painful turf toe injury. But Georgia will welcome the return of wide receiver Colbie Young, who hasn’t played since suffering a broken leg in the previous Ole Miss game. Young caught one 36-yard pass against the Rebels before the injury. He had caught 23 passes for 336 yards over the first seven games.

•••

During the Georgia portion of the Sugar Bowl Media Day, all the Georgia defensive linemen were gathered at two tables. Even when they were sitting, they were huge. They made big tables look small. During the Ole Miss portion of the two press conferences, Georgia’s physical size and strength came up over and over.

“Yeah, it’s Georgia,” Trinidad Chambliss said. “They’re going to have huge guys. They’re going to have five stars; they’re going to have four stars that are hungry. Their defensive line is always stacked with dudes that can be in the NFL any given day.”

Asked about Georgia’s defensive size, Golding smiled. “First of all, they’re big human beings,” he said. “They’re really strong, really powerful. … They got a very good pressure package to create some one-on-ones for those big guys. I think you really see their explosion and power come up when they get the one-on-one matchups. … They’ve always been very talented up front and well-coached and they do a good job with their plans. It will be tough for us.”

•••

The Trinidad Chambliss story – from Division II Ferris State to the Sugar Bowl – has become a national story, but there’s another poignant DII story on the Ole Miss team. Safety Wydette Williams began his college career at Delta State. Three years ago, he was more concerned with Gulf States Conference rival Valdosta State. Now he’s going against the Georgia Bulldogs in the Division I playoff quarterfinals and the Sugar Bowl.

Asked if he ever dreamed of playing in a game this big when he was at Delta State, Williams answered, “Yes, I always thought of it, at Delta State and even when I was a little kid. At Delta State, my biggest thing was to stay where my feet were, get better at what I was doing and keep grinding.”

Williams shares that Delta State background with his new head coach. Of Pete Golding, Williams said, “He knows where he comes from and I know where I come from. We’re connected like that.”

EAD ALSO: Smart vs, Golding: More similarities than differences

DENVER — Young gymnasts and their parents started raising red flags about a coach as far back as 2017 — the same year a watchdog agency was created in the wake of the Larry Nassar sexual-abuse scandal that nearly eviscerated USA Gymnastics and damaged the country’s entire Olympic movement.

But it took until 2022 for Sean Gardner to face any sanction from the U.S. Center for SafeSport, the independent agency created by Congress to investigate misconduct in Olympic sports. And it wasn’t until an Associated Press investigation this year that details emerged about the coach, whose arrest on child pornography charges in August was a turning point in a case one person involved called “Nassar 2.0.”

Now, a new AP investigation has found that months before Gardner’s arrest on allegations of installing cameras in a girls gym bathroom in Purvis, Mississippi, he was willing to accept a lifetime ban from coaching gymnastics as part of a deal where he would admit to the abuse, according to three people involved with SafeSport and its handling of the case.

A tangle of internal politics that included allegations of retaliation against employees inside SafeSport kept it from levying its harshest sanction, the people — who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation by SafeSport — told the AP.

With multiple alleged victims, new witnesses coming forward and Gardner’s history at three gyms in different states, the case became one of the most troubling of the 8-year-old agency’s investigations.

“It was like, ’Well, this is ‘Nassar 2.0,’ so let’s figure out what we can figure out and wrap it up,” one person said.

That person said there was never a clear reason given for why the center did not finalize the permanent ban.

Meanwhile, Gardner has pleaded not guilty to federal child pornography charges and remains jailed pending trial, set for March 2.

Experts point out key differences between temporary and lifetime bans

SafeSport’s inability to lock down a permanent ban is seen by critics as a fundamental failure that undermines one of its key missions — securing permanent sanctions against the most dangerous abusers.

Asked why SafeSport didn’t follow through, center spokesperson Hilary Nemchik said in a statement that she could not comment about those details.

But, she said, SafeSport “took swift action to protect athletes from harm upon receiving the first allegations of sexual misconduct. The restrictions in place during a temporary suspension and a permanent ban are the same.”

Regarding SafeSport’s handling of cases in general, the statement said, “even if a respondent agrees to a significant sanction, center staff are still required to ensure the respondent receives a fair process.”

While not specifically addressing the Gardner case, Nemchik added that the center is careful not to close cases “with inaccuracies or make findings that a respondent was not properly noticed on, because it could jeopardize the case and require the matter to be reopened.”

Gardner’s temporary suspension in July 2022 was put on SafeSport’s disciplinary database — a searchable list of those banned by the center, which updates the list but does not announce new or notable sanctions. The database requires users to know the name of a person they want to check on.

The permanent ban Gardner indicated he was ready to sign in early 2025 would have changed his status on the database and closed the investigation, the people familiar with the case told the AP.

It would have limited his ability to do more damage in a number of ways, experts familiar with SafeSport told AP. These include:

— Eliminating the possibility of the case going to arbitration and any need to reinterview and potentially retraumatize athletes.

— Removing the risk of any ban on Gardner being lifted if he were acquitted in his criminal case.

Just as importantly, it would have sent a clear message to parents, people in sports and possible employers, said attorney Michelle Simpson Tuegel, who represented gymnasts in the Nassar case.

“It communicates something that’s a final determination,” she said. “That means something. It’s not like it’s something that’s being adjudicated and maybe this guy is falsely accused.”

Gardner admitting potentially illegal activity to the SafeSport Center in early 2025 could also have provided law enforcement with more information in a case that didn’t result in his arrest until August, said attorney Steve Silvey, a longtime critic of the center.

“Did he abuse any people in the months that SafeSport was sitting on that information?” Silvey said. “And where did that fit into what the FBI knew” before it arrested him?

Despite being under temporary suspension from coaching gymnastics for two years, Gardner was able to land a job in May 2024 at MercyOne West Des Moines Medical Center as a surgical technologist, responsible for positioning patients on the operating room table and assisting with procedures and post-surgery care. A hospital spokesperson did not respond to a voicemail and email from the AP seeking comment.

Gardner’s attorney, Omodare Jupiter, also did not respond to an email and phone message from the AP asking questions about SafeSport’s handling of his client’s case.

A web of office politics and staffers fearful of retaliation

The people familiar with Gardner’s case told AP it got stuck in a web of internal SafeSport politics that led to HR complaints alleging retaliation and other concerns — and eventually to no lifetime ban being imposed.

They described a dysfunctional culture in which employees were afraid to speak up to their bosses about problems they encountered, including frustration over the center’s failure to close out the Gardner case.

They said SafeSport took a survey of employees earlier this year that produced troubling results. A slideshow presentation to employees, shared with the AP, cited: “Significant concerns about retaliation, perceived favoritism and unqualified promotions” within the center’s investigation and legal departments.

“If I say something, I may get punished without being told why,” read a quote from an employee.

Nemchik did not respond to a question from AP about what SafeSport did in reaction to the survey, which came shortly after CEO Ju’Riese Colon’s ouster in April, but acknowledged “short-term cultural challenges” that came after Colon’s departure.

Nemchik said in a statement that the center expects a new CEO to focus on “organizational excellence as the center evolves under new leadership to best fulfill our mission.”

Some allegations went under the radar for years

Since his arrest, Gardner’s sanction on SafeSport’s disciplinary database has been upgraded from “temporary suspension” to “ineligible” due to “criminal disposition involving a minor” and “sexual misconduct.”

A conviction would change Gardner’s sanction to permanently ineligible to coach gymnastics. That’s the status Gardner had agreed to in early 2025, according to notes on the case file from April, one person told the AP.

“People know what Larry Nassar did and how it happened, and you let it happen again?” said John Manly, an attorney for gymnasts in the Nassar and Gardner cases, when asked to compare the two. “This center’s one job is to protect child athletes from predators. And they are failing.”

Meanwhile, SafeSport, USA Gymnastics and coaches at the Iowa gym where Gardner worked are named as defendants in civil lawsuits filed by two gymnasts who say they didn’t do enough to protect them.

The lawsuits say that in December 2017, USA Gymnastics and SafeSport were notified by one girl’s parents of Gardner’s inappropriate behavior while coaching at Jump’In Gymnastics in Purvis, Mississippi.

Among the lawsuits’ allegations:

— “Gardner requiring minor gymnasts to hug him after every practice, including long, front-facing, two-armed hugs.”

— “Gardner disciplining and intimidating a minor gymnast by taking her into his office for a 25-minute closed-door meeting without parental consent, verbally abusing her, and then hugging and kissing her without consent.”

Both SafeSport and USA Gymnastics declined to comment on the litigation.

The criminal complaint that led to Gardner’s arrest says the FBI found files of videos on his computer that Gardner made with a hidden camera in a girls lavatory as young gymnasts undressed and went to the bathroom at the Mississippi gym. The videos date to at least December 2017 through mid-2018.

The SafeSport center has said USA Gymnastics notified it in January 2018 that one of its affiliated gyms had resolved a report involving Gardner. But, the center said, it didn’t investigate further because the report was not related to sexual misconduct and it did not receive detailed information.

Meanwhile, Gardner was able to land a job at Chow’s Gymnastics and Dance Institute in West Des Moines, Iowa, in 2018 — a gym owned by renowned coach Liang “Chow” Qiao that produced Olympians, including gold medalist Shawn Johnson.

Not until 2022, when new allegations of abuse were reported to SafeSport, did the Iowa gym fire Gardner and the center place him on temporary suspension. The gym and Qiao, which are both named in the lawsuits, did not return phone and email messages left by the AP.

It took another three years and an investigation by the AP to expose the depths of the allegations against Gardner — and the shortcomings of the watchdog agency created to protect athletes in the wake of the Nassar case.

Simpson Tuegel said it’s no surprise this case is being compared to Nassar’s.

“You look at the timeline and how many people knew and failed to protect children and allowed this person to keep having contact,” she said.

“And there really is a point that you see, in some of these cases, where it absolutely could have been stopped and it wasn’t.”

Associated Press reporter Ryan J. Foley in Iowa City, Iowa, contributed to this report.

This article is republished from Verite News, one of Mississippi Today’s partner publications in Deep South Today.

Sally was 14 years old when she was put on a ship leaving Port Pontchartrain in Milneburg, now part of New Orleans, presumably to continue a life of forced labor and other untold horror in Alabama. She stood 4 feet 8 inches tall. 

That’s all I know about her, a single line from a January 1844 slave manifest for the ship Fashion, written for its trip to Mobile. 

I found out about Sally earlier this month as I stood on the lowest level of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington, D.C. There, the tattered manifest, containing everything I’m ever likely to know about the girl,  was displayed behind glass, inspiring a flood of questions.

Who was Sally ripped away from? What was her life like before she was shipped away to Mobile?

Where did she end up — was Mobile the last place she would see, or was that just a transfer point?

How did she cope with the uncertainty of the devil she didn’t know?

A few paces away from the ship manifest, there was a poster advertising the sale of Isam, George, Betsy and Mary Jane, among others, at a slave auction at City Hotel on Common Street, in what’s now the New Orleans Central Business District. Isam had done enough in his roughly 40 years on Earth to warrant being described as “superior engineer and blacksmith … well known for character and qualification throughout the Parish of St. James.”

But the rest of them had much shorter CVs. There was a “house and confidential servant,” a “house girl,” a “field hand.” I wondered about them — these people whose entire lives were reduced to the roles that had been imposed on them — just as I had wondered about Sally. 

That ship manifest and slave auction poster are just two of the more than 150 artifacts of the centuries of dehumanization African-descended people endured at the hands of European settlers that are on view at the museum. These artifacts are proof of the immense suffering caused by the people who colonized the Americas, evidence of the exploitation used to birth the United States, watermarks that show exactly how much oppression a people can overcome.

And if it were up to President Donald Trump and his administration, I wouldn’t be able to see this history on display here. 

Since the early months of his second term, Trump has repeatedly criticized some of the ways that American history has been portrayed in the Smithsonian’s museums, demanding changes that reflect what he says is a more positive vision of this country’s story. Or, as critics see it, a whitewashing of that story. 

In Trump’s March executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” he wrote that the Smithsonian has “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.” Then, in August, his administration sent a letter to Lonnie Bunch, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and founding director of NMAAHC, stating that he was going to start an internal review of select Smithsonian museums ahead of July 4, 2026 — the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding.

“The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been,” Trump wrote that month on his social media platform, Truth Social. 

In the letter to Bunch, Trump’s aides outlined a timeline that the administration wants the Smithsonian to follow to ready its museums, including NMAAHC, the National Air and Space Museum and the National Museum of American History, to be seen by tourists visiting Washington, D.C. for the 250th anniversary celebration.

By Dec. 10, the museums were supposed to “begin implementing content corrections where necessary, replacing divisive or ideologically driven language with unifying, historically accurate, and constructive descriptions.”

It’s not yet clear what will become of the exhibits now on display in the museum. The Smithsonian Institution did not respond to multiple requests for comment, nor did White House officials.

All of this was alarming to me, a descendant of slaves whose roots in the Washington, D.C., region run deeper than the founding of the U.S., for a number of reasons. First, the Smithsonian museums — like the Hirshhorn Museum and the National Museum of the American Indian — are some of my favorite places to visit. To see their collections come under threat was worrying. Second, as a journalist, I value truth and accuracy not only in the first draft of history, but in all of its subsequent versions.

The third reason was the hardest to admit: I had never been to NMAAHC, and these threats to force revisions of museum materials meant that I may never be able to see the space as intended by the people who created it.

‘I took it for granted’

Black America was abuzz over the opening of the NMAAHC, or the “Blacksonian” as it came to be affectionately known, in 2016.  The museum was established in 2003 by an act introduced by Civil Rights icon John Lewis and signed into law by President George W. Bush. I learned more about all of the effort and energy that went into making the physical space a reality, including Bunch’s fight to have the museum located on prime real estate on the National Mall.

People I knew were excited that there was going to be a physical site that would contain a history long ignored by the mainstream in the U.S., one that was only fully taught in historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), Black studies departments, and in Black families. 

I was excited that it would be there, too, for others but I was less enthusiastic about going there myself. I was raised in a Black family that taught us about our community’s history (more on that later) and I went to an HBCU, so I knew a lot more about the history that would likely be contained in the museum than the average person.

And by the time the museum was going to open, I had grown tired of the focus on the symbolic advancement of Black people that became the norm during the Obama years. 

Right or wrong, I felt like there was more of an emphasis on the importance of representation  than on improving the material conditions of Black people in this country. The hype surrounding the opening of the museum — at first, tickets were so hard to come by they were treated almost as status symbols  — felt like more of the same.

Because of all of that, I ended up doing something that many people who grew up in the D.C. area do with the many attractions, historical sites and halls of powers that line the National Mall: I took the museum for granted.

It has the same sense of permanence that I think of when I think of the U.S. Capitol and Washington Monument (which I also hadn’t been inside of). The museum was something that I would visit eventually, but there was no rush.

All of that changed when I first read about the Trump administration’s demands of the Smithsonian Institution. I felt a mix of shame, guilt, stupidity and frustration. I felt like I had betrayed some duty to bear witness to the museum and the history it contained. I felt dumb for assuming that anything in this universe is permanent, let alone a monument to the history of a country that is itself only a few hundred years old. 

And I was annoyed that Trump and his operatives had even jeopardized my ability to act like a punky brat about visiting the museum.

I could no longer take it for granted.  So Dec. 10, I caught a plane from New Orleans to Washington, where I grew up, to get my first, and possibly last, look at what the Smithsonian describes as an attempt to present the “unvarnished truth of African American history and culture.”

‘It’s really heart-wrenching’

It was easy enough to find fans of the museum who had opinions about the Trump administration’s threats.

It was much more challenging, though, to find people who work or worked there who were willing to talk about how the museum is responding. For months, I sought out current or former employees of NMAAHC, and received minimal responses. The museum’s media team also didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. I also contacted people in leadership at organizations that helped get the Blacksonian off the ground as founding donors, but they didn’t want to talk either.

Finally, I was connected with Jordan Blanchard, who was an intern at the museum from 2017 to 2018, during the early years after the opening of the brick-and-mortar building. (The Smithsonian first launched a website for the museum in 2007, nine years before the grand opening of the physical space.)

Jordan’s internship at the NMAAHC was one of her first jobs. She grew up in New Orleans like her father, jazz trumpeter Terence Blanchard. But she spent breaks from school in Washington, D.C. — where her mother, Robin Burgess, is from — and visited Smithsonian museums while staying in town. (Terence Blanchard serves on Verite News’ board of advisers.)

“It was really always my comfort space to be in a building surrounded by old stuff,” she told me. So, when she took a gap year before college, she applied to the Smithsonian’s internship program, and her top choice was to work at the African-American museum.

The day of her job interview marked the first time she set foot in the building. As she walked in, she was distracted by a disagreement she’d had with her mother over what she should wear, she told me. But her focus quickly shifted once she began to explore the building.

Even though she was well-educated in Black history and the African diaspora, she was still blown away by the care put into telling the stories that made up the exhibits and designing the spaces where they were kept. She began at the lowest level of the building, where museum volunteers and regulars tell first-time visitors they should start. That floor contains artifacts and information about the Transatlantic Slave Trade and chattel slavery in America.

“It just gets so devastating from there, and then there’s a whole emotional roller coaster that you go on to sort of mimic the highs and lows of our broader journey as a population,” she said. “It’s really, honestly wild for anyone who’s never been there before.”

Blanchard’s year at the museum was formative. She was a public relations and marketing intern, so she had to study the museum’s exhibits to be able to communicate about them with visitors and the press. When family and friends came into town, she gave them tours and directed them to specific exhibits connected to their family and community histories. Working around so many Black women with advanced degrees gave her confidence, she said, that she carried with her as she earned master’s and doctoral degrees.

So it’s been frustrating for her to see the Trump administration raise issues with how the museum portrays Black history.

“I don’t think that there is much positivity at all in asking us to hide the injustices that our community has faced, specifically at the hands of white America,” she said. “And I’m very firm in not censoring that part of our history whatsoever, especially coming from the South, especially coming from a place like New Orleans.”

Everyone else I spoke with about the administration’s moves in relation to the Smithsonian shared Blanchard’s frustration. A scholar who has conducted research at the museum spoke with me on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation for speaking out against the Trump administration. She said that working at the Blacksonian was “an experience of a lifetime” and that the pressure placed on the museum by the administration is “horrific.”

“It’s really heart-wrenching because … it took so much energy and effort to finally get off the ground, and it is not even a decade old and it’s already being undone in some ways or sidetracked from its vision,” she said.

Divisive and dangerous

Avatara Smith-Carrington, associate counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said that the letter to Bunch is part of an “ongoing attack” on teaching Black history and culture by not just the Trump administration, but conservative legislators across the U.S., including in K-12 and post-secondary institutions. In 2020, during his first term, Trump signed an executive order meant to discourage the teaching of what his administration called “divisive concepts” about racism and sexism in federal agencies, civil service, and the military.

Between then and late last year, state legislatures passed 51 laws restricting race education, according to reporting from The Washington Post. Some of these, like Florida’s 2022 Stop WOKE Act and similar laws passed in Texas, Tennessee and Oklahoma, effectively prohibit public K-12 schools from teaching about the role of race in shaping America. The Smithsonian, Smith-Carrington said, is just a new theater in the war over public education.

“It is an escalation,” they said, “We’re talking about historical sites across the country that are being impacted by the administration’s efforts to essentially write their own version of what is American history that not only excludes Black people, Black culture and Black history, but also minimizes the ways in which Black people have persevered.”

Recent efforts to censor Black history are “just plain dangerous,” Chandra Manning, a historian who teaches about slavery, the Civil War and emancipation at Georgetown University, told me. We spoke at the onset of the 43-day shutdown of the federal government this fall, which came just after I initially booked my trip to go see the Blacksonian for the first time.

At the time, given the shutdown, which temporarily closed the museum, I told her I was worried I might not see it before alterations were made to exhibits.

She couldn’t offer any reassurances.

Instead, she shared her worries with me about the push to revise American history to exclude the struggles historically marginalized groups have had to overcome in order to survive.

“This looks like a concerted effort to edit out periods of conflict, and in particular, to edit out anything to do with anybody who’s not white,” she said. “And that is dangerous.”

That’s because, she said, that the erasure of a group or groups from the past can serve to make erasing them now and in the future seem more legit.

I reached out to Smith-Carrington and Manning both because they work with groups who, in one form or another, are doing something to preserve Black history.

About a month after Trump name-checked the Smithsonian leadership in his “Restoring Sanity” executive order, a coalition of civil rights organizations, including the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the National Urban League and African American Policy Forum, vowed to defend Black history from censorship A few days later, leaders of some of those organizations, including former New Orleans mayor and Urban League President Marc Morial, led a march of hundreds of people on the National Mall to the NMAAHC (Morial serves on Verite News’ board of advisers).

The Legal Defense Fund has litigated on behalf of the NAACP to challenge legislation meant to curb the teaching of Black history in public K-12 schools, most recently in a lawsuit against the state of South Carolina over a new law restricting how public schools can teach about the history of racial inequality.  

When I asked Smith-Carrington if the LDF would sue to stop the push to review and potentially alter material in the Smithsonian museums, they said the LDF is “committed to exploring all avenues in terms of supporting efforts that will allow for Black history and culture to continue to be shown,” but said that support could take the form of policy development, organizing or communications, not just litigation.

And just days after the Trump administration published its August letter to Bunch, Manning co-founded Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian with fellow historian James Millward and technologist Jessica Dickinson Goodman. The project is an effort to digitally preserve the exhibits of the Smithsonian museums, the National Zoo and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Over the course of seven weeks beginning in August, more than 1,500 volunteers took nearly 50,000 photos and videos of exhibits at these institutions and documented 100 percent of Smithsonian exhibits, according to the group’s website.

“We certainly aren’t capturing the full story of the Smithsonian by a long shot, but we are capturing one little thing, and that is a snapshot of” what the exhibits looked like in 2025, before any changes were made, Manning told me.

That was reassuring, actually. Still, I needed to see the Blacksonian for myself.

‘What we create’

I was on the second floor from the bottom at the museum when an eerie familiarity set in — the warble of an organ playing gospel music: I realized I was walking into a recreation of a funeral. I walked down a narrow hallway that opened up into a small room with pictures and information on some of the walls and a couple rows of pews. Most of the room was dimly-lit, except for a bright set of lights shining on the casket of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Black boy who was abducted and lynched in Mississippi in 1955 after being accused of whistling at and grabbing a white woman (the woman in question later said her testimony as to what happened was a fabrication).

A deluge of sadness, anger and desperation — the kind of desperation to reverse a tragedy that can’t be undone — engulfed me as I walked up to his casket. It was the boy’s real casket, which was donated to the museum in 2009. After a few moments standing in front of the casket, I became overwhelmed and had to sit down in a pew. 

A burgeoning of tears that accumulated during my tour through dozens of exhibits about slavery and Jim Crow crested and crashed, and I began crying.

There was a placard in front of the stage where his casket lay that reminded me that we share the same birthday. He was born two years before my dad, and his middle name, Louis, was my dad’s first. My first name is the same as the city where he was lynched: Drew, Mississippi. I remembered the three Black men — my father, my brother, Damon, and my childhood friend, Alex — whose funerals and memorials I attended over the last six years.

Immersive experiences like the one I had at the Emmett Till memorial are important to conveying the suffering that Black people experienced throughout American history, and one of the specialties of the Blacksonian. 

It was clear to me that there was a lot of attention paid to dimension and atmosphere, especially in the museum’s lower levels. A dark, cramped room toward the beginning of the “Slavery and Freedom” section of the museum gives a sense of the space Africans were forced into on slave ships on the Middle Passage.

At one point, as I walked through that section, I heard a young man declare, “This is crazy,” as he got the attention of his family and ushered them over to what he was looking at. He showed them a paragraph describing how slaves were stripped of their religion. The rest of his family were just as surprised as he was.

And, I think, this is at least one reason why all of the people who spoke with me about the threats to teaching about the horrors of America’s past at the Smithsonian — and public education in general — are worried. People aren’t even fully aware of all of the suffering and struggle that so many endured in order to create this country. So the push to censor public education, whether it be in schools or museums, is part of an attempt to halt and reverse the material gains made by historically marginalized groups.

To try to water down the parts of the museum that the Trump administration might consider “divisive,” as it described in its letter, would also lessen the effectiveness of the design of the museum. As someone who loves museums in general and appreciates the art of educational design in particular, the Blacksonian was far and above other museums in terms of its thoughtfulness about how to present concepts and immerse visitors in their learning.

The Interactive Lunch Counter exhibit on the same level of the museum as the Emmett Till Memorial places visitors in the shoes of those who participated in the sit-in movement through a choose-your-own-adventure game. A few floors up from that, there’s an area where people can start to research their family histories. A genealogist is there on Tuesdays and Thursdays to guide people through that process. Bars, bunks and a toilet, all made of metal, that used to furnish a cell at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola are on display.

And in the museum’s Musical Crossroads section, the Mothership from Parliament-Funkadelic’s stage show is hanging from the ceiling, there is a pretend record shop where people can learn about music from across the African diaspora, and there is an interactive exhibit where visitors can create compositions using samples of music from a variety of Black music genres. I can’t believe I slept on this museum for so long.

One of the things that I noticed about the museum’s lower levels — where slavery, segregation and white supremacy are heavily discussed — is that many of the displays and exhibits can’t easily be scrubbed away. Quotes about the horrors of anti-Black racism are painted onto the walls. The names of Black people who were lynched during the Jim Crow era are etched into glass. The truth about the centuries of slavery and segregation Black people experienced in the U.S. is inextricably linked to the building, as it is with the history of the country. 

When I went home to visit the museum, I spoke with one of my older cousins, Nadia Conyers. She was an NMAAHC Ambassador in its early years, meaning she donated to the museum and promoted it in the community. In return, she was able to do cool stuff like attend the museum’s opening night in 2016, bringing my little cousin DJ, when he was still in elementary school.

We talked in the living room of the home that she and her husband bought from my godmother, on either side of a coffee table with a glass top that had pictures of multiple generations of our family underneath. She said that the Blacksonian tells a more complete history not just of Black Americans, but also of white Americans. And it tells the story of all of the ways a people can overcome such ubiquitous oppression over the course of time.

“I think that the museum speaks directly to when we’re put in those situations, what we create and what happens as a result,” she said. “And that is terrifying to people in an administration like that, and to have that symbol in your backyard, of, even if you do this to us, this is what we can do. He doesn’t want that. That’s too much.”

Nadia and I are both the grandchildren of Phyllis Costley, a woman who, along with other parents in Arlington, Virginia, successfully fought to desegregate schools in the state in the face of massive resistance. We’re both descended from a family of educators. So we both know the importance of knowing Black history and passing the word down.

And, well, she’s my big cousin.

So I wasn’t surprised at her reaction when I told her that I hadn’t gone to the museum until a couple of days before we spoke. But the reason for her response surprised me.

“I’m astonished, because coming from where we come from, we take the Smithsonian for granted, because we live here, right?” she said. “But to hear that you didn’t go to the African American museum is wild to me because as the grandchild who is the storyteller of all of us, I’m like, how is it that you didn’t go to the museum? You being the child of your father, who was someone who was a history buff. It’s like one plus one equals two.”

I assumed that there would be some relatively broad reasoning for her astonishment that I hadn’t visited before, like “all Black people have a duty to go,” or something like that. But when she said that I have a role within our family as a storyteller and a love for history that I got from my father, my prior negligence carried new depth and weight. It reminded me of a concept that I learned in my young adulthood that has stuck with me over the years: sankofa.

Sankofa, a word that comes from the Akan language of Ghana, has evolved in the Black community over time to mean that we can learn from the past to build the future. The two literal translations I found online are “it is not taboo to go back and fetch what you forgot” and “it is not taboo to fetch what is at risk of being left behind.” I was taught that it’s imperative to learn from the past in order to inform the future and that you are sent off into the world to acquire skills and knowledge that you then use to help your village. This isn’t only a quaint piece of wisdom passed down through generations — it is a matter of survival.

I’m grateful that I finally made my pilgrimage to the NMAAHC and got to it before the Trump administration could. When I first walked in, I felt a settling in my shoulders and chest, a release of tension, like sitting on the couch at home after a long journey. Walking through the museum for the first time was like engaging with a work of art that is exhilarating as a complete piece but promises individual delightful layers.

I hope that the haven that I found remains in the hands of those who so carefully crafted it. And I hope that we can all learn from the story they are telling.

Mafia hitman Gregory Scarpa Sr. pocketed millions from drug dealing, donned a seven-carat pinky ring and shot to death so many people that he stopped counting at 50.

Oh, and he helped the FBI solve who killed Mississippi NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer Sr.

Hollywood plans to release a movie next year on Scarpa’s role in the Dahmer case, “By Any Means,” starring Mark Wahlberg as the mobster.

The film’s producer, Alex Lebovici, who attended the 100th birthday of Dahmer’s widow, Ellie, in June, said the filmmakers are portraying Dahmer as the family man and brave NAACP leader he was. 

Dahmer’s daughter, Bettie, cooperated with filmmakers and watched them shoot scenes in Georgia. “The way the movie is portrayed, it’s not about Vernon Dahmer, it’s about Gregory Scarpa,” she said. “I have no problem with it.”

Her brother, Dennis, worries that audiences will wrongly associate his right-thinking father with the rotten mobster. “His legacy deserves to be told truthfully about who he was,” he said, “and not intermeshed with fictional characters and a vigilante justice storyline that did not happen.”

The Dahmer family regularly meets with students on the Sojourn to the Past tours to tell Vernon Dahmer’s story. Sojourn Executive Director Jeff Steinberg said he hopes publicity surrounding the film will encourage people to learn more about Dahmer. “He’s a true American hero who belongs in our history books,” he said. “He and his family inspire us all.”

On Jan. 10, 1966, a day after Black citizens learned they could pay their poll taxes at Dahmer’s store north of Hattiesburg, Klansmen firebombed his store and home north of Hattiesburg. Dahmer grabbed his shotgun and fired back at the Klansmen so that his family could escape. 

The flames seared his lungs. That night at the hospital, as he neared death, a reporter asked why he had continued to push for voting rights, knowing it might cost him his life. Dahmer replied, “If you don’t vote, you don’t count.”

A few weeks later, his voter registration card arrived. He had fought his whole life for the right of all Americans to be able to vote, but he had never been able to cast a ballot himself.

In 1964, Joseph Sullivan, known by fellow agents as a by-the-book inspector, headed up the FBI’s investigation into a different Mississippi case, the KKK’s killings of three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, which became known as the “Mississippi Burning” case or MIBURN for short.

But as agents closed in on members of the White Knights of the KKK in 1966, they became targets. Armed Klansmen shot out agents’ windows, and one agent found a rattlesnake in his car.

Roy K. Moore, the former Marine and head of the FBI in Mississippi, decided to fight fire with fire, according to former agents. He sent in a request to the FBI to use informant NY-3461 for his operation in Mississippi. 

That informant was Scarpa, who carried the nickname, “The Grim Reaper,” because of how many people he killed for the Colombo crime family.  He had managed to dodge a bank robbery charge by becoming an FBI informant.

In January 1966, Scarpa and an FBI agent entered Byrd’s Radio & TV Service in Laurel, Mississippi. Inside they found the bug-eyed owner, Lawrence Byrd, a suspect in Dahmer’s killing. Scarpa and the agent bought a TV and asked for Byrd’s help loading it.

Once there, Scarpa and the agent shoved Byrd into the car and hauled him to a remote area, where the mobster pistol-whipped him. After that, Byrd gave the FBI a 22-page confession, which identified Cecil Sessum as an exalted cyclops in the White Knights.

Sessum confessed, too, describing how he and other armed Klansmen pumped gasoline into a dozen jugs before heading to the Dahmer home. He said the only reason he confessed was that agents beat him, made him kneel on Dahmer’s grave and put a pistol to his head. The FBI denied the claim, and the court upheld his conviction.

Juries ultimately convicted four men — Sessum, Byrd, William Thomas Smith and Charles Clifford Wilson — on murder or arson charges. Mississippi governors freed them early.

It wasn’t until 1998 that Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers was convicted of ordering the attack on Dahmer. Bowers died in prison in 2006 while serving a life sentence.

As for Scarpa, he remained a top FBI informant for much of the rest of his life. He ratted on rivals while rubbing out mob foes.

The new movie opens with Scarpa beating KKK leader Edgar Ray Killen with a baseball bat to learn the location of the bodies of the civil rights workers.

Scarpa told a similar story before his death that ABC News and other news outlets have published.

Except former FBI agents say it isn’t true. They say the revelation of the bodies’ location actually came from Mr. X, a Mississippi highway patrolman who knew the Klansmen and told Inspector Sullivan that the bodies were buried in the Old Jolly Dam. Four days later, agents found the bodies there.

In 2007, Scarpa’s girlfriend, Linda Schiro, repeated his claim, but the details she shared — Scarpa tracking down a Klansman who sold TVs, buying a TV set and threatening to kill him — describe what Scarpa did in the Dahmer case.

As for the new movie on Scarpa, Lebovici said the script by Sascha Penn and Theodore Witcher, based on the book “Deal with the Devil: The FBI’s Secret Thirty-Year Relationship with a Mafia Killer” attracted him to the project.

The screenplay appeared on the Black List, a compilation of “most-liked” scripts by film executives that had yet to be produced. “We fell for the material,” Lebovici said. “We thought it was extraordinarily compelling, such a phenomenal story.”

Dahmer’s son, Dennis, had a different reaction. He finished about a third of the script before stopping, he said. “It’s fiction. They’re creating a Black FBI agent that didn’t exist.”

After J. Edgar Hoover began directing the FBI in 1924, he fired what few female special agents there were and kept the FBI Academy from admitting Black men until 1962.

Lebovici said the Black agent portrayed in the film is a composite character, who grew up in Mississippi before moving to Chicago. When the agent returns to Mississippi, “he’s relegated to the file room, but he’s got a relationship with the Dahmers.”

In the script, the FBI assigns the agent to work as a driver for Scarpa, and the two team up to work on the Dahmer case.

Lebovici said producers plan to show the film to possible distributors next year.

Through the movie, he said he hopes viewers can glimpse the hatred of these days and wrestle with the moral question: “Is violence justified in moments like this?” 

Over the past few years, this nation has seen an increase in assassinations and other political violence, he said. “Things are getting out of control. It’s very relevant to what’s going on right now.”

Mississippi will receive nearly $206 million in the 2026 fiscal year as a part of a federal program that aims to transform rural health care and offset budget cuts that could harm rural hospitals.  

Awards were made to all 50 states as a part of a five-year, $50 billion federal investment into rural health care. The amounts average $200 million and range from $147 million to $281 million. Texas and Alaska will receive the largest shares of funding, while Connecticut and New Jersey were granted the smallest amounts. 

“Today marks an extraordinary milestone for rural health in America,” said Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz in a Dec. 29 press release. “Thanks to Congress establishing this investment and President Trump for his leadership, states are stepping forward with bold, creative plans to expand rural access, strengthen their workforces, modernize care, and support the communities that keep our nation running.”

The funding program was tacked on to President Donald Trump’s tax-and-spending law passed this summer, which is expected to result in significant losses to federal Medicaid spending in rural areas. Congressional Republicans added the one-time money for rural health to soften the blow associated with the cuts. 

Half of the $50 billion program is to be distributed evenly among all states with approved applications. Awards for the other half of the funding were determined based on a formula that calculated states’ rurality, the quality of its application and implementation of several policies aligned with the White House’s Make America Healthy Again agenda.

Mississippi has recently taken steps to adopt policies that receive higher scores, including reestablishing the Presidential Fitness Test in schools and seeking a waiver to restrict purchases of sugary foods and drinks through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, in October.

An estimated $137 billion in cuts to federal Medicaid spending are expected in rural areas over 10 years, meaning Rural Health Transformation Program funds will offset roughly a third of those cuts, according to analysis from KFF. 

More than half of Mississippi’s rural hospitals are at risk of closing, according to a recent report by the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform. Hospital leaders have warned that the federal cuts could force more rural hospitals to stop some services or close their doors altogether. 

In Mississippi, cuts to state-directed payments, which help hospitals offset low Medicaid payments, will amount to a loss of $160 million a year statewide beginning in 2029, Mississippi Medicaid Director Cindy Bradshaw told lawmakers in September. 

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released application summaries on Dec. 29 submitted by each state.

According to the summary, Mississippi’s plan consists of six initiatives: 

A statewide rural health assessment will refine investment strategies and align critical rural health needs with funding after a review of data and stakeholder input.

To improve emergency response, coordination of care after discharge and access to behavioral health services, the coordinated regional integrated systems initiative will integrate emergency medical services, hospitals, public health and social services into regional healthcare districts.

A workforce expansion initiative includes retention awards, residency expansion, preceptor development, early-career outreach and “Earn While You Learn” programs to recruit, retain and train clinicians, allied health professionals and support staff.

The health technology advancement and modernization and telehealth adoption and provider support initiatives will modernize health internet technology and advance telehealth infrastructure, cybersecurity and consumer-facing tools to improve efficiency, coordination and access.

The building rural infrastructure for delivery, growth and efficiency initiative will address capital investments, psychiatric emergency services and care gap closure. It will include pilot programs for early intervention, Autism Spectrum Disorder-focused, care management and value-based care programs, and capital investments will be aimed at expanding facility capacity and specialized services.

No subawardees have yet been awarded as a part of Mississippi’s plan, according to the summary. Agreements will be established when the project is implemented and may be formed with rural hospitals, federally qualified health centers, primary care clinics, community health centers, technology and telehealth vendors, universities and professional associations. 

Republican Gov. Tate Reeves, whose office oversaw the development of Mississippi’s plan, unveiled the state’s plan at a Nov. 4 press conference but did not release its application or application summary to the public, like most other states. Mississippi is one of four states that did not publicly release documents pertaining to its plan, and many states released full or partial application documents, according to data from KFF last updated on Dec. 23. 

Reeves’ office denied Mississippi Today’s public records request for the application, saying the requested records “appear to be confidential under Federal law” until awards are made, citing the same document that says states may post plans to their websites at their discretion. 

It also pointed to a state law that exempts public bodies from the Mississippi Public Records Act’s deadlines during procurement. The law does not bar the state from releasing the records, but says it is not required to meet the usual deadlines until contracts are awarded.

On Jan. 15, Adam Ganucheau, then the editor-in-chief of Mississippi Today, announced the inception of Mississippi Today Ideas. On that same day, Mississippi Today Ideas’ inaugural guest essay, written by Civil Rights icon Myrlie Evers, was published.

The calendar is close enough to the anniversary of the announcement and Evers’ inaugural essay to proclaim that Mississippi Today Ideas has been in existence for a year.

And while in many ways we are just getting started, what a first year it has been for MT Ideas. We have heard from famous Mississippians, such as former governors, Mississippi-born music legend Marty Stuart and from everyday Mississippians who we believed had important information to share.

Just in the month of December as Mississippi Today Ideas closed out its first year in existence, we published essays from acclaimed Mississippi-born movie director Tate Taylor about the rededication of a historically significant church in southwest Mississippi and from central Mississippi middle school teacher Brandy Richardson who is toiling to improve the educational outcome of her students.

The Ideas section publishes opinion pieces from both Mississippi Today staff and from guest writers. We look for essays that inform the readers about our state and about the communities where we live and hopefully the writers on occasion suggest solutions to the issues facing our state and communities.

“Mississippi Today Ideas will serve as a platform for thoughtful Mississippians to share fact-based ideas about our state’s past, present and future,” Ganucheau wrote in announcing the inception of Mississippi Today Ideas on Jan. 15. “Rather than following a traditional newspaper opinion section format, the section will strive to focus on creative, constructive solutions that address Mississippi’s unique challenges and inspire progress.”

We also strive to publish quality writing. People who read the MT Ideas section will be impressed with the quality of many of the essays.

In a very real sense, Myrlie Evers had to write the first essay for Mississippi Today Ideas. She, better than any person, bridges the state’s bad and good. No one has more reason to despise her native state than her, who lost her husband, Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers, to a racist assassin who for decades Mississippians refused to punish despite overwhelming evidence. The assassin was finally convicted in 1994. Myrlie Evers wrote about her native state and proclaimed in the essay in 2025, “I still believe in Mississippi.”

How powerful.

Mississippi Today has published 94 guest essays – an average of nearly two per week. We also have published 70 staff written pieces for MT Ideas.

The most read Mississippi Today Ideas offering for the past year was an essay by Ole Miss quarterback legend Archie Manning.

Manning, who has spent his adult life living in nearby New Orleans where for most of his professional football career played for the Saints, wrote about how he has throughout his life maintained his love for Mississippi and remains involved in various entrepreneurial endeavors in his native state.

The realization that Manning’s guest essay was the most read Mississippi Today Ideas’ submission resuscitated a memory of watching a first college football game, the nationally televised Ole Miss-Alabama game in 1969. Manning set multiple Southeastern Conference records in that epic contest, producing legions of long-time Manning fans.

Manning in many ways bridges the state’s past and present.

Read the most read essays of the past year below and sign up for the MT Ideas newsletter to get essays in your inbox on the last day of each month.

Archie Manning: Despite New Orleans roots and broader legacy, Mississippi is still home

Archie Manning writes: “As I go from place to place in Mississippi both in my travels and in my mind’s eye, I realize what I love most about my home state. It’s the people. There’s no place like Mississippi and no people like the folks in Mississippi.”

How Jim Barksdale’s $100 million gift to the state 25 years ago led to ‘The Mississippi Miracle’

Twenty-five years ago, Jim Barksdale and his late wife Sally gifted the state of Mississippi $100 million to create a program aimed at boosting public school reading. Here’s the behind-the-scenes story on the return on investment, since dubbed “The Mississippi Miracle.”

Attorney questions state Auditor White using his post to attack private citizens

Attorney: Auditor Shad White – the first millennial to serve in statewide office in Mississippi – chose to weaponize his platform and power against two women for expressing their views on their personal social media accounts.

Ex Madison resident ran from Mississippi but is now pulling for Lane Kiffin and the state

Despite a bad Mississippi childhood, writer says, “I find myself rooting for Lane Kiffin to stay, and in a strange way, rooting for the people of Mississippi.”

Marty Stuart: Showcasing my love for country music with a new hometown museum

Marty Stuart: “The Congress of Country Music, an endeavor born out of passion, dedication and an abiding respect and admiration for the roots of country music, is now under construction in my hometown.”

Policy analyst: Income tax elimination risks significant harm to Mississippi’s future

If the income tax is fully eliminated, the state’s wealthiest residents would receive a $41,000 tax break, close to the state’s average annual salary. 

Derrick Simmons: Monday’s Confederate Memorial Day recognition is awful for Mississippians

State Sen. Derrick Simmons writes that Mississippi officially celebrating Confederate Memorial Day is bad policy, bad governance and a deep stain on the values we uphold today.

Mississippi still officially celebrates Robert E. Lee on MLK Day. It’s beyond time to stop.

Column: On Jan. 20, Mississippi officially commemorates both Robert E. Lee and Martin Luther King Jr. It’s beyond time the state stops celebrating Lee, a Confederate who chose treason and human bondage over country.

My grandfather’s law firm just bowed to Trump. It goes against his and America’s values.

Essay: My grandfather’s New York law firm just bowed to the Trump administration. That decision goes against what my grandfather — and our nation’s founders — stood for.

Attorney: 1970s Air Force DEI training ‘changed my life,’ but is now illegal in Mississippi

Professor says, “Important lessons the Air Force taught my father would be illegal today, 55 years later, if presented in any Mississippi school or university.”

Mississippi Today journalists this year provided in-depth coverage that holds public officials accountable, shines a light on issues affecting people’s everyday lives and provides a sense of place in this complex state we call home.

Our justice, politics and health teams have continued to expose conditions in state prisons and county jails, including problems with medical care. 

The politics reporters dug beneath the surface of legislative coverage, reporting on how companies that want to spread sports betting in Mississippi paid for the state House speaker and his staff to attend the Super Bowl.

Our health team examined Mississippi’s rate of C-sections, reported on the impact of the federal government shutdown and provided in-depth coverage of how state and local governments have spent opioid lawsuit settlement money.

Our education team reported on teacher pay, Jackson State University’s presidential search and the cultural traditions of high school homecoming in the Mississippi Delta.

Journalists covering Jackson created an in-depth voters’ guide before elections and explained challenges for the capital city, including blight and water billing.

Our environment reporter wrote about the impacts of climate change in Mississippi, including on the insurance market. 

Mississippi Today’s sports coverage provided thoughtful insight about something important to so many people — college football.

Through our Mississippi Ideas section, we have provided a forum for a wide range of people to write interesting, thoughtful essays.

Our video team has ramped up this year, opening our work to millions of people, both on our site and on social media.

As always, we are grateful for your support, whether it is through financial contributions or through reading our articles, looking at our photos and videos and listening to our podcasts.

Nate Rosenfield and Brian Howey examined the power of sheriffs’ offices in Mississippi as part of The Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship. Jerry Mitchell is an investigative reporter who has examined civil rights-era cold murder cases in the state for more than 30 years. This article was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism, the Alicia Patterson Foundation and the Pulitzer Center.

For months, Chancellor Berrong, a 26-year-old in prison for assault and kidnapping, has been trying to tell authorities that he killed a man in a Mississippi jail seven years ago.

He told a prison guard that he had information about the crime, attempted to confess to a detective and gave a written confession to a prison warden, he said, but agents with the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, the state agency that typically investigates in-custody deaths, took no action.

In interviews, Berrong said that he attacked William Wade Aycock IV at the request of a guard in 2018. That allegation is disputed by a former inmate, who told reporters he overheard Berrong and others planning the assault to stop Aycock from implicating a member of their gang in an unrelated crime.

Previous reporting on the Rankin County Adult Detention Center, where Aycock died, revealed that for years, guards relied on some inmates as an attack squad to help keep order and to retaliate against trouble‌-‌makers.

A review of the initial investigation of the death reveals that authorities took steps that could have hindered a full accounting of what happened. Guards and inmates cleaned the cell where Aycock died with bleach before the state investigators arrived, according to four witnesses. In addition, the MBI’s investigation file contains no photos of the cell, no security camera footage and no notes from interviews with inmates.

Days after the death, MBI agents and the state medical examiner determined that Aycock died by accident after falling off ‌his bunk bed — without documenting the evidence that led them to this conclusion.

Mississippi Today and The New York Times have uncovered evidence that supports Berrong’s confession and suggests that the authorities ignored or destroyed evidence that could have helped solve the case. His account is the latest allegation of wrongdoing by law enforcement in Rankin County, a Jackson suburb where sheriff’s deputies have been accused of torturing suspected drug users.

Jason Dare, the spokesperson and attorney for the sheriff’s department, said he had forwarded reporters’ request for comment to the MBI. He declined to comment further.

The commissioner of the Mississippi Department of Public Safety, Sean Tindell, said that the MBI would reopen the case based on the new information.

Berrong, a member of the Latin Kings street gang with a long criminal record, said that in June 2018, he yanked a sleeping Aycock off the top bunk in his cell, slammed him to the floor and stomped on his head. He said he never intended to kill the man, just to send him a message to keep his mouth shut.

Berrong said he has come forward out of a sense of guilt.

For seven years, he said, he had gotten away with the crime, in part because of missteps in the investigation. Shortly after killing Aycock, he watched a group of inmates and guards soak up the blood, which had spread past the cell door, and douse the cell in bleach.

A former inmate named John Phillips said he cleaned the cell before the MBI arrived and compared the scene to a horror film. Two former guards who spoke on the condition of anonymity witnessed the cleanup and confirmed the former inmates’ accounts.

When the investigators arrived, they were “angrily talking with each other about the fact that the whole cell has been bleached,” Berrong said. “They said, ‘There’s nothing here.’”

The MBI’s investigative report on Aycock’s death, provided by Tindell, makes no mention of the cleanup.

Tindell said he spoke with the agent responsible for the report, who said he did not recall the cell being cleaned or seeing men enter Aycock’s cell in security camera footage. Tindell said the footage was not preserved by the MBI.

The Rankin County Sheriff’s Department declined to release investigative records related to the case, citing a state law that allows police agencies to withhold such materials.

The MBI’s file on the case amounts to a two-paragraph summary of the investigation and the autopsy report. There are no photos ‌or security camera footage and no interview descriptions, even though several inmates said they were interrogated by investigators.

“The reporting at the time obviously left some things to be desired,” Tindell said in an interview.

In the years since he took over the department in 2020, the agency has improved its record-keeping practices by “making sure that we had witness lists, that we had narratives, that there was a narrative for everybody that you interviewed and that supervisors had to review their work,” he said. “In this report, there’s none of those things.”

Two days after the MBI filed its report concluding that Aycock had died from an accidental fall, the Mississippi state medical examiner ruled his death an accident.‌‌

Three pathologists who reviewed the autopsy at the request of reporters said that while it was reasonable to conclude he had died accidentally given what the authorities knew at the time, Berrong’s account aligned with the injuries recorded in Aycock’s autopsy.

Dr. Thomas Andrew, the former chief medical examiner of New Hampshire, said that he would have told the agents assigned to the case to investigate further before he could reach a determination.

Details missing from the report, like pictures of Aycock’s cell and security camera footage, could have led examiners to a different conclusion, he said.

The MBI had an opportunity to reopen the case in 2022, when an inmate eyewitness told a Rankin County Sheriff’s Department detective that he had seen Berrong and another inmate leave Aycock’s cell moments before guards found him lying in a pool of blood.

The witness, who was being held in the jail in 2018, spoke to reporters on the condition of anonymity, citing fears of retaliation from Berrong’s associates.

The detective relayed the information to an MBI agent, the eyewitness said, but the authorities never contacted him again. The witness said that he also wrote a letter to the MBI detailing what he had seen, and that his son called the Rankin County District Attorney’s Office to report the information, but they never heard back from the agencies.

The district attorney’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

Aycock’s parents said they have long suspected that their son was killed. They described him as a jokester and as a loving father to his two daughters.

While grateful to have more answers about their son’s death, they said they were left with questions about how the sheriff’s office and the MBI investigated the case.

“ We’ve gone seven years wondering what happened,” Aycock’s mother, Laurenda Provias, said. “I’m ready for closure.

Berrong said his guilt over the killing has been eating at him for years.

“All I could think about was the fact that nothing was ever done,” Berrong said. “ What if it was me in a county jail that had been stomped to death and killed and nobody was ever charged?”

Over the past five months, he has tried to confess to the authorities on several occasions, he said.

While incarcerated at a state facility in Kemper County this year, Berrong said, he told a sheriff’s detective, Steve Windish, that he wanted to share information about Aycock’s death.

Windish said that he contacted an investigator at another agency to share that there might be new information on the case, but that the investigator said they had no interest in speaking to Berrong because they had spoken to him previously.

Berrong said that he and the other inmates in his cellblock were interviewed by MBI agents the day after Aycock’s death, but he did not confess at the time.

Windish said he could not remember whether the investigator who declined to interview Berrong worked for the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department or the MBI.

Berrong said that he also began confessing to a Wilkinson County Correctional Facility guard, but that the guard interrupted him and said it was above his paygrade.

Berrong’s most recent attempt to confess came a few months ago, he said, when he gave a written statement to a deputy warden at the prison where he is serving a 20-year sentence.

Two law enforcement officers visited him afterward and gave him paperwork detailing his confession, he said, but he lost it when guards searched his cell for contraband.

Tindell said that the MBI has no record of these interactions and that if agents had received these tips, he was unsure why they would not have responded.

“ When people contact us,” Tindell said, “ if there’s a stage in our organization where it’s just not being documented, then we need to address that.”

After repeated attempts to get the attention of the authorities, Berrong described Aycock’s death to reporters this month.

Berrong said several of his associates in the Latin Kings street gang assisted in the fatal assault by leading Aycock’s cellmate away from their cell and keeping watch while Berrong slipped inside.

After slamming Aycock to the floor, Berrong said, he stomped on his head as blood poured from his nose and ears. He could hear Aycock struggling to breathe as he fled the cell, a sound that still haunts him.

The former inmate who witnessed the encounter said that when Berrong and another inmate fled the cell, one of them had blood on his clothes.

After the attack, Berrong said, he returned to his own cell, showered and used the sharp edge of his bunk bed frame to cut his uniform into strips that he flushed down the toilet.

When guards found Aycock, they called paramedics, who took him to a nearby hospital where he was pronounced dead.

The account of the former inmate who witnessed the events largely aligned with Berrong’s, but it differed in one significant way: the motive for the attack.

Berrong said that the jail guard who recruited him to attack Aycock did not explain why. But the former inmate said that he overheard the men involved, including Berrong, plan the attack because they believed Aycock was cooperating with investigators who were pursuing a case against one of them.

Rankin County jail records show that after Aycock was arrested on a burglary charge, a detective separated him from other inmates so that he could be questioned.

During that time, at least three other people were arrested in connection with the same burglary. Jail records show that one of them was housed in the same cellblock as Aycock. Three former guards said this violated a standard practice at the jail of separating inmates arrested together to prevent them from fabricating alibis or harming each other.

The witness said that after the authorities ignored his attempts to report what he had seen, he wrote to Aycock’s mother from prison about witnessing her son’s murder. Those letters were reviewed by reporters.

“It’s really weird that no one of the Miss. Bureau of Investigation has come to speak with me about your son’s murder,” he wrote in November 2022. “Your family deserves to know the truth.”

 Mukta Joshi contributed reporting.

All four of Mississippi’s incumbent U.S. representatives and its incumbent junior U.S. senator filed paperwork to run for reelection in 2026, according to news releases from the state Democratic and Republican parties. 

Twenty candidates qualified to run in the party primaries, which will take place on March 10. The party nominees will compete against one another in the general election on Nov. 3. 

Here is the list of Republican candidates running for Congress: 

United States Senate

• Sarah Adlakha 
• Cindy Hyde-Smith, incumbent 

U.S. House of Representatives – District 1

• Trent Kelly, incumbent 

U.S. House of Representatives – District 2

• Ron Eller 
• Kevin Wilson 

U.S. House of Representatives – District 3

• Michael Guest, incumbent 

U.S. House of Representatives – District 4

• Mike Ezell, incumbent 
• Sawyer Walters 

Here is the list of Democratic candidates running for Congress: 

United States Senate

• Scott Colom
• Albert R. Littell
• Priscilla W. Till

U.S. House of Representatives – District 1

• Kelvin Buck
• Cliff Johnson

U.S. House of Representatives – District 2

• Bennie G. Thompson, incumbent 
• Evan Littleton Turnage
• Pertis Herman Williams III

U.S. House of Representatives – District 3

• Michael A. Chiaradio

U.S. House of Representatives – District 4

• Paul James Blackman
• D. Ryan Grover
• Jeffrey Hulum III

A volcanic explosion 2,900 feet beneath Jackson forged the capital city’s very own superhero, Captain Jackson. 

The immortal man – born 1822, the year Jackson was founded – wears a green suit inspired by the city’s flag and takes to the skies in the inaugural issue of Jackson Comics. He fights fire with fire to defend the city from flamethrower-wielding villains who seek the downfall of Jackson. 

“He’s protecting not just the people of Jackson, but also the idea of Jackson,” said Blake Barnes, the writer behind Captain Jackson and the founder of Jackson Comics. “The villains show up in Jackson and they want to just burn the whole place down. They’re like, let’s just start from scratch, let’s burn it all up.” 

Barnes said he wanted readers to be able to imagine their own villains, so he gave the antagonists stormtrooper-esque outfits to mask their identities. 

“But I like to think they’re from Rankin County,” he said jokingly.

Barnes, a Mississippian who has lived in Jackson about five years, wanted to give local writers and artists a space to create comics about their home. Since launching in 2022, he’s published two issues of Jackson Comics so far, featuring short illustrated stories that explore a perennial topic for Mississippi writers – the relationship between the state’s past, present and future. A third installment is due to publish this spring. 

The stories also consider Jackson’s relationship to the state of Mississippi.

“Faulkner was the one who said to understand a place like America you have to first understand a place like Mississippi, and I think it can be said on a smaller note to understand Mississippi you have to understand Jackson,” he said.

When Barnes envisioned Captain Jackson, he knew he wanted the superhero to be a Black man in his mid 40s. He teamed up with local comic book legend Steven Butler, who has drawn for Marvel and DC Comics, to bring the character to the page.

While Jackson is a city so often associated with the issue of access to water, Barnes turned to another key element in Jackson’s past: Fire. He drew inspiration from the dormant volcano beneath Jackson, the Civil War-era moniker “Chimneyville,” a reference to Union troops burning Jackson to the ground, and the fires that so many abandoned homes succumb to today. 

Barnes wanted Captain Jackson to be able to use this element to protect the city. 

A television producer at Mississippi Public Broadcasting, Barnes said he was also inspired by an oft-repeated description of civil rights icon Medgar Evers. 

“We just kept hearing all these people say that Medgar Evers had this fire inside him and he wanted to keep going,” he said. “I liked the idea of fire being a motivator and not necessarily something that was destructive.”

Captain Jackson belongs to the city in more ways than one: When Barnes held an exhibition at the Municipal Art Gallery in October last year, he donated a character sketch, created by Butler, to the city.

For the second issue, Barnes turned the clock forward, curating stories from students of all ages about the future of Mississippi. 

“Most of it was dystopian,” he said. “But they all ended on some good note. … They haven’t lost hope, so that’s good.” 

The stories contain imaginative plots: A bomb has fallen on the state, and a young boy discovers a ragged state flag among the ashes. Magnolia trees come to life and attack. The end times have come, but a biker and the owner of a home cooking restaurant still make conversation over a biscuit. 

For his contribution, Barnes imagined Captain Jackson accompanying a group of students to a museum, where they encounter a man from the future who has traveled back in time to punish people for their historical wrongdoings. 

The villain was inspired by Barnes’ own complicated feelings about Mississippi’s history. He challenged himself to embody that idea in a character. 

“That’s something I have felt for some time,” he said. “We’re always having to pay the dues of people who came before us, and I wish we could just restart with every generation, have it be our own way.” 

But Captain Jackson teaches the students that they can’t change the past. 

“They go off with this idea that they can change the future and that’s really what they have to work for,” he said.