OurTupelo

Editor’s note: Mississippi Today Ideas is publishing guest essays from people impacted by Hurricane Katrina during the week of the 20th anniversary of the storm that hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast on Aug. 29, 2005.

Speaking about Hurricane Katrina feels almost like speaking at a funeral. There’s grief, memory and the weight of honoring both those who survived and those who did not. The storm was not just another hurricane. It was a turning point in countless lives, mine included.

The day before Katrina made landfall was a Sunday. I told my mother Lorna Rose Daniels to be ready at noon to evacuate our homes only blocks from the beach in Pass Christian. As we prepared to leave, my father Harold Thomas Daniels was busy moving vehicles out to my grandmother’s house in DeLisle.

Around noon, my mother, son and I left together. I told my son not to pack anything in the car because I was certain we would be back the next day. At that point, it felt like just another evacuation as we already had done several times that season. Tired of packing and unpacking the car, we left with only the clothes on our backs and a set of pajamas.

When I arrived at my mother’s house, she wanted to bring more things. I still clearly see her walking through her house with a bottle of holy water, sprinkling it in every room. “Mama, they said we have to go,” I told her.

She resisted, saying my father had not left yet. But I reminded her he was only shuttling cars to DeLisle. Finally, she came with me.

The plan was simple.  We would drive up U.S. Highway 49 to Wiggins, stay with a friend and come back the next day like always. But as the day wore on, plans changed. By 4 that afternoon, while the northbound lanes of Highway 49 were jammed with evacuees, our car was the only one headed south.

My mother had broken down crying. She wanted to go to her elderly mother,  who refused to leave her home. She couldn’t bear the thought of leaving her behind at her home in DeLisle about 10 miles from the Gulf of Mexico, but surrounded by water from the Bay of St. Louis.

That drive south is something I will never forget. Highway 49 north was bumper to bumper, but we were alone heading the other way. We turned onto state Highway 53 and stopped at a gas station. I remember buying milk for my son and a bag of ice, telling myself not to buy too much because we would be home the next day.

We made it to my grandmother’s house, the place we called “on the hill”.  My grandmother was in her 90s, and my aunt lived nearby. Family began to gather, parking cars on the high ground. That night we sat on the back porch, talking in the heat of late August, waiting for my father to arrive. He never did.

The first sign of how dangerous this storm would be came from a phone call. My cousin in Henderson Point, which is located on the Gulf, called his mother, my aunt, as the water rose rapidly around his home. He had stayed behind with his dog while his family evacuated, believing the storm would not be that bad.

By the time my aunt handed me the phone, he was standing on top of his van, with his dog, crying, as the water climbed around him. I still remember my aunt’s voice as she handed me her cellphone, ‘Here, I can’t listen anymore,” she said. I stayed on the line until it went dead. We thought we would never see him again.

The next morning, Katrina revealed her strength. Tin peeled off my grandmother’s roof as we huddled on the porch. At first, we even tried to collect the flying sheets so they wouldn’t damage the cars, but soon we realized the danger was far greater than we understood. As the hours passed, we could hear the wind speaking to us – unimaginable devastation.

Then the word spread. Pass Christian was gone. Just 10 miles away, an entire community had been destroyed. News spread fast that those who stayed behind were gone.

My daddy, who stayed at our home on Davis Avenue, was not heard from… not my daddy! Harold Daniels stayed behind along with my two brothers and a nephew. Within 15 minutes of water rising, it had reached its peak of 34 feet. People were asking all over, You saw this one who stayed? Have you seen that one? Who made it? Who didn’t? Where’s my daddy?

He was on the back of my nephew’s truck. They tied themselves to each other, and then to a tree and then watched the rush of houses floating by, cars floating by, appliances, trees. My daddy said if it had hit at night, they wouldn’t have survived. 

My daddy had 10 kids. His will to live and his faith in God brought him back to us. He passed on last year at 89.

For many people, anniversaries are a celebration of momentous occasions. Hurricane Katrina, however, is not something I celebrate.

What I celebrate is resilience, the strength to survive and rebuild. I celebrate Pass Christian and my father, who lived for almost 20 years after Katrina. I celebrate doing hard things, and the rebuilding of our close-knit community along the Gulf Coast. I celebrate the opportunity to rebuild.

The Coast is a state of mind. We love it here. It’s home.

Life in this community is centered around family. I’m very close to my family, and while disaster relief was not perfect, we were not overlooked. I remember people like Robin Roberts, the ABC personality, coming to the Pass not knowing if her family was safe. I remember the raw emotion of relief as she spoke on air. I still hear the tremble in her voice. 

The storm was catastrophic. Many families were destroyed by it, including my fourth-grade teacher, Ms. Lang, and her husband, who stayed and died. My cousin, who had been stranded on a roof with his dog, was found a day or two later on his brother’s porch.

I still get panic attacks when the weather gets severe or hurricanes are mentioned. I am not the only one with this fear. Plenty of people left the Coast, but I stayed because my parents did.

After Katrina, the community came together. People leaned on each other. Our town, Pass Christian, is small but resilient. I celebrate the strength of our community, and the role of faith in our recovery.

Even now, I keep holy water in my nightstand as a reminder that we can survive and do without many of the things we once thought we needed. Katrina taught us that we can live with less and still thrive.

The Gulf Coast is thriving. Streets like Davis Avenue, North Street and Scenic Drive are full of life. Survivors of Katrina continue to show love and care for their community.

While some people may mourn the anniversary of Katrina, I celebrate the resilience, faith, and unity that allowed us to recover. I celebrate the churches rebuilt, and I celebrate knowing that if something like Katrina comes again, we can survive it. We did once, and by God’s grace, we can do it again.

Franchelle Daniels, daughter of Harold and Lorna Rose Daniels, has served for 25 years as the victims assistance coordinator for the 2nd Circuit Court District of Mississippi  She is the vice president of the Pass Christian School District Board of Trustees and has taught victim-based classes at William Carey University, where she earned a master’s degree. She has one son, Jordan Daniels, and his fiancée, Megan. Jordan has a son, Jackson Thomas Daniels, who is age 8  and has just started 3rd grade.

A panel of lawmakers on Monday heard from national education officials who whole-heartedly encouraged them to expand school choice in Mississippi, signaling the Trump administration’s support of passing such legislation.

There was standing room only at the first meeting of the “Education Freedom” select committee, formed by House Speaker Jason White to weigh the pros and cons of implementing a robust school choice program in Mississippi, ahead of the upcoming legislative session. 

Advocates, lobbyists and top education officials, including State Superintendent Lance Evans, were in attendance.

School choice — or “education freedom,” as White and other proponents of the legislation call it — refers to a plethora of policies that, in varying degrees, either give money to families to spend on their child’s K-12 education or allow families to move their children to different schools, regardless of their location or whether the schools are public or private. White has indicated repeatedly in recent months that it will be a key issue during the 2026 session.

Those skeptical of the policy, though, say that the state’s hard-fought academic wins hang in the balance. 

Rep. Rob Roberson of Starkville, who chairs the House Education Committee and the Education Freedom committee, opened the meeting by asking attendees not to get too “emotional” and stressed that “this isn’t about politics.”

But the only two speakers at the committee’s first meeting were officials appointed to top U.S. Department of Education positions by President Donald Trump — Lindsey Burke, Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Programs at the U.S. Department of Education, and Laurie Todd-Smith, who currently leads the federal office that oversees head start and child care. She previously served as former Gov. Phil Bryant’s senior education and workforce policy advisor.

Mississippi’s decision to hold out on expanding school choice was emphasized by Burke, who said it was “time to think differently” about how the state delivers K-12 education, given the uptake of surrounding states.  

Burke pushed legislators to consider adopting a universal education savings account, or ESA, program, though White has conceded that option may not be popular enough to pass the Legislature.

A universal ESA program would allow parents to spend the money the state allocates toward educating their child on whatever educational expenses they’d like, whether that’s private school tuition, a tutor or another option. Nineteen states have some sort of ESA model in place, including Mississippi — where only students with disabilities currently qualify. 

Burke encouraged the adoption of that kind of program because of Mississippi’s rurality, for one. She said a slow adoption would encourage the growth of private schools and allow parents to choose other options if there wasn’t a nearby private school. 

A voucher program, on the other hand, is a sort of coupon that parents can spend on tuition at a private school of their choice, including faith-based schools.

Burke also gave a detailed explanation of the new federal tax credit program, a different sort of school choice model altogether. If Mississippi opts in, which is likely, the program will allow Mississippians to contribute up to $1,700 to an organization that awards scholarships to private school students starting in 2027 in exchange for a tax break of equal amount. 

Burke said expanding these types of programs would incentivize public schools to better serve students in order to avoid declining enrollment. But opponents of school choice say that public schools who struggle to meet the needs of their students are chronically under-resourced — any loss of funds would only exacerbate that problem. 

Mississippi has only fully funded its education formula — both the old version and the newer version established last year — four times since 2003, Democratic legislators noted at the meeting. 

Rep. Jeffrey Hulum III, a Democrat from Gulfport, said the state should wait to see how the new funding formula impacts education before “giving up public funds.” But Republican Rep. Jansen Owen of Poplarville, co-chair of the committee, argued the only way to extend the state’s education gains involves “continuous efforts and reforms to the system.”

If Mississippi’s academic gains are now a model for the country, some legislators wondered why they’d rock the boat by funneling money away from public schools. 

Rep. Kevin Felsher, a Republican from Biloxi, said that only two Mississippi school districts are considered failing by the state education department. 

“We’re having really great results,” he said. “What do you say to public school advocates who would say, ‘Why do we need to come in and do this?’”

Burke responded that “even the best school is not the best school for everybody” and that “not failing” was a low bar for the state to hold itself to. 

There’s practically no evidence to show that low-income students, who Burke said the programs would be aimed toward, see improved test scores from attending private schools. Some legislators also acknowledged that private schools have less oversight than public schools and have no requirement to admit a child. 

Todd-Smith, the other speaker, framed her comments on school choice around early education. The state’s early education model is already choice-based, she said — parents can send their child to a pre-K program associated with a school or a child care center of their choosing. She encouraged legislators to expand the state’s existing early education infrastructure, especially child care, to give parents even more choices.

Owens, a proponent of school choice, said he didn’t hear anything in the meeting that swayed him, but the Trump administration’s support came through loud and clear. 

Republican Rep. Kent McCarty of Hattiesburg, vice chair of the House Education Committee, said after the meeting that he appreciated the discussion but wants to see more data that supports expanded school choice. 

“We’ve heard a lot about all of the academic gains we’ve seen in Mississippi,” he said. “I don’t think this is a silver bullet to extend those gains. 

“We’ve come too far to regress.”

The committee is tentatively planning to meet again on Sept. 25. 

Lowndes, Oktibbeha and Clay counties’ economic development group announced the departure of its longtime chief on Sunday, with little explanation.

In a statement, the group’s executive committee said that it had “determined that a leadership transition is in the best long-term interest of the organization and the region we serve.”

CEO Joe Max Higgins had been with the Golden Triangle Development LINK for over 20 years. The organization is contracted by the three counties to lead economic development efforts.

Under Higgins’ leadership, the counties have seen $10 billion in investment from companies such as PACCAR, Airbus, Steel Dynamics and more. The successful growth of manufacturing, which had shifted overseas, has gained national attention. Higgins and his organization have been credited with much of the region’s economic growth.

“The Golden Triangle is booming – ‘@gtr_link’ and Joe Max Higgins are a big reason why,” Gov. Tate Reeves wrote on social media on Aug. 7.

Higgins’ economic development efforts have in the past drawn national media attention. This has included profiles on 60 Minutes and in The Atlantic. 

At an event last week, the organization celebrated the opening of its new headquarters that Higgins described as “in the middle of the kingdom.”

The executive committee said it will start looking for a new CEO and that “day-to-day operations remain under management of our dedicated and capable team.”

Mississippi Today reached out to Higgins for comment but did not receive a response.

Mississippians can no longer access the Bluesky app after the social media platform blocked access to users in the state.

Bluesky said on Friday that it made the decision after the U.S. Supreme Court declined for now to block a Mississippi state law that the platform said limits free expression, invades people’s privacy and unfairly targets smaller social media companies. The state law, passed in 2024, requires users of websites and other digital services to verify their age.

“The Supreme Court’s recent decision leaves us facing a hard reality: comply with Mississippi’s age assurance law—and make every Mississippi Bluesky user hand over sensitive personal information and undergo age checks to access the site—or risk massive fines,” the company wrote in a statement. “The law would also require us to identify and track which users are children, unlike our approach in other regions. We think this law creates challenges that go beyond its child safety goals, and creates significant barriers that limit free speech and disproportionately harm smaller platforms and emerging technologies.”

Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch, whose office defended the law, told the justices that age verification could help protect young people from “sexual abuse, trafficking, physical violence, sextortion and more,” activities that the First Amendment does not protect.

The age verification law added Mississippi to a list of Republican-led states where similar legal challenges are playing out.

NetChoice is challenging laws passed in Mississippi and other states that require social media users to verify their ages, and asked the Supreme Court to keep the measure on hold while a lawsuit plays out.

That came after a federal judge prevented the 2024 law from taking effect. But a three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled in July that the law could be enforced while the lawsuit proceeds.

On Aug. 14, the Supreme Court rejected an emergency appeal from a tech industry group representing major platforms such as Facebook, X and YouTube.

There were no noted dissents from the brief, unsigned order. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that there’s a good chance NetChoice will eventually succeed in showing that the law is unconstitutional, but hadn’t shown it must be blocked while the lawsuit unfolds.

Bluesky grew after the 2024 presidential election. Many users of X, which is owned by Elon Musk, retreated from the platform in response to the billionaire’s strong support of Donald Trump.

In Bluesky’s statement explaining its decision to block access in Mississippi, the company said age verification systems “require substantial infrastructure and developer time investments, complex privacy protections, and ongoing compliance monitoring — costs that can easily overwhelm smaller providers.”

“This dynamic entrenches existing big tech platforms while stifling the innovation and competition that benefits users,” the company added.

Bluesky said it did follow other digital safety regulations, such as the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act. Under that statute, age checks are required only for accessing certain content and features, and Bluesky does not track which users are under 18, the platform said:

“Mississippi’s law, by contrast, would block everyone from accessing the site—teens and adults—unless they hand over sensitive information, and once they do, the law in Mississippi requires Bluesky to keep track of which users are children.”

The Mississippi law, authored by Rep. Jill Ford, a Republican from Madison, is called the “Walker Montgomery Protecting Children Online Act,” named after a Mississippi teen who reportedly committed suicide after an overseas online predator threatened to blackmail him.

The Associated Press contributed to this report

Where Daniel Lake Boulevard intersects with Terry Road in south Jackson sit a gas station, a strip mall with a blood donation center and the remnants of a failed grocery store. 

At one corner, there’s a recently renovated building, its painted exterior covered in brightly-colored sketches of people eating ice cream and sipping cups of coffee. 

This is the home of Riverside Collective, a weekend coffee shop and ice cream bar that opened its doors in July. It’s here where students such as Antonio Ramirez can learn what it means to be a part of a community. 

“I’m learning how to manage my money, how to make coffee, how to run a business, how to profit, and how to communicate with people and share the idea of Riverside,” the Provine High School sophomore said. 

Ramirez said that while many of his classmates don’t have jobs, he enjoys being able to spend his time working with a group of teenagers who have become his friends. Riverside Collective runs a student entrepreneurship program and currently has eight teens on staff. Ramirez said that he hopes through Riverside Collective, their work can change the narrative of the dwindling landscape of south Jackson.

“People say Jackson barely has anything in it,” Ramirez said. “I feel kind of bad about people saying that about Jackson. I want Jackson to be a city where people can have fun.”

Riverside Collective, co-founded by Vilas Annavarapu, was a project three years in the making. The nonprofit chose south Jackson for its location inside the abandoned Regions Bank because Annavarapu saw it as a place of untapped potential. 

“We wanted to do economic development work in a place where a lot of people aren’t doing economic development work, and in fact, stores are leaving,” Annavarapu said.

He points to the recent departures of Burger King and Dollar General stores nearby. 

“People are really nervous to open up businesses in that part of town, and we believe there’s economic opportunity there,” Annavarapu said. “It’s really important that west Jackson, south Jackson have really nice things and good things and places for the community.”

Annavarapu said that as a former middle school teacher, he noticed some of his students found it challenging to work as a team. He wanted to create a place where young people can learn the value of working together while making a fair wage. Most of the workers there are students from Provine High School, and they’re paid $15 an hour. Annavarapu said he hopes to eventually increase pay to $22 an hour, the amount United Way of Mississippi defines as a “flourishing wage” for single adults.

“ I realized so many of our young people have not had the opportunity, nor have they been given the skills to understand how to work in a team and how to work in a team in a way that feels really good,” Annavarapu said. 

Now, he’s hoping that spirit of creativity could lend itself to a fully fleshed out community calendar of events and classes, similar to the Briarwood Arts Center in northeast Jackson.

“What I hope Riverside opens up for young people is their imaginative potential. What can we create and what can we build that’s not already there? And how can that be a good thing?” Annavarapu said.

He hopes the impacts of Riverside Collective can be felt in tangible ways, like the number of people that they serve and the students who participate in the program. But he also wants there to be internal transformations for everyone who comes in contact with their initiative.

“ I think on the more intangible side, it’s when young people come into our program and when they leave it, do they leave feeling more confident and prepared to take on the world and are more attentive to the world around them?” Annavarapu said.

Riverside Collective is located at 3510 Terry Road. Its business hours are Saturday 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. and Sunday noon to 4 p.m.

CORRECTION 8/25/25: This story was updated to reflect that Riverside Collective currently pays employees $15 an hour, with hopes to increase to $22 an hour in the future.

Veteran editors Bobby Harrison, Geoff Pender and Emily Wagster Pettus recall the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and a monumental special legislative session to address storm recovery 20 years ago. They are joined by multimedia and video editors Michael Guidry and Richard Lake for a preview of “The Bulletin,” a Mississippi Today video documentary that will premiere Aug. 29th, the anniversary of the destructive, killer storm.

Russia’s Vladimir Putin, U.S. President Donald Trump and many Mississippi politicians, including Gov. Tate Reeves, have something in common – their disdain for mail-in voting.

Putin, Russia’s president/dictator, has waged wars where thousands of men, women and children have been killed, and his political enemies who aren’t in prison have a knack for dying under strange and often gruesome circumstances.

Yet, Putin has thoughts about American democracy, and apparently President Trump is listening.

One takeaway Trump said he gleaned from his recent Alaskan summit with Putin, which was called to discuss ending Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is that the Russian president believes Trump would not have lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden if not for fraud and mail-in voting.

Trump volunteered that Putin told him, “‘Your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting. … It’s impossible to have mail-in voting and have honest elections.’” Trump added that Putin said “no country” has mail-in voting.

It is not clear how discussions of the 2020 election will help end the Russian/Ukrainian war. But Putin’s comments are false. Many countries have mail-in voting. And Trump lost the 2020 election because Joe Biden won more votes – a lot more.

Still, soon after the summit Trump announced his intent to draft an executive order to end mail-in voting.

“An executive order is being written right now by the best lawyers in the country to end mail-in ballots because they’re corrupt,” he told reporters.

And here in Mississippi, Reeves and many other politicians have been longtime opponents of no-excuse, mail-in voting.

In 2020 the Republican governor said on social media, “I will also do everything in my power to make sure universal mail-in voting and no-excuse early voting are not allowed in MS—not while I’m governor! Too much chaos.”

In Russia, Putin could most likely end mail-in voting by himself. Russia has consistently been cited for not conducting fair and free elections. But the election clause of the U.S. Constitution gives the legislature in each state the authority to establish the laws regulating elections. The Constitution gives the U.S. Congress the authority to alter the laws passed by the state legislatures. The president, of course, would have the duty of signing into law or vetoing the changes approved by Congress.

But it is difficult to fathom how the president could end mail-in voting by himself. And the White House staff appeared to be walking back the president’s comments that he could end mail-in voting by himself.

The question then is whether Congress would be willing to take such action.

Currently 36 states, red and blue , have universal mail-in voting. Most had mail-in voting when Trump won in 2016, lost in 2020 and won again in 2024.

So, could Trump convince House members and senators, even Republicans ones, to end early voting in say Florida, Arizona, Georgia, Montana or in various other red or swing states?

Perhaps. Republican politicians have often submitted to Trump’s wishes. But it is important to remember politicians passed mail-in voting because their constituents like it. It makes voting easier and promotes civic engagement.

And contrary to the opinion of Trump, as related to him by dictator Putin, there are safeguards to prevent fraud in early voting.

Some of those safeguards include the fact that people have to sign the envelope the ballot is mailed in. And that signature is checked by poll workers against the signature on record from when the person registered to vote.

In addition, most states with mail-in voting also require some type of identifying information, such as the last four digits of the voter’s Social Security number, driver’s license number or an assigned code (usually a set of numbers) that must be placed on the envelope for the mail-in ballot.

If people trust doing banking online, they should feel comfortable with mail-in voting.

Reeves and other Mississippi officials, it is obvious, do not feel comfortable with mail-in voting. Mississippi is among the 14 states that do not have no-excuse mail-in voting.

In addition, Mississippi is among only three states that have no form of no-excuse early voting either by mail or in person.

In the vast majority of states, people can go vote before Election Day. In Mississippi, a person under the age of 65 must have an excuse to vote early.

Mississippi lawmakers have constantly rejected efforts to expand voter access.

In other words, Vlad Putin would most likely endorse Mississippi election laws.

COLUMBUS _ The Golden Triangle’s new headquarters for economic development has opened in the middle of the massive projects it has helped bring to Clay, Lowndes and Oktibbeha counties.

The $2.5-billion Steel Dynamics aluminum mill is visible from one window and the airport from another. Just down the road are the Airbus factory that has built 1,700 helicopters, the 400-acre PACCAR site that churns out engines and Stark Aerospace, which was awarded a $61-million defense contract last year. These are companies that Joe Max Higgins and his team have helped bring to the area. 

“It’s in the middle of the kingdom,” said Higgins, the CEO of Golden Triangle Development LINK. “I mean, you can just look. It’s all here. You can just walk around and see everything.”

READ MORE: Mississippi Marketplace: Another data center on the way

The headquarters was previously located on Main Street in Columbus. But Higgins said that the agency has wanted to move to a more central location for a while. The new headquarters sits on land owned by the Golden Triangle Regional Airport, which is run by all three counties. 

LINK is the regional economic development organization for the three-county area known as the Golden Triangle. It is funded by the three county governments and private backers. This melding of public and private interests was represented at Tuesday’s opening event by the attendance of public officials and business leaders.

The event honored Bobby Harper, a former member of the board of directors, who was instrumental in acquiring private funders to support the organization. 

“We could not be here today without Bobby’s work,” Higgins said at the opening ceremony.

The three counties now work together on economic development, but it wasn’t that way when Higgins started. At first he was just working for Lowndes County.

READ MORE: What is Steel Dynamics, the Fortune 500 company that lawmakers gave $247M?

“I was real slow to embrace the regionalism stuff. I just always believed that the only way you win is to tear everybody’s face off,” said Higgins. “That’s still true, but I will tell you that once we put the three counties together, I found out that I had more bullets for a gun, more resources, more places for people to live, more opportunities and more money.”

Higgins is legendary for his economic development efforts, even outside of Mississippi. He’s been negotiating deals for the Golden Triangle since he was recruited from Arkansas in 2003. Since then his team has brought in over $10 billion in capital investment and over 10,000 jobs. 

In the process, Higgins has developed a national profile for bringing in manufacturing jobs to the region. This has included profiles on 60 Minutes and in The Atlantic. 

Even as more manufacturing moved out of the U.S., the Golden Triangle has continued to invest in manufacturing. And it’s not slowing down.

The group is working on finding a company for its fifth “megasite,” a 1,400-acre piece of land that can accommodate a large scale industrial operation. The organization recently announced a $90-million aluminum processing facility is in the works close to their new headquarters. 

“The guy that grabs a hold on a tiger. The tiger starts running. What do you do?” Higgins responded when asked what the next 20 years of development in the Golden Triangle would look like. “Do you let go and the tiger eats you up, or hang on and you don’t know where you’re gonna end up? I think you hang on, and so I think that’s what we’re gonna do.”

Twenty years ago this month, on Aug. 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Mississippi Gulf Coast, destroying thousands of homes and much of the government infrastructure that provided critical public services to one of the state’s most populous regions.

Then-Gov. Haley Barbour, understanding the necessity of a well-organized, coordinated effort to clean up and plan to rebuild the coastal counties for the long-term future, tapped one of the state’s most successful business leaders, Jim Barksdale, to chair a special commission.

Barksdale, then 62 years old, had recently sold his company Netscape to AOL. He accepted the appointment to lead the entity tasked with deciding how hundreds of millions in federal and state recovery funds would be spent. Just a few days after the storm hit, he and his wife, Donna, flew from Jackson to the Coast, where they spent the first few months of their marriage living on the top floor of a casino resort in Biloxi while Jim led the commission.

Notably, leaders across the country have praised him for his service and modeled it in other post-disaster recovery efforts.

To commemorate the 20th anniversary of the storm, Barksdale sat down with Mississippi Today to recount his time leading the Governor’s Commission on Recovery, Rebuilding and Renewal in the fall of 2005.

Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Mississippi Today: Where were you when the storm hit 20 years ago, and what were you doing both professionally and personally? What did your life look like when the storm hit?

Jim Barksdale: It’s interesting because I was in a strange place. Donna and I had just gotten back from our honeymoon. We got back here around the first of August, and the storm hit the end of August. So the storm hit about three weeks after we got back. We continued our honeymoon a couple years later, but the storm definitely delayed all that. I was here in Jackson. I’d retired here after I sold Netscape to AOL. I was on probably five or six different corporate boards and commissions around the country, but other than that, I was able to take on the job.

MT: How long was it after the storm that you got to the Coast?

JB: Maybe a couple days after the storm hit, Haley Barbour and Leland Speed, who was his economic development director, called me and asked me if I’d come meet them. I met with them, they asked if I’d lead the effort, and less than a week later, we were on helicopters flying down there. One thing I remember from flying over the damage down there, which was extensive and just so incredible to see, was the smell of the beach down near Gulfport. They had these refrigeration warehouses for chicken poultry products waiting to be exported. They were all still there rotting and had not been cleaned out. Even from a few hundred yards above it, it smelled like we were on the ground. It was awful. 

Up and down the Coast, it really looked like an atomic bomb had gone off. People say that all the time, but there’s no other way to describe it. There was really no way to get around. The National Guard had roads blocked off except for first responders and residents. Getting around the debris and the roadblocks was just about impossible unless you had some level of clearance.

We got down there, and the place we lodged ourselves was in a hotel called the Isle of Capri. The front of the building was all busted open from the storm surge and wind with all the slot machines showing. They were working hard to get the slot machines emptied out before they got robbed. The first two or three floors of the high-rise building were obliterated by the storm, but somehow the elevator worked to take us up to the room they gave us, which was on the top floor. The room was nice. It wasn’t touched. We had power and water. Up there, unless you looked down at all the mess and debris and the collapsed bridge over the bay, you wouldn’t have known anything had happened.

MT: How long were you and Donna there?

JB: Oh, three or four months on and off. We came back here (to Jackson) a few times and would head back down, but it was about three or four months we lived down there — until right around the first of the year (January 2006).

MT: Was it a surprise or was it unexpected to get the call from Gov. Barbour to head up this commission?

JB: It was a total shock. I didn’t really know Haley. I’d met him before, but we were not close at all. Haley had asked me to be his finance chairman when he first ran for governor (in 2003). Not too long before then, he had said some things publicly about me and the Microsoft hearings that really irritated me, and I turned him down. I hadn’t really talked to him again until he called me about Katrina recovery.

When I went to meet with him and Leland Speed, they asked if I’d lead the commission. I said, “Now look, is this because you’re being a statesman or is it for revenge over turning you down as finance chairman?” He laughed and didn’t really answer the question, but he told me that he thought I was highly qualified to lead a comprehensive effort like that, so I accepted. I was happy to serve the state in that way. Donna and I had just been married, and she calls it our “Category Five Honeymoon.”

Later, Haley and I got to be good friends. He’s still a good friend of mine.

MT: It’s hard to believe it’s been 20 years since the storm, but looking back on the work of the commission, what are some of your proudest accomplishments during your time as chairman and what y’all were able to do in those first few months?

JB: The thing I’m most proud of that we were able to accomplish is that we brought so many people of the Coast together to help them build plans for the future, and we gave them hope for their communities. Really, the most important thing we did was give them hope in such a difficult moment in time.

You know, as a group, we came in with this idea that the best way to get started was just get everybody involved, to get everyone busy. There was so much to consider. It may sound simple, but just getting started as quickly as we did was something to be very proud of.

We started these charrettes, or small working groups, as a way to get a lot of people involved in one project. We got the mayors involved as the leaders and some others involved, and let me tell you, it worked. They worked their cans off. The mayors were there every day, night and day. It was literally 24 hours for them. You’d go in at 2 o’clock in the morning, and there would be all the mayors in there working with their teams. We had architects and engineers flying in from literally all over the world helping us. There were architects from Italy that came, people from England that were part of the royal planners, Prince Charles’ team. It was amazing how many people from all over the world came and would just drop a team of people. We had renowned experts who were there to meet with the leaders of every Gulf Coast town and have them lay out their dreams.

We had a wonderful group of people, smart and hardworking who were there to transform these cities across the coastline. There wasn’t really anything for them to do except work — they obviously couldn’t go out and eat, couldn’t go out and have fun or anything, so they just worked. We fed them all there at that hotel, used their big ballroom to be the meeting places, and they broke off in the subcommittees in smaller rooms.

We divided the volunteers up in groups for each different community. If I remember correctly, there were 11 communities on the beach at that time. And we came up with some marvelous ideas for how to pull this place, to put it back together and take it into the future. Not all of them were implemented. Some of them were visions and dreams and so forth. Some worked, most didn’t. But they got some version of them working just about everywhere. That would be another thing I was proud of.

I’m also proud of the dozens of town halls we had during that time. I went to every one of them along with the local people. We would just sit there and answer questions from the citizens. And a lot of them were hard questions that we, quite frankly, didn’t have all the answers to. I think by the end of the meetings, people for the most part liked and appreciated the fact that we were there and being transparent and trying to answer all the questions. They were all scared and worried about the future, and we tried hard to make them feel heard and let them know we cared and were working very hard on their behalf.

I think we formed 11 committees run by some of Mississippi’s finest people — people who were mostly from the southern part of the state. We learned a lot from those meetings, and I remember there were a couple where people got up and cussed us, but it was really helpful for us to listen and apply what we heard to our planning.

MT: You’ve focused so much of your life and personal philanthropy on public education. I know that a big focus for you during your time leading the commission was getting schools back open. Can you talk about that?

JB: We knew we had to get the kids back in school. It was so important because if schools weren’t open, parents would move away. The storm hit right at the start of the school year, and many of these buildings were just totally washed or blown away. So we came up with the idea to have two schools running in one school building, for example. We’d have a morning school and an afternoon school. If there was a school building standing, we’d get kids from other schools to meet there for half a day just to get them back in the classroom somewhere. For the buildings that got destroyed in some cases, we brought down a bunch of house trailers to serve as temporary schools.

We reopened the last public school on Nov. 12, 2005. That was the day that New Orleans reopened their first public school. In New Orleans’ defense, they had decided that they’d use the storm as an opportunity to change everything over to charter schools. So they had to get the legislation done and do all that work, but the problem was that delayed getting kids back into classrooms. The children didn’t get into school nearly as quickly, most of them probably until after the first of the year (2006). Also, the Mississippi Coast didn’t lose as many people as New Orleans did. But we were very proud of how quickly we got classrooms and schools reopened.

MT: And I know there was a huge focus on housing for the thousands of people who were displaced and had nowhere to go.

JB: If I remember correctly, we lost about 4,000 housing units during the storm. Of course that’s counting homes, apartments, anywhere else a family could live, but we lost 4,000 housing units. We lost a whole group of Section 8 houses. We lost several big apartment buildings, and then we lost a lot of single family houses. The houses, in most cases, were just moved totally off of their foundations. They just floated away. You’d drive up on them and they looked like they were perfectly fine, but you’d look a little closer and see that they were sitting on dirt 50 yards from the foundation.

We spent a lot of time getting temporary housing built up and set up all over the place, just to get people somewhere they could live and survive. I could never get my head around exactly how we were going to build 4,000 units. But amazingly, within a few months, we had 4,000 units available at least temporarily. And after five years, we had 8,000 permanent new or rebuilt units available. I don’t think all of them were brand new, but they were good units. They were, in most cases, better and stronger than the 4,000 on average that we had lost. I would not have believed that.

MT: You’ve done a lot of really important things over the course of your life and career. With this experience, in particular, how did it stack up for you? What are some of the things that have stuck with you personally over these 20 years?

JB: I was proud to play a more individual role in some things, and I learned a lot from working with so many smart people. One of the best examples of that is after we’d gotten a big pot of money to rebuild the bridge over Biloxi Bay between Biloxi and Ocean Springs.

We got a design, a big curving design so you could take the ships under it with their masts to go to Trinity Yards and build yachts up there. But we wanted to do it at as little cost to people as possible. We had the money, and all we needed was the approval of the two mayors. So we had a meeting down at the Biloxi City Hall. There were a lot of people in there from representing the towns and architects and the builders and so forth, and it quickly became obvious during that meeting that we just weren’t going to get the mayor of Ocean Springs (Connie Moran) to sign off on a bridge design that didn’t have a walkway going alongside the bridge. The plan we’d drawn up for lower budget reasons didn’t have any architectural features on the bridge, it didn’t have any landscaping. That was the way we kept the price down. It was going to cost $9 million more or something like that to do those three things.

The mayor of Biloxi (A.J. Holloway) kept saying, “Look, we don’t want to go back and ask for more money. We got this all federal money, we’ve got it now, we don’t want them to pull any back, let’s just rebuild the bridge at a base level and get it back open.” He also kept arguing that nobody would use a walking trail over the bridge anyways, that it’d be too steep to climb, the climate was too hot, that we didn’t need it. Mayor Moran was strong, I give her credit. She was adamant that the walkway was necessary.

People started leaving because they didn’t think we’d find a resolution, and I asked the mayors, “Why don’t we go in another room here?” We got the mayors and the highway commissioner in a side room together. I forget who else was in there, maybe a couple more people. I looked at them and said, “We can make this decision right here. Now, Connie, your point is you are not going to accept this design unless it has these features, and A.J., you’re not going to accept the design if they modify it unless they come up with more money to pay for it.” I said, “Look, here’s the deal. I’ll either get or give the $9 million myself. You have my personal commitment to that.” We all shook hands and went back out and announced that we’d agreed to the design with the walkway.

The funny thing was the next morning, Butch Brown (the executive director of the Mississippi Department of Transportation) called me and he said, “Yeah, Jim, we’re not going to make you give that $9 million. We found the money in the budget somehow.” You know, in business, sometimes it’s just a matter of getting everyone in a room and coming up with creative solutions. That was an example of that.

A very funny part of this story is that I was down in Biloxi for the 10th anniversary of the storm. A.J. Holloway was there. He came over to me and he said, “Jim, I’ve got a terrible cold, but I had to come down here just to see you.” He says, “You realize this, but that bridge right now, that’s the most popular thing going on in this side of town. There are hundreds of people who walk over that bridge every day, they ride bicycles and everything.” He said he had even walked over it some. He said, “I just want you to know that I was wrong and I’m willing to eat crow.”

That was just one story of many, but it just shows you how important it was during that time to just find ways to bring everyone together and get buy-in from a lot of people with varying interests.

Editor’s note: Jim and Donna Barksdale are Mississippi Today donors and founding board members. Donors do not in any way influence our newsroom’s editorial decisions. For more on that policy or to view a list of our donors, click here.

Jayme Anderson wore so many medals to his Forest Hill High School graduation, his mom, Angella, could hear him clanking as he walked across the stage. 

The 18-year-old is something of a collector for academic achievements. At his home in south Jackson, Anderson has a coffee table’s worth of awards: Trophies, badges, plaques, rainbow-colored cords. 

And a binder stuffed full of college acceptances. 

All told, Anderson applied to more than 600 colleges and was admitted to exactly 582, racking up more than $10 million in scholarship offers. 

The eyepopping feat, which went viral earlier this summer, was driven by curiosity, free time, a desire to go out-of-state for college and a competitive streak. 

He also wanted to be an inspiration to other JPS students, who he said are often misunderstood and stereotyped, even by fellow Jacksonians. 

“I have to say that when most people think about JPS kids, they think about criminals, bad people,” he said, “but at the end of the day, the majority of the people at JPS, they are not that.” 

Who are they? 

“Brilliant, intelligent, inspiring,” he said. “They actually want to do better for themselves.” 

Don’t get Anderson wrong: There were challenges. During his junior year, afternoon gun violence at a nearby convenience store kept forcing Forest Hill to go on lockdown. He said he missed a lot of AP U.S. History instruction that year. 

At one point, Angella thought about putting Anderson in private school. She was frustrated he kept getting marked absent when she knew he wasn’t. The school told her it was an attendance record system issue.

She had a high school picked out – a Christian school on Siwell Road that, like many in the metro area, originated as a segregation academy. But the day she told Anderson she was at her wit’s end, he asked her if he could stay at Forest Hill. 

Anderson didn’t want to start over at a school he didn’t know, with teachers who might not support him. The two agreed that despite hardships, he had blossomed in JPS. 

“I wanted to continue growing,” he said. “The teachers that I had, my counselors, they motivated me to keep on pushing myself.” 

Forest Hill was where, in 9th grade biology class, Anderson decided he wanted to be an oncologist after learning that cancer is caused “by the cells growing out of control.” It was where he joined band and learned to play the oboe, a challenging instrument that he chose in part because it made him more attractive to colleges. 

And it’s where he got an opportunity to take dual enrollment classes at Hinds Community College. 

“It actually taught me how to study better,” he said. 

Anderson’s first anatomy exam, he scored a 79. Then he buckled down and got an 85 on his second.

By his senior year, Anderson had racked up so many credit hours, he had a lighter classload and a lot of free time. With encouragement from his guidance counselor, Monica Dickerson, he used those hours to apply to as many colleges as he could. 

“He was sitting outside of our office, and my email just started dinging, dinging, dinging,” with requests to send his transcript to one college after another, Dickerson recalled. “So I walked out of my office and I said, ‘Jayme.’ I said, ‘Now listen, I know I told you to apply to schools, but I don’t want you just to go crazy.’” 

He was undeterred. Every now and then, he’d ask Dickerson to print him off some more fee waivers, so he didn’t have to pay for the applications.

He applied to colleges in all 50 states, and even to a few he found on Indeed.com. 

“I think his motive was to get a lot of scholarships,” Angella said. “At one point when I talked to him, he was over $5 million, and he was like, ‘Momma, I’m gonna get the most in scholarships.’” 

Anderson had initially planned to attend Stanford University, but earlier this month, he had a change of plans. He enrolled in Pennsylvania State University — in part, his mom said, because it snows there, and he wanted to get out of the southern heat. 

“That was it, point blank,” his mom said. “It was the cold. It was the air.” 

They made the trip to State College earlier this week, taking two cars packed full of the usual necessities — laundry detergent, a mini fridge, boxes of bedding, clothes and lots of pens. 

Anderson also brought the award that meant the most to him: His associate’s degree from Hinds.