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May 3, 1850

Shadrach Minkins, already separated from his family, escaped from the Norfolk, Virginia, home, where he was enslaved. He made his way to Boston, where he did odd jobs until he began working as a waiter at Taft’s Cornhill Coffee House. 

Months later, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which gave authorities the power to go into free states and arrest Black Americans who had escaped slavery. 

A slave catcher named John Caphart arrived in Boston, with papers for Minkins. While serving breakfast at the coffee house, federal authorities arrested Minkins. 

Several local lawyers, including Robert Morris, volunteered to represent him. Three days later, a group of abolitionists, led by African-American abolitionist Lewis Hayden, broke into the Boston courthouse and rescued a surprised Minkins. 

“The rescuers headed north along Court Street, 200 or more following like the tail of a comet,” author Gary Collison wrote. They guided him across the Charles River to the Cambridge home of the Rev. Joseph C. Lovejoy, whose brother, Elijah, had been lynched by a pro-slavery mob in Illinois in 1837. 

Another Black leader, John J. Smith, helped Minkins get a wagon with horses, and from Cambridge, Hayden, Smith and Minkins traveled to Concord, where Minkins stayed with the Bigelow family, which guided him to the Underground Railroad, making his way to Montreal, spending the rest of his life in Canada as a free man. 

Abolitionists cheered his escape, and President Millard Fillmore fumed. Morris, Hayden and others were charged, but sympathetic juries acquitted them. Meanwhile in Montreal, Minkins met fellow fugitives, married, had four children and continued to work as a waiter before operating his own restaurants. 

He ended his career running a barbershop before dying in 1875. A play performed in Boston in 2016 told the dramatic story of his escape.

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At her husband’s funeral in 1963, Myrlie Evers heard NAACP Executive Director Roy Wilkins declare, “Medgar Evers believed in his country. It remains to be seen if his country believes in him.”

Later today, his country will declare its belief in him when the family of the slain Mississippi NAACP leader receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor.

But Medgar Evers was more than a civilian. He fought the Nazis in World War II, only to return home and fight racism, this time in the form of Jim Crow, which barred Black Mississippians from the ballot box.

On his 21st birthday, he and other Black veterans of the war went to vote at the courthouse in Decatur, where they were met by white men with guns.

Afterward, he vowed he would never be defeated again and that he would keep fighting by joining others dedicated to the cause of the civil rights movement.

“The movement for equality was always on his mind, and whites’ denial of his right to vote in his hometown served as one cog of many in the overall wheel of injustice, a wheel of which he was bound and determined to break,” said Michael Vinson Williams, author of “Medgar Evers: Mississippi Martyr.” 

Myrlie Beasley met Medgar Evers on the first day of her freshman year at Alcorn A&M College in fall 1950. As she leaned against a light pole, she said he told her to be careful, “you might get shocked.”

And shocked she was when she fell in love and married him a year later. He was one of those military veterans that her family had warned her about. And he was involved in the movement that her family had avoided.

She joined him in the fight, and they moved to Mississippi’s only all-Black town, Mound Bayou, where he helped Dr. T.R.M. Howard lead a boycott. They distributed thousands of fluorescent bumper stickers that read, “Don’t Buy Gas Where You Can’t Use the Restroom.”

In January 1954, the University of Mississippi School of Law turned Medgar Evers away because of the color of his skin. NAACP officials considered taking his case to court, but they were so impressed with him they hired him instead as the first field secretary for the Mississippi NAACP. 

Myrlie Evers worked as his secretary. She said he insisted they call each other “Mr. Evers” and “Mrs. Evers” in the office.

He spent much of his time on the road, putting 40,000 miles a year on his car, recruiting new members, reviving branches and inspiring young people to participate in the movement, including Joyce Ladner, who invited him to speak to the NAACP Youth Council in Hattiesburg.

“He had a quiet courage,” she recalled. “I was always amazed that he drove up and down Mississippi’s two-lane highways alone at night. He was a marked man, but he kept on going.”

In 1961, Joan Trumpaeur Mulholland was one of more than 400 Freedom Riders, half of them white, who challenged segregation laws in the South. She and other Riders were arrested and sent to serve their time at the State Penitentiary at Parchman.

When she and other Riders needed a lawyer, Medgar Evers “was the one who took care of it,” she said.

He became a model for her and others in character and courage, talking often to Tougaloo College students, she recalled. “He wasn’t intimidated.”

In 1962, Evers installed Leslie McLemore as president of the Rust College chapter of the Mississippi NAACP. “Medgar Evers was really a brilliant man,” he said. “He had an incisive mind and personality that drew people to him. In another era, he could have been a U.S. senator from Mississippi or maybe even President.”

Evers investigated countless cases of intimidation and violence against Black Americans, including the 1955 murder of Emmett Till. Evers often dressed as a sharecropper in those investigations.

No matter where he went, threats of violence followed. He bought an Oldsmobile 88 with a V-8 engine so powerful it would leave most cars behind. On some dark nights across the Mississippi Delta, he floored it to escape those hell-bent on harming him.

His name appeared on Ku Klux Klan “death lists,” and his home telephone rang at all hours with threats to him and his family.

When his daughter, Reena, answered the phone one time, she heard a man saying he planned to torture and kill her father.

In spite of these threats, he stayed. He told Ebony magazine, “The state is beautiful, it is home, I love it here. A man’s state is like his house. If it has defects, he tries to remedy them. That’s what my job is here.”

On May 20, 1963, Evers talked on television about the mistreatment of Black Mississippians. “If I die, it will be a good cause,” he told The New York Times. “I’m fighting for America just as much as the soldiers in Vietnam.”

Weeks later, President Kennedy delivered his first and only civil rights speech, telling the millions watching on television, “If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who will represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place?”

Evers smiled. He and other Black leaders had urged Kennedy to push Congress for a civil rights bill, and now that seemed certain to happen.

Hours later, returning home from a late civil rights meeting, Evers was shot in the back in the driveway of his Jackson home.

Myrlie Evers and their three children dashed outside, saw the blood and screamed. “Daddy!” Reena yelled. “Please get up, Daddy.”

He never did.

“He had the courage to hold an impossible job at a crucial turning point in American history,” said Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a trilogy on the civil rights movement.

For the first time, members of the mainstream press didn’t call such a killing “a lynching,” he said. “They called it an assassination.”

In his book, “Parting the Waters,” he wrote, “White people who had never heard of Medgar Evers spoke his name over and over, as though the words themselves had the ring of legend. It seemed fitting that the casket was placed on a slow train through the South, bound for Washington so that the body could lie in state.”

After the casket arrived, Medgar Evers was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.

“The tragedy of his martyrdom is eloquent testimony to the courage and dedication of a leader who — in his lifetime — deserved the respect and support of the powerful people who later publicly identified with this man and his cause,” said John Dittmer, author of “Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi.” “Though long overdue, this award is a fitting tribute to Medgar Evers and his family.”

A year after Evers’ assassination, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act on his birthday, and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the bill into law hours later. 

“Medgar Wiley Evers boldly stood against injustice, against oppression, against this country’s determination to keep Black people as second-class citizens,” Williams said, “and he was murdered because of his commitment to truth, justice and the struggle for civil and human rights.”

Before leaving office as governor in 1984, William Winter hosted Myrlie Evers and her family at the mansion, where he remarked that Medgar Evers did more than just free Black Mississippians, he freed white Mississippians as well from the bonds of racial segregation, oppression and hate, he said. “We were all prisoners of that system.”

It took three decades before Evers’ killer was finally brought to justice in 1994, and that verdict helped to inspire the reopenings of other cases. There have been 24 convictions in civil rights cold cases.

Myrlie Evers’ courage to press for justice in her husband’s case started all of this, said Leslie McLemore, who helped found the Fannie Lou Hamer National Institute on Citizenship and Democracy. “It would not have happened without her persistence.”

When she learned last week about the Presidential Medal of Freedom honoring her late husband, she exclaimed to her daughter, Reena Evers-Everette, “Oh, my God!”

Then Myrlie Evers grew silent.

“I’m just utterly speechless,” she said, “and frozen with gratitude.”

Evers-Everette still misses the man she knows as “Daddy,” but she perseveres as the executive director for the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute, because his spirit inspires her. 

“I feel him around me all the time,” she said. “I marvel at his courage, stamina, vision, and commitment for equality and justice for his people and all of humanity. I pray for his love and wisdom as I pursue this work, because I don’t want him to have died in vain.”

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An effort in the Mississippi Legislature to accept billions of dollars in federal money to expand Medicaid coverage to the working poor – a policy which medical experts, clergy and business leaders advocated – was expected to die on a Thursday night deadline, according to House leaders.  

House Medicaid Chair Missy McGee, R-Hattiesburg, told reporters that she delivered a proposal to Senate negotiators on Thursday morning that would have allowed voters to have the final say on a statewide referendum in November whether the state should expand Medicaid. 

But the Forrest County lawmaker said she had not heard a response from the Senate at all on Thursday, leading her to believe expansion is certain to die by an 8 p.m. Thursday deadline. 

“It’s disappointing,” McGee said. “We worked really hard on it, and we fought to the bitter end.” 

The bill’s death would mark an end to months of intense debate at the Capitol and scores of rallies urging legislators to adopt expansion under the federal Affordable Care Act. 

For a brief moment on Wednesday, it appeared both chambers at the Capitol might adopt a compromise, but expansion under that proposal contained stipulations the federal government is not likely to approve and could have held expansion here in limbo for years.

House and Senate negotiators on Tuesday night agreed on a compromise that would have expanded Medicaid coverage to individuals who make roughly $20,000 but only if the federal government signed off on a work proposal for recipients – something the federal government was almost certain to reject. 

But the deal fell apart after rumors circulated in the Capitol that the Senate did not have enough votes to support the plan and after a large portion of Democrats in the House objected to the work requirement. 

House Speaker Jason White, R-West, said he would have had the votes Wednesday in the House to pass the compromise, even with the loss of a significant number of Democratic votes.

But the speaker opted to send the proposal back to negotiations after being told by Senate leaders that the Senate only had 28 votes – not enough to pass it by a needed three-fifths majority. 

White said his negotiators offered the referendum option as a compromise that he hoped more Senate Republicans could support. He said he knew it was a long shot that the Senate would accept the proposal, but he thought it was worth a try.

“I am not casting blame,” White said when asked about what he said was the lack of votes in the Senate. “… But I had to act on that information.”

White said he was disappointed that Medicaid expansion did not pass this session, but he said he is glad it was debated and discussed during the session.

“It was a good first step,” he said. “Whether we will look at it next year or the next, I don’t know. We will have to reassess.”

White, in his first year as speaker, was the first Republican legislative leader to bring up legislation to enact Medicaid expansion. That original proposal passed by an overwhelming bipartisan vote in the House.

When asked about whether the Senate had the votes to pass the compromise on Wednesday, a spokesperson for Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann said, “The Senate was working to secure the votes, but that effort stalled when House Democrats indicated they did not support the bill.”

Democratic leaders in a statement said they have been “crystal clear” about what they were willing to accept in a Medicaid expansion compromise, but whether House Republicans wanted to listen to is “beyond our control.”

“Unfortunately, neither House nor Senate leadership chose to act on the language we proposed,” the statement read. “Instead, we will leave Jackson without a plan to solve our state’s increasingly dangerous healthcare crisis.”

If the expansion legislation dies as expected, lawmakers will have to wait until next year during the 2025 session to reconsider the policy that 40 other states have adopted. 

Bishop Ronnie Crudup, Sr., the Mid-South Diocese of the Fellowship of International Church who has been advocating for expansion for months at the Capitol, told Mississippi Today he was still hoping the two chambers could reach a “dramatic” last minute compromise. 

“But we will continue to advocate for Medicaid expansion,” Cruddup said. “If something dramatic doesn’t happen, we will be looking for other routes to make this happen.”

Lawmakers on Thursday said they expect to end the 2024 legislative session early Saturday.

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OXFORD — Police disbanded a pro-Palestinian student protest at the University of Mississippi less than an hour after it officially started when counter-protesters threw a water bottle and other items at the protest, prompting the protesters to respond in kind with water.

When police removed the pro-Palestinian students from the Quad, a grassy area behind the library, the largely white male students roared.

“Nah, nah, nah, nah, hey, hey, hey, good bye,” the counter-protesters chanted. 

The confrontation was in reaction to a largely peaceful protest held by a group called UMiss for Palestine that called on the university to divest from companies tied to Israel, a common demand at student protests across the country in the wake of the Israel-Hamas War. The university has said it doesn’t have any direct investment in Israeli-based companies, and that no arrests were made or injuries reported. Nationally, about 2,000 arrests have been made, according to AP.

Many of the roughly 60 protesters wore masks, chanting “free, free Palestine” and “disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest.” 

But they were vastly outnumbered by more than 200 counter-protesters, who drowned them out with shouts of “fuck Joe Biden,” “whose your daddy,” “USA” and “we can’t hear you.” Some of the counter-protesters shouted racist remarks, such as “hit the showers” and “your nose is huge.”

The campus in north Mississippi had seen two gatherings last fall after the Oct. 7 attacks — a vigil organized by Hillel, a Jewish organization, and a rally for humanitarian aid for Palestinians — but multiple students on both sides said Thursday’s protest was the tensest they had seen. Ole Miss, a largely white university, has few Palestinian and Jewish students.

It was the first pro-Palestine protest at a Mississippi university since students at Columbia University set up an encampment about two weeks ago.

The sheer novelty seemed to draw some of the counter-protesters who came from Fraternity Row, a few blocks away from the Quad.

“Um, we were gonna go to the pool, but then we heard this was gonna happen so we were like fuck that, we’re gonna come over here and counter-protest it,” said Trevor Lahey, a 21-year-old business major, who said he came out with his fraternity brothers, though he wouldn’t say which one. 

Though the pro-Palestinian students have a right to free speech, Lahey added, he thought they were taking it too far. 

“I don’t care that much, I just don’t want them to encamp on my school,” Lahey said. “It looks ugly. I’m paying for them to be there.” 

The Pro-Palestinian protesters were not setting up camp. They wouldn’t speak to a reporter beyond a statement they had prepared, but Mississippi Today couldn’t obtain it by press time.  

Earlier in the day, Gov. Tate Reeves said he was aware of the protest and that campus, city, county and state law enforcement were “being deployed and coordinated.” 

“Peaceful protests are allowed and protected – no matter how outrageous those protesters views (sic) may seem to some of us,” he wrote. “But unlawful behavior will not be tolerated. It will be dealt with accordingly. Law and order will be maintained!”

University police had initially erected metal barricades separating the student protesters from the Phi Mu Fountain, but the counter-protesters began to congregate behind the library. Just steps separated the two camps, with a handful of officers standing between them.

The situation began to escalate when a student in hot pink athleisure exchanged words with a student protester wearing a keffiyeh. The student protester charged at her, but others held her back. 

Then a half-eaten sandwich was thrown at the protesters, prompting the police to hem them in with the barricades. 

It’s pointless to protest in the U.S., said a 21-year-old student who only gave his name as Dillon. The student protesters could better support Palestine by going “over there,” he said, adding he thought it was a “stupid war” that he doesn’t support.  

But he still decided to join the counter-protesters, Dillon said.

“I just wanted to see it for myself,” he said. “I wanted to be a part of something. I love my country. I love them, too. I just don’t think what they’re supporting is right, in my opinion.”

“They shouldn’t be throwing shit, in my opinion,” he added, referring to both sides. 

That’s when a counter-protester threw a water bottle. The student protesters threw something back, and soon, food-related items were volleying across the barricade. 

In an attempt to de-escalate, the police began to escort the protesters away. The counter-protesters cheered and started running after them, which some police and staff with the University of Mississippi First Amendment Support Team tried to prevent, leading one student to shout, “I’m not walking with them, I’m just walking this way!” 

“Nobody fucking cares, shut up!” a white female protester yelled as she swatted him with a plastic bag of takeout. 

“Assault!” The counter-protesters shouted. 

A police officer in a vest pulled her aside. Her mouth trembled, and she initially refused to give her full name. A legal observer with the Mississippi Center for Justice slipped her his card. 

“I’m trying to let you go,” the officer said, exasperated. “But I’m going to annotate that this happened. If you don’t want to cooperate, I’ll just take you to jail.” 

Police warned other students for their behavior. On Chapel Lane, where the student protesters waited to go inside the School of Applied Science, four officers escorted two Black students to their cars as the counter-protesters jeered. 

A plainclothes officer told the crowd to get back. 

“I’m doing the same thing they’re doing — I have freedom of speech,” one student said to him. 

“Absolutely, 100%, but you can’t come up to them,” the officer said.

Inside the School of Applied Sciences, the pro-Palestinian protesters holed up in a classroom. They comforted each other, made a plan to leave campus and accounted for all their sashes and flags. Through windows covered in white vinyl, the visages of counter-protesters could be seen. 

“Y’all did beautifully,” said one student, who didn’t give a name, as students clapped for each other. “I’m so happy.”

Near tears, a student named Jana, whose family is from Palestine, thanked the group.

“Hey guys, I know that what just happened was really intimidating, and it was a little scary, but I just want to say I’m so proud of you guys,” she said. “This wasn’t going to happen in Oxford without all of you guys. Palestine was being heard. And I just want to thank you guys so much. I know that was such a big risk, but this is the most that people have ever thought for us, so don’t give up. I know that was really hard, but we need to keep fighting. This was just the start of it, okay?”

Jana grew up in Southaven, but her dad was born in a refugee camp in Jericho, in the Palestinian West Bank. She said her family still knows people in Gaza.

The idea that her university could be investing in companies connected to Israel is personal, she said. Along with other students, she’s tried to investigate Ole Miss’s ties to military defense contractors like Raytheon, and it’s something she plans to look into more. 

“Our university endowment has no direct investment in Israeli-based companies, the university offers no study abroad opportunities to Israel, and the university has no formal agreements with defense contractors,” Jacob Batte, the university’s media relations director, wrote in an email. 

Jana said she was surprised at how many students came out, considering many of them aren’t affected by the conflict. 

“I don’t even know if they were just against us, or if they were there to just like, get a good laugh,”she said. 

The police helped the protesters get to a bus that would take them to their cars. The counter-protesters started barking at the students, and as a student gave them a middle-finger, one of them shouted “at least it’s not a plane this time,” a possible reference to the Sept. 11 attacks.

As the crowd died down, three Black friends in the parking lots said they wished it would’ve been possible for the two groups to have a dialogue. They didn’t know much about the conflict and would like to learn more. 

But the counter-protesters made that impossible, they said. 

“They just conformed to the larger group,” Hannah Brock, a 21-year-old social work major observed. 

Both sides should’ve had representatives debate, they added. 

“It wasn’t equal, like—” said Victoria Fox, a 21-year-old criminal justice major.

“They were just throwing out insults,” 21-year-old Carlesis Ferguson said about the counter-protesters. “You couldn’t even hear (the Pro-Palestinian students) and it was their protest.” 

In the Circle, the former home of the campus’s Confederate monument and where the protest was slated to be held before the university convinced students to move it, Chancellor Glenn Boyce spoke at a ceremony for JROTC students. The mood was calm, as if the protest hadn’t happened.

“I’m humbled to be here with you today,” Boyce said. “Once again you represent this university’s legacy at its absolute finest.”

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The Mississippi Supreme Court in a 7-2 ruling found that Parents for Public Schools does not have legal standing to challenge the constitutionality of the state Legislature sending public money to private schools.

The opinion, released Thursday, did not address the issue of whether the $10 million appropriation made in 2022 by the Legislature to private schools was constitutional.

Justice Robert Chamberlin of Southaven, writing for the majority, concluded Parents for Public Schools did not have standing to bring the lawsuit, in part, because harm to the public schools could not be proven.

Chamberlin wrote that the public education advocacy group says the legislative appropriation “will adversely affect the funding of public schools by legislating a competitive advantage to the independent schools who will receive the funds. This alleged future harm, however, is speculative and not sufficient to meet even Mississippi’s permissive standing requirements.”

Coloring the ruling of the majority at least in part, is that the funds appropriated to the private schools were federal COVID-19 relief funds and not state money.

The office of state Attorney General Lynn Fitch had argued that the case should be dismissed because of lack of standing.

“We are pleased with the court’s opinion, which will release $10 million in federal funding for infrastructure grants to schools across Mississippi,” Fitch said in a statement.

Will Bardwell, an attorney for Parents for Public Schools, told Mississippi Today that the Thursday ruling was “outrageous” because the organization he represents had a “direct interest” in ensuring Mississippi’s public schools were not undermined.

“This is not how courts are supposed to operate,” Bardwell said. “This is not how courts are supposed to work. When lawmakers ignore the constitution, courts are supposed to stand in their way. Other than Justice Leslie king and Justice Jim Kitchens, seven members of the Mississippi Supreme Court didn’t do that today. And that’s sad.” 

The lawsuit revolved around Section 208 of the Mississippi Constitution, which declares simply that no public funds shall go to any school “that at the time of receiving such funds is not conducted as a free public school.”

During oral arguments before the Court in February, attorneys for Parents for Public Schools contended that it made no difference whether the funds were state or federal funds, only that they were public funds.

Parents for Public Schools argued that it was a group composed of parents of public school children so it should have standing to pursue the lawsuit.

Hinds County Chancellor Crystal Wise Martin agreed with that argument, but the state’s highest court overturned her ruling.

Chamberlin wrote that because the funds were federal, “state taxpayer standing
is untenable under the facts of this case.”

Justice Leslie King of Greenville argued that Parents for Public Schools did have standing. King, who was joined in his opinion by Justice James Kitchens of Crystal Springs, questioned whether anyone would have standing to file a lawsuit under the majority’s opinion.

King wrote, “The majority’s holding today flies in the face of our longstanding liberal standing jurisprudence and severely limits the ability of Mississippi citizens to challenge government actions that violate the constitution.”

Mississippi Today’s Taylor Vance contributed to this report.

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A bill to correct an outdated law barring in vitro fertilization children from next of kin inheritance passed both chambers Wednesday afternoon and now heads to the governor to be signed into law. 

This is the fifth year Rep. Dana McLean, R-Columbus, filed the measure to give inheritance rights to children conceived via IVF after the death of one parent, as 27 other states have done. These bills died in the legislative process the last four years.

“What a relief … I am just so thrilled that after all this time we came to an agreement that will soon be law,” McLean said. “This will help countless families and children have the right to be able to receive these benefits as they should.”

McLean’s legislation was inspired by the personal story of one of her constituents, Katie Studdard, whose 5-year-old daughter has been denied Social Security benefits from her late biological father since birth. 

READ MORE: Five years later, this Mississippi mom is still fighting an outdated law blocking her child’s inheritance

“And that’s how a lot of bills that we end up sponsoring come to us – from stories, from an issue someone is having where we need to make adjustments to state law,” McLean said.

Studdard, who lives in Columbus, started fertility treatments with her late husband, Chris McDill, before he died of cancer. She did not have success with the embryos while her husband was alive, but decided to continue trying for a baby after her husband’s death. She conceived her daughter Elyse a year after her husband died. 

House Bill 1542 passed the House unanimously in mid-March and overwhelmingly passed the Senate in mid-April at the eleventh hour. But the Senate passed it with a reverse repealer, referring it to conference in the hopes of expanding the bill beyond its original scope to protect in vitro fertilization and other forms of assisted reproduction, in the wake of recent events calling fertility treatments into question in Alabama. 

Ultimately, that was too big a task to take on at the end of the session, with pro-life groups coming out publicly to express concern about new language they didn’t have time to vet, explained Sen. Joey Fillingane, R-Sumrall. Fillingane was one of the lawmakers tasked with debating the details of the bill in conference. 

House and Senate conferees reverted the bill back mostly to its original language and were able to achieve the primary goal of securing inheritance rights for posthumously-conceived children with the final version. In addition to that goal, Fillingane said, conferees were able to come up with a definition for “alternative reproduction,” which didn’t previously exist in Mississippi. 

“I think Chairman (Brice) Wiggins and Chairman (Joey) Hood (of the Judiciary A committee where the bill was assigned) thought … ‘let’s get this issue addressed for this family in Columbus that has waited (five) years … and let’s at least get a definition in place sort of as a starting point to build a framework out hopefully over the next sessions to add to protect the IVF procedures and processes and surrogacy,’” said Fillingane.

Fillingane had two of his own children through surrogacy, but traveled to California to do so – because the state has clear statutory guidelines around parental rights in surrogacy cases. 

“I did not feel comfortable having my kids in Mississippi … there were absolutely no protections that the state of Mississippi offers for parents who have children this way. As a family lawyer, I was uniquely situated to see some of these things,” he said.

Senate Judiciary A Chairman Brice Wiggins, R-Pascagoula, who was instrumental in getting the bill to the finish line, wasn’t available for comment. 

Although it’s been a trying few years, Studdard said she has a newfound appreciation for the Legislature. As a teacher, she has live streamed floor debates during her lunch period at school, has become acquainted with the legislative language of various iterations of the bill, and talked extensively with lawmakers. She says that every time she hears a new legislative word that she doesn’t know, she googles it.

“I’ve learned a lot,” she said. “I think anybody going through any life-changing event, like I did with (my husband’s) cancer, and then IVF, and now this bill …you gain a whole new appreciation and so much knowledge you never thought you’d know.”

Studdard is overjoyed that the Senate proposed naming the law after her late husband, Chris McDill, and is proud to model for her daughter and her students that it is possible for an everyday person to enact policy change. 

Primarily, she hopes the benefits her daughter will start receiving next year will go toward her future education.

“I just think this financially will create so much security for her and her education, that’s number one for me,” Studdard said. “I want her to not have to worry about taking out a student loan. I want her to have a good financial start to life when she goes to college. To be able to hand that to your child is a gift.”

When McLean first authored a bill to address Studdard’s predicament, it was the first year of her first four-year term. Now, it’s the first year of her second term, and she says it feels full circle. 

“When (Studdard) first told me about her little girl and being a single mom, at that time Elyse was just a baby, and it really hit home to me because I am also a single mother of a daughter, and I understood the significance of this and how we really need to protect children and women and mothers and families,” McLean reflected. “I felt like it was really something I could get behind.”

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The final version of Medicaid expansion in the Legislature could leave tens of thousands of uninsured, working Mississippians waiting indefinitely for Medicaid coverage – unless the federal government makes an unprecedented move.

The compromise lawmakers reached minutes before a legislative deadline on Monday night makes expansion contingent on a work requirement. That means even if both chambers pass the bill, the estimated 200,000 Mississippians who would qualify for coverage would need to wait until the federal government, under either a Biden or Trump administration, approved the waiver necessary to implement a work requirement – which could take years, if ever.

Lawmakers in favor of the work requirement have not been open to allowing expansion to move forward while the work requirement is in flux. The House bill proposed expansion be implemented immediately but included a “trigger law” similar to North Carolina’s. The “trigger law” mandated that if the federal government ever changed its policy on allowing states to implement a work requirement, Mississippi would move to implement one immediately.

Senator Brice Wiggins, R-Pascagoula, one of the Medicaid expansion conferees, posted on social media “if CMMS wants people covered then it will approve (the work requirement). Nothing prevents them from approving it other than POTUS/CMMS philosophy.” 

But even in states where a work requirement was approved, litigation ensued, with the courts finding the approval of the work requirement unlawful for a number of reasons, according to a KFF report. 

Senate Medicaid Chairman Kevin Blackwell, R-Southaven, did not respond to Mississippi Today by the time the story published. 

Will a Biden – or Trump – administration approve the work requirement?

The Biden administration has never approved the waiver necessary for a work requirement and has rescinded ones previously granted under the Trump administration. Waivers granted under the Trump administration were not granted under the current circumstances as Mississippi. 

Mississippi Today reached out to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for comment but did not hear back by the time of publication. 

Joan Alker, Medicaid expert and executive director of Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families, explained that the Trump administration has never approved a work requirement up front for a traditional expansion plan like Mississippi’s.  

In states like Kentucky and Arkansas, Alker explained, the Trump administration approved work requirements as a means of limiting already-existing expansion plans. In Georgia, an outlier state that remains in litigation with the Biden administration for rescinding the state’s work requirement waiver, the Trump administration approved a work requirement for a plan that isn’t considered full “expansion” under the Affordable Care Act and doesn’t draw down the increased federal match rate.

“If the Legislature passed a bill with both of those requirements being non-negotiable, (the work requirement and the enhanced match) they need to know that there is no precedent for that kind of approval from either a Biden or a Trump CMS,” she said.

What happens if a work requirement is approved?

In the best case scenario – that a work requirement is approved by some administration in the near future – its implementation could mean an increase in administrative costs and a decrease in eligible enrollees getting the coverage for which they qualify. Georgia’s plan, for example, requires people document they’re in school, working or participating in other activities. The requirement has cost taxpayers at least $26 million, and more than 90% of that has gone toward administrative and consulting costs, according to KFF Health News.    

“Even if CMS does approve (it), actually implementing and administering work requirements is costly and complex,” explained Morgan Henderson, the principal data scientist on a study commissioned by the Center for Mississippi Health Policy and conducted by the Hilltop Institute at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “This would almost certainly significantly dampen enrollment relative to a scenario with no work requirements, and cost the state millions to implement.”

Many of the cases where work requirements were approved but then deemed unlawful were due to court rulings that found that the work requirement resulted in lower enrollment, counterproductive to the primary goal of Medicaid. 

In addition to lowering enrollment, the work requirements have not led to increased employment, the primary goal of the work requirement, explained Alice Middleton, deputy director of the Hilltop Institute and a former deputy director of the Division of Eligibility and Enrollment at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. 

“Recent guidance has been clear that work requirements would jeopardize health coverage and access without increasing employment,” Middleton said. “While a future Trump Administration may revisit these decisions and approve work requirements again, legal challenges are likely to follow …”

Senate leaders compromised with the House on a number of fine points regarding the work requirement: reducing the mandatory employment from 120 to 100 hours a month; reducing the number of employment verification renewals from four times to once a year; and removing the clause that would require the state to enter into litigation with the federal government, as Georgia did, if the federal government turns down the work requirement. 

“It was encouraging to see both sides compromising, but, ultimately, the inclusion of work requirements presents multiple sets of challenges to successful expansion,” Henderson said.

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