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President Donald Trump has appointed former Southern District Public Service Commissioner Dane Maxwell as Mississippi director of rural development for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

He also appointed Chris McDonald, currently director of federal and environmental affairs at the Mississippi Department of Agriculture, as director of the USDA’s farm services for the state.

According to the USDA, its missions include providing assistance to America’s farmers, improving the nation’s health, ending hunger, ensuring food safety, providing marketing assistance and conserving and protecting natural resources.

The Farm Service Agency implements agricultural policy, administers credit and loan programs, and manages conservation, commodity, disaster and farm marketing programs through a national network of offices.

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins recently announced the appointments for state directors under the Trump administration.

“When America’s farming communities prosper, the entire nation thrives. This new group of USDA appointees will ensure President Trump’s America First agenda is a reality in rural areas across the country. I am grateful for the leadership of these new state directors and look forward to their work reorienting the agency to put Farmers First again,” said Secretary Rollins.

Maxwell is former mayor of Pascagoula and former state public service commissioner for the Southern District and served as state director for Trump’s 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns.

For the Pearl River Glass Studio, located in the Midtown neighborhood of Jackson, it started as an honor and labor of love, with Memphis-based artist Lonnie Robinson, who out of hundreds of artistic contestants, won the privilege to create the stained glass windows along with artist Sharday Michelle, for the historic Clayborn Temple, located in Memphis, Tennessee, as part of a massive renovation project. 

This team of artisans restored three enormous stained glass windows, panel by panel, for the historic church that was a bastion for the Civil Rights movement in Memphis, Tennessee, in the 1960s. The stained glass windows depicted Civil Rights icons and paid homage to the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike, which lasted 64 days from Feb. 12 to April 16, 1968. It is the site where sanitation workers agreed to end the strike when city officials recognized their union and their raised wages.

Over time, the church fell into disrepair and closed in 1999.

In 2018, it was officially named a national treasure by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

The $14 million restoration of Clayborn Temple was a collaborative effort by non-profits, movers and shakers on the national scene, community leaders and donations.

The hard work, the labors of love, the beautiful stained glass arch windows and other restorative work at the historic church all came to an end due to a fire in the wee hours of Monday morning on April 28 of this year. 

The cause of the fire is currently under investigation.

Editor’s note: This essay is part of Mississippi Today Ideas, a platform for thoughtful Mississippians to share fact-based ideas about our state’s past, present and future. You can read more about the section here.

Given recent policy changes threatening the future of medical research and news of Mississippi’s falling childhood vaccination rates, I fear we are ignoring lessons learned the hard way. 

One of those lessons occurred during a yellow fever outbreak in the summer of 1898 when a community of honest citizens in Orwood, then a hamlet in southwest Lafayette County, helped a team of physicians change the direction of public health for Mississippi and the rest of the country.

I first heard about their story listening to a documentary about yellow fever with my husband, a virologist, who teaches at the University of Mississippi. The video mentioned an unnamed doctor in Mississippi who had advanced a theory linking mosquitoes and yellow fever.

The story I uncovered models the honesty and trust in medical science we need today to keep our families and communities healthy. 

***

Yellow fever was a problem in the South throughout the 1800s. Its initial symptoms — fever, body aches and severe headache — were followed by jaundice and in some cases internal bleeding leading to death. The jaundice left the skin tinged with yellow, thus the name “yellow fever.”  

In early August 1898, a young woman named Sallie Wilson Gray (no relation to the author) developed chills and a fever while visiting at her uncle’s home in Taylor. Her uncle immediately sent her home to be cared for by her family in Orwood, about 10 miles away.  

Days later, Sallie’s uncle in Taylor died from what proved to be yellow fever. Family members wiped black vomit, a sign of internal bleeding, from his body as he lay in his coffin. 

Sallie had now brought the same illness home to Orwood. 

***

I learned about yellow fever in seventh grade when we studied the 1878 yellow fever epidemic, the worst to strike the Mississippi River Valley. That year, Mississippi reported almost 17,000 cases and more than 4,000 deaths. I didn’t realize, though, how yellow fever continued to appear year after year. 

Physicians had a basic understanding of bacteria after the Civil War, but they didn’t recognize viruses, which proved to be the cause of yellow fever, until later in the 1900s. One popular theory suggested yellow fever spread on fomites—inanimate surfaces—like bedding, clothing and furniture. Panic often followed news of a yellow fever outbreak. Health officials established quarantines, closed roads, river ports and train stations, hoping to curb the spread of infections. 

The fear of what was not known then about yellow fever reminded me of the early days of the COVID pandemic when fear spread through rumors and unconfirmed anecdotes on social media. 

***

Sallie’s sisters and brothers in Orwood soon developed the same symptoms as Sallie. By September, 30-plus people in Taylor and Orwood showed signs of the disease and new cases were reported outside the local area. In response, three interstate railroads shut down and Memphis halted train traffic coming into the city. In Starkville, the president of Mississippi A&M (now Mississippi State University) posted a column of guards along its roads. In mid-October, officials placed all of Mississippi under quarantine as thousands fled the state. 

Months earlier, the governor of Mississippi, recognizing the heavy toll yellow fever often brought to his state, had sent a team of Board of Health physicians to Cuba, the center for yellow fever research. There the group met with Dr. Walter Reed, the Army physician directing the American research interests on the island. Reed pursued a theory that mosquitos transmitted the disease, but his experiments to establish that link repeatedly failed. The Mississippi team, including Dr. Henry Gant, a Water Valley doctor, returned home, still hopeful that science could soon solve the yellow fever mystery.

Gant immediately responded when he learned about the outbreak in Taylor. So did Dr. Henry Rose Carter, a field epidemiologist who served as the quarantine officer at Ship Island and who investigated yellow fever outbreaks throughout the South. 

Committed to the same rigorous scientific process that epidemiologists use today, Carter looked for patterns in how diseases spread within clusters of people. With yellow fever, he needed to identify the first person to develop the disease in a specific area and then trace everybody and everything that the person came into contact with.  

Over and over again, unreliable sources or conflicting pieces of data prevented Carter from finding a pattern. People, suspicious of government intervention and scared of the consequences of yellow fever, often distorted the truth. 

Fortunately for us today, the people of Orwood proved to be different. The people, Carter wrote, were “honest enough to tell the truth” and cooperated with efforts to trace the infection of each case.

Working with Carter, Gant moved from house to house in Orwood, instructing families to quarantine at home, though their natural inclination was to care for their neighbors. He also questioned each person, recording data for Gant’s analysis. 

Unlike diseases that produce low-grade fevers, an abrupt and high fever often characterizes a case of yellow fever. For that reason, many of the people Gant interviewed reported the day their infections started and also the time their fevers ignited: Mr. G. W. McMillan, sickened on Aug. 29 at noon.  Mrs. Rogers, Sept. 4, 10:00 am. 

Collecting this detailed information about time proved essential for Carter’s study and he cheered Gant’s ability to gather such reliable data. “A greater tribute to the good faith of the community, or to its confidence in Dr. Gant, can scarcely be given,” he wrote. 

Studying the Orwood data, Carter recognized a consistent time interval between cases, about two weeks between the first case and the development of secondary cases. This meant that the infection did not immediately spread from person-to-person but required time to incubate. He called this the period of extrinsic incubation.

I’ve read Carter’s scientific report with the results of the Orwood study, the same report that persuaded Walter Reed to alter his experimental process. Waiting 10-14 days before introducing infected mosquitos to healthy volunteers, Reed successfully demonstrated the transmission of yellow fever from mosquito to human. 

With the development of mosquito control procedures, the fever soon vanished in the U.S. and Caribbean. Today a vaccine can protect those travelling or living where the disease remains a threat.

***

Sallie and her siblings were among the lucky, surviving their infections with only lingering weakness and fatigue. When frosts fell in north Mississippi in early November 1898, the number of fever cases quickly fell. In total, officials confirmed 2,478 cases across the state. Those who died totaled 114.

Reed later acknowledged that the “work in Mississippi did more to impress me with the importance of an intermediate host in yellow fever than everything else put together.”  

***

My husband and I drove from our home in Oxford to Taylor and then Orwood on a hot muggy day in August, probably experiencing the same weather conditions as Sallie. Orwood is a ghost town today, but we found the cemetery where Sallie’s uncle is buried, adjacent to the wood-planked Presbyterian Church that still stands. 

Walking those grounds emphasized for me what the neighbors who once lived in Orwood taught us. Honesty and rigorous scientific inquiry — and not political rhetoric or unproven claims — are the tools we must trust to combat disease and dispel fear.

Bio: Shirley Wimbish Gray lives in Oxford. A retired writing instructor and science editor, she writes about what is often overlooked or forgotten, particularly in the American South. Her recent essays have appeared in Earth Island, Brevity Blog and Persimmon Tree. 

Rankin County officials announced Thursday that they had settled a lawsuit filed by Michael Jenkins and Eddie Parker—who were brutalized by sheriff’s deputies in 2023—for $2.5 million. 

“This amount, for Mississippi, is historic,” said Trent Walker, the attorney for the two men. “I can’t think of an excessive force settlement larger than this.”

Six Rankin County law enforcement officers handcuffed, beat and shocked Jenkins and Parker with Tasers before shooting Jenkins in the mouth during a warrantless raid of Parker’s home.

“This is the ending of the Michael Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker case from the perspective” of the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department, said its lawyer, Jason Dare.

The county’s insurance policy will cover $2 million of that payment, he said. 

The remaining $500,000 will come from the sheriff’s coffers, which is funded by taxpayer dollars, Dare said, but taxpayers won’t have to pay for any increase to the department’s budget.

Last year, a federal judge sentenced the six officers — former deputies Brett McAlpin, Jeffrey Middleton, Christian Dedmon, Hunter Elward and Daniel Opdyke and former Richland police officer Joshua Hartfield — to between 10 and 40 years in federal prison for their roles in the 2023 torture of Jenkins and Parker.

Middleton’s shift called themselves the “Goon Squad” and created a WhatsApp channel and commemorative coins featuring the moniker and drawings of mobsters.

An investigation by Mississippi Today and The New York Times exposed a decades-long reign of terror by nearly two dozen Rankin County deputies, but the six officers are the only ones who have been charged.

During the officers’ sentencing hearings, former deputies and prosecutors said the torture of Jenkins and Parker was far from isolated. In at least nine incidents over five years, McAlpin brutalized people during arrests, prosecutors said.

“McAlpin is the one who molded these men into what they became,” federal prosecutor Christopher Perras told the judge. “He modeled that behavior for young impressionable officers, and it’s no wonder that they followed his lead.”

Dare said the sheriff’s office has taken steps to ensure such behavior ceases. “The compliance director, Captain Wayne Carter, and the [Internal Affairs] investigators, do an excellent job of going through everything now to make sure that something similar to what happened in January 2023 never happens again,” he said.

The events in Braxton had impacted not only Mr. Jenkins, “but also the Rankin County community and the fine, upstanding law enforcement officers who are with the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department, who have weathered the storm that has ensued since that day,” Dare said. “We hope that this resolution brings some sense of finality.”

Decades after Richard Jordan received a death sentence and went through years of appeals, the Mississippi Supreme Court has scheduled his execution, the oldest and longest serving person on Mississippi’s death row. 

The Thursday order comes nearly two decades after the kidnap and murder of a Gulf Coast woman. Jordan, 78, is set to be executed June 25 at 6 p.m. at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman. 

“After due consideration, the Court finds Jordan has exhausted all state and federal remedies for purposes of setting an execution date,” the court wrote. “Accordingly, the Court finds the State’s Motion to Set Execution Date should be granted and a date should be set for execution of the death sentence imposed upon Jordan.”

Eight of the nine justices ruled to grant the execution, and Justice Leslie King was the sole person who ruled to deny Jordan’s execution. 

Jordan filed his most recent challenge of his death sentence in November 2024, arguing that it was invalid because the death penalty was not constitutional at the time of the murder of Edwina Marter. 

He also asked for the U.S. Supreme Court to hear his case, but that request was denied in March. 

The Mississippi Supreme Court rejected Jordan’s post-conviction petition on May 1, the same day it ordered his execution. 

Jordan was first convicted in 1976 for kidnapping Edwina Marter from Gulfport, killing her in a national forest and demanding ransom from her husband. 

The Hattiesburg native served in the Army after graduating from high school and fought in the Vietnam War. After the war, Jordan married and had three children but found it difficult to adjust to civilian life and experienced symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder related to his combat experience, according to court records. 

In 1976 he was desperate for money and made plans to kidnap someone from a wealthy family and demand a ransom. Jordan called Gulf National Bank in Gulfport and found out the name of its commercial loan officer, Chuck Marter. 

He found Chuck Marter’s address from the telephone book and traveled from Louisiana. Jordan posed as an electric worker to get into the home, and then he took Edwina Marter to the DeSoto National Forest where he shot her. 

It took four trials spanning 20 years before Jordan was successfully convicted and sentenced to death. 

Jordan’s appeals have also been tied to legal challenges of the state’s lethal injection protocol. 

He and death row inmate Ricky Chase are lead plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit challenging the use of midazolam, a sedative, as one of the state’s three execution drugs. 

U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate hasn’t made a final ruling in the case, which he ordered stayed in March pending resolution of a 2023 motion for summary judgment by the prison defendants. 

In 2022, Wingate did not block the execution of Thomas Loden Jr., another death row inmate who was part of the lawsuit. 
If lethal injection is not an option, the state can put someone to death through other available methods: gas chamber, electrocution or firing squad.

Mississippi’s congressional delegation hopes President Donald Trump’s administration will approve a disaster declaration for the state after deadly tornadoes ripped through the South, but the request has been pending for a month. 

Gov. Tate Reeves submitted a disaster declaration request to the Federal Emergency Management Agency on April 1. If approved, it would allow millions of federal dollars to be allocated to state and local governments. 

The state’s four congressmen and two senators signed a letter on April 2 urging the Trump administration to quickly approve the request. But Lea Crager, a spokesperson for FEMA, told Mississippi Today in a statement that the request is pending.  

The tornadoes impacted around 20 Mississippi counties in mid-March. They caused an estimated $18.2 million in damages, destroyed 233 homes and damaged 208 homes, according to the letter from the federal lawmakers. 

U.S. Rep. Michael Guest, a Republican congressman who represents areas struck by the tornadoes, said in a statement that he has been in contact with Trump’s staff multiple times over the last two weeks and is waiting for the administration to sign off on the request. 

The administration has denied a similar request from Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a former Trump White House press secretary, over damage from the same storm system. The administration has also denied requests for disaster relief from other states.

Sanders is appealing that decision, and the state’s congressional delegation, all of whom are Republicans, wrote a letter to the Trump administration asking them to reconsider the denial. 

Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have also floated the idea of dismantling FEMA and suggested that states should spend more of their own money to deal with storm recovery efforts. 

U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, the state’s lone Democrat in Washington, is the top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee. He offered an amendment in the committee recently that would have prevented the federal agency from using federal funds to shutter FEMA. His amendment failed in the GOP-majority committee. 

“For the life of me, I can’t understand why, right now, Arkansas and Mississippi have requested disaster declaration from the president, and he’s refused to give it,” Thompson said in the committee meeting. “North Carolina is struggling. We’re a better country than this.” 

Mississippi has historically benefited from FEMA’s assistance in the wake of deadly storms.

After Hurricane Katrina’s historic devastation in 2005, Mississippi received nearly $25 billion in federal relief spending, which state leaders have credited with saving the state from ruin and allowing communities and families to rebuild.

Below are the full responses from the state delegation to questions from Mississippi Today about the pending disaster declaration request and Trump’s suggestions to shutter FEMA: 

U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker: 

“Mississippi is no stranger to natural disasters. Unfortunately, we are also too familiar with FEMA’s bureaucratic red tape, which stops Mississippians from getting the help they need. I look forward to Mississippi getting much-needed disaster relief and hearing President Trump’s ideas to make FEMA more efficient.”

U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, through her spokesperson, Chris Gallegos: 

“The Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act authorizes the issuance of major disaster or emergency declarations, which make assistance available to protect property, human health and safety.  These declarations trigger critical aid to people in need, and Senator Hyde-Smith fully supports the Governor’s request on behalf of Mississippians impacted by the tornadoes last month.  The Senator, who serves on the Senate Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, is also open to exploring options for making the delivery of disaster assistance more efficient and cost-effective.”

U.S. Rep. Trent Kelly, 1st Congressional District: 

Did not respond to a request for comment.

U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, 2nd Congressional District: 

“Of course, I hope President Trump approves Mississippi’s disaster declaration quickly – but given how he’s been acting lately, I’m not sure we can depend on him to quickly do the right thing. Mississippi, just like every other state, relies on FEMA when disasters strike – whether it’s a storm or a massive hurricane. President Trump wanting to eliminate FEMA is shameful and makes no sense. We’re making sure he won’t be able to do it.”

U.S. Rep. Michael Guest, 3rd Congressional District:

“I have been monitoring the recovery efforts made necessary by storms that hit our state in March. The devastation is awful, and Mississippians are suffering. Right after the storms, I was on the ground for damage assessment, and I have been in continuous contact with those impacted by the storms. Governor Reeves submitted his disaster assistance request to President Trump on April 1st. On April 2nd, the Mississippi Congressional Delegation sent a letter to President Trump requesting his approval of FEMA Federal Assistance. I have been in touch with the President’s staff multiple times in the last two weeks, and we are currently waiting for his final sign-off. Mississippi will rebuild, and we will be stronger when we reach the other side.”

U.S. Rep. Mike Ezell, 4th Congressional District: 

Did not respond to a request for comment.

Javonda Stanton’s T-shirt is impossible to miss: Pink, glittery cursive bearing the words “violence against women will not be tolerated” pop out against a bright, azure blue background, a mugshot and an inmate’s number.

Stanton created the T-shirt displaying her rapist’s face about 15 years ago after the assault. She made several designs, which she used to wear twice a week. 

“For lack of a ladylike word, it’s quite ballsy,” Stanton said. “But that’s how I felt about surviving.” 

Now, Stanton only breaks the shirt out for special occasions, including yesterday’s second annual “Denim Day” hosted by the City of Jackson’s Office of Violence and Trauma Prevention to raise awareness of sexual violence. 

More than 60 advocates, nonprofit employees and community members participated in the event on the brick garden outside City Hall. Organizations from the FBI’s Community Outreach, Teen Health Mississippi, and the Mississippi Coalition Against Sexual Assault shared resources for victims and survivors, such as information on rape kits, STI testing, while the People’s Advocacy Institute offered a sign-up sheet for upcoming meetings for a new program called Jackson Heals focused on trauma recovery through restorative justice conversations. 

But perhaps the most impactful part of the event came when Stanton and other survivors spoke about their experience working through the mental toll of sexual assault, multiple attendees said. 

“Nobody wants to talk about sexual assault because it’s ugly, and then we want to say sexual assault when, really, we should say rape,” Stanton said. “The word rape just sounds so heinous. Well, it is. The act is heinous.” 

In 2024, the state saw a 27% increase in rape kits sent to the state crime lab thanks to a 2023 law aimed at reducing the persistent testing backlog and create a systems for survivors to track the kits as they’re processed, though the extent of the backlog is still undocumented.

Denim Day originated in 1999 after an Italian court found an alleged rape had likely not occurred because, it concluded in a ruling since overturned, the tight jeans the alleged survivor was wearing could not have been removed without her help. Participants in the international event wear denim in solidarity with and in protest of stigma against survivors.

Keisha Coleman, the director of the Office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery, said events like this support her goal of bringing together community organizations. 

“One of the most important things is we are bridging community organizations that have been working in silos,” Coleman said. 

The office, which was formed three years ago in the midst of a crime spike in the city, is also working to create a public-facing dashboard that can help Jacksonians understand the extent of crime in Jackson. 

“We are victim advocates, but for the most part, our goal is to focus on the data,” Coleman said. 

Still, Coleman said much of the office’s work has been difficult to quantify. For instance, Coleman, a trauma coach, works with people who have been traumatized by violence. She recently took seven families out to dinner so they could meet each other. 

“We’re just having people call us and say, ‘Hey, I need help,’ or ‘Hey, I’m a mother suffering’ or ‘I’ve received a call to say my daughter was killed, we have to move because of retaliation and I don’t have food,’” she said. “So stuff like that, it’s not tangible.” 

But qualitative impacts matter too, she said. 

“Anytime we can reach one person, we consider it a success,” she said. 

If that’s the goal, Jamesia Wilson Cox’s experience illustrates it was met. 

The counselor and disorder specialist came out on her lunch break to meet people and hear from the speakers, among them an advocate and military veteran from Clinton named Tara Rivers who read a poem about grappling with the reality of being assaulted. 

“Summer months used to be my favorite, but now it’s just another trigger like my 9 millimeter,” Rivers read. 

As she listened, Wilson Cox pulled out her phone and took a selfie. 

That act might seem small to others, but it was meaningful to Wilson Cox. Last year, she was assaulted in her home in Brandon. She said it changed her self-perception and left her feeling “dirty.” She stopped looking in the mirror or taking selfies. 

“I used to be the selfie queen,” she said. 

But day by day, she’s become more comfortable with her image. 

If the city hosts Denim Day next year, Wilson Cox said she hopes to be in a place where she, too, can get up on the stage and speak. 

A state organization tasked with advocating for and providing legal services to Mississippians with disabilities will stop taking new cases for the first time in its history, the organization announced Thursday.

The federally mandated nonprofit has not received the remainder of its federal funding for the current fiscal year. The organization, referred to as a protection and advocacy agency, is awaiting over $700,000 for several critical programs.  

“ … Without our promised funding, if someone calls tomorrow and needs assistance, we can only refer them to another agency, which is so troubling and antithetical to the mission-driven work that we do,” Polly Tribble, DRMS’ executive director, said in a press release.

The funding delays will affect the organization’s ability to investigate reports of neglect and abuse and to advocate for voter accessibility for those with disabilities, among other services. The five affected programs are funded through the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration and Administration on Community Living – both housed under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. 

Disability Rights Mississippi recently released a report uncovering widespread misconduct in the industry of unlicensed personal care homes across Mississippi, where, unlike in other states, these facilities “have the ability to comfortably engage in illegal practices without the threat of licensing agencies penalizing them.” 

The organization is waiting on just over $741,000 out of $1.3 million awarded for those programs, DRMS Communications Director Jane Carroll told Mississippi Today. 

The magnitude of the money being withheld is what’s leading the nonprofit’s leaders to call this year’s delays a “funding crisis.”

“Maybe one program could be delayed, that’s not totally unheard of … But what’s different here is that it’s all five programs from Health and Human Services, which are our larger programs,” Carroll explained. 

Mississippi’s health and mental health departments have fallen victim to massive cuts in funding in recent months from HHS under the Trump administration.

Protection and advocacy agencies supporting the rights of disabled people in New Jersey and Arkansas have had to limit their services in recent weeks due to not receiving the federal funding they are owed, Mother Jones reported.

A draft of President Donald Trump’s proposed 2026 budget shows eliminations or significant funding reductions of many of DRMS’ programs, Tribble said in the press release.

For the time being, the organization will focus on continuing to serve current DRMS clients as funding allows, but has instated a hiring freeze until further notice. 

“It seems all of these changes, eliminations, and delays are in the name of efficiency and to save money, but our work enables Mississippians to get back to work, to be self-reliant, and to avoid institutionalization in the expensive facilities that rely on taxpayer dollars,” Tribble said. “So not only does our agency’s operations make financial sense, but also, the work we do literally saves lives. We are at a loss at the thought of no longer being able to serve the community we so deeply value.”

We are thrilled to announce that veteran journalist Emily Wagster Pettus has joined Mississippi Today as our senior editor.

Emily brings more than three decades of experience covering Mississippi. She joins the newsroom’s leadership team to help guide our editorial strategy, mentor young reporters and grow our relationship with newsroom leaders across the state and region.

The dean of the Mississippi Capitol Press Corps, Emily served as The Associated Press’s Mississippi Capitol correspondent from 2001 until January 2025. She previously reported for The Clarion-Ledger, The Vicksburg Evening Post and The Oxford Eagle. She is a graduate of the University of Mississippi.

“Emily is, in so many ways, a trailblazer for Mississippi journalists,” said Adam Ganucheau, Mississippi Today’s editor-in-chief. “Her steadfast, tough-but-fair reporting has inspired many journalists — myself included — to serve Mississippians in similar ways. I can’t overstate how excited we are to have her join our newsroom, where her insight and perspective will be invaluable to us and will help shape our future. And, of course, everyone is thrilled about the return of Emily’s byline after a few months of well-deserved rest.”

Emily’s reporting has been widely praised for its fairness, accuracy and depth. In March 2025, the Mississippi Legislature honored her with a resolution recognizing her contributions to journalism and public understanding. She is also a past recipient of the University of Mississippi’s prestigious Silver Em Award.

“I’m looking forward to working with smart, energetic journalists at Mississippi Today, many of whom are friends and former colleagues,” Emily said. “It’s important to report with depth and historical perspective on the complex issues of this state and to demand accountability from public officials, elected and appointed.”

Emily can be reached at epettus@mississippitoday.org.

The City of Jackson is preparing to host the 82nd annual National Folk Festival, a three-day event to be held downtown November 7-9. The free-to-attend festival, the first of a three-year residency in Jackson, will bring around 300 artists, musicians, dancers and storytellers together for a weekend celebrating traditions such as blues, bluegrass and go-go music.

“This moment is especially thrilling because it represents not just a lineup of remarkable performers but the beginning of something truly transformative for our city, a cultural legacy in the making,” said Jackson’s first lady Ebony Lumumba, chair of the executive committee for the National Folk Festival Jackson.

“For the next three years, Jackson will be home to one of the oldest and most celebrated cultural festivals in the nation, and that means that we are planting artistic and economic seeds that will blossom into something extraordinary for our residents, our artists, our young people and visitors from all over the world,” she said.

The National Folk Festival was created in 1934 and has traveled nationwide. With an anticipated 60,000 to 80,000 visitors in its first year, the event is expected to grow to welcome more than 150,000 people to the Capital City. The festival will stimulate economic growth in Jackson, with other host cities seeing $15 million to $30 million dollars of long-term annual impact by the end of its third year, said Blaine Waide, executive director of the National Council for the Traditional Arts. 

On Wednesday, Waide and other key partners in the festival announced the first performers added to the lineup. Artists include sacred steel guitar band The Campbell Brothers, go-go group E.U. featuring Sugar Bear, and Mississippi-born, Chicago-based John Primer & The Real Deal Blues Band. Bluegrass singer Dale Ann Bradley, Irish artist Eileen Ivers, flamenco couple LOS RICOS featuring Sonia and Ismael, bomba band Plena Libre and the South Asian ensemble Riyaaz Qawwali will also perform.

Over the next coming months, more will be announced, including dancers, craftspeople and storytellers, leading to approximately 300 artists tapped to participate. Applications are open for food and market place vendors. The deadline to apply is May 19.

Thabi Moyo, local festival organizer, said that it’s not just a big weekend, but a promising opportunity for Jackson and Mississippi. Jackson was selected out of 42 cities that applied to host the festival.

“Mississippi has been at the National Folk Festival, but this is the first time that it’s come to the Deep South, but Mississippi has always been represented,” Moyo said. “That right there to me speaks to the influence of the type of music and culture, arts and culture and impact that we’ve had because it’s already out in the world and people love it.”

In addition to the National Folk Festival, Moyo has been hosting Folk After 5 at Hal and Mal’s restaurant, which will be held every first Thursday leading up the the festival. Visitors can enjoy folk music played by a live DJ, and meet with organizers and learn more about the festival. 

“I wanted to create a space that’s low stakes, that’s easy, where you can come engage with folks who are involved with making the festival happen,” Moyo said.

Waide said that Mississippi is the perfect place to host the National Folk Festival due to its cultural influence and legacy of creating history-making entertainers. 

“It’s the home of Robert Johnson, Jimmie Rodgers, Pops Staples. You’ve got country music, blues music, gospel music,” Waide said. “… American musical history would not be what it is without the state of Mississippi, so it’s an appropriate place to have this festival.”