More than 40 years after going coeducational, Mississippi University for Women will ask lawmakers this session to approve a new name: Wynbridge State University of Mississippi.
President Nora Miller asked the university community to support the new name Tuesday during a presentation in front of the university’s historic Poindexter Hall. It comes out of a multi-year process that saw the university engage a consulting group, conduct listening sessions and surveys, propose a name that flopped, apologize to alumni who felt excluded, then pivot to keeping “The W” brand it had decided to move away from.
“After all, it is ‘the W’ that bridges us all together,” Miller said to cheers.
Nora Miller has been named Acting President of Mississippi University for Women. Credit: Contributed by the Institutions of Higher Learning
The word “Wynbridge” is a portmanteau of an Old English rune for the letter “W” and the word “bridge,” which is meant to symbolize the university’s relationship to its history, Miller said. Though the new name is similar to ideas proposed by Chernoff Newman, the consulting group, it was created by alumni and faculty.
In Jackson, Sen. Charles Younger, R-Columbus, told Mississippi Today he filed a bill Tuesday to open the code sections pertaining to the university’s name. In the House, Rep. Kabir Karriem, D-Columbus, said he will co-sponsor a bill next week with the chair of the Colleges and Universities committee to support the university’s desired new name.
Younger said he likes Wynbridge State University of Mississippi compared to two other options the univeristy had floated — Wynbright and Welbright — and that the new name will support the university’s efforts to grow its male athletic teams.
“This is gonna make things better for the W,” he said.
Karriem said he thought the proposed name has a stately and literary quality that he feels everyone can get behind.
“Hopefully this will bring a new light to the W and increase enrollment,” he said.
If lawmakers approve the bill, the university’s new name would be effective July 1. The Commercial Dispatch reported MUW has budgeted $500,000 “for recruiting, advertising and marketing to prospective students.”
During the presentation, Keith Gaskin, the mayor of Columbus, said the new name is for the betterment of the university and his town and that he will be calling lawmakers to ask them to support Wynbridge State University of Mississippi.
“They have my unwavering support,” he said.
Samuel Garrie, the student government association president, said the new name demonstrates the university’s forward-looking approach.
The university was founded as the Industrial Institute and College for the Education of White Girls.
Laverne Greene-Leech, who was one of five Black students to integrate the university in 1966 when it was known as Mississippi State College for Women, said each of the past four names have symbolized progress.
“The mission did not change, the building did not change, just the name,” Greene-Leech said. “Change brings about progress, progress brings about change.”
MUW’s push for a new name is just one way the regional college is attempting to reposition itself to meet an uncertain moment for higher education in Mississippi while maintaining its mission to provide educational opportunities for women.
The number of high school graduates — and the rate at which they pursue higher education — is poised to fall, which will force increased competition among the state’s community colleges and universities. As a result of declining enrollment, tuition dollars will drop.
This demographic reality, called the “enrollment cliff,” will be tougher on regionals like MUW. In the last 10 years, enrollment has fallen from 2,366 to 1,933 in fall 2022, according to federal data. Since 2019, the tuition-dependent university has seen its operating deficit outpace state appropriations and its total cash flow dip into the red.
Lawmakers, aware of this shaky outlook, held a hearing on the enrollment cliff last month.
Alcorn State Univerity’s interim president appears to have at least some campus support if he wants the full appointment.
But if Mississippi’s public university governing board forgoes a national search and appoints Tracy Cook, it will mark the ninth time in 10 years that it has hired an internal candidate as a top leader.
One was a university president already. Some were acting or interim presidents when given the full appointment. Others had worked as commissioners within the Institutions of Higher Learning.
Tracy M. Cook is president f Alcorn State University. Credit: Courtesy of Alcorn State University
Cook, who was the vice president of student affairs when he was tapped as interim, did not respond to inquiries from Mississippi Today asking if he wants the job. But he has what it takes to bring life back to the waning campus, some students, faculty and alumni told members of the IHL Board of Trustees last week.
“The student body was given a questionnaire, and it was highly expressed that we would like Dr. Cook as our next president,” said Jordan Buck, the student government association president.
Some of IHL’s internal hires — like Nora Miller, who had served as Mississippi University for Women’s acting president, senior vice president for administration and chief financial officer before the board permanently appointed her the day of the listening sessions — have gone over without a hitch. But others have landed the board in hot water, sparking protests, accusations of favoritism and even bills to abolish IHL.
Just three presidents since 2014 have been hired from outside the state of Mississippi: Jeffrey Vitter at the University of Mississippi, Felecia Nave at Alcorn State and Daniel Ennis at Delta State University, who was appointed following a rare split vote. Nave, who IHL fired last year, was an Alcorn State alumnus.
Either way, IHL makes an unusually high number of internal hires for a public university system, said Judith Wilde, a George Mason University professor who studies presidential searches. She added internal hires are more common at private universities where presidents are often appointed on the strength of their connections.
“Having a friend in a high place who can help you is good for the candidate,” Wilde said. “I don’t know that it’s always the best for the institution.”
On the other hand, internal hires could mean that Mississippi’s universities are growing their own, which Bill Crawford, who served on the IHL board from 1992 to 2004, said is a sign of healthy institutions. He noted some of Mississippi’s most esteemed college presidentswere internal hires, like Aubrey Lucas, who was president of Delta State before he led USM.
What makes the difference, Crawford said, is proper vetting. In Mississippi and across the country, university presidents are among the best-paid public officials.
“What you’re trying to do as a board is find the best person, and whatever means you can use to come up with that is what you oughta use,” he said.
John Sewell, IHL’s spokesperson, wrote in an email that the board’s goal is to find the right person for the position who can be prepared to lead on day one.
“Decisions of the Board are always made in the best interest of the institution,” he wrote.
IHL has not released a timeline for the Alcorn State search. At the listening sessions, Alfred Rankins, the commissioner and former Alcorn State president, said the board would decide what kind of search to conduct after hearing the community’s feedback.
When trustees meet for IHL’s regular board meeting later this week, they could likely discuss how to proceed during the executive session. Typically following the listening sessions, the board hires a headhunting firm and convenes a search committee of students, faculty, staff and alumni.
But even if IHL decides to conduct a national search, the board can change its mind.
IHL is constitutionally empowered to hire the university presidents, and board policies give trustees the authority to cut a search short at any time. That’s what happened in 2022, when IHL suspended its search to hire USM’s interim president, Joe Paul, after he received support during the listening sessions.
Paul’s appointment was largely applauded by faculty — including ones who had criticized IHL for empaneling a search committee with no rank-and-file faculty voices.
But at Jackson State University, IHL’s decision to name its deputy commissioner, Marcus Thompson, as president last year despite conducting a full-fledged national search drew ire.
At Alcorn State, Rankins, who was serving as deputy commissioner and had been acting president of Mississippi Valley State University, was an internal hire when he was appointed in 2014.
The following year, Cook came to Alcorn State to be Rankins’ chief of staff. Till then, Cook, an alumnus and one of Alcorn State’s best-ever football players, had spent his career working in various administrative levels in Jefferson and Claiborne county schools.
In 2018, Cook was promoted to interim vice president for student affairs, a position that came with a $20,000 pay bump. That same year, after Rankins became the IHL commissioner, Cook served on the advisory committee for IHL’s search for Rankins’ replacement.
In 2019, Cook was named vice president of student affairs permanently. He also oversaw enrollment management. Total enrollment at Alcorn State has fallen from 3,523 in fall 2019 to 2,894 in fall 2023, according to IHL and federal data.
Like Rankins, Cook is a member of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, which may have more college presidents than any historically Black fraternity in the nation.
Editor’s note: This story contains graphic sexual content regarding allegations of sexual abuse.
Two women have reported to Hattiesburg police that counselor Wade Wicht sexually abused them during counseling sessions, but he may never face criminal charges because it’s not against the law in Mississippi for counselors to have sexual contact with their clients.
Wade Wicht Credit: Courtesy of Ramona Wicht
Wicht has already admitted to having sex with two women he counseled, a violation of the ethical code that prompted the loss of his license before the State Board of Examiners for Licensed Professional Counselors, which oversees and licenses counselors.
Wicht and his lawyers did not respond to repeated requests for comments regarding the women seeking criminal charges against him and the specific allegations against him.
Hattiesburg Police Det. LaShaunda Buckhalter said she could not comment because the case is under investigation.
More than half the states consider sex between mental health professionals and their patients a crime. Last year, the Mississippi House passed a bill that would have made it a crime for therapists, clergy, doctors and nurses to have sexual contact with those they treat or counsel.
But the bill died in the Senate Judiciary B Committee after some senators questioned the need for a law. If something like this happens, the church can “fire that person, and you don’t let that behavior continue,” said Committee Chairman Joey Fillingane.
Brad Eubank, a pastor for First Baptist Church in Petal who serves on the Southern Baptist Convention’s sex abuse task force, said this should be more than a firing offense — it should be a crime.
Brad Eubank, pastor of First Baptist Church in Petal, is pushing a bill this year in the Mississippi Legislature to get counselors and clergy added to those who can be charged with a crime if they sexually abuse those they counsel Credit: Courtesy of Brad Eubank
Such a law can help prevent professionals from “exploiting their power and authority to gain access to a vulnerable person,” he said. “It happens with counselors and unfortunately some pastors. It’s got to be stopped.”
Eubank, a survivor himself of sexual abuse, said the sexual battery statute in Mississippi needs reform. Under the current law, sexual assault has to involve penetration, or any such assault is only a misdemeanor.
“You can grab a woman and touch all of her body,” he said, and it only carries up to a $500 fine and six months in jail. “You’ve got to rape somebody, or it’s a simple assault.”
Heather Evans, whose Pennsylvania counseling firm specializes in treating sexual abuse by clergy and counselors, said clients typically share their darkest experiences. If a counselor makes calculated attempts to have sexual contact with them, she said, “That is abuse … It is always with the person who holds the power to protect and not harm, to respect but not abuse.”
The American Counseling Association has long banned such relationships: “Sexual and/or romantic counselor-client interactions or relationships with current clients, their romantic partners, or their family members are prohibited for a period of five years following the last professional contact.”
The women said Wicht told them his pornography addiction started as a young teen after he was introduced to Playboy magazines at a friend’s home, and he later read the Kama Sutra, an ancient manuscript that gained popularity for its description of sexual positions.
Hattiesburg High School classmate Chami Kane recalled a time when Wicht told friends and fellow soccer players that he wanted them to see his favorite movie. He showed them “Deliverance,” which features a brutal rape scene.
Kane said Wicht did it to shock them, and they were indeed shocked.
Wicht went on to Belhaven College, where he graduated in 1997 with a degree in psychology. It was at that point that he married his first wife and moved to the St. Louis area.Two years later, he received a master’s in counseling from Covenant Theological Seminary there.
After graduating, Wicht started a job at a nearby mental health facility. It was there he shadowed a clinician named Ramona, who would become his second wife.
Ramona told Mississippi Today that Wicht pursued her, told her that his marriage was dead and that he was getting a divorce — only for her to learn later that wasn’t true.
Ramona Wicht Credit: Courtesy of Ramona Wicht
Three years later, the couple married. They remained in St. Louis and later moved to Hattiesburg, where Wicht’s roots run deep. The couple returned to the church his family had attended for generations, The First Presbyterian Church. Wicht became a deacon, and Ramona led a weekly Bible study group for women.
Wicht worked as a director at Pine Grove Behavioral and Addiction Services, which treats sex addiction. He was working there in 2010 when golfer Tiger Woods came for treatment.
Late one night, Ramona walked into the family room and discovered him watching porn, she said. “I hoped and prayed he no longer struggled with his former addictions. Looking back, it seems that working with sex addicts was fueling that flame.”
After leaving Pine Grove, Wicht ran a Louisiana company and then worked for Camellia Home Health and Hospice in Hattiesburg.
In 2015, he started a Christian counseling center, The Cornerstone Group, for mental health services in Hattiesburg with Ramona, who handled Cornerstone’s coaching as well as home-schooling their four children.
Shortly after Cornerstone opened, Wicht began a sexual relationship with a client, according to a counselors’ licensing board order.
Asked about this, Ramona said Wicht framed it to her as an angry husband had complained to the board and was going to sue “and take away everything you have.” She went into a “preserve my family mode,” she said. “I was a Christian woman, and I was going to fight for my marriage.”
Wicht never told his wife or his staff that his license previously expired. It wasn’t until 2018 that Wicht renewed his license.
Despite counseling for three years without a license, the board renewed his license without any fines or suspension.
LeeAnn Mordecai, executive director for the counselors’ licensing board, said the board’s orders are the only comments that she and the board can make about Wicht’s cases.
In 2019, Kimberly Cuellar, then 26, said she went to see the 44-year-old Wicht for help because of all the trauma she had suffered in a cult and an abusive relationship.
The sessions worsened her trauma, and she wound up writing a suicide note. She drank some wine to relax and “got very drunk instead, which definitely saved me,” she said.
She said she texted Wicht, who kept her on the phone for the next three hours instead of calling 911. “He spent the night in my house.”
In her next sessions with Wicht, they talked about treatment. “He’s very good at making you feel that he cares so much,” she said. “Even my own family had cut me off. I was desperate for somebody to care.”
As a Christian counselor, Wicht ended sessions in prayer. Each time, he scooted his chair closer, she said. “Then he put his hand on my leg.”
Kimberly Cuellar says her journey dealing with Wade Wicht has taught her, more than ever, about God’s amazing grace. Credit: Jerry Mitchell/Mississippi Today
She said she told him she couldn’t afford all these sessions. He offered a trade: free counseling in exchange for her participation in research for a sex addiction book he was writing.
The next session, he asked her to lay on the floor, and after she did, he pulled down her pants and digitally penetrated her without her consent, claiming it was for his research, she told police.
“When you … started touching me, molesting me, I couldn’t believe it,” she wrote in text exchanges she shared with Mississippi Today. “It went on for so long. I could barely breathe.”
She wrote that she froze, just as she had during previous sexual trauma and spent the night on a park bench, where she was nearly kidnapped. Despite that, “I continued to trust you like an idiot.”
He pushed her to move to Hattiesburg, where she could receive intensive outpatient treatment. After arriving, a single mother with no support system, she suffered a panic attack, “memories of sexual abuse coming back to me,” she wrote. “But what did you do? After you found me balled up in the corner of the room, you used the opportunity to make sexual advances on me. To describe in detail what you wanted to do to me sexually, to help me to my bed and touch me again without asking. I froze again.”
In the next session, she said he continued the sexual touching, this time making her wear a blindfold. “He told me, ‘This is therapeutic to know what you like,’” she said. “Then it turned into, ‘I want to show you what real love is.’”
He became frustrated when she didn’t climax, she said. “I told him, ‘I feel very uncomfortable with this because I don’t have any connection with you.’”
He suggested they work on such a connection and that sex would help her heal, she said. “I was like a frog in the pot, slowly boiling.”
On May 21, 2021, the licensing board held a hearing on allegations from a client who said that Wicht had retaliated after she rejected him.
The woman, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution, told Mississippi Today that, in sessions spanning several years, she grew uncomfortable with Wicht’s “inappropriate” compliments on her looks and “creepy” hugs, including one where he held her tightly around her waist and wouldn’t let go.
The woman, who is also a licensed professional counselor, told Mississippi Today that Wicht originally told her that her husband was so dangerous that she needed to leave the state. But after she told him later that she wanted to see a different counselor, she said he retaliated by taking her husband’s side in a custody battle, raising questions about her “moral judgments and mood stability.”
In a letter, Wicht told the judge she suffered from “borderline personality traits” — a claim she said he never mentioned before, a claim her subsequent therapist called ludicrous.
During her discussion with the board, she questioned why Wicht was allowed to counsel her since he didn’t have a license when he started counseling her in 2016 or 2017. The board sided with Wicht.
“When the person you confided in and trusted with the pain and the abuse you and your children were living with turns around to make you look like the unfit parent,” she said, “you no longer trust anyone.”
She supports legislation to require videotaping in the mental health setting, she said. “It is so easy to manipulate clients because they are viewed as being mentally and emotionally inferior to the therapist.”
On Nov. 5, 2021, Belhaven College honored Wicht with an Alumni Award as a “servant leader entrepreneur who … demonstrates a commitment to ethical leadership in the marketplace.”
In his bio, he wrote that the Cornerstone Group provided “mental health services and is passionate about equipping others to live the life God intended.”
In 2022, the licensing board received complaints that alleged Wicht had sex with Cuellar and another woman who had been a client.
“What I did was wrong, and I disclosed this behavior to my wife just two weeks ago,” he wrote in a letter to the board. “I have also disclosed to my family, church, and counseling staff.”
Chami Kane, who grew up with Wicht and later worked as a counselor at Cornerstone, said Wicht felt like after he shared this, “Everybody should be OK. Now let’s all be friends again.”
Chami Kane Credit: Courtesy of Ramona Wicht
She wrote him an email, which she shared with Mississippi Today, about something that had been bothering her. One day when she walked into the clinic, the front lights were off. When she saw Wicht, he led her into his wife’s office where he had been. There Kane said she saw a pair of his underwear on the desk, which he snatched up and stuffed into his pocket.
“You got on to me for not letting you know I was coming,” she wrote. “I know I almost caught you (with a client).”
He never responded to her email, she said. “I felt betrayed and angry and heartbroken. I also worried about his soul.”
In April 2022, Wicht wrote a letter, admitting to “moral failures and ethical violations in my personal and professional life.” In a June 9, 2022, order, the board gave him the ability to reapply for his license in a year.
He told the board that Kimberly Cuellar was a former client when he began to have sex with her and that he had simply failed to wait the required five-year period.
She said this wasn’t true and that he asked her to repeat this lie to the board. After he sexually abused her in sessions, he began to have sex with her in August 2019 during a trip to a Gulf Coast casino, she said. She shared an Aug. 21, 2019, photo of her with Wicht outside the casino as proof.
For the next several months, he continued to conduct therapy sessions with her, and he continued to have sex with her, she said.
Wicht told the board, his staff and his family that his relationship with Cuellar had ended, but she said it never stopped. In fact, she said he had told her that he was divorcing his wife to be with her.
When she discovered that was a lie, Cuellar said she packed up all she owned in a truck and left Hattiesburg for Louisiana.
Despite the distance, she said she remained under his spell. He made her report on all her therapy sessions and made her promise she wouldn’t tell the counselor about him, she said.
In her December 2022 session, she broke down and told her therapist about Wicht, she said. “She told me, ‘Oh, my gosh, you really need to leave.’ He made me fire her, and I did.”
By March 2023, she had repaired her family relationships, moved in with her mother and cut off her sexual relationship with Wicht, telling him that the only way they could have sex again would be if they were married.
Months later, he visited. That night at her mother’s home, she said she told him she was exhausted and going straight to sleep, only to wake up to “him on top of me.”
In text message exchanges, which she shared with Mississippi Today, she told him she felt “very violated” and “if I was awake, you know I would have not said yes to that.”
He responded, “Omgoodness, what??!! That is horrific!!! I am so incredibly sorry that’s how you experienced it. … What you’re accusing me of is criminal, Kimberly!”
“You moved my shorts, and you absolutely tried to get inside me,” she texted him.
“I touched you with my fingers, and I was touching myself,” he responded. “That’s what went on. I was NOT trying to have sex with you while you were sleeping.”
She told him “no” multiple times and, when he refused to stop, she grabbed him, she wrote. “Did you really stop? Not really. You then touched me without consent while you ejaculated on my body after all the no’s I had given. Attempted rape? Absolutely.”
Months later, she texted him, “I hear you’re claiming you’ve changed. … That’s interesting. I hope it’s true.”
He texted her back, “Thank you for reaching out and making a way for God to be glorified through repentance and reconciliation. … I’ve been praying for an opportunity to communicate with you again and started a letter as the first step in making full amends to you, Kimberly.”
The letter, she said, never arrived.
Kimberly Cuellar’s drawings after she started therapy with Wade Wicht. She says she felt like screaming Credit: Courtesy of Kimberly Cuellar
She had long made excuses for his behavior, but now he would be “exposed for the disgusting person you really are,” she texted him. “Do you need more stories? I have them. I have a lot of them.”
One time he spiked her drink, and “I woke up the next morning with only bits and pieces of my memory of the night,” she texted. “I asked you if you had done something to my drink, because I knew one drink would not have gotten me drunk, and you said you had, laughing it off. I was in pain, because you had done anal [sex] without consent.”
She texted him that he was “as bad or worse than every other man who has abused me. I came to you for help, and you used me for yourself. … I’m just letting you know now you didn’t win. I’m not yours, and I’ll never be yours.”
On Nov. 9, she drove to the Hattiesburg Police Department and told a detective what Wicht had done to her, and she is considering filing charges against him for attempted rape as well.“What I want is for him to be held responsible,” she said. “I don’t want this to happen to anyone ever again.”
Another woman also gave a statement to Hattiesburg police about what Wicht had done to her. Mississippi Today does not identify individuals alleging sexual assault or abuse unless they choose to do so.
In 2021, she and her then-husband went to see Wicht for marriage counseling. Instead of helping the couple draw closer, “He drove a wedge between us,” she said.
Her insurance didn’t cover the counseling, she said, and he offered to let her exchange a free membership to her family’s business. She agreed.
Her past made her an easy target, she said. She was a naïve 17-year-old when a teacher groomed her for months before sexually assaulting her, but her family didn’t want her to pursue charges, she said. “For 20 years, I literally wore a scarlet letter, blaming it on myself.”
To this day, she finds herself tying a shirt or jacket around her waist, she said. “I grew up Southern Baptist. God forbid you have a cute figure. There’s a lot of shame for sexual abuse victims.”
From the start, Wicht’s conversations steered to the sexual. After she mentioned her personal training, she said he talked about the size of her breasts and then asked her if she had implants.
She found such talk odd, but she presumed he knew best as a professional counselor, she said.
When she shared with Wicht the story of her sexual assault, she said he began to ask “very specific details of how it happened, which I thought was very strange. He even asked me if I bled.”
She said she found it difficult to share, and she joked that a drink would help her relax. The next thing she knew, she said, he had poured drinks for both of them — a habit he continued.
At the end of the session, Wicht asked for a hug, and she told him no, she said. He told her that being able to accept a hug was part of her healing, she said.
She finally began hugging him, she said.
Over time, she began to trust Wicht and rely on his advice on how she could improve her marriage. He seemed wise and professional. He listened well and spent more and more time with her.
The more time they spent together, the more she said she felt like he understood her. She felt like he really cared.
Months later, she said she told Wicht that she feared she was experiencing transference — that is, redirecting her feelings from her husband to Wicht. “I didn’t know what I needed to do.”
Instead of guiding her to another therapist, she said he reassured her that such transference “could be beneficial to the process.”
In the sessions that followed, she said he had her stand up and turn around, and he hugged her from behind. He told her that hugging like this was therapeutic.
Claiming he was helping her, he began putting his hand on her leg and telling her that she needed to learn to say no, she said. With each session, he moved his hand higher up her leg, she said. “He groomed the hell out of me. I can see it now. I couldn’t see it then.”
After having her talk about her sex life, she said he insisted to her that she was a sex addict and urged her to stop having sex with her husband.
His advice shocked her, she said, because she didn’t believe she was a sex addict. She rejected his talk that she needed to go somewhere to get treatment.
When he wasn’t satisfied that she was sharing all of the details on what she liked sexually, he urged her to masturbate so he could observe, she told police.
He had her stand up again, she told police. “He would hug me from behind while caressing my breasts and body. This progressed to him putting his hands inside my pants.”
He preyed on her, only to end their sessions in prayer, she said. “I finally got the courage to tell him to stop. I thought it was especially twisted for him to pray considering what he was doing.”
After sickness in her family and her own health struggles, she felt emotionally spent. “I was especially low,” she told police. “I was crying uncontrollably.”
She called Wicht for help, and he asked her to come into the office.
In past sessions, he had asked her to remove her clothes, she said. She had refused each time.
This time, she broke down and gave in to his demands. “I cried the whole time,” she said. “That’s the control that counselors have over your psyche and emotions.”
He put a blindfold on her, made her lie on her stomach and spread her bottom cheeks, and “he proceeded to penetrate me with his fingers,” she told police.
When he finished, “He held me and acted as if it had been a caring moment,” she told police. “That was the last time he touched me.”
Throughout his abuse, she told police, “He would remind me I could never in my life breathe a word of it. Said someone could die or be killed if I did. This was triggering as my abuser from teen years threatened to kill himself if I told anyone.”
What he did to her so traumatized her that thoughts of self-harm flooded her mind, she said. To combat this, she posted the suicide prevention hotline number on her wall and turned her closet into a prayer “war room,” where she sometimes slept.
To recover from this devastation, she paid $20,000 to be part of a therapeutic program out of Canada, she said. “I was afraid to go anywhere in the U.S. because I knew they would have to report it.”
She said she was so emotionally devastated at the time that it is only now, after her healing has begun, that she feels able to pursue possible criminal charges, despite the lack of a Mississippi law dealing with counselors.
It’s bad enough for a trusted person to exploit you, but when it’s a counselor, who knows so many intimate details about your life, “It rapes every part of your soul and mind,” she said. “It gets every piece of you.”
Nothing happened to the teacher who abused her as a teen, and he went on to sexually assault other girls, she said. She wants to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen with Wicht, she said, because “sexual abuse victims have had their voices taken.”
In April 2022, Wicht’s wife, Ramona, learned that “my husband of 20 years had been living a double life,” she told the pastors and elders of First Presbyterian Church, where is no longer a deacon. (Church officials declined to discuss the matter.)
Their marriage crumbled as she “uncovered layers of lies and betrayals,” she wrote. When she made him open the family safe, she expected to see stacks of cash. Instead, she saw dozens of sex toys and condoms, she said, and she had previously spotted a box with a blowup sex doll.
A letter she received from an accountant, which she shared with Mississippi Today, detailed how Wicht hadn’t completed personal or business taxes with the firm for seven years, and she wrote how he had also failed to pay employees, cut corners and done “the bare minimum for others while indulging himself.”
She was just discovering some of his reckless spending, including more than $21,000 he had spent on a single video game, she wrote.
Wicht isn’t being required to pay child support though she is the one 90% of the time caring for their four children (one of whom has special needs) and paying all the bills, she wrote. He has visitation rights, and the judge has yet to make a final decision on custody.
“I can’t even make ends meet on a monthly basis,” Ramona wrote. “We currently live in a dilapidated home while Wade enjoys a $2,400-a-month rental home. To make matters worse, I have been required to pay over $10,000 for counseling sessions to help Wade’s failing relationships with the children.”
She told Mississippi Today that she’s “deeply grieved by the sin I’ve seen, but I am grateful for the other victims who, like me, have finally found their voices. Moving forward, my prayer is for redemption, restoration and swift justice in the midst of this heartbreaking situation.”
Where to turn if you need help
Experts say if you or someone you know has been emotionally or sexually abused in therapy sessions, you need to seek help.
They recommend victims and survivors of sexual abuse seek therapy from a trusted and highly recommended expert in such healing as well as the advice of a lawyer before making any legal decisions.
The book “Psychotherapists’ Sexual Involvement with Clients” cites these as possible options:
File a lawsuit for damages
File a licensure complaint
File a criminal charge
File a complaint with a professional association
Notify the employer, agency director, or church hierarchy (n the case of clergy practicing psychotherapy)
Revenue collections needed to fund Mississippi state government fell below projections for the month of January.
January’s revenue collections, according to a report recently released by the staff of the Legislative Budget Committee, were $6 million or 1.1% below the official estimate. For the fiscal year, which began July 1, revenue collections remain $98.3 million or 2.4% above the official estimate. The official estimate is important because it represents the amount of money legislative leaders used in budgeting for the current fiscal year.
If revenue falls too far below the official estimate, legislators or Gov. Tate Reeves (or a combination of the two) would have to make mid-year budget cuts or dip into surplus funds to offset the shortfalls. The official estimate is being buoyed in large part because interest earnings are $56 million or 400% above the official estimate.
Officials said the state is benefiting from a significant spike in interest income because of the large amount of surplus funds that have been obligated but are yet to be spent and because of the higher interest rates currently in effect that increase the interest earnings.
“It is better to have it than not to have it, but I don’t want to base the budget on interest income,” Senate Appropriations Chair Briggs Hopson, R-Vicksburg, recently said.
While revenue collections are exceeding the official estimate, thanks in parts to the interest income, revenue collections are $44.1 million or 1% below the amount collected during the first seven months of the past fiscal year. The state is coming off two fiscal years of unprecedented revenue growth thanks in large part to the federal COVID-19 spending, so it might not be considered unusual for collections to be slumping. It is rare, however, for the state to collect less revenue year-over-year.
If it was not for the interest income, state revenue would be down more than 2% over the previous year.
One reason for the drop in revenue is that beginning in January 2023, an income tax cut phase-in began. State income tax collections are down $123 million or 8.6% over the previous year. Sales tax collections, which were expected to increase because of the reduction in the income tax, are up a more modest $63.3 million or 3.9%.
Even as a $525 million reduction in the income tax is being phased in, Gov. Tate Reeves is arguing that the remaining income tax, which accounts for about 30% of state revenue, should be eliminated by 2029.
State lawmakers recently filed legislation to replace Mississippi’s two statues of white supremacists in the U.S. Capitol in Washington — a move that would follow the lead of several other Southern states.
House Minority Leader Robert Johnson III, a Democrat from Natchez, filed a resolution to replace statutes of Jefferson Davis and J.Z. George in the U.S Capitol’s National Statuary Hall Collection with statues of civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer and Hiram Revels, the first African American to serve in Congress.
Senate Minority Leader Derrick Simmons, a Democrat from Greenville, filed a measure to create a commission to select replacements for the Davis and George statues.
“I just don’t think having statues that represent the Confederacy is a correct representation of who Mississippi is,” Johnson said. “And I just think it’s time for change.”
Each U.S. state is allowed to place two statues of people “illustrious for their historic renown” or “distinguished civil or military services,” after Congress passed a federal law in the mid-nineteenth century establishing the national collection.
Around 3 to 5 million people pass through the collection in the Capitol each year, according to the Architect of the Capitol’s website, to glance at who are supposed to be the country’s most reputable figures.
But the leaders of the Magnolia State, who often boast about Mississippi’s literary, musical and artistic impact on the country, continue to honor the legacy of two slave owners who actively worked to maintain the white power structure of their day.
Davis served in the U.S. House and Senate from Mississippi before becoming the first and only president of the Confederate States of America, which fought to preserve slavery. Davis later said in a speech to the Mississippi Legislature that if he had the chance to change any of his past actions about secession, he would not do anything differently.
George was a member of Mississippi’s Secession Convention in 1861, and he signed the secession ordinance that included these words: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world.”
George served in the Confederate Army and was also the architect of the 1890 Constitution that sought to reestablish white supremacy in the state and disenfranchise Black citizens from voting or holding elected office.
The Mississippians who initially honored George and Davis with statutes also had ties to the Confederacy or sympathized with the Confederacy.
A columnist at the time interviewed David Bramlette Jr., one of the men who selected Davis and George, and invited all Mississippians to attend the unveiling ceremony in Washington. The column specifically noted that “general officers of the Confederate organization” were invited to attend.
The article went on to quote Bramlette saying the reason the state honored George with a statue was because he was a “great constitutional lawyer and a leader in the preservation of the white, Anglo-Saxon civilization of the South.”
Many Southern states have replaced their original statues of Confederate leaders with more inclusive figures. Alabama, in 2009, replaced a statue of Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry, a Confederate officer, with one of Helen Keller, a political activist and disability rights advocate.
Arkansas is in the process of replacing statues of Uriah Milton Rose, a Confederate sympathizer, and James Paul Clarke, a former U.S. senator, with statues of civil rights activist Daisy Bates and musician Johnny Cash.
Florida, in 2016, approved a measure to replace Confederate Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith with Mary McLeod Bethune, a civil rights activist and founder of a Florida university.
Virginia, in 2020, removed Confederate General Robert E. Lee from the collection and plans to replace it with civil rights activist Barbara Rose Johns.
To change a statue, federal law requires a majority of lawmakers in both legislative chambers to vote to approve the replacement, and the state is required to pay for the costs of replacing the two statues.
Mississippi’s Republican committee leaders in the House and Senate were noncommittal about Johnson and Simmons’ proposals to change out the Davis and George statues.
House Speaker Jason White referred Johnson’s proposal to two committees for consideration: the House Rules Committee and the House State Affairs Committee. The measure must pass both committees before the entire House can consider it.
House Rules Committee Chairman Fred Shanks, R-Brandon, said he did not know much about the National Statuary Hall Collection, but that he would review Johnson’s proposal.
Lieutenant Governor Delbert Hosemann referred Simmons’ proposal to the Senate Rules Committee, which is led by Sen. Dean Kirby, R-Pearl.
“I’ll probably poll the committee and see where we are,” Kirby said. “If I see that it’s a real negative, I probably will not bring it up.”
Both Johnson and Simmons said they are open to suggestions for who should replace Mississippi’s statues, but they want it to honor someone who is more representative of a modern-day Mississippi.
“I want two individuals that when my children who are 5 and 10 can look back 50 years from now and they will say those two representations of Mississippi are still positive representations of Mississippi,” Simmons said. “The unfortunate thing is we can’t say that now.”
Mississippi Today Editor-at-Large Marshall Ramsey sits down with Gregory Johnson, CEO and President of the Foundation for the Mid South, a foundation that serves Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana.
With 30% of America’s poverty in this tri-state region, the Foundation for the Mid South focuses on improving education, health and wellness, wealth building, and community development.
Like the Foundation itself, Johnson has a long history of service and philanthropy. He tells about his journey, the Foundation’s goals, and the importance of building trust through communication.
New Amsterdam depicted in a cartoon, circa 1642 Credit: Public Domain
The first known legal protest by those of African descent in what became the United States took place when 11 Black Americans petitioned the Council for New Netherland (New York) for freedom, saying they had fulfilled their contracts to the Dutch West India Co.
They had been brought to the colony just a few years after its 1624 founding. They won their fight, but they remained in legal limbo in what became known as “half-freedom.” They received property, but they still had to pay crops and cattle to the company each year.
One of them, Manuel de Gerrit de Reus, was accused with eight others of killing a Black man. The company decided to execute only one of them, and de Reus drew the short straw. But when the officials tried to execute him, both nooses around his neck broke. At the behest of witnesses, they pardoned him instead.
Five months later, eight Black Americans returned to court, demanding their full freedom. They cited the arrival of English soldiers, who might re-enslave them. Despite those fears, the Black Americans managed to keep their freedom and lived north of what is now Washington Square Park, creating New York City’s first free Black community.
Thick with irony is the Midsouth Association of Independent Schools’ contention that the provision of the Mississippi Constitution plainly stating that public funds cannot go to private schools should be ruled invalid by the courts because of its racist origins.
Perhaps the schools that make up the association should look in the mirror. Many, but not all, of the 125 Mississippi private schools in the association trace their beginnings to the 1950s and 1960s and their founders’ objections to the school desegregation mandated by federal courts. The Midsouth Association of Independent Schools previously was known as the Mississippi Private School Association, which was started in the 1960s by parents and others who did not want white Mississippians to go to integrated schools.
That nugget of truth was omitted by Buck Dougherty, an attorney with the Chicago-based Liberty Justice Center, in arguing last week before the state Supreme Court that Section 208 was enacted as part of the 1890 Constitution for racist reasons and thus should be ruled invalid. Dougherty was making his ironic argument on behalf of the aforementioned Midsouth Association of Independent Schools, which in 2022 received $10 million in public funds now in question before the state’s high court.
Dougherty said in a news release that Section 208 of the Mississippi Constitution “targeted independent schools that dared to teach Catholic immigrants and newly freed slaves to read and write, and there’s no way to sidestep that ugly past. Ultimately, the tension between this discriminatory provision in Mississippi’s Constitution and the U.S. Constitution has been festering for a century, and the Court must resolve that tension.”
It is true that Mississippi is one of more than 30 states with so-called Blaine Amendments that were passed in an effort to keep public funds from going to Catholic schools. But Mississippi is unique in that it is one of only two states with a constitutional provision that prevents not only public money from going to religious or sectarian schools, but also to any school “not conducted as a free school.”
Let’s give the Midsouth Association of Independent Schools the benefit of the doubt. It could be argued that most of the private schools today do not discriminate against Black Mississippians. It also is a fact that Section 208 of the constitution does not cause discrimination against minority students, considering that Black students and other minority groups make up a slim majority of the about 440,000 students in the public schools and white students compose the overwhelming majority of the about 45,000 students attending private schools in Mississippi.
In other words, it is difficult to claim, as the Liberty Justice Center is attempting to do, that the state constitution, which prevents public funds from going to private schools, discriminates against Black students since a narrow majority of public school enrollment is composed of Black and minority groups, while the vast majority of private school enrollment is white. The plain and simple fact is that public money going to private schools is going to majority white schools, while public money going to public schools is going to majority-minority schools.
Perhaps the Midsouth Association of Independent Schools and Section 208 of the state constitution have something in common — maybe they both were created with racist intent, but neither is racially motivated now.
The current lawsuit is not the first involving public money going to private schools and Section 208 of the Mississippi Constitution. In 1964, during the height of efforts to circumvent federal court orders to desegregate Mississippi public schools, the Legislature passed a law that offered tuition for students to attend private schools in clear violation of Section 208.
The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals found that law unconstitutional in 1969. The federal court said that the “tuition grants have fostered the creation of private segregated schools. The statute, as amended, encourages, facilitates, and supports the establishment of a system of private schools operated on a racially segregated basis as an alternative available to white students seeking to avoid desegregated public schools.”
The ruling pointed out that when the Mississippi law was enacted, there were three non-sectarian private schools in the state. But three years later, thanks in large part to the tuition grants and the efforts to avoid integrated schools, there were 45.
If someone doubts the findings of the 5th Circuit, look at the website of the Midsouth Association of Independent Schools. It points out that the formation of the Mississippi Private School Association, which later changed its name to the Midsouth Association of Independent Schools, was precipitated in large part because of that 5th Circuit court ruling.
“That lawsuit, as well as other seismic political and social revolutions in states and communities orchestrated at the federal level, motivated a group of men to meet in Greenwood, MS, and there to draw up a draft of bylaws and a charter of incorporation for the Mississippi Private School Association,” according to the organization’s own website.
