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The post Marshall Ramsey: Chopped appeared first on Mississippi Today.

College football’s crazy season – the one in which we watch as our institutions of higher learning play an expensive game of musical coaches – is off and running. Already, the 2023 crazy season has gone slap-dab insane.

On Saturday night, Texas A & M pummeled Mississippi State 51-10 with its third string quarterback accounting for four touchdowns.

Nevertheless, on Sunday, Texas A & M fired football coach Jimbo Fisher, which means the Aggies must pay off the $76 million remaining on his contract. A & M’s football program, fueled by Texas oil money, will pay Fisher more than $200,000 a day over the next few years not to coach. How insane is that?

Monday morning began with the news Mississippi State has fired its coach Zach Arnett 10 games into his first season. The Bulldogs are 4-6 and have lost three straight. Arnett’s buyout is a reported $4 million.

The two buyouts, so drastically different in enormity, are also different in another important aspect. Fisher will be paid in full no matter whether he takes another coaching job. However, if Arnett takes another job, his new salary will be subtracted from his MSU buyout. In other words, in today’s world of NCAA Power Five conference football, State’s buyout of Arnett is chump change. Not so with Texas A & M, no matter how many oil wells Aggie alumni own.

So, what happens next?

Today is Nov. 13. The NCAA transfer portal will open on Dec. 4. Schools can begin signing recruits on Dec. 20.  

There will be an urge to hire quickly with those two dates in mind. But, as Lee Corso says so often, “Not so fast my friend…” If we’ve learned anything in the Jimbo Fisher and Zach Arnett sagas, it is this: There is an age-old proverb that goes “haste makes waste.” It applies in college football.

First, let’s go back to the crazy season of 2020-21. Fisher’s Aggies had finished 9-1 and No. 4 in the country during the Covid-ravaged season. Fisher was already making over $7 million a year, but the LSU job was open and there were reports that the Tigers wanted Fisher. So, the Aggies, in essence, panicked and signed Fisher to the 10-year, $95 million extension.

How did that work out?

Mississippi State’s rush to judgment came last December. Granted, the Bulldogs were in a bind because of Mike Leach’s death, the transfer portal, the upcoming signing day and bowl preparations. Four days after Leach’s death, Arnett was promoted to head coach.

We could debate at length whether or not State should have moved so fast. What we can’t debate is this: Not quite 11 months after Arnett’s hiring, State saw fit to fire him.

Would State have been better suited to let Arnett serve as interim coach through the bowl season and then hired a proven head coach – say, Tulane’s Willie Fritz? I’d say, yes.

Arnett, who had never been a head coach, faced a difficult task, and he didn’t make it any easier when he decided to scrap Leach’s offense and hire new offensive coaches. Never mind that he had a senior quarterback threatening to break every passing record known to the SEC. Will Rogers, that quarterback, was steeped in Leach’s Air Raid offense and surrounded by players recruited to play in that offense. Nevertheless, Arnett switched to a more run-oriented offense. You ask me, that was the glaring error of his short tenure. It did not work. Granted, injuries to quarterback Rogers and a running back have hurt. What’s more, State’s defense regressed this season.

You could also make the argument – in fact, Lane Kiffin did make it in his weekly Monday press conference – that State rushed to judgment in firing Arnett before his first season was complete. Said Kiffin, “It’s not like it used to be. It used to be that you had time to build things. You had years to sign classes and see them develop before people make a decision. … To get let go 10 games into your first season when you get hired late, I don’t know how you do that that fast.”

Kiffin is right about that. But patience became a thing of the past when schools began paying millions and millions of dollars with the expectation of immediate results.

I have no idea what direction State will go in replacing Arnett. Whoever comes next faces a gargantuan task. Obviously, the talent level at State isn’t up to the SEC level in a league that adds Oklahoma and Texas next season. NIL and the transfer portal have virtually insured that the rich will only get richer. And that the annual crazy season will only get crazier.

We can only imagine how much Texas A & M will spend next.

The post The crazy season is already insane, witness Texas A & M, Miss. State appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Nearly every charter school saw its letter grade decline this school year, according to state test results that measure student performance.

Accountability grades are based on state test results and other metrics, given on an A-F scale. Of the seven charter schools that received grades this year, one got a grade for the first time. For three more, this was their second year in the accountability system.

Charter schools are free public schools that do not report to a school board like traditional public schools. Instead, they are governed by the Mississippi Charter School Authorizer Board. They have more flexibility for teachers and administrators when it comes to student instruction and are funded by local school districts based on enrollment. Charter schools can more easily apply to open in a D or F rated district under the premise they will provide another option to students in struggling public schools.  

RePublic Schools, which operates Smilow Collegiate, Smilow Prep, and Reimagine Prep in Jackson, saw the biggest declines from their 2022 performance. In a statement, the school network said it holds itself accountable for its performance and is reviewing the data to make changes in instructional practice. It also added that these scores are not representative of the schools’ dedication to their students. 

Angela Bass, executive director of the Jackson RePublic Schools, declined to elaborate further.

Leflore Legacy Executive Director Tamala Boyd Shaw said the school’s F grade was “not what we had wanted.”

The sixth through eighth grade school in the Mississippi Delta had students take the science assessment for the first time this year, something Shaw said contributed to the decline from the D they received last year. She also pointed to the fact that the sixth grade students often come to the school several years behind, and it only has one year to get them up to speed. 

“We want to definitely meet the needs of all of our scholars, and we’ll just continue to make whatever significant shifts (are necessary) … so that we not only see growth in our scholars, but proficiency,” she said.

The Charter School Authorizer Board is digging into the data to identify the school’s needs and see how it can provide support to school leaders, according to its Executive Director Lisa Karmacharya.

“Of course, I think we’re disappointed that the scores are not better than they were, but we also are encouraged by the additional infusion of monies (federal pandemic relief money) and the support that I think can come from the charter association,” she said.

While Clarksdale Collegiate, a K-8 school in the Mississippi Delta, received the same letter grade as last year, it was the only charter school that saw its accountability point value increase. Its 2023 score was two points shy of the cutoff for a C.

“(We) definitely wanted to be higher than a D but (are) pleased to see that growth, especially when you add the amount of growth that our kids made in each of the subject areas around proficiency,” said Amanda Johnson, the school’s executive director.

Johnson attributed the school’s improved performance in part to an additional focus on literacy. She said they opened up the library two nights a week and spent additional time with third graders preparing for their reading test.

Rachel Canter, executive director of Mississippi First, an education policy organization that helped craft the state’s charter school law in 2013, said charter schools in Mississippi are primarily serving the state’s “most vulnerable” students. Canter characterized those students as more likely to need special education services and have issues with absenteeism. 

“That means that (charter schools) are going to have a harder, longer climb to recovery than many of our other school districts and the children that they’re serving,” she said. “We know that charter schools signed up to do that job – it’s a job they committed to do, and they’ve got to do that job.”

Canter said that while the causes of the declines vary at each school, schools need to focus on moving kids all the way up to proficiency, not just out of the lowest-scoring groups. She also said several schools need to focus on addressing chronic absenteeism. 

She doesn’t expect parent demand for charter schools to be immediately impacted by these results, largely because charter parents felt “left behind” by the public school system. 

“Over time, parents are going to want to see how their child improved, but I don’t think that’s going to change overnight because I think the parents that have their children in charter schools recognize what challenges they're facing,” she said.

The post Most charter schools see performance scores decline appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The Central District public service commissioner’s race remained too close to call Monday — nearly a week after the Nov. 7 Mississippi general election — although challenger DeKeither Stamps still held a slight lead over incumbent Brent Bailey.

The Associated Press had yet to call the race early Monday afternoon with 96% of votes counted, and reported Democrat Stamps with 130,887 votes, or 50.6%, to Bailey’s 127,628 votes, or 49.4%. Stamps’ lead of now over 3,200 votes has continued to grow slightly as vote tallies trickled in over the last few days.

Friday is the deadline for counties to provide certified election results to the secretary of state’s office.

Stamps said the Veteran’s Day holiday had slowed vote counting in some counties but he was hoping for resolution soon.

“We’ve got folks out at different counties,” Stamps, a Marine Corps and U.S. Army combat veteran who has been serving in the state House of Representatives, said. “We’ve got lawyers ready. We’re prepared for anything. I’m an old war guy. We kill ants with a sledgehammer.”

Stamps said it looked like “It would take a miracle” for Bailey to overcome his lead with the remaining uncounted, absentee and affidavit ballots, but “I believe that miracles can come true — it’s a miracle that 130,000 people felt so strong about us to vote for us even with all those mailouts and ads with false information.”

Bailey said some Rankin County votes were coming in Monday that should help him gain ground on Stamps but said, “At this point the numbers I’ve seen are not in our favor — at this point.”

“It’s a challenging district for a Republican to win,” said Bailey, who is finishing his first term on the three-member commission that oversees public utilities and sets the rates they charge customers.

The two fought a heated race that saw some mudslinging, leaving some hard feelings with both candidates.

Stamps said a Washington, D.C., PAC dumped $250,000 in attack ads against him late in the race.

“There are obviously folks in D.C. that don’t like us,” Stamps said. “A quarter of a million dollars — why is Washington, D.C., that interested in a Mississippi PSC race?”

Bailey said: “Politics is politics, but to be labeled corrupt and have all these allegations against you — I take that personally, when you know good and damned well it’s false.”

The other two PSC seats were decided in the August primary, with Republican state Rep. Chris Brown winning the Northern District and Republican challenger Wayne Carr winning the Southern District seat.

Tuesday’s election also determined the three seats on the Transportation Commission.

Incumbent Northern District Commissioner John Caldwell was unopposed. Incumbent Willie Simmons was reelected to a second term as Central District commissioner and longtime state House Transportation Committee Chairman Charles Busby won the Southern District transportation commissioner’s job.

Incumbent Democrat Willie Simmons defeated Republican Ricky Pennington Jr. to win a second term as the Central District transportation commissioner. With 94% of precincts reporting, Simmons won over 54% of the vote. Simmons previously served in the Mississippi Legislature.

In the Southern District transportation commissioner race, three-term state Rep. Charles Busby, a Republican, defeated independent Steven Griffin pulling in over 72% of the vote with 95% of precincts reporting. Busby has served as the House Transportation Committee chairman.

Busby will replace retiring Commissioner Tom King.

The post Stamps leads Bailey, but heated Central PSC race remains too close to call appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Nov. 13, 1999

A jury in Belzoni, Mississippi, convicted three men of manslaughter in the April 12, 1970, killing of Rainey Pool, a 54-year-old sharecropper. 

When the one-armed man, who had been drinking, happened to enter a “whites-only” bar in Midnight, Mississippi, a mob beat him unconscious and threw him into the Sunflower River, where he died. 

The killers each received the maximum of 20 years behind bars.

The post On this day in 1999 appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Mississippi Today’s Adam Ganucheau, Bobby Harrison, Geoff Pender and Taylor Vance break down Republican Gov. Tate Reeves’ election win over Democratic challenger Brandon Presley. They detail what worked for Reeves, what didn’t work for Presley, and whether Mississippi Democrats can be competitive again.

The post Podcast: Key takeaways from Tate Reeves’ governor’s race victory appeared first on Mississippi Today.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Mississippi Today. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

In Mississippi, many people awaiting court-ordered treatment for mental illness or substance abuse are jailed, even though they haven’t been charged with a crime. Read our full series here.

Fourteen years ago, Mississippi legislators passed a law requiring county jails to be certified by the state if they held people awaiting court-ordered psychiatric treatment.

Today, just one jail in the state is certified. 

And yet, from July 2022 to June 2023, more than 800 people awaiting treatment were jailed throughout the state, almost all in uncertified facilities, according to state data.

Mississippi Today and ProPublica have been reporting on county officials’ practice of jailing people with mental illness, most of whom haven’t been charged with a crime, as they await treatment under the state’s civil commitment law. After the news organizations started asking about the 2009 law earlier this year, the state attorney general’s office concluded that it is a “mandatory requirement” that the Mississippi Department of Mental Health certify the facilities where people are held after judges have ordered them into treatment.

The Department of Mental Health, which oversees the state’s behavioral health system and has no other responsibility for jails, responded by sending letters to county officials across the state encouraging them to stop holding people in uncertified jails. But the law provides no funding to help counties comply and no penalties if they don’t.

Under state law, counties are responsible for housing people going through the commitment process until they are admitted to a state hospital. Counties are allowed to put them in jail before their court hearings if there’s “no reasonable alternative.” 

The last time the Department of Mental Health tried to ensure those jails met state standards,  more than a decade ago, it had little success. After the law passed, the agency got to work to inform counties about the new rules. Some didn’t respond. Others expressed interest but didn’t follow through. By 2013, just two jails had been certified. (One of them no longer is.) After that, the effort apparently petered out, according to a review of state documents.

To be certified, a jail must offer on-call crisis care by a physician or psychiatric nurse practitioner and must have a supply of medications. Staff must be trained in crisis intervention and suicide prevention. People detained during the commitment process must be housed separately from people charged with crimes, in rooms free of fixtures or structures that could be used for self-harm, according to Department of Mental Health standards that took effect in 2011. 

“If they’re going to be held in jail, they have to receive some kind of treatment in a semi-safe environment,” a department attorney told The Clarion-Ledger at the time.

Until recently, many county officials weren’t even aware of those requirements, according to interviews across the state — even though they were routinely jailing people solely because they might need mental health treatment. Mississippi appears to be the only state in the country where people awaiting treatment are commonly jailed without charges for days or weeks at a time.

Mississippi jails are subject to no statewide health and safety standards. Many jails treat people going through the civil commitment process virtually the same as those who have been charged with crimes, Mississippi Today and ProPublica found. They’re shackled and given jail uniforms. They’re often held in the same cells as criminal defendants. They receive minimal medical care. Some said they couldn’t access prescribed psychiatric medications. Since 1987, at least 18 people going through the commitment process for mental illness and substance abuse have died after being jailed, most of them by suicide.

Some local officials say getting certified could be expensive. Sheriffs worry it could codify their role as their county’s de facto mental health care provider. 

“It looks like the state wants the sheriff to be the chief mental health officer,” said Will Allen, attorney for the Mississippi Sheriffs’ Association. “This is coming down to the state stuffing the cost of this down to the counties, and frankly I just think that’s wrong.”

‘Are you going to shut the jail down? No.’

The genesis of the 2009 law was a conversation state Sen. Joey Fillingane had with his girlfriend at the time, a social worker who worked with troubled youth. She told him that Mississippians going through the commitment process in some counties were locked in jail cells like criminals, while in other counties they were held in hospitals like patients, according to a 2011 news story in The Clarion-Ledger.

Fillingane’s bill addressed that. “Shouldn’t there be some kind of minimum standard where you’re holding people who haven’t committed a crime?” the Republican from Sumrall, near Hattiesburg, said in that story about his legislation. 

His bill passed with little fanfare. It made it “illegal for individuals committed to a DMH behavioral health program to be held in jail unless it had been certified” as a holding facility, an agency staffer wrote in a timeline of the law’s implementation obtained by Mississippi Today and ProPublica.

The board overseeing the Department of Mental Health set detailed standards for those facilities. Department staff surveyed counties to see whether they could meet them. 

Ed LeGrand was head of the department when the law passed. He said he viewed it as a progressive effort that could spur counties to stop holding mentally ill people in jail. And even if that didn’t happen, the law would improve jail conditions — at least somewhat. 

“I didn’t think that everybody would be able to meet those standards. I thought they would give it a try,” he said in a recent interview. “A lot of them did, but some of them didn’t.”

Department staff met with county officials and toured jails to offer assistance. Those visits, which records show mostly took place in 2011 and 2012, were the first time the Department of Mental Health had tried to get a comprehensive look at the local facilities where Mississippians awaited psychiatric treatment in state hospitals, LeGrand said. 

Many jails were poorly equipped to care for these people, according to notes by agency staff. 

“Toured the current jail (scary),” reads a status update written after staff visited Tishomingo County, in the northeast corner of the state, shortly before the county opened a new jail. In Jones County in south Mississippi, where the jail had 180 inmates and only four staff: “The holding cells are not safe for violent behavior. Too much cement.”

Jones County Sheriff Joe Berlin said the cells have not changed since then, though now detainees are monitored with cameras.

In early 2011, LeGrand told county officials who hadn’t already begun the certification process that they had six months to find a certified provider to house people awaiting treatment. 

Sheriffs were frustrated. Some objected to being told they had to upgrade their jails and train guards so they could care for mentally ill people they didn’t think they should be responsible for in the first place. 

“What do they expect of me?” one sheriff was quoted as saying in the 2011 news story. “What they need to do is turn around and certify some places that are under Mental Health’s control so they can be responsible for it, not me.”

Some county officials concluded there was little the state could do if they didn’t comply. Mike Harlin, the jail administrator in Lamar County, discussed the standards with a Department of Mental Health staffer in 2012, according to an agency memo. In an interview this year, Harlin said he remembered thinking, “What are you going to do? Are you going to shut the jail down? No.” 

By June 2013, jails in just two of the state’s 82 counties had been certified, according to the department’s tally. (A hospital was certified in another county, and a different type of facility was certified in a fourth.)

Six counties said they couldn’t meet the standards. Another 23 had received guidance from the department on how to meet them. Thirty, including a few of the counties that had received advice, eventually said they didn’t jail people, some because they had contracts with providers. Twenty-one never responded.

Mississippi Today and ProPublica requested all Department of Mental Health records since 2010 related to enforcement of the certification law and correspondence with counties. Documents through 2013 included standards, correspondence, memos describing visits to county facilities and a log summarizing contact with each county. After that, the records released show no statewide outreach. 

The final entry in the department’s timeline of the law’s implementation reads: “June 2013 was the last attempt to update the information about DMH Designated Mental Health Holding Facilities due to lack of additional responses from the counties.” That timeline is undated, but a department spokesperson said data in the file shows that it was created in January 2015 by a staffer who held positions in the certification and behavioral health divisions.

LeGrand, who served until 2014, said he doesn’t recall any decision to stop contacting counties about the law. 

Katie Storr, the current chief of staff at the Department of Mental Health, told Mississippi Today and ProPublica it’s possible staff did communicate with counties beyond what the records indicate. “After more than a decade, a lack of correspondence, email, or other documentation is not indicative that communication and follow-ups did not take place,” she wrote in an email. However, she said the department had no additional records that would show this.

During this time, Storr wrote, the department was focused on trying to get counties to hold people going through the commitment process in short-term crisis stabilization units rather than jail.

Department can’t ‘boss counties around’

The recent effort to implement the certification law stems from inquiries by Mississippi Today and ProPublica. 

In January, the news organizations asked the head of the Department of Mental Health, Wendy Bailey, if the department certifies jails where people are held as they await admission to a state hospital. Bailey, who handled communications for the department when the certification law passed, initially said it didn’t apply to jails. In March, after reviewing documents showing prior efforts to certify jails, she said she didn’t believe the law was intended to apply to them.

After our inquiries, Bailey sought an opinion from the attorney general. (Such opinions are not binding, but officials who request and abide by them are protected from liability.) 

Around the same time, the Department of Mental Health contacted the four facilities it had previously certified to schedule inspections. The department’s standards say such inspections will happen annually, but this was the first year in which staff had sought to visit all of them since 2017. (Storr said the inspection effort was planned before inquiries by Mississippi Today and ProPublica.) 

In March, staffers inspecting the Chickasaw County jail in rural northeastern Mississippi found serious violations. Inmates and people awaiting mental health treatment were housed together in the same cells, where beds were anchored with long bolts that “could be used by a person to harm themselves,” the reviewers recorded. 

The department suspended the jail’s certification in August, but reinstated it after the county submitted a compliance plan that included shortening the bolts and providing mental health training for staff. 

Lafayette County told the state it didn’t want its jail to be certified anymore. The certification for a holding facility in Warren County, home to Vicksburg, was suspended. A hospital in Alcorn County in northeast Mississippi maintained its certification.

In August, the attorney general’s office confirmed that the department must “ensure that each county holding facility, including but not limited to county jails,” meets its standards. If they don’t, an assistant attorney general wrote, the law allows the department to require counties to contract with a county that does have a certified facility. 

When Bailey informed county officials about the opinion in her October letter, she instructed that if a county holds someone in an uncertified facility, including a jail, officials should contact the department to seek certification or work with local community mental health centers. These are publicly funded, independent providers set up to ensure that poor, uninsured people can access mental health care. 

Several counties, including Lamar, have taken up the matter in public meetings or have contacted the department to begin the certification process.

Storr told Mississippi Today and ProPublica that the department asked counties to initiate the certification process because the law says it’s up to counties to determine which facility they use. 

But the Department of Mental Health already knows which counties have held people in uncertified jails. Starting in July 2021, in response to a federal lawsuit over the state’s mental health system, department staff have tracked how many people come to state hospitals directly from jails for psychiatric treatment.

The tally for the year ending in June breaks down all 71 jails, only one of which is certified, where a total of 812 people who had been civilly committed were held before being admitted to a state hospital. (The tally doesn’t include anyone who was jailed and released without being admitted to a state hospital.)

In Lauderdale County, on the Alabama line: 83. Across the state in DeSoto County: 76. A couple hundred miles down the Mississippi River in Adams County: 33. 

Storr and Bailey have emphasized that they have limited authority over counties and no way to force them to do anything. The department’s only means of enforcement, Storr wrote, is to put a jail on probation, then revoke certification — if the jail in question even was certified in the first place — and require the county to contract with another provider. 

LeGrand said a law without teeth is effectively optional. “The department’s not really in a good position to boss counties around,” he said.

James Tucker, an attorney and the director of the Alabama Disabilities Advocacy Program, which has sued that state over its civil commitment process, said the agency has a responsibility to make sure counties are treating people properly. “You don’t discharge that duty by sitting on your hands and waiting for every local sheriff to report in,” he said. 

Bailey’s department encourages counties to connect families with outpatient services in order to avoid the commitment process. If someone does need to be committed, the department said, counties should hold people in crisis stabilization units operated by community mental health centers. 

“I do not believe jails are an appropriate location to hold someone who is not charged with a crime and is awaiting admission to a treatment bed,” Bailey told Mississippi Today and ProPublica in an email. “The person should be in a safe location, receiving treatment.”

But there are only 180 crisis beds in the state, and crisis stabilization units frequently turn people away because they are full, can’t provide the needed care, or deem a patient too violent. Storr said the agency is working to reduce denials and plans to use one-time federal pandemic funding to expand capacity.

Allen, the sheriffs’ association attorney, said the state will need more crisis beds if officials want to keep people out of jail as they await mental health care. He said he’s been meeting with sheriffs and county officials since the guidance was issued. 

“This has catalyzed the county governments and law enforcement to do something,” he said. Sheriffs agree on the need for “certified centers, just not in the county jail.”

Mollie Simon of ProPublica contributed research to this story.

The post Mississippi jailed more than 800 people awaiting psychiatric treatment in a year. Just one jail meets state standards. appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Here’s a Veteran’s Day story for you: Three generations of Mississippians serving our country while working the same job. Meet Retired Chief Master Sergeant Dan Jones (grandfather), soon-to-be pinned Chief Master Sergeant Joel Jones (dad), and Senior Airman Scott Jones (son) who all are Boom Operators in the KC-135 Stratotanker (a flying gas station) based at the 186th Air Refueling Wing based at Key Field in Meridian.

Boom operators help refuel aircraft mid-air, which is vital for long missions. Scott could not be in this video because he was deployed. When asked if he was proud of his son and grandson, Dan Jones replied, “Mission accomplished.”

The post Mississippi Stories: Dan and Joel Jones appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The post Marshall Ramsey: Bright Spot appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Nov. 12, 1914

Civil rights leader William Monroe Trotter led a delegation that confronted President Woodrow Wilson. 

Raised in Hyde Park, Massachusetts, Trotter had more education than the president. He had graduate and postgraduate degrees from Harvard University, where he became the first Black member of Phi Beta Kappa. 

“New Englanders liked to talk as if ‘the Negro problem’ afflicted only the South,” The New Yorker wrote of him, “but Trotter looked around his beloved Boston and saw segregation in the city’s churches, gyms, and hospitals. This ‘fixed caste of color’ meant that ‘every colored American would be a civic outcast, forever alien in public life,’ he wrote.” 

In 1901, he started The Guardian with the motto: “For every right, with all thy might.” The newspaper called itself “an organ which is to voice intelligently the needs and aspirations” of Black Americans.” 

Both he and his wife, Deenie, published The Guardian each Saturday, only missing two issues: “The Trotters had no children and did not want any; The Guardian was their child.” 

In their pages, Trotter leveled vicious attacks against Booker T. Washington and his accommodation policies, calling him “the Great Traitor.” When Trotter began to question Washington at a gathering of 2,000, a fight broke out, which became known as “the Boston riot,” and he was arrested, spending 30 days in jail. The wealth his family once enjoyed turned to poverty because of the money he sunk into his newspaper. 

“It has cost me considerable money, but I could not keep out of it,” he wrote. “I can now feel that I am doing my duty and trying to show the light to those in darkness and keep them from at least being duped into helping in their own enslavement.” 

He turned his attention to political candidates he felt would support African Americans and began backing Wilson, whom he met and shook hands with in 1912 “with great cordiality.” 

A year later, he and Ida B. Wells and other civil rights leaders expressed dismay over the reinstitution of Jim Crow and even shared a chart that showed which federal offices had begun separating workers by race. 

In 1914, Trotter and other Black leaders appeared at the White House with 20,000 signatures, demanding an end to Jim Crow in federal offices. The leaders told Wilson they felt betrayed because they had supported him in the election, and he had since reinstituted segregation in the federal government that included separate toilets and dismissed high-level Black appointees. 

“Only two years ago you were heralded as perhaps the second Lincoln,” Trotter said, “and now the Afro-American leaders who supported you are hounded as false leaders and traitors to their race.” 

He reminded the president — who had been busy championing his “New Freedom” program to restore fair-labor practices — that he had promised to aid Black Americans in “advancing the interest of their race in the United States. … Have you a ‘New Freedom’ for white Americans and a new slavery for your Afro-American fellow citizens? God forbid!” 

Wilson responded that “segregation is not humiliating but a benefit” and that he had put the practice back in place because of friction between Black and white clerks. Trotter challenged this claim, calling Jim Crow humiliating to Black workers. 

Wilson stuck to his guns, telling Trotter that if he and other Black Americans think “you are being humiliated, you will believe it.” The exchange lasted 45 minutes, and the president challenged Trotter’s “tone” as offensive: “You have spoiled the whole cause for which you came.” 

The civil rights leader responded, “I am pleading for simple justice. If my tone has seemed so contentious, why has my tone been misunderstood?” 

The argument landed on the front page of The New York Times. During World War I, the State Department refused to give Trotter a passport to Paris. To get around the restriction, he took a job as a cook on a freighter to France, and when he began reporting on the plight of Black soldiers, French newspapers shared his reporting, and he spoke there about discrimination against African Americans. 

When Trotter returned home, he was welcomed by 2,000 supporters. He unsuccessfully championed a section added to Wilson’s 14 Points for peace that would say, “The elimination of civil, political, and judicial distinctions based on race or color in all nations for the new era of freedom everywhere.” 

Trotter helped found the Niagara Movement, a forerunner of the NAACP. The civil rights organization adopted his proposal to address segregated transportation as a grievance, but the group rejected his proposal to make lynching a federal crime. 

He championed cases the NAACP was slower to pursue, including Jane Bosfield, a Black woman was told she could only work for a Massachusetts hospital if she ate separately from her white fellow workers. 

When the racist movie, ‘The Birth of a Nation’, appeared on a screen, the national NAACP tried to raise money for a rival film to counter those lies, but Trotter believed in direct action. His protests succeeded in shutting down a play that was the basis for the movie, which depicted Klansmen as heroes. After failing to halt the debut of the film in Boston, he teamed up with Roman Catholics to get a revival showing canceled. 

His tactics were later used by the modern civil rights movement “to integrate lunch counters, buses, schools, and other essential spaces,” The New Yorker wrote. And his mindset “incubated the politics of Malcolm X and of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.” 

A multicultural center at the University of Michigan bears Trotter’s name, and his first home in Dorchester is now a National Historic Landmark. He made the list of the 100 Greatest African Americans.

The post On this day in 1914 appeared first on Mississippi Today.