OurTupelo

Mississippians seem to be providing contradictory responses to questions asked in a recent poll commissioned by state Republican House Speaker Jason White.

On the one hand, according to the 501 people questioned in the scientific poll, their top priority was inflation or the cost of most retail goods, such as clothes, groceries, gasoline and many other items.

But on the other hand, a majority of those polled say they would favor eliminating the tax on primary residences (or on homesteads) and offset that lost revenue by increasing the sales tax, resulting in those retail items costing more.

Despite those increased costs, 56.6% of poll respondents said they would favor eliminating the property tax on primary residences while increasing the sales tax, while 24.6% opposed the proposal and 18.9% offered no opinion. Inflation was the top priority of 22.2% of respondents, followed by crime and public safety at 19.1% and healthcare at 14.7%. Only 13.5% said reducing taxes was their top priority.

Maybe, the people who identified inflation as the top priority were among the respondents opposed to eliminating the property tax and increasing the sales tax. Maybe, some poll respondents weighed the options and decided they would rather pay no property tax even if it resulted in increased costs for retail items.

No polling explanation offered

The polling firm – Republican-leaning Cygnal – did not attempt to explore that contradiction.

White and his House Republican leadership are currently exploring the option to eliminate the homestead property tax and increase the sales tax.

The option is being considered even though Mississippi has one of the lowest property tax rates in the nation with an effective property tax rate of 0.58% – meaning homeowners on average pay .58% of the value of their home in property taxes.

It should be pointed out that property taxes fund city and county governments and are levied by local officials under the restraints put in place in state law. Property tax rates could be significantly higher in some cities and counties than in others.

Mississippi has a 7% statewide sales tax on most retail items. The sales tax on food recently was reduced to 5%.

Most of the sales tax revenue currently goes to the state, but 18.5% of it is returned to the municipality where the sales tax was collected. Counties currently receive no sales tax revenue.

The sales tax is the largest single source of state revenue, accounting for more than 38% of the general fund used to fund state government services, and it will become even more important thanks to plans to eliminate the income tax. Based on recent legislation, the income tax, which currently accounts for a little less than 28% of the state general fund revenue, will be phased out sometime in the late 2030s.

Sales tax vs. property tax

With Mississippi eliminating the income tax, and already beginning to face budgetary pressures, it will be difficult for the state to provide any money to local governments to offset the potential loss of the homestead property tax. If the Legislature eliminates the property tax, local governments will be dependent on an increase in the sales tax with the revenue going to them. 

The homestead tax generates significantly more than $1 billion annually for cities and counties, according to Jason Camp, an extension specialist with the Center for Government and Community Development at the Mississippi State University’s Extension Service.

According to the Tax Foundation, when combining  funds for both local and state governments, the sales tax accounts for 35.1% of the total revenue while the property tax accounts for 26.4% and the income tax accounts for 16.8%, though that is steadily declining as the income tax is phased out.

The bottom line is that it will take a significant increase in the sales tax to offset the cities’ and counties’ loss of the homestead property  tax revenue. And the result will be Mississippians facing higher prices at retail establishments. How much of an increase is perhaps the key question for House leaders to ascertain before taking any action during the legislative session that begins in January.

Perhaps the question Speaker White should get his pollsters to ask before the 2027 session begins is whether Mississippians want to forgo government services or pay higher prices for retail items or keep paying what is one of the lower homestead property rates in the nation.

OCEAN SPRINGS — Phil Proctor left South Mississippi to build a career as a professional sculptor, creating large-scale art installations across the country. Two decades later, the Lucedale native has returned to the Mississippi Coast to create sculptures inspired by an artist he has admired since childhood — Walter Anderson. 

“Walter Anderson has been sort of a name I’ve known for many years, going back to being a young child and being one of my favorite artists ever because of the content of the work and the naturalism and just the representation of the animals and the way they are drawn,” Proctor said. 

Proctor was chosen to create two sculptures for the Ocean Springs Gateway Sculpture Project, a shearwater bird and a pelican based on Anderson’s work. 

From South Mississippi to a career in sculpture

Proctor graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi in 2000 with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts. He later earned a master’s degree in fine arts from East Carolina University before moving to Atlanta. 

His path to becoming a full-time artist was gradual. 

“Being an artist is — sometimes you gotta hold down a couple of jobs,” Proctor said. “I’d say after about ten years or so, I could leave most of my other kind of work behind and just focus on sculpture professionally full time.” 

His work has since taken him across the country, including projects in Arizona, Oklahoma, Florida and Ohio. 

“It was really nice to be able to work where I really know a lot of the people,” Proctor said. 

Bringing Anderson’s work into the third dimension

The Gateway Sculpture Project took shape through meetings with residents and community leaders about what best represented Ocean Springs. 

Julian Rankin, strategic adviser for the Walter Anderson Museum of Art, said the process led organizers back to Anderson and the city’s artistic tradition. 

Proctor was selected after a public call for artist qualifications from Mississippi and the surrounding region. His task was to transform two-dimensional designs based on Anderson’s work into large-scale sculptures.

“Phil got to collaborate, if you will, with Walter Anderson across time and to turn these into three-dimensional sculptures,” Rankin said. “That, I think, was the magic about it.” 

“It was really kind of a wonderful experience working what I would describe as a collaboration with Walter Anderson in spirit,” Proctor said. 

Design and engineering work began in late 2025, followed by manufacturing around March 2026, Proctor said. The sculptures were unveiled Oct. 1. 

Rankin said the overall project took about two and a half years, including public input, design, funding and manufacturing. 

More than just art

The Gateway Sculpture Project aims to place public art at entrances to Ocean Springs while helping direct visitors downtown. 

The project was funded through the Gulf Coast Restoration Fund as part of the Mary C. O’Keefe Cultural Center rehabilitation and signage project. 

Rankin said the sculptures are intended to guide visitors toward businesses and bring art into developing areas of the city. 

He said the project could serve as an example for other Mississippi communities. 

“It’s a model for other cities and areas of the state to say, ‘We could do something like this too,’” Rankin said. 

For Proctor, the project also marked a return to his Mississippi roots. 

“Being able to work on a project in Mississippi really meant a lot to us,” he said. 

Bobbi-Jeanne Misick is an investigative reporter at Verite News, and Mukta Joshi is an investigative reporter at Mississippi Today. They are spending a year as New York Times Local Investigations fellows covering immigration and other issues. They can be reached at bobbi.misick@nytimes.com and mukta.joshi@nytimes.com. 

NEW ORLEANS — Immigrants who enter the United States without appointments with immigration officials can be detained indefinitely and are not entitled to bond hearings, regardless of how long they have lived in the country, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Friday.

The 10-7 decision was issued in the case of three immigrant fathers in Texas who were detained without bond. It applies to immigrants who have already entered the U.S., as well as those who will enter in the future, and it has far-reaching implications for the more than 20,000 people held indefinitely in detention centers in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi – the states in the appeals court district. 

Rebecca Cassler, an attorney at the American Immigration Council, who represented the three men, said the ruling is “an affront to the U.S. Constitution.”

“The principle at stake here is simple: if the government wants to detain someone, it has to explain why depriving them of their liberty is necessary. And anyone who is detained has the right to ask a judge for review of that detention,” Cassler said. “Instead, this ruling allows the government to lock people up when detention plainly serves no purpose, and without any way to challenge it.” 

Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi hold more than 40% of all ICE detainees by average daily population, making the 5th Circuit the largest jurisdiction for people challenging their confinement as unconstitutional. So far, it continues to be one of only two circuits to have upheld the Trump administration’s mandatory detention policy.

The Supreme Court has agreed to take up a similar case from the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, which will allow for precedent to be set regarding bond eligibility and indefinite detention for immigrants in removal proceedings. That case is expected to go before the justices early next year.

The 5th Circuit reversed an earlier decision by a panel of three of its own judges, which had granted  bond to immigrants in detention after 90 days. The new ruling says people in ICE detention have no constitutional right to due process.

In the majority opinion issued Friday, Judge Cory Todd Wilson wrote that immigrants who have been in the U.S. a long time are still “applicants for admission” and therefore are subject to mandatory detention without bond.

The seven judges who dissented agreed that constitutional rights, including the right to liberty, are available to all people present in the United States. Judge Leslie H. Southwick wrote in dissent, “statutory admission status does not decide when aliens gain due process rights. The Constitution, after all, is supreme, with statutes’ needing to conform to its dictates, not the Constitution to statutes.” 

James Percival, general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security, praised the majority’s ruling.

“Big win in the Fifth Circuit on mandatory detention for illegal aliens, a principle codified in 1996 legislation but ignored by the deep state for decades,” Percival said Friday.

The three-judge panel had ruled in July that the Trump administration’s policy of denying certain due process rights to immigrants who entered the United States without formal appointments with immigration officials, no matter how long they had resided in the country, was unconstitutional. The panel ruled that the government must hold bond hearings for immigrants arrested within the U.S. within 90 days of their detention. 

However, 10 days later, and with no official prompting from the federal government, the entire court decided to re-consider the case. The announcement of the hearing paused the relief that the panel of judges had granted to the three men. The 5th Circuit is generally regarded as one of the most conservative in the nation.

In 2025, constitutional petitions by immigrants pleading to be released began inundating federal courts across the country, after the Trump administration stopped a long practice of providing bond hearings to those who had lived in the U.S. for years. To date, more than 80,000 such petitions have been filed nationally. About a quarter of these have been filed within the 5th Circuit.

Federal district courts in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi will continue to have the power to grant habeas corpus petitions on a discretionary basis,  but Friday’s ruling “would foreclose nearly all of those petitions from being granted on constitutional grounds,” Cassler said. 

Until the Trump administration ramped up its immigration crackdown in 2025, federal courts for decades had distinguished between people arrested at the U.S. border and those who had built lives in the country. The latter would automatically receive bond hearings, which would allow an immigration judge to decide whether the person was dangerous or posed a flight risk.

Then Trump’s second presidential term began and ICE detention populations exploded. In August, ICE boasted that it had broken its own record of the number of people it had arrested, as populations inside detention facilities across the South swell, triggering complaints of crowding. Andrei Zykov, a detainee at the Adams County Correctional Center in Mississippi, said Thursday that the facility designed to hold 2,200 people has been holding more than 2,600 for weeks, based on the number of meals kitchen workers were asked to prepare. 

The 5th Circuit’s latest decision has effectively sealed the path for hundreds of them who hoped to be released while immigration judges decided whether they could remain in the U.S.  

Attorneys for American Immigration Council and the National Immigration Project, who represent the three men, argue that the case, as well as the issue of habeas corpus, is about personal liberty, a constitutional right that they say is granted to all people within the United States. 

The government continues to argue that immigrants who entered the country without those formal appointments, which is called entering without inspection, are not entitled to certain constitutional rights no matter how long they have lived in the U.S., because their very presence in the country is unlawful. 

Illegally entering the U.S. is, in most cases, a misdemeanor. Cassler said the government is trying to rob immigrant detainees of  rights that are guaranteed even to violent criminals. 

“When people murder someone and they’re put on trial for it, the government’s interests are at their strongest,” Cassler said. “They want to protect the community. They want to make sure that that person doesn’t go kill someone else. And even in those cases, that person has very robust rights to due process with regard to their pretrial custody. Violating the law doesn’t take away your constitutional rights.”

Robert Stewart of Verite News contributed reporting.

Republican Attorney General Lynn Fitch said Friday that Scott Colom, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, likely violated state law with a digital ad that featured an artificial intelligence-generated depiction of Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith running away from reporters. 

Colom told Mississippi Today he would delete the post because he didn’t want Fitch to launch litigation with taxpayer money. That came after Fitch sent Colom a complaint letter demanding that he remove that ad from his social media accounts. If he did not, the complaint said, the attorney general’s office could file an injunction against him. 

“As violations of this election integrity law can carry criminal penalties, Attorney General Fitch has also asked Scott Colom and his campaign to preserve all records related to this matter so as not to obstruct justice,” the statement reads. 

In a statement, Colom said that Hyde-Smith is “clearly desperate” and that she and her allies are “once again trying to weaponize the justice system to distract from the real issues, which is that she has sold out our farmers, sold out our small businesses, and sold out our families.” 

“Clearly this was parody, maybe too close to home because she knows she does love to hide from her own constituents and reporters,” Colom said. 

Fitch’s threat is the latest salvo between Colom’s campaign and the state GOP in a race that has generated national attention and millions of dollars from national party interests leading up to the Nov. 3 election. National pundits are saying the Mississippi race, initially taken for granted by Republicans, is in play.

The complaint follows a letter that Mississippi GOP Chairman Mike Hurst sent to Fitch asking her to launch an investigation and criticizing the Colom campaign for not labeling the content as AI-generated.   

After a rally with former Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday, before Fitch had acceded to Hurst’s request to investigate the matter, Colom said Republicans were mounting a coordinated attack to distract from his campaign’s increasing momentum. He pointed out that the ad has been up for weeks, yet Hurst and Fitch were first opining on the matter 11 days before the election. 

“They understand that I’m a threat. Mike Hurst does this all the time. Every time somebody gets competitive, they try to weaponize the justice system to intimidate their opponents,” Colom said. “I thought they weren’t snowflakes. You’re telling me they can’t take a joke?” 

If Fitch does pursue legal action, it would be a rare instance of her office enforcing campaign laws. 

During the 2023 statewide election cycle, Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann claimed for months that his Republican primary challenger, state Sen. Chris McDaniel, violated campaign finance laws by accepting more than the state’s legal limit from corporations. 

Several Mississippi Republicans agreed that it was a clear-cut example of a campaign-finance law violation, but Fitch later declined to pursue any action against the campaign or the leaders of a political action committee involved in the donations. 

Her reluctance to investigate or prosecute alleged campaign finance violations prompted other state leaders to call for reform and more enforcement. Most of those attempts have failed in the Legislature.

Hurst and Fitch issued similar statements about a Democrat close to a competitive election. Fitch shortly before last year’s elections said she was investigating former state Rep. Sonya Williams Barnes, the Democratic nominee for mayor of Gulfport, over allegations that residents had received meal vouchers in exchange for voting. No charges were filed against Williams Barnes.

WASHINGTON — In a deep, dark part of the Gulf of Mexico, the number of marine animals plummeted by about 60% in the years following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion, a new study found.

In a crucial part of the Gulf between the light surface and the darkest depths, where the BP-operated well failed and dumped 134 million gallons of oil, the number of fish found dropped by 63.5% from the year after the spill to 2015. Crustaceans, including shrimp and krill, a key food for whales, went down 62%, and larger animals like squid and octopuses fell 59.7%, according to a study published Monday in the journal PNAS.

And those populations haven’t come close to recovering, the study found.

Researchers focused on the ocean’s “twilight zone,” a vast area above the seafloor, where much of the surface marine life, including dolphins and whales, feast on creatures. Yet little is known about this gigantic ecosystem, and this region of the Gulf had not been studied before the 2010 spill, said study lead author Tracey Sutton, a biological oceanographer at Nova Southeastern University.

A 2011 post-spill exploration cited in the research, which used six sets of nets at different depths and acoustic sonar, gave scientists a good sense of how much sea life was in the area between the surface and 5,000 feet deep. They returned to the same place with the same equipment three-and-a-half years later and found sea life was between one-third and one-quarter of what it was in 2011.

“We saw this big decline,” Sutton said. “The question was then why? So we looked at all of the natural variables we thought could account for it, namely temperature, oxygen supply and food. None of those vary with the decline. The event that did was the oil spill. So we think that’s the most likely cause of the decline.”

Researchers kept on sampling since 2015 and the low populations remained, with a slight rise in 2022 and 2023 that did not prove statistically significant or lasting, Sutton said.

Documenting the decline

Sutton’s team documented the population declines with three different lines of evidence: what they caught in the nets, what their acoustic sonar found and genetic studies showing the species losing genetic diversity because of inbreeding.

A lot of marine life died instantly after the explosion, which killed 11 workers, and from nearly five months of leaking oil and gas. Those pollutants got stored in the eggs of survivors and subsequent generations of critters got more compromised and weaker, Sutton said.

BP spokesperson Paul Takahashi said the accident “forever changed” the company: “We have made many changes intended to help prevent an event like this from ever happening again.”

Both the oil and the dispersants used to clean the spill hurt fish, but in different ways, said study co-author Isabel Romero, a chemical oceanographer at the University of South Carolina. Oil is more toxic and an overall threat, but the dispersant breaks the oil into smaller droplets, increasing the exposure of animals that live in the deeper water column, she said.

Dispersants caused many problems, and new studies show that in future accidents, it would be better to avoid those chemicals and instead add agents that increase oil-munching microbes, said former National Science Foundation Director Rita Colwell, a University of Maryland environmental microbiologist who headed a 10-year, $500 million BP-funded program to study spill effects.

Sutton said his team couldn’t prove an exact causal link to the BP oil spill, but by eliminating the other possibilities and looking at the timing, it’s logically clear that the spill caused the problem.

The krill population dropped 72%. Lanternfish — odd fish with blue-green lights embedded over their bodies — are a third of what they used to be, Sutton said. The stunning but scary dragonfish — with sharp teeth, light organs and a lure attached to its head — also had big losses, he said.

“These are foundational species,” Sutton said. “They’re the things most things eat. So it’s no wonder that we had wholesale changes across the community.”

The inner ocean is more unknown than outer space

Scientists learned much about this unexplored area of the Gulf.

“One of our biggest findings from the whole thing is how connected the whole oceanic Gulf is from top to bottom because the animals move up and down,” Sutton said. “There are predators at the top that dive deep. Lots of things that are deep that come up at night. So the system is one very large pulsing system, rather than just a layered system like people might have thought beforehand.”

Outside scientists were especially bothered by where the spill damaged.

“We know more about space in some ways than we do about the inner ocean. Because we can’t see these regions, there is a tendency to assume everything is fine, but here we have a clear result showing that something went very wrong,” Scripps Institution of Oceanography marine scientist Kaitlin Frasier said in an email.

Frasier, who wasn’t part of the study released Monday, published a post-spill study in 2024 looking at Gulf of Mexico whales and dolphins, finding population drops as high as 83%.

“It’s shocking how a single failure in a drilling rig can have this vast and sustained impact over thousands of square kilometers, with little visible recovery over 13 years after the spill,” said Dalhousie University marine scientist Boris Worm, who wasn’t part of the study. “It is important that we see this, because for the longest time these consequences were completely out of sight and out of mind.”

Worm and Colwell said this damage should be kept in mind as the world talks about deep-sea mining and increased oil drilling in deep waters.

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A federal appeals court decided this week to reverse an injunction preventing the enforcement of a state law banning diversity, equity and inclusion programs in Mississippi public schools and universities. 

The court has also ordered the case be reassigned to a new district judge, after his staff used artificial intelligence to draft an order in the case. 

The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision means the law can now be enforced in classrooms across the state. It also resolves a key concern of the plaintiffs: that the law would be interpreted to prohibit discussions of issues related to race, sex and civil rights, said Rob McDuff, one of their attorneys.

“This interpretation by the Court is good news for public school teachers and students throughout the state and signals that they can continue teaching and learning about these subjects as they have for many years,” he said.

Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch’s office defended the law, which was passed during the 2025 legislative session. State attorneys told the court last year that the state government has the right to regulate educational content in public schools. 

But U.S. District Judge Henry T. Wingate sided with the plaintiffs’ attorneys — arguing on behalf of students, parents and educators — that the law was dangerously vague and violated the constitutional right to free speech. 

As the lawsuit was playing out in court, Wingate came under fire amid revelations that his staff used artificial intelligence to draft an order in the case. The order was riddled with errors — naming defendants and plaintiffs who weren’t parties to the case, misquoting state law and referencing a nonexistent case.

Wingate, who was appointed in 1985 by President Ronald Reagan, initially declined to explain the errors until U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley demanded an explanation. 

The appeals court judges criticized Wingate in the Thursday order vacating his injunction. 

“The proceedings in the district court were a botch job, to say the least,” the order stated. 

In September, Anthony Shults, the state deputy solicitor general, told the three-judge appeals panel that the state has a legal right to regulate the material that public educators teach students. He also said he believed a new judge should take over the case.

McDuff argued that the law’s vagueness would cause chaos, and he told an appellate judge that Wingate’s error was serious, but “it’s not as if AI told Judge Wingate to grant” the injunction.

While the law can now be enforced in public school classrooms and colleges, its scope is fairly narrow as interpreted by the appeals court, McDuff said. 

“In sum, the Act does not apply to students,” the order reads. Other parts of the document say the law names a number of exemptions, including scholarly work, the activities of students and their groups, and creative engagement. 

A footnote says the plaintiffs were wrong to claim that the law would ban the discussion of civil rights history, including the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Ku Klux Klan, the 14th Amendment and Juneteenth.

“We’ve got to study the decision more carefully to see how it plays out in the future and go from there,” McDuff said. “But I don’t think this will be much of a problem in the future.”

A new judge will be assigned to the case at a later date. 

More than a year after state officials declared a public health emergency over rising infant mortality rates, eyes are on Mississippi, and Dr. Dan Edney, state health officer, said the national media attention has helped the cause. 

“The narrative switched from ‘Poor old Mississippi, they’re so pitiful, they can’t keep their babies alive’ to ‘Oh my goodness, look what Mississippi is doing,’” Edney said. “We’re the only state that’s ever declared one.”

In 2025, an infant mortality report showed Mississippi’s infant mortality rate rose from 8.9 deaths per 1,000 births in 2023 to 9.7 in 2024 – nearly twice the national average. Edney then declared the emergency status, which he said has helped his agency cut through red tape to roll out new programs. But state and national stakeholders say more could be done when it comes to transparency and solutions. 

In an interview with Mississippi Today, Edney outlined four initiatives he said his department launched or expanded since the declaration:

• In December 2025, the state Health Department launched the Saving the Smallest campaign around safe sleep. To date, Edney said department employees have distributed 680 cribs and taught hundreds of families safe sleep practices during home visits. 
• In May, the Legislature approved the creation of a Fetal-Infant Mortality Review Committee, which first met in August and needs about $150,000 annually to keep running, Edney said. 
• The state Health Department continues to build its obstetric system of care, designed to streamline hospital transfers for high-risk pregnancies by modeling the trauma system. Hospitals are currently being surveyed and will receive designations in the coming months for the level of care they’re equipped to handle, Edney said. 
• The agency is restructuring its county health departments. In 2025, Edney cut services at some county clinics following insufficient funding from the Legislature. Now, Edney said he is working to offer perinatal care at some of those clinics. He said the agency would start with four or five counties, but did not say which ones. 

Some public health researchers in the state were surprised to learn that the state Health Department characterized its response to the emergency as this four-pronged approach. Mitchell Adcock, executive director at the Center for Mississippi Health Policy, said his team had heard about these initiatives, but didn’t know their status. 

“With a public health emergency, I just thought we would know a bit more about what’s been going on,” he said. 

Meanwhile, provisional numbers for 2025 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show infant mortality in Mississippi went down from 9.7 deaths per 1,000 births in 2024 to 8.4. Most of the department’s new initiatives don’t overlap with those 2025 numbers. The crib distribution began in December 2025. Edney said he couldn’t take credit for that decrease and can’t say what accounts for it, but called it a “substantial reduction.” 

“It’s about 40, 45 babies who survived 2025 who would not have survived 2024,” Edney said.

Once the official data is released, Adcock said his team will start digging into what’s driving those numbers. 

The Fetal-Infant Mortality Review Committee has already shed light on hidden problems, Edney said. Within a couple of meetings, the committee identified several infant deaths resulting from one twin rolling over the other while sleeping, Edney said.

“The pediatricians hadn’t thought about it, the neonatalogists hadn’t thought about it. But the FIMR identified it,” Edney said. “So right there, boom, in just a few months, it was a gamechanger.”

‘counties where there is nothing’

Jonathan Webb, CEO of the national Association of Women’s Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses, said he believes the emergency designation was appropriate “given where Mississippi ranks.” He thinks states with similar rankings could collectively prioritize the challenge and share what works. 

“It creates awareness and brings some visibility to the issue,” Webb said. “But it also makes it easier to direct funds to programs.” 

Webb said while the declaration is commendable, Mississippi’s plan lacks certain elements he would hope to see in an emergency response, such as a focus on equity. In 2024, nearly twice as many Black infants as white ones died in Mississippi. 

Data from Mississippi’s most recent infant mortality report shows the death rate for white infants in 2024 was one of the lowest over the last decade. But during that same period, the number of deaths among Black infants reached its highest rate. 

“I really think that an honest assessment of our biases individually and as a system has to happen,” Webb said.

Solutions could include the health department partnering with community organizations that serve women of color, creating patient advisory committees and embedding accountability offices into health spaces, he said. 

Webb also highlighted the importance of providing resources and training to clinicians who might be left picking up the slack when hospitals shutter their labor and delivery units. 

“When you have these maternity care deserts and services leave communities, people are still having babies in these communities,” Webb said. “It just falls to the EMS team or the emergency room teams or critical care units, nurses who are in those environments.”

The University of Mississippi Medical Center has a program called STORK, which trains first responders and emergency room clinicians to better respond to obstetric emergencies. In 2022, UMMC doctors launched the program in response to the dwindling options for obstetric care and the concern that a growing number of women would be delivering babies outside dedicated labor and delivery units. Part of the obstetric system of care involves amplifying that effort, Edney said. 

That’s not a bad thing to do, but it’s not a comprehensive approach, said Getty Israel, founder of a Jackson-based women’s health clinic called Sisters in Birth. 

“Is the state doing enough? No,” Israel said, adding that she doesn’t believe the department can shore up meaningful improvements without more funding.  

For the third consecutive year, the health department requested no increase in funding from lawmakers during legislative budget hearings earlier this month. 

On Tuesday, the Commonwealth Fund released a new report highlighting the importance of midwifery-led birth centers, cost-effective clinical spaces outside hospitals where low-risk women can safely give birth with fewer interventions and more hands-on support. Mississippi has none.

Israel has been trying to open the state’s first birth center for nearly six years. Several state laws have stood in her way, she said, including expensive monthly fees certified nurse midwives are required to pay physicians to practice within their scope. 

A willingness from lawmakers to break the status quo, and to fund the construction of more community health spaces, “could reduce so much of the risk that women experience that leads to death,” she said. 

Nearly half the state’s counties are maternity care deserts, where there are no obstetric clinicians or birthing facilities, according to the March of Dimes. There should be more of a focus on shrinking those deserts by offering more reproductive health services, Israel said, than on routing women out of those deserts. 

“We need to build infrastructure in those counties where there is nothing,” Israel said. “You’re relying on an EMS system to drive how many minutes, how many miles, to get to a woman’s house in a rural place?”

The Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame announced its 2027 class on Thursday, the most diverse group of inductees in the history of the Magnolia State sports shrine.

The class, which will be inducted in ceremonies next July, includes three women, three football greats and two Major League Baseball standouts.

In alphabetical order, they are: Mississippi State football great John Bond, Jackson State and Major League Baseball standout Dave Clark, Southern Miss and professional football linebacker Rod Davis, Pearl native and Olympic gold medalist sprinter Bianca Knight, Ole Miss All American and 10-year NFL veteran Kris Mangum, Ole Miss and Major League Baseball star Seth Smith, Mississippi State and WNBA basketball great LaToya Thomas and Shirley Gibbs Walker, who coached Alcorn State to 493 victories and 12 SWAC basketball championships.

A brief bio of each:

John Bond

Few athletes in Mississippi State history made such an immediate impact as John Bond did on Bulldog football. The Bulldogs were 3-8 in 1979, Emory Bellard’s first season as the coach. In 1980, with Bond running Bellard’s Wishbone offense, the Bulldogs won nine games, including a historic 6-3 victory over Bear Bryant’s No. 1 ranked Alabama Crimson Tide. Bond, who ran for more than 2,000 yards and passed for more than 4,000, remains the only State quarterback to defeat LSU four times.

Dave Clark

Clark, from the northeast Mississippi town of Shannon, was the 11th overall pick in the first round of the 1983 Major League draft. Clark, an outfielder, played 13 Major League seasons before embarking on a long coaching and managerial career in baseball. Currently a coach for the Houston Astros, he has managed, coached and won championships at the Minor League and Major League level.

Rod Davis

Davis won the C Spire Conerly Trophy, for Mississippi’s top college football player, in 2002 when he was the nation’s leading tackler for Southern Miss. He is the answer to an interesting trivia question: Eli Manning won the Conerly Trophy as a sophomore and a senior. Who won it Manning’s junior season? Davis, a three-time all-conference player at USM, is the school’s all-time leading tackler and was the Conference USA Defensive Player of the Year in 2003. The Gulfport native is currently the athletic director and head football coach at Florence.

Bianca Knight

Knight, a Pearl native, won Olympic gold, running a world record time in the 4×100-meter relay at the 2012 London Games. She was also a 2011 world champion in the same event. She won the 2008 NCAA indoor 200-meter championship, running for the Texas Longhorns after a remarkable high school career at Ridgeland High, where she captured 23 state championships.

Kris Mangum

Kris Mangum follows his older brother, John Mangum, into the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame. Mangum won All-SEC and All-American honors as an Ole Miss tight end and then played 10 seasons for the Carolina Panthers, excelling as a blocker and catching nine touchdown passes. He helped Carolina reach the 2004 Super Bowl. As a freshman in 1992, he helped Alabama to a national championship before transferring to Ole Miss, where he was a three-year starter and standout.

Seth Smith

Smith, a Jackson native, will be remembered as one of the greatest hitters in Ole Miss baseball history, who wasted no time making his presence known. He was the SEC Freshman of the Year, hitting .402, while also serving as the backup to football quarterback Eli Manning. In three seasons at Ole Miss, he recorded an on-base percentage of .410 and a slugging percentage of .473. He played 11 Major League seasons with five ball clubs and hit 126 home runs. In 2007, he helped the Colorado Rockies reach the World Series.

LaToya Thomas

Thomas, a Greenville native, was a four-time All American and two-time SEC Player of the Year in women’s basketball at Mississippi State. She finished her State career with 2,981 points and an average of 23.8 points per game. Her jersey, No. 32, is retired and hangs in Humphrey Coliseum. She was selected first overall in the 2003 WNBA draft and played professionally in the WNBA for six seasons and internationally for 11 seasons.

Shirley Gibbs Walker

The basketball floor at Alcorn State was named in Gibbs Walker’s honor in 2015 after her 30-year coaching tenure that included 493 victories, 12 SWAC regular season championships, six SWAC Tournament titles and three NCAA Tournament bids. The Bude native was inducted into the SWAC Hall of Fame in 2010.

COLUMBUS – Former Vice President Kamala Harris campaigned in Mississippi for Scott Colom on Thursday, calling the Democratic Senate nominee a historic candidate whose victory would send a statement that America has begun to reject President Donald Trump and his party.

Harris’ arrival followed a steady stream of campaigning for Colom by Democratic senators and a last-minute large investment from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, as Democrats grow increasingly hopeful that Colom can pull off an upset over Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith in ruby-red Mississippi. 

Speaking to an energized crowd at the Columbus High School gym, where Colom played basketball as a youth, Harris said Mississippi’s increasingly competitive U.S. Senate race is a fight worth waging for Democrats. 

“We’ve got 12 days to make history. And I’ve traveled here because, indeed, Mississippi Matters,” Harris said, referencing Colom’s campaign slogan. “The power is with the people. And the people are with Scott.”

Republicans appear to be taking Colom’s challenge seriously. The day before Harris arrived in Mississippi, party leaders announced on Wednesday that President Donald Trump will campaign for Hyde-Smith in the northeastern town of Corinth on Monday.

The crowd at Colom’s rally chanted “Mississippi Matters!” throughout the evening, and cheered, “We want Scott!” as Colom continued to connect the high cost of gasoline and groceries to Hyde-Smith’s approval of Trump’s war with Iran and tariffs. Colom delighted the crowd with his favorite label for his Republican opponent: “Cindy High Prices.”  

“She’s given away our voice, she’s given it away to her MAGA daddy,” Colom said.  

Harris said Trump is leading “the most corrupt administration in American history,” and that Hyde-Smith, a devoted Trump ally, deserves to lose. 

“The junior senator from Mississippi voted in favor of a $1 trillion cut to Medicaid,” Harris said. “It doesn’t have to be this way. We deserve better.” 

Earlier on Thursday, Harris and Colom were at a community health center in Clarksdale for a roundtable discussion about rural healthcare. They were joined by U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, the lone Democratic member of Mississippi’s congressional delegation, whose district includes Clarksdale, as well as local doctors, a mother who lost a child as a result of inadequate healthcare access and other local leaders. 

Healthcare is an animating issue for voters in Mississippi, a state that has for years struggled with hospital closures and poor health outcomes. Mississippi, one of the nation’s poorest states, hasn’t expanded Medicaid, and many residents struggle to afford care. Throughout his campaign, Colom has hammered Hyde-Smith for voting for Trump’s so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which slashed Medicaid funding. 

“Our junior senator is going to do nothing to fix rural healthcare in Mississippi,” Colom said. “She’s going to do nothing to fix hospitals in Mississippi. She’s made that clear. She’s got no solution. I’m offering solutions.”

Colom promised to work on reversing cuts to Medicaid and Affordable Care Act subsidies. 

Harris said voters in areas such as the Delta have the opportunity to turn their hardships into action by voting for Colom. 

“People are feeling and experiencing pain, and the feeling of being unseen, unheard, alone, hopeless and therefore feeling powerless,” Harris said. “This is a moment where we can understand in this election season with less than two weeks to go, we can turn that pain into purpose.”

Harris’ trip marks her second visit to Mississippi in the past year. She came to Jackson in January for her book tour and spoke before a packed crowd. 

Harris has said in multiple recent interviews that she’s focused on helping Democrats win in November. But she’s not ruled out another presidential campaign after losing the 2024 general election to Trump.

In a statement ahead of the rally, the Senate GOP’s campaign arm said Colom’s embrace of Harris shows he is out of touch with voters in a state Trump won handily 

“Scott Colom is a Chuck Schumer-backed, George Soros-funded, Transgender Defender so out of touch with Mississippi that he is campaigning with Kamala Harris, who lost the state by 22 points,” said NRSC Regional Press Secretary Samantha Cantrell. 

With a little over a week left until the midterm elections, Mississippi has become a surprising battleground state where national party figures are swarming the state to energize their bases. Former U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg will stump for Colom on the Gulf Coast on Tuesday. Those who have already visited Mississippi for Colom include Sens. Raphael Warnock of Georgia, Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland and Cory Booker of New Jersey.

Feeling confident about retaking the Senate and House majorities, Democratic leaders have begun to invest in Mississippi, a state that has long been solidly Republican in federal elections. But the state has the highest percentage of Black voters in the nation, a core voting bloc of the Democratic Party. 

If Mississippi, a state which hasn’t voted for a Democratic U.S. senator since 1982, were to elect Colom over Hyde-Smith, it would be an embarrassing rejection of Trump in the Deep South and prove a historic win in the state that hasn’t elected a Black person to a statewide or federal office since Reconstruction. 

Colom on Thursday seemed visibly moved by the possibility of Mississippi, a state that was the epicenter of the Civil Rights Movement and where white supremacists actively worked for decades to disenfranchise Black citizens, potentially electing its first Black statewide official. 

He told the crowd that the state has a chance to write “a new chapter” on Nov. 3 and depart from its past where candidates used divisive and sometimes racist rhetoric to divide voters. 

“So many times throughout history that worked,” Colom said. “But not this time.”