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Mississippi Today Ideas is a platform for thoughtful ideas to be shared about our state’s past, present and future. Opinions expressed in guest essays are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of Mississippi Today. You can read more about the section here.   

Before I moved to Jackson for the summer, a New Yorker living in Montgomery, Alabama, told me to pay close attention to people’s reactions when I shared my summer plans.

I had just recently received nearly unanimous encouragement for my decision to study abroad in Madrid, so I was curious what she meant; this potential for contrast became a little game for me. I was a double agent, watching closely for the reactions I predicted: coastal elitism and disparagement.

What I noticed instead was more damning. A pause, a curious tilt, an eye squint. The subtle signs of drawing a blank. My friends and family in New York City and Boston didn’t condemn Mississippi. To have such strong opinions, they would have needed to observe, judge and then reject Mississippi. Instead, Mississippi sits outside their scope of consideration altogether.

I grew up in New York City, where a heavy dose of civic pride taught me that I hail from the center of the universe. College in Boston marked a departure down a well-blazed path for New Yorkers looking to expand their world, but only just so. In this universe, Mississippi is an abstraction, rarely registered beyond a childhood memory of spelling practice: MI-SS-I-SS-I-PP-I! It is scarcely acknowledged as a place to go, let alone stay or build a life.

It wasn’t until I talked with my professor, Gene Corbin, about his years living and working in Mississippi in the 90s that its inclusion in this universe—as much more than a thing to spell—became obvious and necessary.

Professor Corbin sent me to Jackson to work for Jake McGraw at Working Together Mississippi. My task was to join in their effort to research why Mississippi struggles to attract and retain college-educated people, a phenomenon known as “brain drain.”

Mississippi Today, in conjunction with Rethink Mississippi and the University of Mississippi Center for Population Studies, created a first-of-its-kind study dedicated to the state’s brain drain crisis. I began my job this summer by reading through the thousands of survey responses they had collected, placing myself at the “stay vs. leave” crossroads that many Mississippians perennially consider. Immersed in these fraught considerations, I found that most respondents reckoned with a home state where they don’t feel they have sufficient opportunities to stay, but they would, and they want to.

Ironically, I was analyzing an instinct that I recognize in myself and my friends: glancing toward the coasts, assuming that real life, real opportunity, happens there. The difference is that Mississippians must weigh the cost of outsourcing opportunity with what it costs to stay. Having started on this note, I was primed to spend the rest of my time in Jackson open to experiencing the full weight of either conclusion. Paradoxically, the more I studied leaving the state, the more I felt the value of staying. I was swimming against the current.

As the summer progressed, my understanding of Jackson grew beyond what I read in my research and rested instead on the experience of building a routine and community in this city. I listened to Blues at Hal & Mals on Mondays, learned about community organizing for a weekend in Louisville and wandered through the “L.V. Hull: Love Is a Sensation” exhibit at the Mississippi Museum of Art on rainy weekdays. I felt deep affection for a culture that I also recognized—one I had seen fragments of in New York City and pop culture my whole life.

Multiculturalism is a core part of New York’s identity, and most New Yorkers would balk at being called insular. But my time in one of New York’s great cultural wellsprings revealed just this: a blind spot in New York’s identity and proof that some constituent cultures are celebrated while others are forgotten.

So, let’s celebrate. You all know this better than I do, so forgive me for stating the obvious: Elvis Presley is from Mississippi, and so is Oprah. Robert Johnson, raised primarily in the Mississippi Delta, is the blues giant who inspired the 2025 film “Sinners.” And civil rights legend Medgar Evers is the namesake of a City of New York public college in Brooklyn, a fact I would fairly confidently state many Brooklynites could not explain. What happens in Mississippi does not stay contained behind a state line; it ripples throughout the rest of the country. The case for staying in this cultural wellspring is easily made.

Yet Mississippi is a real place, one whose challenges are concentrated and in their rawest forms – the brain drain didn’t come out of nowhere. And still the state remains unconsidered, even by those who claim to care passionately about social and racial justice. The instinct to engage injustice when it is exotic and geographically or historically distant keeps places like Jackson invisible. We should refuse to tolerate this hypocrisy.

Mississippians, the problem isn’t that coastal “elites” are judging you; it is that we ignore you. The message I will bring back with me is that if you, like me, desire a full understanding of the country you live in, and not just its wealthiest cities, come to Mississippi. If you don’t come, read; and if you won’t, at the very least, consider with curiosity.

Ella Caplan is a senior at Tufts University, studying sociology and Spanish. She grew up in New York City.

A state lawmaker pleaded with members of the Jackson City Council on Monday night to sell city-owned swampland along the Pearl River, a move that could advance a long-sought riverfront casino resort in Mississippi’s capital city.

Rep. Chris Bell, a Democrat from Jackson, expressed his dismay that the council had not yet approved an order allowing LeFleur Development to buy and develop 93 acres within the river’s floodplain.

“We have an opportunity to change the trajectory of the city of Jackson,” Bell said after thanking the council for letting him speak even though the project was not on the council’s work session agenda. 

Further delays, he asserted, would mean the potential loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in much-needed tax revenue for the cash-strapped city. Last year, the city’s tourism arm, Visit Jackson, estimated that the proposed resort could attract over 4 million visitors annually and create more than 6,722 new jobs. 

“I’m not saying we will, but we do not need to fumble a $600 million influx of funds to the city of Jackson,” Bell told the council.

The council had tabled the matter during an Oct. 6 meeting after Ward 1 Council Member Ashby Foote, who represents northeast Jackson and is the body’s lone Republican, had questioned if the proposed selling price of $110,000 was too low. The amount was based on two estimates LeFleur Development obtained from two Mississippi property appraisers.

LeFleur Development is supported by former Gov. Haley Barbour and attorney-developer Robert Gibbs, a key ally of Mayor John Horhn.

Jackson City Council President Vernon Hartley, who represents Ward 5 in west Jackson, told Bell the proposal was not dead but had been referred to a committee for further discussion.

While the council’s support is crucial for advancing the project, the development faces other hurdles.

Despite repeated attempts, Bell has yet to secure passage of the required legislation that would allow a casino to be built in Jackson. His bill faced opposition from lawmakers whose districts already have casinos. 

Under state law, casinos can only be built along the Mississippi River and Gulf Coast, or on land owned by Native Americans.

It also remains to be seen how the Pearl River’s swampy banks will be converted into land suitable for development. In March, the Rankin Hinds Pearl River Flood and Drainage Control District announced that it had approved a plan to widen and develop the river, though federal officials later clarified that no final decision has been made.

Libby Reuter watched the creek flow slowly, like she had done dozens of times before.

Mallard ducks rested on stones and cattails sprang out of the creek. The water ran parallel to a street busy with traffic and joggers, pooling behind the art museum in Springfield, Mo. 

Fassnight Creek is hundreds of miles from the banks of the Mississippi River, but that’s exactly what drew Reuter, an artist, there with her creative partner, Joshua Rowan. They wanted to tell a story about the creek and its changing environment. More importantly, the pair wanted to highlight its place in the larger story of the Mississippi River watershed. 

Here in Springfield, Reuter saw “an opportunity to show both the urbanization and the way the natural environment can contribute to it.”

Rowan, meanwhile, studied the scene. As a photographer, he was looking for a composition that could serve as a “gateway” into the themes surrounding water resources — in Fassnight Creek’s case, erosion, flooding. 

“Even in the background, the tall grass is the diversity of vegetation,” Rowan said. “If we can include even this rigid piece of concrete, forming at the far end of the photograph — that goes far to tell the story.”

The pair have followed this process more than 400 times over the past 15 years in states across the Mississippi River Basin, from Iowa to Wisconsin and Tennessee to Louisiana. 

The artists build cairns, which are normally stacks of stones raised to mark trails or a place of significance. But theirs are delicate, fleeting sculptures made out of found glassware, often recycled vases or antique dishes. Each one is custom-made to its location — rivers, creeks and wetlands in the basin — and placed at 40-mile intervals from one another.

The goal is to spark conversation about the state of the watershed and how each location is impacted by both nature and human activity. “There’s the common things,” said Reuter. “About stormwater, about flooding, about the soil and what it supports, and the history of the place.”

Each cairn’s construction and placement is inspired by the story of water the artists uncover there. For example, one of their many cairns sat on top of a levee in Rohwer, Ark., while another stood in the shadow of a grain silo in Warsaw, Ill., rising from an overgrown flowerbed on a no-till farm. In Mississippi, the artists created temporary cairns in Greenville bridge, Coahoma County, Natchez and Vicksburg.

We’re “trying to get a new metaphor of how we’re connected to the water and land and each other,” Reuter said.

Before the cairns are built, the pair meet with local stakeholders to get a better sense of the location’s past, present and future. In Springfield, they talked to Caleb Sanders, a parks supervisor for the city. 

Sanders told them that, before colonization, the area surrounding Fassnight Creek was likely a prairie with a series of buffalo wallows — places where native wildlife could find watering holes and rest. While this creek might not ever return to what it once was, he said, the city is making improvements to help the creek better manage stormwater and protect its soil from washing away. 

“It’s a space that, like an art installation, challenges expectations and norms and really serves to give that same feel that you would have when you’re walking into an art space,” Sanders said.

That mindset of connecting art and nature is why Joshua Best, museum educator at the Springfield Art Museum, commissioned the artists to create three cairns in a special series for the city. They met last year at an environmental conference and decided to work together on the local project. 

“Naturalization projects have been at the forefront of our civic thinking in Springfield,” Best said. “So it was one way that I saw to connect art with what we’re doing.” 

After viewing the site, the artists headed back to their cargo van. Inside were milk crates and plastic tote bags full of fragile glassware, cushioned with packing paper and styrofoam. The containers were labeled with descriptions like “swirly.” 

With help from Rowan, Reuter unboxed a long cylindrical vase with a small illustration taped to it: blueprints for the cairn that the artists would build.

The final product was a deep blue-green glass tower made of stacked platters and vases, its mismatched pieces evoking an otherworldly tea party set. For a brief moment, it rose from the bubbling Fassnight Creek, marking the many paths that intersected here across time: that of the buffalo, rainwater and visitors to the art museum.

True to the artist’s goal of sustainability, the sculptures are not meant to stay. “The photograph and the sculpture are both capturing a moment, and that moment doesn’t exist beyond that,” Reuter said.

After they’re photographed, the artists take the cairns apart, storing the pieces for possible reuse elsewhere in the basin. The artists log each cairn’s location and add the photos to their interactive map.

Occasionally, the glass sculptures might find themselves reconstructed at an art exhibition alongside Rowan’s photographs. In Chicago, the Watershed Art and Ecology Center is hosting the pair’s artwork through Oct. 31.

For Reuter, the connection between each community and the Mississippi River is why they’ve kept this project going.

“That’s what we’re trying to mark with the cairns,” Reuter said. “Not only the biological, ecological, but the history and the dynamics of the place. And the culture — the human culture — and how we all interact. None of it is independent of it.”

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri.

Despite growing evidence that midwife-led birth centers improve outcomes for mothers and infants, Mississippi remains one of 10 states with no centers. Mississippi is also among the states with the fewest midwives per births in the nation, according to a new report by the Commonwealth Fund, a non-profit research organization focused on healthcare issues. 

Built in the communities they serve, freestanding birth centers employ midwives to care for people with low-risk pregnancies, according to the report released Tuesday. They focus on patient autonomy and cultural responsiveness, which can help reduce pregnancy and delivery disparities for Black and Indigenous communities. Birth centers also may lower unnecessary interventions and increase maternal satisfaction, the report authors said. 

“Birth centers offer the kind of continuous, midwife-led care, shaped around each family’s needs, that can be part of the response to our maternal health crisis,” said Laurie Zephyrin, senior vice president of the Achieving Equitable Outcomes program at the Commonwealth Fund, in a press release. 

Last year, Mississippi health officials declared a public health emergency over rising infant deaths, most of which were Black infants. Experts have said increased access to care is a vital part of the solution. But in February, state lawmakers failed to pass legislation that would have made it easier for midwives to practice without paying a collaborating physician a monthly fee. Advocates argue these arrangements provide little meaningful collaboration while creating financial barriers that discourage midwives from practicing or opening birth centers. 

Mississippi, along with Louisiana and Alabama, has fewer than 20 midwives per 10,000 births, according to the report. All three states have collaboration agreements for nurse midwives. 

In 2026, the American College of Nurse Midwives sued Mississippi for restricting access to midwives in a place with some of the worst outcomes for mothers and babies. That lawsuit is still pending. 

Beyond collaboration agreements, the Mississippi State Department of Health has regulated birth centers in a way that may put underserved, rural areas at a disadvantage, Zephyrin told Mississippi Today. 

For example, a Mississippi birth center can only open within 30 minutes of a hospital, according to state regulations. Nearly half the counties in Mississippi are maternity care deserts, where there are no obstetric clinicians or birthing facilities. 

“With hospital shortages and maternity deserts, there may not be a hospital nearby,” Zephyrin said, adding that state leaders need to be innovative to address gaps in care. 

The state Health Department did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication. 

Across the country, access to birth centers remains limited. In addition to the 10 states without birth centers, eight states have only one. 

On the other hand, Texas leads the nation in this health model, with 90 birth centers. Between 2004 and 2024, the model grew significantly, according to the report. However, birth center deliveries still only account for less than one percent of all U.S. births.

Getty Israel, founder of a Jackson-based women’s health clinic called Sisters in Birth, has spent nearly six years trying to open a birth center in the state. She believes the state overregulates birth centers and midwives. She said lawmakers lack the will to integrate midwives and birth centers into the healthcare system. 

Israel said she feels lawmakers don’t pay attention to the growing research that supports midwifery as an integral part of the solution. 

“There’s a lot of evidence about the efficacy of birth centers,” Israel said. “But no one is helping me to build a birth center.”

Southern Poverty Law Center President Ryan Haygood told Mississippi Today on Monday that his organization is prepared to fight the Trump Justice Department’s indictments in a trial set for April.

Haygood was in Jackson for the start of the organization’s “Truth, Poverty and Democracy Tour” across Mississippi, which will combine community listening sessions to spotlight socioeconomic problems faced by residents. While the Center continues a shift toward anti-poverty advocacy as a central pillar of its work, fighting the lawsuit is of existential importance for civil rights advocacy more broadly, as the lawsuit against SLPC could be a “test case” used against other organizations, Haygood said.

“It’s a vicious irony that the DOJ has been weaponized against the organization that toppled the Klu Klux Klan, even as hateful organizations remain free to operate across the country,” Haygood said. “So it’s a case we intend to win.”

Without detailing the organization’s legal strategy, Haygood said the trial will shed light on why the SPLC was created and all the ways it serves communities across the South.

The Justice Department’s probe against against the Alabama-based group has thus far ensnared one of its former political extremism experts, who left the center about six year ago. That former employee, Heidi Beirich, has been charged with wire fraud conspiracy, conspiracy to submit false statements to a federally insured bank and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering.

Her legal team has said she is innocent of the charges and described the case as politically motivated.

The SPLC is a frequent target of conservative critics who claim the nonprofit is politically biased. Critics argue the organization has used its “Hate Map” to lump ordinary conservative political groups in with militant extremist groups.

In the wake of the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, anger from Trump and his supporters toward groups such as SPLC intensified.

In the fall of 2025, Trump directed federal law enforcement agencies to investigate what he claimed were wealthy donors and organizations funding left-wing political violence. A week later, Mississippi Today spoke to former SPLC President Bryan Fair, who warned the memo could be used as a pretext to target civil rights organizations perceived to be enemies of the administration and Republican causes in states such as Mississippi.

In April of 2026, U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel announced an 11-count federal indictment against the SPLC in the Middle District of Alabama on charges of wire fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy to launder money.

Haygood took over as SPLC’s president in August, at a moment when “civil society organizations face mounting attacks” the Center said.

As the SPLC prepares for a trial this April, Haygood said his organization remains undeterred

“It stands to reason that the kind of work SPLC does, the kind of work to connect people to prosperity and to create a fair criminal legal system, to create a multiracial democracy, and also to identify hateful actors and to topple their organizations,” Haygood said. “It stands the reason that an organization like ours given the work we are doing would be challenged in this moment by this kind of government.”

Haygood, who met earlier on Monday with Democratic state lawmakers, said the center plans to play an active role in pushing for Mississippi to raise its minimum wage, which remains set at the federal minimum of $7.25 per hour. Proposals to do so have repeatedly died in the Legislature.

At the Mississippi Museum of Art, the SPLC convened panels on gaps in the social safety net that impact Mississippi, one of the poorest states in the country. Federal cuts to Medicaid, food assistance, housing, education and childcare have rattled communities across the the state, the center has said.

Joseph Cranney is a reporter with the Deep South Today Investigative Reporting Center in collaboration with The New York Times. Mukta Joshi is an investigative reporter at Mississippi Today. She is spending a year as a New York Times Local Investigations fellow examining immigration and criminal justice issues. 

The police officer who shot and killed 1-year-old Kohen Wiley while chasing two women accused of shoplifting was justified in shooting at their car as it pulled out of a Walmart parking space in June, the Mississippi Attorney General’s office ruled Monday.

The decision came four months after Hunter Foster, an officer with the Senatobia Police Department, was placed on leave while state authorities investigated his actions. Although he has not been directly named as the officer who fired, Foster is the only officer among those present that day who was placed on leave.

Many details of the incident remain unknown, and it wasn’t immediately clear if or when law enforcement would release body-worn camera footage or other surveillance video of the incident.

It is also unclear what other evidence state authorities considered. Several witnesses and Kohen’s mother, Vellesiya Wiley, said as recently as this month that they had never been interviewed by investigators.

Video taken by bystanders around the time of the shooting shows officers on foot intercepting the slow-moving vehicle in the close quarters of the parking lot on a Sunday afternoon. Five officers had surrounded the car, but none of the video made public so far clearly shows the car or the officers’ actions when the shots were fired.

Vellesiya Wiley said she was holding her son in her arms in the front passenger seat when her friend, Latoya Ferrell, tried to back out of a space and then drove forward to get away from the officers. Both women are Black. Foster is white.

In the hours after the shooting, the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation issued a statement saying police had fired at a vehicle when it drove toward an officer, “almost striking” one.

Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch “found the use of force was justified,” her short statement Monday said. The statement said “one officer” was involved, though it did not name the officer or share any more details about what had happened.

Ben Crump, a lawyer for the Wiley family, reiterated his calls Monday for law enforcement to release video of the incident.

“How can anyone accept that conclusion when Kohen’s family and the public still have not been allowed to see the body-camera footage?” Crump said in a statement.

“If the footage supports the state’s decision, release it,” Crump added. “We will not stop fighting until this family gets the truth.”

Reached by phone Monday, Vellesiya Wiley wept over the decision. The Senatobia Committee for Accountability and Transparency, founded by Senatobia resident Patrick Lumumba after the shooting, posted on its Facebook page that it was withholding comment too.

“Our founder has literally wiped the tears of Kohen’s grandmother,” the statement said. “It affected people, relationships, and a community in ways that cannot be fully captured in headlines or social media statements.”

Martin Zummach, a lawyer for Foster, said Fitch’s decision was “expected” and “overdue.”

Veronica Roberson, the toddler’s grandmother, said Monday she learned of the attorney general’s decision when she logged onto Facebook. No state or local law enforcement official had reached out to the family, she said.

Foster, 33, is a former member of the U.S. Army National Guard and the son of a longtime law enforcement officer. Prior to joining the Senatobia department in March 2025, Foster made a name for himself at the DeSoto County Sheriff’s Office, where he won a statewide award for issuing the most DUI citations of any law enforcement officer in Mississippi in back-to-back years in 2023-24.

Foster was promoted to sergeant six months into his term at Senatobia. In the last year, he was twice accused of directing racially offensive language toward coworkers on the job, including referring to a Black officer as a “Black motherfucker,” Mississippi Today reported.

Senatobia’s former chief, Harold “Hal” Vanderford, who took no action against Foster in either case, was fired in September less than two weeks after The New York Times, Mississippi Today and Verite News revealed he had routinely used racist slurs in private texts with a colleague.

Angelica Maze, a Black woman who was serving as a lieutenant in the department, was named Vanderford’s interim replacement. She didn’t respond Monday to a request seeking comment on the attorney general’s decision. The city of Senatobia released a brief statement on Facebook on Monday, saying it “continues to extend its deepest sympathy to Kohen Wiley’s family and all those affected by this tragedy.”

Update, 10/19/2026: This article has been updated with additional details.

The U.S. Department of Justice has announced it reached a settlement forcing reforms in a Mississippi city and its police department, which the DOJ found discriminated against Black people, used excessive force and retaliated against critics.

The settlement announced Friday comes after a scathing 2024 DOJ report said the Lexington Police Department routinely violated citizens’ civil rights in the rural, poor, majority-Black city located about 65 miles north of the state’s capital. Police targeted Black people for arrests, made arrests for low-level offenses to generate money for the police department and locked people up for extended periods of time if they could not afford to pay fines, according to the report.

The out-of-court settlement requires the City of Lexington and its police department to reform practices on a number of issues — from fines and bail to stops, searches and use of force — and bring them into compliance with state and federal law.

The Associated Press called and emailed city and police department officials but did not immediately receive responses.

The agreement bars the Lexington police from continuing to jail people for unpaid fines without first assessing whether they can afford to pay them, a practice that violates the Fourteenth Amendment. The 2024 report found the city court had issued arrest warrants for more than 650 people, roughly half of the city’s population, for unpaid fines.

The city and the Lexington Police Department must also dismiss all existing warrants for unpaid fines and fees that violate the law and move to expunge the records of all unlawful fine-based convictions.

Additionally, the city and the Lexington Police Department are barred from creating and implementing a quota or incentive system for stops, warnings, citations, arrests or related revenue. The DOJ previously found that between 2022 and 2024, the Lexington Police Department made one arrest for every four people in town, more than 10 times the per-capita arrest rate for the state of Mississippi.

The department will also require DOJ-approved trainings on stops, searches, arrests and use of force, in addition to implementing documentation and review systems to ensure such actions are lawful.

“Through these reforms, we seek not only to address the concerns identified in our investigation, but also to strengthen public trust and promote practices that respect the rights and dignity of every person,” U.S. Attorney J.E. Baxter Kruger for the Southern District of Mississippi said in a news release.

The DOJ said it would work with the city and police to “ensure that they remedy the alleged violations.” The agreement lasts for three years, but could be cut short or extended depending on whether the parties mutually determine the city and police department have reached compliance.

The DOJ launched a probe into the Lexington Police Department in 2023, after citizens accused officers of using roadblocks to target Black drivers, engaging in excessive force, committing sexual assault and arresting people without justification, among other claims.

SAN FRANCISCO – These eight women and their families fought in a war known as America’s Civil Rights Movement. Over the weekend, they gathered, perhaps for the last time, as former President Bill Clinton and others cheered their courage and their grace.

“Throughout the course of their lives, these women have proved that love and compassion are better than bitterness and hatred,” Clinton said in a videotaped message. “They have led with courage, strength, dignity and grace to help build an America that more closely lives up to our founding ideals of equality and justice for all. And through their actions and their example, they have inspired millions of people, including me.”

He wished four of the women happy birthdays: Minnijean Brown Trickey and Elizabeth Eckford, two of the Little Rock Nine who integrated Central High School in 1957; Reena Evers-Everette, whose father, Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers, was assassinated in Jackson in 1963; and Lisa McNair, whose sister, Denise, was among the four girls whose lives were stolen by the Ku Klux Klan in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing.

“To the four of you celebrating your birthdays, I thank you for the life you have lived and continue to live,” Clinton told them. “We’re all better off because of you.”

The other women gathered at the event, sponsored by the Sojourn Project, included: Kim McNair, the other sister of Denise McNair; Bettie Dahmer, whose father, voting rights activist Vernon Dahmer Sr., died defending their family from a Klan attack in Hattiesburg in 1966; the Rev. Gwen Webb, who took part in the 1963 Children’s March; and Angela Lewis, whose father James Chaney was among the three civil rights workers killed by Klansmen in Neshoba County in 1964.

Salute from San Francisco officials

On Friday, the city of San Francisco, county supervisors and the sheriff’s office honored these women.

“Your courage changed history,” Mayor Daniel Lurie told them. “It changed the course of history, and your example continues to inspire generations and generations.  I know we still have a whole lot of work to do, but your example will help guide us forward.”

Sheriff Paul M. Miyamoto praised the women.

“We know their names, the events and some of the photographs, but we don’t know the people,” he said. “You’ve helped change our history by being part of our history.”

The history of the Civil Rights Movement includes some in law enforcement “who failed to protect people at that time, who failed to protect you in our community, and, in some cases, were responsible for the very injustices that people experienced during this time,” Miyamoto said. “That’s not an easy part of our history to confront, but it’s one that we have to accept and understand and move on from.”

More than 20 Klansmen, including some Mississippi law enforcement officers, killed three civil rights workers, Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, on the first day of summer in 1964 and buried their bodies 15 feet down in an earthen dam.

Three years later, seven Klansmen were convicted of federal conspiracy charges, including a deputy sheriff. In 2005, a Neshoba County jury convicted Edgar Ray Killen of orchestrating the killings of the trio. He was sentenced to 60 years in prison, where he died.

Miyamoto has taken some of his deputies on the Sojourn trip, walking across some of the same ground that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once walked.

“He’s always been, from birth, an influence on my life,” Miyamoto said. “It meant something very special to me as a history major and also sharing Martin Luther King’s birthday.”

He said it’s important for young people and for those in law enforcement “to learn together, to remember the past and make sure that it’s our responsibility to make sure nothing comes close to repeating it again.”

District Attorney Brooke Jenkins praised Trickey and Eckford for “stepping up at that time to make that sacrifice. You were so strong and brave.”

She told Evers-Everette, who now heads the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Institute, ”Your father died doing the work to give us the chance to be here, to give people like me the chance to serve in these positions. Thank you.” 

In 1994, his killer, Byron De La Beckwith, was finally convicted of murder. Beckwith was sentenced to life in prison, where he died.

Through photos of the children marching in Birmingham or the Black students entering school in Little Rock amid a screaming mob, “we see strength, and we see beauty,” Jenkins said, “but what nobody wants to talk about are their scars.”

She said she hopes “we can set aside all the many differences that so many of us have and make sure we continue to work together to maintain their legacy — people who lost parents, who lost siblings, who lost so much of themselves to give us the chance to just go to school together.”

‘Women Who Dared, Women Who Cared: Warriors of the Civil Rights Movement’

She noted the upcoming elections in November. “I’m not telling you how to vote,” she said, “but you have to vote because we have multiple people who lost their fathers trying to make sure we had the right to do so.”

In 2023, Jenkins took her first of four Sojourn’s trips to civil rights sites in the South, where she met these women and visited landmarks where history was made. Through these trips, “we gain a deeper understanding of the courage it took, and continues to take, to change our country for the better,” she said. “These lessons matter.”

On Saturday, Sojourn celebrated these “Warriors of the Civil Rights Movement” with songs, speeches and birthday cakes with photos of the women.

Jenkins pointed toward the historic photos of the women and their families. She told them that she keeps a photograph of the four Dahmer sons dressed in military uniforms, standing over the rubble of what had been their home.

“Vernon Dahmer Sr. spent his life and lost his life over voting rights, over making sure that we could vote,” she said. A part of Medgar Evers’ work “was making sure that Blacks got the right to vote,” she said. “James Chaney and the others lost their lives to give us the right to vote.”

There is no more critical time than now, she said. “Their spirits are calling upon us to act, or else we will see this time again.”

Jenkins said when she walked inside the 16th Street Baptist Church, where the bomb killed four girls and injured dozens of others, “I had no idea how I would feel.”

But after hearing the McNair family speak, “I was overcome with emotion, not just because of their story, but because I, too, had buried my child,” she said. “When you think about losing your baby because of hate, there’s nothing worse.”

What led her to the path of becoming a prosecutor was the loss of her son, she said. “We have to look at these experiences of loss and of grief and of trauma, and use it as our purpose to act. Find the purpose out of our pain.”

When she thinks of Eckford and Trickey, she thinks of her grandmother, who graduated from a segregated high school in Texas and what it meant for her younger siblings to attend an integrated high school, she said. “It was because of your sacrifice that they had that opportunity.”

She praised Webb, who as a teenager faced the dogs and firehoses of Birmingham police to march for justice, only to later become one of the first Black police officers.

“She said, ‘I won’t be turned away by my experience,’” Jenkins said. “I’m going to come into this institution and make it change.”

Sojourn’s founder, Jeff Steinberg, said his nonprofit organization aims to amplify stories that people should know beyond King and Malcolm X — people such as Dahmer, Medgar Evers and the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, who was repeatedly beaten for his activism in Birmingham and whose home was blown up by Klansmen.

“They live up to America’s ideals,” Steinberg said. “They set the standard of what we all should aspire to be.”

Lewis said if people want the world to change, they need to become part of that change. “It has to start with us,” she said. “We all want to see things change in a major way, but the way things change is in small amounts over time.”

When it comes to voting, “a lot of people think that their vote doesn’t count, but it does count,” Lewis said. “It begins with us being responsible by voting, because we have to make sure that we have a say in how this country is being run.”

Eckford said she tells “young people today to use your voice, ’cause if you don’t use your voice, somebody else is speaking for you.”

Marlena Jenkins is a public high school teacher who loves helping kids ask the right questions. 

Jenkins, 47, knows what happens when kids don’t learn that skill. At 18, Jenkins had a baby after graduating high school in Hattiesburg in 1997 with no sex education. While she counts her daughter as “one of her greatest blessings,” Jenkins said what came next was not. Two months after giving birth, Jenkins was prescribed “the birth control shot” at her local county health department. Over the next two decades, she developed diabetes and struggled to lose the 60 pounds she gained during her four-year stint on the contraceptive. 

With her first shot, Jenkins joined thousands of Mississippi women on Medicaid who receive the injectable contraception, typically administered as one shot four times a year. In 2025, Mississippi Medicaid recipients received more than 19,000 prescriptions for the drug known as depot medroxyprogesterone acetate or by its brand name “Depo-Provera,” across both generic and brand name versions. In that same year, the state accrued the highest prescription rate per Medicaid recipient in the U.S., the fourth year in a row Mississippi led the nation. 

Experts say that too often, providers don’t give Medicaid patients extensive options or engage in discussion to reach informed consent. Many times, it comes down to providers making assumptions about what might be best for low-income women, young women and people of color. 

Jenkins said thinking about birth control once every three months appealed to her. But she wishes she had been given more information. If she had, Jenkins said she might not have taken the shot. And she might not have needed gastric sleeve surgery in 2019. 

Now, Jenkins partners with Converge, a Jackson-based nonprofit program that administers Title X federal family planning funds to 91 clinics statewide. She tables events monthly and shares her experience with other women to ensure Mississippians know what informed consent around contraceptive care looks like. 

“If you’re new (to something), you don’t know what to ask,” Jenkins said. 

Brain tumors?

Some people who have taken this contraceptive say they experienced side effects more adverse than weight gain. 

Two studies published in 2024 and 2025 found that prolonged use of the shot is associated with a higher relative risk of meningiomas, a brain tumor that is not usually cancerous but can still have harmful side effects. A 2024 case-control study from France of more than 108,000 women found increased risk with more than a year of use, and a 2025 retrospective study of more than 10 million U.S. women on birth control found that the risk increased after more than four years of use.

Over 6,400 plaintiffs across the country have since filed lawsuits against the manufacturers of Depo-Provera.

One plaintiff is Ecclesiastes Patton, a 37-year-old Clinton resident who filed a lawsuit on behalf of his mother. 

For years, Victoria Patton suffered migraines. But it wasn’t until she turned 50 that she learned she had a meningioma. According to her son, by that time, the tumor had swelled to “the size of a grapefruit.” Within two weeks of being admitted to a hospital in Jackson, she couldn’t hold a glass or form sentences, he added. Doctors successfully removed the tumor, but the surgery left the elder Patton with sepsis, a life-threatening condition where the body overreacts to an infection. She was placed in a medically-induced coma for 10 days.

She recovered enough to leave the hospital, but two years later, in 2022, she died of heart complications. Her meningioma and death were due partly to the Depo-Provera shots she had taken for 25 years, the lawsuit alleges. She was 51.

“I had a lot of anger around that time,” recalled Patton, adding that many of his questions about the cause of her death remain unanswered. Since he was a child, Patton said his mother suffered migraines, and he doesn’t know why doctors didn’t take them more seriously. 

Cassandra Welchlin, executive director of the Mississippi Black Women’s Roundtable, a nonprofit program that fights for economic justice, voting rights and reproductive health, was not surprised to hear that doctors took so long to diagnose the elder Patton. 

Along with her collaborators, Welchlin’s organization interviewed 34 Black women around the state about their experiences with contraception and the medical system. Welchlin said she couldn’t comment on the specifics of Patton’s case, but that stories of Black women being dismissed in doctor’s offices are common. 

“We always hear that they are not believed, that the pain is ignored,” she said. 

Welchlin thinks providers should have paused on dispensing the drug after scientists linked it to meningiomas, so that more information could be made available. “When they saw the risk, they should have discontinued it,
because now people are hurt by it,” she said. 

Dr. Jennifer Karlin, associate professor of family and community medicine at University of California, San Francisco and clinical director of a provider-focused reproductive healthcare hotline, emphasized that while there is a risk of meningiomas from the shot, the overall risk is still small, adding that all contraceptives have pros and cons.

“The absolute risk of it is so low, and yet, there’s an absolute risk,” said Karlin, adding that individuals need to weigh their own tolerance for that risk against the risk of pregnancy. “Part of it is telling people about these different risks.” 

Karlin also shared a draft of an upcoming article from the hotline that cited more recent, smaller studies suggesting that stopping use may reverse or stabilize meningiomas.

Patton’s lawsuit, and the thousands of others, have been consolidated into multi-district litigation, a type of lawsuit that resembles a class action but that keeps individual lawsuits distinct. In June 2026, Pfizer agreed to a settlement with about 80% of plaintiffs. The other 20% are continuing to pursue litigation to trial.

In an emailed statement Thursday, a Pfizer spokesperson told Mississippi Today that the settlement agreement “includes no admission of liability or wrongdoing and has no effect on cases pending in state courts.”

In late December, the Food and Drug Administration approved the addition of a safety warning to Pfizer’s label for Depo-Provera. “Cases of meningiomas have been reported following repeated administration of medroxyprogesterone acetate, primarily with long-term use,” the warning reads. 

The Pfizer spokesperson told Mississippi Today that “Pfizer stands behind the safety and efficacy of Depo-Provera, which has been used by millions of women worldwide and remains an important treatment option for women seeking to manage their reproductive health.”

Questions emerge about provider bias

The FDA first approved Depo-Provera in 1992. The now-defunct Upjohn Company manufactured the medication until Pfizer acquired its then-parent company in 2003. A year later, the first generic version of the medication became available. Generics now account for the overwhelming majority of Medicaid prescriptions. (The multi-district litigation only applies to brand-name Depo-Provera and “authorized generics” by a handful of manufacturers that repackage the Pfizer formulation). 

The history of the injectable contraceptive known as “the shot” has dark beginnings. Decades before Depo-Provera was approved by the FDA, the largest study of its use was conducted in the 1960s and 1970s at the Grady Memorial Hospital Family Planning Clinic in Atlanta. According to “Contraceptive Risk,” a book by political scientist and historian William Green, more than 11,400 women were administered the drug. Most were Black and on Medicaid. Later, an FDA audit would conclude that these women had signed consent forms without knowing the drug was not yet FDA approved. 

In 1987, a congressional hearing examined the drug’s use by the Indian Health Service, which had administered it to more than 150 Native American women, even though the FDA had declined to approve the drug in 1978 for contraceptive use, due to early concerns of breast tumors from animal studies.

Millions of women have taken the drug at least once in their lifetime, many of them through Medicaid. Among contraceptive users, Depo-Provera and its generic are more popular among Medicaid recipients than those with private insurance, according to a KFF analysis of nationwide Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. A Center for Mississippi Health Policy analysis of 2016 data from more than 26,900 reproductive-age Mississippi women found that 58% of Medicaid users used an injectable contraceptive compared to 45% of privately-insured women.

Across the country, Black sexually-experienced women are more than twice as likely as white sexually-experienced women to have ever been prescribed an injectable contraceptive, according to the CDC. It was also three times more common in women without a high school diploma than those who had a bachelor’s degree or higher, according to the same report.

Women aren’t necessarily taking Depo-Provera because they prefer it to other forms of contraception, said Danielle Lampton, co-founder and co-executive director of Converge, the Jackson-based nonprofit program that administers Title X federal family planning funds to 91 clinics statewide. 

Contraceptive use is greatly influenced by provider bias, Lampton continued. For example, providers might make assumptions that the convenience of not having to take a pill every day will outweigh potential side effects for patients. Most of the time, she said, providers have good intentions. 

“Bias often is not located in a nefarious plot to harm someone,” Lampton said. “It’s often located in believing that you know what’s best for them.”

Mississippi is not the only state where exam rooms hold little discussion or women are dismissed. Studies show that across the U.S., asymmetrical power dynamics between providers and patients are starker when it comes to patients who are young, low-income and people of color. 

Years of stagnant research has left many people feeling disillusioned about their available birth control options, said Mary Ziegler, a professor and reproductive health expert at the University of California, Davis, School of Law. 

Among sexually active women not using contraception, 1 in 5 don’t use birth control because they dislike or worry about the side effects, according to a 2024 KFF analysis. Improving birth control methods demands deeper investment in research, said Ziegler, but that’s unlikely to happen if the issue remains politically polarized. 

Conservatives often discourage research on birth control because they fear contraceptives verge on being abortion-causing substances, Ziegler said. But progressives worry that saying anything negative about the existing options paves the way to restrict abortion and contraception. 

“What’s looming over everything involving reproductive health is the abortion debate, and it kind of twists everything else,” Ziegler said. 

‘…then she ended up pregnant’

In September, Sen. Kamesha Mumford, a Democrat from Jackson, got a call from one of her constituents. The woman she spoke to, Mumford said, had received a letter in the mail about the multi-district litigation for Depo-Provera and didn’t know what to do. 

That was the first time Mumford heard about the issue, and she said it has reignited concerns for her about health disparities for vulnerable women in rural areas. Mumford said her constituent turned to Depo-Provera because it meant skipping a monthly trip to the pharmacy.

“She talked to me about a family member of hers who tried to go the pill route, and things would come up, she couldn’t get a ride, she ended up missing a week here or there, and then she ended up pregnant,” Mumford said. 

Mumford has advocated for women’s healthcare and the right to contraception throughout her first year in the Mississippi Legislature. She said she intends to introduce legislation next session that expands access to healthcare through telehealth and transportation. Mumford said she hopes that will allow more women to choose the option best for them – and not just the only one they can access. 

Dr. Jennifer Karlin, the UCSF professor, said resource limitations might obstruct providers from counseling patients adequately. 

“Providers aren’t being malicious. They don’t care whether someone’s on depo or not,” said Karlin. “They just want to have the time to be able to counsel people so people can be on things that work for them.” 

Karlin encouraged providers to reach out to the reproductive health hotline that she is clinical director of, ReproHH, which is available to providers all around the country. “We will help you,” she said. “There are specialists sitting online right now ready to answer your questions.”

Cassandra Welchlin, the executive director of the Mississippi Black Women’s Roundtable, agreed that better provider training is integral to addressing inequities in contraceptive access. 

In 2026, Welchlin’s team conducted several two-hour cultural sensitivity training sessions with 52 healthcare providers across Jackson, Biloxi, Mound Bayou and Laurel. They also gave those providers guides on how to use language as a tool for equity, dignity and quality care. The guide advises providers to swap phrases such as “resistant to care” for “patient expressed concerns or requested more information.”

That additional training is necessary, Welchlin said, because racism has been baked into the healthcare system. It has caused providers to make assumptions about who should give birth – and when. 

“Mississippi should not regulate when and how a woman should or should not have a baby,” Welchlin said. 

The New York Times’ Susan Beachy and Kitty Bennett contributed research.

Methodology: Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) State Drug Utilization Data was used to calculate the number of prescriptions for medroxyprogesterone acetate (brand name “Depo-Provera”) for each state and year. Medicaid data does not distinguish between prescriptions that were made to the same user and different users. So, the number of prescriptions is likely several times higher than the number of unique users, as the contraceptive is typically taken once every three months. Both brand-name and generic versions were included, as the vast majority of Medicaid prescriptions (more than 95% in 2025) use the generic version. Prescriptions for oral tablets/pills and high-dose formulations (400 mg/mL), typically used for palliative cancer care, were excluded. Subcutaneous (“SubQ”) formulations, which can be dispensed at a pharmacy and self-administered, make up less than 1% of Medicaid prescriptions and were excluded, though Mississippi’s ranking did not change with inclusion. CMS Medicaid & CHIP enrollment data was used to calculate the number of Medicaid enrollees for each state and year, obtained via KFF. Data analyses were restricted to 2018 onward as data from 2017 is unreliable due to state and federal Medicaid changes. (While Census data includes the number of self-reported Medicaid recipients, this tends to be an undercount.) State Drug Utilization Data is not broken down by age or sex, so all Medicaid enrollees, regardless of age or sex, were used to calculate the prescription rate among Medicaid enrollees.