OurTupelo

Gov. Tate Reeves on Monday appointed Amanda Jones Tollison, a private-practice attorney in Oxford, to a vacant seat on the Mississippi Supreme Court. 

Tollison is currently a partner with the law firm Butler Snow, where she has practiced since 2012. Before this, she served as legal counsel to former Gov. Haley Barbour from 2008 to 2012. In that role, she advised Barbour on legal, legislative, and policy matters, including judicial appointments, elections, budget issues, and disaster recovery efforts. 

“Amanda has distinguished herself throughout her career as an excellent attorney, respected leader in the Mississippi Bar, and dedicated public servant,” Reeves said in a statement. 

Tollison earned her law degree from the University of Mississippi School of Law and an undergraduate degree from Mississippi State University. She has served as president of the Mississippi Bar, as a member of the Board of Bar Commissioners and as a trustee and fellow of the Mississippi Bar Foundation. 

“I am deeply grateful to Gov. Reeves for this appointment and humbled by his trust in me to fulfill the duties of a justice on the Mississippi Supreme Court,” Tollison said in a statement.

Tollison’s term will begin on Sept. 1, 2026, and continue until a special election fills the seat.

She replaces James Maxwell, also from Oxford, who left his seat on the state Supreme Court after being confirmed by the U.S. Senate as a federal judge in northern Mississippi. The appointment now fills all vacancies on the nine-member court.

When Tollison is sworn in, she will become the third woman on the court, serving alongside current justices Jenifer Branning from Philadelphia and Celeste Wilson of DeSoto County. This is the largest number of women who have served on the state’s highest court at the same time. 

She is also the wife of current 3rd Circuit Court Judge and former state Sen. Gray Tollison.

When a panel of state lawmakers convenes in Tupelo on Tuesday to hear from the public on how, or whether, the state should redraw Mississippi’s legislative, judicial and congressional districts, the hearings will be open to the public. 

State and local authorities plan to provide security for the hearings before a joint House and Senate committee on redistricting on what has become an intensely debated topic.

Alex Gibert, spokesperson for the Mississippi Department of Public Safety, said no threats have been made against any legislator. Still, the Mississippi Highway Patrol will work alongside other divisions within the agency to “ensure the safety of legislators and civilians who are present.” 

Many civil rights leaders, Black lawmakers and voting rights advocates believe the hearings are a pretext for the Legislature moving to dismantle several majority-Black districts and weakening Black political power in the state.

Republican leaders believe that when the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling in the Callais decision on a Louisiana casae, it cleared the way for the Legislature to redraw political lines to make it easier for Republicans to get elected.

The committee is encouraging the public to participate. The public can offer comments at any of the eight public hearings, or submit a redistricting plan to the committee, according to the directions on the committee’s website. 

This is not the first time state police have protected board members during an impassioned policy debate.

In 2000, former Gov. William Winter led a 17-member advisory council on changing Mississippi’s former state flag that featured a Confederate battle emblem in the upper left canton that many Black citizens viewed as racist and white citizens viewed as part of the state’s history. 

The council conducted hearings across the state to gather input on how state officials should proceed after it was revealed that the state never actually adopted an official state flag. Some of the hearings grew heated and saw citizens argue with one another.

Below is the schedule of planned redistricting hearings. Each will start at 6 p.m. 

• Aug. 18 at Itawamba Community College in Tupelo 
• Aug. 27 at Northwest Mississippi Community College in Senatobia 
• Sept. 1 at Delta State University in Cleveland 
• Sept. 8 at Alcorn State University in Natchez 
• Sept.10 at Meridian Community College in Meridian 
• Sept. 17 at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg 
• Sept. 22 at Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College in Gulfport 
• Sept. 24 at the state Capitol in Jackson

Deep South Today, a nonprofit network of newsrooms in Louisiana and Mississippi that will soon launch a new newsroom in Arkansas, is pleased to announce it has received a $150,000 grant from Local News Hub to increase its coverage of women in politics across the communities it serves.

“We are very pleased to be able to build upon our strong track record of nonpartisan political reporting to strengthen our coverage of how women participate in government and are impacted by it,” said Deep South Today President and CEO Warwick Sabin. “This focus is particularly important during a time of rapid political evolution in our region, and we are grateful to Local News Hub for providing the resources to make it possible.”

With this new support, Deep South Today will deepen and enhance its reporting about redistricting, statehouse races and local elections in Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas, allowing each newsroom to sustain coverage of how these events affect women’s political participation and representation.

“Women have long been under-represented in politics in the Deep South, for a wide range of cultural and political reasons, and the challenges are especially steep for women of color,” said Mississippi Today Editor-in-Chief Emily Wagster Pettus, who started covering politics in the state in the mid-1990s. “One mission of our nonprofit newsrooms at Deep South Today is to examine how political systems affect people’s lives, and our coverage of women in politics is an important part of that.”

Deep South Today will coordinate enterprise projects across all of its newsrooms, including a series examining how the post-Callais redistricting landscape is reshaping the pipeline of women entering public office across Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas. That reporting will track which districts are being redrawn, what those changes mean for women — particularly Black women — and what communities are doing in response. In conjunction with this work, Deep South Today will create interactive databases of who represents our states in the legislatures and the courts, focusing on how many women are elected to these influential roles.

About Deep South Today

Deep South Today is a nonprofit network of local newsrooms that includes Mississippi Today, Verite News, and The Current. Its new Arkansas Today newsroom will launch in fall 2026.

Founded in 2016, Mississippi Today is now the largest newsroom in the state, and in 2023 it won the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting. Verite News launched in 2022 in New Orleans, where it covers inequities facing communities of color. The Current is a nonprofit news organization founded in 2018 serving Lafayette and southern Louisiana.

With its regional scale and scope, Deep South Today is rebuilding and re-energizing local
journalism in communities where it had previously eroded, ensuring its long-term growth and
sustainability.

About Local News Hub

The mission of Local News Hub is to support the essential work of local and independent news organizations across the country by providing consultations and advice, distributing grants, and acting as a fiscal sponsor. Local News Hub operates as a program of the Lexington Observer under the Lexington Observer’s non-profit tax status.

Through fiscal sponsorship and re-granting efforts, Local News Hub has distributed funds to nonprofit newsrooms in Arizona, Colorado, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Ohio, Texas and Wisconsin through an invitation-only grant-making process.

Local News Hub’s role as an adviser, grant giver and fiscal sponsor is due to the support of partners such as Pivotal Ventures.

Professor Kamal Ali and his team of Jackson State University student researchers spent their summer tending to a crate of oysters, magnets and wires. 

The team has been developing tiny sensors that attach to oyster shells to collect data on how the creatures respond to changes in their environment. 

The marine research project is part of the Mississippi Based RESTORE Act Center of Excellence, or MBRACE, and one of 400 research projects at Jackson State. 

It’s also an example of a much larger ambition: JSU leaders want to join the nation’s highest tier of research institutions, a designation they believe could help the university attract top faculty and students, compete for larger federal grants and expand its national reputation.

In April, Jackson State was among 14 historically Black colleges and universities to launch the Association of HBCU Research Institutions. The coalition aims to help HBCUs to compete for larger grants and expand their campus programs. The coalition will also work with the country’s top research universities and receive support from Harvard University. For now, Howard University is the only HBCU in the country with such status. 

“As JSU succeeds, so does the city of Jackson and the state of Mississippi, and the collaboration positions us to drive meaningful economic growth and transformative discovery at scale,” Jackson State President Denise Jones Gregory said in an email. 

Gaining the designation as one of the nation’s top research universities requires spending at least $50 million annually on research and development and awarding at least 70 research doctorates, according to the American Council on Education, which helps manage the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, a system used to group and rank colleges and universities.  

The project Ali and his students are working on is also an example of how that research can have a broad impact. EMBRACE, funded with a $26 million, 15-year grant from the U.S. Department of the Treasury,  partners JSU with Mississippi State, the University of Mississippi and the University of Southern Mississippi.

“Oyster reefs used to be a $100 million industry and prime indicator of the health of the Mississippi Gulf Coast but hurricanes, disease, seawater pollutants and other environmental factors frequently affect these habitats,” said Ali, a professor of electrical and computer engineering. “So protecting Mississippi’s culture, traditions and revenue from the Gulf is an important part of what we do here that has the potential to bring jobs and money to the state.” 

In 2023, JSU spent nearly $19.5 million in research and development, said Almesha Campbell, the university’s vice president of research and economic development. Jackson State’s key research areas include cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, health disparities, materials science and civil engineering. 

For JSU to reach that $50 million benchmark, the university will need to seek larger research grants, not just from the federal government, but from private industry. By partnering with the coalition, the university can gain more visibility and work with other universities who are looking to share resources. 

“We’re now asking how do we get more contracts, more grants and opportunities? How do we partner and bring in money that’s not from the federal government into the institution to expand its capacity,” Campbell said. 

University leaders are also working to recruit and hire new faculty who could take on research and expand programs to recruit students, Campbell said. 

JSU is already close to one of the Carnegie benchmarks. The university awards nearly 68 doctoral degrees annually, close to the 70 research doctorates required for the high research status, said Preselfannie McDaniels, provost and vice president of academic affairs.

JSU has 13 doctoral programs. The College of Education and Human Development awards more doctorates than other programs at the university, McDaniels said. JSU’s top programs have produced 27 education doctorates, 12 health professional doctorates and eight psychology doctorates. Research doctorates are degrees classified by the federal government as focused on research or scholarship.

The university also has an internal quality assurance committee that reviews doctoral programs and student research, she said. 

“We were never totally worried about meeting that particular challenge,” McDaniels said. “But we have been very dedicated to making sure that we weren’t focused on numbers when it came to our dissertations. But, we were focused on rigor and on the product itself being the very best.” 

Sharolyn Love, a member of JSU alumni group Thee 1877 Project, said the university must end leadership turnover and create a long-term strategic plan to reach its goals. Then it could also attract the support of billionaire donors and other investors.

“We’re seeing a resurgence of HBCUs despite what is happening in the state and across the nation,” Love said. “The designation could open up just a huge avenue of possibilities for the university for the future.” 

Strengthening Jackson State’s status as a research university also opens career paths and opportunities for students, Ali said. 

“A lot of people don’t know that some of the research we’re doing is work behind the scenes supporting large projects in the state of Mississippi,” Ali said. “But the exposure of the work leads to innovation and opportunity for our next generation of scientists, researchers and engineers.” 

Democrat Scott Colom is trying to do what has not been done since 1942 – defeat an incumbent United States senator from Mississippi.

Colom, the district attorney for the Columbus area in parts of northeast and east central Mississippi, is considered a longshot to defeat Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith for a number of reasons.

First of all, Mississippi is considered a solid Republican state that has not elected a Democratic governor since 1999 and has not elected a Democratic U.S. senator since 1982.

And to make matters worse for Colom, former Democrat Ty Pinkins is running as an independent in the November general election and could siphon more votes from him than from Hyde-Smith in a contest where the challenger needs every vote he can get.

And finally, Mississippians do not vote incumbent senators out of office. There is no better definition of job security than holding one of Mississippi’s two U.S. Senate seats.

For those reasons and others, it really is not surprising that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee opted not to allocate any of the $40 million pledged on electing Democratic senators this November to Colom in Mississippi. Based on polling data, the Democrats have a realistic chance to garner control of the Senate and the powers that be chose not to spend their finite resources in a state where the odds of winning appear long.

Still, Colom and Democrats can cite reasons for a glimmer of hope. In high-profile statewide elections the past few years – Senate races between Hyde-Smith and former U.S. Rep. Mike Espy and recent gubernatorial elections – Democrats have been relatively close to victory.

So, Colom continues the campaign grind, hoping to do what has not been done since 1942 – defeat an incumbent Mississippi senator.

But the specifics of the 1942 campaign also do not provide Colom much reason for hope. It was an unusual turn of events that led to James O. Eastland defeating incumbent Wall Doxey in 1942. After that fateful 1942 election, Eastland, a Democrat, went on to serve until he retired in 1978 and was replaced by Republican Thad Cochran.

Eastland was originally appointed in 1941 by Gov. Paul Johnson to fill a Senate seat vacated when Pat Harrison died in office. But in accepting the appointment, Eastland promised not to run in the upcoming special election later that year. He did not. Doxey won the special election, but a short one year later lost the regularly scheduled election for the full six-year term to  Eastland, who had sat out the special election to fulfill his promise.

Actually at the start of the process where senators were elected by the people instead of the state legislatures, it was not that uncommon for an incumbent Mississippi senator to lose. The 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1913, provided for the election of senators by the people.

In 1912, Mississippi opted to hold the first popular vote to elect a U.S. senator, jumping ahead of the ratification of the 17th Amendment in 1913. In that election, Delta planter LeRoy Percy, who originally was elected by the Legislature, lost to notorious racist James K. Vardaman. Then Vardaman, who was one of six senators to vote against America entering World War I, was defeated in 1918 by Harrison. In 1934 incumbent Hubert Stephens of Union County was upended by another notable racist – Theodore Bilbo. And then there was the 1942 election.

Those are the examples where incumbent Mississippi senators have been defeated in popular elections or by a vote of the people – Percy, Vardaman, Stephens and Doxey.

Scott Colom is hoping to add Hyde-Smith’s name to the list of defeated U.S. senators from Mississippi.

Perhaps, in reality the odds are in his favor. It is bound to happen eventually.

As it would for the typical U.S. Census taker, the work of counting bears in the woods starts with a clipboard and a blank piece of paper.

Armed with this equipment — along with bear spray and, perhaps more importantly, tick repellent — a team of researchers has been fanning out to hundreds of survey stations set up across western Connecticut this summer to collect data on the area’s resident population of black bears. Their goal is to conduct the first scientific survey of the state’s bear population in over a decade.

The project is a collaboration between the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection and the Carnivore and Population Ecology Lab at Mississippi State University, which has conducted similar population surveys of black bears for several other state wildlife agencies.

Instead of trying to locate bears in the wild, the survey relies on hair samples collected in barbed wire traps, which can be used to identify individual bears based on their DNA. Researchers will later come up with a population estimate based on how many different bears they identified and how often those bears showed up in the samples across different geographic areas.

“It’s basically forensics, right,” said Dana Morin, the principal investigator at the Mississippi State lab, who holds a Ph.D. in wildlife conservation. “It’s the same idea as identifying somebody from saliva or something like that.”

The work begins each weekday morning, when members of the 10-person research team head out to collect samples from their daily list of traps. The traps consist of two strands of barbed wire wrapped around multiple trees with a scented lure in the center.

How to lure a bear: doughnuts and raspberries?

What scents are best for attracting bears? The standard setup, honed through similar projects in other states, uses a small pile of sticks sprayed with used doughnut grease along with a tampon soaked in raspberry extract, which is suspended from a line running through the center of the corral. Both lures are intended to attract bears while not providing them with actual food that can habituate them to humans.

“If a bear is in the area, it might sniff it due to their curiosity, but they’re not going to be coming back because there’s no calories to be gained from it,” said Connor Kurz, the project manager and a research associate at Morin’s lab.

In order to spot hair among the dark hues of the forest floor, researchers use a sheet of white paper pegged to a clipboard to provide a bright background, which they pass slowly underneath the strands of wire. Even to their discerning eyes, it’s not always clear whether the hair is that of a bear or some other furry mammal.

“Bears can come in all different colors,” Kurz says. “Typically, here in the Northeast, they’re going to be black with a brown muzzle, and sometimes they’ll have a white chest blaze. But in other states, they can be brown, cinnamon, red, even white.”

For that reason, any hair collected from the traps is bagged and documented to be sent back to Morin’s lab in Mississippi for genetic testing. The researchers also note any other signs of bear activity in the area, such as footprints, scat or a sighting of a live bear. The population estimate, however, will be based solely on the DNA collected from the hair samples and what that indicates about the number of individual bears living in the area.

The researchers have set up 340 collection sites from the New York border to the Connecticut River. While black bears are known to inhabit nearly every town in Connecticut, they are concentrated more heavily in the western half of the state, and both DEEP and the research team have focused their efforts on studying that population of bears.

The group’s survey efforts are mostly organized into 17 clusters, each containing 12 to 16 individual collection sites spread out in a grid of roughly 14 square miles. (There are also several smaller satellite clusters, with between three and five collection sites, included in the project area).

Kurz said that the field team put careful consideration into selecting each site. They’re looking for a small stand of evenly-spaced mature trees with little brush in the center. Because the sites are generally located at least 100 feet away from any trails, visiting them can require bushwhacking through swampy terrain or dense undergrowth, dodging branches and the occasional cobweb.

Each site is checked weekly for hair samples, starting in early June. As of the first week of August, the team had collected about 850 hair samples from all of its sites. The field work is scheduled to conclude later this month.

Mississippi know-how

In order to get an accurate population estimate back at the lab, Morin uses a technique known as “ spatial capture-recapture, ” which builds upon earlier research methods used to determine the likelihood that any individual bear in an area will show up in one of the samples. By factoring in the size of the survey area along with the distribution of bears within that area into their calculations, Morin said, the team can more accurately determine the density of the bear population.

“That’s accounting for both the individuals we detected but also the individuals we didn’t, and it’s estimating how many individuals are there but we just didn’t happen to detect them,” Morin said. “With the spatial capture-recapture, we’re now also incorporating an estimate of what the area is. We’re getting a more accurate estimate of the abundance by using that.”

Morin said it will take several months to prepare and conduct genetic testing on all of the samples before running the results through her estimation models. A final population estimate based on the samples should be available by next spring, she said.

“The longest part of the process is extracting all the DNA from the hair because it’s pretty tedious, and you have to be really careful with it to make sure nothing gets contaminated and all the samples are straight,” Morin said.

The last scientific study of state’s bear population was conducted by researchers from the University of Connecticut between 2013 and 2014, using similar methods. The results of that study, published in 2016, identified 235 distinct bears using genetic testing and estimated the total bear population in western Connecticut was around 400 to 450 individuals.

Since then, DEEP estimates the total population of bears living in Connecticut has grown to around 1,000 to 1,200 individuals.

Bear encounters grow more common

As bears have become increasingly common in Connecticut, so have their encounters with humans. Thousands of human-bear confrontations are reported to DEEP each year, with most involving bears eating from trash cans or bird feeders. The agency has also recorded more than 250 instances of bears breaking into homes over the last six years, as well as several reported attacks on humans. Just this week, the agency published an advisory warning that over 50 home entries have already been reported in 2026, more than in all of last year.

In response to those run-ins, some lawmakers have proposed establishing a regulated bear hunting season in parts of Connecticut, particularly the northwest corner. So far, none of those efforts has been successful, and opponents say hunting would do little to address the most problematic bears that tend to live closer to residential neighborhoods.

DEEP has issued some permits allowing farmers to kill bears that damage crops. Experts encourage people living in bear-prone areas to lock doors, keep trash and other food sources stored in bear-proof containers and avoid putting out bird feeders.

Bill Flood, a spokesman for DEEP, said the agency decided to commission a new population survey to help inform its ongoing conservation efforts and its work to mitigate conflicts between people and bears.

“Our previous estimates were completed more than a decade ago, and we know Connecticut’s bear population has changed significantly over that time,” Flood said. “Density and abundance estimates are important metrics for developing effective bear management and conservation strategies. These estimates can be compared to habitat types to help explain variation in density and abundance, population-level behavior, carrying capacity, human-bear conflicts, geographic range expansion and population health.”

Flood said the agency selected Morin’s lab due to its “renowned” work studying bear populations in other states, which include Louisiana, Mississippi and North Carolina. The cost of the survey, which is between $400,000 and $500,000, is being funded through Connecticut’s share of federal wildlife management grants delivered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Flood said.

While Morin’s lab is based at Mississippi State, the team working on the ground in Connecticut this summer includes researchers and undergraduate students hired from around the county.

For the purposes of developing a population estimate, the team doesn’t closely track how many bears they’ve spotted incidentally while crisscrossing the state. However, they do keep a competitive tally on a white board at one of the houses they rented for the summer.

Ben Woxman, a field technician from Ohio, is currently leading the team with 30 sightings as of early August. He’s also seen a wide sampling of other New England wildlife, including bobcats, grey foxes, porcupine, mink and even a nest of barred owls that is active around one of the survey sites he visits each week.

“I’ve really gotten to see them go from fresh fledglings to now, they’re actually starting to look like adult owls,” Woxman said.

How do you shoo a bear away?

When the researchers encounter a bear in the woods, Kurz said, they generally try to shoo the animal away using loud sounds or, if the bear is being stubborn, they’ll leave and come back at a later time.

So far this summer, he said, no one on the team has had to use their bear spray.

For many of those involved in the project, bears aren’t the only focus of their research interests.

Woxman, for example, is starting a graduate program on waterfowl management in the fall. And Kurz has previously worked on projects studying pythons, crocodiles, frogs, coyotes and river otters, among other species. He said he got involved studying bears after taking a class focused on their mating habits.

Morin said she began her career studying coyote populations in the mountains of Virginia and later transitioned to bears. Her interest in large carnivores, she said, was driven by a seemingly simple question that kept popping up in her conversations with local officials: How many are there?

She compared the work of developing population models to filing out a crossword puzzle.

“We could put collars on animals, we could talk about what habitats they use, and we could talk about survival rates,” she said. But people and state agencies really just need good information about the size of animal populations in order to make the right wildlife management decisions, she said.

“I think the draw for me was that was the question people wanted answered,” Morin said. “And I just I enjoy it.”

This story was originally published by The Connecticut Mirror and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.

Journee Herrington circled outside the arena at the Mississippi State Fairgrounds with her horse, Turbo, waiting for her turn to weave through the barrels and race against the clock. 

“I love barrel racing, and I love coming to Jackson,” said Journee, a 10-year-old from Natchez. “We’ve been doing barrel racing for a long time now.”

For Journee, the competition is about more than racing around barrels. 

“My brother died a couple of years ago, and that’s what makes me want to work harder,” she said. “I do this for him and God.”

She is one of many competitors who traveled to Jackson for the Ultimate Bayou Gold Barrel Race, a three-day competition running Thursday through Saturday at the Kirk Fordice Equine Center, a facility named for a former Mississippi governor who, himself, loved riding horses.

Riders from Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana and other states brought their horses to compete in an event that tests speed, timing and control as they race around a three-barrel pattern. 

The event, put on by Bayou Productions, is part of the larger competitive barrel-racing circuit and draws riders and horses from well beyond Mississippi. 

Journee’s father, Jeremis Herrington, has also connected her competition to her brother’s memory. After one of her runs, he wrote on social media that he saw “her big brother’s smile shining through her.”

Near the horse stalls, Dan Cattani and his 8-year-old daughter Leah Cattani, of Franklinton, Louisiana, gave their horse, Thunder, a wash before entering the arena to compete. Cattani watched and smiled as Leah moved around the stalls, tending to the horse with the familiarity of someone who has done it many times before. 

“I am so proud of her,” Cattani said. “She hasn’t gotten off the horse since I first put her on a pony with her riding instructor.”

Leah has been riding horses since she was 3 and competing in barrel racing since she was 5. Traveling to competitions has become part of the father and daughter’s life together. 

“We’ve been to more competitions than we can count,” Cattani said.

When Leah entered the arena, Cattani watched from behind the fencing, calling out as she and Thunder took off around the barrels. 

“It was awesome to see,” Cattani said after her run. “There is always something to learn from every run.”

Her first round took nearly 18 seconds. The time was less important to Cattani than what Leah could take away from the run. He told her she needed to pull Thunder’s head around the barrel faster to cut time. 

“It’s a learning experience for her, but we learn from every run,” he said. 

Leah offered a short assessment of her own. 

“This is so much fun,” she said. 

Dawn Hawkins traveled from Walker, Louisiana, to Jackson with her new horse, Baby, looking to see how they would measure up against some of the best barrel racers in the region. 

“The best of the best usually come here to Jackson,” Hawkins said. 

Baby had fewer than 10 runs under her belt when Hawkins brought her to the competition. The pair had a few mistakes during their first run, but Hawkins was already looking ahead to another chance.

“We had a few bobbles, but we will try again tomorrow,” she said. 

Asked what it feels like to compete, Hawkins described the connection between herself and her horse.

“It’s magic,” she said. “Taking a horse that didn’t know anything before and teaching it to run barrels. You’re asking a 1,200-pound animal underneath you to give everything it has to turn a barrel as fast as it can.”

That connection between riders and their horses was on display throughout the competition as they raced around the three-barrel pattern, chasing fractions of a second. 

Dust flew behind the horses as riders leaned into the turns, and an occasional cowboy hat flew off in the wind. Some riders celebrated their runs while others walked away disappointed. 

The announcers introduced each rider as live play-by-play echoed through the arena. After their runs, riders climbed off their horses, some wiping sweat from their brows before walking or trotting back toward the stalls to wait for another chance to beat their previous times. 

Before leaving the competition, Journee stood next to Turbo, gently petting her horse as riders continued to prepare for their runs. 

Mississippi faith leaders on Friday denounced recent comments about Muslims made by state Agriculture Commissioner Andy Gipson, a gubernatorial candidate in next year’s elections.

“This reckless and dangerous rhetoric by an elected official and a candidate for governor has no place in our public discourse,” said Rhoda Yoder of Open Door Mennonite Church, on behalf of Working Together Jackson and Working Together Mississippi, two groups that organized the news conference.

The groups invited Gipson to meet with them for “an open and honest dialogue.”

The recent appointment of attorney Assma Ali as municipal judge by the small Mississippi Delta town of Benoit drew social media backlash from internet trolls and a few Mississippi politicians, and even reportedly some threats, because she is Muslim.

Her appointment prompted Republican Gipson, a former longtime state lawmaker, to renew his vows to ban “Sharia law and the influence of Islam” if he’s elected governor, even though use of Sharia law in Mississippi courts was already banned by the Legislature in 2015 when Gipson was a member of the state House. He voted in favor of the law that outlaws enforcement of any “foreign law” in Mississippi, which at the time was billed as being an anti-Sharia law measure.

Leaders from several faith communities gathered at the International Museum of Muslim Culture in downtown Jackson on Friday in response to a social media post Gipson made about the museum and invited Gipson to meet with them.

Gipson has made several social media posts about Islam and Sharia law in recent days, including: “If you are among those who think Sharia law is ‘not an issue in Mississippi,’ you’d better think again. You see what’s happening in Dearborn, Michigan. But did you know that in our own capital city, in Mississippi, there is a center for Muslim Culture at the Planetarium in Jackson?”

The organizations said that one commenter on Gipson’s post called for the museum to be burned down. They said they have historically felt safe in Mississippi but that this has prompted them to take extra security precautions.

Many people and groups have criticized comments by Gipson and others and have come out in support of Ali, saying the U.S. native is a qualified and upstanding member of Mississippi’s legal community. Ali has vowed to uphold the U.S. Constitution and Mississippi law in her role as a city judge, mainly handling traffic violations, misdemeanors and other minor legal issues.

This week, Benoit officials defended Ali and their decision to appoint her as city judge.

“Religion is not listed as a qualification for service as a Municipal Court Judge in the State of Mississippi. Being Muslim is not a lawful basis for denying or terminating the appointment,” the mayor and board wrote, “We are pleased to have her.”

The groups that held the Friday event are nonpartisan civic engagement organizations made of nonprofits, churches and other religious institutions from across Jackson and the state. 

“Sharia law, it’s like the law of Moses. Like the Ten Commandments. It’s just about the laws that govern a just, upright community of people,” said Okolo Rashid, one of the museum’s founders.

In a post, Gipson also included a photo of the museum, which says that it is America’s first Muslim museum, that featured Rashid at an exhibit on the shared heritage of Muslims, Christians and Jews. The museum opened in 2001 and is dedicated to educating the American public on Islamic history, art, and culture.

“I want to invite Commissioner Gipson to come sit down with us so we can share with him what the museum has to offer,” Rashid said.

By her family’s account, Tasia Fortune was a loving, caring woman who led a troubled life. She ran away from foster care when she was 16, leaving western Kentucky and finding her way to Jackson, Mississippi. There were homelessness and addiction. Relationships that didn’t last produced four children.

Then on an August day, the body of the 29-year-old was found hanging from a tree behind a vacant home in a mostly Black neighborhood in west Jackson strewn with pockets of tall grass, vacant lots and older homes.

“She had a good heart. She just had a hard life,” her mother, Christy Spivey, told Mississippi Today.

Spivey doesn’t know much about Fortune’s life in Jackson. She felt numb when she learned of her daughter’s fate.

National interest grew in the days following the discovery, primarily because of the manner in which Fortune, a Black woman, was found. Results of an autopsy have not been released. Authorities say they have identified a person of interest, who is being held on an unrelated charge, but have yet to release an explanation of how Fortune died and why.

Spivey said she is not ruling anything out, but insists her daughter would never take her own life nor does she think race was a factor.

“I really don’t feel like it was a racial crime. … I think that this was more of a personal crime, but I definitely understand the fears,” she said.

Like many others, Robert Luckett, a professor of history at Jackson State University, has been watching the case unfold. He understands the national attention.

The public’s perception of Mississippi as a dangerous place, particularly for people of color, taps into the state’s history of violence, he said earlier this week.

“It’s a reputation that we’ve earned in the state due to the very real nature of racialized violence whether or not we attribute it to this case or not,” Luckett said.

“It’s an image of this state that lingers and that people from the outside look at Mississippi and say ‘Oh, an incident like this one is obviously a continuation of the history of really intense hate crimes that we witnessed in this nation,’” he said.  

The circumstances surrounding Fortune’s death have evoked the recent case of Trey Reed, a Black student who was found hanging at Delta State University last September. Mississippi authorities concluded he died by suicide amid initial speculation by his family that foul play was involved. 

LaToni Fortune said she last saw her older sister last month when Tasia returned to Kentucky for a family reunion.

“She just comes back to Kentucky and visit us or we’ll go to Jackson and visit her,” she said.

She said her sister had no car and had trouble finding work.

Her mother acknowledged the family’s troubles, describing battles over keeping her family together. 

Fortune and her other two siblings were put into foster care, Spivey said. Fortune grew into a talented student and a cross-country track athlete. Despite being separated from family, she found ways to stay in touch with loved ones.

“They couldn’t keep us apart, one way or another,” Spivey said.

Fortune was just 16 when she ran away to Mississippi with someone she met in foster care, her family said. She eventually made her way to Jackson, where she lived for most of the last 13 years of her life. 

She fell on hard times, her family said, spending a lot of her time homeless and wandering the streets.

Spivey was heartbroken to learn her daughter had fallen into addiction. The family tried to help her return to Kentucky and get sober multiple times. She always returned to Jackson to be close to her children. 

The recent reunion in Kentucky is a happy memory for Spivey. It was the last time she would see her daughter. They all went swimming and went out to eat together.

A makeshift memorial has risen at the house on the 500 block of Road of Remembrance where Fortune was found  – a small mound of flowers, balloons, teddy bears and pinwheels surrounding a framed picture of her.

“We’re going to fight until the end to get justice for her,” Spivey said.

A GoFundMe account has been established to cover burial costs and care for Fortune’s children. 

Candice Wilder and Molly Minta contributed to this reporting.