OurTupelo

Mississippi Today Ideas is a platform for thoughtful Mississippians to share their ideas 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.    

A proposed railroad merger between the Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern would concentrate an unprecedented share of U.S. freight rail into a single system — and Mississippi’s farmers, manufacturers and ports would feel the impact.

As a state senator, I believe in free markets. In fact, I’ve built my career on this principle. But free markets only work when competitive balance allows small businesses to thrive, industries to grow and hire and consumers to benefit. A merger between the Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern would shift that balance in the wrong direction, and that’s why I oppose the proposed $85 billion merger.  

If approved by the federal Surface Transportation Board, this transaction would create the largest railroad in American history, with a single company controlling roughly 40% of all U.S. freight rail traffic. In an industry where four carriers already handle nearly 90% of all freight, that’s not a merger. It’’s the last step toward a monopoly. To be clear, the people who will pay the price aren’t the shareholders in Omaha or Atlanta, but instead farmers, mill workers and small businesses right here in Mississippi.

Let me tell you what I believe is at stake for our state.

Mississippi’s agricultural producers move billions of dollars of soybeans, corn and cotton by rail every year. Those farmers operate on margins so thin that even modest rate increases can wipe out a season’s profit, especially amid ongoing shifts in global trade dynamics.

The American Farm Bureau Federation has warned that this merger would reduce what little bargaining leverage shippers still have, leaving farm-product customers who can’t easily switch to another mode of transportation increasingly captive to a single carrier’s pricing decisions. Rail rates for corn, soybeans, wheat and fertilizer have already risen significantly over the past decade. Further consolidation isn’t going to reverse that trend.

If this merger reduces competition and gives one carrier more power over rates, routing and service, Mississippi automakers will face higher shipping costs, greater delays, and less leverage when they need to get products to dealers and customers on time. That is exactly the kind of supply-chain risk a manufacturing state like ours cannot afford.

Likewise, the port of Pascagoula and our connections to the broader Gulf Coast port network depend on competitive rail access to stay viable. Norfolk Southern currently provides Mississippi shippers an alternative check on pricing and service quality. Remove that alternative through this merger, and you remove the competitive pressure that helps keep shipping costs in check at our ports. When competition fades at a port, cargo doesn’t stay put — it moves elsewhere. 

I’m not alone in my concerns. 

Conservative commentator Ken Blackwell, a chair at the America First Policy Institute, drew the connection plainly: when competition disappears, what follows is stagnation, higher costs and diminished service. “That’s what happens when competition disappears,” he wrote, “which is exactly the risk posed by the Norfolk Southern–Union Pacific merger.”

This merger was not driven by a clear need to improve service or expand capacity. Instead, it reflects a financially driven consolidation that risks prioritizing returns over reliability and competition. I support healthy markets and strong investment, but those gains should not come at the expense of working Mississippians, small businesses and the industries that keep our state moving.

Unlike most issues, the American people are united in opposition to this deal. A recent national poll found that 71% of Americans oppose this merger. That number holds across party lines. Free markets thrive on competition. Concentrated power works against the people who have the least ability to push back.

Mississippi’s farmers, manufacturers and port communities cannot afford to be collateral damage in a Wall Street transaction. I’m urging the Surface Transportation Board to reject this application and calling on our congressional delegation to make sure Mississippi’s voice is heard loud and clear in Washington. 

Charles “Chuck” Younger, a Columbus Republican, has represented District 17, the Lowndes County area, in the Mississippi Senate since 2014. He is previous chair of the Agriculture Committee and currently chairs the Highways and Transportation Committee in the Mississippi Senate.

Mukta Joshi is a reporter at Mississippi Today. She is spending a year as a New York Times Local Investigations fellow. Joseph Cranney is a reporter at Verite News. Both report for the Deep South Today Investigative Reporting Center in collaboration with The Times.

Ten days ago, as our team at Mississippi Today, Verite News and The New York Times reported on the Senatobia Police Department’s fatal shooting of Kohen Wiley, a 1-year-old boy, a source came forward to share texts they said had been sent by Police Chief Harold Vanderford.

The source, a colleague of the chief’s, said they suspected the chief would know who had given us the texts. But they agreed to let us publish the messages if we agreed not to publicly identify them.

The source showed us 10 text conversations from July 2025 to April 2026. In them, Vanderford uses a racist slur more than a dozen times, spelled various ways. As we previously reported, Vanderford wrote multiple times that he had been loudly and repeatedly saying the slur, sometimes so loud that his neighbors might have heard it. In one text, he wrote that he “almost beat a nigger and white woman’s ass a few minutes ago.”

Our source said these text conversations were between them and the chief. We took a number of additional steps to verify their authenticity. Here’s why we stand behind our reporting that Vanderford sent those texts:

1. The numbers lined up.

Under the contact labeled “Hal Vanderford” on our source’s phone, the number listed was 662-897-6708. We are publishing the full number in the interest of transparency.

No one answered at that number, and there was no personalized voicemail greeting. So we contacted three separate acquaintances of Vanderford’s, each of whom confirmed that the number we had matched the number they had saved for Vanderford. In the days since, that phone number has been disconnected.

2. We looked for context clues.

In one of the text messages, Vanderford says he’s with a woman, whose name we’re withholding to protect her privacy. Two acquaintances of the chief identified her as the chief’s girlfriend. The woman is pictured with Vanderford on her Facebook profile, too.

Another text message includes a photo of a person who the chief calls “GAY!!!” We identified that person as a employee at the department. 

Vanderford appears to have sent a number of text messages while watching college sports games, and we separately learned that the chief is a Mississippi State fan.

Mississippi State’s schedules show that Vanderford was texting contemporaneously on dates when the Bulldogs were playing. On Oct. 18, Vanderford texted about a football game against Florida. Mississippi State played the Gators that day — we checked. 

3. We reviewed the attached video and photos.

A message the chief sent on Thanksgiving Day includes a video attachment. The man recording the video can be heard addressing our source by name, saying, “You’re missing out.” The metadata of the video shows it was recorded two minutes before it was sent, on the same day. 

We had already obtained the chief’s home address through his voter registration records and spoken to his neighbors, who confirmed he lived there.

So we compared the video he’d shared to a Google Street View image taken in February 2025 from the angle of the chief’s home. The images lined up perfectly.

4. We asked Chief Vanderford himself. Many times. 

We first contacted Vanderford on Friday, Aug. 21, and have since made more than a dozen attempts to reach him by phone, email and notes left at his home or office, sharing the specifics of our findings, and explicitly asking for his side of the story.

As recently as Monday, we asked Vanderford and Lt. Shane Howell, a Senatobia police spokesperson, if Vanderford denies the texts came from him.

Neither have responded to our inquiries.

Below, we are publishing Vanderford’s uncensored text messages. 

Editor’s note: Mississippi Today does not normally publish racist slurs, but we chose to do so in this case because the slurs themselves are central to why our team reported this story.

Sen. Juan Barnett, a three-term Democratic legislator from Heidelberg and chairman of the Senate Corrections Committee, resigned from the Legislature on Monday, Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann said in a statement. 

It’s unclear why Barnett resigned, and he did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but he has dealt with health issues that caused him to miss several weeks of this year’s regular legislative session.

“We thank Senator Barnett for his years of service to the state of Mississippi and wish him a happy and well-deserved retirement,” Hosemann said in a statement. 

Barnett took office in 2016 and has served as the chairman of the Senate Corrections Committee since 2020.  He has represented portions of Forrest, Jasper and Jones counties in the Senate.

Barnett in the past pushed for earlier release and shortened sentences for many incarcerated in Mississippi prisons, despite his father being shot to death in the early 1990s while Barnett was in the Army deployed to Iraq, and the shooter receiving a relatively short sentence. Barnett said he believes in forgiveness and giving people second chances.

Barnett missed several weeks of the 2026 legislative session because of an extended illness. Gov. Tate Reeves will now have 30 days to set the date for a special election.

While he was absent from the Capitol, legislation that attempted to improve medical care in Mississippi prisons died on key deadlines. The vice chairman of the committee at the time said she let the legislation die at Barnett’s direction. 

Before serving in the Legislature, Barnett was the mayor of his hometown of Heidelberg. 

Mississippi Today reporter Michael Goldberg contributed to this report. 

A group of Mississippi University for Women alumni and Columbus residents is asking the state’s college board to consider a prominent alumna as the institution’s next president. They’re also pressing trustees to disclose a timeline and details about how the board will conduct the leadership search. 

Doris Taylor, a biotechnology researcher and scientist who graduated from the W in 1977, is the top pick for the Citizens Coalition for MUW and Mississippi School for Mathematics and Sciences.

The W is at a defining moment that “demands a leader of national standing who is also a daughter of this institution,” the coalition wrote in a letter to the college board. 

That leader would be able to walk the halls of the National Institutes of Health or engage the state Legislature at the Capitol with equal authority, the coalition wrote. 

MUW’s next president, the group said, should be someone “who can mobilize philanthropic capital this university has never been able to access, and who will fight for the W with the conviction that comes from having been shaped by it.”

Taylor has had distinguished faculty leadership roles at Duke University and the University of Minnesota, the coalition noted in its letter to the college board. The group also said she is a dedicated MUW foundation board of trustee director, donor and proud alumna whose knowledge of the institution and region could benefit the institution.

Taylor, founder and CEO of Organamet Bio Inc., said the coalition’s endorsement is an honor. She had expressed interest in the top job in 2018, but the appointment went to Nora Miller. 

Taylor said she wants to give back to the university that shaped her career. She also said she wants to encourage other candidates who are interested in the role to apply. The more candidates vying for the role, the better options the state Institutions of Higher Learning board of trustees will have to select a strong leader, Taylor said. 

“MUW deserves a president that can protect it, fund it and build it,” Taylor said. “And, whoever takes on the role, it’s a critically important opportunity to eliminate those issues that have put an excessive burden on the campus and our community.”

The MUW president search has not yet started

At listening sessions IHL held in April, some speakers named Sally Burchfield Doty, director of Broadband Expansion and Accessibility of Mississippi, as a potentially strong president for MUW. Doty, from the W’s class of 1988, served in the state Senate from 2012 to 2020. 

Scott Tollison, MUW’s interim president, told Mississippi Today he is focusing on providing transitional leadership and has not thought about the permanent role.

Miller, who was the W’s president since 2018, retired in June. In April, the IHL board of trustees held listening sessions for MUW stakeholders to gather feedback on traits they want to see in their next leader. Since then, the college board has not announced its next steps and plans for the president search. 

The IHL board is still discussing details of the search, board President Steve Cunningham told Mississippi Today. IHL board member Teresa Hubbard is chair of MUW’s search committee.

Cunningham said trustees understand the importance of keeping MUW stakeholders updated throughout the search process to ensure transparency. While the college board hasn’t announced their plans, he anticipates the search process will take around three months once it’s initiated. 

“We want to ensure that alumni, community residents and other stakeholders are involved in the search process,” Cunningham said. 

Coalition forms out of concern for MUW’s future 

The coalition’s endorsement of Taylor was a way for stakeholders to assert their voice in the presidential search, said Keith Gaskin, former Columbus mayor and coalition member. IHL trustees’ selection of MUW’s next leader is critical to the university’s future. 

“It shouldn’t be about politics, favors or friendships,” Gaskin said. “It should be picking the absolute best person for MUW.” 

The group’s seven members include MUW alumni and former professors, former elected officials, judges and community residents. 

Gaskin said the coalition formed partly in response to recent legislative proposals and discussions that would close or merge MUW with Mississippi State University and relocate MSMS, a residential high school for gifted juniors and seniors. Betty Bryan, a parent of an MSMS student and MUW alumna, is also a member of the coalition. 

Bruce Hanson, a former state representative who wrote the bill to establish MSMS, serves as the coalition’s chairman.  

The merger or closure of these schools could devastate the local economy, said Martha Jo Mims, a retired MUW professor. 

“We’ve had this burden for a couple years and the communication from our legislators doesn’t reassure us that they are committed to keeping these institutions in Columbus,” said Mims, who is also a coalition member. “It’s critical that our next leader recognizes the importance of these schools as the heart of our city’s economy and future.”  

Jim Davidson Jr., a retired chancery court judge, said the coalition isn’t dissuading interested candidates from applying for the presidency. The group worried that IHL would announce a name before the process could even begin. 

“We don’t know what IHL will do,” Davidson said. “But we want them to know that people in our community are talking about names who would make great leaders. We want to help them.” 

Clarification 08/31/26: This story has been updated to reflect that Scott Tollison, interim president of the Mississippi University for Women, said he is focusing on providing transitional leadership and has not thought about the permanent role.

CLEVELAND — Just 30 minutes down the road from the Mississippi prison where they are serving time, Lee Andrew Smith and six other incarcerated people felt free — for a few hours.

On stage before a crowd of more than 100 people at the GRAMMY Museum Mississippi, Smith riffed on his guitar alongside fellow members of the Parchman prison band. About halfway through a rendition of Luke Combs’ “15 Minutes,” tears begin to stream down his face.

All kinds of things cross your mind

With all this doin’ time

And a chain gang waitin’ in a long line to use this phone

Same old view, a cinder block room, same old jumpsuit on

I’m just tryna make the best of the rest of this life sentence

But enough about me, I only get 15 minutes

The 44-year-old Smith — who has a close haircut and a salt-and-pepper beard — turned his back to the crowd. He continued playing his guitar, standing there in his well-worn brown cowboy boots and prison-issued, green-and-white striped pants, before walking off stage. After a moment, he returned.

In the audience, tears flowed down his wife’s face. “I feel what he feels,” Joann Smith said. “He was thinking about home … he misses his children, misses his mom, wants to be home with his mom, so all of those things probably ran across his mind.”

The concert this summer was the third stop on the Parchman Band’s tour through the state with country singer-songwriter Charlie Worsham. It’s part of a musical tradition that dates back to the early 1930s at the prison. The Mississippi State Penitentiary, a prison farm, has a long history of brutality and sits on about 18,000 acres of flat, fertile land in the Mississippi Delta, where the blues were born.

“The torch has been passed down to us,” said Leonard “LJ” Stevenson Jr., 33, a founding member of the latest iteration of the band. They’ve since played at other prisons and festivals and shared the stage with blues legend Bobby Rush. “I’ve heard some of the old ’60s Parchman Band originals, and I can relate to it because I’m living it firsthand,” Stevenson said. “That was basically prison blues.”

Playing in the band offers the incarcerated men a chance to experience life outside the walls, said Marc McClure, the former superintendent at Parchman who restarted the group in 2023. Proceeds from the band go into the state’s inmate welfare fund.

“(The band) gives them that opportunity for one moment to be human and be accepted, which leads them down the road to forgiveness and redemption, and they can be different than what got them there,” he said. “The crime doesn’t dictate their life forever. That band gives them that hope.”

With Smith on lead guitar and Stevenson playing bass, the band also includes Houston Jones on keyboard, drummer Jakellsey Hollis, and vocalists Steven Chambers, Charles Glassco and Michael Snell. The white and green stripes on their pants are indelible reminders of their biggest mistakes, but their music — and the album that will be coming out next year — are a testament to them being so much more.

On that spring night at the museum, the band played its way through a full spectrum of emotions, from slow ballads serenading women they love to electrifying originals that talk of wild times before prison. They also backed Worsham on some of his own songs, and recreated some country covers that evoked the reality of doing hard time in Mississippi.

Stevenson played in the background, laying the bassline that undergirded the songs. As he and his band members got into a groove, a slight smile peeked out from behind his cinnamon-brown beard. Smith’s fingers, almost a blur to the naked eye, glided effortlessly across the strings as he traded solos with Worsham and Jones.

Though he stood at the back of the stage, Smith performed in a way that demanded attention. He smiled and pointed out the prettiest woman in the room — his wife — before the band performed a soulful rendition of Chris Stapleton’s “Tennessee Whiskey.”

You’re as smooth as Tennessee whiskey,

You’re as sweet as strawberry wine

You’re as warm as a glass of brandy

And honey, I stay stoned on your love all the time

Smith stepped to the front of the stage, not missing a beat as he stared into his wife’s eyes. He walked his fingers up and down the electric guitar’s neck, delivering a complex solo that drew applause and cheers from the audience.

“Music is his freedom,” his wife said. “He’s free when he’s dealing with any type of instrument.”

The men took turns in the spotlight, telling stories of love and redemption through songs that will be featured on their upcoming album.

Vocalist Charles Glassco, also known as Beast, introduced a high-energy song he wrote for his wife called “Love You Out Loud,” about proclaiming his love publicly, no matter where they are. And Jones, who played both guitar and keyboard in the show, introduced a low-key ballad he wrote to his daughter, who he described as “a great friend.”

I tried my best, just couldn’t give it all to you

I couldn’t be who you needed me to be

But I just wanted you to see

…

I would climb the tallest mountain

Part the Red Sea

Just to have you right here next to me

The themes of love, hard times and redemption in their music have roots in the Delta. It’s a place where Black people — ensnared in the traps of racial terror and White supremacy — made meaning of life on a prison farm as they provided free labor for the state. Incarcerated people worked in the fields, picking cotton, hoeing corn, and working for the state in what historian David Oshinsky called “the closest thing to slavery that survived the Civil War.” They worked to the sounds of field hollers to keep the work tempo and pass the time.

Over the past century, legal action brought an end to corporal punishment, including with a leather whip named “Black Annie”; the end of prisoners given the power to shoot fellow incarcerated people; and upgrades to Parchman. Yet, violence, rampant drug use, poor security, and a brutal underground economy run by gangs have endured.

The music has endured, too, except for a gap in the 1990s.

Like more than 2,000 Mississippians today, Smith, Stevenson, Jones and Chambers have been sentenced to spend the rest of their lives in prison. Stevenson said his life sentence is torture, mentally. “I have a family. I’m engaged now. I have a kid,” he said. “It’s hard being on the phone with them, and not being able to hear first words, see first steps, first heartbreak, first game.”

But he and the other band members are among the few who get to leave the prison grounds and play music in the free world.

“This is as good as it gets for guys like Houston, guys like LJ, because they’re never going home. This is home,” said Trish Doty, a former prison warden who once did vocal coaching with the band and coached LJ in softball. “What sort of justice does it serve to lock them up and throw away a key and give them nothing?”

After the show ended, Smith took the stage again.

“I can’t help but to cry with certain things going on, because this is a thing that I dreamed of all my life. And even though I have this on,” he said, his voice cracking as he pointed down at his green-and-white stripes before pointing up toward the sky, “God’s still fulfilling his promise for me. I’m so grateful.”

“God is good,” an audience member shouted out.

“Yes,” Smith said, “He is.”

This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project – Jackson, a nonprofit news team covering Mississippi’s criminal justice systems.

Housing advocates are pushing for stronger protections for Mississippi renters, arguing state law leaves tenants with limited options when problems with their housing go unresolved. 

Tenants generally cannot withhold rent over needed repairs, and state law limits when they can make repairs themselves and recover the costs. For renters who cannot afford to move, advocates say those restrictions can leave few immediate options. 

Lily Coleman faced that dilemma when she and other residents at Addison Place Apartments in Jackson went more than a month without running water. 

Coleman, who has lived at the complex since 2018, said she continued paying rent because she did not want to risk eviction. 

“We’re going to still pay rent, and we are going to pay whatever we got to pay because we are not trying to get evicted,” Coleman said. “We don’t pay for the water over here — they pay for it.” 

 Coleman said the cost of moving also leaves her with few alternatives. 

“We cannot move right now,” Coleman said. “We’re trying to save some money right now to get in a position to move.” 

Several major water shutoffs at Jackson apartment complexes with large outstanding utility balances raised concerns about protections for tenants who can lose service because of bills tied to their properties.

Mississippi law strengthened those protections this year through House Bill 1404, which makes it a crime to knowingly, willfully and unlawfully fail to apply utility payments collected from tenants to the bills for which the money was collected. 

Ashley Richardson, director of housing law at the Mississippi Center for Justice, said the new utility law is progress but more is needed to protect tenants. 

The organization is seeking changes that include more notice before evictions for nonpayment of rent, regulation of rent-to-own housing contracts, changes to the repair-and-deduct law and creation of a state fair housing act.  

“In the work that I do with MCJ, I would say that the Mississippi landlord-tenant statute favors landlords more than tenants,” Richardson said. 

Mississippi’s Residential Landlord and Tenant Act requires landlords to comply with building and housing codes that materially affect health and safety and maintain rental units and their plumbing, heating and cooling systems in substantially the same condition as when the lease began, excluding reasonable wear and tear. 

Those requirements may not apply when a tenant deliberately or negligently causes the damage. State law also allows some maintenance responsibilities to be assigned through a written agreement. 

Tenants cannot simply stop paying rent when a landlord fails to make a repair. Instead, state law provides a process for making certain repairs and seeking reimbursement. 

To use that process, a tenant must provide written notice of a specific and material defect and give the landlord 30 days to make the repair. If the landlord does not, the tenant can pay for the repair and seek reimbursement.

After receiving receipts, the landlord has 45 days to reimburse the tenant or offset repair costs against future rent. 

Richardson said those requirements can make the process difficult when repairs are urgent or tenants cannot afford to pay upfront. 

“Depending on the repair, they might need something sooner than 30 days,” Richardson said. “A lot of the people that we service, they don’t have the money to pay for the repairs themselves.” 

Richardson said deposits and other upfront expenses can create similar barriers for tenants with limited financial resources. 

“We see that a lot of people don’t have the money to just pick up and move somewhere else,” Richardson said. 

Beyond the financial barriers, tenants can also struggle to understand what protections are available to them. 

Rep. Fabian Nelson, D-Byram, has twice introduced legislation to loosen restrictions on the repair-and-deduct process. 

Nelson introduced bills in 2025 and 2026 that would have eliminated the one-month rent limit on repair costs and allowed tenants to use the remedy more than once in six months. His most recent proposal, House Bill 442, died in committee. 

Correction, 8/31/2026: This article has been updated to show Rep. Fabian Nelson is from Byram.

Mathematically speaking, Democrat Scott Colom’s chances of defeating Republican U.S. Sen. Cindy-Hyde-Smith this November might be underestimated.

Many prediction markets give Democrats a near even money chance of capturing the Senate in the November midterm election, based on surprising polling numbers in usual red states including Texas, Alaska, Iowa and Ohio.

But neither those prediction markets nor the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee are counting on Mississippi being a state that helps put the Democrats over the top.

Granted, the odds are far from favorable for Colom, a district attorney from Lowndes County, to upset Hyde-Smith, who was appointed in 2018 to the Senate by then-Gov. Phil Bryant after Thad Cochran stepped down. This is her third election campaign since the appointment.

The reasons Colom is considered a long-shot are many. Mississippi last elected a Democrat to the Senate in 1982, and the last Democratic governor was elected in 1999. A Democrat has not won a statewide election in Mississippi since 2015, when Jim Hood was reelected as attorney general.

In addition, a U.S. senator from Mississippi has not been defeated since 1942. From an historical standpoint, things don’t look good for Colom

And on top of everything else, it is not clear how many votes independent Senate candidate Ty Pinkins, a former Democrat, will siphon from Colom. Pinkins could erase the slight chance Colom has.

But let’s consider a path forward for Colom with the assumption that Pinkins’ impact will be minimal.

Based on recent election results, there is a mathematical path forward – at least the proverbial puncher’s chance – for a Colom victory.

The outcomes of the two most recent statewide elections – the 2024 U.S. presidential election and the 2023 gubernatorial election – provide a roadmap for Colom and his supporters.

In the 2024 general election, 1,228,008 Mississippians voted and gave Republican Donald Trump a sizable 60% to 38% victory over Democrat Kamala Harris. The turnout will be less in this November’s midterm. History tells us it will be much less.

But perhaps turnout in a midterm election could equal that of the 2023 Mississippi gubernatorial election, when some 821,000 people voted. In that election, Republican incumbent Tate Reeves held on to defeat Northern District Public Service Commissioner Brandon Presley 51% to 48% or by a mere 26,619 votes.

Every election is different, but some patterns do emerge.

Granted, these are big ifs, but it is reasonable to assume that the turnout this November will be similar to that in the 2023 gubernatorial election – higher than most federal midterm elections but less than a presidential election.

And if that is the case, it is not far-fetched for Colom to find 27,000 more votes, or enough to put him over the top.

Consider the possibility that national polls are correct and the enthusiasm among Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters is much higher than that of Republican voters. A recent national poll indicates that Trump is underwater – more unpopular than popular– in every state except Idaho, Wyoming and West Virginia. His approval rating in Mississippi is minus 15, according to the YouGov polling tracked by The Economist.

Still, where does Colom find 27,000 additional votes if, indeed, the 2023 gubernatorial election is the benchmark?

In just five larger counties, – Hinds, Rankin, Harrison, Madison and DeSoto – if the Democratic turnout is similar to the 2024 presidential election in Mississippi, Colom could easily garner 30,000 votes. That is not even taking into account whether he could make similar inroads in other larger counties, such as Lee, Lowndes, Forrest and others.

Heck, just in DeSoto County in northwest Mississippi, 14,000 more people voted for Harris in 2024 than voted for Presley in the 2023 gubernatorial contest.

Can Colom convince the people who came out to vote for Kamala Harris in 2023 to go to the polls in November and vote for him?

If Colom can gain a margin closer to the 2024 Democratic turnout and Republicans vote at their traditional midterm election numbers, Colom can win. He does not need to equal the turnout Harris received in 2024. He just has to be considerably closer to it than to the Presley turnout in 2023.

Sure, it is a big if, but mathematically speaking, it is possible.

On the Fourth of July, a picture of a black bear sitting on the edge of a Tennessee cornfield sparked a social media flurry.

It was the beginning of a deluge. Over the next month, bears would be recorded running through yards and sprinting through a golf course on a rainy day. 

Reactions ranged from bewilderment to humor. Many responded with shock — mainly over the location. Because these bears were not being observed in the rolling mountains and hollows of East Tennessee. They were hundreds of miles away, on the opposite side of the state, in the flatlands of West Tennessee. 

But these sightings did not surprise Dan Gibbs, black bear coordinator at the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency. While most black bears in Tennessee are concentrated in the east, reports from Middle and West Tennessee residents have steadily streamed in over recent years.

The recent sightings are likely several bears that probably came from bordering states with expanding populations, like Kentucky, Mississippi, Arkansas and Missouri.

“It will be a slow process, but bears are going to recolonize Middle and West Tennessee,” Gibbs said. “You can’t stop it … they’re going to be in northern Mississippi, they’re going to be in eastern Arkansas, eastern Missouri, western Kentucky. That’s just their historical range, and they’re going to reclaim it.”

Mississippi Alluvial Valley was ‘breadbasket’ for black bears

Black bears were once abundant across most of the United States, including the lower Mississippi River basin. But decades of habitat destruction and overhunting in the 1800s and 1900s threatened to wipe out the population altogether. In Tennessee, the animals’ range shrunk to just 10 secluded, mountainous counties along the state’s eastern border by the early 1970s.

In Mississippi, the population was estimated at just 12 bears when the Mississippi Game and Fish Commission (now Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks) was founded in 1932.

One of the biggest misconceptions about black bears is that they are a mountain species.

They’re really “generalists” that can survive — and thrive — in a variety of ecosystems, including swamps and wetlands. In Tennessee, European settlement and hunting pushed bears into the Great Smoky Mountains and the Cherokee National Forest, large areas of conserved land and places that were harder for people to reach. But wetlands are rich, productive ecosystems that make great food sources for black bears.

“The whole Mississippi Alluvial Valley … the historical floodwaters that used to flood miles and miles before the levee system, that was kind of the breadbasket of the black bears in this part of the Southeast,” said Anthony Ballard, black bear program leader for the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks.

Mississippi’s core black bear population is concentrated along the Mississippi River in the bottomland hardwood systems — frequently flooded, low-lying areas where oak, hickory and old-growth cypress trees are common. Increasingly, bears are colonizing the state’s southeast corner, establishing home ranges in a very different habitat: pine stands with thick underbrush, Ballard said.

Another myth about black bears is that they form their dens in caves, according to Janelle Musser, TWRA’s assistant black bear coordinator. In reality, caves are damp and not particularly attractive.

“They are great at finding dens in the habitat that they are living in,” Musser said. 

In southern Alabama, bears often create dens in shallow depressions in brush on the ground. In the Mississippi Delta, dens can be found in cane thickets and tree tops, Ballard said, sometimes as high as 50 feet off the ground in old-growth cypress.

Black bear populations take decades to recolonize.

Female black bears don’t begin to have cubs until they reach 3 years of age, and if they’re eating natural foods, they’ll have a couple of cubs every other year. Young males begin to move away from their mothers at around a year and a half old, sometimes traveling tens or hundreds of miles to establish their own home range, Ballard said. “It’s kind of nature’s way of making sure that there’s not inbreeding.”

Male black bears can have home ranges anywhere from 25 to more than 60 square miles, depending on the availability of food and presence of female bears. Females’ home ranges are much smaller, and a female cub’s home range may overlap with her mother’s. 

These large home ranges and frequent movement make it difficult to survey bear populations, Gibbs said.

A population of black bears is generally considered “established” if there are breeding females in the area. 

Tennessee has received cub sighting reports in counties just east of Nashville, Gibbs said. But it will probably be another 10 to 15 years before Middle and West Tennessee have a bear population large enough to survey.

Bear hunting

Hunting black bears was a “part of life” in the Southeast in the 1800s and early 1900s, Ballard said. “It was as much a part of the hunting world as whitetail deer are today.”

Davy Crockett wrote about killing dozens of bears in a personal account of his life published in 1834. “Of all the hunting I ever did, I have always delighted most in bear hunting,” he wrote. When Crockett arrived in Lincoln County, just north of the Alabama-Tennessee border, around 1809, he noted an “abundance” of deer and smaller game, “but the bear had been much hunted in these parts before, and were not so plenty as I could have wished,” Crockett wrote. He had better luck along the Obion River in the western-most part of the state.

Almost a century later, President Theodore Roosevelt went on a storied hunting trip in Mississippi in 1902, failing to find a bear. When assistants located a bear, tied it to a tree and suggested he shoot it, Roosevelt refused. The story led to the invention of the Teddy Bear. 

Mississippi put protections in place preventing black bear hunting in 1932, when the estimated population dropped to around 12 bears. 

Arkansas — once called the Bear State — was home to an estimated 50,000 black bears before settlement began, according to the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. The state banned black bear hunting in 1927 due to declining populations. By the 1950s, an estimated 40 to 50 bears remained in the state, according to an article published in The Mountain Echo in 1979. 

Arkansas officials trucked in more than 250 black bears from Minnesota and Manitoba, Canada, to the Ozark and Ouachita Mountains in western Arkansas in the 1960s in an attempt to bolster their population. Today, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission estimates there are around 5,000 black bears in the state.

Louisiana’s Wildlife and Fisheries Commission closed all bear harvest seasons temporarily in 1956 as the population there plummeted. The state similarly brought 161 bears from Minnesota to the Mississippi and Atchafalaya River basins from 1964 through 1967, but continued habitat destruction as agriculture replaced forest land contributed to continuing population decline, according to Louisiana’s Black Bear Management Plan. 

The state banned bear hunting in the late 1980s, and the Louisiana black bear was listed as a federally threatened species in 1992.

At least two dozen of the bears relocated to Louisiana were recorded as killed, according to a 1968 article in The Times-Picayune. Others wandered far from their release sites, with one recorded traveling 260 miles. Musser said moving bears away from their home range is not considered effective practice now, because bears frequently attempt to find their way back, increasing the chance that they are killed on the journey.

A 2003 study found that bears in the Arkansas mountains have genetics indicating they descended from bears released in the reintroduction program.

After population growth, the Louisiana black bear was removed from the federally threatened species list in 2016, and the state opened a limited December hunting season in 2024. Louisiana issued 26 tags to hunters in 2025, allowing each to bag one bear. The number of tags increased to 42 this year, and the state’s wildlife department expanded hunting boundaries. The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries estimates there are now around 1,500 black bears in the state.

Black bears were thought to be all but wiped out in Missouri by 1931, but sightings began to tick up after Arkansas began its reintroduction program in the late 1950s. Missouri opened a limited, highly regulated hunting season in 2021, and the University of Missouri Extension now estimates there are around 1,000 black bears in the state.

Tennessee closed its hunting season from 1970 through 1972, and partnered with North Carolina and Georgia in 1976 to share management information, ultimately adding Kentucky, South Carolina and Virginia to the fold. Tennessee’s black bear hunting regulations are focused on reducing poaching and protecting breeding females. Bear hunting is prohibited in more than 450,000 acres of bear sanctuary reserves, including the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. Tennessee estimates its current population at around 6,000 bears.

Mississippi has yet to reopen a hunting season for black bears. The state has been studying its black bear population in a standalone program since 2002, initially collaring individual bears to document their home range habitat and reproduction. The population has since grown to the size that it’s no longer feasible to track each individual. 

The program is expected to release its most up-to-date population estimates in the coming weeks. (The state typically waits 10 years between estimates to measure a full generation.) The most recent estimate from 2012 put the bear count between 150 to 300.

“Obviously, there’s a lot more now,” Ballard said.

A bill that would have forced a hunting season in 2027 passed through Mississippi’s Senate last year but stopped in the House. Ballard said there’s no set bear population that the state needs to reach before granting hunting licenses, but there are many considerations, including different management objectives for different populations and parts of the state. 

“We don’t shy away from the fact that we want to have a season, because that’s a natural outgrowth of having a sustainable population,” Ballard said. “We just want to make sure that we’re not doing it at the risk of potentially over-harvesting an animal that’s just made a recovery to a point where we can harvest.”

Mississippi wouldn’t want to over-harvest its “core population” along the state’s western edge, he said, but in the Southeast, where there are more human developments and less ideal habitat, there may be a different hunting strategy.

Coexistence

Residents and visitors to areas with black bear sightings should start preparing now to live alongside established bear populations, Musser said. 

“We don’t know exactly how long that will be until it’s more common per se, but if they continue to wait (to adjust), that’s when we’re going to see those (human-) bear conflicts,” she said.

That means learning more about black bears using resources like bearwise.org and transitioning to using bear-resistant trash cans in residential and public areas.

“We have many people in East Tennessee living with bears, and throughout the country, living in areas with bears, and it’s not a huge safety risk as long as you do a few simple things,” Musser said.

One of those things is preventing bears from eating human food. In Tennessee, it is now a Class B misdemeanor to feed a black bear or fail to secure trash in areas where the state fish and wildlife commission prohibits it.

“I try to impress upon people just how good of a sense of smell that bears have. It’s about seven times better than a bloodhound,” Ballard said. “Anything that a dog can get into, a bear is going to be able to smell better and is going to be much more able to get into that.”

Farmers may see bears attempting to eat crops, mostly corn, Ballard and Gibbs said. But populations in West Tennessee and Mississippi are not dense enough to make a noticeable difference.

Compared to other animals like deer, Ballard said, bears cause much less crop damage. Gibbs said people have had success using herd dogs to keep bears, coyotes and other animals away from livestock and crops. 

For smaller-scale farms and chicken coops, electric fences may be a solution, Musser and Ballard said.

And then there’s hazing — using loud noise deterrents or paintball guns to scare bears away.

“Stuff that doesn’t cause long-term harm, but enough that it makes that bear uncomfortable,” Musser said.

Chris Dowdy, 52, grew up in Paris, Tennessee. He has a picture of his grandmother from the 1950s standing next to a bear in her yard. He describes himself as an outdoorsman and hunter. “Ironically,” he said, “my grandmother … and myself are descendants of Davy Crockett.”

He now lives in Dover, which has had several recent reported bear sightings. Dowdy said he welcomes the animals’ return to their original habitat. 

Their presence in West Tennessee is literally written into the region’s maps, he said: Dover abuts the Cumberland River, and has an area called “Cub Creek.” To the east, an unincorporated town called Bear Spring was named for the place where the supposed last bear in Stewart County was killed, according to a 1928 article in the Nashville Banner.

“It’s not abnormal (for bears to coexist with people), it’s just abnormal to us because it’s not something we’re used to having,” he said.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding

A Nigerian man will face federal prosecution for sextortion of a Mississippi teenager, leading to the 16-year-old’s death by suicide. 

On Friday, Adebola Festus Adekunle, 26, of Lagos, Nigeria, appeared in federal court in Oxford. 

He is charged with a number of crimes, including the sexual exploitation that resulted in the death of Walker Montgomery of Starkville and production of child sexual abuse material. 

In 2022, Walker died by suicide after Adekunle, allegedly posing as another person, convinced the teenager in an Instagram message to open a video chat and have a sexual encounter, not knowing it was recorded, said Brian Montomgery, the teen’s father in a campaign video against sextortion. 

Later, Adekunle contacted Walker again and allegedly demanded $1,000 to prevent the video from being sent to friends and family. The teen said he didn’t have the money and begged for the video not to be released. By the early morning, he was dead. 

“Walker Montgomery should be here with us today. He should be moving into his dormitory, meeting up with friends, and running to class. That he is not is a tragedy,” Attorney General Lynn Fitch said in a Friday statement. 

“This trial cannot bring back Walker, and the Montgomery Family will always hurt. But I hope that today they get some closure, and some assurances that Walker will get justice.”

The FBI arrested Adekunle in Nigeria in August 2023 as part of a wider operation to arrest sexual extortionists targeting minors in the United States. He was extradited to the U.S. Thursday. 

He faces up to a life sentence. The charge of child exploitation resulting in death alone carries a mandatory 30-year sentence. 

“Sextortion is a serious crime with devastating consequences. Its impact on victims and their families is profound and long‑lasting,” Special Agent in Charge of the FBI Jackson Field Office Robert Eikhoff said in a Friday statement. “The extradition of Adekunle sends a clear and unmistakable message: crossing state lines does not erase criminal charges, and international borders do not shield individuals from accountability.”

The FBI says it has seen an increase in financial sextortion cases targeting minors.

U.S. Attorney Scott Leary gave credit to state, federal and international partners, including Nigeria’s attorney general and the minister of justice in working on the case. 

In 2021, Mississippi criminalized revenge porn. A first offense is a misdemeanor that carries six months in jail or a $1,000 fine. A second offense is a felony punishable with a year in jail or a $2,000 fine.

To remember Walker and address future crimes, the Mississippi Legislature passed “Walker’s Law” making sextortion a criminal offense punishable by up to five years in prison for a first offense and up to 15 for a third or subsequent offense. 

In addition, Gov. Tate Reeves signed the “Walker Montgomery Protecting Children Online Act,” which requires age verification on social media platforms. Months after its passage, industry trade group NetChoice challenged the law’s constitutionality, and a federal judge issued an injunction blocking its enforcement. The state appealed to a panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. 

When her office defended the law, Fitch told the judges that age verification could help protect young people from “sexual abuse, trafficking, physical violence, sextortion and more,” activities that the First Amendment does not protect. 

Last year, the federal appeals court allowed the age verification law to take effect.