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Mississippi has a long history of voter suppression. An 1890 rule that permanently strips people convicted of certain crimes of their right to vote remains in the state’s constitution. This practice, called felony disenfranchisement, impacts an estimated 55,000 people today. State lawmakers this year considered, then rejected, lifting the voting ban for some nonviolent offenses.

When Mississippi was admitted to the union in 1817, White men reserved decision-making power for themselves. After the Civil War, they used violence, terror and Jim Crow laws to keep power in their own hands and out of the hands of the formerly enslaved Black people who outnumbered them. Here is a quick look at how voting intimidation and voting rights have evolved through the last 150 years.

READ MORE: How Mississippi’s Jim Crow Laws Still Haunt Black Voters Today

1865

The Civil War ended, freeing enslaved people in Mississippi and starting the period known as Reconstruction. Enslaved Black people accounted for 55% of the state population in 1860.

1866

A federal civil rights bill is passed. At the same time, the White-controlled Mississippi government created “Black Codes,” which criminalized behaviors and conditions of newly freed Black people such as being unemployed, required them to get special licenses to preach and own guns, and required Black children to work as apprentices to former slave masters.

1867

After federal officials took control of voter registration, more than 79,000 Black men registered to vote by the fall. Mississippi voters elected 94 delegates, including 16 Black men, to write a state constitution that would admit Mississippi back to the Union. This 1868 constitution granted citizenship and extended civil liberties to Black men. By this time, nearly 97% of eligible Black men had registered to vote.

1869

Mississippi elected its first Black secretary of state and its first Black legislators in 1869. When they took office in 1870, Black men constituted 14% of the state Senate and 47% of the state House of Representatives. That same year, Mississippi’s Legislature sent Hiram Rhodes Revels, the first Black U.S. senator in the nation, to fill the state’s vacant Senate seat.

1870-1875

Black political representation increased for Mississippians. They elected a Black lieutenant governor in 1873 and another Black U.S. senator in 1874, and consistently held the secretary of state position through 1874. The 1874-1875 legislature reflected the height of Black political representation, with 69 Black men across the state House and Senate.

1875

White Democrats devised what is known as the first “Mississippi Plan” that used violence and intimidation to stop Black people from voting. White vigilantes and paramilitary groups including the Ku Klux Klan committed a series of massacres, including the Vicksburg Massacre of 1874, which killed as many as 300 Black people, and the Clinton Massacre of 1875, which killed about 50 Black people.

1877

Federal troops were withdrawn from Mississippi, ending Reconstruction, and ushering in the era of Jim Crow laws that legalized racial segregation.

1890

The state constitution was rewritten, adding felony disenfranchisement crimes and introducing voter suppression methods such as literacy tests and poll taxes. These were all part of a second “Mississippi Plan,” a concerted effort by White leaders to nullify the Black vote. By 1892, less than 6% of eligible Black men were registered to vote.

Crimes that would lead to a lifetime loss of voting rights were bribery, burglary, theft, arson, obtaining money or goods under false pretenses, perjury, forgery, embezzlement and bigamy.

1910-1930

Many Black Mississippians left the state during the Great Migration. By 1940, they no longer constituted a majority in the state.

1950

Burglary was removed from the list of disenfranchising crimes in the state’s constitution.

1963

Mississippi’s racial violence and civil rights activism became national flashpoints. NAACP Field Secretary Medgar Evers was assassinated in Mississippi. President John F. Kennedy called for a civil rights bill in the wake of Evers’ murder and was assassinated months later.

1964

President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Council of Federated Organizations, a coalition of civil rights groups, led several large efforts, including the “Freedom Summer” of 1964, to boost statewide voter education and registration.

A week after Freedom Summer began, Ku Klux Klan members murdered local activist James Chaney, along with volunteers Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, both from New York. Later that summer, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party ??sent a delegation to the Democratic National Convention, where Fannie Lou Hamer testified on national television about the abuse she faced when trying to register to vote.

As Mississippi became a battleground, GOP presidential candidate Barry Goldwater visited the Neshoba County Fair in August, just a week after Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney’s bodies were found buried in a dam. Goldwater, who carried the state in the national election, represented a shift in conservatism that equated civil rights activism with lawlessness and laid the foundation for “tough on crime” rhetoric that would lead to mass incarceration.

1965

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights held hearings in Jackson and found Mississippi’s voting practices discriminatory. Months later, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed, prohibiting racial discrimination in voting. The following year, a federal court ruled Mississippi’s poll tax unconstitutional. Black political participation began to rise again and in 1967, the state elected Robert G. Clark Jr., its first Black representative since Reconstruction.

1968

Murder and rape were added to the list of disenfranchising crimes in the state’s Constitution.

1970 and beyond

Mass incarceration began to take hold in Mississippi and across the nation. Since 1983, prison populations in the state increased more than 200%, according to the Vera Institute. National “tough on crime” rhetoric contributed to the increase in convictions. Though people not convicted of disenfranchising crimes were allowed to vote from Mississippi’s prisons and jails, many faced challenges in accessing ballots.

1998

In Cotton v. Fordice, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the felony disenfranchisement clause in the state constitution, stating that its amendments to remove burglary in 1950 and add murder and rape in 1968 took away its “discriminatory taint.”

2008

The Mississippi House passed a bill to restore voting rights to those convicted of felonies, excluding murder and rape. The bill died in the state Senate.

2023

A three-judge U.S. Fifth Circuit Court panel ruled that Mississippi’s lifetime voting ban violated the Eighth Amendment’s “cruel and unusual punishment” prohibition. The full appeals court is reconsidering the case, leaving the disenfranchisement laws unchanged.

March 2024

The Mississippi House of Representatives advanced legislation to restore the right to vote for people convicted of some nonviolent offenses. The bill died in the state Senate in April. 

Sources: Mississippi Department of Archives and History; Mississippi Encyclopedia; SNCC Digital Gateway; A Bicentennial History of Mississippi 1817-2017 by Mississippi Secretary of State; National Park Service; Against All Odds: The First Black Legislators in Mississippi by DeeDee Baldwin; Zinn Education Project; Library of Congress; Vera Institute; The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander; Voting in Mississippi: A Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights 1965.

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This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system, and Mississippi Today. Sign up for The Marshall Project’s Jackson newsletter, and follow them on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and Facebook.

Charles Caldwell was never meant to have a voice. Mississippi’s White ruling class made sure of it.

He was part of Mississippi’s silenced majority in 1860 — 436,600 enslaved people to 354,000 White people, according to the Census — who would be granted full citizenship after the Civil War.

By 1868, Caldwell was one of 16 Black delegates at the state’s post-war constitutional convention, which extended the right to vote to all men and created a framework for public education.

Described in a White politician’s historical account of the Clinton Riot as “one of the most daring and desperate negroes of his day,” Caldwell was “the dominant factor in local Republican politics.”

In December 1875, Caldwell was lured to a cellar for a celebratory Christmas drink. He was ambushed — shot once from behind — and then carried into the street, where a White mob riddled him with bullets. Caldwell, who rose from servitude to become a state senator, was once again silenced. 

His murder was a calculated part of white supremacists’ post-war efforts, collectively known as the Mississippi Plan, to maintain political control by White men, whom freedmen outnumbered. In the post-war South, white supremacists used lynchings, massacres and intimidation to silence the Black people they once owned, then cemented racism into the state’s 1890 constitution to further restrict the Black vote. 

Although most other racist sections of Mississippi’s 1890 constitution were erased by the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, one part of the plan continues to stalk Black voters today. Called felony disenfranchisement, the constitution takes away — for life — the right to vote upon conviction for several low-level crimes, like theft and bribery, that the 1890 drafters felt would be mostly committed by Black people.

A bill that would reinstate voting rights for thousands convicted of nonviolent offenses was passed by the Mississippi House of Representatives in March but died this week in the state Senate. Republicans control both chambers.

Section 241, the disenfranchisement clause of the constitution, has since been expanded and interpreted to cover 102 crimes. 

Why was voter disenfranchisement created? In 1890, state Rep. James K. Vardaman, who would later be elected governor, said, “There is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter. … Mississippi’s constitutional convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the [n-word] from politics.”

Over the past 30 years, approximately 55,000 Mississippians have lost their rights to vote due to felony disenfranchisement. About six out of 10 are Black, according to state conviction records reviewed by The Marshall Project – Jackson.

An effort to overturn the state’s disenfranchisement law has gone before the U.S. Supreme Court twice, and the case was twice rejected by the majority. In her 2023 dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson rebuked the law’s racist intent, saying it contained “the most toxic of substances” that needed to be removed.

In addition to disenfranchisement, the 1890 delegates crafted legal language around racism and conditions perpetuated by slavery. Poll taxes and literacy tests attacked the lack of wealth and education. Left out of Section 241 were violent crimes — murder, rape and assault — that were often part of white supremacists’ terroristic strategy. 

In an 1896 case, the Mississippi Supreme Court noted the choice of disenfranchising crimes was racist. “Restrained by the federal constitution from discriminating against the negro race, the convention discriminated against its characteristics and the offenses to which its weaker members were prone,” the court wrote. It describes Black people as “patient, docile people,” more inclined to “furtive offenses than to the robust crimes of the whites.”

Yet as 20th-century civil rights laws stripped away most voting restrictions, voter disenfranchisement remained because civil rights have never come easy to Mississippi, voting advocates say.

“There’s never been a time period in Mississippi history where we have done what the federal government has wanted us to do without the federal government having to directly step in and make us do it,” said Hannah Williams, policy and research director of voting rights advocacy group Mississippi Votes. “Even now.”  

“Movements change, but commitments don’t,” said Flonzie Brown Wright, the first Black woman in the state elected to public office in a racially mixed town. “Call it whatever you want to call it,” Brown Wright told The Marshall Project – Jackson. “But the common denominator is: Let’s [not] give these minorities any power.”

Civil rights gains — and new ways to stop them

Mississippi is one of 13 states that imposes a lifetime voting ban, even after the end of a felony sentence. In most of those states, lifetime disenfranchisement is for violent crimes or government corruption. In Mississippi, a single felony conviction for writing a bad check or shoplifting takes away the right to vote.

Across the nation, courts and state legislatures have restored voting rights for people convicted of felonies. Since 1997, 26 states and the District of Columbia have expanded voting rights for people with felony convictions, according to The Sentencing Project. 

Mississippians last amended Section 241 in 1968 — to add murder and rape to the list of disenfranchising crimes, after burglary was removed in 1950. (See the full list of offenses here.) 

Though they once outnumbered White people in the state, Black people have never held a majority of representation in the state’s government. Robert Luckett, a civil rights historian and professor at Jackson State University, said the modern conservatism that rules Mississippi can be traced back to the insidious Mississippi Plan to eliminate Black political power. 

“Conservatives today, especially in the South, didn’t just pop up out of nowhere,” Luckett said. In his view, “they are directly descended from segregationists, from white supremacy.” 

The plan effectively suppressed the Black vote in the 19th and 20th centuries. Luckett and other historians said White political control continues to evolve in the 21st century.

Between 1875 and 1892, the number of Black voters plummeted. Though about 67% had been registered in 1867, fewer than 6% of eligible Black men were registered to vote by 1892, according to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. 

Starting early in the 20th century, hundreds of thousands of Black Mississippians left the state during the Great Migration caused by economic and social hardships. By 1940, Black people were no longer a majority in the state. And in many rural places, the order established by slavery remained. Black sharecroppers farmed land owned by White people.

Except for a few pockets of Black political power, such as the all-Black town of Mound Bayou in Bolivar County, the Black vote in Mississippi remained largely dormant until the 1960s.

Black people who remained in Mississippi faced much of the same oppression as their ancestors: lynchings, beatings, intimidation and imprisonment.

George W. Lee, a preacher in Belzoni, Mississippi, was murdered for his efforts to register Black voters in 1955. Fannie Lou Hamer, who rose to become a national civil rights champion, sharecropped in rural Ruleville, Mississippi, and had no idea she could vote until she was 44 years old. Hamer was arrested, sexually assaulted and beaten so brutally that it left her with kidney damage and a permanent limp, she testified at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. 

Brown Wright said her father was fired from his job because of her activism. Before her barrier-breaking election in 1968, more than 1,000 civil rights protesters in Jackson were arrested and held in livestock pens in 1965, in one of the largest mass arrests of the Civil Rights Movement.

The passage of the federal Voting Rights Act in 1965 protected the right of Black citizens to vote and outlawed discriminatory barriers like literacy tests. By 1968, 60% of eligible Black residents had registered to vote, and Mississippians elected their first Black state legislator since Reconstruction, according to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Brown Wright won her race for the elections commission in Canton, despite a rule change that required her to win votes across all parts of Madison County, instead of just the votes from the single district she would represent. 

“It was a clear case of voter suppression,” she said. 

After she took office at age 26, she said the board routinely denied her lists of poll workers who had been community activists and disqualified Black candidates. She sued to overturn the discriminatory actions and won.

White people “never intended for Blacks to supersede or give the perception that we were in the process of gaining some semblance of equality. It was never intended to be,” Brown Wright, now 81, told The Marshall Project – Jackson. 

Carroll Rhodes, a civil rights attorney who has challenged the state on voting rights for more than 40 years, said that following the 1965 Voting Rights Act, local circuit clerks would come up with devious ways to make it difficult for Black people to register and vote. Some examples he listed were splitting majority-Black areas across different districts to dilute Black voting power and requiring voters to re-register multiple times. 

“The only difference is, after Reconstruction, all the way through Jim Crow, it was easy to tell that race was the motivating factor, because they explicitly say it,” Rhodes said. “But the court and the federal government cracked down on those White officials because they were saying they were doing it because of race. So the White official got smart. They no longer say they’re doing it because of race. They come up with other excuses.” 

Mass incarceration as modern voter suppression

At the same time that Mississippi’s civil rights activism gripped the nation, a conservative movement laid the foundation for tough-on-crime rhetoric that eventually took hold among both major political parties and fueled the escalation of arrests and mass incarceration.

The key to the new rhetoric was erasing any mention of race. Instead, disciples of this new movement used crime and welfare as coded language to target Black people, attorney and civil rights scholar Michelle Alexander wrote in “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.” 

“Barry Goldwater, in his 1964 presidential campaign, aggressively exploited the [civil rights] riots and fears of black crime, laying the foundation for the ‘get tough on crime’ movement that would emerge years later,” Alexander wrote.

Goldwater’s narrative resonated with White Mississippi voters who rejected Democratic incumbent Lyndon B. Johnson’s civil rights reforms. A majority of Mississippians voted for a Republican presidential candidate — Goldwater — for the first time since Reconstruction.

White Mississippians then continued to vote for Republican presidential candidates in almost every election after 1964, while the state government maintained a status quo of White men, mostly Democrats, who dominated the state legislature and governor’s office. Despite splitting the vote across party lines, the common denominator in White Mississippians’ voting practices was their singular goal of maintaining power. 

After the Voting Rights Act, tough-on-crime rhetoric fueled initiatives like GOP President Richard Nixon’s war on drugs and Democratic President Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill that increased mandatory prison sentences. Mississippi now incarcerates more people per capita than any other state. About 60% of all incarcerated people in the state were Black in 2022, according to the Mississippi Department of Corrections, 

Though not all incarcerated people have lost their right to vote, a lack of information about who can and can’t vote makes it difficult for many affected by the legal system to access ballots. 

However, some in Mississippi’s government have tried to change the state’s disenfranchisement laws. 

In 2008, the Mississippi House passed a bill to restore voting rights to the disenfranchised, excluding rape and murder convictions, but the bill died in the state Senate. 

A 2023 lawsuit challenge to felony disenfranchisement was successful when a three-judge U.S. Fifth Circuit Court panel ruled that the lifelong voting ban violated the Eighth Amendment’s cruel and unusual punishment clause. However, the state appealed to the full appeals court, and the disenfranchisement law remains in place. In its defense, the state said disenfranchisement is not punishment and that the Legislature, not the courts, should decide on any modifications.

In March, the Mississippi House voted across party lines to approve a bill that would restore the right to vote for people convicted of some nonviolent offenses. However, the bill died in the state Senate without a committee hearing.

Rhodes, the civil rights attorney, is co-counsel for the Mississippi State Conference of the NAACP in a lawsuit that challenges the state’s congressional redistricting plan, saying it dilutes Black voting power. The case is pending in federal court.

“There will always be a constant struggle. I learned that early on,” Rhodes said. “The forces that want to undo the progress that’s been made will always be there.”

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No telling how many times this sports writer has made the drive back from Oxford to Jackson following some sports event. Hundreds of times for sure. I don’t know, but I do know the strangest and most bizarre — the drive that seemed like it was right out of a Rod Serling “Twilight Zone” episode.

The date was June, 16, 1994, nearly 30 years ago. A cohort and I had covered a press conference during which Ole Miss announced a sordid list of NCAA recruiting violations, highlighted by accusations of cash, cars and airplane tickets being used to entice football recruits, also entertained at Memphis strip clubs. It was seedy stuff. 

We were ready for lighter fare. The NBA Championship series was being played. We wanted to listen. Instead, fumbling through the static of AM radio, we found, of all things, a slow-moving car chase.

It was surreal. The newscast was coming from Los Angeles. A white Ford Bronco, with O.J. Simpson in the backseat, was on an L.A. freeway, being followed by a phalanx of police cars and helicopters. The announcer told us that O.J., the prime suspect in the murder of his wife and a friend, was holding a gun to his own head.

The reporter told us so much more: That Simpson had left a letter, threatening suicide. That people were actually lining the interstate and the overpasses, cheering the procession. One station would fade, and we would find another. The “chase” continued. We were told that Simpson and his driver apparently were listening to the same report we were.

This cannot be real, we thought. This can’t be happening. But it was. And it got stranger still.

Vince Evans, Simpson’s former Southern Cal teammate, called the station and was put on the air with a message for his friend. Between sobs, Evans managed, “Juice, we love you Juice, God, Juice, pull the car over. Just pull the car over…”

Then, John McKay, Simpson’s former coach at USC, called the station and he, too, addressed Simpon. “O.J., this is your coach. My God, O.J., stop this nonsense. If you pull over, I will come out there right now. I’ll stand by you the rest of my life. Please, Juice, I love you.”

Had this been a scene in a Hollywood movie, it would have been panned for not being believable.

But on and on it went. We got back to Jackson about the same time the Bronco pulled up to Simpson’s residence. Subsequently, he was arrested.

The story was far from over, of course. The trial would follow months later, and the trial itself would last 11 months. Incredibly, Simpson was found not guilty. Then came the civil trial, during which Simpson is found liable and later forced to forfeit all his assets, including his Heisman Trophy.

All this — and so much more — was sadly remembered with Wednesday’s news of Simpson’s death at the age of 76. Has there ever been a more sensational crime story in modern times? The kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby? The Patty Hearst kidnapping? The Manson murders? I don’t know.

But I think I know what made the O.J. Simpson saga so remarkable it commanded an entire nation’s attention. And that was due to Simpson’s previous persona. He was an authentic American hero. He had it all: amazing athletic ability, good looks, so much charm, such a warm, inviting smile, fame and fortune.

Mississippi icon Archie Manning was a friend of Simpson’s, and I remember calling him the night of the chase and Simpson’s arrest. The two had met when Manning was a junior at Ole Miss and had quickly hit it off. Then, of course, their professional careers intertwined.

“I always considered O.J. the ultimate superstar,” Manning said. “It wasn’t just how great a player he was, but how he carried himself, how he always had time for fans and younger players. He never acted like he was a big deal, and he was a big deal. He’d make the lowliest rookie feel like he was O.J.’s best buddy. I don’t know that I have met a more charming person.

“That’s what has made this all so shocking, so unbelievable,” Manning continued. “My heart says it couldn’t have been him. He couldn’t have killed those people, but the evidence seems so overwhelming. Maybe he just snapped. I don’t know …. I just know that’s not the O.J. that I know.”

I called Manning again this week after news of Simpson’s death. Thirty years later, Archie still values the time he spent with Simpson and can’t comprehend what in the world happened to the guy he considered a good friend. 

“I don’t know what happened. I know some of his friends think it was cocaine, rage, a combination of the two,” he said. “I just know it was tragic, a real life tragedy.”

It was that.

Something else from the news broadcast nearly 30 years ago I remember. Someone read from the letter Simpson had written earlier that day. Part of it went like this. “Think of the real O.J. and not this lost person,” he wrote.

Not then. Not now. Not ever.

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Nearly a quarter of adults disenrolled from Medicaid in the past year say they are now uninsured, according to a survey released Friday that details how tens of millions of Americans struggled to retain coverage in the government insurance program for low-income people after pandemic-era protections began expiring last spring.

The first national survey of adults whose Medicaid eligibility was reviewed during the unwinding found nearly half of people who lost their government coverage signed back up weeks or months later — suggesting they should never have been dropped in the first place.

While 23% reported being uninsured, an additional 28% found other coverage — through an employer, Medicare, the Affordable Care Act’s insurance marketplace, or health care for members of the military, the survey by KFF found.

“Twenty-three percent is a striking number especially when you think about the number of people who lost Medicaid coverage,” said Chima Ndumele, an associate professor of health policy at the Yale University School of Public Health.

Going without insurance even for a short period of time can lead people to delay seeking care and leave them at financial risk when they do.

Seven in 10 adults who were disenrolled during the unwinding process say they became uninsured at least temporarily when they lost their Medicaid coverage.

Adrienne Hamar, 49, of Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, said she struggled to enroll in an Affordable Care Act marketplace plan this winter after the state informed her that she and her two children no longer qualified for Medicaid. They had been enrolled since 2020. She said phone lines were busy at the state’s marketplace and she couldn’t complete the process online.

Hamar, who works as a home health aide, and her children were uninsured in March. But since April 1, they’ve been enrolled in a marketplace plan that, with the help of government subsidies, costs $50 a month for the family.

“I was very relieved,” she said. Unsure of their insurance status, Hamar said, her 23-year-old daughter delayed getting a dental checkup.

Hamar’s struggles were common, the survey found.

Of adults enrolled in Medicaid before the unwinding, about 35% who tried to renew their coverage described the process as difficult, and about 48% said it was at least somewhat stressful.

About 56% of those disenrolled say they skipped or delayed care or prescriptions while attempting to renew their Medicaid coverage.

“People’s current insurance status is likely to be very much in flux, and we would expect at least some of the people who say they are currently uninsured to reenroll in Medicaid — many say they are still trying — or enroll in other coverage within a short period of time,” said Jennifer Tolbert, a co-author of the KFF report and the director of KFF’s State Health Reform and Data Program.

The survey didn’t include children, and the KFF researchers said their findings therefore couldn’t be extrapolated to determine how the Medicaid unwinding has affected the overall U.S. uninsured rate, which hit a record low of 7.7% in early 2023. Nearly half of enrollees in Medicaid and the related Children’s Health Insurance Program are children.

The unwinding, in which states are reassessing eligibility for Medicaid among millions of Americans who enrolled before or during the pandemic and dropping those who no longer qualify or did not complete the renewal process, won’t be completed until later this year. Enrollment in Medicaid and CHIP grew to a record of nearly 94.5 million in April of last year, three years after the federal government prohibited states from cutting people from their rolls during the covid-19 public health emergency.

Nationally, states have disenrolled about 20 million people from Medicaid in the past year, most of them for procedural reasons such as failure to submit required paperwork. That number is expected to grow, as states have a few more months to redetermine enrollees’ eligibility.

Among adults who had Medicaid prior to the start of the unwinding, 83% retained their coverage or reenrolled, while 8% found other insurance and 8% were uninsured. The share left uninsured was larger in states that have not expanded Medicaid under the ACA (17%) than in states that have (6%). Forty states have expanded Medicaid to cover everyone with an income under 138% of the federal poverty rate, or $31,200 for a family of four this year.

The KFF survey found that nearly 1 in 3 disenrolled adults discovered only when they sought health care — such as going to a doctor or a pharmacy — that they had been dropped from Medicaid.

Indira Navas of Miami found out that her 6-year-old son, Andres, had been disenrolled from Florida’s Medicaid program when she took him to a doctor appointment in March. She had scheduled Andres’ appointment months in advance and is frustrated that he remains uninsured and his therapy for anxiety and hyperactivity has been disrupted.

Navas said the state could not explain why her 12-year-old daughter, Camila, remained covered by Medicaid even though the children live in the same household with their parents.

“It doesn’t make sense that they would cover one of my children and not the other,” she said.

Kate McEvoy, executive director of the National Association of Medicaid Directors, said the sheer volume of millions of people being redetermined for eligibility has overwhelmed some state call centers trying to support enrollees.

She said states have tried many ways to communicate with enrollees, including through public outreach campaigns, text, email, and apps. “Until the moment your coverage is at stake, it’s hard to penetrate people’s busy lives,” she said.

The KFF survey, of 1,227 adults who had Medicaid coverage in early 2023 prior to the start of the unwinding on April 1, 2023, was conducted between Feb. 15, 2024, and March 11, 2024. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 4 percentage points.

KFF Health News correspondent Daniel Chang contributed to this article.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

The post Nearly 1 in 4 adults dumped from Medicaid are now uninsured, survey finds appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Efforts to expand Mississippi’s state financial aid programs to adult and part-time students could be at a standstill after the House failed to pass a bill to do so by a key deadline, due largely to the price tag. 

Earlier this week, the Senate moved to keep the possibility of changes alive by inserting code sections pertaining to the Mississippi Resident Tuition Assistance Grant into legislation that provides financial assistance to teachers in critical shortage areas.

This move could send the bill to conference, potentially reviving the financial aid proposal. But whatever changes come out of conference could likely wind up looking very different from the proposal championed by the Mississippi Office of Student Financial Aid and Jennifer Rogers, its director. 

“You ever heard of the bird Phoenix?” asked House Appropriations Chairman John Read, R-Gautier, who let the Senate financial aid bill die in his committee. “Rises from its ashes? Sometimes that happens.” 

The original proposal would have doubled the award amounts under MTAG and expanded who is eligible for the program to include adult and low-income students, the latter of which, by law, has been barred from receiving the grant. While college students from millionaire families can get MTAG, the state’s poorest students are not eligible, Mississippi Today previously reported. 

It also would have created a last-dollar scholarship program for community college students, a priority of the lieutenant governor’s. 

All told, an estimated 37,000 students would benefit, according to OSFA, which would result in the state of Mississippi spending upwards of $30 million extra each year. The existing programs cost the state roughly $50 million a year. 

“Every single lawmaker in the state Legislature could go back to their constituents and say, ‘we made college more affordable for the state of Mississippi,’” Rogers said. “That’s a win. That’s doing something.” 

Rogers added the existing program has problems: It excludes students who need help paying for college, and it covers far less in tuition than it did when it was created in the 1990s.

“The expansion proposal addresses every single one of those issues,” she said. 

But it may prove too costly for lawmakers. House Universities and Colleges Chairman Rep. Donnie Scoggin, R-Ellisville, said that, after he heard from House Appropriations that the bill was too expensive, his committee passed a strike-all amendment to gut the bill and reduce its cost to $3 million. 

The strike-all amendment is not online, but Scoggin said it would have created a scholarship to cover expenses after state, federal and institutional aid for community college students pursuing certain career-technical education programs determined by the state’s Office of Workforce Development. 

“It was either gonna die, or we had to make changes,” Scoggin said. 

The strike-all amendment is inexpensive, because few students would benefit, but Rogers said she would support a last-dollar scholarship program if it was part of a larger strategy to improve college affordability. 

Ultimately, Read said he was concerned the cost of the programs could balloon. He added he hadn’t seen estimates on the number of students that would benefit because he had not spoken to Rogers, though other committee members had. 

“Show me one person who’s gotten elected that doesn’t want to help little children, fresh water, education,” Read said. “That’s why we’re up here. There’s a thing called money that we have to deal with, sometimes it’s short.”

On the Senate floor earlier this week, Sen. Nicole Boyd, R-Oxford, said the purpose of amending House Bill 765 to include the MTAG code sections was to revisit the proposal that came out of the House committee. 

After fielding a question from Sen. Angela Burks Hill, R-Picayune, Boyd stated it was not her intention to limit MTAG so existing recipients no longer qualify, something past proposals have sought to do. 

Depending on this sessions’ outcome, Rogers, who has been trying to revamp MTAG since 2018, could be back to the drawing board. Her push comes as higher education agencies and nonprofits across Mississippi are working to improve the state’s educational attainment rate, a measure of the population that has a college degree or equivalent credential. 

Increasing that, Rogers said, entails providing more financial aid to students whose families can’t afford to pay for college on their own. 

“Employers are clamoring for a better educated workforce, people to fill their jobs, and our communities need it,” she said. “Our communities in Mississippi cannot thrive if we do not have technicians to fix our air conditioner in our hot summers, teachers to teach our children, doctors to deliver our babies, to take care of our sick and elderly.” 

Rogers drew a parallel between state financial aid and the economic development projects that lawmakers funded earlier this session, and cited a recent study that found for every 1% increase in educational attainment, the state could save $21 million in reduced social services. The study was commissioned by the Woodward Hines Education Foundation. 

“I would argue that first of all, state aid is not an expense, it is an investment in the workforce,” Rogers said. “Lawmakers don’t think twice about spending tens or hundreds of millions to attract large companies to the state, because they view it as an investment with expected future returns. State aid is no different.” 

Woodward Hines Education Foundation is a donor to Mississippi Today.

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A coalition of clergy from around the state urged lawmakers on Thursday to pass legislation that fully expands Medicaid coverage to upwards of 200,000 poor Mississippians and cautioned them from enacting a watered-down plan that would only cover a fraction of that population. 

“We feel like full expansion is the best thing to do because we believe that full expansion is full gospel,” the Rev. Dr. Jason Coker said. “Because the gospel means good news, and this has got to be good news for the most vulnerable.” 

House and Senate leaders are in the process of negotiating a final bill to expand Medicaid coverage in some form to the working poor because both chambers have passed different plans. 

The House’s expansion plan aims to expand health care coverage to 138% of the federal poverty level, which is estimated to cover upwards of 200,000 Mississippians, and accept $1 billion a year in federal money to cover it, as most other states have done.

The Senate wants a more restrictive program, to expand Medicaid to cover around 40,000 people, turn down the federal money, and require proof that recipients are working roughly 30 hours a week. 

READ MORE: Gov. Tate Reeves’ newly-approved Medicaid plan would make expansion more lucrative for hospitals

“We, therefore, call upon the conferees from the House and Senate to reach a compromise and fully expand Medicaid up to 138% of the federal poverty level,” Bishop Ronnie Crudup Sr., the senior pastor of New Horizon Church International, said.

READ MORE: Q&A: Why Arkansas could be a model for Mississippi Medicaid expansion

House Speaker Jason White, a Republican from West, recently appointed Republican Rep. Missy McGee of Hattiesburg, Republican Rep. Sam Creekmore IV of New Albany and Republican Rep. Joey Hood of Ackerman to lead the House negotiations. 

READ MORE: Mississippi hospital officials say marketplace insurance helps, but not as much as Medicaid

Republican Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, the leader of the Senate, has not yet appointed three senators to participate in the conference process, as of Thursday evening. 

The Thursday event was also a precursor to a “Full Expansion Day” rally that the coalition intends to host with hundreds of participants on the south steps of the state Capitol at 1 p.m. on April 16.  

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Where do people go when they cannot access or afford professional mental healthcare?
For many, the options are few. Mental healthcare’s high cost and inaccessibility make it too difficult for many in need.

According to a 2023 report, Mississippi has the fewest mental health providers per capita and is in the top five worst states for mental health treatment costs.

Given the rise of crises people face, there may be no place to turn other than faith communities for guidance through troubled times.

This is why Mississippi Public Health Institute’s Congregational Recovery Outreach Program (CROP) leads an innovative initiative in collaboration with local congregations and mental health services. In partnership with the Mississippi Department of Mental Health, this endeavor seeks to nurture inclusive faith-based communities, particularly in areas where empathy and care are in high demand.

CROP acknowledges that faith-based communities are pivotal in lessening social inequities and offering vital support for mental health challenges.

To advance this mission, CROP is delighted to announce its inaugural Mississippi Mental Health Faith-Based Summit, which will be held on Thursday, April 25, 2024, at the Jackson Convention Center from 8 am to 3 pm. Admission is free and open to the public. To attend this free summit, register by going to msphicrop.org or by calling 601-398-4406.

“Community-level partnerships are essential for effective public health work. Strong partnerships with churches and faith-based organizations as trusted community partners facilitate improved outcomes and sustainability,” said Roy Hart, CEO, Mississippi Public Health Institute (MSPHI).

According to U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, we are a nation suffering from an epidemic of loneliness, which is an urgent public health issue. Mental health affects all aspects of our lives, including physical health. Public health interventions are needed to help prevent mental health crises, and community involvement is key.

“These organizations serve as pillars of strength, offering compassionate care, understanding, and a sense of community to those in need,” said Wendy Bailey, Executive Director of DMH. “Their commitment to addressing mental health issues aligns seamlessly with our mission at the Mississippi Department of Mental Health to provide accessible and comprehensive mental health services to all Mississippians.”

The event features panel discussions that address stigma and myths surrounding mental health and address the current realities in Mississippi. Participants can visit booths to find vital resources of local services and training to provide trauma-informed support groups in their communities.

Keynote speaker, Dr. Monty Burks, Deputy Director of the (Tennessee) Governor’s Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, said, “We know that when a person leaves treatment, leaves recovery support, leaves incarceration, they go back to their community. Having those communities working together intersected to serve that person makes it easier for a person to attach to a community and continue in their recovery walk. There is no one pathway to recovery. People are gonna find their own walk no matter how they find it so the more resources they can find the better for them in the community.”

Through strategic alliances with the Jackson Revival Center, Pearl Street AME Church, and New Horizon Church International and a partnership with Hinds Behavioral Health Services, CROP is dedicated to addressing racialized disparities in behavioral health. These alliances are built upon a shared commitment to health equity and a resolve to serve marginalized communities.

“CROP and the Faith-Based Summit are important to the church and community to remind community members that the church is a vital part of the community and committed to addressing spiritual and mental health challenges that impact church and community members,” said Stan Johnson, Assistant Pastor, New Horizon Church International.

This first-of-its-kind event is free and open to the public. It seeks to empower faith-based communities with the tools and knowledge to effectively address mental health concerns. Don’t let this chance slip by to be part of a transformative endeavor in mental health advocacy. Join us at the Mental Health Faith-Based Summit and contribute to cultivating healthier, more supportive communities for all.

For further details and to register for this free event, please visit msphicrop.org or contact Sylvia Turner, 601.398.4406.

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House leaders resuscitated their revised school funding formula Wednesday – a day after the Senate killed it.

House Education Chair Rob Roberson, R-Starkville, successfully amended a bill dealing with failing school districts to insert into the legislation the Investing in the Needs of Students to Prioritize, Impact and Reform Education, or INSPIRE.

INSPIRE would replace the longstanding Mississippi Adequate Education Program as the vehicle used to provide state funds to local school districts for their basic operation. INSPIRE also would remove for the first time since the 1950s an objective funding formula as a determinant of how much each local school district should receive.

For years various public officials have been calling for the elimination of the MAEP because they said the state could not afford the spending it calls for.

On Wednesday in reviving INSPIRE, Roberson said, “This will give us one more opportunity to give the Senate a chance to look at this and do what is best and right for our school children.”

The amended bill passed 103-16 and now goes back to the Senate.

The fight over the school funding formula could be one of the most contentious issues during the final weeks of the legislative session. House Speaker Jason White said, “I have clearly communicated with Senate leadership the House position that we have funded MAEP for the last time.”

READ MORE: Senate shelves House education funding rewrite. DeBar vows to work on it in off season

Before the vote, Rep. Robert Johnson, D-Natchez, and Sen. Derrick Simmons, D-Greenville, their respective chambers’ minority leaders, issued a joint statement questioning the wisdom of the House’s effort to rush to passage of INSPIRE. Senate leaders said they have agreed to meet with House leaders and education officials to work on a possible new funding formula to be considered during next year’s session.

The Democratic leaders said, “No one in this building is under the illusion that MAEP is a perfect formula. However, scrapping it completely and in this fashion — quickly and without thorough vetting — isn’t the solution. And it’s certainly not the solution when some of the new formula’s architects and most vocal supporters are people who’ve historically sought to dismantle public education at every turn.”

They pointed out that many people who have embraced the formula and who even worked on its development have been supporters of sending public funds to private schools. They also have complained about the costs of MAEP.

Roberson and others have argued their INSPIRE plan directs more funds to at-risk students.

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Nearly a month after being sentenced to federal prison for torturing and sexually assaulting two Black men and a third white man, six former Rankin County law enforcement officers known as the Goon Squad received state prison sentences Wednesday.

Rankin County Circuit Court Judge Steve Ratcliffe handed down prison sentences ranging from 10 to 20 years during a brief hearing.

“For many, many years, the Goon Squad has come into this courtroom and they have testified falsely against persons that they have beaten and caused to be wrongfully incarcerated,” Malik Shabazz, a lawyer representing two of the victims, said outside the courthouse. 

“But today was dramatically different. Today, the judge in this circuit county court has given out justice to the Rankin County Goon Squad.”

Ratcliffe sentenced former patrol deputy Hunter Elward, who shot one of the men, to 20 years in state prison. Brett McAlpin, the former chief investigator, and Jeffrey Middleton, the lieutenant over the night shift known as the Goon Squad, were both sentenced to 15 years in state prison.

Former narcotics detective Christian Dedmon was sentenced to 20 years. Patrol deputy Daniel Opdyke and Richland narcotics investigator Joshua Hartfield got 15 years and 10 years, respectively.

Last month, the deputies all received federal prison terms ranging from nearly 18 years to 40 years. Hartfield received the shortest federal sentence – 10 years. The state sentences will run concurrently to the men’s federal sentences, meaning it’s unlikely any of the former officers will serve additional prison time.

The former officers will be required to turn in their state law enforcement certificates. They did not read statements during the hearing.

The five Rankin County deputies and the Richland police officer pleaded guilty last summer to state and federal charges for illegally raiding the home of Braxton residents Eddie Parker and Michael Jenkins in January 2023.

The officers handcuffed the men before beating them, hurling racial slurs and assaulting them with a sex toy.

Elward then shoved his gun into Jenkins’ mouth and pulled the trigger, shooting him through the neck and nearly killing him. The officers attempted to cover up their actions by planting drugs on the men, concocting a false narrative to justify the shooting and destroying evidence, according to a Justice Department investigation.

Dedmon, Elward and Opdyke also pleaded guilty for their roles in a separate torture incident in December 2022. After Rankin County deputies pulled over Alan Schmidt, they beat the man and shocked him with a Taser on the side of the highway. Dedmon fired his duty pistol to scare Schmidt, and threatened to dump his body in a nearby river.

Dedmon then sexually assaulted Schmidt, pressing his genitals against the man’s mouth and bare buttocks while he was handcuffed.

“These criminal acts make a difficult job even harder and far more dangerous,” MIssissippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch said in a statement. “And it is left to us all to commit ourselves to repairing that damage.”

Charges against Rankin County officers have so far been focused on these two incidents, but dozens of county residents say the sheriff’s department has routinely targeted drug users and minor drug dealers with similar levels of violence.

The New York Times and Mississippi Today published an investigation last fall revealing that deputies in the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department, many of whom called themselves the Goon Squad, routinely barged into homes in the middle of the night, handcuffed people and tortured them for information.

The deputies repeatedly shocked people with Tasers, assaulted a Hinds County sheriff’s deputy, waterboarded several men, dripped molten metal onto one man’s skin and beat several people until they were bloody and bruised, according to dozens of people who say they witnessed or experienced the raids.

Several of the people who said they experienced violence filed lawsuits or complained to the department. A few said they contacted Rankin County Sheriff Bryan Bailey directly, but were ignored.

Protesters have held rallies at the sheriff’s office and the Governor’s Mansion in recent weeks, renewing demands for Bailey to resign. Bailey, who did not respond to requests for comment for this story, has said he has no plans to step down.

Local activists said the sentences were another step toward accountability for a sheriff’s department that has long terrorized its residents.

“This chapter of the book has been written, but the book has not finished,” Angela English, president of the Rankin County chapter of the NAACP, said outside the courthouse. “There is much more to be done.” 

After Wednesday’s hearing, a crowd of activists and local residents walked from the courthouse to the sheriff’s office through pouring rain, demanding to speak with Sheriff Bailey and calling for him to resign. 

Department attorney Jason Dare, facing a barrage of forceful questions from the crowd,said he would try to schedule a meeting between residents and department representatives to discuss how to move forward together. The sheriff did not make an appearance.

The Rankin County district attorney’s office confirmed it was reviewing and dismissing criminal cases involving Goon Squad members, but District Attorney Bubba Bramlett has declined to share which cases have been dismissed or how far back in time his review will go.

The Mississippi House of Representatives and Senate recently passed a bill that would expand oversight over the state’s law enforcement, allowing the state board that certifies officers to investigate and revoke the licenses of officers accused of misconduct, regardless of whether they are criminally charged.

The bill is expected to land on the governor’s desk in the coming weeks after a final review by the House. 

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