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A federal judge has again delayed the trial of the Madison man accused of setting fire to Mississippi’s largest synagogue, this time to Aug. 3. 

U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate granted a second request from Stephen Spencer Pittman’s federal public defender for more time to review evidence in the case. Wingate signed the order Monday, and it appeared in the federal court’s electronic records Tuesday.

Pittman, who usually goes by his middle name, is facing three federal charges: arson, damage to religious property and using fire to commit a felony for allegedly burning the Beth Israel Congregation synagogue in northeast Jackson in January.

If convicted of all charges, he could face up to 60 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. 

Pittman has pleaded not guilty to all counts. He is accused of breaking into the house of worship and dousing a lobby in gasoline before setting it on fire. The blaze charred parts of the building and left smoke damage throughout.

Pittman remains in jail as he awaits trial, despite the efforts of his attorney, Michael Scott. Scott had previously successfully requested to move Pittman’s trial from April 6 to June 1. Federal prosecutors have not opposed Scott’s motions. 

State and federal prosecutors indicted Pittman within days of his arrest by law enforcement at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. Pittman was being treated for burns just a few hours after the synagogue fire. 

In addition to the federal charges, Pittman is facing a separate first-degree arson charge in state court that is enhanced under a Mississippi law punishing “offenses committed for discriminatory reasons.” 

In the weeks before the synagogue was attacked, Pittman began making antisemitic statements on social media and allegedly behaving in such a way that the “family pets were afraid” of him and his mother was considering “locking their bedroom doors at night,” an FBI agent testified at the February hearing. 

Beth Israel Congregation leaders recently revealed plans for rehabilitating the one-story brick building, with work that included sending away the Tree of Life for cleaning and restoration. The brass plaque commemorates milestones such as congregants’ birthdays and anniversaries.

Brenda Travis was 15 when she joined the Civil Rights Movement, deciding she could not “sit still and be silent.” She was subsequently beaten, jailed, expelled and ultimately sent away from Mississippi,

The McComb native, a self-described exile of the Mississippi movement, died Sunday at age 81.

When she was 10, the sheriff broke into her family’s house without knocking or a warrant and arrested her 13-year-old brother.

A vision flashed in her head of the photograph of Emmett Till’s beaten, battered and swollen body, she said in a 2007 interview posted to the Civil Rights Movement Archive website. “I became enraged and knew that one day I had to take a stand.”

That time began in 1961 when she was just 15, and she became the youth leader for Pike County’s NAACP. Local president C.C. Bryant had just welcomed Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader Bob Moses to the area.

“I joined the NAACP and became involved in the movement to get people to vote. “But they were afraid,” she said in a 2013 interview published in the Huffington Post.

SNCC began to teach Black Mississippians how they could vote. First, they had to pay a poll tax and then they had to pass the test given by circuit clerks. The test was supposed to center on the Mississippi Constitution, but Travis recalled that it sometimes became an absurd question like “How many grains are in a bag of rice?”

SNCC soon began a series of protests in McComb. After a sit-in at Woolworth’s in August 1961 resulted in two arrests, SNCC members gathered. Moses had been beaten for helping two Black men try to register to vote, and his head was wrapped in gauze.

“They were asking people to volunteer, because they wanted to keep the momentum going,” Travis recalled. “And it was at that point that I knew that I could not sit still and be silent. So I volunteered to go to jail.”

On Aug. 30, 1961, she and two other SNCC volunteers purchased tickets and sat at the “all-white” lunch counter inside the Greyhound Bus station.

She spent a month in jail. “The Movement trained us very well,” she recalled. “They trained us how to survive, how not to go stir crazy. … Our survival technique was prayer and singing. … We had the jailhouse rocking.”

When she was finally released, she learned that civil rights leader Herbert Lee had been killed for working with SNCC.

She also learned that Berglund High School had expelled her. She stormed to the school and led a walk-out of more than 100 students, who sang “We Shall Overcome” as they marched to city hall and knelt in prayer.

They were beaten and so were SNCC leaders who accompanied them — Moses, Chuck McDew and Bob Zellner — who were arrested for contributing to the delinquency of minors. Behind bars, Moses wrote, “This is Mississippi, the middle of the iceberg. … There is a tremor in the middle of the iceberg — from a stone that the builders rejected.” 

Students continued protesting by refusing to return to school until Travis was allowed to re-enroll. School officials expelled those students, too.

SNCC started its own high school for the students. Moses taught math, Dion Diamond handled science, and McDew informed students about history. 

“Nonviolent High” inspired the creation of “Freedom Schools” during 1964’s Freedom Summer. 

Travis was sent to Oakley Training School, a juvenile detention center near Raymond.

“People say, ‘Time heals all wounds,’ but that’s not true,” she recalled. “The wound may have a scab over it, but deep within, it’s still sore. It’s still painful. When I was placed in reformatory school, nobody knew where I was, not even my attorney.”

She was released after six and a half months when she agreed to leave Mississippi. She finished high school in Connecticut and later attended the Tony Taylor School of Business in California.

“I still carry the blood-stained banner, and one day it will be all right,” she recalled in the 2007 interview.

Six years later, she started the Brenda Travis Historical Education Foundation in McComb and wrote a memoir, “Mississippi’s Exiled Daughter: How My Civil Rights Baptism Under Fire Shaped My Life.”

A half-century after the protest, district officials honored the protesting students and awarded Travis, a longtime civil rights veteran, an honorary degree.

“You know what the beauty of it is?” she told The Associated Press. “They made a scapegoat of me, but the students continued to come.”

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.     

Across the country, resistance to data centers is rising even as plans are steadily being made to build new ones.

According to the Pew Research Center, a majority of new data centers — 67% — are being built in rural areas. And three-quarters of those are in Midwestern and Southern towns, including more than 20 in Mississippi, according to Baxtel, which does data center research. The Mississippi date centers include smaller data centers and hyperscale centers that are used for cloud computing and AI and generate the most controversy

The negative effects have not gone unnoticed. A planned xAI  data center in Southaven in DeSoto County, for example, is reportedly terrorizing the community with high levels of noise and air pollution, and residents are now regretting its existence.

Other factors that could lead to community resistance of data centers include the depletion of water systems and the increased energy costs to consumers. When you dig a little deeper, you begin to see how data centers are built on exploitation that goes far beyond small-town USA.

Data centers are both products and producers of wars that kill people and destroy the planet on a global scale. The rapid expansion of these data centers requires raw materials, especially fossil fuels — resources often obtained through violence —  and they fuel a technology that is increasingly used to commit war crimes.

Fossil fuels provide almost 60% of the power for data centers, especially for “emergency generators.” AI data centers run almost 24/7, so these “emergency” generators are consistently operating.

Control over fossil fuels, of course, is a driving factor behind the U.S. regime change efforts in Iran, Venezuela and other resource-rich regions. And the extraction of other needed minerals — like silicon, gallium, lithium and cobalt — requires both the destabilization of the sovereign regions in which they are found and inhumane mining practices, including the use of child labor.

Then there is the question of the moral and ethical use of generative AI. The expansion of data centers comes at a time when AI and LLMs (large language models) are increasingly being used by the Pentagon for militarism domestically and internationally.

The Pentagon recently agreed to massive deals with both Palantir and OpenAI. The employment of AI in military operations has already resulted in war crimes. For instance, Anthropic’s Claude was used in the bombing of the girls’ school in Minab, Iran, which killed about 170 students and teachers. Do towns that pride themselves on family values want to be behind a killing machine capable of murdering young girls?

It’s easy to understand why the announcement of these data centers can seem like good news for areas facing dire economic conditions. Existing low-wage jobs are difficult to survive on. But the evidence suggests data centers create very few local jobs in the towns where they’re built. Should this small number of jobs come at the expense of people and the future of our planet?

The state officials brokering these deals with tech companies could instead work on bringing jobs that design, install and maintain renewable energy systems to replace fossil fuel reliance. They could sign contracts with companies that manage and protect the beautiful natural ecosystems, habitats and biodiversity that often surround rural towns.

We need jobs that sustain the heartbeat of the Midwest and the charm and hospitality of the South — not jobs in an industry that terrorizes communities and kills people.

Data centers are not just toxic installations in communities’ backyards. They are a driving force behind wars and instability, and they keep American workers tied to the endless cycle of wars for fossil fuels.

In defense of the planet, our communities, and communities around the world, I hope urban and rural communities alike can unite to stop data center projects  — especially across the Midwest and the South, where there is so much beauty and love to protect.

Rural communities’ future is not AI. We should be investing in what makes us great: the people and the land.

Melissa Garriga is the communications and media analysis manager for CODEPINK. She was born and raised in Mississippi, where she continues to live and work. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.

House Democratic Leader Robert Johnson of Natchez says that as states across the nation become embroiled over racial and partisan gerrymandering of voting districts, he believes now they’ll know “what it’s like to be in Mississippi” with its long struggles with voting rights and drawing district lines. What other states see as unprecedented political battle, Johnson said, “We call Tuesday.”

This article is the first in a series on Mississippians sharing their thoughts on the new gerrymandering push embroiling Mississippi, the South and the nation.

Inside a tin-roofed shed on a grassy stretch along Dentville Road in Hazlehurst, Michael Watts’ grandmother did something she had never done before – she voted.

It was 1987, and Betty Watts had been too fearful to vote for her entire adult life. Polling taxes, literacy tests and intimidation aimed at deterring Black people from voting persisted until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, when Betty Watts was middle-aged, and vestiges of Jim Crow and more subtle voter suppression lingered.

When Betty Watts was in her 60s, a white Democrat named Ray Mabus ran for governor promising that Mississippi would “never be last again.” The prospect of ousting adherents to a movement that took pride in “standing athwart history” propelled Betty Watts to the polls for the first time.

Mabus would go on to become the 60th governor of Mississippi, securing almost 90% of the Black vote, which included the late Betty Watts. The memory of his grandmother voting for the first time still lingers in Michael Watts’ memory. It resurfaced weeks ago when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act and opened the door for states such as Mississippi to eliminate majority Black electoral districts.

Despite having the highest percentage of Black residents of any state in the country, Mississippi has no Black statewide elected officials and only one Black member of Congress, whose seat Republicans now have in their sights as a result of the Supreme Court ruling.

The ruling in the Louisiana v. Callais case places Mississippi and other Southern states at the center of a national partisan and racial political battle over redistricting.

The ruling has also prompted some Mississippians to grapple with questions over race and political representation in a state that’s home to people who lived through a period of widespread voter suppression targeting Black residents, or had family members who did. Such controversies aren’t only a distant relic of history.

As recently as last year, a George W. Bush-appointed federal judge ruled that Mississippi’s Supreme Court districts diluted the Black vote and ordered them redrawn. But now the legal landscape has changed, and some Mississippians worry about the diminishment of hard-won progress in voting rights and fairness.

‘That’s crazy’

President Donald Trump has urged Mississippi officials to redraw the state’s four congressional districts as part of his national push for Republican states to flip Democratic districts to the GOP in this year’s federal midterm elections.

In the Deep South, where partisanship and race are intertwined, this poses the specter of undoing decades of civil rights gains in voting.

Republican Gov. Tate Reeves, a devoted ally of Trump, has called off a special session he initially ordered to redraw state Supreme Court districts in light of the Callais decision, which could signal the state is unlikely to take the step of redrawing congressional maps before the 2026 midterms. But in a radio interview, Reeves vowed the state would redraw lines to oust Rep. Bennie Thompson, the lone Democrat and lone Black member of the state’s congressional delegation.

“The tenure of Congressman Bennie Thompson reigning terror on the 2nd Congressional District is over,” Reeves said. “It’s not a question of if. It’s a question of when.”

In Mississippi, the impact of the Supreme Court decision is almost certain to trickle down to the state and local level, as the decision significantly narrows how courts can require states to account for race in redistricting. The majority-white, Republican-dominated Legislature has already formed special committees in both chambers to consider redistricting, putting some legislative seats held by Black Democrats at risk.

Now, as Watts contemplates the effort to redraw lines and oust Black Democrats from office, he remembers that day nearly four decades ago, watching his grandmother vote for the first time. What stands out is the potential eradication of all the progress made in Mississippi to increase Black representation in elected offices.

“It kind of hurts to see how, in my lifetime, all of that is gone,” Watts said. “My grandmother was in her 60s, voting for the first time when I was 8 years old. And that’s just, that’s crazy.”

Betty Watts had come from Carpenter, Mississippi, and his grandfather, Tom, from Utica. They spent their lives as sharecroppers and met while picking cotton. When the Watts family later moved to Hazlehurst, they washed clothes in an iron pot out back and left them to dry outside. If it rained and the laundry wouldn’t dry, Betty Watts would hang her grandson’s clothes near their wood stove, and Michael Watts would go to school smelling of smoke. The family home had a five-gallon bucket in lieu of a toilet.

These material conditions and the burdens they imposed on daily life made voting a distant concern, Michael Watts said. When elections were discussed in the Watts household, it was often due to the fear they induced.

The specter of poll taxes and literacy tests, even after they were banned, instilled in Betty and Tom Watts a sense that they wouldn’t measure up to the standards imposed on those who exercised their right to vote.

“She didn’t want to do it because she was afraid she was going to fail them,” Watts said of his grandmother.

In 1987, Watts’ mother explained that poll taxes and literacy tests were gone, which helped coax Betty to the polls. But for Michael Watts’ late grandfather, Tom Watts, the fear would be insurmountable.

He never voted.

Michael Watts has a different fear — that the political representation in his home state will begin to look more like it did before Betty Watts summoned the courage to vote for the first time in the shed on Dentville Road.

“We’re going backwards,” Watts said. “That is not what the voters need. Their leaders are getting chosen for them. That’s not how it’s supposed to work.”

‘People are waking up’

Public opinion among Black Mississippians is not monolithic. That’s part of the argument made by Republicans like Reeves, who said federal law before the Callais decision engaged “in the offensive and demeaning assumption that Americans of a particular race, because of their race, think alike and share the same interests and preferences.”

The overwhelming majority of Black people in Mississippi vote for Democrats. But in the wake of the Callais decision, some have complicated feelings about the incumbents who represent their communities, even if they disagree with Republicans’ plans to gerrymander districts.

Bridgette Morgan, 37, is an attorney from Greenville. The predominantly Black Mississippi Delta is one of the poorest parts of the state, and many of its elected officials say the needs of their region are overlooked by the Republican-controlled Legislature.

Other areas have more hospitals and more taxpayer-funded special projects. The lion’s share of economic incentives and private investment have flowed east of Interstate 55, which divides the Delta from the rest of the state.

With that reality in mind, Morgan, who is Black and considers herself an independent, moved to Jackson and got involved with politics. She saw the city as the “playground of civil rights.”

“I was enamored by it,” Morgan said.

But she quickly became disillusioned with the area’s leaders, most of whom were Black Democrats. Morgan ran unsuccessfully for Hinds County Court judge, a defeat she said was brought about by opposition from Jackson’s entrenched political class.

Morgan believes some incumbents in heavily Black districts have failed to deliver for the constituents who elected them, which exacerbates the apathy that leads to lower turnout in these same districts.

“They’re apathetic at this point about this outcry about redistricting,” Morgan said. “People are waking up to some of our own leaders taking advantage, and we’re not getting what we voted for.”

A debate has long raged between white Republicans and Black Democrats about whether Mississippi’s longstanding issues with poor health outcomes and poverty in places such as Jackson and the Delta persist due to disinvestment from the state or mismanagement by local officials.

Unlike Watts, Morgan’s grandparents died when she was young, so the historical memory of race-based voter suppression never loomed as large.

She wants to see increased political competition in majority Black areas of the state, where she believes politicians have grown accustomed to getting re-elected without much effort or improving the lives of their constituents.

But she is quick to affirm that she does not want Black representation intentionally drawn out of existence, whether such an effort is driven by racism or partisanship.

“I am not for intentionally drawing out Black representation,” she said. “If that’s what the whole thing is — to keep any type of person who is Black from office — I have an issue with it. Of course, we want to be represented by people who look like us. But you can look like us and still not have our best interests at heart.”

Partisan gerrymandering is ‘just as bad as any other kind’

Melody Worsham, 64, grew up in Ocean Springs, the daughter of a military father stationed in Vietnam while the family lived in Mississippi.

Worsham, who is white, remembers hearing about Black neighborhoods on “the other side of the tracks,” and stories of difficulty setting up voting precincts in these areas.

When Worsham was in third grade, Black students arrived at her school through busing and desegregation orders, and she befriended a girl who sat behind her in class. On the playground, they once touched each other’s skin, curious whether it would feel different.

“We just wanted to see what we had in common,” Worsham said.

She also remembers “whites only” signs in downtown Ocean Springs persisting on some storefront windows into the late 1970s and early ’80s.

For Worsham, who now works in the mental health field and lives in Biloxi, these visceral memories cannot be divorced from the current calls to redraw electoral maps and potentially eliminate Black representation in service of a partisan agenda.

“It’s disgusting how they’ll go, ‘Oh, see, we’ve been wrong all this time, and we’ve got to correct the egregious sins of our past.’ And it’s like, no — you’re just trying to commit another sin that you have rationalized,” Worsham said.

But Worsham also has reservations about how map drawing was practiced before the Callais ruling.

Protecting minority representation should not uphold the assumption that race always predicts political affiliation.

“We’ve got to stop assuming that all Black people are Democrats,” she said. “I hang out with Black people all the time, and not all of them are Democrats.”

Worsham would like to see maps drawn by population count and geography alone.

“The partisan gerrymandering,” Worsham said, “is just as bad as any other kind.”

A judge has dismissed a lawsuit by former Jackson State University President William Bynum Jr. against the university and the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees, ending a six-year legal battle. 

Bynum, who was JSU president from July 2017 to February 2020, sued the university and IHL in Hinds County Circuit Court alleging that the state’s college board violated his contract after he resigned. Bynum resigned after he was arrested in a prostitution sting.  

Bynum remained on staff at Jackson State as a professor until April 2020. A month after he filed the lawsuit, university leaders fired him. In the lawsuit, IHL and JSU countered that Bynum’s contract never granted him tenure at the university.

Bynum argued in the lawsuit that through a clause in his contract, he could resign or be fired as president but remain employed at the university as a full professor.

Senior Status Judge James D. Bell noted in his decision that the IHL Board of Trustees’ policies stipulate that after completing five years of service, a college president could be granted tenure as a professor at the board’s discretion. 

But Bell ruled, Bynum did not serve five years as JSU president and did not qualify for tenure. 

Nothing in the contract gave Bynum a right to tenure, Bell wrote. “Upon his resignation, he became an at-will employee. The entire premise of his Complaint is based upon a misreading or misunderstanding of the plain words of his contract.” 

Bell also dismissed Bynum’s complaint that he was entitled to punitive damages because IHL’s and JSU’s actions were “‘fraudulent, egregious, in bad faith and in total disregard for’ his actions.” 

Charles Winfield, an attorney who represents Jackson State and IHL, and Bynum’s lawyer, Dennis Sweet III, did not respond to a request for comment.

State Rep. Jeff Hale, a Republican lawmaker from Hernando, was arrested and charged by the Hernando Police Department on Friday night with driving under the influence, reckless driving, speeding and disorderly conduct. 

Online police records show Hale was booked into the DeSoto County detention facility, posted a bond of $1,500 and that he has been released from custody. The online records also say that this is Hale’s first DUI charge.

Hale did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It’s unclear if he has an attorney representing him. The police department also did not respond to a request for comment. 

Hale told the DeSoto Times-Tribune in a statement that he received a phone call from his son and daughter-in-law saying that his granddaughter was unconscious and that they were traveling to the hospital for treatment. 

He further told the news outlet that while he was traveling to meet his family at the hospital, he was “providing instructions through my wife over the phone in an effort to help my granddaughter.” 

He also apologized to the police department and the sheriff’s department for his actions, but said he was not under the influence of alcohol or any other intoxicants. 

Hale has been in the Legislature since 2016, and he currently serves as the chairman of the House Energy Committee.

READ MORE: FAQ: Mississippi redistricting. Why does it matter? What’s being considered?

The U.S. Supreme Court, in a brief order on Monday, reversed a lower court’s ruling that determined Mississippi lawmakers unlawfully diluted Black voting strength when it redrew the state’s legislative districts. 

Monday’s order from the high court sends the case back to the lower federal court for further arguments in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent Callais decision, which rolled back protections against racial discrimination in the redistricting process.

The order contained no legal justification or reasoning. Justice Kentaji Brown Jackson was the sole dissenter from the order. She wrote that she dissented because the only issue raised in the appeal was whether private groups could file a lawsuit under the Voting Rights Act. 

The ruling stems from a federal three-judge panel’s order in May 2025 that determined Mississippi lawmakers did not give Black voters in three areas of the state a fair chance to elect voters of their choice and ordered the state to conduct special elections for the new districts. 

The state attorney general’s office appealed a portion of that ruling last year. It did not ask the U.S. Supreme Court to vacate the entire order. It only asked the high court to rule that private citizens did not have a right to file litigation under the Voting Rights Act. 

During the special elections last year resulting from the lower federal court’s order, the Democrats flipped one House seat and two Senate seats.  

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — In 1965, Black Americans peacefully demonstrated for voting rights and were beaten by Alabama state troopers before returning two weeks later to complete their march under federal protection. Keith Odom was a toddler then.

Now 62 years old, the union man and grandfather of three retraced some of their final steps. On Saturday, he came from Aiken, South Carolina, to Atlanta, where he joined several dozen other activists on two buses to Montgomery, Alabama. A few hours later, he stepped off his bus and onto Dexter Avenue, where the original march concluded.

“The history here — being a part of it, seeing it, feeling it,” said Odom, who is Black.

His voice trailed off as he saw the Alabama Capitol and a stage that sat roughly where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. concluded the original march.

Odom lamented that he and his fellow bus riders were not simply commemorating that seminal day in the Civil Rights Movement. Instead they came to renew the fight. The 1965 effort helped push Congress to send the Voting Rights Act to Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson to sign, securing and expanding political power for Black and other nonwhite voters for more than a half-century.

Saturday’s “All Roads Lead to the South” rally was the first mass organizing response after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that severely diminished that landmark law. Striking down a majority Black congressional district in Louisiana, the justices concluded in a 6-3 ruling that considering race when drawing political lines is in itself discriminatory. That spurred multiple states, including Alabama, to redraw U.S. House districts in ways that make it harder for Black voters, who lean overwhelmingly Democratic, to elect lawmakers of their choice.

“I’m not trying to live a life that’s going backwards,” Odom said. “I want to go forward, for my grandchildren to be able to go forward.”

An old political battle is new again

The passenger rosters and the scene when riders arrived in Montgomery sounded the echoes and rhymes of past and present.

“I talked to my grandmother before I came, and she was so excited,” said Justice Washington, a Kennesaw State University student named because her mother and grandmother had faith in the American system. “My grandmother told me she did her part, and now it’s time for me to do mine.”

No one on the Atlanta buses had reached voting age when the Voting Rights Act became law. The youngest attendee was born as Democrat Barack Obama was elected the first Black president in 2008.

Kobe Chernushin is 18, white and just graduated high school in Atlanta’s northern suburbs. He is an organizer with the Georgia Youth Justice Coalition and spent the day filming Khayla Doby, a 29-year-old executive for the organization, doing standups for the group’s followers on social media.

“I believe in the power of showing up,” he said.

The buses launched from the congressional district in Georgia once represented by John Lewis, bloodied on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, when he was 25. Lewis died in 2020, but some on the buses Saturday celebrated that a proposed federal election overhaul is named for him. If some Democrats get their way, the bill would override the U.S. Supreme Court, reinvigorate the Voting Rights Act and outlaw the kind of gerrymandering competition that Republican President Donald Trump has instigated.

“I’m here because of the same forces that pulled on John Lewis when he was a student,” said Darrin Owens, 27. He has worked for former Vice President Kamala Harris and now trains Democratic candidates.

“Political activism is personal,” Owens said, explaining that he attended Saturday as a citizen, not a political professional. “Sometimes those lines are blurred, and as a Black person in America, a Black person living in a Southern state, I’m committed to action that stops what I consider to be un-American, this possibility that the person who represents me is someone who is not from my community and does not understand me or my community.”

When he arrived, Owens saw no federal authorities on Montgomery’s streets. A wounded, recovering Lewis did during the second march in 1965.

This time many of the Alabama troopers and local officers who walked the area were Black.

The buses and sandwich lunches had been arranged by Fair Fight Action, a legacy of the political network built by Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams, who became a national figure in her unsuccessful runs in 2018 and 2022 to become the first Black woman elected governor in U.S. history. No Black woman has yet achieved that feat.

Different generations share their stories

At different points, Montgomery has branded itself as the cradle of the Confederacy and the cradle of the modern Civil Rights Movement.

“It feels like our country is stuck in this pattern of making progress, then there’s a huge backlash, and then people have to go through the same battle again just to get to where we were,” said Phi Nguyen, the 41-year-old daughter of Vietnamese refugees. She is now a civil rights lawyer in Atlanta.

She stood across from the church where a young King led the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 and not far from where Jefferson Davis took the oath of office in 1861 as the slavery-defending Confederate president.

Nguyen and her sister Bee, a 44-year-old who served in the Georgia General Assembly and ran for statewide office, met two other women as they walked. Carole Burton and Tondalaire Ashford are 72-year-old Montgomery residents who have been friends since they were in a segregated junior high school and then newly desegregated Sidney Lanier High School.

“I don’t call it ‘integration,’” Ashford said, pointing at her dark skin. “It was never real integration, and it’s not like we can ever just blend in.”

Burton described them as being “in the second wave” of Black students. “It wasn’t easy,” she said. “And we had to support each other.”

They remember their parents not being able to vote in the era of poll taxes, literacy tests and other racist restrictions that the Voting Rights Act eventually outlawed. But they smiled as they swapped family histories with the Nguyens.

Burton said immigrants, descendants of enslaved persons and Native Americans have different but overlapping paths. “We just want to be treated like people with the same rights and opportunities the country has promised us,” she said. “They’ve never fully lived up to it.”

Conflicting legacies are at stake

To Odom, who had begun his journey Saturday in South Carolina, the current U.S. Supreme Court reinforced that history by refusing to see some race-conscious election policy as a way to ensure fair representation, not simply the “technical right to vote.”

He recalls decades of his life being represented by Strom Thurmond, a segregationist Democratic governor who became a “Dixiecrat” presidential candidate and U.S. senator — by now as a Republican — into the 21st century. Odom said he fears his state losing U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn, a senior member of the Congressional Black Caucus, through redistricting.

“They want to take away that legacy when we’re still living with Strom’s?” Odom said.

Odom said he is also worried that the young people who participated Saturday are not a vanguard but outliers.

“I was talking to a 20-year-old co-worker about this trip,” he said. “She told me she supported me but didn’t want to do it or work for anybody” running for office. “She wondered what any of them are going to do for her.”

Nonetheless, he said on the way home, “I’m still going to tell her what I saw and what I heard.”

MADISON — Even on a damp day, the gaily painted blooms, ladybugs and butterflies on a brick wall of Madison Avenue Elementary School seem to pull a ray of sunshine out of thin air and an overcast sky.

The new mural is a vibrant anchor for the Reading Garden at the K-2 school — a cozy gathering spot just out back from the school’s library and designed for use by students and the community, too.

Seeds for the project first germinated a few years back, with school librarian Tosha Nowell’s idea to take the library from inside to out.

“Lots of people come up here and play on the weekends or afternoons on the playground,” Nowell said, “so I just thought it would give them an opportunity to sit and read, and just have some books out there.”

Extra seating, outdoor cushions for the low brick wall and a still-to-come reading shed with bookshelves will make it an inviting hangout space during school hours and beyond.

“That area is used so much on the weekends and after hours for recreation,” Madison Avenue Elementary Principal Kristal Epting said. “ We have families that walk dogs back there, we have families that come to run, throw Frisbees, use the playground equipment.” 

Baseball and soccer teams practice there, too.

“Since it’s an active area for the community, we just provided an additional space to focus on literacy and reading,” Epting said.

The Reading Garden became an active focus this school year for the Madison Avenue Elementary Parent Teacher Organization. Members sold Blue Cards, which provide discounts at local merchants, to raise money for the mural, a reading shed, seating and whimsical artificial flowers, as well as other projects and student opportunities, said PTO co-presidents Kristen Shumaker and Amanda Wilson. Allyn Anderson was the chair for the Blue Cards.

“It couldn’t have happened without the parents’ support,” Shumaker said. “We’re very thankful for the support of our school families.”

Epting noted the mural’s tie-in with the importance of the arts at the school.

“Madison Avenue has been an arts-integrated school for many years,” she said. “Under multiple administrations, through multiple faculties, that’s just something that’s always stayed — an arts focus.” 

Epting said the arts can be “a vehicle for learning,” with teachers connecting academic content with visual arts, music, dance and theater.

Nowell sees daily how her library’s bright, engaging surroundings support and encourage early readers. Kids scurry to find comfy spots to settle down, books in hand. She might give them a flashlight to read by and turn out the lights, or let them crawl under a table with pillows and stuffed toys to tuck into a book.

“It’s the point of making reading a comfortable, exciting — not just a dreaded ‘You’ve got to read’-type thing,’” she said. “They think it’s a fun thing. It’s the enjoyment of reading.”

That is the type of zeal Wilson sees in her daughter, Katherine: Morning visits to the library are a prime reason the first-grader can’t wait to come to school.

“I know she’s looking forward to this summer,” Wilson said. “She’ll be excited to come and to play on the playground and read, too.”

The mural is the work of Clinton artist Lucia Duque, who specialized in murals in her art studies in Spain, where she grew up. Her artwork, measuring nearly 500 square feet, enlivens the brick with bright, bold colors and a visual buzz of activity behind the slender trunks of crepe myrtles. 

Its bounty of botanicals and bright insects suit the Reading Garden theme, and the word “Avenue” and a jaguar, the school’s mascot, tie it directly to the location. 

Several ladybugs crawl across the design, inspired by beloved late teacher Nancy Summerhill Gross.

“She loved that area and she loved ladybugs,” Nowell said, crediting former school principal Melissa Philley with the idea for that memorial detail.

Madison Avenue Elementary PTO Grounds Chair Melissa Shows said Duque incorporated all the ideas people provided: “She delivered, and more.”

Duque previously painted Mannsdale Elementary’s Measurement Garden, and she embraced the team’s requests at Madison Avenue Elementary. “They wanted something with a bunch of colors. … I was so excited that I could do something I really love.” 

Duque reached out for an assistant to help with the big project, and Sherry McAlilly, who had previously taken a watercolor workshop with the artist, stepped up.

“It definitely is Lucia’s project. I told people, ‘I just painted in the lines,” McAlilly said with a fond laugh. Her granddaughter, Eleanor, a 6-year-old kindergartener at Madison Avenue Elementary, was able to join in, too, with some brushstrokes.

Work that started during spring break was wrapped up in a few weeks. Construction on the reading shed is projected for the fall. Nowell likened the potential for a bring-a-book, take-a-book type of exchange there to “those Little Free Libraries you see, but on a grander scale.”

“I’ve had a few parents say, ‘Now, I’ll sit down and read, and my child will sit down and read their book and we just have reading time,” Nowell said. “To me, the more you get a book in their hand, and they enjoy it, the better.” 

Nowell said she wants the outdoor reading space to be inviting.

“You have students that truly love to read. And, they’re K-to-2. They’re small,” Nowell said. “I still have kindergarteners that come in here in the mornings and they go find a spot to read. … Anything that’s not forced is going to encourage reading and literacy for the students.”

The mural enhances that pull, Epting said.

 “The art mural supports an inviting space that people want to come to. … Your eye is drawn to that. You’re driving up the back driveway to the building, your eye goes to that immediately.”

She pictured families using the outdoor area there as a cool spot to chill out with a book as well as a place for play. “Taking the learning from the inside out gives them that option. And parents need that option.”

Shumaker said her kindergartener, Ollie, loves the outdoors and has gushed about the mural, which he dubbed “the decorations.”

“With active kids, it’s nice to be able to have some on the playground, and some be able to sit,” said Shumaker, whose four children include several book lovers and one particularly avid reader. “Ben Shumaker is going to take a book wherever he goes.” 

Schoolchildren are thrilled with the artwork, evident in excited gasps at first sight, and their calls to pals, “Look!” Nowell said. “You should just see the look on their face when they were looking at that mural.”

Epting said, “It’s always going to be a trademark of the school, in the years moving forward.”