East St. Louis Race Riot headline, St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Friday, July 6, 1917 Credit: https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/east-st-louis-race-riot-1917/
One of the worst racial massacres in U.S. history ended after three days in East St. Louis, Illinois. After Black workers were given jobs in a factory that received government contracts, White workers began stabbing, beating and killing them. As many as a 100 or more were killed, hundreds more were injured, and 6,000 were driven from their homes.
“My father … witnessed … horrible things: people’s houses being set ablaze, . . . people being shot when they tried to flee, some trying to swim to the other side of the Mississippi while being shot at by white mobs with rifles, others being dragged out of street cars and beaten and hanged from street lamps,” said Dhati Kennedy, whose father was one of the survivors.
The Pittsburgh Dispatch wrote, “The picture of wantonness by the savagery of mobs at East St. Louis will be a humiliating display for the Fourth of July sun to look down upon as it rises on our national liberty jubilation with the country just entered upon a war to make democracy safe.”
Greta Kemp Martin, a Democrat challenging incumbent Attorney General Lynn Fitch this year, joins Mississippi Today’s Adam Ganucheau to discuss her campaign and the ideas she has for the job.
Lauren Rhoades moved to Mississippi and figured she’d be here three years. Ten years later, she not only loves the state, she is raising a family here and helping other transplants tell their stories. In this episode of Mississippi Stories, Marshall Ramsey (also a transplant) visits with Lauren and talks about what is so special about their adopted home. She also talks about her excellent Substack magazine, Rooted.
Tyree Irving, the chairman of the Mississippi Democratic Party since 2020, resigned as dozens of the state party’s executive committee members appeared poised to remove him from his seat in a July 6 emergency meeting.
Irving’s resignation, effective July 22 but announced on Saturday, comes less than a week after Mississippi Today published emails that some party officials feared would jeopardize a $250,000 donation from the national party.
The emails, which included a nasty personal attack of the No. 2 leader of the state party and were sent to senior staffers of the Democratic National Committee, led the state party’s executive committee members to begin gathering signatures to call a special meeting next week. The purpose of the meeting, according to a form being circulated, was to “address the long standing and repeated actions of malfeasance and misfeasance of the Chair of the Mississippi Democratic Party.”
Dozens of signatures had been gathered as of the weekend — more than enough to both call the meeting and ultimately remove the chair, several sources on the state party’s executive committee shared with Mississippi Today.
A portion of the form that dozens of Mississippi Democratic Party executive committee members had signed by the weekend.
Irving, who sent his resignation letter to some committee members on Saturday, was critical of the coverage of his actions.
“The past week has been very stressful for me, and especially my family, due to the circulation of false and misleading information impugning my name and reputation, while we are trying to plan for a successful election this year,” reads the resignation letter from Irving, first reported by SuperTalk Mississippi. “Regrettably, today I must inform you of my intent to resign as Chairman, effective at midnight, July 22, 2023.”
Emails published on June 26 showed that Irving sharply criticized Andre Wagner, the state party’s executive director and No. 2 leader of the party, in a note that was sent to three Democratic National Committee staffers. Shortly before Irving sent the email, the DNC officials had committed to sending the state party $250,000 to boost political programs and support candidates “up and down the ballot.”
Wagner had sought in an email to clarify Irving’s previous comments about how the state party should spend that $250,000 from the national party. Then Irving, a 77-year-old former Mississippi Court of Appeals judge who has been party chairman since 2020, insisted that he alone ran the state party and that Wagner was “out of order.”
“Mr. Wagner, you do not speak for the chair, and you are out of order,” Irving wrote. “I am an accomplished jurist. I know and understand things that you cannot know or understand because: you do not have the education level, you do not possess the personal or vicarious experience that I have, and you know nothing about the historical political landscape of Mississippi. You are not in a position to speak for the Mississippi Democratic Party or say how the Mississippi Democratic Party will spend any funds without being granted that authority to speak, and it has not been granted to you. You are a salaried employee and nothing else. You need to find your place and stay in it.”
Wagner, in response, forwarded the exchange to other state party leaders and predicted that the national party would pull its commitment to send the money to the state party. Several other Democratic Party officials told Mississippi Today they shared Wagner’s concern.
Irving, in an interview and follow-up messages with Mississippi Today, declined to respond to the content of his emails and whether he thought they may encourage the DNC to pull back on their commitment.
After the article published, several prominent Democrats publicly called for Irving’s removal from his post.
Shuwaski Young, the lone Democrat running for secretary of state this year, said the state Democratic Party’s executive committee should promptly remove Irving from his post.
“The chairman’s main job is to fundraise and to support candidates up and down the ticket,” Young said earlier this week. “When you have a chairman acting in this outrageous way, it makes people not want to invest into the party. It makes people not want to donate to candidates. And politically, it makes it harder for Democrats to win. When we can’t operate in a coordinated fashion because our leader can’t respect other people, it hurts every Democrat in the state. We have to be able to have our house in order, and that’s clearly not the case.”
Irving’s resignation comes at a critical time for Mississippi Democrats. Every statewide office, legislative seat and district attorney positions is on the ballot in November. And at the top of the ticket, Democrat Brandon Presley is challenging incumbent Republican Gov. Tate Reeves in a race many political observers have opined will be close.
On Thursday, before Irving announced his resignation, Presley attempted to distance himself from the Democratic Party drama.
“We’re running our own race, which, frankly and truthfully, doesn’t give me time to divert attention to things that seem to be internal matters within the party or party matters and are not my campaign matters,” Presley told Mississippi Today after speaking to Burning Bush Missionary Baptist Church in Grenada.
Democrats in recent years have been dominated by Republicans at every level of politics in the state. In election years, the party chair often guides political strategy and programming in addition to fundraising.
The executive committee is expected to meet in coming days to select a new chair of the party, who will lead the party’s efforts to support its candidates in the major election year. The new chair must currently serve on the state’s 80-member executive committee and must secure a majority vote of the committee.
On his 21st birthday, Medgar Evers and six other World War II veterans, including his brother, Charles, tried to vote in Decatur, Mississippi, only to be turned away by an armed White mob.
That day, Medgar Evers vowed that he would never be whipped again. He and other Black war veterans joined together to fight the civil rights movement.
After graduating from Alcorn College, he tried to enroll at the University of Mississippi School of Law — only to be turned away. NAACP officials considered taking up his case but were so impressed with him they decided instead to hire him as first field secretary for the Mississippi NAACP.
He put thousands of miles a year on his Oldsmobile, recruiting new members, reviving branches and investigating often unpunished violence against Black Americans, including the 1955 murder of Emmett Till.
On May 20, 1963, he talked on television about the mistreatment of Black Mississippians: “The years of change are upon us. In the racial picture things will never be as they once were. History has reached a turning point, here and over the world.”
Three weeks later, he was assassinated in the driveway of his Jackson home. On his birthday in 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it hours later.
Gov. Tate Reeves proudly proclaims in a campaign advertisement that “more of our people are working in Mississippi than ever before.”
That statement running on local television stations would be true for most states, but not necessarily so for Mississippi, according to at least one set of statistics compiled by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Based on one jobs report produced by BLS, the federal agency that tracks employment data, Mississippi reached a high-water mark for jobs in May 2000 with 1,243,022 people employed. In May 2023, the state had 1,206,804 people working, about 5,000 fewer than a month earlier — though those latest two months of jobs numbers are subject to revision.
Based on another jobs report compiled by BLS using different data, the governor is correct when he says more people are working than ever before. According to that data, Mississippi reached an all-time employment level high of 1,178,700 jobs in May, up about 300 jobs from April.
The difference in reports depends on varying models used by BLS researchers. The unemployment rate released each month is developed using data from the Current Population Survey and does not count people working multiple jobs, but does count self-employed workers, workers on leave, agriculture workers and others.
In the other BLS model, though, if a person is working two jobs, it counts both jobs in the total. But the model, the Current Employment Statistics, does not count self-employed workers, workers on leave, agriculture workers and others.
But even using the non-farm data that shows the state currently at its peak employment numbers, Mississippi still ranks 50th in jobs growth since 2000, based on information compiled by Arizona State University’s Seidman Research Institute.
At any rate, using various metrics, Mississippi has not exceeded the jobs growth of the rest of the nation since the COVID-19 pandemic. The United States regained all the jobs lost during the pandemic in July 2022. Mississippi already was losing jobs by the time the pandemic hit in early 2020. The state hit a high mark in non-farm payroll in November 2019 with 1,170,900 jobs and did not surpass that number again until September 2022.
According to BLS, using the non-farm category, Mississippi added 16,600 jobs from May 2022 to May 2023, or a 1.4% increase. That placed Mississippi among the bottom eight states in terms of jobs growth.
Rhode Island was the only state that had more jobs in May 2022 than a year later, according to BLS, using the non-farm, payroll data.
Without a doubt, the health of the Mississippi economy will be a major issue during this year’s gubernatorial campaign between the incumbent Republican Reeves and Democratic challenger Brandon Presley. And numbers can be manipulated to prove various arguments.
“Mississippi is open for business and our state is growing stronger every day. This is Mississippi’s time,” the governor said on social media.
But Presley has said, “Mississippi is at the bottom of the nation for economic growth.”.
Who is right? That will be much discussed before Mississippians go to the polls in November.
Reeves is celebrating the fact that Mississippi has a historically low 3.2% unemployment rate for the month of May and highlighting three consecutive months the state had set records for lowest unemployment rates.
The national unemployment rate was 3.7% in May — the highest since October 2020. But the national unemployment rate for multiple months is still historically low for the modern era. The lowest on record of 2.5% occurred in 1953.
The unemployment rate reflects the number of people looking for a job.
Many believe the labor force participation rate, which reflects the number of people eligible to work who are employed, is a more accurate reflection of economic well-being.
Mississippi continues to trail the nation in the labor force participation rate. Mississippi’s and West Virginia’s seasonally adjusted labor force participation rates of 54.6% in May were the lowest in the nation. The national average for May was 62.6% — the highest since before the pandemic.
Mississippi’s best labor force participation rate in the modern era of 62.8% occurred in early 2000, when the state hit its zenith in terms of employment, according to at least one Bureau of Labor Statistics measurement category.
The governing board of Mississippi’s public university system announced that Alcorn State University’s interim president is leaving next month to focus on his family.
The change, which the Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees approved in a special called executive session on Thursday, comes a little over two months after Ontario Wooden was appointed in the wake of the board’s firing of Felecia Nave, the university’s first female president.
Wooden had served as the provost and senior vice president for academic affairs since 2020. When Wooden was appointed in April, some faculty were optimistic he could repair the strained relationship they had with Nave due in part to some changes she’d made early in her tenure that increased the minimum number of classes faculty had to teach.
“We appreciate Dr. Wooden’s leadership and his three years of service to Alcorn State University,” said Dr. Alfred McNair, the new IHL board president, in a press release. “We wish Dr. Wooden and his family well in their future endeavors.”
Wooden will be replaced by Tracy Cook, the vice president for student affairs and enrollment management. Cook is an alumnus of Alcorn State, the oldest public historically Black university in Missisippi. He will begin serving on July 8.
“Dr. Cook will keep the university moving forward and building on its rich heritage,” McNair said.
The nature of Wooden’s departure was not immediately clear from IHL’s press release, and a spokesperson for the university did not respond to an inquiry from Mississippi Today by press time.
This is not unusual: The board did not provide a reason for Nave’s firing, which came two days after she interviewed as a semi-finalist for thechancellor positionat Louisiana State University, Shreveport.
An alumni group called Alcornites for Change has called on IHL to provide more information on the reason for Nave’s firing. The group had closely followed Nave’s presidency and prepared a report on declining enrollment, resignations and the abysmal state of the univesity’s athletic facilities.
“It was a shocker to us because my thing was, we’ve been presenting the information, we have been rallying the stakeholders, and all of a sudden, boom, they make a decision,” Jared Gilmore, a member of Alcornites for Change, told Mississippi Today last month. “We need to know where we go from here because we have some issues.”
IHL has yet to announce a timeline for a presidential search, and the board said at its meeting yesterday it does not plan to meet until August.
The U.S. Supreme Court rejected President Joe Biden’s plan for student debt relief that would have forgiven between $10,000 and $20,000 in student loan debt for millions of borrowers across the country, including nearly 439,000 Mississippians.
Biden’s plan, which made good on a key campaign promise, would have primarily benefited Black, brown and low-income borrowers, who nationally and in Mississippi have higher averages of student debt than white, wealthier borrowers. It was based on a 2003 law that gave the president the authority to waive federal student loans during a national emergency like the COVID-19 pandemic.
But the court disagreed that Biden could use the law how he wanted in the 6-3 partisan ruling. Writing for the conservative majority, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote Biden’s plan amounted to rewriting “that statute from the ground up.”
On Twitter, Gov. Tate Reeves wrote “this is another good decision from the Supreme Court and another win for America.”
“It is utterly absurd and incredibly unfair to punish the blue collar electrician or plumber, or any individual who worked hard to pay off his debt, so that Joe Biden can effectively bribe voters with our tax dollars,” Reeves added.
But student debt affects working-class professions, too. Trade schools can also leave students burdened with debt, and borrowers who attended for-profit colleges default at higher rates than those who do not, often because these institutions charge pricey tuition rates for non-accredited degrees.
And Biden’s plan could have been a boon for Mississippi’s tax revenue, Mississippi Today reported last year. Thanks to a longstanding state tax provision, the Mississippi Department of Revenue would have taxed student loan forgiveness the way it does any form of debt cancellation as income.
That would have left in-state borrowers on the hook for up to $1,000 in additional state income taxes.
A bill was introduced this legislative session to prevent that from happening, but it died in committee.
Monthly payments on federal student loans are currently paused but set to resume this fall; the first payment will be due in October.
GRENADA — Brandon Presley, the lone Democratic candidate running for governor, declined on Thursday to weigh in on whether Tyree Irving should resign as chairman of the Mississippi Democratic Party.
Presley will become the Democratic Party’s official nominee for governor in August, and, if elected to the highest office in the state, will become the de facto leader of that party. Still, the 45-year-old utilities regulator sought to distance himself from the intraparty bickering.
“We’re running our own race, which, frankly and truthfully, doesn’t give me time to divert attention to things that seem to be internal matters within the party or party matters and are not my campaign matters,” Presley told Mississippi Today after speaking to Burning Bush Missionary Baptist Church in Grenada.
Emails published Monday showed that Irving sharply criticized Andre Wagner, the state party’s executive director and No. 2 leader of the party, in a note that was sent to three Democratic National Committee staffers.
Shortly before Irving sent the email, the DNC officials had committed to sending the state party $250,000 to boost political programs and support candidates “up and down the ballot.”
Wagner had sought in an email to clarify Irving’s previous comments about how the state party should spend that $250,000 from the national party. Then Irving, a 77-year-old former Mississippi Court of Appeals judge who has been party chairman since 2020, insisted that he alone ran the state party and that Wagner was “out of order.”
“Mr. Wagner, you do not speak for the chair, and you are out of order,” Irving wrote. “I am an accomplished jurist. I know and understand things that you cannot know or understand because: you do not have the education level, you do not possess the personal or vicarious experience that I have, and you know nothing about the historical political landscape of Mississippi. You are not in a position to speak for the Mississippi Democratic Party or say how the Mississippi Democratic Party will spend any funds without being granted that authority to speak, and it has not been granted to you. You are a salaried employee and nothing else. You need to find your place and stay in it.”
Wagner, in response, forwarded the exchange to other state party leaders and predicted that the national party would pull its commitment to send the money to the state party. Several other Democratic Party officials told Mississippi Today they shared Wagner’s concern.
Since the back-and-forth between Wagner and Irving was brought to light, Shuwaski Young, the Democratic candidate running for secretary of state, has publicly called for Irving to resign as chairman of the party.
Presley acknowledged to Mississippi Today that the state party could use the DNC’s money for voter engagement efforts, but said he would not attempt to influence the national party’s decision to invest the resources in the Magnolia State.
“We’re running our own race, and we’re going to continue taking our message to Democrats, Republicans and independents that want to end the corrupt career of Tate Reeves,” Presley said. “And we’re not turning away support, but, obviously, this is a completely internal issue within the Democratic Party. And we don’t have time to focus on those issues.”
Irving was elected chairman of the party in 2020 to serve a four-year term.
The governing board of Mississippi’s eight public universities will review its admission policies in light of the U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down the consideration of race as a factor in college admissions.
Going forward, colleges and universities will only be able to consider race in the context of how it’s affected a potential student’s life, the court ruled. The decision, which concerned admissions policies at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, is expected to make elite institutions less diverse.
Alfred Rankins, the commissioner of Institutions of Higher Learning, said in a statement Thursday that the board of trustees will work with the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office to determine if its admission policies, which are relatively open, are in compliance.
“We will review the Supreme Court’s ruling and our general undergraduate, graduate, and professional school admission policies to determine if any changes are needed to ensure compliance with federal law,” Rankins said.
The ruling, delivered by the Court on ideological lines, was decried by Democrats, including U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, who noted that race-conscious admissions policies were an important way for universities to ensure historically marginalized students had “access the same educational opportunities available to their more privileged peers.”
It was celebrated by conservatives. On Twitter, Gov. Tate Reeves wrote that his office will “enthusiastically work to ensure that our universities across the state comply with both the letter and spirit of this decision.”
“Our academic institutions will be stronger and more fair because of it,” he added.
But it’s not clear that any institution of higher education in Mississippi considers race as a factor in admissions. In Mississippi, affirmative action was struck down in 1996 by the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in Hopwood v. Texas, a case sometimes referred to as “the beginning of the end of affirmative action in higher education.”
None of the state’s top three public universities considers race as a factor in admissions, according to the Common Data Set.
In general, Mississippi’s public universities have open enrollment. Prospective undergraduate students are admitted if they meet a range of criteria such as completing certain college prep curricula with a minimum grade point average, or maintaining a 2.0 GPA and scoring an 18 or higher on the ACT, a cut-off that’s lower than the state’s average.
These across-the-board standards are rooted in changes IHL had to make in the aftermath of a 1991 U.S. Supreme Court case called Ayers v. Fordice that found Mississippi was maintaining a separate-but-equal system of higher education, with the five predominately white institutions and the three historically Black institutions almost exactly divided by race.
The court ruled that ACT scores played a particular role in maintaining this segregation. In 1963, the year after James Meredith desegregated the University of Mississippi, that institution adopted a policy requiring a minimum ACT score of 15 as a requirement for admission along with Mississippi State University and the University of Southern Mississippi.
“At the time, the average ACT score for white students was 18 and the average score for blacks was 7,” the court wrote.
As a result of the Ayers ruling, all eight universities adopted the same entrance requirements. The 2004 settlement went even further, though, requiring the three HBCUs to spend extra dollars recruiting non-Black students in order to unlock certain endowment funds.
