OurTupelo

U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna of California visited Jackson to highlight a technology job training initiative with Jackson State University he’s spearheading as part of a larger effort to connect the tech sector to historically Black colleges and universities.

Khanna, a Democrat, represents Silicon Valley, home to Google, Nvidia and Apple. His Thursday visit is part of the congressman’s broader effort to connect Black communities, particularly in the Deep South, with the uber-wealthy companies in his home district.  

“We need a generation of people who are participating in the modern digital economy that are being trained and educated right here in Jackson,” Khanna said at the Smith Robertson Museum downtown.

The program gives $5,000 scholarships to students at Jackson State University and allows them to participate in an 18-month course, according to Khanna. After completing the program, the graduates are usually offered a lucrative job in the technology sector, with a starting salary ranging from $65,000 to $80,000. 

“You have to bring the digital revolution to the Black South,” Khanna said. 

The son of Indian immigrants, Khanna said he and and his family have a deep appreciation for the Civil Rights Movement and the Mississippi organizers at its epicenter. 

The California lawmaker said his grandfather was jailed in India for four years for his support of Mahatma Gandhi’s movement for independence from the British Empire. That same movement in India inspired the nonviolent organizing tactics utilized by civil rights leaders such as Medgar Evers, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis. 

“The Civil Rights Movement then led to the Immigration Reform Act of 1965, and that’s what led my parents to come to the United States,” Khanna said. 

Despite its rich civil rights history and status as the Blackest state in the nation, Mississippi is sometimes overlooked by the national Democratic Party because of the state’s overall conservative electorate. 

Khanna told Mississippi Today in an interview that the national Democratic Party should invest more in Mississippi. If it supports organizing efforts, he said, the Magnolia State could become competitive in statewide elections. 

Beyond politics, the lawmaker said the party and nation did not support the capital city enough during the Jackson water crisis that left thousands of residents without clean running water and has not put Mississippi at the front and center of economic development. 

“Anyone who wants to understand the history of segregation, the history of racial justice, has to understand Mississippi,” Khanna said. “And anyone who wants to see the hope and promise of economic development has to come here.”

Delta Health Alliance is starting construction on a center in Leland that will offer dentistry and occupational, physical and speech therapy – with options for those who are uninsured or underinsured.

Groundbreaking was held Thursday for Delta Cares Center. It will be a $10 million addition to the comprehensive Leland Medical Clinic that has served the region since 2013. 

The expansion is made possible by a U.S. Department of Agriculture grant to Delta Health Alliance, a nonprofit organization that works to improve access to health services in the mostly rural, impoverished part of the state. 

The decision to focus the new center on rehabilitative therapies and dentistry was born from the need providers saw in the main clinic, said Karen Matthews, CEO of Delta Health Alliance. 

“Dentistry is just very hard to come by in the Delta for our population,” Matthews said. “And people desperately needed it. Also with physical, occupational and speech therapy – it’s very hard to come by. And when people can get it, the wait is just extremely long.”

While construction of the new building will take approximately a year, Matthews said patients can make dental appointments immediately to be seen in the clinic’s mobile van. 

A sliding fee scale is available to people whose income is less than about $31,000 annually for one person or $53,000 for a family of three – below 200% of the federal poverty level. Fees start as low as $3.

That’s available for patients who are uninsured, as well as those who have what many call “junk” insurance plans, said Hilary Meier, head of Leland Medical Clinic. 

“Anybody can apply for the sliding fee scale, even if you have insurance, because a lot of people have really high deductibles or co-pays,” Meier said. “If they qualify then they can be in that sliding fee scale for any of the services we provide at the clinic.”

In addition to flexible cost options, the clinic also offers free transportation to those who need it with a van that picks up patients up to 45 minutes away. That service will also be available for the new Delta Cares Center. 

“Our mission for Leland Medical Clinic is to be able to serve everyone in the community regardless of their ability to pay or not, and to be able to offer high-quality services to everyone,” Meier said. “So that will expand into this new building, as well, and with the additional services that we’re going to be able to offer our community.”

This story was originally reported by Shefali Luthra and Barbara Rodriguez of The 19th. Meet Shefali and Barbara and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.

When there’s a maternal health emergency, Jessica Wheat springs into action.

Alongside a group of specialized health providers at Research Medical Center in Kansas City, Wheat works fast to make sure patients are able to have their babies delivered safely or their children given critical treatment at the Level III neonatal intensive care unit on site.

“We have just an abundance of resources, and people that know what they’re doing,” the labor and delivery nurse said.

That abundance is coming to an end. Last month, HCA Midwest Health, which owns Research Medical Center, announced it was closing its obstetrics program and NICU. The umbrella company that runs HCA Midwest Health, which oversees multiple hospitals and related sites of care in nearly two dozen states, cited declining births at the hospital as part of its reasons for the closure.

Wheat is worried about the implications for local patients who often struggle to find transportation even across Kansas City. But she’s also concerned about the rural patients outside of the metro area.

“We tend to get smaller hospitals that will Life Flight bleeding moms or moms who are breech or moms who are having a hypertensive crisis,” she said. “We can do the emergency C-section — a lot of smaller hospitals do not have those capabilities. The farther they have to go, the more at risk they’re going to be for complications, even death.”

The availability of obstetrics care in America has been dwindling for years. That could accelerate now, as hospital leaders across the country warn that President Donald Trump’s massive cuts to Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance program for low-income Americans, could leave pregnant people in rural communities with vanishingly few options for medical care. 

Obstetrics is one of the most expensive services provided by hospitals, especially in rural areas, which often see a larger portion of Medicaid patients. Nationwide, the program pays for about 40 percent of all births. With financial hits looming, hospitals are primed to close maternity wards first, and rural areas are particularly vulnerable.

“This is going to have an enormous impact,” said Dr. John Cullen, a family physician in Valdez, Alaska, a remote city of about 4,000 people. “Already we’re seeing OB deserts that are increasing in size, and after the passage of this bill those are going to be markedly worse — where people are going to have to drive hundreds of miles before they can get prenatal care, much less delivery.”

For years, hospitals facing financial pressure have shuttered maternity wards. Between 2010 and 2022, more than 500 hospitals across the country dropped obstetrics, per a recent study that also shows more than half of rural counties now have no hospital-based obstetric services. A report from the advocacy group March of Dimes found that 1 in 3 U.S. counties had no OBGYN at all.

There are numerous reasons for the recent closures, ranging from declining births to difficulties hiring local providers. But the biggest issue is financial: Hospitals typically don’t earn enough from labor and delivery to cover the cost. Now, cuts to Medicaid — which will further cut hospital revenues and increase their share of uncompensated care — threaten to strain finances further.

“I do have a lot of concern that we’ll continue to see labor and delivery units close in rural hospitals and potentially even at an accelerated rate, as hospitals feel greater strain due to cuts in the bill,” said Carrie Cochran-McClain, chief policy officer with the National Rural Health Association.

The National Rural Health Association and Manatt Health, a consulting firm, estimated in June that the proposed Medicaid cuts over 10 years could reach almost $70 billion just for rural hospitals. Nearly half of all children and 1 in 5 adults in rural communities are enrolled in Medicaid or the related Children’s Health Insurance Program. The health insurance plan also pays hospitals less for the same services than private insurance does.

“When rural hospitals say, ‘We have these big Medicaid cuts, how do we deal with that shortfall?’ the OB units are going to be first on the chopping block,” said Jamie Daw, an associate professor of health policy at Columbia University.

One analysis from the National Partnership for Women and Families, a nonpartisan organization that supports policies such as equal pay and access to health care, suggests that the new cuts to Medicaid put almost 150 rural hospitals with maternity services at risk of serious downsizing or closing altogether.

The changes to Medicaid — including cumbersome new paperwork requirements for people insured through the program, and cuts to some of the taxes used to finance state Medicaid programs — largely won’t take effect until after the 2026 midterm elections. But already, hospitals are preparing for huge reductions in services, and pointing to labor and delivery as one of their most vulnerable offerings.

Michigan-based Trinity Health operates five hospitals that include maternity services. Hospital leaders are deeply concerned about service cuts that would make it harder for pregnant patients to get appropriate medical care, said Dr. Sharon O’Leary, an OBGYN and the organization’s chief data analytics and chief equity officer.

When patients have to travel further for prenatal care, they are more likely to cut the number of doctors’ visits or to receive no prenatal care at all. Studies over the past several years have shown that obstetrics unit closures — and increased travel time for pregnant patients — result in higher rates of pregnancy-related complications, including premature birth and low birth weight. 

“Our biggest fear is that as women lose coverage that they will not seek prenatal care,” O’Leary said.

The consequences are likely to be heightened in areas that are already underserved, and where birth outcomes are worse: rural parts of the country, and, in particular, large swaths of the South. 

“While we are concerned about the impact the bill will have on all hospital services, we are particularly concerned about its impact on labor and delivery services,” said Richard Roberson, president and CEO of the Mississippi Hospital Association.

Already, rural areas have seen access to reproductive care dwindling, particularly in the past three years, since the fall of Roe v. Wade allowed states to outlaw abortion. Preliminary data shows that medical residents for OBGYN are applying in smaller numbers to states with abortion bans and a recent study in the medical journal JAMA, the first to assess the relationship between abortion bans and provider availability, found that in Idaho, the number of OBGYNs fell by 35 percent between August 2022 — when the state implemented its near-total ban — and December 2024.

Abortion ban states, which are largely in the South, also have higher rural populations, worse birth outcomes and larger shares of hospitals at risk of closure. 

“It’s an additional trend — on top of this piece of the general financial pressure  — that’s going to also affect predominantly rural Southern communities,” Daw said. “It seems like a perfect storm of these concurrent trends really really affecting access to care.”

If hospitals reduce their pregnancy-related offerings, few alternatives will be able to fill in the gap. Earlier this year, the Trump administration began withholding millions of dollars in family planning grants through Title X, the federal program that supports family planning services for low-income people. Planned Parenthood, a major provider of services that include cancer screenings, testing for sexually transmitted diseases and contraception, is also one of the largest Title X providers. Most Planned Parenthood clinics are in rural or otherwise medically underserved areas. The federal budget and tax law also includes a provision that would cut federal Medicaid funding from Planned Parenthood, though that policy has since been blocked by a federal court ruling. In recent weeks, several clinics have announced their plans to close. 

“You have to think of them as related,” Daw said. “It’s definitely not helpful to have all of these changes happening at the same time and really undermining the safety net for reproductive-aged women.”

Cochran-McClain said when a provider with a background in obstetrics care leaves a rural town or city, that impacts health services more broadly: Often, that provider was also providing contraception, general gynecological care and routine screenings.

“It’s so interconnected. While we’re talking specifically about labor, delivery and pregnancy, it can have an impact more broadly on access to women’s health in rural communities,” she said. “It’s been a rough couple of years before all of this, so it just feels like it’s a worsening trend in terms of overall access.”

The closure at Research Medical Center in Kansas City — where its obstetrics program is scheduled to close down in early September — also shows that even when a person in a rural area is forced to travel greater distances into a city setting for specialized care, those services aren’t guaranteed.

Wheat and other affected nurses at Research Medical Center, where they are represented by National Nurses United, said HCA Midwest Health has not provided enough information about the logistics of winding down services. Will the rest of the hospital, including its ICU unit, take emergency patients who need labor and delivery services? Or will the remaining staff in other areas of the hospital get specialized training?

HCA Midwest Health, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The 19th, said in a statement to a media outlet that it is working with area health providers to ensure patients have other delivery options.

Wheat has lined up another nursing job in labor and delivery with a different hospital system. In her text group chats with other impacted staff, there is a sense of sadness. She believes the obstetrics-related health providers will find other work, even if it means even more gas mileage to get to a new job. But Wheat keeps thinking about what’s to come for the patients.

“I’m emotionally exhausted. It is hard,” she said. “We’re just grieving for the community at this point, because we know they’re going to have a lot of issues after we’re gone.”

Demand for electric vehicles has slowed in the United States. Mississippi is already feeling its effects with a delay in production at the Nissan plant in Canton.

While President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” ended EV tax incentives it also freed up cash for companies to invest in domestic production. If national demand continues to slow what will this mean for Mississippi?

Electric vehicle demand slowed in the United States before EV tax incentives ended due to higher up front costs, limited ranges and lack of charging infrastructure. Despite embracing EV manufacturing, Mississippi has one of the lowest rates of EV ownership in the country. EVs make up 0.1% of the market share in Mississippi compared to 1.2% nationally according to data from the US Department of Energy. 

What do you think the future of EVs in Mississippi looks like? Let us know what you think at marketplace@mississippitoday.org.

EV Manufacturing 

Auto manufacturing is a major employer in Mississippi, with 15,000 employees according to the Mississippi Development Authority. Over the past few years, there has been an influx of investment in EV manufacturing in the state: 

• Nissan announced a $500 million investment in its Canton plant to build EVs.
• Mullen Automotive, now Bollinger Innovations, began producing commercial EVs in Tunica. 
• Cummins Inc., Daimler Trucks & Buses and PACCAR planned to invest $1.9 billion in a new EV battery plant in Marshall County.

Nissan’s declining sales of EVs and other financial pressures led to the announcement that EV production would be pushed back at its Canton plant. Bollinger Innovations’s ongoing legal battles forced it to consolidate its operations and transfer ownership of a plant in Indiana. However, its Tunica plant continues to be operational.

In July, the Commercial Dispatch reported that Paccar was laying off an unspecified number of people at its Lowndes plant, which manufactures diesel engines. While the company announced that its net income was down from the previous year in Q2 2025, it exceeded industry expectations. There’s been no announcements that the company is stopping plans for a new facility in Lowndes and the battery plant in Marshall County. Paccar’s executives were optimistic about the second half of 2025 on a recent earnings call. 

One reason was changes to tax law in the new federal tax and spending bill that allows companies to deduct spending on domestic research and development, equipment and factories all at once instead of spread out over multiple years. The result, more cash for companies sooner.  

Other News: New Factories, New Investment, New Leadership

• Anduril Rocket Motor Systems, a California defense company, opened a new factory in Stone County.
• Mancuso Chemicals, a Canadian company is investing $5.52 million to build a logistics distribution center in Clarke County. The project is expected to create 17 jobs in the next five years.
• Mississippi Power announced a new CEO and chairman, Pedro Cherry. Mississippi Power provides service to 23 counties and is a subsidiary of the Southern Company.
• Howard Industries is investing $236 million to expand its Mississippi footprint.

Have economic or business news? Email Katherine Lin at marketplace@mississippitoday.org.

BUCHAREST, Romania — Tudor Lakatos is fighting discrimination against the Roma people, one Elvis Presley song at a time.

Decked out in a rhinestone shirt and oversized sunglasses, with his black hair slicked back into a 1950s-style quiff, Lakatos swivels his hips and belts out his own idiosyncratic versions of hits like “Blue Suede Shoes” at venues throughout Romania.

But don’t call him an Elvis impersonator. Lakatos prefers to say that he “channels” the King of rock ‘n’ roll’s global appeal to break down stereotypes about the Roma and provide a positive role model for Roma children.

“I never wanted to get on stage, I didn’t think about it,” Lakatos, 58, said after a recent gig at a restaurant in the capital, Bucharest. “I only wanted one thing — to make friends with Romanians, to stop being called a Gypsy,” he added, using an often derided term for people belonging to the Roma ethnic group.

The Roma, an ethnic group that traces its roots to South Asia, have been persecuted across eastern Europe for centuries and are still associated with high rates of poverty, unemployment and crime. They account for about 7% of the population of Romania, where a fifth say they have faced discrimination in the past year, according to a recent survey by the European Union.

Lakatos’ quest to change that began in the early 1980s when he was an art student and Romania was ruled by the hard-line communist regime of Nicolae Ceausescu.

At a time when anti-Roma discrimination was mainstream, Lakatos found that singing Elvis songs was a way to connect with ethnic Romanian students while rock music was a symbol of rebellion against the oppressive government.

Four decades later, he’s added a new audience.

A school teacher for the past 25 years, Lakatos uses his music to show his students that they can aspire to something more than the dirt roads and horse driven carts of their village in northwestern Romania.

“The adjective Gypsy is used everywhere as a substitute for insult,” Lakatos said. “We older people have gotten used to it, we can swallow it, we grew up with it. I have said many times, ‘Call us what you want, dinosaur and brontosaurus, but at least join hands with us to educate the next generation.’”

But Lakatos still crisscrosses the country to perform at venues large and small.

On a hot summer evening, that journey took Lakatos to Terasa Florilor in Bucharest, a neighborhood joint whose owner takes pride in offering live music by local artists who perform on a stage made of wooden beams painted in vivid colors.

The audience included those who came for the show and others attracted by the sausages, pork roast and Moldavian meatballs on the menu. A few danced and others took selfies as they enjoyed Lakatos’ trademark “Rock ‘n’ Rom” show, a mix of Elvis songs delivered in the Romani language, Romanian and English.

The eclectic mix of languages can sometimes lead to surprises because there isn’t always a literal translation for Elvis’ 1950s American English.

For example, “Don’t step on my blue suede shoes” doesn’t make sense to many of the children he teaches because they are so poor, Lakatos said.

In his version, the lyric Elvis made famous becomes simply “don’t step on my bare feet.”

It’s a message that Elvis — born in a two-room house in Tupelo, Mississippi, during the Great Depression — probably would have understood.

 This report was written by Vadim Ghirda and Andreea Alexandru of The Associated Press.

We are in that period of the sports calendar when baseball is winding down and football talk is heating up. The Clevelands discuss Saints pre-season camp, the college football preseason rankings, the lowly Atlanta Braves, and much more.

Stream all episodes here.

A federal judge will soon decide if a Mississippi law banning educators from teaching diversity, equity and inclusion programs should be blocked indefinitely. 

Dozens of educators, students and parents watched on Tuesday as attorneys argued over a preliminary injunction. It would extend the pause issued by U.S. District Judge Henry T. Wingate and prevent the controversial state law from being enforced until there’s a final ruling in the case.

The biggest hang-up? Whether teachers and students have First Amendment rights in the classroom. 

Lawyers for the plaintiffs argued over the course of two days about the law’s unconstitutionality and vagueness. Rob McDuff, a Mississippi Center for Justice attorney, emphasized that entire curricula would have to be rewritten, and that widespread confusion about the statute could lead to a flood of complaints. 

“The statute is breathtaking in breadth and confusion,” McDuff said. 

Attorneys for the plaintiffs called four witnesses — a parent, a professor, a graduate student and a law-school professor — to the stand. They all said they felt uncomfortable with and confused by the law. The two University of Mississippi educators — sociology professor James Thomas and law-school professor Cliff Johnson — said they were unable to finalize their syllabi, just weeks before classes begin. 

Thomas, who teaches a sociological race and ethnicity seminar, said he didn’t think he could teach his discipline “without running afoul of the law.” A parent of two Oxford School District students, he also said he was concerned that his kids’ education, as a result of the law, would not stack up to their peers who live in other states. 

Johnson, director of the MacArthur Justice Center at the University of Mississippi School of Law, described a portion of the statute as “nonsensical,” to titters from the audience. At one point, Wingate questioned Johnson himself, asking if he felt comfortable teaching various lawsuits and statutes — the list spanned the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, as well as defining U.S. Civil Rights cases such as Korematsu v. United States. 

When Johnson responded that he didn’t feel comfortable teaching those things under the law, both the judge and the court were silent. 

Lisa Reppeto of the Mississippi Attorney General’s office chalked up the plaintiffs’ concerns to “histrionics” and an “overwrought” reading of the statute. 

She argued that the testimony provided was largely irrelevant because what the educators, parents and students feared would most likely not come to pass, and that the educators in particular gave up their First Amendment free speech rights when they chose employment with public institutions. 

“I have been a public employee now for two months,” she said. “I knew when I took the job with the attorney general’s office that my First Amendment rights are now subject to my employer. It’s what every public employee agrees to. If you don’t want to be subject to those rules, you should probably find another job.”

As for the parents and students in the lawsuit who expressed anxiety and dismay about the law’s enforcement?

“Feelings aren’t evidence,” Reppeto said. 

This was also the first time that parties appeared before Wingate since he issued an error-riddled temporary restraining order that contained several factual inaccuracies.

The first iteration of the order named plaintiffs who weren’t parties to the suit, quoted state law incorrectly and referred to a case that doesn’t appear to exist — errors some lawyers speculated were made by artificial intelligence. After the state attorney general asked Wingate to clarify the document, he replaced it with a corrected version, removing the original from the docket entirely.

Then, the state asked that the original faulty order be restored to the docket and for an explanation for the errors. 

But Wingate, in an order on Aug. 1, denied the request and attributed the mistakes to “clerical errors.”

“The Court corrected the record, notified the parties, and the corrected TRO is the controlling order,” he wrote. “No further explanation is warranted.”

While attorneys have been questioned or sanctioned for using artificial intelligence, the power imbalance makes it difficult to do the same when the same is suspected of a judge. 

The plaintiffs have also filed a motion seeking class-action status, which would prohibit state agencies from forcing other educators to comply with the DEI law. That motion was not substantively discussed on Tuesday or Wednesday.

Wingate is expected to issue a ruling on the preliminary injunction before Aug. 17, when the temporary restraining order expires. Lawyers on both sides stressed that time is of the essence — some Mississippi schools have already welcomed students back for the new year. The remainder will begin classes within weeks.

Mississippi Today reporter Taylor Vance contributed to this article.

CANTON – Jeff Goodwin, director of the state auditor’s compliance division, was congenial while describing to Canton officials how the office has taken $352,000 of the city’s revenue to pay for past-due audits – the first time Auditor Shad White has exercised this authority.

“I didn’t write the law. Auditor White didn’t write the law, but we’re charged with enforcing it,” Goodwin said at the Canton Board of Aldermen meeting Tuesday.

Canton is one of 68 local governments across Mississippi that received an auditor’s letter in March, putting officials on notice of their delinquent audits. 

The notices went as far north as Farmington near the Tennessee line and as far south as Moss Point on the Gulf Coast. They spanned from mid-sized cities like McComb, to rural towns like Coffeeville, to tiny villages like Beauregard – a signal of widespread municipal finance concerns.

This is especially true in the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic, during which Congress dolled out billions to local governments nationwide, necessitating more accounting, and city and town halls dealt with the fallout of a reduced labor force. 

Incomplete audits create a host of problems, including reducing a city’s ability to borrow money and prohibiting it from drawing down federal grants.

Audits are important, despite not appearing urgent, said Billy Morehead, Mississippi College accounting professor and member of the Mississippi Public Procurement Review Board.

“All of a sudden, the can’s been kicked down the road and the municipality is at risk of losing a variety of funding, a lot of their federal funds, but also their credit ratings,” Morehead said. “It could be catastrophic to some of these places.”

The March letters required compliance within 30 days or the auditor would request the Mississippi Department of Revenue to divert sales tax dollars from the municipality – the estimated price of bringing the audits up to date, plus 50% of that amount the auditor is allowed to retain for its administrative cost of hiring the accounting firm and acting as a third party on the reports.

Jackson has faced scrutiny for falling behind on its audits, including one for 2023 which has yet to be complete, but the capital city did not receive a noncompliance letter. The auditor’s office said it focused on municipalities that are as far behind as 2022.

Only Canton, a city of about 11,000 in Madison County, and Maben, a town of fewer than 1,000 in Oktibbeha County, have seen their funds diverted under this process so far. Maben’s transfer totaled more than $68,000. Holly Springs, Indianola and Tchula are not far behind.

The planned diversions total $1.6 million, with Indianola facing the largest threatened seizure of $675,000. That’s more than half of the city’s total annual sales tax revenue of about $1.1 million. Holly Springs, which has been under investigation for its management of the local electric utility, faces a sales tax diversion of $450,000, also roughly half of its annual sales tax revenue of $900,000.

The auditor’s office has chosen so far not divert an additional total of $900,000 from four other towns – Itta Bena, Okolona, Winona and McComb – which it said demonstrated a good faith effort to rectify their incomplete reports. WLBT reported that McComb hadn’t completed an audit since 2020, and that residents “think someone is stealing from the city,” according to a local official.

Annual audit requirements were relaxed during the pandemic, Goodwin said, “But COVID has since passed.”

“And so we’re finding municipalities in circumstances where they can’t borrow funds, they can’t get grants, which is a jeopardy to the health, safety and welfare of the constituents,” he said.

In the case of Indianola, the audit delinquency caused the city to lose federal grants, such as a half-million dollar sidewalk project from the Mississippi Department of Transportation, according to reporting by The Enterprise-Tocsin, though it found a workaround by routing the money through the school district.

The auditor’s office has the power to direct these diversions under a law passed in 2009. But this is the first time it has deployed this authority, assuming control of a city’s funds and engaging a firm to conduct the audits.

“It’s brand new, uncharted territory,” Goodwin said, “The way the code reads, we have to estimate the fee and we have to put a 50% penalty on it. We don’t want your money.”

White, a Republican, has jokingly referred to his office as “MOGE,” the Mississippi version of President Donald Trump former adviser Elon Musk’s DOGE, or Department of Government Efficiency. The auditor was more rigid in his comments on the municipalities’ overdue work.

“We’ve given cities plenty of chances to catch up on their audits,” White said in a statement to Mississippi Today. “For the ones who have refused to get audited, their citizens deserve better, and my office will use the full extent of its legal authority to make sure the taxpayers get the transparency they deserve.”

The auditor’s office notably does not have the authority to audit municipalities itself, and legislators killed a 2024 proposal to permit the auditor to review and examine them.

The Mississippi Department of Revenue declined multiple requests for an interview about the diversions, directing all questions to the auditor’s office.

Under the law, the auditor’s office has the power to choose the CPA firm to complete the past-due audits, enter the contract as a third party, and pay the invoices with the diverted revenue. Canton recently retained Tann, Brown and Russ in an effort to comply. The same firm has been working on the 2019 audit for Indianola since 2024. An accountant there declined to comment about their engagement or about the challenges surrounding municipal auditing.

It’s difficult to find CPA firms that will conduct municipal audits, let alone one that will do it for a price some small towns are willing or able to pay. The number of students majoring in accounting has dwindled, despite an uptick in more recent years, Morehead said, and firms are still struggling to keep up with the demand.

“I know folks who are just exhausted,” Morehead said.

In Tchula, one of the poorest towns in the nation on the edge of the Mississippi Delta in Holmes County, Mayor General Vann served 2017-21 and oversaw the last annual audit the town completed. He was elected again this year and took office July 1. Within a few weeks, Tchula had retained Watkins, Ward and Stafford, headquartered in West Point. 

“The town finances are meager,” Vann said. “But this is a priority and a necessity and it’s something that you have to get done. And the price, you just have to bear it and come up with it. You don’t have any choice.”

The audits become even more difficult to complete when municipalities haven’t maintained proper recordkeeping – every transaction, deposit and debit – in part because they’re losing institutional knowledge inside their clerks’ offices due to retirement and population loss.

“I think there’s a brain drain,” Vann said. “You have to have someone that knows how to keep a good set of books.”

The auditor’s office said it would be returning any unused money to the municipalities, but since the estimated cost of the audit assumes financial statements will be in a good enough shape to audit and that may not be the case, it could be unlikely there are any leftover funds.

“I do have concerns for you, each one of you,” Goodwin told the Canton officials. “You’re basing your decisions off of financial statements that will not be complete.”

Alderwoman Shannon Whitehead, who was just elected in April, smiled, nodded and repeated “right” and “absolutely” during the presentation Tuesday. 

Jason Camp, a Mississippi State University extension specialist who specializes in municipal government, said in some cases, current municipal officials were not in charge when the audits fell behind, but someone has to hold them accountable for following the law.

“It does sound like the actions taken by the state auditor’s office has made some urgency come into play with some of the cities who maybe didn’t think it was such a big deal to be behind,” Camp said in an interview with Mississippi Today. “They’re now saying, ‘Hey this is a serious issue and we have to put resources towards getting us caught up.’”

All but one incumbent Mississippi lawmaker won their primary race in special elections scattered across the state Tuesday. 

With complete but unofficial numbers, Sens. Michael McLendon of Hernando, Chris Johnson of Hattiesburg and Reginald Jackson of Marks, and Reps. Kabir Karriem of Columbus and Rickey Thompson of Shannon all won their primaries.

See vote totals below.

Sen. Robin Robinson of Laurel was soundly defeated, ending her brief tenure in the Senate. Donald Hartness, a retired Ellisville resident backed by former longtime state Sen. Chris McDaniel, captured the Republican nomination with more than 70% of the vote.

In newly drawn Senate District 2, including parts of DeSoto and Tunica counties, Theresa Isom defeated Robert Walker in the Democratic primary. She will face Republican Charlie Hoots in November.

A federal three-judge panel ordered Mississippi to conduct special elections for 14 legislative seats this year because the court determined the Legislature diluted Black voting strength when it redrew state House and Senate districts.

The federal panel specifically ordered the state to have special elections for House districts in the Chickasaw County area, Senate districts in the Hattiesburg area and Senate districts in the DeSoto County area.

Ten of the 14 seats are contested. Of those 10, seven had a contested primary Tuesday. After party leaders certify the election results, the Republican and Democratic nominees will compete in the Nov. 4 general election. 

Here are the complete results of the primary election: 

Senate District 1 – DeSoto and Tate counties: 

Republican Primary: 

• Michael McLendon, incumbent:  4,176
• Jon Stevenson: 1,941

In the general election, McLendon will face Chris Hannah, who was unopposed for the Democratic nomination. 

Senate District 2 – DeSoto and Tunica counties: 

Democratic primary: 

• Theresa Isom: 841
• Robert Walker:  234

In the general election, Isom will face Charlie Hoots , who was unopposed for the Republican nomination. 

Senate District 11 – Coahoma, DeSoto, Quitman, Tate and Tunica counties: 

Democratic primary: 

• Abe Hudson, Jr.: 1,025
• Reginald Jackson, incumbent: 1,427

In the general election, Jackson will face Kendall Prewett, who was unopposed for the Republican nomination. 

Senate District 42 – Forrest, Greene, Jones and Wayne counties: 

Republican primary: 

• Donald Hartness: 4,246
• R.J. Robinson: 84
• Robin Robinson, incumbent: 1,676

No Democrat ran, so Hartness has won the seat. 

Senate District 19 – DeSoto County: 

Dianne Black, a Democrat, will face Republican Sen. Sen. Kevin Blackwell in the general election. They were unopposed for the party nominations.

Senate District 44 – Forrest, Lamar and Perry counties: 

Republican primary: 

• Chris Johnson, incumbent: 2,282
• Patrick Lott: 1,961

In the general election, Johnson will face Shakita Taylor, who was unopposed for the Democratic nomination. 

House District 16 – Chickasaw, Lee, Monroe and Pontotoc counties: 

Democratic primary: 

• Brady Davis: 348
• Rickey Thompson, incumbent: 1,325

No Republican ran, so Thompson was reelected. 

House District 22 – Chickasaw, Clay and Monroe counties:

Democrat Justin Crosby will face Republican Rep. Jon Lancaster in the general election. They were unopposed for the party nominations.

House District 41 – Lowndes County: 

Democratic primary: 

• Pierre Beard, Sr.: 248
• Kabir Karriem, incumbent: 1,310

No Republican ran, so Karriem was reelected.

Four seats that are part of the special elections were not contested, which means only one candidate filed to run. These incumbent candidates win those races by default. Those districts are: 

• Senate District 43: Juan Barnett, Democrat.
• Senate District 41: Joey Fillingane, Republican.
• House District 36: Karl Gibbs, Democrat.
• House District 39: Dana McLean Republican. 

More than a half-century after the state banned it, “Mississippi: Conflict and Change” is back on the shelves.

The University Press of Mississippi is releasing an updated version of the 1974 book this week, “Mississippi: Conflict and Change: A New Edition.” Byron D’Andra Orey, a professor of political science at Jackson State University, revised the ninth-grade history textbook.

In 1974, the State Textbook Commission rejected the original book, co-authored by James Loewen and Charles Sallis, which banned the work from classroom use. Now, more than 40 years later, the revised textbook may not have any more luck than its predecessor.

After the commission rejected “Conflict and Change” in 1974, litigation followed. Six years later, a federal judge ordered state officials to include it among the approved textbooks.

Historian Charles W. Eagles detailed that fight in his 2017 book, “Civil Rights, Culture Wars: The Fight over a Mississippi Textbook.” The book “grew out of the civil rights movement,” he wrote, “and foreshadowed the emerging culture wars.”

Unlike its predecessors, “‘Conflict and Change’ did not flinch in its discussions of lynching, white supremacy, and Jim Crow segregation in the late nineteenth century,” he wrote. “For the first time black and white ninth graders could read about the civil rights movement in their state.”

Stephanie Rolph, author of “Resisting Equality: The Citizens’ Council, 1954-1989,” said the 1974 book “struck at the very foundations of the Redemption narrative that had prevailed in Mississippi classrooms for decades. By providing more honest and historically accurate descriptions of the Civil War and the institution of slavery, it supported a shared history for all Mississippians, and an opportunity to grapple with the economic, political and social impacts of the past.”

From the early 1900s until the 1970s, Mississippi textbooks often depicted the Civil War as a noble cause, the Ku Klux Klan as a band of heroes who saved the South and slavery as a good thing, even for the slaves, said historian Rebecca Miller Davis, who has studied the state’s textbooks throughout the 20th century and is writing a book on the Mississippi press during the civil rights era.

White schoolchildren read about enslaved people being “happy and content,” “corrupt Negro-controlled” Reconstruction governments, and “troublemaking” civil rights activists, while never reading about the brutality of slavery, the violence of the Ku Klux Klan or the thousands of lynchings of Black Americans, she said.

At the time, history professor C. Vann Woodward said this kind of “bedtime story” was aimed at keeping “the South sleeping” and Black Southerners in “their place.”

Davis said a 1967 assessment of Mississippi textbooks charged that “among the perversions committed in the name of education, few equal the schoolbook’s treatment of the Negro and his history.” That assessment, she said, concluded that these books portrayed Black Americans as “sub-human, incapable of achieving culture, happy in servitude, a passive outsider.” 

When Orey first began revising the textbook four years ago, his initial aim was simple: republish the book with minimal changes to preserve its original essence. But a “reviewer’s misinterpretation” of his revised draft led him to “refresh, rather than rewrite.” 

“It was the kick in the butt I needed to go in the right direction and to that anonymous reviewer I have to give them credit,” Orey said. “It made it a much better book in a comprehensive way.” 

The version updates the textbook’s original language, capitalizing “Black” and referring to people as “enslaved,” rather than calling them “slaves.”

At the time of the textbook’s original publication, milestone events such as the Freedom Summer of 1964 and the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till, which propelled the civil rights movement, were only decades old.

Orey said extensive research and decades of scholarship shed more light on these moments, allowing a new generation of students to engage with the state’s complex and rich history. 

On July 8, University Press of Mississippi officials met with the Mississippi Department of Education staff regarding whether “Conflict and Change” could be supplemental material for the classroom.

In a statement, department officials said that “an informal, unofficial review of the book by MDE staff has been misinterpreted as an official rejection of the book on the state level, and that is not the case.”

There was a discussion regarding how a new law barring public schools and universities from inclusive programs and teaching of “divisive concepts” might affect the book.

Last month, a federal judge temporarily blocked that anti-DEI law from going into effect.

“People might deem some of its content as controversial, but everything in the book is fact based,” Orey said. “The intent for this textbook’s republishing was to carry on the legacy of the original book and interestingly, 50 years later, we are right back where we were.” 

The State Textbook Rating Committee, which replaced the textbook commission, reviews and recommends textbooks for required courses. The State Board of Education decides whether to approve them.

The board did approve an updated history textbook by Mississippi State University professor Kenneth Anthony, head of MSU’s Department of Teacher Education and Leadership. The book, “Mississippi: Our History, Our Home,” is a revision of the late David Sansing’s 2013 textbook, “A Place Called Mississippi.”

Debate continues to rage over what Mississippi public schools should teach regarding slavery, Jim Crow and the state’s violent past.

Jeanne Middleton Hairston, one of the last living Millsaps College students who co-authored the 1974 textbook with Sallis, said there is always a struggle to create an honest and appropriate schoolbook for middle and high school students. 

People didn’t like the idea of “Conflict & Change” including a graphic photo of a lynching. When the professors sued the state, she recalled her testimony plainly: If a child is old enough to be lynched, than they’re old enough to know about it. 

“Of course there are ugly things that occurred in our history, and there’s no reason we should prohibit our youth from knowing about it in our state,” said Hairston, who serves on the board of trustees at Jackson Public Schools. “We as a nation can’t move forward with our history until we recognize, learn and understand it.”