Every summer, the Mississippi State Capitol hosts thousands of people at a one-day, free festival to celebrate books, authors, and readers. The Mississippi Book Festival will return for its ninth year this August with over 150 authors, whose written words have inspired many readers. Booklovers can connect with authors and each other through a wide selection of panels, book signings, family-friendly activities, and more on August 19th, 2023, in downtown Jackson.
The Mississippi Book Festival is excited to host a plethora of talented authors, including children’s authors Lois Lowry, whose recent novel, The Windeby Puzzle, is a combination of strange history and compassionate reflection. She will join award-winning Mississippi author Margaret McMullan to discuss her book. Jackson native Richard Ford will sit down with the festival’s founding director Holly Lange in a conversation about his final novel in the world of Frank Bascombe, Be Mine. Readers of literary fiction will be eager to witness the conclusion of Ford’s “everyman” character.
There will be panels for every type of reader at the festival, including Cookbooks & Culture, Mississippi Culture, Author Biography, Book Club Picks, and more. Jackson author Mary Miller will lead the “Novel Women” panel featuring fellow Jackson author Katy Simpson Smith, Ramona Ausubel, Jenny Jackson, and Mona Simpson as they explore identity and relationships in their gripping narratives. In a panel on “Marriage, Memoir, & Misadventure,” Former Mississippi Poet Laureate Beth Ann Fennelly will moderate an honest and moving discussion with writers Harrison Scott Key, Helen Ellis, Maggie Smith, and Hannah Pittard.
Black men, many of them veterans of the Civil War, were killed in New Orleans when they paraded outside the Louisiana Constitutional Convention in favor of their right to vote. According to the official report, a total of 38 people were killed and 146 wounded. Other estimates put the numbers even higher.
“The whites stomped, kicked, and clubbed the black marchers mercilessly,” wrote Ulysses S. Grant’s biographer, Ron Chernow. “Policemen smashed the … windows and fired into it indiscriminately until the floor grew slick with blood. They emptied their revolvers on the convention delegates, who desperately sought to escape. Some leaped from windows and were shot dead when they landed. Those lying wounded on the ground were stabbed repeatedly, their skulls bashed in with brickbats. The sadism was so wanton that men who kneeled and prayed for mercy were killed instantly, while dead bodies were stabbed and mutilated.”
This massacre and similar violence helped fuel the Reconstruction Act, breaking the South into military districts in 1866. Martial law was imposed on New Orleans, and city officials were removed from office for the roles they played in the massacre. The violence also helped fuel the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.
No one was ever tried or convicted in the massacre.
Some see the issue of cutting Mississippi’s grocery tax as a partisan divide.
After all, in three of the past four gubernatorial elections, the Democratic candidate has advocated cutting or eliminating Mississippi’s 7% sales tax on groceries while the Republican standard bearer has touted reducing the income tax.
This year Republican incumbent Gov. Tate Reeves is again advocating for the elimination of the income tax. Brandon Presley, his Democratic opponent, wants to eliminate the sales tax on food.
But the issue of cutting Mississippi’s highest-in-the-nation, state-imposed sales tax on groceries is not always a partisan fight. And it is definitely not a partisan issue for Mississippi’s four contiguous states.
While Mississippi politicians have argued about and flirted with cutting the grocery tax only to be stymied at some point in the process, all four of Mississippi’s neighbors have reduced or eliminated the state-imposed grocery tax. All were led at least in part by Republicans. The first to act was Louisiana, where the tax was eliminated in 2003 under Republican Gov. Mike Foster.
Earlier this year, Alabama, led by an overwhelming Republican majority in its Legislature and by Republican Gov. Kay Ivey, cut its 4% state grocery tax to 3% beginning in September. The tax will be reduced by another 1% in future years and a special committee will look at the complete elimination of the tax.
Republicans and Democrats in Arkansas have worked together to cut the grocery tax to a minuscule 0.125%. In Tennessee, Republican leaders have not completely eliminated the grocery tax, but last year they imposed a one month tax holiday on grocery purchases. This year, the holiday when the sales tax on grocery purchases will be eliminated will be three months, beginning on Aug. 1.
Mississippi’s partisan divide on the grocery tax goes back to at least the 1995 gubernatorial election. Democratic Secretary of State Dick Molpus proposed reducing the grocery tax while Republican incumbent Gov. Kirk Fordice advocated for a cut in the income tax.
Molpus lost the election.
In Fordice’s second term, the Legislature did provide an income tax cut for married couples by changing the tax code so that married couples filing jointly did not pay more in state taxes than did two single people living together. That bill was authored by then-Senate Finance Chair Hob Bryan, D-Amory.
While Bryan led the effort to eliminate the so-called marriage penalty on the income tax, in recent years he has advocated for cuts to the grocery tax.
According to a Siena College/Mississippi Today poll conducted earlier this year, 58% of Mississippians say they would only vote for a candidate who supports eliminating the grocery tax, while 7% say they would only vote for a candidate opposed to eliminating the tax.
On the other hand, less than a majority — 45% — say they would only vote for a candidate who supports eliminating the income tax, while 17% would only vote for a candidate opposed to the income tax elimination.
And to illustrate that it is not necessarily a partisan issue in Mississippi, bills to cut the sales tax on food have been introduced by Republican legislators in recent years, and Republican Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann has voiced support for reducing the grocery tax.
The closest Mississippi has come to eliminating the grocery tax occurred in 2006, and that effort was led by Republicans. That year Republican Lt. Gov. Amy Tuck stunned the Capitol when her lieutenants, at her behest, introduced legislation to eliminate the grocery tax and to offset the lost revenue by increasing the cigarette tax, which at 18 cents per pack was one of the lowest rates in the nation.
Twice, Tuck got grocery tax cut proposals through the Legislature by more than the two-thirds majority needed to override a governor’s veto. But on both occasions Republican Gov. Haley Barbour changed enough votes in the Senate to uphold his vetoes.
Barbour, a former cigarette lobbyist, gave a lot of reasons for opposing the reduction in the grocery tax, including that the grocery tax was fair because everyone had to pay it.
But not all Republicans bought that argument.
The late Sen. Alan Nunnelee, R-Tupelo, opposed for moral reasons placing a food tax on poor people.
Nunnelee, who died in 2015 while serving in the U.S. House, told The New York Times in 2007 the sales tax on groceries “is just the most cruel tax any government can impose.”
Before his term ended, Barbour eventually acquiesced to an increase in the cigarette tax, but he never yielded in his opposition to cutting the grocery tax.
Since then, there have been enough Republicans in leadership opposed to cutting the grocery tax to ensure it did not happen. But the tax cut was not opposed by all Republicans.
Delta State University President Daniel Ennis met Thursday with the school’s marching band students in the wake of revelations that the recently hired band director had mocked trans people and agreed pro-LGBTQ+ religious leaders should be stoned on his now-deleted podcast.
During the 45-minute meeting, Ennis told students via Zoom from a conference in California that the comments in Steven Hugley’s podcast “Always Right” prompted several alumni and parents of students to reach out to him, but not any students. So he said he wanted to know what the roughly 30 students in the band who joined the call thought before taking an action that might affect them.
Ennis invited students to share any information with him that would help him “as an outsider” better understand the situation. He started as president of the regional college in Cleveland, a small town in the Mississippi Delta, earlier this summer after spending two decades at a university in South Carolina. (In a text to a Mississippi Today reporter after the meeting, Ennis said he was “fine” letting his comments speak in the Zoom meeting for themselves.)
“Certainly, I have to be clear, all decisions on a college campus are eventually the responsibility of the president,” Ennis said in the meeting. “It is my place to make sure that we’re doing the things we should be for our students.”
The Zoom seems to be just one step Ennis is taking to address the situation. Earlier this week, he personally sent a reminder asking administrators to refer media inquiries to the communications department to “support the university’s ability to speak with one voice regarding personnel and legal matters.”
The interim chair of the music department, Kent Wessinger, had spoken to Mississippi Today last week about Hugley’s hiring.
But the university has not publicly addressed the comments Hugley made on his podcast, which include gagging at a photo of a trans woman, repeatedly misgendering notable trans people and calling for transitioning — the process of changing one’s physical appearance to align with their gender identity — to be made illegal for trans adults. In Mississippi, lawmakers earlier this year banned gender-affirming care that results in trans minors medically transitioning.
“If you do, not only are we gonna lock you up, we’re also gonna lock up the doctor,” Hugley said in reference to parents who seek gender-affirming care for trans kids, “and then we take it the next step.”
Many students thought the Zoom, which was billed to them as a meeting “to discuss plans for the upcoming year,” would involve Ennis announcing some form of action. It did not. He said he first wanted to hear from students and talk to faculty in the music department when he got back to Cleveland.
Some wanted to know if the university was going to issue a comment, whether Hugley had been placed on administrative leave or what, if anything, the administration was going to do to make LGBTQ+ students feel comfortable participating in band. Others wanted to know if Ennis felt that Hugley would be able to keep his personal views out of the classroom.
When Ennis said he would not be answering questions like those during the meeting, some students were disappointed.
Delta State University’s new president Dr. Daniel J. Ennis, speaks with students and staff at E.R. Jobe Hall on Delta State’s campus, where he was introduced to students and faculty, Thursday, April 6, 2023. Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today
“I’ve called this session not to make any announcements,” he said. “I’ve called this session to get more information from you, so I will learn from you, your perspectives and thoughts on this, and when I get back to campus, I’ll have conversations with the leadership involved. But this will not be a session where you get news, announcements or anything like that regarding the marching band.”
“I believe there was a miscommunication in the email then,” Matthew Brewton, a senior music education major, replied in the comments.
Ennis also told the music students that he had not been able to watch or listen to Hugley’s podcast because the YouTube channel had been taken down. Hugley, the interim band director as of June 30, removed the videos after a Mississippi Today reporter contacted him last week.
“The item preexisted this individual’s hiring at Delta State so in other words, it was up before he was hired here, and now it’s down, so that’s different than if he put it up this week after he was appointed interim,” Ennis said.
“I don’t know if anybody here has seen it because it was pulled down really quickly as I understand it,” he added.
Multiple students replied in the Zoom comments that a Google Drive of the podcast’s YouTube videos had been widely circulated on campus, and Ennis responded by cautioning students who hadn’t heard the podcast not to listen if they thought it might upset them.
“Out of concern for you, given what we’ve just heard, there may be something hurtful in that link,” he said.
At that, one student commented it “speaks for itself” that Ennis felt the need to issue a content warning.
“I was making a cautionary comment,” Ennis said. “But anyway, I think that’s a good point. The fact that I had to think about how you would react is probably something — that’s why we’re having this conversation.”
Some students said they wanted to give Hugley a chance. They had met him and he was nice to them. They thought it would be okay for Hugley to remain interim band director so long as he didn’t discuss his political views during practice. They noted they were more concerned about the band having a director who could revitalize its statewide reputation, which, they said, is currently poor.
Not every student has “the same beliefs as the LGBTQ community,” said one student, who did not give their name on Zoom. They student added that “we need to be professionals, because we are going to grow up and be around other people in work business that do not agree with our lifestyles and how we live, but at the end of the day, the only thing that we can do is just move on.”
“If we need to be professional then why is Steven Hugley an exception? I do not think that his comments were very professional,” Brewton replied in a comment.
Ennis also suggested that he knew issues with the music department and the marching band went beyond Hugley’s hiring.
The door for Hugley’s hiring was opened earlier this year when Wessinger, the interim chair, removed the former longtime director of the band. Wessinger came to the department after the beloved former chair, Karen Fosheim, was killed. The Bolivar County Sheriff’s department charged Fosheims’ 14-year-old stepson with the crime.
Some students said they didn’t like how the former band director treated them, which heightened their worries about Hugley, because they had hoped the band would become more enjoyable with him. Participating in the band is required for some music majors at Delta State.
But there was one thing on which nearly every student who spoke up agreed. When Ennis asked if they were excited for the fall semester, almost everyone said “no.”
Correction 7/28/23: A quote from Delta State President Daniel Ennis contained a typo and has been corrected.
NESHOBA COUNTY FAIR — The sheer intensity of crowd interaction at the Neshoba County Fair on Thursday largely overshadowed the traditional stump speeches from the two leading candidates for governor, signaling the arrival of an intense election cycle that will grip the state for the next four months.
Hundreds of supporters of incumbent Republican Gov. Tate Reeves and Democratic candidate Brandon Presley filled the Founder’s Square benches and fiercely interacted with the two candidates in a way that hasn’t been seen at the event in recent years.
Reeves’ supporters repeated loud “Tate!” chants during the governor’s speech, while Presley’s supporters shouted “Let’s go, Brandon!” when the Democrat delivered his 10-minute stump. And, at certain points, the two factions engaged in chant battles.
When Presley asked the crowd who they trusted to stand up for working Mississippians, Reeves’ faction shouted “Tate” to dump cold water on the Democrat’s speech.
And when Reeves concluded his speech, Presley supporters shouted, “Lock him up,” an apparent extension of their attempt to tie the governor to the welfare scandal, though prosecutors have not charged the governor with any crime connected to the issue.
Brandon Presley, Democratic candidate for governor, supporters cheer during the 2023 Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Miss., Thursday, July 27, 2023. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
The first-term governor, at one point during his speech, even used his allotted time to engage in a back-and-forth with a Presley supporter who was standing near the stage.
“To support him, you’ve got to believe we are on the wrong track,” Reeves said to the supporter. “You’ve got to believe that our culture is wrong and that our values are bad. You want to say yes to that, sir, because you believe it? You believe it, don’t you?”
While neither candidate delivered any new policy pitches, their messaging and starkly differing views of Mississippi’s present and future became crystal clear under the blistering July heat at one of the state’s longest-running political traditions.
Reeves staunchly defended his record as a conservative leader and attacked Democratic Party values while Presley attempted to cast the governor as a derelict politician who is numb to the difficulties average Mississippians deal with.
Reeves, running for a second term, rattled off accomplishments over the last four years, including recruiting new jobs to the state and improving education test scores.
“To hear Brandon’s fiction, Mississippi is just not doing well,” Reeves said. “It’s all my fault. … He said, and I quote, ‘Under Tate Reeves’ leadership, we are moving in the wrong direction.’ That’s what Brandon Presley says. The math says that’s pure fiction.”
Brandon Presley, Democratic candidate for governor, speaks during the 2023 Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Miss., Thursday, July 27, 2023. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
Presley, the current utility regulator for north Mississippi, panned the governor for not doing enough to keep health care infrastructure in the state from deteriorating and again reiterated to reporters his support for expanding Medicaid coverage to the working poor.
“Much like Nero of old, he’s fiddling while our hospitals are burning to the ground, and he doesn’t care,” Presley said of Reeves.
Reeves called Presley’s Medicaid expansion push a “welfare check” to poor Mississippians and later told reporters he believed the better approach was for more Mississippians to obtain private insurance coverage that tied to their careers.
The governor also tied Presley, a moderate Democrat, with other liberal candidates across the nation, such as California Gov. Gavin Newsom and former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, common rhetoric Reeves has used during the campaign.
Gov. Tate Reeves speaks to media during the 2023 Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Miss., Thursday, July 27, 2023. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
Presley rejected that notion and said the governor was using that tactic as a smokescreen to keep from discussing real campaign issues.
Typical publicity stunts also made their way to the fairgrounds, with two Presley supporters donning orange jumpsuit costumes mimicking prison inmates to symbolize two of the governor’s donors who have pleaded guilty to crimes connected to the state’s welfare scandal.
The Wednesday speeches marked a rare instance in which all three GOP candidates for governor appeared in the same location.
Reeves is expected to capture the Republican nomination in the Aug. 8 primary election, though his two GOP opponents, David Hardigree and John Witcher, also delivered stump speeches on Wednesday.
Hardigree, a retired military member, advocated for new efforts to crack down on crime throughout the state, and Witcher, a doctor, said he would work to enact conservative social policies such as putting Bibles in public school classrooms.
The winner of the primary will compete against Presley, the only Democratic candidate, in the general election on Nov. 6.
After pandemic-driven declines on the kindergarten readiness exam last year, more students are meeting benchmarks in kindergarten and some pre-K programs, while other pre-K programs did not see any change.
The Kindergarten Readiness Assessment tests public pre-K and kindergarten students to measure early literacy skills. It is used as an instructional baseline for teachers, and students who meet their benchmark score have been shown to become proficient in reading by the end of third grade.
Students took the test last year for the first time since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and fewer students met literacy benchmarks in all pre-K programs and kindergarten. Education officials attributed this decline to the impact of the pandemic, as students were less likely to have been in day care and therefore less likely to have a history of formal classroom experiences.
Head Start programs also performed worse than their peers in the pre-K programs last year, a gap that officials attributed to more time spent in virtual learning and said they expected to close.
Early learning collaboratives (ELC) are one form of public pre-K, made up of partnerships among school districts, Head Start agencies, childcare centers, and nonprofit groups. This year, slightly fewer ELC students met the end-of-year benchmark than last year, which had already seen post-pandemic declines.
Tenette Smith, director of elementary education and reading at the Mississippi Department of Education, attributed this to the rapid growth of the ELC program, with the number of collaboratives doubling in the last year. She also pointed out that these new ELCs were in various stages of implementation.
Micayla Tatum, director of early childhood policy at Mississippi First, said she was pleased with the results for the ELCs. Mississippi First, an education policy organization, was a leader in the push to establish early learning collaboratives in 2013.
“I was very happy with the results for the collaboratives,” said Tatum. “Typically when you scale a program you can expect that there’s going to be some type of implementation effect and you will lose impact, and we’re not seeing that.”
The report also covers other public pre-K programs, which refer to special pre-K programs for students with disabilities and those funded by federal money to support high-poverty schools. More students in these programs met the benchmark than last year, but still fell short of the 2019 level.
Students also take this test at the end of kindergarten to track their progress over the year and to help teachers identify areas for additional instruction. More kindergarteners across the state met their benchmarks over last year, but they also were still shy of pre-pandemic levels.
“Still a lot of work to do, and of course our goal with all of our assessments and accountability results is to get back to pre-pandemic levels and continue that upward trajectory,” said Paula Vanderford, chief accountability officer with the state education department.
The agency recommends districts ensure their professional development is aligned with research-backed practices, provide similar professional development to paraprofessionals who support elementary teachers, and use the data from this test to target students who need additional help.
Melissa Beck, K-3 assessment coordinator for the state education department, also stressed how important it is for parents to understand their child’s test results to ensure they are on track to pass the third-grade reading test a few years later. If students do not pass the third-grade test, they will not be promoted to the next grade.
“If you have questions, please reach out to your teacher, your school, or even me,” Beck said.
The University of Mississippi Medical Center, approved in April to host the state’s next burn center, didn’t fully meet almost a third of the required criteria.
However, an expert said that wasn’t uncommon, and UMMC filed a corrective action planfollowing the visit which lists steps UMMC will take in the following months to get up to speed.
Since Mississippi’s only burn center closed in October, both UMMC and Mississippi Baptist Medical Center have submitted applications to become the next burn center’s host. The state Health Department was given $4 million by the Legislature this year to choose the home of the next burn center, though nothing prevents the money from going to more than one hospital.
Baptist received its site visit from the Health Department on July 18. The results from that site visit have not yet been released.
A March inspection of UMMC showed that in 46 of 155 categories, the health system did not meet or only “partially met” the requirements for a burn center.
The corrective action plan shows remedial steps for 44 of those 46 deficiencies.
UMMC spokesperson Patrice Guilfoyle declined to comment on any of Mississippi Today’s questions, including about improvements the health system has made since the site survey.
The site survey pointed out that UMMC had no internal burn education plan, did not have sufficient staff and was missing some policies and procedures.
According to the corrective action plan, the health system will develop its internal burn education plan by the end of the year and staff will have been trained in it by March 2024.
The health system plans to recruit staff — including a dietitian, psychiatrist, outreach coordinator and pharmacist — and develop the policies it’s still missing by the same deadline.
Corrective actions for two of the “partially met” requirements, though, are missing from the report.
Mississippi State Department of Health employees directed Mississippi Today to UMMC for an explanation but confirmed the entire report was released. Guilfoyle, the spokesperson for UMMC, also declined to answer that specific question.
Previously, the site survey found that UMMC’s policies and procedures for the use of allograft tissues were being updated, and therefore, the health system only “partially met” that requirement. Additionally, UMMC was still recruiting staff for a rehabilitation program for its burn patients. Neither criteria were mentioned in the corrective action plan.
At the time of the site survey report, Dr. Peter Arnold, director of the burn center, was not current in Advanced Burn Life Support (ABLS), the standard training for burn patient providers. Though he was scheduled to undergo this training in April, Arnold’s deadline for completing the training in the plan is the end of this month.
While the health system’s initial burn center application showed that none of its staffers were ABLS trained, a Facebook post from May showed that 48 people had undergone ABLS training. The corrective action plan notes that “hospital administration revealed a very robust plan for ABLS.” By the end of the year, attending staff will be trained in ABLS, the plan says.
UMMC is also remodeling a dedicated operating room space, which will be available by next March, the plan says. The Institutions of Higher Learning recently approved UMMC’s request to use $4 million of its own money to renovate its facilities to create a new burn center.
