IHL board voted to renew Hudson’s contract a week before no-confidence vote
One week before the faculty senate at Jackson State University voted “no confidence” in President Thomas Hudson, the college board voted to renew his contract for another four years.
During an executive session after its regular monthly board meeting on Jan. 19, the Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees voted to renew Hudson’s contract through 2027. They also renewed the contract for Jerryl Briggs, the president of Mississippi Valley State University, for another four years.
The contract renewals were made public in this month’s board book.
The contract renewal does not mean Hudson or Briggs received a raise, according to IHL spokesperson Caron Blanton. As of last year, both presidents received a $300,000 annual salary from the state of Mississippi and an additional $5,000 foundation bonus.
The contract renewal signals the IHL board is supportive of Hudson as he is now dealing with the fallout from the faculty senate’s no-confidence vote. A JSU alum, Hudson was appointed president in the wake of a scandal after former president William Bynum was arrested in a prostitution sting.
At Thursday’s meeting, Hudson told Mississippi Today he is “always grateful for the support” from the IHL board.
In a statement to Mississippi Today sent after the story published, Hudson continued: “We’ve seen excellent progress over the last three years and I look forward to the work ahead. I’d like to thank the IHL board for their continued support of my administration and our accomplished students, faculty and staff.”
Tom Duff, the IHL Board president, said the board is “very pleased” with Hudson and that the contract renewal was not connected to the no confidence vote.
“Candidly, Jackson State is moving forward,” Duff said, citing the university’s financial and enrollment metrics and graduation rate.
At public universities, faculty senates are governing bodies elected by faculty to represent their concerns. No-confidence votes are relatively rare in Mississippi: The most recent happened in 2019 after the Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees appointed Glenn Boyce as chancellor at the University of Mississippi.
The JSU faculty senate’s two-page resolution accused Hudson and four members of his administration of a “continuous pattern of failing to respect” shared governance and other professional norms of higher education. It cited the fact that Hudson has not met with senate leadership since last August, according to faculty senate meeting minutes, instead requesting that concerns be sent in an email to members of his administration.
The resolution also calls out persistent issues of campus safety and the continued lack of a pay equity study for faculty and staff, which the senate has for years been asking Hudson’s administration to undertake.
Hudson’s administration has maintained that JSU could not afford to pay the vendors that responded to two requests for proposals for a pay equity study, though it is unclear how much money Hudson has committed to the study.
After the no-confidence vote, the Clarion-Ledger reported that IHL will investigate.
Duff told Mississippi Today Thursday that the IHL board’s commissioner, Al Rankins, will look into the vote and bring a recommendation to the board.
Rankins works directly with the university presidents in Mississippi, meeting with them frequently.
During a listening session at JSU after he was appointed in 2018, Rankins, who served as president of Alcorn State University, said that matters of shared governance don’t fall under his purview.
“Nothing gives me the authority to address shared governance,” he said. “Shared governance does not mean that all these different groups tell the president what he should do. Ultimately, the decision rests with the president.”
READ MORE: ‘The honeymoon period is over’: JSU faculty senate votes no confidence in president, administration
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Rankin County deputies beat, tortured two Black men, leaving one in the hospital for weeks, lawyers allege
The FBI has opened an investigation into the alleged beating and torture of two Black men by Rankin County dputies.
“The FBI Jackson Field Office, the U,S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Mississippi have opened a federal civil rights investigation into a color of law incident into the Rankin County Sheriff’s Office,” according to a statement from the FBI.
Weeks after Rankin County deputies raided a home and beat and threatened two Black men and shot one in the mouth, a civil rights attorney is calling for justice, answers and for the deputies to be charged.
On Wednesday, Michael Corey Jenkins, 32, was released from the intensive care unit at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. He underwent two surgeries to treat injuries to his mouth and head, including surgical removal of his tongue. As a result, he is unable to talk and now communicates through writing or gestures.
“Easily he could have been like Tyree Nichols or on the long (list of) names of victims here of police abuse and police brutality,” said Malik Shabazz of Black Lawyers for Justice in Washington, D.C., one of Jenkins’ attorneys.
On Jan. 24, Jenkins and another victim, Eddie Terrell Parker, 35, were at a home in Braxton where Parker lives with the property owner when six white Rankin deputies conducting a drug investigation raided.
Shabazz said they did not announce themselves or show a search warrant. They accused the men of selling drugs and later charged them with possession of a controlled substance and possession of paraphernalia, the attorney said.
For 90 minutes, deputies exercised what Shabazz called intimidation and unjustified torture of Jenkins and Parker. The men were punched, kicked, slapped and tasered while handcuffed. They had guns pointed at them and were threatened with death, Shabazz said.
The attorney said during that time, the deputies waterboarded Jenkins and Parker. Waterboarding is an illegal torture technique that involves strapping someone down, putting a wet rag in their mouth and pouring water over them to simulate drowning.
“It was senseless and uncalled for,” Parker said at the news conference. “It was traumatizing and something I never thought I’d go through.”
It ended when a deputy placed a gun in Jenkins’ mouth and pulled the trigger, Shabazz said. Jenkins could have died, but the bullet exited his mouth.
When Mary Jenkins found out her son had been shot by police, she called the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department. She asked what the charges were against Jenkins, but did not get an answer. She was only told he was under investigation.
“They acted like my son wasn’t even human,” she said, adding that the sheriff’s office didn’t treat her family well, kept Jenkins under their watch at the hospital and prevented them from seeing him.
On Tuesday, the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation interviewed Jenkins in his hospital room for the first time since the shooting, and he confirmed what deputies did to him, Shabazz said.
The recounting of Jenkins’ and Parker’s experience differs from information offered by investigators and law enforcement.
A Jan.25 news release from the Department of Public Safety said Rankin County deputies encountered a person – now identified as Jenkins – during a narcotics investigation at a Braxton residence and shot when he displayed a gun.
During the Wednesday news conference, Jenkins shook his head when Shabazz asked whether he had a gun or handled one at any point during the incident.
Rankin County Sheriff Bryan Bailey released a five-sentence statement Tuesday evening that did not address allegations of mistreatment by the deputies against Jenkins and Parker.
He said the sheriff’s office contacted the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation to look into the deputies’ actions.
“We are fully cooperating with that ongoing investigation and will continue to do so,” Bailey said in the statement. “Rest assured, if any deputy or suspect involved in this incident is found to have broken the law, he will be held accountable in accordance with the law.”
Shabazz said the sheriff’s office has not shared much information, including confirmation whether any officers have been placed on administrative leave.
The attorney is asking for attempted murder, aggravated assault and conspiracy charges to be filed against all the deputies, all body camera footage be released and Rankin County to respond immediatelyreply to all records requests related to the incident.
He read the allegations of brutality from a notice to file a lawsuit against Sheriff Bryan Bailey and the government of Rankin County. After a 90-day period, Shabazz can file the lawsuit and is set to ask for $90 million in compensatory and punitive damages for the two men.
Shabazz also wants the “totally false” charges against the men to be dropped. In addition to drug charges, Parker was also charged with disorderly conduct and Jenkins was charged with aggravated assault, the attorney said.
Another member of the men’s legal team, attorney Trent Walker, said they will take the lead to get the charges against Jenkins and Parker dismissed.
“Something has to change because what is going on here should not go on in a civilized society,” he said.
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House addresses Mississippi post-Roe challenges with tax credits
A House committee passed a bill late Wednesday that would create or expand eight tax credits aimed at helping care for poor families, mothers and children in wake of Mississippi’s ban on abortions.
“This is designed to help newly pregnant ladies and struggling families,” House Ways and Means Chairman Trey Lamar, R-Senatobia, told members of his committee. “…Most are existing (tax credit programs) that we are expanding, but a couple are new.”
Lamar said the tax credits, for both businesses and individuals, would be “dollar-for-dollar” for taxpayers who donate to qualified charities, health centers and homes or write off child care or adoption expenses. But some of the programs would limit the credits to 50% of tax liability, and all are capped by total amounts lawmakers allocate to them.
The bill came from House Speaker Philip Gunn’s “Commission on Life,” which was created in June 2022 after the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on a Mississippi case that overturned Roe vs. Wade abortion rights. Gunn said the ruling would bring “new challenges” for Mississippi to make sure “those who are born have the resources they need.”
Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann also created a select committee of lawmakers — who held public hearings in the fall — to help guide post-Roe policies in a state already struggling to provide healthcare. Gunn’s committee, however, has met in private and scant details about its work have been made public.
READ MORE: Six months after Dobbs ruling, the work of Gunn’s ‘Commission on Life’ remains a mystery
Gunn and Lamar co-authored House Bill 1671 and its tax credits. The bill, which now heads to the full House chamber for a vote, would:
- Create a child care expense tax credit, like the federal one, allowing up to 50% of the amount of the federal income tax credit claimed for individuals and couples making less than $50,000 a year.
- Increase the total amount of tax credits for those donating to pregnancy resources centers from $3.5 million a year to $10 million.
- Increase the maximum adoption expense tax credit for families from $5,000 to $10,000.
- Increase tax credits of up to $400 for an individual and $800 for a couple donating to qualified charitable and foster care organizations to up to 50% of tax liability, including ad valorem taxes.
- Increase the total tax credits available for the “Mississippi Children’s Promise Act” — donations to qualified charities that help children — from $18 million to $24 million.
- Create tax credits, up to 50% of a tax liability, for those donating to transitional homes, that help people aging out of foster care, homeless people under 25, homeless families and/or homeless or referred pregnant women.
- Create new health care tax credits of $3 million for businesses and $1 million for individuals for those those who donate to nonprofits that provide health care to low-income people.
- Create tax credits totaling $1 million for any nonprofit “purchasing, warehousing and delivering food directly to food pantries or soup kitchens in more than five Mississippi counties on a monthly basis.”
READ MORE: Republicans vowed a robust post-Roe agenda. Here’s how it’s going.
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House Republicans reject Medicaid expansion on floor, say plan to aid hospitals is coming
The House Republican majority rejected a Medicaid expansion amendment on the floor Wednesday that supporters said would aid the state’s struggling hospitals.
The amendment, offered Wednesday by House Minority Leader Rep. Robert Johnson, D-Natchez, would have prevented the appropriation for the Mississippi Division of Medicaid from going into effect until Medicaid was expanded to provide health care coverage for the working poor.
The amendment was supported by 41 Democrats and one independent. Five Republicans and one independent did not vote.
READ MORE: Poll: 80% of Mississippians favor Medicaid expansion
Since the vote was on the budget for the Division of Medicaid, Democrats could not offer an amendment mandating the expansion of Medicaid. Instead, under provisions of the Mississippi Constitution, only conditions can be placed on budget bills, such as the money cannot be appropriated to the agency until Medicaid is expanded.
The Johnson amendment also would have mandated that the Division of Medicaid could not be funded until funds were committed:
- For neonatal intensive care in the Delta.
- To prevent the closure of hospitals in immediate danger of closing.
- To restore services for a burn center in Hinds County.
Johnson told his colleagues that in the past few days, his mother had to be rushed to the hospital late at night.
“What I was thankful for is that a brick-and-mortar hospitals with doctors and nurses were right there in Adams County,” Johnson said, adding his mother is recovering. He said that there are areas in the state where health care is not as accessible. Citing reports that 28 hospitals or more in Mississippi are on the brink of closure, Johnson said there could be more areas in the state where health care would not be as readily accessible.
“This is the hill I am going to die on this session,” said Johnson. “It is the hill I am going to stay on … It is a matter of life and death.”
Thirty-nine states have approved the expansion of Medicaid with another, North Carolina, currently debating the issue in its legislature.
The Mississippi Hospital Association and many state health care groups have advocated Medicaid expansion as a method to help struggling hospitals and to provide health insurance to primarily the working poor in the state.
Republican leaders — primarily House Speaker Philip Gunn and Gov. Tate Reeves — have staunchly opposed expansion, describing it as a welfare program. Plus, they claim the state cannot afford to pay for the expansion.
But multiple studies have concluded that in Mississippi, Medicaid expansion, with the federal government paying the bulk of the cost, would be a boon to both the state economy and state coffers.
READ MORE: Mississippi leaving more than $1 billion per year on table by rejecting Medicaid expansion
Democrats continually pressed Rep. Joey Hood, R-Ackerman, who handled the budget bill Wednesday and chairs the Medicaid Committee, about Republicans’ plan to address the health care crisis in the state. They said the crisis included the poor health condition of many of the state citizens, who lack insurance, and the financial crunch facing many hospitals.
Hood repeatedly said the leadership is continuing to work on a possible solution.
“We are going to do what we can to help Mississippi hospitals,” Hood said, indicating that the leadership might propose state grants for hospitals instead of pulling down federal funds through Medicaid expansion.
The legislative leadership is just beginning the process of passing a budget to fund state government for the upcoming fiscal year, which starts July 1. The more than 100 budget bills being passed this week in both the House and Senate are nothing close to the final product that the membership will be asked to vote on during the final days of the session.
Democrats said their votes on Wednesday were opportunities for rank-and-file House members to provide input in the budgeting process. But the members of the House majority rejected those pleas, opting to not buck their leaders, who ultimately will make the final decision just before the session ends in late March.
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Feds give Greenville grant for primary care clinic as Delta faces loss of health care services
Local leadership in the Delta says the region’s crumbling health system has been abandoned by the state – so they’re figuring out how to fix it on their own with the help of federal funds.
Greenville’s mayor and a local health clinic say they’re working to give people in the Delta better access to doctors and primary care, as hospitals around them shutter and strip back specialty care. As a result, the city of Greenville received $2 million in federal funds to construct a new health clinic in partnership with the Delta Health Center.
“This is a bottom-up action in response to the state’s failure to act,” said Greenville Mayor Errick Simmons. “We went straight to the solution, and we will continue to do these types of projects to make sure our folks get the health care they need.”
Simmons accepted a symbolic check from U.S. Congressman Bennie Thompson who helped secure the funds from a House spending bill earmarked for community projects during a Tuesday press conference. Thompson announced close to $18.8 million in federal funds for his district, which covers much of Western Mississippi.
“A lot of you have heard of the trouble that health care is having in the Delta,” Thompson said during the press conference. “Our governor, for some reason, doesn’t want to help.”
Thompson was referring to Gov. Tate Reeve’s firm stance against Medicaid expansion, despite a mounting statewide hospital crisis. New data from mid-January shows that 38% of Mississippi hospitals are at risk of closing. Of the 28 rural hospitals at risk of closing, 19 are at risk of shuttering immediately.
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Reeves’ office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Mississippi Today.
Greenwood Leflore Hospital recently shuttered its labor and delivery unit, primary care clinic and reduced other services. Delta Health-The Medical Center in Greenville also closed its neonatal intensive care unit and cardiac rehabilitation department last year.
Simmons said he applied for the grant last year because he feared the Delta would continue to lose access to doctors. Already, he said, there is only one pediatrician for every 4,000 children in the region.
He hopes other cities may copy his approach to help fund sorely needed primary care options to lessen the burden on the hospital system, which continues to struggle against massive staffing shortages.
“I think the Biden-Harris administration has a wealth of opportunities to begin grabbing pockets of money, working from local government to federal government, providing better access to quality health care to the folks that deeply need it,” Simmons said.
Delta Health Center CEO John Fairman said the new facility is projected to cost about $10 million to construct. He said he is in conversations with other funding sources and hopes to break ground on the new building before the end of the year.
The vision is for the clinic to better make use of telehealth options to connect rural residents who may not have internet access in their homes with specialists virtually. A nurse or a physician assistant would be in the room in person, too, helping facilitate care.
“Then they can make an assessment for intervention and as to whether or not they need to arrange transport to get to a specialist (in person),” Fairman said. “Once we get a better understanding of the data, we can have a specialist where the most acute cases are (scheduled weekly in person).”
The new clinic would also have a pharmacy open until 11 p.m. – most Delta pharmacies close at 6 p.m.
Fairman said the future of health care in the Delta needs to be collaborative, and he’s already in discussion with county hospitals on how to better partner. The Delta continues to be among the unhealthiest parts of the state with high percentages of uninsured residents. Fairman and Simmons want better health care intervention to prevent hospital visits.
“We need other ways to offer care after hours so people are not crowding up the emergency room, and we’re preserving trauma centers and emergency rooms for the people who really need that,” Fairman said.
Medicaid expansion would mean between 200,000 and 300,000 more Mississippians would have access to health insurance and hospitals would have an easier time being reimbursed for care rendered. More than 15 state bills that would have expanded Medicaid to provide coverage to the working poor died earlier this month without any debate or vote in the House or Senate.
“Had Mississppi accepted the expansion nine years ago, they would have accrued about $14 billion dollars that would go toward health care,” Thompson said. “But somehow they think people don’t need that.”
Simmons has little faith in the state stepping up to support what his community needs. He hopes more mayors are emboldened to think creatively.
“An unhealthy child cannot go to school to learn; an unhealthy adult cannot work,” Simmons said. “This is a way for us to begin addressing an epic state failure.”
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‘What are we doing?’: Protesters say legislative focus on anti-trans bill misplaced amid health care crisis
Trans kids, supportive parents and activists from across Mississippi gathered on the south-facing steps of the Capitol on Wednesday to rally against a bill that would ban gender-affirming medical care for trans minors.
More than 50 people attended the protest against House Bill 1125, called the “Regulate Experimental Procedures for Adolescents Act,” holding colorful signs and wearing the pink, blue and white trans pride flags draped on their shoulders.
Some trans kids who attended, like Theodore Milnor, a 15-year-old freshman at Tougaloo Early College High School, had excused absences from school. Milnor’s counselor gave him one condition: To write a report on the protest and present it to the whole school for kids who couldn’t go.
Before the protest started, Milnor turned to a family friend, Tifani Keith, who’d come with him because his parents couldn’t get off work. He said he was anxious.
“We’re in a very safe and loving place right now,” Keith told him as they walked up the Capitol steps.
Inside the building, conservative lawmakers have fast-tracked HB 1125 without consulting trans kids or providers of gender-affirming care, an evidence-based form of treatment that is supported by every major medical association in the U.S. If the bill passes, providers could lose their license if they continue to treat trans kids, and anyone who “aids and abets” gender-affirming care for trans kids could be sued for damages for up to 30 years, in a provision modeled off a Texas anti-abortion bill.
“It is infantilizing, unfair, discriminatory and frankly unconstitutional,” said McKenna Raney-Gray, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi’s LGBTQ Justice Project. “This is the kind of thing the ACLU was designed to fight against.”
The bill has yet to pass the Senate but it is backed by a powerful coalition of lawmakers, including Gov. Tate Reeves who has indicated he’ll sign it.
“The fact is that we set age restrictions on driving a car and on getting a tattoo,” Reeves said during his State of the State address. “We don’t let 11-year-olds enter an R-rated movie alone, yet some would have us believe that we should push permanent, body-altering surgeries on them at such a young age.”
Other lawmakers have likened gender-affirming care to child abuse and called the bill a measure to protect kids. But at the rally, speakers said the bill will do the exact opposite: by denying trans kids the opportunity to transition, they say HB 1125 will increase the risk of suicide among a population that is already disproportionately vulnerable to mental illness. Nationally, trans youth attempt suicide at a rate more than four times their cisgender peers due to social stigma and discrimination. Research has repeatedly shown that gender-affirming care significantly boosts the chances that trans kids will live to see adulthood.
READ MORE: What to know about gender-affirming care in Mississippi
Some of the trans kids who attended, like Milnor, have not started gender-affirming care but still view the bill as an attack on their rights.
“This bill is not about health care in my point of view,” he said. “I feel it is more about ostracizing trans people.”
Gender-affirming care is already difficult to obtain in Mississippi. There is likely only one clinic in the state that offers gender-affirming care, with parental consent, to 16- and 17-year-old trans teenagers. The number of kids in the state who have prescriptions to hormones or puberty blockers — treatment that is reversible — could likely fit in a whole classroom, according to in-state providers of gender-affirming care.
In speeches, House lawmakers like Rep. Nick Bain, R-Corinth, a co-sponsor of the bill, could not name a single instance of trans kids undergoing surgery in Mississippi. There is no clinic in Mississippi that offers gender-confirmation surgery to trans kids, according to providers.
“Believe me, the gentleman from Corinth did not come up with this idea one afternoon in the duck hunt,” said Clint Faulkner, a father who drove up from Sumrall with his child to attend the rally. “He got a call from a special interest group. … That’s what bothers me.”
Multiple speakers asked, rhetorically, why lawmakers are prioritizing HB 1125 instead of other health care issues in Mississippi, like the rural hospital crisis or the worsening rate of maternal mortality, one of the highest in America.
“My question, as always, is this,” said Lance Presley, a reverend at Broadmeadow United Methodist Church in Jackson. “Why is it that every time folks in this building start talking about protecting our children, it’s never about making sure that our children in this state have adequate nutrition, it’s never about making sure that the kids in this state live past childhood?”
“Why is it always – when they talk about protecting children – why is it always about hurting the kids who are already hurting most,” he continued.
Ashley Moore, the mother of a trans child, echoed Presley’s point.
“What are we doing?” she said. “We rank last in so many things, and we’re trying to take away our children’s rights? Gender-affirming care is evidence-based. Everybody seems to be overlooking that.”
Moore said that she was so scared to speak out against the bill she was shaking, but that, “I am even more terrified of what will happen to my child and my family if this is passed.”
Leviathan Myers-Rowell, a 16-year-old high school junior, talked about what it’s like to be a trans kid in Mississippi, an experience he said lawmakers don’t understand. He quoted a comment that Sen. Joey Fillingane, R-Sumrall, made in a Senate committee claiming that parents are forcing gender-affirming care on trans kids.
“This is horrifying to me because it just isn’t true,” Myers-Rowell said. “There are no parents out there who actually want to choose the gender assignment of their children … the reality is being trans is hard, and nobody chooses this.”
After speeches finished, protesters marched two blocks to the Governor’s Mansion, waving flags and chanting “protect trans youth.”
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Podcast: Crooked Letter Super Bowl wrap.
Starkville natives A.J. Brown and Willie Gay both went off on football’s biggest stage, but it was Gay’s Chiefs that pulled out the 38-35 thriller. The Cleveland boys discuss the game, including the “controversial” call that helped decide the game.
Stream all episodes here.
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On this day in 1848
FEBRUARY 15, 1848
Sarah Roberts, a 5-year-old Black American, entered an all-white school in Boston — only to be turned away. She wound up entering four more white schools, and each time she was shown the door. And so she found herself walking from home, passing five all-white schools on the way to an all-black school the city of Boston was forcing her to attend.
This angered her father, Benjamin, one of the nation’s first Black American printers, and he sued the city. Robert Morris, one of the nation’s first Black lawyers, took up the case.
“Any child unlawfully excluded from public school shall recover damages therefore against the city or town by which such public instruction is supported,” Morris wrote.
He and co-counsel Charles Sumner argued that the Constitution of Massachusetts held all are equal before the law, regardless of race, and that the laws creating public schools made no distinctions.
Sumner wrote, “Prejudice is the child of ignorance … sure to prevail where people do not know each other.”
In 1850, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court upheld the racial segregation of public schools. The attorneys brought the issue to state lawmakers. In 1855, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts banned segregated schools — the first law barring segregated schools in the U.S.
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