Quincy Jones was born in Chicago. His trumpet play won him a scholarship to the prestigious Berklee College of Music. Time magazine named him one of the most influential jazz musicians of the 20th century, and his gift for arranging songs made him sought after as an arranger, a musical director and a producer. He has received a record 79 Grammy nominations, which includes 28 wins.
Jones also showed a talent for scoring films, starting with the 1964 film, The Pawnbroker, breaking through many color barriers. In 1968, he became the first African American to be nominated twice within the same year for an Academy Award for Best Original Score.
In 1995, he received the Academy’s Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for his charity work. In 2013, he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Two years later, his daughter, Rashida Jones, produced an award-winning documentary that detailed his life from battling poverty on Chicago’s South Side to producing some of the world’s most beloved music.
Fewer Mississippians in mental health crises are stuck waiting in jail cells for a hospital bed each day than they were a year ago, but the state has yet to eliminate the troubling practice completely, according to a new report.
The latest data available shows that from December to mid-January, an average of 23 people in crisis waited for a hospital bed each day. Eight of those waited in jail, despite not being charged with any crime.
Those numbers were much higher not long ago: In the first quarter of this fiscal year, which started in July, an average of 72 people waited for a bed with 24 in a jail cell each day. Similar numbers had been reported for the prior fiscal year.
“The scope of progress is substantial,” wrote Dr. Michael Hogan, the author of a court-mandated biannual report on the state of Mississippi’s mental health system. “But the work is not complete, and some conditions remain that should satisfy no one.”
Hogan’s report comes as the result of a 2016 lawsuit filed against the state by the U.S. Department of Justice. A judge sided with the federal government in 2019, finding the state had violated the Americans with Disabilities Act by separating people with mental illness in hospitals from their homes and families. Hogan, a former New York State Commissioner on Mental Health, is now tasked with writing the twice-yearly reports on the state’s compliance with the lawsuit’s consent agreement as a court monitor.
Ultimately, the report found DMH was compliant or in partial compliance with all key issues pointed out in the agreement.
Wendy Bailey, executive director of the Department of Mental Health, speaks to an audience during the Mental Health Meet Up at the Two Mississippi Museums in Jackson, Miss., Wednesday, May 26, 2022. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
“The Mississippi system could fairly be described as the most unbalanced state system in terms of preferences for institutional care in the country,” Hogan wrote, referring to alarming issues in patient care first documented by the DOJ in 2011. “As this report is being written, a decade of attention means this imbalance in care has been substantially addressed.”
Late in 2022, DMH reopened a 30-bed unit at East Mississippi State Hospital that had been closed because of staffing shortages. A closed 20-bed unit at Mississippi State Hospital was reopened in January. The added beds contributed to keeping people with mental illness out of jail cells.
Patient counts that the department supplied to Mississippi Today show the number of people waiting in jail for a state hospital bed has been steadily declining for months.
“This is not a small undertaking and is due to the unwavering dedication of an incredible team of staff at DMH Central Office, the four state hospitals, and community mental health centers who strive daily to improve the state’s system of care,” the department’s executive director, Wendy Bailey, told Mississippi Today in a statement, “and to state leaders and legislators who are supporting and funding the efforts.”
The latest report, the third ever, was published this week and charted much of the Mississippi’s Department of Mental Health’s progress in care access across the state. However, lingering staffing retention troubles, data collection and use, patient outreach and communication issues, and jail stays remain sore points in need of improvement, according to Hogan’s report.
When community mental health centers were created 40 years ago – each with their own designated region – they operated with little oversight from the DMH, which focused on running state hospitals. As a result, statewide mental health care was often disjointed or inconsistent.
Hogan’s report studied discharge documentation to better understand how often patients across the state were getting intervention to lessen the likelihood they hit a severe crisis point again requiring inpatient treatment.
While entering inpatient treatment can help stabilize severe mental illness, it doesn’t cure it, Hogan points out. Follow ups are needed to prevent relapses and readmission. Hogan and his team found that community mental health centers contacted a hospitalized client, while the individual was in the hospital, at a rate of 45%.
He said “lukewarm success” in establishing relationships while people are still hospitalized impacts whether they attend a follow-up appointment after discharge. The overview found that initial visits were completed in 59 of 89 incidents they could track – about 66%. The rate of follow-up and engagement efforts were adequate in 56 of 87 cases they could track – or 64%.
“Some Regions do a good job on some elements and all do a good job some of the time,” Hogan wrote. “But consistency is lacking.”
Workers like peer support specialists who help contact patients after discharge are often paid at or below what a fast food worker can make, Hogan pointed out. The staffing shortages among these roles were higher than that of other vacancies, such as registered nurses and therapists.
Bailey acknowledged the same hardships but hopes average annual salaries for those support staff positions reach $30,000 by fiscal year 2025. The department has asked the Legislature for more funding to help raise wages and improve retention rates.
“We are not only dealing with competition from the private sector, we are dealing with burnout from staff dealing with patients who require 24/7 care who have significant mental and behavioral challenges,” Bailey said in her statement.
Hogan’s first report, issued in March, described Mississippians sometimes waiting weeks in jail for a bed at a state hospital. He also found that some people admitted to state hospitals did not have a serious mental illness – meaning the hospital wasn’t the right place for them and they were occupying a bed that could have been used by someone else.
In his second report, he surveyed North Mississippi State Hospital and community mental health centers in the northern part of the state and did not find patients admitted without a serious mental illness diagnosis.
Bailey said that DMH expects to also see more positive results from people now working as court liaisons who help staff identify community treatment options. The department has also grown programs that provide transitional housing, supported employment and community outreach over the last several years.
Recently the agency began fidelity monitoring, or progress monitoring, of its mobile crisis teams, another positive step Hogan recognized.
“Are there improvements still to be made?” Bailey posed, reflecting on state’s mental health system. “Yes.”
Mississippi voters, by an overwhelming margin, support full funding of the Mississippi Adequate Education Program, which provides to local school districts the state’s share of money to pay for their basic needs.
A Siena College/Mississippi Today poll released on Monday found that 79% of respondents — including 91% of Democrats, 73% of Republicans and 77% of independents — support fully funding MAEP, while just 9% are opposed. Eleven percent of respondents are undecided.
The poll was conducted on March 6-8 of 764 registered voters. The poll was conducted soon after the state Senate, in a surprise move, voted unanimously to make a few changes to the MAEP formula and appropriate an additional $181 million to achieve full funding.
Editor’s note: Poll methodology and crosstabs can be found at the bottom of this story. Click here to read more about our partnership with Siena College Research Institute.
If the House and Gov. Tate Reeves agree to the Senate proposal, it will mark the first time the formula, viewed as landmark legislation nationally when it was passed in 1997, has been fully funded since the 2007-08 school year.
Siena asked poll respondents if they support “fully funding, with the addition of about $275 million, the Mississippi Adequate Education Program or MAEP, the formula that sends state money to local schools for basic school needs.” (Note: Mississippi Today commissioned the Siena poll before the Senate released its final additional cost estimate of $181 million — about $94 million less than the $275 million asked of poll respondents.)
The Senate passed legislation, now pending in the House, that would make technical changes, resulting in less than $275 million to provide full funding. Even with the changes to the formula, all 138 school districts, plus charter schools, would receive more funding than they garnered last year and are scheduled to get this year under the budget proposals of the governor and legislative leaders. The formula was underfunded by $273 million last year and was scheduled, to be underfunded by about $275 million for the upcoming year.
The Senate plan would not require any school district to raise taxes to receive the additional funding.
MAEP was approved in 1997 and fully funded in 2003, its first year of full enactment. It also was fully funded in 2007.
According to the Parents’ Campaign, an education advocacy group, MAEP was underfunded by $3.3 billion since 2008. But still, it is generally the largest state expenditure each year. In the 2022 session, the Legislature appropriated $2.1 billion for MAEP.
State Superintendent of Education Robert Taylor said of the possibility of full funding for the local districts: “It would be significant. That (fully funding) means that they now have the resources to put toward things that they haven’t been able to do. We know that proper funding in education is what is going to give any district the capacity to do the work.”
MAEP covers most of the state costs for the basic operation of school districts, ranging from textbooks to utilities to teacher salaries.
Siena has been rated as one of the top pollsters in the nation by the FiveThirtyEight Blog, which analyzes pollster data. The poll has a margin of error of 4.6%, meaning the results could vary by that margin.
The respondents had a racial breakdown of 57% white voters and 35% African American voters. It also included 35% Republicans, 33% Democrats and 31% independent and other parties.
The poll was conducted via cell phones, landlines and “from a proprietary online panel of Mississippians.”
Mississippi Today’s Julia James contributed to this report.
Angie Thomas, Jesmyn Ward, Kiese Laymon, Rick Bragg and other noted authors will speak at the first Banned Books Festival in the state on March 25 at Millsaps College in Jackson.
The Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting at Mississippi Today is sponsoring the event, along with the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute, the Millsaps Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation Campus Center, the Mississippi Humanities Council, the Mississippi ACLU and Lemuria Books.
The theme of the event is “Erasing,” and the authors will talk about the dangerous trend of book banning, which has led some school districts to remove scores of library books from the shelves.
The list of banned books across the nation continues to grow, including such treasured books as “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee, “The Hate U Give” by Angie Thomas, “Beloved” by Toni Morrison, “A Time to Kill” by John Grisham, the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling, “The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck and The Bible.
Reena Evers-Everette, executive director of the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute in Jackson, will co-host the event with Jerry Mitchell of the MCIR at Mississippi Today.
“Some of the world’s greatest writers have come from Mississippi, so it only seems appropriate that we hold the state’s first-ever Banned Books Festival here,” Evers-Everette said. “These books are being banned, because some people want to rewrite history and erase reality. This festival is taking a stand for truth for all.”
She recalled the assassination of her father “60 years ago because he dared to become the first Black Mississippian to go on television and let the world know what was really happening in this state. He took a step in courage and so must we.”
The Mississippi Banned Books Festival will kick off at 9 a.m. in Millsaps’ McMullan Lecture Hall with Mississippi Todaycartoonist Marshall Ramsey interviewing Rick Bragg, whose book “All Over But the Shoutin’“ drew criticism and an effort to ban it.
In keeping with the event’s theme of “Erasing,” Cheryl W. Thompson, senior editor and investigative correspondent for National Public Radio, will interview some of the nation’s top investigative reporters on the subject of “Erasing Truth.” They include: Mississippi Today’s Anna Wolfe, who broke the story on the state’s $77 million state welfare scandal; Julie K. Brown, whose book, “Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story”, is based on her exposés on Epstein; and Gilbert King, the Pulitzer-Prize winning author who exposed the wrongful conviction of Leo Schofield in his popular podcast, “Bone Valley”.
“These stories demonstrate why investigative reporting is so important, because investigative reporting holds the powerful accountable,” said Mitchell, the founder of the MCIR. “Without this kind of reporting, democracy must operate in the darkness.”
Ebony Lumumba, who serves on the advisory board to the Mississippi Book Festival, will interview Angie Thomas, whose “The Hate U Give” is among the most banned books in the nation.
For the “Erasing History” panel, Alan Huffman, author of “Mississippi in Africa”, will interview Stephanie Rolph, author of “Resisting Equality: The Citizens’ Council, 1954-1989”, historian Daphne Chamberlain, the founding director of the Civil Rights Education Center at Jackson State University and the vice president for Strategic Initiatives and Social Justice at Tougaloo College, and Ko Bragg, who wrote in the Atlanticmagazine about an aging cohort of Black tour guides fighting the local erasure of the Freedom Summer killings of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.
W. Ralph Eubanks, the author of “A Place Like Mississippi”, will interview authors Kiese Laymon and Jesmyn Ward on “Erasing Memory.”
The Mississippi Banned Books Festival is encouraging Mississippians to post videos of themselves reading passages from their favorite banned books. Students also will host read-ins at the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home and other places across Mississippi to bring attention to banned books and the need to read.
“As an institution that has produced informed, creative thinking and versatile citizens for more than 130 years and that today remains resolutely dedicated to its mission of academic excellence, open inquiry and free expression,” said Keith Dunn, provost and dean of Millsaps College. “Millsaps College believes deeply in the value and importance of all voices, even when those voices may be telling difficult stories. The college’s new strategic plan, ‘Destination 2027: Lighting the Path,’ specifically calls for us to be a place ‘known for free, courageous and bold academic discourse.’ Our support of this important event is one more way we are living into that plan.”
Note: This editorial anchored Mississippi Today’s weekly legislative newsletter. Subscribe to our free newsletter for exclusive access to legislative analysis and up-to-date information about what’s happening under the Capitol dome.
Senate Republican leaders shocked the state on Feb. 28 when they announced their intention to fully fund Mississippi’s public school formula for just the third time since 2003.
Just a few minutes before the Senate was set to vote on the proposal on March 7, Gov. Tate Reeves took to Twitter with an eyebrow-raising warning to lawmakers.
“Be very cautious of a last minute change in funding formula that seems to have unanimous support amongst Democrats in Senate and liberal activist groups. Very very cautious,” Reeves tweeted, followed by his office sending his tweet to reporters as an official press statement. “Instead of funneling more money to the district offices — where our kids won’t see it — why not another teacher pay raise? Put it in the classroom!”
A little more than an hour later, the supermajority in the Republican state Senate, apparently unfazed by their Republican leader’s words, voted unanimously to do the exact opposite of what Reeves had warned. Every single Republican and Democrat in the Senate voted with virtually no debate to tweak the education funding formula and fully fund public schools.
The Senate plan, which would help local school districts cover basic costs such as supplies, building costs and, yes, teacher salaries, would require the state send an additional $181 million to the Mississippi Adequate Education Program per year. The proposal comes as Mississippi sits on a record revenue surplus of $3.9 billion, and more than $1 billion of that is recurring.
The politics of opposing full funding of public education during an election year are questionable at best. And even more problematic for Reeves is that his unprompted Twitter take dredged up his controversial record on one of the single biggest political issues of any campaign.
Reeves, at least on this issue, appears wildly out of step with Mississippi voters, including his Republican base. A new Siena College/Mississippi Today poll released today shows that a whopping 79% of Mississippians — including 73% of Republicans surveyed — believe lawmakers should fully fund public schools this session.
Democrat Brandon Presley, who is getting all sorts of statewide and national attention for his political upside against Reeves in the governor’s race later this year, pounced immediately. As one longtime political operative put it in a text message later in the day: “I hear they’re having a Field Day in Nettleton today,” referencing Presley’s hometown.
“I commend both Republicans and Democrats in the state Senate for coming together across party lines unanimously to better fund our schools,” Presley tweeted shortly after the Senate vote. “As usual, Tate Reeves is now attacking this bipartisan effort and playing politics once again. Tate Reeves has shown over and over he cares more about HIS political career than OUR students. He won’t lead. As governor, I will.”
Reeves’ tweet leads astute political observers to recall Reeves’ many black eyes from his action (or inaction) on public education related issues. If you’re interested in taking a stroll down memory lane, here are just a few of those moments:
In eight years as lieutenant governor, when he had deep influence over the state budget, Reeves raised teacher pay just two times — both during election years. And those pay raises were so marginal that education groups and teachers publicly panned them with descriptors like “a joke”; “insufficient”; “a slap in the face’: “insulting”; and “another election-year-timed symbolic gesture.” His March 7 tweet suggested current lawmakers consider another teacher pay raise. Needless to say, that wasn’t received too well.
The governor highlighted in his March 7 tweet that the Senate full funding effort was “last minute.” But no one, seemingly, has forgotten about perhaps the most notorious “last minute” leader in modern political history regarding education-related moves. When Reeves was lieutenant governor, he famously sneaked $2 million for private school vouchers into an unrelated appropriations bill in the 2019 election year, drawing the broad ire of every single public education group.
In 2017, Reeves and other legislative leaders tried and failed to rewrite the state’s public education funding formula. A majority of Republican senators shot down Reeves’ plan in broad daylight. Shortly after the Senate vote, Reeves went sour grapes and blamed reporters: “I know you’re all smiling big today. You worked really hard to kill this, and you were very, very successful at doing so.” Reeves has rarely publicly discussed the failed rewrite effort since then, and he has neither tried nor proposed another rewrite effort.
In Reeves’ last five years as lieutenant governor, the Legislature underfunded Mississippi Adequate Education Program by $1.06 billion, according to data compiled by The Parents’ Campaign. Since 2008 under the same measures, MAEP has gone underfunded by $3.35 billion, including a worst-ever stretch from 2012-2020 — the eight years Reeves served as leader of the Senate.
From 2015-2019, his last four years as lieutenant governor, Mississippi’s public education budgets were cut by $173.5 million ($102 million cut to Institutions of Higher Learning, $40 million cut to K-12 education, $32 million to community colleges).
Several teacher loan forgiveness programs in 2016 received budget cuts so extreme from the Reeves-led Legislature that they had to stop forgiving loans for teachers. “It really got me thinking, ‘Well, my state’s not really on my side here,’” a north Mississippi teacher said.
And how soon we forget one of the biggest political blunders of modern politics. In 2019, late in his heated governor’s race with Democratic Attorney General Jim Hood, Reeves released a TV ad touting his plan to raise public school teacher pay. There was just one problem: most of the ad was filmed inside a private school and featured several private school teachers. That private school, then a little-known entity, is now one of the most familiar schools in the state for all the wrong reasons. Reeves filmed the ad at New Summit School, owned by welfare and education fraudsters Nancy and Zach New, who were 2019 campaign donors of Reeves.
It remains unclear what Reeves thought he was doing March 7 with his social media warning to lawmakers and his effective trolling of the Senate’s full funding proposal.
The Senate plan now moves to the House, where Republican leaders there have to decide whether to heed Reeves’ warning. But legislative Democrats, like Presley, are already using the moment to apply pressure.
“This appropriation would be less than 5% of our nearly $4 billion surplus and he still doesn’t want to spend it on Mississippi’s public school students,” said Rep. Robert Johnson, the House Democratic leader. “If we’re in the best financial shape in our state’s history, as the governor so often likes to remind us, why should we have to choose? If he isn’t interested in investing in public education now, will he ever be?”
Johnson continued: “If House Republicans and Tate Reeves think blocking $181 million from going into our public schools while they crow about a $4 billion surplus is a winning strategy going into an election year, then good luck to them.”
But before too long, we’ll get some clarity on how Reeves’ questionable take — effectively, “I know we have more money than we’ve ever had, but let’s actually not send additional funding to our consistently struggling public schools during this major election year” — will affect his effort to win one more term in the Governor’s Mansion.
A federal judge rejected the claim that Grenada police officers should be protected by qualified immunity in the 2018 death of Robert Loggins in the local jail.
The ruling by U.S. District Judge Sharion Aycock moves the case one step closer to trial in Mississippi.
“The court’s decision is an important milestone in the family’s quest for justice, and they are prepared to fight for as long as it takes,” said Jacob Jordan of the Levy Konigsberg LLP law firm, the attorney for Loggins’ family.
A video obtained by the Mississippi Center of Investigative Reporting at Mississippi Today shows Loggins rolling when officers and jailers piled on top of him inside the Grenada County Jail. It also shows officer kneeling on his neck.
Three and a half minutes later, they got off of him. He never moved again. More than six minutes passed before anyone checked his pulse or breathing.
Despite that, the state of Mississippi concluded Loggins’ death was an “accident.” The alleged culprit? Methamphetamine toxicity.
After viewing the video as well as the autopsy report and the photos, renowned forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden concluded the death was a homicide. “They killed him by piling on top of him,” he said. “He absolutely died from some kind of asphyxia.”
Loggins’ death came two years before the 2020 murder of George Floyd. All the officers who played a role in Floyd’s homicide were fired and convicted on criminal charges.
Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who knelt on Floyd’s neck, was sentenced to two decades behind bars. Three other officers were each sentenced to between two and a half and three and a half years in prison, including one officer who kept bystanders away.
The Grenada officer who kneeled on Loggins’ neck has never faced any criminal charges, nor has any other officer.
Baden considers the officers’ actions in the Loggins’ case much worse. “The intentional brutality inflicted on Loggins,” he said, “who was in an acute mental crisis, having done nothing criminal, makes his death — and many, many others — so much more criminal than Floyd’s.”
Baden compared the Loggins’ case to the Jan. 10 death of Tyre Nichols, whom five Memphis police officers pepper-sprayed, kicked, punched and shocked with a Taser. A grand jury has indicted the now-fired officers on second-degree murder and other charges.
The pathologist said Loggins’ death is “more typical of the thousands of police custody deaths of unarmed persons that have occurred without much notice.”
Since 2000, at least 342 deaths have taken place across the country after police restrained people, according to FatalEncounters.org. Many of those deaths were due to asphyxia.
In some of those deaths, officers used restraints condemned by the U.S. Department of Justice. The agency, along with the International Association of Chiefs of Police, warned officers that keeping restrained people face down increases the risk of death from asphyxia.
“As soon as the suspect is handcuffed, get him off his stomach,” the memo advises.
At 5:40 a.m. on Nov. 29, 2018, a woman in Grenada telephoned 911, saying, “Someone’s in the back of my house calling for help. Please hurry.”
Five members of the Grenada Police Department responded: Capt. Justin Gammage, Sgt. Reggie Woodall, Cpl. Edwin Merriman, Patrolman Michael Jones and Patrolman Albert Deane Tilley.
They found a Black man face down with his arms tucked beneath his body. One officer recognized Loggins, who had battled both mental issues and a drug problem.
“Although Loggins was likely guilty of trespassing and disturbing the peace, there is no real contention that he had committed any offense more serious than those,” the judge wrote. “In fact, according to the call to Grenada Police Department, Loggins was screaming for help, which would undercut any argument that he was attempting to commit some sort of serious crime under cover of night.”
U.S. District Judge Sharion Aycock
In bodycam footage obtained by MCIR, officers repeatedly asked Loggins to put his hands behind his back. He refused.
“My soul belongs to Jesus Christ, my savior, my protector,” he told officers.
“Your ass belongs to us now,” one of them replied.
The judge concluded that “any fears the officers may have had must have subsided quickly. Loggins was screaming incoherently, never attempted to exert any force against them, never brandished a weapon and never even threatened to harm them.”
She wrote that Loggins refused to put his hands behind his back, which may have been because he was in an altered state.
Gammage and Woodall shocked Loggins with a Taser at least 10 times, and Woodall struck Loggins with a flashlight nine times — a degree of force that “was not justifiable under the circumstances,” the judge wrote.
After handcuffing the 5-foot-8, 190-pound man, officers carried him to a carport, where a report by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation claims that “Loggins’ disorderly behavior” kept emergency personnel from conducting “a full medical assessment.”
But bodycam video paints a different picture. As officers carry Loggins, an EMT can be heard saying, “He looks fine to me.”
Jail video shows that at 5:59 a.m. officers carried Loggins upside down into the lobby of the jail. They left him face down on the floor, handcuffed.
He seemed to be in distress, rolling from side to side, the shift supervisor, Sgt. Edna Clark, told the investigations bureau. “To me, he was trying to gasp for breath because he couldn’t breathe.”
She said she asked officers to take Loggins to the hospital but was waved off.
After Tilley reportedly said he needed his handcuffs back, at least four officers and jailers piled on top of Loggins at 6:04 a.m. to remove the cuffs from his wrists, the video shows. When they got off Loggins more than three minutes later, he didn’t move.
Clark noticed that he was bleeding and called 911. The dispatcher replied that EMTs had previously checked him.
“He’s bleeding from his mouth. He’s bleeding from his legs,” she told the dispatcher. “I’m not going to take him.”
At 6:14 a.m., Clark checked Loggins’ pulse and his breathing. She called 911 again.
“This man has got no heartbeat, and he’s not breathing. I want them officers back over here. I want an ambulance,” she said. “Get them over here now.”
A few minutes later, medical personnel arrived. They pounded on Loggins’ chest hoping to revive him, and when they couldn’t, they airlifted him to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
In 2020, Loggins’ wife, Rika Jones, filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court, accusing the officers of assault and the medical personnel and the private jail operator of failing to provide him with proper medical treatment.
Tilley’s lawyer insists his client didn’t cause Loggins’ death or act with excessive force and is shielded by qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that says government workers can’t be held liable for what they do on the job, except in rare circumstances.
Other officers have also denied any wrongdoing, insisting that Loggins’ constitutional rights were never violated.
The judge, however, disagreed, concluding that officers used “excessive force” and weren’t entitled to immunity from litigation.
In its response, the private jail operator, Corrections Management Services, said its staff acted in good faith, with Clark advising police “multiple times that Loggins would not be accepted into the jail and that he needed medical attention.” Medical personnel have denied the suit’s allegations of failure to provide proper treatment.
When Loggins died, he was 26 — seven years younger than his mother was when she died.
Debbie Loggins died in police custody after being hogtied, another restraint that the Justice Department has condemned.
Debbie Loggins, Robert’ Loggins’ mother, was hogtied by officers responding to a call about a fight in 2005, and she died in their custody. Credit: Courtesy of Robert Ford/MCIR
The late pathologist who conducted her autopsy, Dr. Steven Hayne, ruled out trauma, drugs and alcohol, concluding that she died because of advanced heatstroke, even though the sun hadn’t risen when she was arrested, the temperature was in the 70s, and officers transported her in an air-conditioned car.
Instead, Hayne — whose autopsies have been called into question — concluded her death was an accident, blaming her “excessive exertional activity.”
Loggins’ father, Robert Ford, still passes by the jail where his son breathed his last. Sometimes, he stops outside and thinks about his son.
He believes his son deserves justice. “He was murdered,” he said. “You can see it in the video.”
Legendary television anchor Howard Ballou joins Editor-at-Large Marshall Ramsey for this week’s episode of Mississippi Stories. Ballou has been a fixture on Mississippi TVs for over three decades. But today, the WLBT anchor talks about his mother Maude Ballou, who was Martin Luther King, Jr.’s friend and personal secretary in Montgomery, Alabama. Howard tells stories of his mother’s time working with King, her bravery and his memories of the Civil Rights movement.
Imagine you’re a young teenager living with your grandmother in the 1960s, in the Georgetown neighborhood of Jackson. It’s 10 o’clock at night and quiet. Suddenly, there’s a knock at the door.
A peek through the curtains reveals a white man standing there, waiting.
“My grandmother asked out loud and nearly simultaneously, ‘What in the world? What could this white man possibly want?’” said Dorothy Moore with a chuckle at the memory. “You know, those times back then … it was the Civil Rights era and all. So yeah, we were wondering.”
The man was record producer Bob McRee of Epic Records. He had gotten wind of this young singer who’d caused a stir singing at the Alamo Theater on Farish Street in Jackson.
The emcee that night at the Alamo had been local radio talent Jobie Martin.
McRee searched high and low for young Dorothy, and it had taken him all day and into the night to find her. He wanted to sign Dorothy to a record deal.
After he explained himself, her grandmother, Minnie Mitchell, co-signed the deal.
The ensuing record deal put Dorothy into the all-girl trio, The Poppies, an R&B/pop group consisting of Dorothy, Petsye McCune and Rosemary Taylor. They had a hit in the mid 1960s called “Lullaby of Love,” which reached the middle of the Billboard Hot 100.
After a couple of years, Rosemary and Petsye went back to school. Later, Dorothy left school and became an unintentional star.
“For me, it was just exciting and fun,” said Moore. “I just loved to sing and really wasn’t thinking about being famous, let alone becoming a star.”
Even as a backup singer, her sultry voice got her noticed and gave her solo opportunities to sing for the label. Her voice allowed her to see the world, first as a back-up singer for renowned vocalists and groups of that era, and then, as a solo singer.
Eventually, she signed with Malaco Records in Jackson.
It was at Malaco that the song “Misty Blue” found its way to Dorothy. It was written by Bob Montgomery in Nashville and first recorded by country artist Wilma Burgess.
“I recorded that song in one take,” said Moore with pride. “Oh, and there it sat on a shelf for two years. But you know what, my friend Eddie Floyd, who was an artist at the time with Malaco too, heard it and told Malaco to release it. He told them that song was a hit.”
Floyd was right.
Moore was working on Mill Street in Jackson when she got word that the song had, indeed, become a hit.
“Misty Blue” catapulted Moore into the music stratosphere, garnering her fans around the world and a Grammy Award nomination. The song has been a part of soundtracks for many popular movies.
Since that first Grammy nod, Moore has been awarded three other Grammy nominations. In 2015, she was inducted into the National Rhythm & Blues Music Hall of Fame, located in Marks.
After many albums for other labels, and a respite from the music business, nowadays, Moore produces herself.
“The music biz didn’t control me,” said Moore. “I found out that I actually love producing. And there are great musicians right here close to home that I use.”
Her latest drop, “I’m Happy with the One I’ve Got Now,” produced on her Farish Street Records of Mississippi label that she founded in 2002, is a rousing homage to her gospel and blues roots.
Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today
Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today
Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today
Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today
Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today
Credit: Photo courtesy of Peggy Brown
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A Raisin in the Sun, the first Broadway play written by a Black woman, debuted at the Ethel Barrymore Theater. Lorraine Hansberry drew inspiration for her play from a Langston Hughes’ poem: “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?”
Hansberry also drew on her past, her family fighting Chicago’s restrictive covenants in court and finally getting their day in court. The Broadway drama starred Sidney Poitier, Claudia McNeal and Ruby Dee. It was also the first Broadway play of the modern era with a Black director, Lloyd Richards.
The New York Drama Critics’ Circle named it the best play, and it was adapted into a 1961 film, which starred the original Broadway cast. Hansberry wrote the screenplay, and Dee won Best Supporting Actress from the National Board of Review. In 1973, the drama became a Broadway musical, Raisin, and it won the Tony for Best Musical. In 2010, Hansberry’s family home became a historic landmark, and the play continues to be performed on Broadway and across the nation.
