Brandon Presley is a proud Democrat, but you can guarantee he’ll be beat over the head with the “D” behind his name by Tate Reeves as the campaign progresses.
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On this day in 2001
MAY 1, 2001
A jury convicted Thomas Blanton of taking part in the Ku Klux Klan’s 1963 bombing of a Birmingham church that killed four girls, and he was given four life sentences — one for each girl murdered.
After the verdict was announced, U.S. Attorney Doug Jones announced, “Justice delayed is still justice, and we have it in Birmingham, Alabama.”
Jones told the story of the conviction of both Blanton and Bobby Cherry in his memoir, “Bending Toward Justice.”
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Podcast: It’s officially 2023 election season
Mississippi Today’s political team breaks down statewide 2023 primary and general elections of interest, including the increasingly bitter GOP primary for lieutenant governor and the general election between Republican Tate Reeves and Democrat Brandon Presley.
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Olympic champion Ralph Boston, ‘a skinny kid from Laurel,’ dies at 83
Laurel native Ralph Boston, a three-time Olympic long jump medalist and surely one of the most accomplished athletes in Mississippi history, died April 30 at his home in Peachtree City, Ga., following a massive stroke suffered in late March. Boston would have turned 84 on May 9.
In addition to his remarkable athletic accomplishments, Boston will be remembered as a smart, friendly, courteous gentleman, immensely proud of his Laurel and Oak Park High School roots and the fact that he was the first Black athlete ever inducted into the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame (1976).
Boston won a gold medal in the 1960 Rome Olympics, a silver medal in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and a bronze in the ’68 Olympics at Mexico City. “Yes sir, I got the complete Olympic set,” Boston once told this writer, which was as close to boastful as Boston would ever get.
The story behind the bronze medal at Mexico City might tell us more about Boston’s sportsmanship and character than all his other accomplishments. Those were the Olympic Games when Bob Beamon set perhaps the most astounding track and field record ever, leaping 29 feet, 2.5 inches, an amazing two feet beyond the world record.
Beamon, making a promotional appearance in Jackson three decades later, sat down for an interview with this writer. “What people don’t know is that I wouldn’t have done any of that if it hadn’t have been for Ralph Boston,” Beamon said. “I fouled on my first two attempts and was about to get disqualified and then Ralph told me how I needed to adjust my footwork leading to my takeoff. I figured I had better listen to the master, and I did. The rest, as they say, is history. I owe a lot to Ralph Boston.”
A few days later, Beamon’s words were recounted to Boston, who chuckled and then said, “He beat me by two feet; that’s a heck of a way to treat your teacher isn’t it. If you see Bob again, tell him I’m still waiting for my check.”
Another time, Boston recounted the day that made him famous. The 1960 U.S. Olympic track and field team was holding a conditioning meet in preparation for Rome at Mt. San Antonio College near Los Angeles. Boston leaped 26 feet, 11 inches, breaking the 25-year-old record of the legendary champion Jesse Owens. It was the last world record Owens owned.
“Suddenly people recognized me,” Boston said. “Before that night nobody outside of Laurel, Mississippi, knew who I was, and the people in Laurel knew me as Hawkeye Boston, not Ralph Boston.”
Boston remembered a short time later getting ready to board a plane for Rome and the Olympics. A handsome, strapping young man from Louisville, Ky., stopped him and asked if he could have his photo made with him. Said Boston, “He introduced himself as Cassius Marcellus Clay and told me, ‘You don’t know who I am yet, but you will soon.’ You don’t forget moments like that.”
Boston recalled entering the Olympic stadium in Rome for the opening ceremonies. “I was just a bright-eyed, skinny kid from Laurel who didn’t know which way was up. And then I walked into that stadium and there were more people there than I had ever seen in my life. I thought, man, what have I gotten myself into.”
And then the skinny kid from Laurel won the gold medal. “Boston! Boston! Boston!” a crowd of nearly 75,000 chanted. He had just turned 21.
Today, the same feat most likely would earn Boston millions in endorsements. Back then, there were no such rewards for Olympic athletes, who were amateurs in the strictest sense of the word. Boston worked as a school counselor and trained and competed on the side.
“I’ve got no complaints, no regrets,” Boston said when a writer mentioned that 40 years later. “I did OK for myself.”
He surely did. The 10th of 10 children born to a Laurel farmer and his wife, Ralph Boston did far, far better than OK.
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Mississippi Stories: Pamela Junior
In this episode of Mississippi Stories, Mississippi Today Editor-at-Large Marshall Ramsey sits down once again with Pamela Junior, who is retiring as the director of the Two Museums – The Museum of Mississippi History and the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson, Mississippi. She talks about the museum, its mission, and some of her favorite memories.
Junior, a native Jacksonian, is a Jackson State University graduate, the former manager of the Smith Robertson Museum and Cultural Center, and even was a park ranger with the National Park Service in Washington, D.C. Honored by many national and local groups, prepared to be inspired by Junior’s story.
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Marshall Ramsey: The Final Rose
Poll: Tate leads Brandon. Sixty-percent want another choice.
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On this day in 1945
APRIL 29, 1945
The memoir by Richard Wright about his upbringing in Roxie, Mississippi, “Black Boy”, became the top selling book in the U.S. He described Roxie as “swarming with rats, cats, dogs, fortune tellers, cripples, blind men, whores, salesmen, rent collectors, and children.”
In his home, he looked to his mother: “My mother’s suffering grew into a symbol in my mind, gathering to itself all the poverty, the ignorance, the helplessness; the painful, baffling, hunger-ridden days and hours; the restless moving, the futile seeking, the uncertainty, the fear, the dread; the meaningless pain and the endless suffering. Her life set the emotional tone of my life.”
When he was alone, he wrote, “I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all.”
Reading became his refuge. “Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books,” he wrote. “Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.”
In the end, he discovered that “if you possess enough courage to speak out what you are, you will find you are not alone.”
He was the first Black author to see his work sold through the Book-of-a-Month Club. His novel, “Native Son”, told the story of Bigger Thomas, a 20-year-old Black man whose bleak life leads him to kill. Through the book, he sought to expose the racism he saw:
“I was guided by but one criterion: to tell the truth as I saw it and felt it. I swore to myself that if I ever wrote another book, no one would weep over it; that it would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears.”
The novel, which sold more than 250,000 copies in its first three weeks, was turned into a play on Broadway, directed by Orson Welles. He became friends with other writers, including Ralph Ellison in Harlem and Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus in Paris. His works played a role in changing white Americans’ views on race.
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Fact or fiction: What to make of Reeves’ claims about Jackson crime
When Gov. Tate Reeves signed legislation to create a separate court and police district within Jackson, he said the focus was public safety and used various statistics to make his point about crime in the capital city.
“Jackson has to be better,” he said in an April 21 statement. “This legislation won’t solve the entire problem, but if we can stop one shooting, if we can respond to one more 911 call – then we’re one step closer to a better Jackson.”
As the law faces two lawsuits seeking to block it from going into effect in July, Mississippi Today is fact checking some of the claims Reeves made and providing more context about what these numbers say and efforts Jackson police and leaders are taking to address crime and community safety.
Claim: “The capital city is approximately 6% of Mississippi’s population yet, in 2020, accounted for more than 50% of the homicides in our state.”
Reeves is incorrect about the number and portion of homicides committed in Jackson compared to the rest of the state.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracks homicide mortality for all states, and in 2020 found that Mississippi’s rate was 20.5 per 100,000, which was 576 homicides.
Half of the CDC number would be 288 homicides in Jackson – a number that is higher than the 130 recorded in 2020 and higher than the city’s all-time high of 157 set in 2021.
Gov. Reeves may have reviewed information from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report expanded homicide data for 2020, which says Mississippi had 213 homicides and Jackson had 107, which is roughly 50%
But this data does come with limitations. In 2020, 113 of 251 law enforcement agencies in the state reported crime data to the FBI, meaning calculations made about it are not complete.
Claim: “In 2021, Jackson’s homicide rate was almost 100 murders per 100,000 residents – nearly 13 times higher than the U.S. rate of 7.8 per 100,000.”
Reeves is correct about the capital city’s homicide rate for 2021 compared to the national homicide rate.
The way to calculate the homicide rate is to divide the total number of homicides,155, by the total population, estimated at 156,800, and multiply that result by 100,000, which would result in a rate of nearly 100 homicides per 100,000.
A similar figure has also been reported in local and national news sources.
City leaders have acknowledged Jackson’s high number of homicides and, along with community members, have tried to find ways to address crime, including by taking a more holistic approach.
Jackson is launching an office focused on violence prevention and trauma recovery.
During a January forum with the U.S. Marshals Service, participants from the city said they want to see root causes of crime such as poverty, trauma and mental health to be addressed and the support of community violence interruption and credible messenger programs, which aim to prevent crime and people’s involvement in the criminal justice system.
Claim: “In 2022, it (the homicide rate) was approximately 88.9. On the global level, Jackson found itself in the company of Tijuana, Acapulco, and Caracas as one of the most dangerous places in the world.”
Reeves is correct that Jackson’s homicide rate last year would rank it among the Mexican cities of Tijuana and Acapulco and the Venezuelan city of Caracas with high homicide rates.
In 2022, Jackson had 135 homicides and a population of about 156,800, giving the city a rate of about 87 per 100,000, according to data kept by the city and shared with Mississippi Today.
The Citizens Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice, based in Mexico, releases yearly rankings of the most violent cities in the world. Its report for homicides in 2022 ranked Tijuana as fifth with a homicide rate of 105.12 per 100,000 and Acapulo at tenth with a rate of 65.55 per 100,000.
Its list does not include Jackson, but if it did based on a homicide rate of 87 per 100,000, the capital city would rank seventh.
Instead, the first United States city listed is New Orleans in eighth with a homicide rate of 70.56 per 100,000.
Another list of the most dangerous cities in 2022 by Statista ranks Tijuana, Acapulco and Caracas as the top three with homicide rates of nearly 100 and higher.
Again, Jackson is not mentioned on the list, but based on its rate for 2022, it would make the top five. The only U.S. cities mentioned are St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit and New Orleans.
Claim: “We can arrest all the violent criminals in the city, but if the judicial system puts them right back on the street—what have we really accomplished?”
Reeves does not specify who in the judicial system is allegedly responsible for releasing people nor does he provide evidence that this is happening.
If someone is arrested on a felony charge in Jackson, a Hinds County judge has a say in whether to approve bail, which if paid could allow the person to await their next court date from home, or to order them to be held in jail before trial.
Rep. Ed Blackmon Jr., D-Canton, who has spoken out against HB 1020, said under the state constitution and presumption of innocence, people have a right to bail. It’s a judge’s discretion of what amount to set and whether to allow bond.
“The judges in Hinds County follow the same guidelines as any judicial district in Mississippi,” he said, referring to rules and guidelines for bond release set by the Mississippi Supreme Court.
Blackmon said the state should not be empowered to hold a person who has not yet been convicted unless there is a reason, such as they are a flight risk or if they pose a risk to public safety.
It is possible for people to be released on their own recognizance without posting bail, but this release is usually for minor and nonviolent offenses and whether the person isn’t found to be a safety threat to the community or if they don’t have an existing criminal record. If they fail to appear in court, an arrest warrant could be issued.
For years, Jackson police officials have also been talking about how the lack of a misdemeanor holding facility has led to letting most people charged with misdemeanor offenses go until their appearances in Municipal Court.
Between March 2020 and November 2021, police released at least 3,000 people charged with misdemeanors, Chief James Davis said during a community meeting in November 2021.
Police haven’t been able to take those charged with misdemeanors to the Raymond Detention Center because of a 2016 federal consent decree.
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