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The post Marshall Ramsey: Let’s Make A Deal appeared first on Mississippi Today.

They are called the Partin Tables, named for Dr. Alan Partin, the renowned Johns Hopkins urologist who created the ground-breaking medical reference material. Partin developed the tables when he wasn’t performing hundreds and hundreds of often life-saving prostate surgeries a year.  

And you may wonder why a sports writer would write about such an obscure (if invaluable) medical reference. It is because Partin, who died on March 28 at age 62, grew up in Grenada and played college football at Ole Miss.

“Smartest damn guy I ever met,” said Madison resident Tim Bell, who was a student trainer for the Ole Miss football staff during the early 1980s when Partin played in the offensive line for the Rebels.

“Most guys played college football hoping to get to the pros,” Bell said. “Alan Partin knew he was gonna be a doctor, knew he was going to be a surgeon, knew he was going to study at Johns Hopkins. He was super, super intelligent and he was driven.”

So much for the hackneyed image of offensive linemen as dumb jocks. Partin, a chemistry and pre-med major, made straight A’s at Ole Miss. He was brilliant. He was far from alone among offensive linemen, and we’ll get to that.

Just google “Partin Tables” if you want to learn how smart Partin was. Developed in 1993, the tables are based “on thousands of nerve-sparing radical retropubic prostatectomies…” 

Asked to put the Partin Tables in layman’s terms, Dr. Charles Pound, division chief of urology at University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC), said, “It was a big deal. It is a big deal. For many years, it was the best tool you had to help doctors and patients make decisions on prostrate treatment. It gave you the info about the stage of your disease. It is still very helpful today. I still use it.”

As it turns out, Pound studied under Partin at Johns Hopkins and they were good friends. Indeed, Pound was the best man in Partin’s second wedding.

“I met him when I was a student and he was a resident at Johns Hopkins, and then we worked together for three or four years,” Pound said. “Clearly, Alan was really, really intelligent, but I’m not so sure that his drive and determination were not his greatest assets. He would take on anything with sheer determination and nearly always succeed. He was special.”

Dr. Theodore L. Deweese, CEO of Johns Hopkins Medicine, worked closely with Partin for years and issued a statement at the time of his cohort’s death. “Throughout his career as a researcher, clinician and a leader, Alan Partin was consistently at the heart of discovery and innovation in the filed of urology, always keeping a singular focus on improving the outcomes for our patients.”

Football, Partin often said, helped prepare him for his medical career. In a 2016 interview, Partin  talked about the correlation. “You think you’re running to the right, then the defense changes and now you’re going left. Everything can change in a split second…” Partin said. “As a surgeon, you have to do that non-stop. No surgery is the same.

“Everybody has anatomical variations,” he continued. “I remove men’s prostates when they have cancer. There are literally 387 well-defined maneuvers in that operation. Then you get inside a patient and notice an artery that isn’t supposed to be there is running across the area where you are operating. You have to change what you are doing. You have to adapt to that moment. That’s like coming up to the line and expecting to see one defense and they’ve shifted into another other. You still want to move the ball forward, so you have to think quickly, change up what you were doing and run the play.”

There’s one other striking similarity between playing in the offensive line and being a doctor. Put it this way: An offensive lineman is the only position in which the ultimate goal is to protect someone else. 

More than half a century of experience covering the sport has led this writer to this conclusion: Offensive linemen are often not only the smartest, but also most diligent and most selfless players on the field.

Selfless might be the most important of those traits. An offensive lineman toils mostly in obscurity, noticed only when an umpire throws his flag, and the referee announces over the loudspeaker, “Holding, number 75, 10-yard penalty, repeat first down.”

Quarterbacks, running backs and wide receivers get the headlines; offensive linemen – often referred to as the Big Uglies, for goodness sake, simply pave their way. Certainly not all become nearly as successful as Dr. Alan Partin, but let’s take a quick look at some of Partin’s Ole Miss teammates. Hoppy Cole, Partin’s roommate, owns banks. Murray Whitaker became a cardiologist. David Traxler runs a highly successful technology company in North Carolina. Greg Jeffcoat became a college registrar. Bobby Dye runs a successful resource management and financial planning company. Marc Massengale is another successful financial adviser. And then, of course, there’s Partin. That’s all from one team’s offensive line. Amazing.

Cole, who lives in Ellisville, was Partin’s college roommate for three and a half years.

“Big Al is what we called him,” Cole said. “Such a great guy, such a great friend – funny, kind, thoughtful and so, so smart.”

“Big Al and I made T-shirts that said we were part of the 30-30-30 club,” Cole said.

30-30-30?

“Yeah, that meant we played when we were either 30 points ahead, 30 points behind or there were 30 seconds left,” Cole said, chuckling.

That’s an exaggeration. I covered those Ole Miss teams. They played far more more than that.

The record will show that those Ole Miss teams (1979-82) lost more games than they won.

Thankfully, far more meaningful and lasting measures of achievement exist, which don’t always get reported. And in those measures, Dr. Big Al Partin and his partners in the Ole Miss offensive line, proved smashing successes.

The post Alan Partin: From Ole Miss football to a remarkable medical career appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The United States Supreme Court has postponed for the eighth time this year a decision on whether to hear a case challenging the constitutionality of a Mississippi provision enacted in 1890 with the intent of preventing African Americans from voting.

The case is an appeal of a decision last year by the U.S. 5^th Circuit Court of Appeals upholding a provision imposing a lifetime ban on voting for many people convicted of felonies. The lifetime ban was imposed on certain crimes that the framers of the 1890 Mississippi Constitution believed at the time Black people were more likely to commit, the 5^th Circuit conceded in upholding the provision.

It is not known what the eight postponements in deciding whether to hear the case might mean.

“The Supreme Court takes about one of every hundred cases it’s asked to take,” said Rob McDuff, director of the Impact Litigation Project at the Mississippi Center for Justice, and part of the group asking the nation’s high court to hear the case. “But the troubling racial history of this provision makes it a more likely candidate for review than most of the other cases. I assume the repeated postponements mean the justices are considering this one very carefully. We will see.”

The Supreme Court justices are scheduled to meet in conference on Friday to decide if they will take up any of the cases currently pending. Before this latest postponement, the Mississippi case was supposed to be among those cases discussed during the Friday conference.

The Mississippi felony suffrage case had been on the schedule to be taken up at seven past conferences of the Supreme Court this year. In each of those instances, like this week, the justices opted to postpone a decision on the case.

Four of the nine judges must agree to take up a case on appeal in order for the high court to hear it. According to the U.S. Courts webpage, “the Court accepts 100-150 of the more than 7,000 cases that it is asked to review each year.”

The Mississippi Center for Justice and others filed the lawsuit currently pending before the Supreme Court on behalf of Mississippians who lost their voting rights after being convicted of felonies. Mississippi is among a handful of states — less than 10 — where people do not regain their voting rights at some point after completing their sentence.

Those challenging the lawsuit say the 1890 provision is unconstitutional because it was enacted for a discriminatory purpose, thus having a “racial taint.” State Attorney General Lynn Fitch argued the “racial taint” had been removed because of action in more recent times, and a majority of the 5th Circuit agreed.

In 1950 the Legislature passed a proposal approved by voters to remove burglary as one of the disfranchising crimes. And in the 1960s, the Legislature and ultimately the voters approved a provision making murder and rape disenfranchising crimes.

Those changes, the majority found, removed the “racial taint” from the original 1890 language. But McDuff pointed out that those changes were made during an era of intense racial conflict and discrimination in the state. Perhaps, more importantly, the changes did not allow Mississippians to vote on whether to remove lifetime bans from voting on people convicted of other felonies.

Or as Court of Appeals Judge James Graves wrote in his dissent, “Mississippians have simply not been given the chance to right the wrongs of its racist origins. And this court … deprives Mississippians of this opportunity by upholding an unconstitutional law enacted for the purpose of discriminating against Black Mississippians on the basis of race.”

Fitch’s office also argued that state commissions pondered changing the felony suffrage provision in the 1980s and opted not to do so, thus removing the racial taint.

Those crimes placed in the constitution where conviction costs a person the right to vote are bribery, theft, arson, obtaining money or goods under false pretense, perjury, forgery, embezzlement, bigamy and burglary.

Under the original language of the constitution, a person could be convicted of cattle rustling and lose the right to vote, but those convicted of murder or rape would still be able to vote — even while incarcerated.

In Mississippi, most people with felony convictions who lose their voting rights must petition the Legislature to get a bill passed by a two-thirds majority of both chambers to regain voting rights. Normally only a handful (less than five each year and none in 2023) of such bills are successful each session. There is also the option of the governor granting a pardon to restore voting rights, but no governor has granted pardons since Haley Barbour in 2012.

Editor’s note: The Mississippi Center For Justice President and CEO Vangela Wade serves on Mississippi Today’s board of trustees.

The post For the eighth time, U.S. Supreme Court delays hearing state’s felony suffrage case appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Only in Mississippi would you find the last two college baseball national champions playing a regular season game that draws more than 16,000 in attendance for one game and more than 43,000 for a weekend series. The Clevelands discuss the weekend’s Egg Bowl baseball series at Starkville, USM’s weekend sweep of James Madison and more in college baseball. As a bonus, Tyler tells Rick about the football spring games, which Rick was all too happy to miss.

Stream all episodes here.

The post Podcast: Only in Mississippi… appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Double murderer James Williams III is set to walk out of a Mississippi prison May 16.

The state Parole Board has agreed to release Williams, who was convicted in 2005 of shooting to death his father, James Jr., and stepmother, Cindy Lassiter Mangum, after failing to poison them to death. He was 17 at the time of the killings in south Jackson.

“He murdered ‘em, threw ‘em in trash bags, put them in Rubbermaid trash cans and threw ‘em out like the trash,” said Magnum’s son, Zeno. “We are concerned not only for our personal safety, but also for the safety of anyone who may come in contact with this psychopath.”

Parole Board Chairman Jeffrey Belk said he was limited in what he could share, “but I can tell you all facts and information was considered and he received the majority number of votes required to be paroled.” He said the parole received no objection from the family or others.

Williams’ lawyer, Jake Howard, called his client “an exceptional candidate for parole.  He has served over 20 years in jail and prison — more than half his life — for the tragic crimes he committed on December 28, 2002, when he was just 17 years old. Since then, he has worked tirelessly to better himself and atone for his crimes.”

Originally given two life without parole sentences, Williams, now 38, qualified for parole after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2021 that juveniles should be eligible for parole.

Mangum’s sister, Barbara Rankin, said it may have been more than 20 years since the 2002 killings took place, but it seems like yesterday to her and her family.

She said Williams presumed by killing his father and stepmother he would inherit $850,000 in life insurance benefits. Their bodies were found a week later in the woods.

“My husband and I saw the bodies,” Rankin said. “The investigator said it was the most horrific thing he’d ever seen.”

Williams initially denied that he killed them before telling police that his father beat him and pulled a gun on him for missing work days earlier, according to court records. 

Williams then got a gun from his room and shot his father, and when Mangum walked in the room and started screaming, he shot her, too, according to records.

At trial, Williams gave a different version of events. He testified that his father accidentally shot Mangum and that a friend shot his father.

A jury convicted Williams of murdering the couple, and the judge sentenced him to life without parole.

Mangum’s son, Zeno, said each time Williams has become eligible for parole, the family has flooded the Parole Board with letters and has appeared before the board.

Last year, the board assured her and her family that Williams would never be paroled, Rankin said.

On her birthday, April 15, she opened something from the mailbox. It was a letter from the Parole Board.

“We understand this decision may come as a disappointment to you,” Stephanie Walters, the board’s executive secretary, wrote. “However, the board believes that Offender James Williams is able to be a law-abiding citizen and that parole supervision would be more beneficial than further incarceration.”

Rankin said she couldn’t read past the first line before she was overcome with emotion.

Former Parole Board Chairman Steve Pickett said he and the Parole Board had reviewed Williams’ case “numerous times, and he was previously denied for parole multiple times.” 

Pickett worked at the time in the Hinds County Sheriff’s Department. “Because it happened in Hinds County,” he said, “I was familiar with the case.”

Asked why parole was denied, Pickett replied that Williams gave varied stories to the board “about the circumstances that led to the deaths of his father and stepmother.” There was also “community opposition all along,” he said.

Belk told Mississippi Today that Mangum’s family “admittedly chose not to reply or schedule a meeting with the Parole Board.”

Zeno Mangum responded that he received no notification.

Belk disputed that claim, saying that the board and Victim Services of the Mississippi Department of Corrections “made numerous attempts months ahead of the hearing to notify all registered victims. They admittedly chose not to reply or schedule a meeting with the Parole Board.”

He added that Williams’ parole also received no opposition from the sheriff, district attorney or judge.

Howard pointed to Williams’ achievements as proof of change: a GED and a bachelor’s degree in Christian ministry as well as completing numerous other educational and rehabilitation programs.

“James has devoted himself to serving God and his fellow inmates,” Howard said. “He has been affiliated with MDOC’s faith-based programs since 2008, began tutoring students in 2012, became a field minister in 2018, and served as the Minister of Music for Parchman’s Koinonia Church from 2020 until 2022.”

At that time, Williams voluntarily agreed to transfer to the Marshall County Correctional Facility as a missionary and field minister, served as pastor for the Living Waters Baptist Church, taughta “Fundamentals of the Faith” class and provided counseling services to other inmates, Howard said.

Williams has received glowing letters of support for his release from chaplains, the seminary director and the Parole Board’s own psychologist as well as dozens of others, Howard said. Upon release, Williams hopes to serve as a chaplain at the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility.

If Williams is truly changed, Rankin asked, why hasn’t he reached out to the family?

“He has never shown an ounce of remorse,” she said. “In 20 years, he has never reached out to Zeno and said he’s sorry, because he’s not sorry.”

Howard responded that Williams “is deeply remorseful, makes no excuses for his crimes, and understands why members of his father’s and stepmother’s families oppose his release on parole.”

He pointed to Williams’ letter to the Parole Board, where he wrote, “I will have to live the rest of my days knowing that I took the lives of two people I loved. I could give reasons for my state of mind at the time, but I know that nothing can ever justify taking lives. I also know that there is nothing I can do to lessen the pain of those I deprived of loved ones. I sincerely wish I could change the past, but I cannot.”

Howard said Williams is “truly a model of what our correctional system hopes to accomplish. I’m honored to call him a friend, as well as a client. If James Williams hasn’t earned the privilege of supervised release on parole, then I’m not sure who could.”

Rankin said it would be one thing to parole someone for a drug offense or a nonviolent offense, “but when you have somebody who threw away bodies, and we can’t even see the bodies at the funeral because it’s so bad. No family should have to go through that.”

She has never missed a single parole hearing, but one of her sisters had to recently enter the intensive care unit, she said. “I don’t know if she’s going to die up in that hospital.”

She hopes the Parole Board will rescind Williams’ parole, just as the board has done before.

She choked back the tears. “I’m devastated to say the least, because it’s like living the thing over and over,” she said. “I feel like I’ve failed Zeno.”

The post Convicted killer of two set for May release appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Read the story behind the cartoon here.

The post Marshall Ramsey: ‘Possum PAC appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Staff members of the American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi and other Southern states are unionizing. 

Workers of the nonprofit in Mississippi, Louisiana and Kentucky joined under the name ACLU Southern Affiliates United and are requesting joint union recognition from their employer, according to a Tuesday news release. 

The staff are looking to bargain jointly and urge leadership from each affiliate to commit to setting new standards for the Southern affiliates by negotiating a common agreement across the organizations. 

McKenna Raney-Gray, staff attorney for the LGBTQ Justice Project at the ACLU of Mississippi, said she wants to unionize to create more stability. 

“I am not interested in doing this because this is the worst job I’ve ever had. I am interested in doing this because it’s the best job I’ve ever had,” she said in an interview before the announcement. “If people have a say in what they’re working conditions are, they’re more likely to put down roots and stay.”

The workers organized with the Washington-Baltimore News Guild, which represents news, information and nonprofit employees, and is a local chapter of The NewsGuild. 

The announcement comes a week after staff from the ACLU of D.C. requested union recognition with the news guild. 

Other Southern affiliates including Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia have formed unions, and in recent years, ACLU national staff and other affiliates have organized, according to the news release. 

Jaclyn Maffetore, member of the ACLU-NC union, said organizing has helped establish policies that make work sustainable and align with their values, which helps support staff 

as they work to protect and advance civil rights. 

Yvonne Slosarski, a member of ACLU-D.C. Staff United, said they are excited to join the growing labor movement with the Southern affiliate staff. 

“Unions are a great way for ACLU staff and management to embody our commitment to civil rights and liberties by ensuring that the workers who are most impacted by the organizations’ policies can shape our working conditions,” she said in a statement. 

Reporter Molly Minta contributed reporting.

The post ACLU workers are unionizing appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Goldsmith, a graduate student at the University of Southern Mississippi, had recently been critical in the student newspaper about a growing controversy on campus: One of the finalists for provost — an administrator and finance professor named Lance Nail — had a checkered past at a former employer, Texas Tech University. A Title IX investigation found Nail reportedly mishandled a report of sexual misconduct and “failed in his responsibility as the Dean of the College.” 

The news touched a nerve on campus where students had called on the university to adopt a zero-tolerance policy toward sexual assault a year and a half ago. More than 750 students, faculty and alumni signed a petition protesting Nail’s possible hiring. Goldsmith, whose pronouns are they/them, just so happened to be the only student quoted in the student newspaper. Still, they knew they were speaking for many when they said that hiring Nail “would communicate that all the university’s claims about diversity, inclusion, and equity were meaningless platitudes.” And, they began helping to plan a protest. 

Days later, the email came through. 

“You do not know me but my name is Chuck Scianna and I am the guy that Scianna Hall is named after,” it began. 

Goldsmith knew of Scianna. The 93,000-square-foot building that bears his name in gleaming gold font faces U.S. Highway 49, a major thoroughfare in Hattiesburg. Scianna, an alumnus and co-founder of a major distributor of oil pipeline products, also happens to be one of USM’s largest individual donors along with his wife, Rita, having given more than $10 million. He is also “lifelong friends” with USM’s new president, Joe Paul. 

But Goldsmith didn’t know why Scianna cared about their protest. 

In the email obtained by Mississippi Today, Scianna wrote that he knew Goldsmith was planning to protest but asked them to consider that USM had hired a search firm, created a search committee and instituted a “process” to vet the candidates for provost and still, Nail had become a finalist. 

“If you are going to protest the interviewing of Dr. Nail, should you not protest Dr. Paul and the search committee, the search firm and everyone else involved in the selection process,” Scianna wrote. “Should we just turn the university over to you and your group to hire the provost and run the university?” 

In his 48 years of business, Scianna wrote, he had been accused of “many things that were not even close to the truth.” He suggested there was more behind the news articles about Nail, who he noted he had worked with “in the past.” 

“I am not advocating that you should not have a voice, but it should be peaceful and armed with the facts, not just a google search,” he wrote, adding “I believe that if you have a conversation with him before you rely only on a google search you might have a different opinion.” 

“You are completing a PhD,” he concluded. “Don’t you have to have an open mind to get the best out of an education? Does your program allow you to get all of your research facts from one source? I am only asking that you go into this with an unbiased opinion of Dr. Nail and let the process pick the best candidate.” 

USM did not return a comment by press time, but Scianna’s email offers a look at how university donors in Mississippi, who have extraordinary access to powerful administrators, view the role of community feedback in the largely confidential search-and-selection process of key university hires. It also speaks to whose voices get results from university administration.

“I do think it’s troublesome to discount the students who are saying they have feelings about this,” Goldsmith said. “This is their campus. Even if we’re going to say ‘majority rules,’ nobody has made a petition to say that we should hire Lance Nail, so it’s not like there’s this loud opposite voice.” 

Goldsmith didn’t reply to Scianna and forwarded the email to their dissertation advisor — their immediate superior — who then sent it up the chain. Scianna’s email soon started circulating among faculty before it ultimately made its way to Chris Winstead, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. 

Troubled by the message, Winstead texted and called Paul about it, according to another email shared with Mississippi Today. 

“I do think that there is a power dynamic at play,” Goldsmith said. “Perhaps it would not have been unusual if I had had prior overlap (with Scianna) or conversations or a personal connection or even perhaps if I was in the College of Business.” 

Scianna told Mississippi Today that he was just trying to offer Goldsmith some advice — not telling them not to protest. “Read the email. It’s very clear. There’s no threat,” he said.

“The higher up you get in any organization, you’re more susceptible to people finding fault with what you do, finding fault with your decisions and then the narrative gets misconstrued — a lot of times by the media, to be honest, because they don’t go out and get all the facts or look at both sides,” he said.

The controversy started earlier this month after USM announced that Nail was one of four finalists for provost, the university’s chief academic officer. Students at USM promptly dug into his history — and had concerns about what they found. 

Nail became dean of Texas Tech’s business college in 2012, after spending four years at USM’s College of Business. In 2015, Nail let go of a business school professor, reportedly a friend of his, who had been accused of sexual misconduct, according to KCBD. But the Title IX investigation, which Nail said had “inaccuracies,” found that he still invited the former business professor to a university trip to Chile, where the professor harassed a female student. 

Later that year, Nail resigned from Texas Tech after the university determined he had broken its grading policies. 

Nail, who was visiting the USM Gulf Park campus on Monday, didn’t return an inquiry from Mississippi Today before press time. In a comment to SM2, the student newspaper, Nail wrote that “the many Southern Miss colleagues I worked with” could attest to his character, particularly his former students and “those who served on the Business Advisory Council who supported my mission to graduate ethical business leaders from Southern Miss.” 

Scianna told Mississippi Today that he is one of those colleagues who served on USM’s Business Advisory Council, which advises the dean of the business college. He said he worked closely with Nail, reviewing the college’s curriculum to see how it “would be beneficial to my company” and recruiting students for internships or non-profit projects that he declined to share more details about. 

But perhaps the biggest project Scianna and Nail collaborated on was the construction of Scianna Hall, a more than $30-million project. At the time, Scianna’s $6-million donation was the USM Foundation’s largest one-time gift from an alumnus. 

As dean, Nail had a key hand in stewarding the campaign to build the business school. He lists the project as one of his significant professional accomplishments on the first page of his resume. 

“He didn’t just walk in one day and say ‘Will you write a check?’” Scianna said. 

After Nail left USM, Scianna said the two stayed “acquaintances.” He said he didn’t recommend Nail for the position or express a preference for Nail to anyone on the search committee. 

“I’m not impartial,” he said. “I want the very best candidate, but I want the process to work out. My email to Emily has nothing to do with Lance Nail. It’s with the way that it’s being approached. … Don’t make your decision based on Google searches.” 

Scianna has served on search committees for key hirings at USM before, most recently last year when he was on the committee convened by the Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees to select the university’s next president. When it comes to the hiring process, he said that unlike the majority of students, faculty and alumni, the search committee has access “to all the facts.” 

“Shouldn’t their decision weigh more?” he said. “I mean, we don’t like chocolate ice cream. Let’s have a protest. Should we ban chocolate ice cream? Should we have the facts? And that’s all I’m saying.” 

He said he wasn’t sure what a protest — no matter how large — could accomplish when the university ultimately makes a hiring decision based on the help of the search committee and the headhunting firm. 

“What if a thousand people got together and said your newspaper was dishonest, didn’t report the truth?” he said. “Should there be an investigation? You know, I don’t know. That’s, that’s, I’m just not smart enough, I guess, to figure that out.”

USM’s provost 13-person search committee does include two student voices — the SGA presidents of the Hattiesburg and Gulf Park campuses — but Goldsmith said the process should be more transparent so that all students can be heard. They suggested the university share the steps that were taken to vet Nail before he became a finalist. 

And while they don’t plan to ask Nail any questions when he visits campus Tuesday, they will attend the protest they helped organize in USM’s designated free speech zone in the middle of campus.

“I do think generally that undergrad and graduate students should be made more aware of administrative hiring,” they said. “There isn’t always a ton of transparency in higher education. Sometimes students don’t even know to look at this stuff … but I have learned through this process that many undergrad students do care. They’re not thoughtless, they’re not uninvolved. They are thinking, they are thoughtful, they are involved.” 

Scianna, who is back in his office in Waller, Texas, after visiting Hattiesburg this weekend, doesn’t plan to see the protest for himself because his philanthropy shows his dedication to USM.

“I don’t have to be part of this,” he said. “They can do what they want to do. I mean, talk, beat your drum, do whatever. But let your actions speak for yourself.” 

The post A USM student spoke out about a candidate for provost. Then they got an email from one of the school’s biggest donors. appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Lieutenant governor candidate Chris McDaniel has reported returning legally questionable large donations from a Virginia dark-money nonprofit, and shutting down his PAC through which the donations flowed to his campaign.

McDaniel’s Hold the Line PAC has reported it returned $460,000 to the American Exceptionalism Institute nonprofit corporation and closed out the PAC. This came days after McDaniel’s campaign account returned $465,000 to Hold the Line.

McDaniel’s Hold the Line PAC campaign finance public filings and subsequent explanations and amended reports have been confounding. Hold the Line initially failed to list the source of hundreds of thousands of dollars and its reports have had amounts and dates that don’t add up. For instance, Hold the Line reported having raised hundreds of thousands of dollars the year before McDaniel legally registered it with the secretary of state’s office, and failed to list the source of that money as required by law.

McDaniel’s PAC was the largest contributor to his lieutenant governor campaign, donating $465,000 of the $710,000 his campaign reported raising last year.

Oddly, in some of its latest filings, Hold the Line reported it returned $460,000 to American Exceptionalism Institute on the same day it received the second of two donations of $237,500 from AEI, in February. But McDaniel’s campaign had reported it received a total of $465,000 from Hold the Line in January, before the PAC would have had that much money — primarily coming from AEI — per its own reports.

When questioned about this, McDaniel’s camp declined comment, but filed an amended report changing the date of the second donation to mid-January. Even with multiple amended reports, it appears McDaniel’s PAC received $475,000 from AEI but returned only $460,000 to the nonprofit corporation.

READ MORE: Hosemann accuses McDaniel of ‘clear violations’ of law with campaign money

Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann’s campaign has a complaint pending with the attorney general’s office that includes claims that McDaniel’s PAC and campaign violated Mississippi law, which prohibits a corporation from donating more than $1,000 in a single year to a candidate or PAC and requires listing of sources of donations.

Hosemann campaign adviser Casey Phillips in a statement said: “Chris McDaniel’s campaign is based on a lie, staffed with Democrat operatives, and funded with illegal money. Election integrity includes campaign finance transparency. McDaniel would know that if he bothered to show up to vote when the Senate passed the election security package. Instead, he is blatantly disregarding Mississippi’s election laws.”

A spokeswoman for Attorney General Lynn Fitch’s office, asked for comment on Hosemann’s campaign finance complaint, said only, “We are reviewing it.”

A Mississippi Today article in February pointed out McDaniel’s financial reports for his campaign and PAC left voters in the dark about the source of hundreds of thousands of dollars and raised questions about whether donations violated state law.

McDaniel, a four-term state senator, has vocally called for stricter campaign finance laws and more transparency in the sources of campaign money. But when questioned about his campaign and PAC finances, he said he knows scant details about them, has deferred questions to staffers and chalked up any discrepancies to “clerical errors.”

McDaniel initially deferred questions to the Rev. Dan Carr, a pastor and political consultant from Gulfport listed as treasurer of the Hold the Line PAC. Carr, mostly by text messages, gave a series of confusing and conflicting statements that never explained what the clerical errors were, or the source of the large amount of unaccounted for donations to Hold the Line.

McDaniel’s campaign last month said that U.S. Supreme Court rulings on federal campaign finance issues nullify Mississippi’s law banning corporate contributions over $1,000. But a spokeswoman said McDaniel’s campaign and PAC would be returning American Exceptionalism Institute donations “to avoid a protracted legal fight with the establishment.”

Hosemann filed his campaign finance complaint against McDaniel last month with the secretary of state’s office. Records show the secretary of state’s office, citing its lack of investigative and prosecutorial authority, forwarded the complaint to the criminal investigations division of the attorney general’s office.

An intentional violation of the campaign finance disclosure law is a misdemeanor with a
maximum penalty of $3,000, six months imprisonment, or both. But in Mississippi, campaign finance laws are seldom enforced, and alleged violations seldom investigated or prosecuted.

Hosemann, former secretary of state, is seeking a second and final term as lieutenant governor overseeing the state Senate. McDaniel is a four-term state senator who has run twice unsuccessfully for U.S. Senate.

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The life and work of civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer is being commemorated with a historical marker to be unveiled Saturday in Kilmichael, her husband’s hometown.

The ceremony will be at 11 a.m. at 311 N. Depot Ave. in the heart of downtown Kilmichael in Montgomery County. Leslie Burl McLemore, who worked alongside Hamer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, is the guest speaker. 

Fannie Lou Hamer often said she was born in Montgomery County, but testified in federal court in 1963 that she was born in Tomnolen in Webster County, which borders Montgomery County.

Montgomery County native Chris Snell and her husband, Wiley, a retired high school administrator from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, raised the funding and worked with Jim Woodrick and the Mississippi Department of Archives and History for two years in their effort to preserve the Hamers’ legacy with the marker. 

“This marker is a reminder that we are in this space because Fannie Lou Hamer fought and gave her life so that future generations can continue their thrust for excellence by lifting up their voices as she did,” Chris Snell said in a news release announcing the unveiling.

Additional funding for the event was provided by the Kappas of Rust College and the Zetas as part of their outreach activities. 

Hamer’s last surviving child, Jacqueline Hamer Flakes had been asked to be the guest speaker, but declined due to failing health. She died on March 27. 

“We don’t concentrate enough on how brilliant Fannie Lou Hamer was and her ability to adapt to her new environment — and her new environment was in the civil rights movement,” McLemore said in the news release. 

She went from from being a timekeeper on the Marlow Plantation in Sunflower County to becoming SNCC’s chief fundraiser, noted McLemore, professor emeritus of political science at Jackson State University, was the founding director of the Fannie Lou Hamer National Institute on Citizenship and Democracy at JSU in 1997. 

This will be the second marker in Montgomery County that acknowledges Hamer’s efforts for racial equity. The first was unveiled on June 9, 2022, in Winona at the site of the former jail where Hamer and several other activists were beaten in June 1963. A third marker, as part of the Mississippi Civil Rights Trail, will be unveiled on June 9, 2023, at the site of Staley’s Café/Trailways Depot where Hamer and the others were arrested prior to the jailhouse beating. 

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