The deadline for voter registration for the Aug. 8 Mississippi statewide primary is Monday.
You can register in person at your county circuit clerk’s office or municipal clerk’s office by 5 p.m. on Monday, July 10. Mail-in registration applications can be found here, and must be postmarked no later than July 10 for voting in the primary.
In-person and mail-in absentee ballots are available at county circuit clerks’ offices. To verify eligibility for voting absentee, check this secretary of state’s guide or contact your local circuit clerk’s office.
For absentee voting, your county circuit clerk will confirm you are a registered voter in that county by checking the Statewide Elections Management System, confirming your address, and checking your photo ID. For more information on Mississippi’s voter ID requirements, check here. You will also be asked your reason for absentee voting.
For those unable to go to their circuit clerk’s office during weekdays, Saturday in-person absentee voting dates are July 29 and Aug. 5, from 8 a.m. to noon.
Protestors gathered outside the offices of Attorney General Lynn Fitch and Rankin County Sheriff Brian Bailey on Wednesday, calling for the indictment of six Rankin County deputies accused of torturing two Black men and shooting one of them in the mouth while he was restrained.
“We want them charged. We want them sentenced.” said John C. Barnett, one of the organizers of the protest. “We’re not asking. We’re demanding.”
Fitch and Bailey would not meet with the protestors. Organizers said they reached out by phone, letter and email for the past week before attempting to meet with the officials in person and have received no response.
Neither office responded to requests for comment by Mississippi Today.
“Their silence is their answer,” said Sherrell Potts, an organizer with the New Black Panther Party. “We won’t be silent.”
The Department of Justice and the FBI opened an investigation into the incident in January. Last week, Bailey announced that the deputies involved in the alleged torture had been fired.
“This isn’t a decision that Sheriff Bailey made,” Barnett said. “He’s only doing what the Department of Justice put pressure on him to do.”
On Jan. 24, Michael Corey Jenkins, 32, and Eddie Terrell Parker, 35, were at Parker’s home in Braxton when Rankin County deputies burst inside to conduct a narcotics raid, allegedly without a warrant.
The deputies restrained the two men while shouting racial slurs at them, according to a federal lawsuit filed last month. While they were handcuffed, the men were beaten and tased. Court documents also state the men were waterboarded – an illegal torture technique in which a person is restrained, a wet rag is placed over their mouth, and liquid is poured over it to simulate drowning.
The deputies proceeded to sexually assault the two men using a sex toy, according to the lawsuit, before one of the deputies, Hunter Elward, placed a gun in Jenkins’ mouth and fired, breaking his jaw and lacerating his tongue. Jenkins would have died, if he had not received life-saving surgeries, according to his lawyer, Trent Walker.
The day after the incident, Elward signed an affidavit claiming Jenkins had pointed a gun at him, which the federal lawsuit against the deputies called “false.” No firearm was recovered.
Protestors Monica Lee Cameron, John C. Barrettt, and Sherrell Potts walk out of Attorney General Lynn Fitch’s office Wednesday, July 5, 2023, after Fitch wouldn’t meet with them. Credit: Nate Rosenfield/MCIR at Mississippi Today
“If you are going to shoot him because you claim he had a weapon, then the entry wound would’ve been from outside his mouth,” Walker said.
The deputies did not turn on their body cameras during the incident, according to sheriff’s department’s records. Court documents claim a surveillance camera within the home was taken by the deputies during the arrest and never returned.
Elward’s affidavit stated two bags of methamphetamine were found during the raid. Jenkins was charged with assaulting an officer and drug possession. Parker was charged with possession of drug paraphernalia and disorderly conduct.
“They came there to torture these young men, and that’s what they did,” said Walker, who has asserted the incident was a hate crime.
Walker said one of his clients was living in the home of a White woman with whom he was not romantically involved. “These officers had a problem with that,” Walker said.
“No one is being held accountable,” said Priscilla Sterling, a cousin of Emmitt Till, who was present at Wednesday’s protest.
The Rankin County Sheriff’s Department has faced several investigations into police misconduct, some involving the deputies present at Jenkins’ shooting.
In 2021, a man named Damien Cameron died in police custody after being tasered and restrained by Elward and another deputy.
Cameron’s mother, Monica Lee Cameron also spoke outside the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department, demanding justice for her son. “Sheriff Bailey needs to go,” Cameron said.
In 2021, a man named Cory Jackson died in custody at the Rankin County Jail. Jackson’s family was attempting to take him to a hospital because he was suffering from a psychotic episode when Jackson fled. He was arrested by a Rankin County deputy and suffered injuries while in custody. He died that same night.
In 2019, Pierre Woods was shot and killed by Rankin County deputies including Deputies Christian Dedmond and Hunter Elward.
“This has been happening for many years,” said Charles Muhammad, a community organizer from Jackson who told the crowd at Wednesday’s protest that his son, Andre Lemond Jones, died after he was taken into custody by the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department in 1992. Muhammad said that 19 hours after his son’s arrest, Jones was found dead — strangled with his own shoelaces in Simpson County Jail. Muhammad believes his son was killed because of his family’s involvement in civil rights activism.
“I wanted to add my voice,” Muhammad said, “and let the world know that this has been happening way before this incident.”
John C. Barnett said that if the organizers of Wednesday’s protest did not hear from Attorney General Fitchor Sheriff Bailey by the end of the week, they would return with greater numbers.
“We will be back,” Barnett said.
Nate Rosenfield is an Immersion Fellow with the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, part of Mississippi Today.
JACINTO — Candidates for the state’s highest offices were stumping under the historic Jacinto courthouse at the community’s annual Independence Day festival, but certain people in the area won’t have a say this year in which of those candidates represent them.
Mississippi is one of fewer than 10 states that places a lifetime voting ban on people convicted of certain felonies, resulting in more than 10% of the state’s voting-age population being barred from the ballot box, according to one study.
Numerous people from nearby communities in northeast Mississippi have petitioned state politicians in recent years to return their voting rights. But because of the state’s convoluted system for getting those rights restored, their efforts have been unsuccessful.
The U.S. Supreme Court last week declined to hear a case challenging Mississippi’s process for stripping voting rights from people with certain felony convictions, leaving the future of this system in the hands of state officials.
“I’m open to doing something,” Republican Rep. Nick Bain of Corinth told Mississippi Today. “But we frankly can’t do anything until we get the governor on board,” Bain said.
Once a person has had their suffrage taken away from them, it’s incredibly difficult to get it back.
To do so, a disenfranchised person must get a lawmaker to sponsor a suffrage restoration bill on their behalf and get two-thirds of both the House and Senate to approve of the legislation. The Legislature did not approve of any suffrage restoration bill this year.
A governor can also pardon a convicted felon, but both Reeves and his predecessor, former Republican Gov. Phil Bryant, have declined to issue any pardons.
Reeves’ campaign did not make the governor available for questions from the press on Tuesday, but he has previously told reporters that he is hesitant to change the current disenfranchisement process.
Brandon Presley, Reeves’ Democratic opponent, said he wants to establish a criminal justice task force to examine felony suffrage and other measures but stopped short of calling for an overhaul of the system.
“I think there is a common sense approach to dealing with this issue, and it’s clear that when you go an entire year, and no one’s right to vote has been restored, that we’ve got a system that needs to be looked at,” Presley said.
While candidates debate whether the system should be revamped, the current process has real implications for a significant number of Mississippians.
More than 235,000 people in the state cannot vote because of a felony conviction, according to an estimate by the Sentencing Project, a criminal justice non-profit organization. Black people make up more than half of that disenfranchised population.
The lieutenant governor, who leads the Senate, has a direct impact on legislative policy. Incumbent Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann and his challenger, state Sen. Chris McDaniel of Jones County, are both competing in the Republican primary this year.
Both Hosemann and McDaniel told reporters on Tuesday they want to maintain the status quo and leave the system intact for the foreseeable future.
“I don’t approve of violent criminals,” Hosemann said. “If you’re a murderer and rapist, I’m not giving you your right to vote back. You’ve cut yourself out of society.”
The current structure stems from the framers of Mississippi’s 1890 Constitution crafting the law to prevent Black citizens from voting by targeting crimes they were believed to commit.
The state constitution strips voting rights from people convicted of 10 felonies, including forgery and bigamy. The Mississippi Attorney General issued an opinion in 2009 that expanded the list to 22 crimes, including timber larceny, carjacking and felony-level bad check writing.
Bain leads the House committee with jurisdiction over the state’s criminal code, and he has repeatedly said the Magnolia State should have a more consistent, fairer way to decide who has their voting rights restored instead of having politicians decide the outcome.
Bain last year led the efforts to clarify that those who have had a disenfranchising crime purged, or expunged, from their criminal record can obtain their voting rights back.
But Reeves vetoed that legislation because he believed it “created a pathway to restoring rights” that went beyond what the state constitution allowed.
Yazoo City native Rod Walker, a Mississippi State-educated engineer, switched careers and became an award-winning sports writer, first at the Clarion Ledger and now at the New Orleans Times Picayune. His bank account’s loss was the sports world’s gain. Rod joins us to talk New Orleans and Mississippi sports.
This illustration of the emancipation of Black Americans ran in Harper’s Weekly.
A day after those enslaved were freed in the state of New York, 4,000 Black Americans marched along Broadway through downtown streets with a grand marshal carrying a drawn sword. They arrived at the African Zion Church, where abolitionist leader William Hamilton said, “This day we stand redeemed from a bitter thralldom.”
Celebrations took place as far away as Boston and Philadelphia. In New York’s capital, Nathaniel Paul, pastor of the First African Baptist Society, declared, “We look forward … (to) when this foul stain will be entirely erased, and this, the worst of evils, will be forever done away … God who has made of one blood all nations of men, and who is said to be no respecter of persons, has so decreed; I therefore have no hesitation in declaring this sacred place, that not only throughout the United States of America, but throughout every part of the habitable world where slavery exists, it will be abolished.”
Among those freed by this act? Sojourner Truth, who was born into slavery and had escaped to freedom just a year earlier. The Fifth of July is still recognized and celebrated in New York City.
Brian Snitker, a 67-year-old grandfather who managed the 2005 Mississippi Braves, has the Atlanta Braves in first place by nine games. (AP Photo/John Bazemore)
As this is written, the Atlanta Braves, who have several Mississippi markings, have the best record in baseball. The Braves are insanely hot at present, having won 23 of their last 26 games to improve their record to 56-27.
How hot are they? The Braves just completed a three-game sweep of the second place Miami Marlins. And check this out: The Braves are 9-1 against the Marlins, who are a remarkable 47-28 against every other team they have played.
Rick Cleveland
How hot are the Braves? Eight Braves will play for the National League All-Stars, including the entire infield. You could have made a good case for other Braves, as well.
How hot are they? In Saturday’s game at Atlanta, Marlins starter Eury Perez entered as baseball’s best pitcher having not given up more than five hits in any of his previous nine starts and having given up only one run in his last 33 innings. You read right: one run in 33 innings. Perez had not given up more than four runs in any appearance.
So former Mississippi Brave Ronald Acuna homered to lead off the bottom of the first inning, and then former Mississippi Brave Ozzie Albies homered behind him. Eury had allowed one run in 33 innings. He gave up two in two batters. Before the first inning carnage was complete, the Braves would score six runs. Against a pitcher who had not allowed more than five hits in any game, the first six Braves hit safely. Against a pitcher who had not allowed more than four runs in any game, the Braves scored six before Eury could record his second out. In fact, he never did get that second out.
And, dear reader, the Braves are doing this game after game after game. Now this is baseball, and the Braves will undoubtedly cool down. And some other team will get hot — watch out for the Phillies — and perhaps make a race of it in September. We will see.
But the Braves are playing the best baseball these eyes have seen in a long, long while. The scary part is they have achieved most of this with two of their best starters — left-handed ace Max Fried and right-hander Kyle Wright (21-5 last season) — sidelined with injuries. They will be back. Fried and Wright are former Mississippi Braves, too. And so is Michael Soroka, a Major League All-Star in 2019, who finally appears to be returning to that form after career-threatening injuries. Soroka, you may recall, won 11 games for the 2017 M-Braves with a 2.75 earned run average.
Now seems a good time to look at all the former M-Braves who are producing, big-time, in Atlanta. Acuna, the best player in baseball not named Shohei Ohtani, leads the list and is surely the mid-season leader for National League MVP honors. Acuna hit .327 with nine home runs and 19 stolen bases in 56 games for the 2017 Mississippi Braves.
Albies, the second baseman, hit .321 with four home runs, seven triples, and 22 doubles for the 2016 M-Braves. Southaven native Austin Riley, the former DeSoto Central wunderkind, hit .333 with an eye-popping slugging percentage of .677 in just 27 games for the 2018 M-Braves.
As has been written in this space before, the last piece of Atlanta’s everyday lineup puzzle is none other than 22-year-old Michael Harris II, who was playing for the M-Braves just last spring when he hit .305 with five home runs, 16 doubles, two triples and 11 stolen bases during the first 43 games of the Southern League season. He skipped Class AAA altogether and was called up to Atlanta on May 28. Since then, Harris has hit .286 with 26 home runs and 30 stolen bases and has turned untold doubles, triples and home runs into outs as one of the best centerfielders in the sport.
Another measure of just how good these Atlanta Braves are: Harris bats ninth in the order. He would bat first, second or third for most Major League teams.
And then there’s Spencer Strider, the fire-balling 24-year-old with a 10-2 record and 155 strikeouts in just 98 innings. Hard to believe Strider was 3-7 with a 4.71 ERA, pitching for the M-Braves in Pearl just two years ago. It is true.
We would be remiss not to mention perhaps the most important of all the former Mississippi Braves contributors to the current Atlanta Braves success. He would be skipper Brian Snitker, a Braves lifer who managed the 2005 Mississippi Braves. “Snit,” as his players and friends call him, is the glue that holds it all together.
Watch Snitker, a 67-year-old grandfather, and you cannot tell whether the Braves are down 12-0 or up 5-4. He never changes expression whether the Braves are two games behind in the standings or nine games ahead, as they currently are. Snit is a throwback to Hall of Famer Bobby Cox, whom Snitker constantly praised back in 2005 when he spent the season in Pearl.
Said Mississippi Sports Hall of Famer Jay Powell, who did a rehab stint under Snit back in the summer of 2005: “There are certain managers or coaches you just want to do the best you can for them. There’s a respect there, a trust. I was fortunate to play for some Hall of Fame managers including Bobby Cox and Jim Leyland, and I put Snit right in there with them. He just gets it. He gets baseball.”
To which Snitker would probably tell you: “It’s pretty easy to manage with guys like Acuna, Albies, Riley, Harris, Strider and all the rest.”
There’s some truth to that, too. But it is an amazing blend of talent, management (in the front office and on the field, and esprit de corps the Braves display night after night. And we watched a lot of it in Mississippi before it became, at least for now, the best in baseball.
East St. Louis Race Riot headline, St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Friday, July 6, 1917 Credit: https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/east-st-louis-race-riot-1917/
One of the worst racial massacres in U.S. history ended after three days in East St. Louis, Illinois. After Black workers were given jobs in a factory that received government contracts, White workers began stabbing, beating and killing them. As many as a 100 or more were killed, hundreds more were injured, and 6,000 were driven from their homes.
“My father … witnessed … horrible things: people’s houses being set ablaze, . . . people being shot when they tried to flee, some trying to swim to the other side of the Mississippi while being shot at by white mobs with rifles, others being dragged out of street cars and beaten and hanged from street lamps,” said Dhati Kennedy, whose father was one of the survivors.
The Pittsburgh Dispatch wrote, “The picture of wantonness by the savagery of mobs at East St. Louis will be a humiliating display for the Fourth of July sun to look down upon as it rises on our national liberty jubilation with the country just entered upon a war to make democracy safe.”
Greta Kemp Martin, a Democrat challenging incumbent Attorney General Lynn Fitch this year, joins Mississippi Today’s Adam Ganucheau to discuss her campaign and the ideas she has for the job.
