OurTupelo

The Mississippi Legislature is set to vote on its own plan to spend opioid settlement money, counting on power it does not yet have to send nearly $60 million across the state. 

House and Senate negotiators released the plan late Friday, and both chambers face a Monday deadline to approve final versions of budget bills. The opioid settlement spending plan only loosely resembles the advice of a state council tasked with overseeing most of the funds, which was submitted last winter.

Legislators are moving toward giving themselves the power to spend the settlement money without following the council’s advice. The legislative line item amounts rarely match the council’s recommendations, and would even send money to some organizations the council never vetted. 

Lawmakers made updates to seven different appropriations bills —  the Attorney General’s Office, the State Department of Health, the Department of Mental Health, the University of Mississippi Medical Center, the Institutions of Higher Learning, the Administrative Office of Courts and the Department of Employment Security. Each instructs the agencies to use and distribute the lawsuit money for specific purposes when the next fiscal year starts July 1.

The appropriations will not be final until the House and Senate approve each agency’s budget and Republican Gov. Tate Reeves signs the budgets into law. 

Mississippi Today turned the list of budget appropriations it identified from Friday’s update into a database, comparing them to the advisory council’s recommendations. The newsroom put in public records requests for applications of every organization that applied for opioid settlement funds last fall, and it linked application narratives it has for the listed line items. 

Like every state, Mississippi started receiving tens of millions of dollars in the early 2020s from companies accused of contributing to over a million American overdose deaths. Unlike every state, Mississippi had spent less than $1 million as of last fall on addressing that crisis — the purpose of these funds. 

The Legislature controls 85% of Missisisppi’s opioid settlement funds, expected to total about $421 million by 2040. For three and a half years after the state received its first payment, as others across the country sent their money to address the addiction crisis, the funds Mississippi lawmakers controlled have only been used to pay attorneys fees. 

Last spring, the Legislature created a law to spend most of the money it controls and set up an advisory council to solicit, review and recommend projects to address opioid addiction. Then, lawmakers were supposed to review those recommendations. 

Attorney General Lynn Fitch, who has managed the funds since 2021, led the advisory council and carried out that plan. She sent the council’s list of recommendations to legislative leaders in December, highlighting that the state government had just over $100 million of opioid settlement funds it could use.

While Fitch and state lawmakers set aside some opioid settlement funds for the Legislature to use on any non-addiction purpose it sees fit, last year’s law instructed that lawmakers spend most of the money with the advice of the advisory council — only permitting legislators to accept or reject its recommendations. 

But Friday’s updated budget bills show lawmakers want more decision-making power. The plans released frequently modify the advisory council’s recommended amount and send money to fund efforts the council hasn’t considered. While current laws don’t permit that, lawmakers are close to passing a bill that would create power to modify how much funding the council recommends. 

Sen. Nicole Boyd, a Republican from Oxford and lead sponsor of the reform bill, told Mississippi Today on Thursday it was her hope to have that law enacted before the Legislature finalizes this year’s opioid settlement distributions. It still needs to pass the House and be signed by the governor before it would become law.

The bill’s current version still instructs the Legislature to spend all addiction money on projects reviewed by the advisory council. However, in the Department of Employment Security’s budget bill, lawmakers instruct the agency to use $1 million of abatement settlement funds to pilot an addiction recovery-to-work program, even though the agency never submitted an application to the council. Legislators are also proposing to fund other projects that never applied for money.

It’s unclear how that would be permitted under Mississippi’s current or proposed laws. Boyd did not answer multiple calls from Mississippi Today inquiring about that on Saturday. 

Lawmakers also propose sending $4.5 million of addiction settlement funds to community mental health centers, which had expressed concerns about their operating costs.

If these plans are enacted, the Legislature would send out over $50 million the settlements require to be spent to address addiction and over $9 million lawmakers gave themselves the power to use for any public purpose. Of the unrestricted money, $5 million would go to fund clinical trials for the psychedelic drug ibogaine. 

Lawmakers’ plans for funds that must be spent to address addiction are mostly tied to applications the advisory council reviewed and scored last fall. But there are some notable exceptions. In addition to the employment department funding, lawmakers plan to send $500,000 for an organization called Hope Squad to do youth opioid prevention outreach. But it’s not clear what this organization is, where it’s based, and how it plans to prevent Mississippi overdoses. 

Another project the Legislature is looking to fund that went unlisted in the advisory council’s review is a Canton-based nonprofit called Finally First. This organization is set to receive $250,000 from the Legislature for a school addiction prevention program in four central Mississippi counties.

But the advisory council did receive an application from that organization. Mississippi Today obtained Finally First’s proposal when it submitted its November public records request to the Attorney General’s Office. It’s unclear why the application was never scored by the council, and Attorney General Office spokesperson MaryAsa Lee did not answer the newsroom’s call Saturday.

Comelia Walker, Finally First’s chief executive officer, said she submitted her application well before the council’s deadline. She said that while she’s glad the Legislature is set to fund her nonprofit’s application, it’s disappointing to learn that the council didn’t fulfill its responsibility to review every opioid settlement application.

“That kind of hurts,” she said. “Because that means we didn’t even have an opportunity initially.”

Thousands of people turned out Saturday for fun in the sun at the Hal’s St. Paddy’s Parade in downtown Jackson. It’s a decades-old tradition in Mississippi’s capital city.

The theme was “Stars, Stripes & Shamrocks — Jackson Celebrates America250.

WASHINGTON — The Associated Press captured photos of Mississippi National Guard members patrolling in the nation’s capital, where cherry blossoms have reached peak bloom and the city’s spring rush is in full swing.

The Mississippi National Guard said in mid-March that soldiers from the 890th Engineer Battalion were headed to Washington to help provide security in the city. It is part of an ongoing effort President Donald Trump started last year, deploying troops to Democrat-led cities including Los Angeles; Chicago; Portland, Oregon; and D.C. What has been billed as an effort to address crime in those cities has spurred protests and raised legal and political questions. 

Mississippi is one of at least 11 Republican-led states, along with D.C., that deployed troops. ABC News reported earlier this month that the Pentagon said the operation could continue until the end of Trump’s term, Jan. 20, 2029.

The National Park Service says the flowering blooms on the cherry trees in Washington hit their peak on Thursday, meaning 70% of the Yoshino Cherry blossoms are open. The park service says this timing is typical for late March and early April.

The Washington Post reported that the average date for peak bloom has become earlier over the past century, from April 4 to March 29, amid human-caused climate change.

The blooms last only a few days. Cool, calm weather helps them stay, but rain, wind or heat can strip petals fast.

The National Cherry Blossom Festival runs for four weeks, with music and Japanese cultural events. The Tidal Basin is where most of the trees are located, but parts of it are fenced off for seawall repairs.

The cherry blossoms date back to a 1912 gift of 3,000 trees from the mayor of Tokyo, and the Japanese government remains involved in their care and in the annual festival celebrations.

In 2024, Fumito Miyake, minister for public affairs at the Japanese Embassy, said his government’s decision to contribute an additional 250 trees would be a “birthday present” in advance of this summer’s celebration for the 250th anniversary of American independence.

Again this year, visitors are contending with a somewhat restricted blossom appreciation area at the Tidal Basin, home to the highest concentration of the trees. With the National Park Service still in the midst of a three-year renovation project to shore up the basin’s aging seawall in time for this summer’s anniversary, parts of the basin are fenced off.

More than 100 of the trees had to be cut down as part of that project and will be replanted.

Quilt work embarks on a journey of discovery in the art of Coulter Fussell and returns a changed art form with deeper ties, greater resonance and more stories than traditional patterns can hold. 

“Coulter Fussell: The Proving Ground,” on view through June 14 at the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson, assembles five bodies of work produced by the Water Valley artist since 2020 in the first museum survey of her textile art. Works in her Escape Quilts, War Quilts, River Quilts, Pillow Talk and Video-Chiffons share a remarkable range.

The exhibition runs concurrently with “L.V. Hull: Love Is a Sensation,” bolstering the museum’s draw with two one-woman shows focusing on Mississippi artists. They represent different small towns, different generations and different races, but the strong community connections in their art and practices are a parallel thread.

A proving ground is a site of experimentation, to test a new theory or technology. “The Proving Ground” exhibition focuses on Fussell’s continuing artistic evolution, as her works become increasingly sculptural and wrap in upholstery techniques, mixed media, photography and digital projection.

Textiles dropped off by friends and strangers to her storefront studio become the raw materials for Fussell’s works of art.

“Everything, really, that she uses in her works has been given to her. It’s a really beautiful story of community,” said Betsy Bradley, Laurie Hearin McRee Director of the Mississippi Museum of Art. Some materials are inherited or shared by family members.

Fussell’s career is gaining more national attention, Bradley noted. This year, Fussell was the Mississippi artist selected as a Creative Capital inaugural State of the Art Prize Artist; the national program awards one artist in each state for artistic innovation.

Prizes and grants at national, regional and state level, and eight solo exhibitions since 2020 at art institutions around the South have helped Fussell’s development and growing recognition.

This exhibition, Fussell said, “is by far the pinnacle, up to this point.” She credited the Mississippi Museum of Art’s support and encouragement as key in her journey. She singled out her selection for the Jane Crater Hiatt Fellowship (Mississippi Invitational 2021) as particularly instrumental, allowing her to “wait tables less and sew more,” she said.

Quilting’s familiar format, and Fussell’s source material of entirely donated fabrics and more from her community, will likely resonate most with viewers, MMA Associate Curator of Exhibitions Kaegan Sparks said. 

“A lot of times, someone in the gallery will recognize a particular scrap of fabric as similar to something that they owned at one time,” Sparks said. “It’s happened to both of us, talking about the show with people. The way that people identify with the different materials that she’s using is something special about this show.”

That material connection can be a fast-track way to identify with the works. “To me, that is a very important part of it,” Sparks said, “but it wouldn’t be what it is, if Coulter didn’t transform that raw material into these really vibrant and … formally complex works.

“She’s really pushing different frameworks,” the curator said, employing strategies of reversal, inversion, layering and more in her compositions.

Works reference terrain both actual and internal, and the materials, often well-used before they are discarded and donated, bring their own history and cultural markers.

War imagery was prevalent during Fussell’s growing up years in a military town — Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia — and crops up often in her pieces, Fussell said, indicating a sweep of artworks in the exhibit’s war quilts series. In “Hawks,” two birds of prey fly at each other in a work that appears to defy gravity.

In “Country Captain,” the 3-D effect  (“attic windows” in quilt lingo) calls to mind a shelf where mementos and the memories they hold are stashed. The title refers to a popular dish, often saved for company and special occasions in Columbus, Georgia, that came directly through the military and Fort Benning, Fussell said. 

“Country Captain is fried chicken over this sort of rice curry. It was the only dish I ever had growing up that had a curry flavor to it,” she said.

This piece harks to the cross-cultural exchange in the military and textile industries, in its mix of a chenille bedspread manufactured in Dawson, Georgia, and an Indian kantha quilt. It wraps in globalism and war with souvenir pillow scraps, lenticular postcards of ships on the ocean and a heron in an Asian-inspired design from an 1880s houserobe. Crumpled cigarette packs (“Those were found in a front pocket of an old shirt somebody gave in a donation,” she explained with a laugh) fold in with the Army base theme.

Works in her Pillow Talk series play with jokes, dreams, double images and double meanings in a collection of whimsical headboards.

“The other series are my observations about life and environment — what I feel is beautiful or what I feel is interesting about the world around me. This series is what it feels like to be me,” Fussell said. 

In one, a pastel knit baby blanket, a bright strip of sky printed on fleece, net from a kids’ backpack, stretch neon lace and a pair of plump lips from a shower curtain are layered like a cake. In another, cat tails curl like scrolls on the upper end of a headboard bookended by feline hindquarters. Its head comes down the center in an arrangement both amusing and surreal.

Fussell slowly began adding photography to her works. When she got to the point of printing on fleece, she then wanted to bend, sew and stuff photos like she does fabric. Cotton and fleece didn’t work for the layering she wanted — ”too static,” she said — but chiffon did. Her ongoing Video-Chiffon series uses the translucent fabric, custom-printed with a repeated photograph or video still.

Her teenage sons’ cellphone videos, capturing the beauty of their Yalobusha County landscape and shared via Snapchat, also caught her eye.

“The nature of Snapchat, those things go away in, like, a day, so I was seeing this abundance of beautiful, discarded photography and video,” she said. “At the same time, I walk into a studio every day of beautiful, discarded fabrics. So, it all became the same material, really.”  

Photographs from her dad and her brother, and videos by her sons, are woven into the installation “Hill Country,” where a massive braid arcs into a hill, forming a frame or a stage of sorts. There, videos are back-projected onto a stretched, gingham-printed fabric. From wild roadside blackberries on the braid to pickup truck fun at Sardis Lake on the screen, “Hill Country” combines warm familiarity and fresh innovation for a captivating portrait of home.

Visit msmususem.org for details on admission, hours and related events.

To the surprise of perhaps nobody, the Mississippi Supreme Court on Friday denied the NCAA’s petition to appeal Ole Miss quarterback Trinidad Chambliss’ injunction against the governing body of college athletics.

That means the final hurdle likely has been cleared for Chambliss, one of the nation’s most exciting and productive players, to play for the Rebels this fall. Chambliss will enter the season as one of the top candidates for the Heisman Trophy.

“We find that the petition should be denied,” Presiding Justice Josiah Dennis Coleman wrote in the one-page Supreme Court order turning down the NCAA’s appeal.

Chambliss led Ole Miss to a school record 13 victories and the national semifinals in 2025. Ole Miss ended the season with a No. 3 ranking, its highest since 1962.

Chambliss’ legal saga began when he petitioned the NCAA for a medical waiver that would give him another year of eligibility. Chambliss believed respiratory problems caused him to miss the 2022 season at Michigan’s Division II Ferris State and that he should receive a medical redshirt.

The NCAA denied his petition. Chambliss then sued the NCAA in Lafayette County Chancery Court. Judge Robert Whitwell ruled against the NCAA on Feb. 12 after a day-long hearing in Pittsboro, granting the temporary restraining order that Chambliss requested against the association.

Whitwell ruled that the NCAA “acted in bad faith” when it denied Chambliss’ appeal for another season of eligibility. The NCAA appealed, and a panel of three Supreme Court justices blocked that appeal Friday.

The chancery and Supreme Court decisions were quite predictable.

Chambliss threw for an SEC-best 3,937 yards in 2025, throwing for 22 touchdowns compared to only three interceptions. A fantastic runner as well, Chambliss ran the football for 527 yards and another eight touchdowns.

Chambliss and Texas quarterback Arch Manning are generally considered the top two candidates for the 2026 Heisman.

Chambliss transferred to Ole Miss in the spring of 2025 after leading Ferris State University to the Division II national championship in the 2024 season.

The NCAA argued that Chambliss, who spent four years at Ferriss and then one at Ole Miss, had used up his allowed five years of eligibility to play a maximum of four seasons.

But Chambliss didn’t play at all his first two seasons at Ferris. He red-shirted as a freshman in 2021 and then was plagued by severe upper respiratory illness as a sophomore. He testified that he was told the 2022 season would count as a medical redshirt season. The NCAA argued otherwise.

Landlords who collect utility payments from tenants but fail to submit the money to utility providers could face prison time, fines or both, under a new law signed by Gov. Tate Reeves.

The change comes months after tenants in some Jackson apartments were forced to move out of their homes because water was shut off after their landlords accrued thousands of dollars in unpaid bills.

Rep. Shanda Yates, an independent from Jackson, authored House Bill 1404.

“We have apartment complexes and other landlords across the state who are apparently charging for utilities as part of the tenants’ rent, they are collecting this from the tenant and they are failing to remit payment for those utilities,” Yates said during a House discussion of the bill in February. “These tenants are then being faced with having their utilities turned off despite the fact they have paid for their utilities as part of their rent.”

Louisiana enacted a similar law last year to address issues there, Yates said.

Mississippi’s new law took effect as soon as the Republican governor signed it Wednesday.

A person who collects and then fails to remit over $25,000 in utility payments from tenants’ rent can face up to 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $50,000, if convicted under Mississippi’s new law. If the amount is less than that but at least $5,000, the person can face up to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000. The law also includes smaller penalties for smaller misappropriations. Additionally, offenders will have to pay restitution to anyone who suffered a financial loss as a result.

The law specifies that it doesn’t apply to delays resulting from a tenant’s late payments or from errors on the utility’s side.

Last July, JXN Water, the capital city’s third-party water and sewer system operator, shut off water to Blossom Apartments after the landlord ran up more than $400,000 in unpaid bills. Shortly after, tenants there were forced to move after the Mississippi Home Corporation labeled the property unfit to live in.

The utility also shut off water to the Chapel Ridge apartment complex around the same time. JXN Water estimated last year that the city’s multi-family complexes were collectively behind over $7.5 million on their water bills.

The owner of Blossom Apartments, Tony Little, and JXN Water later sued each other after Little disputed the amount he owed. Those lawsuits are continuing. Recently, a bank that loaned money to the complex asked a Hinds County judge to appoint a receiver to run the property, WLBT reported.

The Senate amended an earlier version of the bill to say that the misuse of utility payments must be done “knowingly, willingly and unlawfully.” The bill then passed in the House by a vote of 100-14, after passing in the Senate without opposition.

Legislative negotiators on Friday said they have agreed, after months of back-and-forth and considering larger amounts, that Mississippi teachers will get a $2,000 pay raise. 

It’s an anticlimactic result to a teacher pay raise debate that, at one point weeks ago, saw dueling offers from the Senate and House that reached $6,000. The state’s educators, the lowest paid on average in the country, who have helped rocket Mississippi students to academic achievement that’s been nationally recognized say they’re disappointed. 

“We’re certainly grateful for any type of raise, but everyone involved in this process knows this does not meet the standard of what educators both have earned and desperately need,” said Jason Reid, a longtime teacher in the DeSoto County School District. Reid drives a school bus before and after work to supplement his income. 

Mississippi teachers last received a meaningful pay raise in 2022, but they say it was quickly eaten up by rising health insurance costs and inflation. Since then, educators told Mississippi Today that they’ve had to take second jobs and make tough financial decisions to scrape by. And educators largely attribute the ongoing and worsening teacher shortage to low pay.

The teacher pay debate has been a top issue of the 2026 legislative session. The Senate and the House passed their respective plans early in the year  — first $2,000 from the Senate, with a promise of trying to raise the number later in the process, and $5,000 from the House. But as the weeks wound on, both chambers proceeded to kill each other’s bills. 

Before the teacher pay bill went to negotiations, the Senate had landed on a $6,000 raise, spaced out in $2,000 increments over three years, while the House stuck with its one-time $5,000 raise. 

However, after negotiations, it appears that Mississippi teachers are likely to only get a $2,000 raise — the Senate’s early proposal that the House said it wouldn’t agree to because it was too low. Special education teachers would get an extra $2,000 salary supplement — a total of $4,000. 

Neal McCarty, a high school teacher in Union, said he’s experienced a rollercoaster of emotions from the teacher pay raise debate, but had feared all along that lawmakers had promised too much early in the session.

“It’s kind of like a slap in the face,” he said. “I just think for all of the thousands of teachers across the state to hear those numbers, you get your hopes up.”

House Education Chairman Rob Roberson, a Republican from Starkville and one of the negotiators on the compromise plan, said he shares educators’ disappointment.

“I had some pretty grand ideas as to what we could do this year,” he said. “It is substantially less … it is what it is. You’re not able to do what you want to do.”

Roberson said the $5,000 House proposal came before budget talks. He said legislators were aware of hefty state retirement system costs, but were surprised by the state Medicaid agency’s request, which was $390 million more than the current year.

“They rolled in with a huge number,” he said. “We expected a decent size, but nobody expected the monster it ended up being. You have to fill in the blanks … this is unfortunately where we’ve landed.”

Senate Education Chairman Dennis DeBar, a Republican from Leakesville and another one of the negotiators, also chalked the lower amount up to concerns about state spending.

“We had been pushing for a multi-year raise, but we also have to be fiscally responsible, and when we were talking with the House, we all had to consider Medicaid, PERS and all our other responsibilities,” DeBar said. “When we got into negotiations, we all agreed to budget only a one-time infusion for teacher pay.”

The plan also includes a $2,000 raise for assistant teachers, school psychologists and occupational therapists, DeBar said. He said school attendance officers would get $5,000 raises, and that the agreement would add 9 new SAOs, “so we will have one for every 4,000 students.”

The lower raise amount is likely to draw fire from educators and advocates, who have watched state lawmakers credit the state’s academic gains to Republican policy and leadership over the past several months. 

“It’s very disappointing,” said Nancy Loome, leader of The Parents’ Campaign, a public school advocacy organization. “Our teachers have done such tremendous work to move Mississippi forward. Our state has gotten so much positive national recognition for their work, and they are struggling to make ends meet.”

Lawmakers are expecting to vote on negotiated final budget bills on Sunday. Both the House and Senate would have to pass the pay raise plan, and there is a potential it could be sent for further negotiation. 

“We can always address it again next year,” DeBar said. “Nothing says we can’t come back and revisit (a teacher raise) next year.”

Officials from the Mississippi State Department of Health on Friday reported the state’s first confirmed pediatric flu death of the 2025-2026 flu season. 

This is one of 28 pediatric flu deaths that have occurred in the state since officials began reporting these deaths during the 2008-2009 flu season. Flu season in Mississippi usually peaks between January and March, and the vaccine can take up to two weeks to provide immunity. 

The Health Department did not provide any further details about the circumstances of the death, citing privacy and respect for the family. Health officials continue to recommend annual immunization, and the department did not say whether the child who died had been immunized.

“A vaccination won’t necessarily keep you from getting the flu, although it can reduce your risk of infection and is the best protection to keep you from a severe outcome,” State Epidemiologist Dr. Renia Dotson said in a press release. “We recommend everyone six months of age and older to get an updated flu vaccination.”

For those 18 and under, flu shots are covered by insurance, Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP. Some children may be eligible for free vaccination under the Vaccines for Children Program at qualifying locations. 

Uninsured and underinsured adults who meet certain high-risk criteria qualify for an adult influenza vaccination at county health department clinics. The vaccine is available for insured adults through pharmacies, retailers and private physicians throughout the state.

Mississippi Today Ideas is a platform for thoughtful Mississippians to share their ideas about our state’s past, present and future. Opinions expressed in guest essays are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of Mississippi Today. You can read more about the section here.

“The President is the symbol of who the people of the United States are. He is the person who stands for us in the eyes of the world and the eyes of our children.”

William Bennett, “The Death of Outrage,” 1998

There was a time, not that long ago, when American conservatives were obsessed with the public virtues of private character.

Ronald Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan titled her biography of Reagan, “When Character Was King.”

“In a president,” Noonan wrote, “character is everything. A president doesn’t just deal with the problems of the day; he sets the tone and spirit of the nation.”

James Q. Wilson, a longtime Harvard professor, wrote “The Moral Self” in 1993, a key text in the conservative case that character was the cornerstone of public and private life: “Human beings are endowed with a moral sense — an intuitive capacity to judge actions as fair or unfair, right or wrong.”

When I was working in the George W. Bush campaign, his single most powerful message was “Restoring honor and dignity to the White House.” Of all the ads we made, the one with then-Gov. Bush delivering that line straight to the camera moved the numbers more than any other.

While there is much on the policy front that Republicans got wrong in the 1980s and 1990s — remember the Laffer Curve that was the cornerstone of Republican tax policy — they got the importance of character right

“The presidency is not merely an office of power; it is an office of example,” George Will wrote in 1998.

Watching Jeffrey Epstein’s best friend launching a war with the Persian Empire and chortling over killing Iranians — “We might do it again for fun” — I’m struck by what the Donald Trump era has done to our national sense of self. A president who treats war like a snuff film he would have enjoyed with Ghislaine Maxwell — “I just wish her well,” Trump said when the pedophile was arrested — is a cancer on the nation’s soul.

It’s no surprise that we keep hearing about groups of youngish Republicans who praise Hitler in chatrooms. It has been 2007 since they knew a Republican president who was a decent human being.

Why does JD Vance defend the Nazi-humpers in his party? Because he knows that the way to advance in the Republican Party is to be the most transgressive. Donald Trump launched his campaign in 2015 by calling Mexicans rapists.

Now that a masked death squad is chasing brown people across the country, there’s no political juice in a mere verbal assault against Hispanics. So, Vance decides to up the ante and defend those in his party who cosplay as Nazis. Let’s see you top that, Marco Rubio.

It is the deepest sort of denial to assert that a country led by broken, sick men does not impact the definition of what it means to be an American.

Compare this moral collapse to Ukraine. Since the Russians launched their full-scale war of genocide, Ukrainians look to their country and leaders with great pride and respect. The Russians thought that Ukrainians would fold like a cardboard box left in a long rain. Not since Hitler invaded Russia has there been such a miscalculation in a European war

 Now in the fifth year of the largest European land war since World War II, the character of the Ukrainian people has been tested under the most brutal conditions. For generations, the quiet heroism and courage of Ukrainians and their leaders will be celebrated.

To grow up in America today is to look at our national leaders with a sense of disgust and alienation. Who in their right mind would want to be Jeffrey Epstein’s best friend who talks in public about dating his own daughter? Who would want to be a man so void of any basic humanity that the death of millions after the killing of USAID is gleefully cited as shrewd budget management?

The conservatives who once lectured the country about character did not lose the argument. They abandoned it. When it became inconvenient — when their voters chose a man who embodies everything they once claimed to oppose — they folded. Not gradually, not reluctantly, but enthusiastically.

The same movement that once insisted a president must be a moral exemplar for the nation’s children now explains away a man who paid hush money to a porn star, who mocks the disabled and who celebrates cruelty as strength. They did not change their theory of character. They simply decided that winning was worth more than the theory.

That is the real American crisis. Not just that we have a president of broken character, but that an entire political movement chose him knowingly, repeatedly and joyfully.

William Bennett was right in 1998. He just didn’t anticipate that the people who agreed with him most loudly would be the ones who burned it all down.

Stuart Stevens, a Jackson native, is  a veteran political consultant, working on multiple high-profile Republican campaigns, including presidential and senatorial campaigns. In more recent years, he has been affiliated with the Lincoln Project, comprised mainly of longtime Republicans who oppose Donald Trump. Stevens has spoken out on what he views as the country’s shift toward authoritarianism and is the author of multiple books, including the 2020, “It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump.”

On March 27, 1961, Joseph Jackson Jr. was alone in a jail cell in Jackson and afraid for his life. 

“The silence got to me, because here I am in Mississippi, where Negroes could just disappear without any investigation or without any recourse as to prosecuting whoever the white perpetrator would be,” said Jackson, now 88.

Jackson was a member of the Tougaloo Nine. He, along with Meredith Anding Jr., James “Sammy” Bradford, Alfred Lee Cook, Geraldine Edwards-Hollis, Janice Jackson Vails, Albert Lassiter, Ameenah E. P. Omar (born Evelyn Pierce) and Ethel Sawyer Adolphe staged a sit-in at the whites-only Jackson Municipal Library, near the state Capitol, to challenge racial segregation.

Jackson and Lassiter reflected on their experiences on that historic day with Mississippi Today ahead of the 65th anniversary of the Tougaloo Nine’s sit-in protest.

The group is named for their alma mater, Tougaloo Southern Christian College, now known as Tougaloo College. They were all members of the North Jackson Youth Council of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Medgar Evers, the NAACP’s field secretary for Mississippi, was key to organizing the sit-in. Evers secured them bail money and legal representation. The group spent weeks preparing, doing simulations to mentally prepare themselves to get attacked by a white mob without striking back.

Jackson said the mock demonstrations prepared them mentally and spiritually for what they were going to face.

“We had to go within, and get in touch with the spirit,” Jackson said.

On the day of, the nine made their first stop at the George Washington Carver Library, the branch for Black people, and asked for books they knew the library didn’t carry.

When that branch didn’t have them, they went to the whites-only library and began reading quietly and browsing the card catalog. The librarians there told them to leave. They refused, and the librarians called the police.

Lassiter, now 84, explained his thought process, saying, “I was a more visible target, tall and slim. I said, ‘Well, let me get over here into the card catalog so I’ll have a notice if a policeman comes around to whack me.’”

When officers arrived and the students still refused to leave, they were arrested for breaching the peace. The plan was for the students from the historically Black college to be bailed out the same day, but Sheriff J.R. Gilfoy, the only person who could accept their bail money, he left town.

They remained in jail for 32 hours.

“We really didn’t know what was going to happen or what they were going to do,” Lassiter said.

“So we just had to be tough and pray.”

While they sat in jail, support for them grew on the outside. After they were arrested, students at Jackson College for Negro Teachers, now Jackson State University, held a prayer vigil for them. The college’s president, Jacob Reddix, and the police broke up the gathering. Reddix, according to Clarion-Ledger reports at the time, assaulted two students, and three students were expelled.

The next morning, Jackson State students boycotted class and held a rally on campus in support of the Tougaloo Nine. Some of them marched toward the jail where the Tougaloo students were arraigned, but never got that far, because it was the same day as celebrations of the centennial of Mississippi’s secession from the Union.

The day after that, the Tougaloo Nine arrived to the courthouse. When a group of supporters gathered nearby and cheered for them, police attacked them with clubs, dogs and tear gas. Among those assaulted were Evers, several women, two children and an 81 year-old man.

The Tougaloo Nine were charged with breaching the peace, and each was sentenced to a $100 fine and 30 days in jail. The jail sentence was suspended on the condition that they never participate in another demonstration.

Though not the first sit-in, this demonstration is cited as a catalyst in the growth of the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi. Activists across the state staged their own sit-ins, challenging racial segregation in public spaces. Two of the Jackson State students who were expelled after the prayer vigil were sisters Joyce and Dorie Ladner, who became local activists.

Barred from demonstrating, the Tougaloo Nine went back to their lives. Lassiter said they became “like family,” even as they spread out across the country.

“One or two students in class made a comment, ‘You guys crazy?’” said Lassiter.

“No, we just did what we wanted to do to make a change, make things better.”

Jackson was originally from Memphis, Tennessee. His early life was marked by poverty and the oppression of Jim Crow. He claimed that when he was 11 years-old, a Greyhound bus driver struck his mother in the face. He said “the most humiliating experience” was knowing they had to board the bus and walk all the way back to the “colored” section, and when they got there looking at the other Black people and knowing they had no way to get recourse. It inspired him to get involved in activism in college.

“We had no one to speak on our behalf, and I never forgot that,” he said.

He began attending Tougaloo College on choral and ministerial scholarships in 1960. He was president of Tougaloo’s chapter of the NAACP Youth Council. Before Tougaloo, he spent his freshman year at Arkansas AM&N College, now the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, prior to getting married and working as a pastor among other jobs.

Jackson had to drop out of Tougaloo to support his family, but graduated in 1972 from California State College at Fullerton, now California State University, Fullerton. He went on to remarry and have another child.

He became a Los Angeles County deputy probation officer and juvenile investigator, which he said, “became a ministry to me.” He retired in 2002. Tougaloo College awarded him an honorary doctorate in humane letters in 2021.

Lassiter was born and raised in Vicksburg. His father was a bricklayer and later a pastor, while his mother stayed home to care for him and his eight siblings. He said he had scholarships and worked four jobs to pay for school.

Lassiter recalled how, when 14-year-old  Emmett Till was murdered in the Mississippi Delta by white men in 1955, his eighth grade teacher pulled all the boys into a group to tell them how to avoid meeting Till’s fate.

“Colored folks, or Black folks, were put down in every way,” he said. “So we just had to scrap and work whichever way you could to take care of your family and to take care of yourself.”

After graduating from Tougaloo, Lassiter joined the military in 1964. He was promoted to the rank of colonel in the Air Force 1990, retiring in 1995. He is married with two children. He believes the country has made a lot of progress.

“We’ve come a long way because there are many individuals who were elevated to positions of leadership in all arenas … who would not be there if we hadn’t made that kind of progress,” Lassiter said.

In 1962, the NAACP filed a class-action lawsuit against the whites-only library branch, and a federal court ruled that the library had to integrate.

A Freedom Trail marker commemorating the sit-in was erected in 2017 where the library used to stand on State Street.

Most of the Tougaloo Nine shared their stories with writer and independent researcher Michael J. O’Brien’s for his book “The Tougaloo Nine: The Jackson Library Sit-In at the Crossroads of Civil War and Civil Rights.” Published in 2025, it chronicles their protest and the event’s local and national impact.

Jackson believes the struggle for freedom is ongoing, and young people need to learn about their history and “get into the fight.”

Paraphrasing a quote from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., he said: “If you think that full equal rights are going to be granted to us, mainly as Black people, coming riding in on the wheels of inevitability without us really rolling up our sleeves and maintaining our history, it will never happen.”