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The governing board of Mississippi’s public university system announced that Alcorn State University’s interim president is leaving next month to focus on his family.

The change, which the Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees approved in a special called executive session on Thursday, comes a little over two months after Ontario Wooden was appointed in the wake of the board’s firing of Felecia Nave, the university’s first female president.

Wooden had served as the provost and senior vice president for academic affairs since 2020. When Wooden was appointed in April, some faculty were optimistic he could repair the strained relationship they had with Nave due in part to some changes she’d made early in her tenure that increased the minimum number of classes faculty had to teach.

“We appreciate Dr. Wooden’s leadership and his three years of service to Alcorn State University,” said Dr. Alfred McNair, the new IHL board president, in a press release. “We wish Dr. Wooden and his family well in their future endeavors.”

Wooden will be replaced by Tracy Cook, the vice president for student affairs and enrollment management. Cook is an alumnus of Alcorn State, the oldest public historically Black university in Missisippi. He will begin serving on July 8.

“Dr. Cook will keep the university moving forward and building on its rich heritage,” McNair said.

The nature of Wooden’s departure was not immediately clear from IHL’s press release, and a spokesperson for the university did not respond to an inquiry from Mississippi Today by press time.

This is not unusual: The board did not provide a reason for Nave’s firing, which came two days after she interviewed as a semi-finalist for the chancellor position at Louisiana State University, Shreveport. 

READ MORE: ‘7 university presidents have left in the last year. Why is turnover so high?‘

An alumni group called Alcornites for Change has called on IHL to provide more information on the reason for Nave’s firing. The group had closely followed Nave’s presidency and prepared a report on declining enrollment, resignations and the abysmal state of the univesity’s athletic facilities.

“It was a shocker to us because my thing was, we’ve been presenting the information, we have been rallying the stakeholders, and all of a sudden, boom, they make a decision,” Jared Gilmore, a member of Alcornites for Change, told Mississippi Today last month. “We need to know where we go from here because we have some issues.” 

IHL has yet to announce a timeline for a presidential search, and the board said at its meeting yesterday it does not plan to meet until August.

The post IHL: Alcorn State interim president leaving after two months to focus on family appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The U.S. Supreme Court rejected President Joe Biden’s plan for student debt relief that would have forgiven between $10,000 and $20,000 in student loan debt for millions of borrowers across the country, including nearly 439,000 Mississippians. 

The ruling comes a day after the court found race-conscious admissions policies violate the Constitution. 

Biden’s plan, which made good on a key campaign promise, would have primarily benefited Black, brown and low-income borrowers, who nationally and in Mississippi have higher averages of student debt than white, wealthier borrowers. It was based on a 2003 law that gave the president the authority to waive federal student loans during a national emergency like the COVID-19 pandemic. 

But the court disagreed that Biden could use the law how he wanted in the 6-3 partisan ruling. Writing for the conservative majority, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote Biden’s plan amounted to rewriting “that statute from the ground up.” 

That argument was made in an amicus brief that Attorney General Lynn Fitch signed onto in November last year. Fitch’s office did not respond to Mississippi Today’s request for comment on the ruling. 

On Twitter, Gov. Tate Reeves wrote “this is another good decision from the Supreme Court and another win for America.” 

“It is utterly absurd and incredibly unfair to punish the blue collar electrician or plumber, or any individual who worked hard to pay off his debt, so that Joe Biden can effectively bribe voters with our tax dollars,” Reeves added. 

But student debt affects working-class professions, too. Trade schools can also leave students burdened with debt, and borrowers who attended for-profit colleges default at higher rates than those who do not, often because these institutions charge pricey tuition rates for non-accredited degrees. 

And Biden’s plan could have been a boon for Mississippi’s tax revenue, Mississippi Today reported last year. Thanks to a longstanding state tax provision, the Mississippi Department of Revenue would have taxed student loan forgiveness the way it does any form of debt cancellation as income. 

That would have left in-state borrowers on the hook for up to $1,000 in additional state income taxes. 

A bill was introduced this legislative session to prevent that from happening, but it died in committee. 

Monthly payments on federal student loans are currently paused but set to resume this fall; the first payment will be due in October.

The post 439,000 Mississippians won’t see student debt relief following U.S. Supreme Court decision appeared first on Mississippi Today.

GRENADA — Brandon Presley, the lone Democratic candidate running for governor, declined on Thursday to weigh in on whether Tyree Irving should resign as chairman of the Mississippi Democratic Party.

Presley will become the Democratic Party’s official nominee for governor in August, and, if elected to the highest office in the state, will become the de facto leader of that party. Still, the 45-year-old utilities regulator sought to distance himself from the intraparty bickering.

“We’re running our own race, which, frankly and truthfully, doesn’t give me time to divert attention to things that seem to be internal matters within the party or party matters and are not my campaign matters,” Presley told Mississippi Today after speaking to Burning Bush Missionary Baptist Church in Grenada. 

Emails published Monday showed that Irving sharply criticized Andre Wagner, the state party’s executive director and No. 2 leader of the party, in a note that was sent to three Democratic National Committee staffers. 

READ MORE: Democrats fear state leader’s tirade will jeopardize $250K commitment from national party

Shortly before Irving sent the email, the DNC officials had committed to sending the state party $250,000 to boost political programs and support candidates “up and down the ballot.”

Wagner had sought in an email to clarify Irving’s previous comments about how the state party should spend that $250,000 from the national party. Then Irving, a 77-year-old former Mississippi Court of Appeals judge who has been party chairman since 2020, insisted that he alone ran the state party and that Wagner was “out of order.”

“Mr. Wagner, you do not speak for the chair, and you are out of order,” Irving wrote. “I am an accomplished jurist. I know and understand things that you cannot know or understand because: you do not have the education level, you do not possess the personal or vicarious experience that I have, and you know nothing about the historical political landscape of Mississippi. You are not in a position to speak for the Mississippi Democratic Party or say how the Mississippi Democratic Party will spend any funds without being granted that authority to speak, and it has not been granted to you. You are a salaried employee and nothing else. You need to find your place and stay in it.”

Wagner, in response, forwarded the exchange to other state party leaders and predicted that the national party would pull its commitment to send the money to the state party. Several other Democratic Party officials told Mississippi Today they shared Wagner’s concern.

Since the back-and-forth between Wagner and Irving was brought to light, Shuwaski Young, the Democratic candidate running for secretary of state, has publicly called for Irving to resign as chairman of the party. 

Presley acknowledged to Mississippi Today that the state party could use the DNC’s money for voter engagement efforts, but said he would not attempt to influence the national party’s decision to invest the resources in the Magnolia State. 

“We’re running our own race, and we’re going to continue taking our message to Democrats, Republicans and independents that want to end the corrupt career of Tate Reeves,” Presley said. “And we’re not turning away support, but, obviously, this is a completely internal issue within the Democratic Party. And we don’t have time to focus on those issues.”

Irving was elected chairman of the party in 2020 to serve a four-year term.

READ MORE: Statewide candidate calls for ouster of Mississippi Democratic Party chairman

The post ‘We’re running our own race’: Brandon Presley tries to distance himself from state Democratic Party drama appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The governing board of Mississippi’s eight public universities will review its admission policies in light of the U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down the consideration of race as a factor in college admissions. 

Going forward, colleges and universities will only be able to consider race in the context of how it’s affected a potential student’s life, the court ruled. The decision, which concerned admissions policies at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, is expected to make elite institutions less diverse. 

It remains to be seen how the ruling will affect public universities in Mississippi, which have recently come under a microscope by the State Auditor’s Office for spending on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. 

Alfred Rankins, the commissioner of Institutions of Higher Learning, said in a statement Thursday that the board of trustees will work with the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office to determine if its admission policies, which are relatively open, are in compliance. 

“We will review the Supreme Court’s ruling and our general undergraduate, graduate, and professional school admission policies to determine if any changes are needed to ensure compliance with federal law,” Rankins said. 

The ruling, delivered by the Court on ideological lines, was decried by Democrats, including U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, who noted that race-conscious admissions policies were an important way for universities to ensure historically marginalized students had “access the same educational opportunities available to their more privileged peers.” 

It was celebrated by conservatives. On Twitter, Gov. Tate Reeves wrote that his office will “enthusiastically work to ensure that our universities across the state comply with both the letter and spirit of this decision.” 

“Our academic institutions will be stronger and more fair because of it,” he added. 

But it’s not clear that any institution of higher education in Mississippi considers race as a factor in admissions. In Mississippi, affirmative action was struck down in 1996 by the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in Hopwood v. Texas, a case sometimes referred to as “the beginning of the end of affirmative action in higher education.” 

None of the state’s top three public universities considers race as a factor in admissions, according to the Common Data Set. 

In general, Mississippi’s public universities have open enrollment. Prospective undergraduate students are admitted if they meet a range of criteria such as completing certain college prep curricula with a minimum grade point average, or maintaining a 2.0 GPA and scoring an 18 or higher on the ACT, a cut-off that’s lower than the state’s average. 

These across-the-board standards are rooted in changes IHL had to make in the aftermath of a 1991 U.S. Supreme Court case called Ayers v. Fordice that found Mississippi was maintaining a separate-but-equal system of higher education, with the five predominately white institutions and the three historically Black institutions almost exactly divided by race. 

The court ruled that ACT scores played a particular role in maintaining this segregation. In 1963, the year after James Meredith desegregated the University of Mississippi, that institution adopted a policy requiring a minimum ACT score of 15 as a requirement for admission along with Mississippi State University and the University of Southern Mississippi. 

“At the time, the average ACT score for white students was 18 and the average score for blacks was 7,” the court wrote. 

As a result of the Ayers ruling, all eight universities adopted the same entrance requirements. The 2004 settlement went even further, though, requiring the three HBCUs to spend extra dollars recruiting non-Black students in order to unlock certain endowment funds.

The post Mississippi public universities to review admissions policies following U.S. Supreme Court ruling  appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The U.S. Supreme Court, more than six months after receiving the case, ruled on Friday it will not hear a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of a Mississippi provision that places a lifetime voting ban on many people with felony convictions.

The nine-member court had set the Mississippi case for conference, where the justices decide whether to hear a case, 17 times this year. But each time the justices had postponed rendering a decision on whether it would consider the constitutionality of Mississippi’s lifetime felony voting ban, the only one like it in the nation.

The Supreme Court on Friday denied the petition for a writ of certiorari by a vote of 7-2, ending the chances they would take up the appeal.

The case is an appeal of a decision last year by the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upholding the 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 5th Circuit conceded in upholding the provision.

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 — fewer than 10 — where people do not regain their voting rights at some point after completing their sentence. Mississippi is the only state where people who lose the right to vote must garner a two-thirds vote of each chamber of the Legislature to regain their suffrage. The Legislature has been reluctant to restore voting rights. No voting rights were restored during the 2023 legislative session. Governors also can restore voting rights, but also have been reluctant to do so on a large scale.

In a dissenting opinion issued on Friday, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that “constitutional wrongs do not right themselves.”

“With its failure to take action, the Court has missed yet another opportunity to learn from its mistakes,” Jackson wrote. “… the majority’s decision not to take up this matter is doubly unfortunate. We were asked to address this problem 125 years ago in Williams, and declined to do so. And this Court blinks again today … Mississippians can only hope that they will not have to wait another century for a judicial knight-errant.”

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 that was 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 5th Circuit majority found, removed the “racial taint” from the original 1890 language. But Rob McDuff, an attorney with the Center for Justice, 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 a statement, McDuff of the Center for Justice said, ““We are extremely disappointed in the Supreme Court’s failure to review the case and eliminate this post-Reconstruction vestige of white supremacy from Mississippi’s constitution and Mississippi’s elections. Now that the federal courts have declined to step it, the Mississippi legislature must step up and launch the process of amending the state constitution to repeal it.”

 Former U.S. Solicitor General Don Verrilli joined the Center for Justice on the felony suffrage case. Other attorneys working with the Center for Justice on the case included former Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Fred Banks and civil rights lawyers David Lipman and Armand Derfner.

Editor’s note: This story was updated at 11:30 a.m. on June 30 to reflect breaking news that the Supreme Court issued an order refusing to hear the Mississippi case.

The post Supreme Court refuses to hear Mississippi felony suffrage appeal appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Read more here.

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U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves has dismissed a gun possession case against a man convicted of a felony, citing a Supreme Court precedent he criticized last year and ruling convicted felons have a Second Amendment right to own a weapon.

His ruling appears to take shots at the high court’s expansion of gun rights over the last couple of decades, and Reeves said he hopes the U.S. Supreme Court starts to apply such expansive interpretations to the rights to vote, to a speedy trial and others.

READ MORE: Judge Carlton Reeves’ full ruling

Jessie Bullock served about 15 years on a manslaughter conviction in Mississippi after killing someone in a bar fight in 1992. In 2018, he was indicted for possessing a firearm in his home.

When Reeves was assigned the case last year, he made national news with his criticism of the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in a New York case that overturned some of that state’s restrictions on carrying guns. That Supreme Court decision held that because of the Second Amendment, any gun law must be “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

Last year, Reeves criticized the high court, saying, “This court is not a trained historian. The Justices of the Supreme Court are not trained historians. And we are not experts in what white, wealthy, and male property owners thought about firearms regulation in 1791. Yet we are now expected to play historian in the name of constitutional adjudication.”

Reeves in his Wednesday order of dismissal noted that “no historian has expressed an opinion regarding the history of felon disarmament” and that neither the government nor Bullock had submitted any historical evidence or reports.

“This court did not want to be guilty of itself cherry-picking the history,” Reeves wrote in the order, adding that he asked the parties if he should appoint a professional historian as an independent expert. He said both sides declined.

He said federal prosecutors cited 120 federal court decisions upholding band on felons owning firearms, but “the government conceded that none of these courts has appointed an expert to help the sift through the historical record.”

Reeves said that under the high court’s historical test, state bans on firearms possession might fare better because they would be based on the principles of federalism.

Reeves also wrote: “This Court then discovered that an overwhelming majority of historians reject the Supreme Court’s most fundamental Second Amendment holding — its 2008 conclusion that the Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms, rather than a collective, Militia-based right.”

Reeves said: “In breathing new life into the Second Amendment, though, the Court has unintentionally revealed how it has suffocated other fundamental Constitutional rights,” Reeves wrote. “Americans are waiting for Heller and Bruen’s reasoning to reach the rest of the Constitution.”

The post Judge Reeves rules man convicted of felony has right to firearm, criticizes U.S. Supreme Court appeared first on Mississippi Today.

JUNE 29, 1941

Stokely Carmichael, also known as Kwame Ture, was born. Inspired by the sit-ins in the South, he joined the civil rights movement and became a Freedom Rider. Arrested in Jackson,

He became a leader in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, replacing John Lewis, and popularized the term “black power.” The phrase became a movement, and he became known as “honorary prime minister” of the Black Panther Party. He died of prostate cancer in 1998.

The post On this day in 1941 appeared first on Mississippi Today.

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The mother of a man allegedly tortured and shot in the mouth by a Rankin County sheriff’s deputy earlier this year and another mother of a man beaten, tased and killed by deputies in 2021 said the recent firing of deputies accused of misconduct is not enough.

They want to see criminal charges. 

“It’s not enough to fire those deputies because all they will do is go on to another police department and do the same thing,” said Mary Jenkins, whose son Michael almost died when a deputy placed a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. 

“They treated our children as if they weren’t even human,” she said during a Wednesday press conference.  

Rankin County Sheriff Bryan Bailey announced Tuesday that deputies accused of beating and torturing Michael Jenkins and Eddie Parker have been fired. Bailey did not name the deputies or specify how many were let go, but did say some remedial measures have been put in place, such as the hiring of a compliance officer and review of the department’s policies and training. 

Malik Shabazz, an attorney representing the men, said it is now up to Attorney General Lynn Fitch to secure a criminal indictment for the deputies. 

The U.S. Department of Justice and FBI opened an investigation in February into the incident.

On Jan. 24, six deputies conducting a drug investigation raided the home of Jenkins and Parker and, over the course of 90 minutes, allegedly subjected them to torture in the form of waterboarding, attempted sexual assault and threats of death by having guns pointed at them. The men’s attorneys say the deputies entered the home without a warrant and that their clients have been wrongly charged.

Attorneys have said they were charged with possession of a controlled substance and possession of paraphernalia, but drugs weren’t found. Deputies also said Jenkins pointed a gun at a deputy, but a firewarm wasn’t recovered.

A $400 million lawsuit against the sheriff, county and department detailing the men’s experience named three of six deputies allegedly involved in the incident: Hunter Elward, Brett McAlpin and Christian Dedmon. 

Bailey didn’t specify how many deputies he fired. Attorneys for the men said the sheriff fired five deputies, but their clients have been clear that there were six. The attorneys asked who the remaining person is and why they have been allowed to keep their job. 

Jenkins and Parker appeared on camera during the press conference, but they did not comment because of the ongoing civil lawsuit. 

For Monica Lee, termination isn’t enough because deputies have not been held accountable for the death of her son, Damien Cameron,  two years ago, nor has the family received sufficient answers from the sheriff’s office. 

On July 26, 2021, deputies responded to a vandalism call reported by a neighbor who accused Cameron of the damage, according to an incident report obtained by Insider. Elward was one of the deputies at the scene who punched, tased and chased Cameron. 

Lee believes that if the sheriff had taken action against the deputies involved in her son’s death, maybe what happened to Jenkins and Parker could have been prevented. 

“Had (the sheriff) got rid of them when he killed my son, it would have never happened to Michael,” Lee said Wednesday while seated next to Mary Jenkins. 

The post Firing Rankin deputies accused of brutality not enough, mom says: They need to be charged appeared first on Mississippi Today.