Gifted actor James Caan died today at the age of 82, leaving behind a remarkable list of memorable characters he played on the big screen and television. Yes, and today, upon hearing the news, I feel a good bit older.
Rick Cleveland
Younger viewers likely will remember Jimmy Caan from playing Will Farrell’s daddy in “Elf.” His most famous role, surely, was that of Sonny Corleone in “The Godfather,” perhaps the greatest movie ever made.
But I will always remember him best for his role as Chicago Bears football player Brian Piccolo in “Brian’s Song.” There’s a story there. Today, I’d like to tell it.
“Brian’s Song” came out on television in 1971. It was the ABC Movie of the Week, and it hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks. I was 18, trying my best to become a man. I watched with my brother Bobby and my mother on the console TV in the den of our Hattiesburg home.
I wasn’t expecting much, to tell you the truth. TV movies usually weren’t especially good in those days. I didn’t know much about Caan’s work, and Billy Dee Williams, his co-star, was yet to become as widely known as “Brian’s Song” would make him.
I loosely knew the story before watching the movie. I knew that Sayers was one of the greatest football players I had ever witnessed. I knew that he and Piccolo had been Bears teammates in the same backfield. I knew Piccolo had died. There was so much I did not know.
So we watched and the film not only drew us in, but gripped us and gripped us tightly. The late William Blinn’s award-winning script was powerful. But it was the acting — Caan’s Piccolo, Williams’ Gale Sayers and Jack Warden’s George Halas — that made the film so compelling.
Blinn’s script won an Emmy. Warden won a Peabody Award for best supporting actor. Caan and Williams were both nominated in the best leading actor category. Neither won, and I am not sure how you would have awarded one over the other. Both were terrific.
You probably know the story: Piccolo and Sayers are teammates, Sayers by far the more talented of the two. They become friends. Sayers, a generational athlete, is injured and Piccolo takes his place in the lineup and is the star of a huge Bears’ victory. Meanwhile, Piccolo helps Sayers in his recovery, even challenging him in a race in which Sayers stumbles, but still wins. Piccolo switches positions to fullback and becomes a starter in the same Bears backfield as Sayers.
But then Piccolo begins to lose weight and his performance declines. He is diagnosed with cancer, loses a lung and eventually his life. There are so many poignant scenes filled with pathos and often humor.
Sayers and the Bears are about to play a huge game while the critically ill Piccolo is hospitalized. Sayers challenges the team to win the game for Piccolo, a feat they can’t quite pull off. When the players visit the hospital afterward, Piccolo teases them that the line in the old Ronald Reagan movie wasn’t, “Let’s lose one for the Gipper.”
By then, we were laughing through watery eyes. Then came the scene in which Sayers, being presented the Halas Award as the Bears’ most courageous player, tells the crowd they have chosen the wrong player, that he was accepting for his friend, Brian Piccolo. “I love Brian Piccolo,” Sayers says, struggling for the words, “and I’d like all of you to love him, too. And tonight, when you hit your knees, please ask God to love him.”
By then, the three of us were sobbing, Mama openly while Bobby and I tried to hide our emotions, which neither of us did very well.
A day or two later, our good pal Tim Floyd, the future famous basketball coach, was visiting and Mama told him about the movie and about how Bobby and I cried like babies. Tim laughed and laughed and said something like, “Real men don’t cry.”
Flash forward a few months to the next summer. The re-runs are on and “Brian’s Song” is playing again on the TV in our den. This time, Floyd, future coach of the Chicago Bulls and New Orleans Hornets, has joined us to watch. I made sure of that.
We get toward the end of the movie. Billy Dee WIlliams is making his speech. Mama, Bobby and I hear a muffled sob from across the room. We look. Tim has his head buried in one of the pillows on our couch.
My mama, bless her heart, gets the points for what she said during the closing credits: “Timmy Floyd, what was that you said last year about real men?…”
The clinic – a box perched on wheels and painted with trees and people – sat in the gravel and grass parking lot of a burger and wings joint called VNV Sports Bar and Grill, the only restaurant in Metcalfe, Mississippi. Choosing where to park it in this Delta town of about 1,000 people had not been difficult.
“It’s the main strip in Metcalfe,” said Antoinette Roby, a community health worker and driver at Plan A. The mobile clinic offers pap smears and mammograms, testing for sexually transmitted diseases and COVID-19 vaccines, contraceptives and blood pressure tests– all for free.
Since April 2021, Roby and her colleague Juliet Thomas have criss-crossed the Delta in the clinic, aiming to expand access to primary and reproductive health care in a region where many people hear “clinic” and assume they can’t afford to step inside.
Mississippi has one of the highest rates of uninsured people in the nation, a statistic exacerbated by state leaders’ refusal to expand Medicaid. About 20% of adults in Washington County, where Metcalfe is located, don’t have health insurance.
Family planning is a key part of the clinic’s work, as they counsel patients – especially women – on contraceptive methods and field questions about fertility and pregnancy. And now, with the end of legal abortion in Mississippi, the stakes of that work are rising.
“It’s not going to interrupt what we do,” Thomas said of the ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which means abortion will be illegal in almost all cases in Mississippi. But it does spotlight the dire need for contraceptives, pregnancy-related care, and primary care in the poorest part of the poorest country in the United States.
After the leak of the draft opinion showing the U.S. Supreme Court was poised to overturn Roe, Plan A announced plans to distribute emergency contraception and take-home pregnancy tests to patients. The clinic is also adding ultrasounds and pregnancy- and miscarriage-related services.
“Mississippi has one of the highest rates of maternal mortality in the country, and banning abortion will lead to an increase in high-risk pregnancies with no plans to reduce the barriers to care faced by pregnant people,” the clinic said in a press release in May. “Plan A will help to fill that gap.”
In the wake of the overturning of Roe, Republican leaders in Mississippi are touting a “new pro-life agenda.” The leaders of the state House and Senate have established committees to recommend plans to help mothers, children and families.
They have mentioned trying to improve the state’s abysmal foster care, which is the subject of a federal lawsuit, and child support systems. But they have avoided endorsing measures like Medicaid expansion that would make comprehensive health care more affordable and accessible for Mississippians, and that doctors say would make moms, babies and families healthier. Last year the Legislature refused to extend Medicaid coverage for new moms, even as other conservative Deep South states did so.
Attorney General Lynn Fitch, Gov. Tate Reeves, and Speaker Philip Gunn, R-Clinton, have all described the state’s “pregnancy resource centers” as a key way to support pregnant women and new moms. The centers offer ultrasounds and pregnancy tests but generally no other medical services and are not regulated by the health department. And there are only a handful in the Delta; the closest one to Metcalfe is in Cleveland, a 45-minute drive away.
While state leaders hold press conferences celebrating the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Roby and Thomas keep seeing their patients.
Metcalfe is a regular stop on their rotation through the Delta: They visit every fourth Tuesday, rain or shine, at the invitation of Rev. Arthur Thomas, head of the town’s Mayoral Health Council.
On a Tuesday afternoon, Arthur Thomas sat inside Metcalfe’s City Hall, a squat brick building, working the polls for a runoff primary election in which no one so far had voted. Thomas said he had wanted the mobile unit to come to Metcalfe because many residents are low-income, and medical facilities in Greenville aren’t accessible without a car.
“It should be a right for everyone to have it,” Thomas said of health care. “But everyone can’t have it, and that’s where Plan A clinic comes in.”
Plan A’s mobile clinic is parked in Metcalfe, Miss., Tuesday, June 28, 2022. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
When Caroline Weinberg – a New Yorker with an M.D. and a background in public health – first conceived of Plan A, the goal was to help meet needs for family planning care in rural, underserved communities.
Mississippi has one of the country’s highest rates of unplanned pregnancy. In 2020, it claimed the highest rate of teen pregnancy. The state has the highest infant mortality rate in the country. It also has a high overall maternal mortality rate, and Black Mississippians are nearly three times likelier than white Mississippians to die of a pregnancy-related complication.
For years, the state’s federally funded family planning offerings have fallen short. Until early 2022, the state health department got the grant to administer the program and used it to provide services at the county health departments. A report commissioned by the department to evaluate its own work found serious problems: Long wait times for appointments, inaccurate information about payment, clinics running out of condoms, and patients being told that they couldn’t choose what contraceptive method they got because “it is up to what the doctor wants.”
Just as reproductive health can’t be separated from health care more generally, barriers to accessing family planning are often the same reasons people struggle to get care at all.
“We’ve fallen into this trap of making it seem like women’s health is a specialty,” Weinberg said. “That’s part of the issue of rural health care – it’s like, ‘Go talk to your lady doctor about that issue.’ If it’s hard for you to get to the doctor, there’s no reason that everybody shouldn’t be talking about this.”
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So while providing reproductive health care is a priority, Plan A offers as many services as it can. Staff check blood pressure and blood sugar, test for HIV, perform mammograms and pap smears, and provide referrals to providers whose services are as close to free as possible. It costs about $700,000 to run the clinic in Mississippi each year. In the first five months of 2022, the clinic saw 642 patients.
“They come in for one thing, we end up treating them for a whole lot of different things,” Thomas said. “They come in for blood pressure or blood sugar. Then when they start talking, they’re talking about, my feet are swelling, my back hurting. So we have our nurse practitioner come in and go a little bit further.”
About 75% of their patients do not have health insurance.
Roby and Thomas are both Delta natives: Thomas of Greenville, right next to Metcalfe, and Roby of Isola, about an hour away.
The daughter of a teacher and a parks commissioner, Thomas always wanted to stay in the Delta. She worked for the federal government for 15 years.
“I kind of worked my way through the Delta and saw a lot of the problems we have through no fault of the people here,” she said. “A lot of times the trust comes into play – everybody wants to study the Mississippi Delta and everything that goes on, but once the money is gone, people are just left with what they had already.”
Roby initially applied to Plan A as a driver and now serves as a community health worker, too. She spends her free time riding with a motorcycle club; in Metcalfe, she wore a T-shirt from a rally in Perry, Georgia.
Their 230-square-foot mobile clinic consists of two exam rooms, a small bathroom, and a lab space with a minifridge. The walls are decorated with photographs of Delta scenes: cypress lakes and wind-swept fields. The space is efficient, with drawers under the exam tables labeled to indicate they hold patient gowns and speculums. It smells like the citrus disinfectant Thomas and Roby use to wipe everything down at the start and end of each day.
When patients arrive, they climb the stairs to the unit and pick up an intake form listing the clinic’s services.
In Metcalfe, some people take their clipboard over to the grocery store next door to stand in the air conditioning while they fill out the paperwork.
At Frank’s Quick Stop, in business for 37 years, the counter is stacked with pink pickled eggs, pickled pigs’ feet and hot dill pickles. There used to be other places to buy snacks and some groceries in town, but they didn’t last, and now Frank’s is referred to in Metcalfe as “the store.” All day, people walk in and out to chat and buy cold drinks or a $5.89 fish sandwich.
Talk turns to the Delta’s troubles. The region’s population has been falling for decades. Washington County, for example, has lost a third of its residents since 1990. Factories have closed. There are few jobs.
Frank’s was once featured in an Associated Press article about the Delta culinary phenomenon of Kool-Aid pickles, and a print now hangs by the door. The lead photograph shows a young woman, the owner’s niece, smiling behind the counter at Frank’s. She has since moved away.
Metcalfe Alderwoman Etta Christon Washington, whose brother owns VNV Sports Grill, believes her hometown has become less self-sufficient than when she was born in 1964. The Delta can’t depend on the government, she says: Too much red tape, and in recent years the health department closed two of its three clinics in the county.
She describes herself as a resource center, always on the lookout for opportunities to meet needs in Metcalfe, from food to transportation. Plan A is one of those opportunities.
“I was surprised, because I had no idea that there was such services … I had no idea that you could do pap smears and everything on the mobile clinic,” Washington said of the first time she learned about Plan A. “It was mind blowing.”
Desiree Norwood, program coordinator for Plan A, prepares for patients to arrive at the Plan A clinic in Louise, Miss., Friday, July 1, 2022. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
Down the block from Plan A and Frank’s, 48-year-old Beverly Peterson sat outside her home with a few relatives, sipping sodas in the shade. Everyone had some experience with the clinic, whether they’d gotten a COVID vaccine a few months earlier or, in Peterson’s case, a free mammogram.
Without the mobile clinic, she said, “I probably wouldn’t have taken one, because I couldn’t afford it.”
Peterson, a lifelong resident of Metcalfe, was on Medicaid until her daughter turned 18 about four years ago. Since then, she has gone to the doctor every six months, paying $50 out of pocket to get her thyroid checked, because she knows if she doesn’t, the potential consequences are serious.
Oher needs go unmet. Her anxiety medication isn’t expensive, but the quick doctor’s visit to get the prescription is a cost she can’t justify, so she’s gone without it for months now.
“If I’m not just really hurting, hurting, I get something over the counter,” she said. “After I got off Medicaid, I just stopped going to the doctor.”
She was grateful for Plan A, but it wasn’t a complete solution. Peterson was trying to figure out how she was going to come up with the money to get a tooth pulled.
“Put some dentists in there,” she said. “They need a dentist.”
Thomas and Desiree Norwood, Plan A program coordinator and the mayor of Sunflower, said they’ve talked about adding dental and mental health services.
“There’s always going to be more,” Norwood said.
Plan A’s mobile clinic is parked in Metcalfe, Miss., Tuesday, June 28, 2022. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
At 5:48 p.m., nearly an hour after the clinic was supposed to close, Roby and Thomas came outside to walk a patient to her car. A regular at Plan A, she had called to find out where they would be. She made it to Metcalfe a little after 5 p.m., but Roby and Thomas didn’t think of turning her away.
“If they see those stairs, they come up,” Thomas said. “If they come, we’ve got to see ‘em.”
“For instance, here – we won’t be back for another month,” Roby said. “What if their blood pressure is up?”
It’s not uncommon for the Plan A staff to check someone’s blood pressure and send them directly to the emergency room because they’re at risk of a heart attack.
With this patient, they had taken their time “educating and talking,” as Roby put it. It’s common for patients to need more than medical services, and Roby and Thomas are happy to connect them with resources and information, like how to call for free transportation as a Medicaid enrollee. They sometimes give patients their personal cell phone numbers so they can call with questions.
By the time they left Metcalfe, they had seen nine patients and provided every service they offer except for mammograms – a good day, Thomas and Roby agreed.
When the clinic launched in 2021, Plan A staff spent a lot of time meeting with local leaders and trying to find the “movers and shakers” in each Delta town who could help them build relationships. That’s still a key part of their work, but things have changed.
“Last year, we were calling, calling, calling,” Thomas said. “This year, they’re calling us.”
We continue to keep Mississippians informed because we – like you – love Mississippi.
Last week’s news that Southern Cal and UCLA are joining the Big Ten Conference caused jaws to drop and alarm bells to ring across college athletics.
But not here.
Rick Cleveland
My reaction? Of course USC and UCLA are joining the Big Ten. Makes as much sense as most anything else that is happening these days in the college sports world. Think about it: USC and UCLA are joining the Big Ten, which is actually the Big Fourteen and hasn’t been the Big Ten since 1990 when Penn State became the 11th team in the Big Ten. Now, the Big Ten will actually be the Big Sixteen until the next shoes (probably Oregon and Washington) drop.
This is a college sports world gone mad. Geography doesn’t matter. Dollars do. Actually, dollars are all that do.
Southern Cal and UCLA are traveling across the continent to join the Big Ten because it means more money. TV pays the bills and the Big Ten TV package becomes millions upon millions more lucrative when the California market is added.
Never mind that UCLA and Southern Cal athletes will now spend about as much time in airplanes as they do classrooms. College athletics long ago quit have anything to do with education. It’s about the dollar. Period.
At least the NFL, the money-making-est sports organization in the world, keeps geography in mind. That’s why we have in north, south, east and west divisions in both the NFC and the AFC.
Only in college sports would you have Missouri in the Southeastern Conference’s Eastern Division, flying over Arkansas, Mississippi and Alabama to play a division game in Florida.
Tradition used to matter in college sports. It doesn’t matter much now. Think about this: Southern Cal might soon be the visiting team in the Rose Bowl.
Or think about this: The UCLA gymnastics team could now be competing in a conference match against Rutgers 2,750 miles from home in Piscataway, N.J. The match could be on a Sunday at noon in New Jersey, which would be like 9 a.m. California time for the Bruins. Win or lose, it will be a long, long ride home. That Monday morning kinesiology class will require two alarm clocks.
And I wonder how the baseball and softball coaches at Southern Cal and UCLA feel about all this. That March road series at Michigan or Northwestern will require bigger suitcases and considerably more layering. Jet lag will be the least of the worries. It could be an even bigger problem for Michigan and Northwestern coaches when their teams play February or March conference games in L.A. Michigan and Northwestern players might not want to board the jet to take them back to their still frigid homes.
I do not want to sound like an old fogey about all this. But the Biblical verse — “For the Love of money is the root of all evil” — rarely has rung more true. I am not sure where college athletics is heading, but I don’t like the looks of much of any of it. That includes NIL and the one-time transfer rule.
We are fast reaching the point — or maybe we have reached it — where college coaches are going to recruit talent from other college teams as much as they do from high schools and junior colleges. And it is changing the way coaches coach. It used to be “my way or the highway.” Now, given that choice, the athlete likely will choose the highway — or, just as likely, a jet. The school just down the road or across the country might offer a better NIL deal.
Where does all this leave the Mississippi schools? Good question. Ole Miss and Mississippi State are grandfathered in to the SEC. That’s not going to change. But with the NIL and one-time transfer rule, winning in the SEC will not get any easier, especially not with Texas and Oklahoma presumably joining the SEC Western Division. Money may well be the root of all evil, but it does buy better players. And now that “buying” players is legal, the rich will only get richer.
Southern Miss has found a new home in the Sun Belt Conference, a league of like-minded schools that is more like a throwback in today’s world of college athletics. It is a regional league where buses will far outnumber airplanes. Yes, its talent pool will be raided from time to time by bigger conferences with bigger NIL deals. So it goes.
From time to time, Jackson State has entertained the thought of leaving the SWAC to move “up” in the college athletic world. Be careful, I say. I am not so sure whether up is up any more.
My question for the day: Could it be that the Ivy League had it right all along?
Working on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic was a challenge for staff at the Singing River Health Care system — a challenge only made harder by staffing issues.
Singing River is hoping to tackle the statewide health care worker shortage directly through its new apprenticeship programs.
The Singing River Health Care Workforce Academy is a community-centered program on the Gulf Coast that aims to create more opportunities for people to become qualified health care professionals.
The academy offers apprenticeships, such as a surgical tech internship and a certified nurse assistant internship, to create opportunities for people to continue working while they learn and accelerate their careers.
Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College is working with Singing River on the licensed practical nurse (LPN) apprenticeship program, which hospital officials say is the first of its kind in the state. Jessica Lewis, director of human resources at the hospital, hopes that other hospitals will soon adopt the apprenticeship model to generate more career opportunities for Mississippians interested in working in the medical field.
“We’re putting a huge investment into really training (people) and filling those gaps. The critical piece is making sure that we develop and build pipelines, because we’re going to continue to have staffing crises,” she said. “We have to go out there teaching and training our own.”
The Singing River Health Care system will create more than 220 jobs while educating more than 1,000 students as a result of the program, according to the hospital.
Katherine Klonoski, left, Sonja Jackson and Kellie Powell practice measuring blood pressure and phlebotomy during the Health Care Academy Workforce Development Programs at Singing River Health System in Pascagoula, Miss., Friday, June 24, 2022. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
Students use practice care techniques during the Health Care Academy Workforce Development Programs at Singing River Health System in Pascagoula, Miss., Friday, June 24, 2022. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
Allison Gordon, left, and Kellie Powell practice CPR during the Health Care Academy Workforce Development Programs at Singing River Health System in Pascagoula, Miss., Friday, June 24, 2022. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
Kim Hunt, professional development nurse educator, teaches students about the different chambers of the heart during the Health Care Academy Workforce Development Programs at Singing River Health System in Pascagoula, Miss., Friday, June 24, 2022. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
Students listen as their instructor teaches about the different chambers of the heart during the Health Care Academy Workforce Development Programs at Singing River Health System in Pascagoula, Miss., Friday, June 24, 2022. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
Sandra Fitch, from left, Sonja Jackson and Katherine Klonoski practice phlebotomy during the Health Care Academy Workforce Development Programs at Singing River Health System in Pascagoula, Miss., Friday, June 24, 2022. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
Sandra Fitch, from left, Sonja Jackson and Katherine Klonoski practice phlebotomy during the Health Care Academy Workforce Development Programs at Singing River Health System in Pascagoula, Miss., Friday, June 24, 2022. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
Students can start in the academy as early as high school so that young people can get exposure to the medical field and make informed decisions about their career paths. Singing River has partnered with the Jackson County and Harrison County high schools to engage 11th and 12th grade students to participate in pre-apprenticeship programs and plans to expand to schools in Hancock County.
Singing River will offer immediate employment to qualified graduates in high-demand critical specialties such as certified nurse assistants, surgical techs and licensed practical nurses.
Kellie Powell, a 33-year-old mother of three originally from Texas, has worked at Singing River as a medical assistant for nine months. She will graduate from the LPN program Sept. 2023.
Prior to joining Singing River, she lived in New Orleans and worked for Ochsner Health System. After being displaced by Hurricane Ida, she describes coming to Mississippi as “a blessing in disguise.”
“My children’s father and I packed for three to four days to evacuate and discovered that we couldn’t go back home after the storm,” she said.
She went to Gautier with her family. Her employers at Ochsner told her to find a branch in the Gulf Coast area and start working.
“I found Singing River in Pascagoula and they hired me on the spot … I didn’t have any interview clothes or a car.”
She hopes completing the program will help her pay off her student loan debt from when she attended college.
“This program is the golden ticket. When I graduate, I will be debt free.”
After graduating, she will sign a contract agreeing to work at Singing River for at least two years after completing the program.
The hospital plans to build a new facility to house this program, which is currently operating in a temporary location, in addition to a community health education center.
Construction for this facility near Ocean Springs Hospital will begin soon and is being paid for with a $7 million grant from the state, Lewis said. Topics explored in the community health education center will include tobacco cessation, first aid, parenting, breastfeeding and childbirth.
There will also be an emphasis on mental health, Lewis said. All of these programs will also be offered virtually through their digital medicine program, a program made by Ochsner Hospital System, that allows individuals to manage one’s high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes insulin from your phone and provides telehealth visits.
When the last patient went inside Mississippi’s only abortion clinic on the final day of legal abortion in the state, escort Derenda Hancock packed up stray bottles of Coca-Cola and water next to the driveway she has guarded for nine years. Wearing aviator sunglasses that hid her eyes, she leaned silently against the pink stucco wall for a moment. Then she walked away.
The Jackson Women’s Health Organization provided abortions for the last time on Wednesday afternoon. Starting Thursday, Mississippi will permit abortions only in cases where the pregnancy threatens the mother’s life — a medically imprecise standard that may force doctors to wait for patients to deteriorate before providing care — or when the pregnant person reported a rape to law enforcement.
The clinic, which also offers contraceptives and other services, will likely close altogether. Director Shannon Brewer and a few staff members plan to move to New Mexico to open Pink House West.
The Pink House spent much of its existence fighting for its survival against laws and regulations designed to make it as difficult and complicated as possible to provide abortions in Mississippi. In the end, the facility at the heart of the case that overturned Roe was able to stay open longer than many others in the region of the country most hostile to abortion rights.
Since Texas banned almost all abortions last September, the clinic parking lot had regularly been crowded with Louisiana and Texas license plates. And for the last 10 days, it became an unlikely island of abortion access when other southeastern states halted the procedure almost immediately after the Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
When Brewer arrived at work around 8:15 a.m. on Wednesday, the clinic escorts gathered in the parking lot. They applauded as she walked inside.
“That’s right, the hero of our age,” said John Busby, an anti-abortion protester.
“Turn to Jesus, Shannon! Repent,” shouted another frequent protester, Gabriel Olivier, who remained sitting in his camp chair across the street from the parking lot.
For the last four years, Busby has spent at least three days a week protesting at the Pink House. But he’s not satisfied with its closure.
He plans to travel to other states where abortion is still permitted, to preach and protest outside clinics there. And he wants to see Mississippi pass a “full abolishment” of abortion—no exceptions for rape or to protect the life of a pregnant person.
Cases where a pregnancy endangers the pregnant person’s life are “almost nonexistent,” he said. Between 1 and 2% of pregnancies – at least 350 pregnancies in Mississippi every year – implant outside the uterus and cannot be carried to term. They are always fatal for the fetus and unless treated can cause life-threatening bleeding. Busby doesn’t think abortion should be allowed in those cases.
“The baby either can’t be sustained because of an ectopic pregnancy, or it’s gonna, by a miracle of God, it’s gonna full term…What we do as a human race, we want to say, we know better than what God knows.”
As the first patients arrived before 10 a.m., Dr. Cheryl Hamlin, the Boston-based OB-GYN working her final three-day shift at the clinic, came outside to speak to reporters. Anti-abortion protesters chanted through megaphones while supporters of the clinic blew kazoos.
When Hamlin started working in Mississippi five years ago, inspired to do something after the election of President Donald Trump, she never expected she’d be at the clinic on its last day providing abortions.
“There will be women who will die because their OB/GYN or family doctor or whatever is afraid to treat them because they’re afraid of the implications,” she said. “‘It’s not quite life threatening yet. This may be only 50% life threatening. Or 75. Is that enough? Does it have to be 100%?’”
Sonnie Bane arrived around 9:30 Wednesday morning. She came to sit outside the clinic because the abortion she got there in late 2016 saved her life, she said. She was in an abusive relationship, and while “it wasn’t the easiest decision for me to make,” she’s never regretted it.
“I wouldn’t be the same person and I love who I am today,” she said.
Since the Court’s ruling in Dobbs, she’s spent most days sitting outside the clinic with a group. They’ve mostly gotten supportive honks from passers-by.
“I want someone to drive by that needs to see it,” she said.
Even with the clinic open in Mississippi, access was limited. The mandatory 24-hour waiting period between visits could force people to miss two days of work, especially if they lived far from Jackson. The state already had one of the lowest abortion rates in the country, and many Mississippians traveled out of state for abortions. Reproductive rights advocates say some people believed abortion was illegal already.
Now, people will have to travel hundreds of miles to get an abortion or order pills online—a practice which is prohibited by Mississippi law but which will likely be difficult for law enforcement to stop.
Advocates expect the closest clinic to Jackson will be in Carbondale, Ill., a more than six-hour drive away.
The abortion ban will disproportionately affect Black women in Mississippi, who get about three-quarters of all abortions in the state. Black women also face much greater risks during pregnancy: They are about three times likelier than white women in the state to die of a pregnancy-related complication.
Though southeastern abortion funds have vowed to keep helping patients pay for the procedure and travel expenses, they face legal uncertainty. The Yellowhammer Fund in neighboring Alabama has paused financial assistance for abortion while its lawyers assess whether the organization and patients could incur legal risks, deputy director Kelsea McLain said in an interview with Mississippi Today.
About 12 hours after the Court issued its ruling in Dobbs, she had to call a patient whose appointment was the next day to tell them Yellowhammer couldn’t help pay for the procedure.
“It’s become so accustomed to them that they run into barriers and obstacles that running into another one is not even that big a deal,” she said. “It’s expected. I don’t think it would have made it better, for people to lash out, curse me — but it just broke my heart even more that these people are depending on us. We were revoking that support, and they just understood.”
The Atlanta-based organization ARC-Southeast, which supports people across the South, including Mississippi, has not paused funding.
During the final days before Mississippi’s trigger ban took effect, the clinic escorts were exhausted. Hancock had started showing up at 4:30 a.m. to make sure she got there before the protesters.
“This last year has felt like the other eight put together,” she said.
On Tuesday morning, she sat in a green camp chair next to the driveway, with a waist-high orange and white traffic cone next to her. Olivier, who had started referring to himself as her “media partner” came over.
“What would we be if there was no man here?” escort Kim Gibson said. “At peace.”
“Chaos,” Olivier retorted. “Men run the world. Even just the small amount of authority you’ve been given, look how terrible things have gotten.”
Coleman Boyd, such a frequent presence outside the Pink House that the security guards working there since the ruling have nicknamed him “Ringleader,” came over and started jostling the cone. He sang “Celebration” by Kool & the Gang.
The three security guards who have spent 10 hours a day outside the clinic since June 24 had dubbed the experience “interesting.” One of the anti-abortion protesters repeatedly referred to his “colored” wife over the loudspeaker, and another had told one of the guards, a Black man, that he hadn’t had a father in his life.
“It’s almost like babysitting little children,” said Keswic Farrar. “That’s both sides included. It’s amazing how much they know about each other. They spend so much time hating each other. … apparently everyone’s opinion is the right one.”
“How you gonna insult someone?” said another security guard, who wanted to be identified as KJ. “If your goal is to argue facts and things like that, you can’t resort to petty insults and then say, ‘I’m doing this ‘cause God loves you.’ That ain’t how that works.”
Before 3 p.m. on Wednesday, Gibson looked across the street from the parking lot and recognized 79-year-old Dr. Beverly McMillan. In 1975, McMillan started working at the state’s first freestanding abortion clinic.
“I hope you’re happy for what you have wrought here,” Gibson called to her. “Women dying and babies in trash cans.”
McMillan said that she grew up Catholic but was secular when she moved to Jackson. A year after she started working at the abortion clinic, she encountered Christ and returned to reading the Bible. Then, after performing an abortion, she saw a “perfectly formed little biceps.” It reminded her of her youngest son, a 4-year-old who liked to show off his arm muscle.
“I got this sadness,” she said. “I couldn’t do abortions any more.”
By 1980, she had gotten involved in a local pro-life organization. She has regularly prayed the rosary outside the Pink House since it opened. She understood why Gibson had shouted at her, she said, and she would pray for her, too.
Another demonstrator came over to talk.
“Are you the lady that Kim was hollering at earlier?” he asked. Yes, McMillan said.
“It’s a glorious day,” he said. “I just feel like, go ahead and yell all you want, you know, because it’s a great day.”
Following the U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn a federal right to abortion, two Mississippi district attorneys say they will not prosecute those who seek, provide or help someone obtain an abortion.
Hinds County District Attorney Jody Owens and District Attorney Shameca Collins, who represents the sixth district for Adams, Amite, Franklin and Wilkinson counties, signed a joint statement published by Fair and Just Prosecutions.
They join 90 district attorneys and state attorneys general from 31 states who pledged to use discretion not to criminalize personal healthcare decisions. With the overturn of Roe v. Wade, individual states can decide how to legislate abortion.
“All members of our communities are our clients – they elected us to represent them and we are bound to fight for them as we carry out our obligation to pursue justice,” prosecutors said in the June 24 statement. “Our legislatures may decide to criminalize personal healthcare decisions, but we remain obligated to prosecute only those cases that serve the interests of justice and the people.”
Prosecutors said enforcing abortions bans goes against obligations and interests they are sworn to uphold. They also said it will wear down trust in the legal system, take resources away from prosecuting other crimes, retraumatize victims of sexual violence and hinder prosecutors’ ability to hold people accountablefor sexual violence.
Collins, elected in 2019 and whose office is in Natchez, did not respond to a request for comment. Owens, also elected in 2019 and whose office is in Jackson, was not available for comment.
Other district attorneys who signed the joint statement represent major cities in the South including Atlanta, Austin, Birmingham, Dallas, Durham, Nashville, New Orleans and San Antonio.
Mississippi is one of 26 statesthat have or are poised to ban or restrict abortion in most circumstances following the Supreme Court decision, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research and policy organization. Most of those states are in the South.
The state is also one of 13 with trigger laws that can go into effect now thatRoe v. Wadehas been overturned, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Under those laws, people who seek abortions or those who perform them can face felony charges and prison time.
In Mississippi, a 2007 trigger law will outlaw abortion with two exceptions: when the mother’s life is in danger or a rape has been reported to law enforcement.
Anyone who performs an abortion here, other than the pregnant person, can face between one and 10 years in prison, according to state code.
Mississippi’s trigger law is set to take effect this week after Attorney General Lynn Fitch certified the law June 27.
A day after the law certification, the Jackson Women’s Health Organization – Mississippi’s only abortion clinic and the subject of the case that resulted in the Roe decision – filed a lawsuit that argued the trigger law is invalid because of a 1998 state Supreme Court decision said abortion is protected under the state constitution.
After a Tuesday hearing, Judge Debbra Halford denied the clinic’s request to block Mississippi’s trigger ban from going into effect.
Not all of the prosecutors agree about abortion on a personal or moral level, but they said in the joint statement they stand together because they have a responsibility not to use the criminal legal system against people for their medical decisions.
“Criminalizing abortion will not end abortion; it will simply end safe abortions, forcing the most vulnerable among us — as well as medical providers — to make impossible decisions,” the prosecutors said.
Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch, who recently argued in a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that the last half-century of women’s economic advancement negates the need for safe and legal abortion, has closed the gender wage gap.
For white women, anyway.
White women working in the attorney general’s office have seen a median salary increase of a whopping $9,500 in the last few years since Fitch took office, the only demographic to see such a bump. While replacing many of former Attorney General Jim Hood’s employees, Fitch hired so many more white women in higher level positions that women now earn more, on average, than white men at the agency.
The median salary of Black women working for Fitch, however, has dropped about $1,200 since January of 2019, even as inflation soars.
Fitch, the only woman serving in statewide office, has loudly advocated for equal pay as a necessary balance to her other goal of outlawing abortion.
“The task now falls to us to advocate for the laws that empower women,” Fitch said in a statement last Friday after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, all but ensuring abortion would become illegal in Mississippi.
But to some advocates, data from her own office could demonstrate which women she’s talking about.
“She says that she wants to be supportive of all women and we all need pay equity, but she’s not practicing what she says,” said Cassandra Welchlin, head of the Mississippi Black Women’s Roundtable, in response to Mississippi Today’s findings. “And Black women are not important to her. Their jobs are not important. Their salaries are not important. And that’s really wrong and really disappointing – completely disappointing – that she would say that she champions equal pay, but yet her own policies, pay practices are not equitable.”
Welchlin also argues that the equal pay law Fitch has touted, which takes effect July 1, actually makes it harder to prove gender discrimination.
Mississippi Today analyzed five snapshots of salary data from the attorney general’s office, one for each year from 2018 to 2022. The data showed that most recently in April, the median salary of 109 white women at Fitch’s office was nearly $73,000, up from $63,000 at the start of Hood’s last year in office, while the median salary of 53 Black women was just over $44,000, down from about $45,500. There were 100 white women and 57 Black women working in the office in January of 2019.
The pay gap between white and Black women in Fitch’s office – where Black women earn 61 cents for every dollar a white woman earns – dwarfs the national pay gap between white and Black women workers, which is 83 cents on the dollar.*
Michelle Williams, a spokesperson for Fitch, rejected the notion that selecting significantly more white women for higher level positions was intentional. She said statistics that show Black women more heavily represented in lower paying jobs are irrelevant and simply reflect the educational attainment and experience of the applicant pool.
“That's not General Fitch. That is a statement about where these women were when they got to this point, and that's not what General Fitch is doing,” Williams said. “General Fitch is doing what she can now with the tools that she has to empower them and to increase their salaries and give better opportunities within the office.”
Carol Burnett, a longtime reverend and director of the Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative, has spent decades working to improve policies and facilitate career opportunities for working mothers in Mississippi. The Roe decision Fitch helped usher is a blow to Burnett’s work.
“So much of the ground we've lost on women's access to reproductive health has also been the result of a decades-long, big lie put forward by the right-wing to try to erode public support for this incredibly important health care issue for women,” Burnett said. “And the loss of that is going to fall on the backs of women, and it's going to fall most heavily on the backs of low-income women of color. And the consequences are going to be forced birth that imposes a lifelong economic consequence for the women that are being forced into giving birth against their will by people who feel like wearing a mask is an imposition of individual rights.”
Mississippi was the last state in the nation to implement an equal pay law, which is supposed to give women greater avenues to legally challenge pay disparities among men and women who do the same work. Mississippi lawmakers passed this law in the most recent legislative session.
But longtime advocates for working women complain that nuances in the new state law, which permits employers to take into account an employee’s pay history, continuity of employment and negotiation attempts when setting salaries, may actually reinforce wage discrimination. The law took effect July 1.
“We will take a giant leap forward in closing the 27% pay gap – a pay gap that makes it harder for working women and their families, that leads to young Mississippi women taking their talents beyond our borders, and that perpetuates the cycle of poverty in our State,” Fitch said when the equal pay bill was signed.
In her own office, white women have fared so well that the average woman’s salary is now about $1,400 or 2% more than the average man’s, but Black women earn $19,429 or about 30% less than the average man, according to a snapshot from April of this year. In January of 2019 under Hood, white women earned $1,135 less than the average man and Black women earned $18,645 less.
Since then, the attorney general’s office has lost a net of 12 employees, while gaining nine white women.
The 27% pay gap Fitch cites is primarily driven by the type of jobs women, and particularly Black women, hold – and the value that society and the economy places on that type of work – as opposed to unequal pay for the same work. Fitch was able to close the gender wage gap in her office not just by paying women the same or more as men, but by hiring more of them in higher level positions, giving more women the opportunity to serve in roles historically dominated by men.
But when examining the salaries of employees in the same position, slight pay disparities remain. The most common job at Fitch’s office in April was “Attorney II.”
The 33 women holding that job earn $5,000 less on average than the 18 men with the same position. The seven Black women in that position earn even less, $72,156, compared to the median salary of $73,336 for 26 white women, $77,307 for 15 white men and $79,310 for three Black men.
Under Hood, pay disparities existed, but they didn’t always fall as heavily on Black women. In the most common position at the office in January of 2019, Special Assistant to the Attorney General, white men earned the most; Black women earned 98 cents for every dollar a white man earned; Black men earned 96 cents; and white women earned 95 cents.
Fitch has since reorganized the office, changing position titles and categorizing attorneys into three tiers. Williams said Fitch has embraced a new project led by the Mississippi State Personnel Board to create a more fair and equitable system for employee classification and compensation, which took effect Jan. 1. A new law that raises the cap of the attorney general’s pay from $108,960 to $150,000 also raises the cap for staff attorneys to allow the office to pay higher, more competitive wages starting July 1.
Williams said these efforts apply to women working in lower level positions, who have received pay raises under Fitch.
“Those people had been completely forgotten under the Hood administration. They hadn't been getting any raises,” Williams said. “... General Fitch has brought them all up. She's standardized her salaries. She's increased their salaries. And she's given them a better position and better voice and empowered them in their positions that they've got now.”
“You can’t see that in the numbers but I will tell you right now that that is exactly what is happening here right now,” she added.
Williams calculated the mean pay for all attorneys in the office under Hood and Fitch and came up with a similar analysis: White women in that position, which had historically made the least, saw salary increases of nearly $6,000 compared to virtually no difference for Black women or men attorneys.
“We are hiring a lot of younger attorneys, giving them a great opportunity to start their career in the law,” Williams said by email. “Yet, our salaries are still keeping pace with what AG Hood was paying. Again, I think that goes back to our overall goal of trying to pay all of our professionals at more competitive salaries.”
In a state with the highest poverty rate in the nation at nearly 20%, Fitch and other pro-life politicians have acknowledged the need to boost support for women beyond fighting for fair wages.
Fitch’s office has pointed to a new initiative called Her PLAN (Her Pregnancy and Life Assistance Network), a project of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America (formerly Susan B. Anthony List), as the vehicle of these efforts. The plan’s lead organizer is Anja Baker, formerly of the Center for Pregnancy Choices, a Jackson-area crisis pregnancy center, and a contributing fellow to conservative policy think-tank Mississippi Center for Public Policy. Baker joined Fitch at a pro-life rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court building the day of oral arguments in the case in December.
“I would say our rights end the moment someone else’s rights begin,” Baker said, WAPT reported.
The Her PLAN consists of seven components: prenatal diagnosis; material or legal support; financial assistance, work or education; health and wellbeing; care for children; substance abuse recovery and mental health; and mentorship.
The project, which spans across four states, has a team of 11, including Baker in Mississippi – and all 11 appear to be white women.
The plan does not provide services or advocate for policy changes.
Instead, it aims to coordinate existing providers – those that do not refer for abortion – and create a repository of organizations providing resources to women. Mississippi’s directory isn’t public yet; Baker said she is still building relationships with providers and adding them to the list. The directory for Georgia and West Virginia is live, and the map so far contains 485 organizations across the two states – just 12 of which offer actual medical services.
Eight offer work opportunities. Five offer transportation. Four offer child care.
Baker doesn’t do case management or have clients, she told Mississippi Today, “but what I do is I meet with people who do, and then, I would say, 1) try to just identify what it is that they do 2) keeping it in mind to add them to our online directory so that it can be more visible, not just to their own community, but to other service providers as well.”
This doesn’t translate to providing more resources to women in a state with one of the most meager and punitive social safety nets in the nation, but Baker said Her PLAN has identified child care and transportation as two services that are lacking and hopes to aid in expanding access in the future.
To other advocates, abortion access and efforts to achieve economic equality for women, like pay equity, are part of the same conversation.
“Equal pay ensures that people have the economic security they need to decide when and where and how to raise their family or when to have children as they wish. And it’s not a substitute for one's ability to decide if and when to continue a pregnancy,” Welchlin said. “They go together. You can’t separate that.”
Especially in Mississippi, Welchlin continued, racism and white supremacy are at the heart of anti-abortion policymaking.
“Our bodily autonomy is central to our liberation. And if our freedom to make decisions about our own health and bodies are denied, we, as a people, are not fully liberated. It’s rooted in white supremacy or rooted in slavery,” Welchlin said. “Black women, our bodies were used at the control of white plantation owners and white men to produce labor for their fields which contributed to economic security for them and their white families. But not for us.”
*In 2020, the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey estimated the following median earnings for these demographics nationally: white men ($58,000), white women ($46,067), Black men ($42,067), Black women ($38,373). For this story, we only examined people identified as white or Black because the attorney general’s office currently employs just two people of other ethnicities.
Finally back from Omaha and still recovering from a big 4th of July weekend, Rick and Tyler discuss who makes the Atlanta Braves Mississippi’s pro baseball team and what makes this year’s team so good. Plus, Arch Manning signs with Texas and big money pushes USC and UCLA to the Big 10.
