The governor tweeted a red-meat tweet on Wednesday saying, “Today Biden will announce that welders, plumbers, laborers, & other Mississippians (black, white, Hispanic, etc.) will be forced to pay off the debts of Harvard doctorate degree gender studies majors living in California. Why does the Democrat Party hate working people so much?”
Hmm.
Forget that there are a lot of working Mississippians who have college debt.
At the end of the day, whipping of outrage and dividing to conquer may be a winning political tactic — but like starting a fire, it can come back to burn you.
Jefferson Davis County celebrates the 2021 MHSAA Class 3A championship won at Roberts Stadium at Southern Miss.(Keith Warren photo)
The Mississippi High School Activities Association (MHSAA), the governing body of the state’s public schools athletics, begins its 100th year of operations with this football season.
Mississippi high school football is slightly older.
On Dec. 5, 1905, Yazoo City defeated visiting Winona 5-0 in the state’s first high school football game. No, there wasn’t a field goal or a safety. A touchdown counted five points back then. Yazoo scored the only one. There were no shoulder pads, no helmets. The largest players on either team tipped the scales at about 145 pounds. The Winona team and supporters rode a train to Yazoo to play the game. You could look it all up. I did. Details are sketchy. There were no sports writers in Mississippi back then.
The 1905 Winona High Tigers played Yazoo City in Mississippi’s first high school football game.
Little did those country boys from Winona and Yazoo know, but they were starting a tradition that has not only endured but flourished. Mississippi high school football has produced an inordinate amount of the greatest players in the history of the sport. Friday night football has become almost a part of the state’s culture as Sunday morning church services.
Years ago, someone asked me why high school football has such a hold on the state’s citizenry. Why do we love it so much? I wrote my answer in a column. It follows:
It’s the dimly lit, small-town field, carved and leveled from a cow pasture or a bean field, and surrounded by wooden bleachers that sag toward the middle on a Friday night.
It’s the bugs, by the millions, that swarm in the stadium lights.
Rick Cleveland
It’s the mamas who wince and cover their eyes every time their boy gets hit.
It’s the dads who fidget and fret, just as they did in a hospital waiting room 16, 17 or 18 years ago.
It’s the grandmas and grandpas, aunties and uncles who scream themselves hoarse.
It’s the railbirds, too nervous to sit, who prowl the sidelines shouting encouragement to the players, advice to the coaches and things we can’t print here to the men in stripes.
It’s the rivalries: Brandon-Pearl, Booneville-Baldwyn, Mendenhall-Magee, Laurel-Hattiesburg, Forest-Morton, Pisgah-Pelahatchie and so many more.
It’s the cheerleaders, smiling, bouncing, clapping and screaming. They live for this night, and it shows.
It’s the managers and ballboys, often small boys with towels wrapped around their necks, who eagerly race onto and off the field with water bottles throughout the night.
It’s the bands, some large, most small. It’s an often off-key version of our national anthem that fans on the visitors’ side can’t hear.
It’s the majorettes shivering on a chilly November night.
It’s the little kids, behind the bleachers, playing their own spirited games with footballs made of crumpled paper cups, dreaming of their turn on the striped field on the other side of the bleachers.
It’s the homecoming court, daddies escorting daughters, praying their darling’s name will be called.
It’s the smoky aroma of hamburgers and hot dogs grilling just outside the concession stands. It’s a steaming cup of hot chocolate on that first brisk, late October night.
It’s the explosive crack of a linebacker’s shoulder pads crashing into a fullback’s gut.
This was the scene when Madison Central and Brandon played in the 2021 MHSAA Class 6A Football Championshipg. (Keith Warren photo)
It’s the coaches, some who act as generals and others more like drill sergeants. More often than not they are as edgy as a cat in a dog kennel. Wouldn’t you be if your job depended on the capricious bounces of an oblong ball and the fickle focus of teen-aged boys?
It’s coaching legends such as Jim Drewry, Mike Justice, Willis Wright, Ed Steele, Jack Bailey, M.C. Miller, Marion “Chief” Henley, Ricky Black, Mac Barnes, Stanley Blackmon and so many more.
It’s those teen-aged boys, themselves, pounding each other’s shoulder pads, shaking their fists, bouncing on the tips of their toes just prior to kickoff.
It’s the big-bellied, gray-haired head linesman in a striped shirt, telling the 15-year-old wide receiver he needs to back up a little bit.
It’s that brutally hot first game in August when everyone is undefeated and everyone’s expectations are so high.
It’s that first Friday and Saturday in December when the best of the best play in the State Championship games and whole towns follow them.
It’s so rich a heritage: a skinny wide receiver named Rice, a drum major- turned-running back named Payton, a freckle-faced redhead named Archie, a coach’s son named Favre, a mama’s boy named Stevie McNair.
It’s all those broad-shouldered, rangy, raw-boned country boys named Poole.
“Boys, have I found us a game to play,” Buster told Ray and Barney, and, boy, had he. . .It’s the sports writers, from big daily newspapers and small weeklies, thanking heaven someone actually pays them to write about these weekly passion plays.
It’s how important it all is. It’s how entire communities rally around the team. It’s our culture, part of our fabric.
The monkeypox virus has spread to dozens of countries and infected more than 44,000 people worldwide since the outbreak began in May. Nearly 16,000 of those infections have occurred in the United States, and 23 cases have been identified in Mississippi as ofAug. 25. Dr. Paul Byers, state epidemiologist, answered some of the most common questions about the disease for Mississippi Today.
Monkeypox was discovered in 1958. Cases usually occur in areas of West and Central Africa where monkeypox is endemic. Cases have occurred outside of these countries before but have been associated with travel to or exposure to someone who’s been inthese endemic countries. In the current outbreak in the U.S. and worldwide, person-to-person transmission is occurring in countries that don’t normally report monkeypox.
Monkeypox is part of the variola virus family, the virus that causes smallpox. This a naturally occurring virus.
Monkeypox is spread through close personal, often skin-to-skin contact, including direct contact with the body fluids of an infected person, their rash, scabs, or contact with respiratory secretions. Direct contact can include sexual contact, hugging or kissing, or prolonged face-to-face contact. Monkeypox can also be contracted by touching objects, fabrics (clothing, bedding or towels), and surfaces that have been used by someone with monkeypox.
Anyone who engages in close personal or physical contact with an infected person is at risk for contracting monkeypox.
Monkeypox is a virus closely related to smallpox, but not as severe and fatalities are rare. People with certain underlying medical conditions may be at higher risk for severe infections. People with monkeypox develop a rash that may be located on the face, hands, feet, legs, genitals or other areas. Sometimes, people have flu-like symptoms before the rash. Some people get a rash first, followed by other symptoms. Others only experience a rash.
Monkeypox symptoms usually start within 3 weeks of exposure to the virus. If someone has flu-like symptoms, they will usually develop a rash 1-4 days later.
Adults 18 and older are eligible for the vaccine if:
They have been in close physical contact (including household or sexual contact) with someone diagnosed with monkeypox,
Or they identify as gay, bisexual, or as other men who have sex with men, or as a transgender individual, and they report:
Or having multiple or anonymous sex partners,
Or having attended an event or venue where monkeypox may have been transmitted (for instance, by sex or skin-to-skin contact).
Individuals interested in monkeypox vaccine who meet the eligibility criteria are encouraged to call the Monkeypox Call Center at 1-877-978-6453 to determine their eligibility and a make vaccination appointment.
There is an antiviral medication, TPOXX, available for individuals with severe disease or who are at higher risk for severe disease.
Those who are at risk for monkeypox have been in close physical contact (including household or sexual contact) with someone diagnosed with monkeypox. To date, most of the cases have occurred among individuals who identify as gay, bisexual, other men who have sex with men or in transgender individuals. But anyone exposed to monkeypox is at risk for infection.
The Pearl River by Jackson surpassed its flood stage Wednesday night, and officials on Thursday afternoon urged those in downtown and northeast Jackson to start preparing immediately.
The National Weather Service expects the Pearl River to crest on Tuesday, which means that flooding could continue throughout next week as the river drops back below the 28-foot flood stage.
NWS projects the Pearl to crest at 36 feet, which would equal the eighth highest peak ever for the river at Jackson. Of the top ten highest peaks, this would be the only one to occur during the summer. NWS also announced that Wednesday’s rainfall made this month the wettest August ever in the capital city’s history.
Marty Pope, senior hydrologist with the NWS in Jackson, said the area has seen anywhere between five and 15 inches of rain over the last three days, filling up the upper Pearl River basin and its tributaries. The Tuscolameta Creek, an offshoot of the Pearl, is close to record levels near Walnut Grove, Pope said.
WAPT also reported flooding in Canton for the second time in a month, as well as in Scott, Leake and Rankin counties yesterday.
Those in need of sandbags can call the Jackson’s constituent services at 311 to get them delivered or get them in person on Michael Avalon Street. Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba said that information on shelters and which streets may be flooded will be on the city’s website later Thursday.
Mississippi Emergency Management Agency Executive Director Stephen McCraney said the agency is also anticipating impacts to places along the Pearl south of Jackson, including Terry and southern Hinds County, as well as Lawrence and Copiah counties.
MEMA urges anyone who experiences damages to documents those impacts on its self-reporting tool (which can be found at this link) to help receive assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
ROLLING FORK – Patience wore thin in the South Delta Wednesday night.
Several hundred business owners, farmers, families and other Mississippians filled into a high school auditorium, summoned to give their input on flood control solutions. To most of the attendees that night, that solution is the Yazoo Pumps.
Frustration in the room stemmed from decades of what the pumps’ supporters call a broken promise, and what opponents call an illusion.
Sen. Roger Wicker, who hosted the town hall meeting along with Rep. Bennie Thompson, has pressed federal officials in recent months to revisit the pumps proposal after the Environmental Protection Agency shut down the idea for the second time last November.
South Delta residents in attendance for a listening session on flooding in the area. Credit: Staff of Sen. Roger Wicker
Wicker told the audience that the agency, after restoring a veto from 2008, promised an alternative plan to the pumps within 12 to 16 months, or at earliest this coming November.
The federal government first presented the idea of the Yazoo Pumps in 1941 as part of a response to the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.
After decades of planning and design, the EPA first vetoed the idea in 2008, determining that the pumps could drain 67,000 acres of wetlands in the South Delta. The agency briefly brought the project back to life in 2020, when, under President Donald Trump, the EPA decided that an altered proposal that moved the pumps’ location exempted it from the 2008 veto.
Wicker and Thompson – both of whom support the project, although Thompson more tentatively in recent years – sat on the auditorium stage next to Chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality Brenda Mallory, along with representatives from four different federal agencies.
“We want an enduring solution, we recognize that what is going on in this community is unacceptable and not sustainable,” said Mallory, who added that the pumps are “not necessarily what we’re going to need today.”
Backwater flooding surrounds a farm in the lower Mississippi Delta in June, 2019. Credit: Photo by Rory Doyle
Opponents of the pumps, largely scientists and conservation advocates, have pointed to the large price tag, which Thompson has estimated as around half a billion dollars. They also argue that only 17% of the half million acres that flooded in 2019 would have been spared with the pumps, citing data from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
As record-setting rainfall landed across Mississippi Wednesday, many recalled the devastating 2019 backwater flood, which left properties inundated for over six months. Some of the residents who testified on Wednesday said their homes and businesses still need repairs.
“You guys have no idea what it’s like to live through a seven-month flood,” said Ann Dahl, an Eagle Lake resident.
About thirty members of the crowd came up to the microphone over the course of two hours, displaying a wide range of hopes, emotions, and truths about the pumps.
Victoria Garland, who lives in Issaquena County, held back tears as she spoke. In 2019, she had to park at her neighbor’s home and boat through a creek to get to her house.
“The things that we saw on our trips to and from (the house) were indescribable,” Garland said.
“If you’ve never seen deer that just don’t look right, the smell of decaying flesh will more than turn your stomach at eight o’clock in the morning when you’re just trying to leave and go make some money.”
At one point, a commenter asked the audience to raise their hands if they supported building the pumps. A vast majority of hands went up.
Eventually, the crowd directed their feelings towards the bureaucrats on stage.
“Get off your asses,” one of the commentersbegged.
“Have you ever had to fill a sandbag?” another audience member shouted from their seat.
While most in attendance supported the pumps, others were in favor of seeing more options presented to flood victims, such as easements, buyouts, and raising homes.
Chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality Brenda Mallory speaking in front of South Delta residents during a meeting about flooding. Credit: Staff of Sen. Roger Wicker
“‘Finish the pumps’ is a nice slogan,” said Ty Pinkins, an organizer and attorney, after the event. “But one solution won’t satisfy every citizen. Raising a home might be a viable solution for someone.”
The most consistent theme among the speakers on Wednesday was impatience. With generations of families having come and gone since 1941, residents are anxious to see something change in an area where roughly a third of people live in poverty.
“All the political minutia, the arguments between farmers and non-farmers, and all this other crap, I could care less about it,” said Roy Rucker, from nearby Panther Burn. “But what I do care about is the people who live here, and why industry won’t come here.”
Mississippi has opened applications for first-year teachers to apply for loan repayment funds on a first-come, first-serve basis with priority given to those in districts with a teacher shortage.
The Office of Student Financial Aid will award up to 150 first-year, full-time teachers through the William Winter Teacher Loan Repayment Program, which was created by the Legislature in 2021. The program makes loan repayment awards to teachers for up to three years.
Awards are paid to teachers at the end of the school year, and the amount will vary depending on a teacher’s school district. First-year teachers with a valid, five-year state educator’s license who work in a geographical critical shortage district will receive $4,000 in loan repayment, while teachers who do not will receive $1,500.
A school district is declared a geographical teacher shortage area if it has 60 or more teaching positions and 10% or more of them are not appropriately licensed. Not appropriately licensed includes teachers teaching out of field, teachers teaching with no certificate, and long-term substitutes.
A school district with less than 60 teaching positions becomes a geographic shortage area if 15% or more of their teaching staff isn’t appropriately licensed.
Second-year teachers who received funds last year are also eligible to reapply. Second-year teachers in geographical shortage districts will receive $5,000 in loan repayment; those in a non-shortage area will receive $2,500.
To qualify, teachers with undergraduate loans must be graduates of a regionally accredited university and cannot be delinquent or in default.
Teachers who have received funds from other state loan programs targeting the education profession – such as the Critical Needs Teacher Forgivable Loan Program, the William Winter Teacher Forgivable Loan Program, or the Teacher Education Scholars Forgivable Loan Program – are not eligible.
Teachers who don’t qualify might be eligible for Public Service Loan Forgiveness, according to OSFA’s website.
The William Winter Teacher Loan Repayment Program was proposed by Sen. David Blount, D-Jackson, last year as a way to ameliorate the state’s current teacher shortage. It replaced a slew of loan programs targeting teachers that the Legislature had created in the 1990s but left unfunded in recent years.
The hustle and bustle happening at Marshall’s Music and Bookstore is a wondrous sight. Endless customers, deliveries and phones ringing nonstop keep owner Maati Primm on her toes. And she handles all of it herself.
Marshall’s is one of the oldest Black-owned bookstores in the country, and with the exception of the original founder, Greater Pearlie Grove Missionary Baptist Church Pastor Louis Wilcher, the business has been owned and operated on Farish Street in Jackson by Primm’s female family members since 1938. Until the early 1970s, Farish Street was the epicenter of Black businesses in Jackson.
“When I was a little girl, I’d come in here and play bookstore,” Primm says with a smile at the memory. “This was my Disney.”
The bookstore offers a variety of books and music promoting Black history and excellence. It is a sanctuary for those who want to learn history and continue to learn.
“And maybe find out what they didn’t know, what they weren’t taught in school,” Primm said. “It can be an eye-opening, mind-blowing experience.”
An entire wall in the store is dedicated to notable Mississippians who have reached various levels of fame via books they’ve authored, television shows they’ve hosted, activism they’ve led or movies they’ve starred in.
Primm even plays videos of historical events for customers, sharing snippets of history from Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech to Little Richard schooling Arsenio Hall’s audience on their rights as living, breathing human beings.
“My great grandmother was enslaved. When she freed herself, she started a church, school and burial grounds. She was an educator too. To this day, the church and burial grounds still remain,” Primm said, while showing an image taken in 1908 of her grandmother with classmates at Utica Technical Institute.
“Her two daughters, and now I, run this business. We’ve seen some of everything happen economically, socially and racially here and around the world. And Marshall’s is right here, still. That’s commitment,” Primm adds.
“My family has been committed to serving. I’m only three generations born out of enslavement and look at what that commitment has become. I love serving our community, and that’s what Marshall’s Music and Bookstore is … a continuation of the commitment that we have to community.”
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Editor’s note: This story contains graphic language.
The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has affirmed a lower court ruling allowing a provision of the 1890 Mississippi Constitution designed to keep African Americans from voting to remain in place.
The provision places a lifetime ban on voting in most instances on people convicted of certain felonies — crimes that the framers of the 1890 state Constitution said Black Mississippians were more prone to commit.
The framers did not disenfranchise people convicted of murder or rape, for instance, but did strip voting rights of people convicted of several “lesser crimes,” which the writers of the Constitution falsely believed would be committed by African Americans.
The “per curiam” or unsigned opinion of the 5th Circuit said because of actions taken by the Legislature in the 1950s and 1960s allowing voters a chance to amend the constitutional provision, among other things adding murder and rape as disenfranchising crimes, the provision no longer has a racist taint.
“Plaintiffs have not demonstrated that Section 241 as it currently stands was motivated by discriminatory intent or that any other approach to demonstrating the provision’s unconstitutionality is viable,” the majority said.
The majority opinion also cited the Legislature taking up the issue in the 1980s and opting not to change it.
The provision was defended on behalf of the state by the office of Attorney General Lynn Fitch.
The Mississippi Center for Justice among other groups brought the lawsuit on behalf of two Black Mississippians who had lost the right to vote: Roy Harness and Kamal Karriem, convicted of forgery and embezzlement, respectively.
“This provision was a part of the 1890 plan to take the vote away from Black people who had attained it in the wake of the Civil War,” said Rob McDuff, director of the Impact Litigation Project at the Mississippi Center for Justice. “Unfortunately, the Court of Appeals is allowing it to remain in place despite its racist origins. Despite this setback, we will continue this battle and seek review in the U.S. Supreme Court.”
The case was considered by 17 members of the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, considered one of the most conservative judiciaries in the nation. Oral arguments were held in the case in September 2021 in New Orleans.
In a statement, Fitch’s office said, “We are pleased with the court’s decision. As the court noted, ‘Plaintiffs’ proposal that a state constitutional amendment must be voted on word for word to avoid any vestigial racial taint is radically prescriptive…. No subsequent case law supports plaintiffs’ novel, judicially crafted political theory of public consent.’”
”Seven of the 17 members dissented with the majority opinion. Circuit Judge James Graves Jr., previously a member of the Mississippi Supreme Court, wrote a lengthy dissent detailing the state’s sordid racist past, including events from the 1960s when the Legislature allowed the electorate to vote on the constitutional provision. That vote allowed murder and rape to be added as disenfranchising crimes, but did not give the electorate the opportunity to vote on whether other changes needed to be made to the provision or whether the entire Jim Crow provision should be stricken from the Constitution.
As part of Graves’ history of the state’s racial past, he cited progress that led to the election of Black officials — including him as a judge — and led to the replacement of the old Mississippi state flag that contained the Confederate battle emblem as part of its design.
Citing that the state had not been allowed to vote on the provision, Graves wrote: “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.”
In his opening, Graves quoted segregationist former Mississippi Gov. James K. Vardaman.
“There is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter … Mississippi’s constitutional convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the nigger from politics … In Mississippi we have in our Constitution legislated against the racial peculiarities of the Negro … When that device fails, we will resort to something else.”
In Mississippi, people with felony convictions must petition the Legislature to get a bill passed by a two-thirds majority of both chambers to regain voting rights. Normally only a handful (less than five) of such bills are successful each session. There is also the option of the governor granting a pardon to restore voting rights, but no governor has granted pardons since Haley Barbour in 2012.
For a subset of those who lose their rights, the courts can expunge their record. In some instances that expungement includes the restoration of voting rights, while for others it does not. That outcome depends on the preference of the judge granting the expungement.
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.
The Mississippi State Department of Health will host a monkeypox vaccination clinic on Friday inside the Jackson Medical Mall from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Due to the limited supply, the vaccine has only been available to Mississippians aged 18 and older who have had close, intimate contact with an infected person or who are a member of the LBBTQ+ community at high risk for infection.
Mississippi’s initial allotment of the Jynneos monkeypox vaccine included enough doses to inoculate 300 people. The department still does not know how many more doses the state will receive through the rest of the year.
Individuals interested in receiving the monkeypox vaccine are encouraged to call the health department at 1-877-978-6453 to verify their eligibility and make a vaccination appointment, though walk-ins are welcome.
Monkeypox vaccinations are also available by appointment at the health department locations in Lee, Panola, Leflore, Lowndes, Lauderdale, Adams, Hinds, Forrest and Harrison counties.
“If you are at risk for monkeypox, you can help prevent infection by avoiding close skin-to-skin or intimate contact with people who may be infected, and you should be vaccinated if you are eligible,” the health department said in a press release. “If you develop a new or unexplained rash, especially if you have been in close contact with someone who has monkeypox, isolate at home and contact your healthcare provider for testing.”
The monkeypox virus has spread to dozens of countries and infected more than 44,000 people worldwide since the outbreak began in May. Nearly 16,000 of those infections have occurred in the United States, and 21 cases have been identified in Mississippi.
Monkeypox, which is part of the same family of viruses as smallpox, produces many painful symptoms, but deaths from the disease are rare.
Symptoms of monkeypox can include: Fever, headache, muscle aches, swollen lymph nodes, chills and exhaustion. Infected people often experience a rash that looks like pimples, or blisters that appear on many parts of the body. The illness typically lasts for two to four weeks.
The Biden administration declared the monkeypox outbreak a national health emergency on Aug. 4. The World Health Organization declared monkeypox a global public health emergency on July 23, the first time it has taken this step since the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020. Monkeypox, COVID-19 and polio are the only diseases that have this designation.
