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Rapper Rick Ross’ family, which operates several Wingstop franchises, owns the five Mississippi locations the labor department found to be illegally deducting money from workers’ wages, leaving some with take-home pay less than $7.25 an hour. 

The Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division says the Mississippi stores – under Boss Wing Enterprises – made their employees illegally pay for uniforms, safety training, background checks, and even cash register shortages. 

“Restaurant industry employees work hard, often for low wages, and many depend on every dollar earned to make ends meet,” Jackson’s Wage and Hour Division director, Audrey Hall, said in a statement. “The law prevents Boss Wing Enterprises LLC from shifting operating costs to workers … or to allow a worker’s pay to fall below the minimum wage rate.”

The rapper and Clarksdale native’s older sister and assistant, Tawanda Roberts, is listed as the registered agent and manager of Boss Wings Enterprises LLC in Mississippi, according to business records filed with the state. His mother, Tommie Roberts, is also listed. Ross’ family has been growing its number of Wingstop locations for the last decade. 

Last year, the rapper posted to Instagram he gifted his 16-year-old son his first Wingstop franchise.

The DOL says it recovered $51,674 in wages owed to 244 workers and fined the franchise company $62,753 in civil penalties. 

Tawanda Roberts did not respond to a request for comment to her business email regarding the DOL’s investigation. A Boss Wing representative reached by phone told a reporter to contact Wingstop’s corporate public relations department for comment, even though they operate independently. In a statement, Wingstop distanced itself from Boss Wings. 

“The restaurants investigated by the DOL are owned and operated by a franchisee, not Wingstop Restaurants Inc. Our franchise agreement requires all of our franchisees to operate under our operating standards, which requires compliance with all laws and regulations,” the company said in a statement. “We were not previously aware of the DOL action against Boss Wings LLC.” 

During its investigation, the Wage and Hour Division found minimum wage violations because of improper paycheck deductions; overtime violations when the employer deducted wages for safety training and background checks during weeks workers took extra shifts; and violations for failing to maintain proper records of hours workers logged. 

Investigators also found a 15-year-old who illegally worked past 10 p.m. last June. Federal law says young teens cannot work past 7 p.m.

The DOL says it has uncovered more than $34.7 million for more than 29,000 workers in the food service industry during the last fiscal year. At the same time, the Bureau of Labor Statistics continues to report record job openings in the service industry as an influx of service workers begin efforts to organize unions. 

READ MORE: Starbucks employees and others trying to unionize in Mississippi face decades-old hardships

“Employers who do not respect their workers’ rights will likely struggle to retain and recruit the people they need to remain competitive, as workers look for opportunities with employers that do,” Hall said.

Ross and his sister have spoken publicly about their entry into the wing business. The rapper – whose 2006 song “Hustlin” launched him to fame – told Forbes in 2014 that he first thought about opening a franchise of his favorite wing spot shortly after his music career took off. 

Tawanda Roberts is an alum of Mississippi Valley State. Boss Wing lists its offices based in Southaven in state records. The DOL named the Wingstop locations in Clarksdale, Tupelo, Starkville, Olive Branch, and Oxford as part of its investigation.

Ross cut the ribbon to open the downtown Clarksdale location in 2020. 

“This is an opportunity for jobs in Clarksdale and an opportunity for the Black community,” Ross told local media during the opening ceremony. “This will bring people downtown and Clarksdale needs that.”

The rapper had a cluster of locations in Memphis, but Wingstop’s corporate office said Boss Wings has transferred those locations to a new operator. Most of the family’s locations are throughout the southeast and Miami, where Ross lives.

It’s unclear how many Wingstop locations the family now runs, but a Wingstop blog said Ross owned 28 as of 2019.

The post Feds fine Mississippi Wingstop stores run by family of rapper Rick Ross appeared first on Mississippi Today.

“Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker” – the almost 500 page anthropology of diary entries by the acclaimed writer – starts with a poem inspired by Walker’s time living in Jackson. 

“While love is dangerous / let us walk bareheaded / beside the Great River,” she writes in the poem’s second and final stanza. “Let us gather blossoms / under fire.” 

The final lines are a metaphor for the impulse that moved a young Walker to join the civil rights movement in Mississippi in the summer of 1966; it also nods at her decision to leave about 10 years later. Walker wanted to prove to her family that it was possible for a Black woman to freely live in a place as dangerously racist as Jackson was at that time. 

“That summer marked the beginning of the realization that I could never live happily in Africa–or anywhere else–until I could live freely in Mississippi,” Walker wrote. 

But after several years of depression, loneliness and trauma – the result of watching civil rights activists face repeated abuse – Walker was burnt out, like a fire left unattended. 

“I was starting to fray, my spirit was in tatters,” Walker told Mississippi Today. “It’s incredibly difficult to live in a place where people you care about deeply are being so abused – bombed, shot and banged, drowned, and assistanted and their houses blown up – it wears on you, and I felt all of that.” 

“It wasn’t so much that I gave up on being there, it was that I simply wore out,” she added.
I couldn’t really endure.” 

Walker’s journals, released earlier this year, document her development as a writer. The journals also show Walker coming to realize the kind of community she wanted to live in, one where creativity was not stifled by segregation. Walker and her editor, Valerie Boyd, who passed away earlier this year, hope can serve as a “workbook” – or put another way, as a form of therapy. 

“I want the journals to be used so that people can see this working through of disappointment, anger, sorrow, regret,” Walker said in an interview with the New York Times. “So in that sense, it’s a medicine book.”

The first section – titled “Movement, Marriage and Mississippi” – records Walker’s time in Jackson in the 1960s while she was partners with Melvyn Leventhal, a Jewish lawyer for the NAACP, in the first legal interracial marriage in Mississippi. Many of the entries were written in the large backyard of a house in north Jackson and show Walker working through states-of-mind that will be familiar to any artist. – confidence, self-consciousness, and ambition. 

“How odd it is – I am having trouble writing honestly or well,” Walker writes at one point. “Could it be because I dared mention to Mel that I might one day publish this journal?” 

The section begins in 1965 with the 32nd anniversary of Walker’s parents – a time, she remarks, “that seems so long to live with someone and still enjoy being with them occasionally.” 

In the next entry, Walker is on an airplane, flying south from New York to Atlanta for an orientation for student members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. It’s the first time Walker – who grew up in rural Georgia, the eighth child of sharecroppers and valedictorian of her segregated high school – returned South since she left to attend Sarah Lawrence College. 

The time away was fortifying. She mocks the whiteness of the clouds – one looks like a king, “whiter among his subjects and with pigs’ ears and a snout.” She’s less disgusted by the syrupy accents of the white flight attendants. Then she’s on the ground, on a bus driving past Morris Brown College, a historically Black liberal arts college, to meet fellow foot-soldiers, whose solidarity imbues her journal entries with a sense of community. 

Throughout the first section, before Walker marries her husband in Mississippi in 1967, she talks about dating men who fall into archetypes – the ones who want to date their mothers or think it’s bourgeois to want to be a writer. She also contemplates creating her own philosophy – “not Philosophy of the Absurd, etc, but a Philosophy based on Curiosity.” 

Walker later does this, coining the term “womanist” to describe what it means to be a feminist of color. 

In Jackson, Walker is initially “afraid” to say she likes it, but she admires the people who “are mainly doing what they want or what they feel has to be done.” Isolated in her house with her dog, unable to freely go to the grocery store with her husband, Walker starts to have nightmares in which she tells her family about “the beauty of Mississippi Negro Bravery” but is then arrested outside a gas station. 

“How odd, after so much travel, to land in Mississippi,” she writes. “Definitely not the route Wright and Baldwin took. Mel would like to stay here a long time. So would I if only we could get away two or three times a year. Soon we will have been here a year and a half. I begin to feel like a colonizer.”

She teaches at Tougaloo College and Jackson State University and, as she gains more acclaim, she knows people wonder why she stays in Mississippi. Her husband wants to stay, though, so she oscillates between familial and personal responsibility. She feels like she should live in Mississippi because of the political premise of it: “Imagine being afraid of being in your own country!” She writes. “Simply to live anywhere with freedom requires a willingness to become an immovable force, except by death.”

 An incident, not described in the journal, brings clarity born out of anger.

“I looked at the back of the cracker bus-driver’s head and I hated him and everybody that looks like him,” she writes. “I am not going to stay here much longer – and all the placating, explaining, courageous talk in the world is not going to make me stay here and be destroyed.” 

Once she leaves Mississippi, it lingers. Walker has lived in northern California, but her first stop after she left was Brooklyn. She gets a divorce and lives with her daughter. She notes that Brooklyn is “remarkably” similar to Mississippi, but she’s decided that ideology does not always equate to endurance. 

 “We must go wherever we are not destroyed in the image of those who hate us,” she writes. “Home is wherever we can live human lives.” 

Walker is a featured panelist at the Mississippi Book Festival on Aug. 20.

The post Alice Walker’s journals offer a ‘workbook’ for artists appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Activist and author James Meredith relaxes in the back yard of his Jackson home, looking dapper in an off-white suit and Panama-style straw hat.

In his hand, he holds a copy of ‘Man on a Mission: James Meredith and the Battle of Ole Miss,’ a graphic novel as told by Meredith, written by Aram Goudsouzian and illustrated by Bill Murray.

The book tells Meredith’s dramatic story as the first Black American to attend the University of Mississippi and his fight against white supremacy in 1962, rife with the terrors of being Black in the Jim Crow era South.

There were riots and deaths on campus, protection from the National Guard and a deal struck between then U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy and Gov. Ross Barnett, allowing Meredith to register. Meredith’s determination and courage never faltered because he was on a mission. He graduated in 1963 with a political science degree.

In a hand-written statement, Meredith asks, “Who is James Meredith? I may not know yet! But I do know who I always thought I was… a man on a mission from God.”

His mission continues, the last he admits, with plans to commemorate the 60th anniversary of his entering Ole Miss by visiting every county in the state. Meredith wants to, “uplift moral character through the word of the Lord.”

That’s 82 counties, by a man born in 1933 … still determined, still fearless, still a man on a mission.

The post James Meredith is still a man on a mission appeared first on Mississippi Today.

NATCHEZ – Shavondra Smalley wakes up on her living room couch and looks at her 8-year-old daughter Layla stretched out on a hospital bed beside her, BiPAP machine humming. The two start their day as they always do. 

Smalley pulls out a stethoscope and listens to Layla’s labored breathing, checking to see how much mucus has built up in her trachea in the four hours since she last performed this sacred task. She grabs a chest percussion therapy cup, shaped like the bottom of a toilet plunger, and taps her daughter’s chest with it for around five minutes. Having broken up any secretions that could obstruct Layla’s airflow, she then inserts a suction catheter into her tracheostomy tube and removes the debris. 

It’s a Wednesday, but Smalley can’t go to her job of seven years. Layla, who is bedridden, requires the care of a registered nurse when her mother is away. For over a month, the nursing staffing agency she uses has been unable to find enough nurses willing to take a job that only pays up to $35 per hour.

The current reimbursement levels from Medicaid were set in 2009, amidst a recession, and have not changed since, according to Kate Taylor, the owner of Faith and Friends Healthcare Staffing. Smalley uses her agency to find Layla’s nurses.

The hourly wages travel nurses can earn has decreased dramatically since their pandemic-fueled peak, when they could make up to $10,000 per week in New York. But they’re still much higher than the wages private-duty nurses can make serving patients like Layla who are on Medicaid. 

Smalley said she’s called the Mississippi Division of Medicaid multiple times to plead for help, but hasn’t received any response. Officials with the Division did not respond to emails or calls from Mississippi Today about reimbursement levels for private-duty nursing. When a reporter went to the Division building to try and speak with someone, he was told he must make an appointment. 

Taylor has also been reaching out to Medicaid.

“We have asked them (Medicaid) for reimbursement increases, and they say it’s in the works, but in the meantime, we can’t compete,” Taylor said.

Layla requires 20 hours of nursing care a day due to a litany of complex medical conditions. She was born with lissencephaly, which literally means “smooth brain,” a rare brain malformation characterized by the absence of normal folds in the cerebral cortex. She also suffers from scoliosis, chronic respiratory failure and pyruvate dehydrogenase complex deficiency, among other conditions. 

Over the past three weeks alone, Layla has only received 180 of the 420 hours of nursing care she needs, Smalley said. As a result, Smalley has missed work and is becoming increasingly exhausted.

“If they’re (Medicaid) not willing to try to increase the pay, then we’re still going to be going without the care that she needs,” she said. 

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Smalley, a single mother of three children, is currently on unpaid family leave from her job. She gets up to 12 weeks of leave each year and is quickly running out. She’s worried about paying her bills and putting food on the table for her three children. She wants to work and loathes the idea of taking “handouts” from others or getting on welfare.

“I work so hard to take care of my kids and to take care of my responsibilities,” Smalley said. “Anybody that knows me knows that I don’t like to owe anybody.”

She does not want to institutionalize Layla, believing she would receive lower quality care. She takes pride in the care she provides Layla at home, noting she has never had a bed sore.

“I took on the battle to fight for my child since day one, and I’m not stopping,” Smalley said

Though their life has never been “normal,” Smalley is proud of the life she has built for herself and her children. Not having the nursing care Layla needs not only keeps her from working, but also prevents her from doing simple things like going to church or attending her 13-year-old son, Jonathan’s, sports games. 

Jonathan helps out with Layla’s care when she can, though Smalley tries to prevent this as much as possible.

“I try not to put responsibility on my children, because they’re just kids,” Smalley said.

Federal dollars from coronavirus relief packages  subsidized increased nurse wages for hospitals, but not for private nursing staffing agencies like Taylor’s.

Taylor said in addition to Smalley, she has clients in Vicksburg, Collins and Greenwood who can’t get the level of nursing care they need. 

“Any place that’s a little bit more rural, it’s hard to staff,” Taylor said. “Even if I offer a little bit more pay, that doesn’t seem to help.”

Data from the health care management consulting firm Kaufman Hall & Associates showed the dramatic increase in the national average for contract nurse labor costs. Before the coronavirus pandemic, wage rates for contract nurses were almost double those for employed nurses. By March 2022, contract nurses were making $132 per hour while nurses employed by hospitals were making $39. 

Hospitals are competing with each other to hire nurses. Mississippi has lost more than 2,000 nurses over the course of the pandemic due to burnout or higher paying jobs in other states. This strain is being felt all across the country, and the national shortage is likely to get worse over time.

Smalley was told when she was five months pregnant with Layla that her child would have  lissencephaly and was given the option to terminate the pregnancy. She is against abortion, so she declined. 

After giving birth, Smalley received two weeks of tracheostomy and gastrostomy training at the hospital before being sent home with Layla. Through Medicaid’s Disabled Child Living At Home program, she was able to get a rotating group of nurses, each working 10-hour shifts, to take care of Layla. 

That has not been the case for over a month now. 

Medicaid is also experiencing a shortage of certain medical supplies, including tracheostomy tubes. Smalley has been forced to boil Layla’s tube in water to sanitize and reuse it, instead of replacing it each week as she should. 

The staffing problem Smalley is experiencing has been made worse by restrictions placed on who can provide Layla’s care. The nasopharyngeal suctioning Smalley performs on Layla every four hours is considered a “specialized skill” outside of the scope of practice of other health care workers like licensed practical nurses (LPNs) and vocational nurses. This restriction frustrates Smalley, as she’s able to perform it herself even though she’s not a medical professional.

Dr. Phyllis Johnson, executive director of the Mississippi Board of Nursing, said that while she understands Smalley’s frustration, nurses without the educational background of registered nurses do not have the skills needed to perform the kinds of emergency interventions that might be needed in a case as medically complex as Layla’s. 

“Our job is to make sure that the nurses perform safe, efficient and competent care the way they’ve been trained to, because when they don’t do that or step outside the scope of practice, that’s where the patients’ lives become endangered,” Johnson said. 

Smalley is doing the best she can in an exhausting and unsustainable situation. Her kids can’t help but notice the strain caring for Layla puts on their mom. Her 5-year-old daughter  Katelyn just started kindergarten and will often come and sleep next to Shavondra on the couch next to Layla’s hospital bed. 

Smalley has called multiple other staffing agencies across the state, none of which had the staffing available to help her.

“My daughter doesn’t have a voice so I have to be her voice and advocate for her … I just don’t know how long we can go on like this,” Smalley said. 

The post Nursing shortage, low reimbursement rates mean this 8-year-old can’t find care appeared first on Mississippi Today.

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Sen. Derrick Simmons of Greenville, the Senate Democratic leader, discusses with Mississippi Today’s Bobby Harrison and Geoff Pender ways he says the state can help improve the lives of working poor Mississippians.

READ MORE: Gov. Tate Reeves halts federal rental assistance, says it incentivizes not working

The post Podcast: Dem leader urges Gov. Reeves to reconsider ending rental assistance program appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The post Marshall Ramsey: Swept Away appeared first on Mississippi Today.

In this episode of Mississippi Stories, Mississippi Editor-at-Large Marshall Ramsey sits down with Jeff Good about how Jackson’s continuing water crisis is pushing local independent restaurants to the brink.

Water is a huge part of a restaurant’s operation from drinks to food preparation to hand washing to ice and when drinks and ice have to be bought, dwindling profit margins (down 75% due to inflation) are stressed. Good speaks on behalf of other restaurants in Jackson and how leadership needs to start communicating to find a solution.

The post Mississippi Stories: Jeff Good appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Mississippi is the only state in the modern era to rescind its initiative process that allowed voters to bypass the Legislature and place issues directly on the ballot.

In 2021 the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional the signature-gathering process as spelled out in the Constitution to place issues on the ballot. The ruling resulted in a medical marijuana initiative approved by voters in November 2020 and the entire initiative process being found to be invalid.

The Legislature could not agree during the 2022 session on language to revive the initiative process.

If the Legislature did restore the initiative, there would be at least five issues that could be the subject of initiative efforts. Those five issues, all opposed by many of the state’s political leaders, might be the reason legislators are reluctant to revive the initiative.

Those five initiatives would:

• Expand Medicaid.
• Allow early voting.
• Approve recreational marijuana.
• Restore abortion rights.
• Allow people convicted of felonies to regain their voting rights at some point after they complete their sentence.

No doubt, there are other issues that most likely would be the subject of initiative efforts if the process was restored. Generally, initiatives are undertaken when legislators refuse to act on issues, such as on medical marijuana recently and on voter identification in 2011.

Medical marijuana was being rejected by the Legislature as a whole. In 2011, one chamber of the Legislature – the Democratic-controlled House – was blocking the enactment of a voter ID requirement.

Just like with medical marijuana and voter ID, the five issues cited above are currently being blocked by key legislators.

Medicaid expansion

Mississippi is one of 12 states that have not expanded Medicaid to provide health insurance for primarily the working poor. The two biggest obstacles to Medicaid expansion have been House Speaker Philip Gunn and Gov. Tate Reeves, who argue the state cannot afford to cover Mississippi’s share of the costs. Various studies have concluded that the expansion would actually be a boon to state coffers since the federal government would pay the bulk of the costs.

Various diverse groups ranging from the Mississippi Hospital Association to the Delta Council have endorsed expansion.

Early voting

Despite the rhetoric of former President Donald Trump and many of his supporters bemoaning the evils of early voting, 46 states allow no excuse early voting and 27 permit voting by mail. And most states were allowing the various forms of early voting long before the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic.

And truth be known, early voting has long been popular. Still, Reeves and other Mississippi politicians proudly proclaim they will block any effort to place Mississippi within the mainstream of states by enacting no excuse early voting.

Recreational marijuana

Like with early voting and Medicaid expansion, there was a recreational marijuana initiative being considered when the Mississippi Supreme Court shut down the initiative process.

And granted, it might be a long shot that Mississippi voters would approve recreational marijuana. But marijuana supporters in Arkansas garnered significantly more signatures than needed to place the issue on the November ballot.

If Arkansans approve or come close to approving recreational marijuana in November, that could be a sign that Mississippians also are willing to consider the issue.

Felony suffrage

Mississippi is one of a few states (less than 10) that do not restore voting rights to people convicted of felonies at some point after they complete their sentence. The felony suffrage provision was incorporated into the 1890 Constitution by those attempting to prevent African Americans from voting.

Voters in Florida recently voted via ballot initiative to restore voting rights to people convicted of felonies.

Abortion rights

Granted, it has long been perceived that Mississippians as a whole are staunchly anti-abortion. But after the June ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Mississippi decision – Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization – overturning Roe v. Wade and rescinding a national right to an abortion, there has been a hue and cry by some to let Mississippians vote on the issue. After all, people who support abortion rights figure they have nothing to lose since existing Mississippi laws ban most abortions.

And there are a few reasons to give abortion rights supporters hope. For instance, in Kansas, a conservative state like Mississippi, voters recently rejected an anti-abortion proposal at the ballot box.

In addition, when Mississippians voted on abortion in 2011, they overwhelmingly defeated the “Personhood” initiative that defined life as beginning at conception. Plus, recent polling indicates that a vote on abortion in Mississippi might be close.

But unless the Legislature restores the initiative, we may never know how Mississippians feel about these issues and others.

The post 5 reasons lawmakers might not want to restore the ballot initiative appeared first on Mississippi Today.

As the police-led motorcade carrying the members of Mississippi country trio Chapel Hart made its way to the pavilion at Founders Square at the Neshoba County Fair on July 23, Devynn Hart was surprised by the number of cars she saw. 

But she was truly shocked when they finally arrived, and she could see the crowd of people waiting to see her perform with her sister, Danica Hart, and cousin Trae Swindle, all childhood friends from Poplarville, on the Thacker Mountain Radio Hour. It’s a moment she won’t soon forget.

“Seeing everybody sing the words to our songs, [and] not just ‘You Can Have Him Jolene’—there were little kids there that knew all the words to almost every song that we performed—it’s mind blowing,” Devynn says.

Danica, who immediately outs herself as “the loud one,” agrees. “It sounded like we were performing at a stadium, and the only thing that I could think was, ‘Mississippi loud and proud, baby!’ I was right where I needed to be after all of this. You know, after everything exploded.”

She’s referring, of course, to Chapel Hart’s stunning televised audition on “America’s Got Talent” just four days earlier, which vaulted them onto the national stage. After performing their original song “You Can Have Him Jolene,” a response to Dolly Parton’s signature hit “Jolene,” the four celebrity judges—Simon Cowell, Heidi Klum, Howie Mandell and Sofia Vergara—put their hands on the coveted “golden buzzer,” a unanimous sign of approval ushering them straight to the competition rounds. 

Social media immediately went nuts for the group, especially after Parton herself weighed in the following morning with a tweet praising their take on her “Jolene” tale. The group’s new fans sent their 2021 album, The Girls Are Back in Town, to the top of the iTunes country charts the same day. Even Darius Rucker jumped in, announcing they would sing on his next album. 

Three weeks later, the Chapel Hart train is still rolling strong. The group’s “AGT” performance has been viewed more than seven million times on YouTube—on top of the seven or so million who watched it live on NBC—and their video for “You Can Have Him Jolene,” filmed in Pass Christian and released a year ago, is clocking views in the millions, as well.

Seated on a couch in a Ketchum, Idaho hotel suite, the ladies of Chapel Hart are beaming with energy and enthusiasm. They’re on a short tour, playing gigs booked before their breakout moment, until they’re due back in Los Angeles to continue their bid for the “AGT” crown. But they know that no matter the outcome of the show, they’ve already won big. A month from now, they’ll fulfill a dream by performing on the Grand Ole Opry. And the numbers don’t lie; they have the attention of country music fans, and likely the industry gatekeepers, as well.

Wracked with emotion standing on the “AGT” stage, Danica responded to Cowell through tears when he asked how they’ve been working to establish themselves in the country music industry. “We’ve been trying to break into Nashville for the last couple of years,” she said, “but it’s been kinda hard when I think country music doesn’t always look like us.” 

Trae picks up her cousin’s train of thought, using a pointed anecdote she heard at a recent conference organized by Change the Conversation, a Nashville group established to pursue gender equality in country music, about the unspoken rules dictating how non-white and female artists get pushed in Music City.

“They highlighted a very specific, pertinent point—and it wasn’t just for minorities, it was for women and marginalized communities as a whole—Nashville has forever had this, ‘just one at a time’ concept,” Trae says. “For a while it was just Darius Rucker, then they slowly added the Jimmie Allens and the Brelands and the Kane Browns. Mickey Guyton just got pushed to the forefront last year, although she’s been in Nashville and in the music industry for over 15 years.”

Similarly, the overnight success of Chapel Hart has been brewing for years, built on their mutual love of the country music that has been omnipresent in their lives since they were kids. 

“Growing up in Poplarville, country music was the music,” Danica says. “If you’re going in the grocery store, the music playing overhead’s country music; if you’re on the school bus and the school bus driver brings his or her radio, it’s country music; if you have a job and you’re at work and they have music that goes on at work, it’s country music. Even I remember at nap time when we were little and they turned on music when you get ready to lay down and go to sleep, and it was country music.”

The lifestyle they portray in songs like “Jesus & Alcohol” and “That’s a Redneck Summer Night” comes honestly. Although they were in the pews on Sunday morning—Danica and Devynn are the daughters of a preacher, and their grandfather was a minister—come Saturday night, they were in a field drinking beer with friends. Danica characterizes their upbringing as “Rebel Baptist.” “I’ll pray you up to heaven and drink a little Budweiser afterwards,” she laughs.

Once they came together as a musical group, they went through years of woodshedding, networking and pounding the pavement for opportunities. Chapel Hart had been making connections for years, and their growth was steady until the “AGT” rocket ride began. The MuzikMafia hitmakers they sang along with in their youth, like “Redneck Woman” singer Gretchen Wilson, Cowboy Troy and Big & Rich, are now in their phones; Danica still gets a thrill when John Rich texts her to check on them.

“We always used to say, we wanna bring country music back to country radio,” Danica offers. “And so the push is just good country music, you know what I’m saying? It’s the stuff we grew up on it. It’s nineties country.”

Although the trio has been based in New Orleans for several years, they make an effort to show love for their home state. Devynn wore a Mississippi shirt on a recent CMT appearance, and they refer to her in songs like “4 Mississippi.” Their love of home comes with few asterisks, if any.

“Honestly, I think the world needs to understand that Mississippi is a place of just pure love,” Trae says. “I know that there are lots of stigmas on Mississippi, being at the bottom of the list for a lot of things, from education to health to everything else. Danica often says it in our show, talking about growing up, a lot of people were too poor to even know the difference, so everyone came together. And I feel like seeing us do what we’re doing on such a scale is showing the power of that Mississippi hospitality. You have people who are in completely different socioeconomic classes, completely different culturally, but, like, being brought together all the sake of good music.”

The post Chapel Hart is ready to put the country back in Nashville appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The Oxford Police Department released a statement Friday afternoon that the killing of Jimmie “Jay” Lee, a Black student who was well-known in the town’s LGBTQ community, is an “isolated incident” that does not reflect a broader threat to queer people in Mississippi. 

The statement comes three days after a Lafayette County judge determined there was probable cause for police to arrest Sheldon Timothy Herrington Jr., a 22-year-old Ole Miss graduate, for Lee’s murder, and that he should be held without bond. 

“Based on the information collected to date, our investigators believe this crime represents an isolated incident stemming from the relationship between Jay Lee and Tim Herrington,” the release states. 

Members of the LGBTQ community in Oxford have been asking police to release more information about the nature of the case ever since Herrington was arrested three weeks ago. Many members said more transparency from police would help them make decisions about how to stay safe. 

Police nodded to this perspective in the release: “More broadly, we want to stress that our agencies are committed to doing all that we can to maintain a safe environment for everyone in our community.”

Members of the LBGTQ community are more likely to be the victim of physical harm from domestic and intimate partners. This is especially true for Black queer people who face compounded discrimination due to homophobia and racism — a routine threat of violence that is personal and systemic, with roots much deeper than any one case.

The release also follows a story Mississippi Today published earlier this week based on accounts from 11 LGBTQ students, faculty and University of Mississippi alumni who said they no longer felt safe in Oxford. At least one community member is afraid to leave their house, said Jaime Harker, the director of the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies at UM and the owner of Violet Valley, a feminist bookstore near Oxford. 

Harker said she felt that OPD’s silence contributed to harrowing rumors in the community about the nature and reason for Lee’s killing. 

“I think people are filling the void with what their biggest fears are,” she said. 

Lee, 20, was a well-known member of Oxford’s LBGTQ community who regularly performed at Code Pink, a local drag night. An open, confident person, Lee ran for homecoming king last year to promote a platform of “self love and living your truth.” He repeatedly spoke out about the harassment received for wearing women’s clothing. 

For many people in the community, Lee’s outspokenness made his disappearance all the more terrifying. 

Lindsey Trinh, a senior journalism student at Ole Miss, told Mississippi Today that after weeks of receiving no information about Lee’s killing, she decided she was too fearful and anxious to return to classes in person. She wrote an email to the university provost and her professors explaining how Lee’s case had affected her. 

“At the time and because of the unknown of why this has happened to Jay and the whereabouts of his body, I have decided that I cannot physically come back to Oxford for my last semester this Fall,” Trinh wrote in her email. “I fear for my safety and well-being as an outspoken and proud gay person of color.”

Authorities believe that Lee’s body, still missing, is somewhere in Lafayette or Grenada County. But the circumstantial evidence that police have so far gathered was enough to bring charges, Lafayette County Assistant District Attorney Tiffany Kilpatrick argued in court on Tuesday. 

“In 2022 you do not need a body,” Kilpatrick said. “It’s not the 1870s.” 

During the preliminary hearing, Kilpatrick alleged that Herrington’s casual relationship with Lee was unknown to his friends and family. She said that early in the morning on July 8, Herrington “lured” Lee to his apartment, strangled him, and then “staged a cover up” by driving Lee’s car to Molly Barr Trails, a student housing complex. 

Herrington then picked up a box truck belonging to his moving company, Kilpatrick said, and drove it to his parent’s house in Grenada where he retrieved a long-handle shovel and wheelbarrow. 

Kilpatrick argued that Herrington should have been denied bond because his charge – first-degree murder – will likely be elevated to capital murder as police uncover more evidence; some of which is still being processed at a private crime lab. Kilpatrick also argued Herrington was a flight risk, noting that a forensic search of his MacBook showed he had searched for flights from Dallas to Singapore. 

Herrington’s defense attorney, state Rep. Kevin Horan, disputed that Herrington, who has $1,910 in his bank account, could afford to flee the state. In his closing statement, Horan said the prosecution’s case amounted to “suspicion, conjecture and speculation.” 

Horan called four witnesses who testified, in an effort to obtain bond for Herrington, to his character and connections to the community in Grenada. The witnesses included Herrington’s mother, an elder at his church, one of his teachers, and ??Emily Tindell, the principal of Grenada High School. 

Tindell said that Herrington and his family have “the best of character in Grenada County.”

In her closing statement, Kilpatrick said that Herrington was not the same person that his teachers and family described. 

“They don’t know this other Tim Herrington, his double life,” she said. “They don’t know the Tim Herrington who lives in anonymity. This Tim Herrington, your honor, is the Tim Herrington who killed Jay Lee.”

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