Northern District Public Service Commissioner Brandon Presley is urging state, county and city officials to wisely spend billions in federal pandemic stimulus to tackle Mississippi’s most pressing needs. These, he said, given the federal rules on spending the money, needs are clear: water, sewerage and broadband projects. He noted more than 380,000 rural Mississippians do not have community water service.
In 2018, Lafayette Stribling, at 84, posed beside a poster created after he took Mississippi Valley State into the national basketball spotlight. (Photo by Rick Cleveland) Credit: Rick Cleveland
Lafayette Stribling, the remarkable basketball coach and stylish character who died Saturday at age 87, was most famous, at least nationally, for a miracle that didn’t quite happen.
Longtime Mississippi basketball fans surely remember. On March 14, 1986, “Strib” took his Mississippi Valley State Delta Devils to play Duke in the opening round of the NCAA Tournament. Duke was the top seed, meaning that Valley was No. 64. Duke, coached by Mike Krzyzewski and led by the great Johnny Dawkins, was a prohibitive favorite, playing a few miles from home in Greensboro, N.C., where the Blue Devils had just won the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament.
“Nobody gave us a chance,” Strib once told this writer, knowing I was among the biggest doubters. Indeed, I wrote that it was “the biggest mismatch since Poland took on Germany.”
I was so, so wrong. Valley led at halftime and by as many as seven points midway through the second half. Valley pressed and guarded the Blue Devils as they had rarely been pressed and guarded before. Strib’s guys played as if their survival — and that of their mothers — depended on the outcome. If there had been Twitter back then, Valley and Strib would have set national records for trending.
Rick Cleveland
Only after four of Valley’s five starters fouled out in the final five minutes did Duke surge ahead and win 85-78. Afterward, the largely Duke crowd gave Valley and their resplendently dressed coach a prolonged standing ovation. At his postgame press conference, a visibly relieved Coach K lavished praise on Strib.
The story becomes more amazing when you consider that Strib had taken the Valley job three years before when Mississippi lawmakers were seriously considering shutting the school down. Strib’s first Valley basketball team posted the first winning season in school history.
He turned Valley into a SWAC powerhouse, winning four championships. “They had been talking about closing us down,” Strib once told me. “After that, the Legislature brought us down to Jackson and celebrated us.”
Stribling’s career was the cause for so many celebrations. He won more than 800 high school basketball games and several state championships before ever getting chance to coach at Valley. Then, after so much success at MVSU, he came back to coach at Tougaloo where he was a smash hit, again.
That was in 2005. With 48 years in the Mississippi retirement system, Strib resigned at Valley and took a job coaching at Tougaloo, taking over another losing program. After one losing season — the only one of Strib’s entire career — Tougaloo had six straight winners, won five conference championships and went to the NAIA national tournament five times.
In 2011, at the age of 76, he took a team of seven Tougaloo players to a conference championship and the national tournament. “The Magnificent Seven,” the team was called.
“We didn’t have nearly enough players to scrimmage,” Stribling once told me. But they finished 27-4.
Lafayette Stribling and columnist Rick Cleveland at the MHSAA State Championship games in 2015. Credit: Keith Warren/MHSAA
The fact is, Strib would have been a success at any level of the sport. He knew basketball and he knew people. He knew how to motivate. His players would have climbed a mountain barefoot for him.
But even with all the victories, Strib was known as much for his friendly manner and legendary wardrobe as for his basketball success. He had as many colorful suits, pairs of shoes and top hats as he had victories.
There’s a poignant story behind the wardrobe. When he graduated from tiny Harmony Vocational High School in 1950, he had no suit to wear to his graduation. Actually, Strib had very little, period, including just one pair of shoes that he wore for basketball and everything else. He was the son of dirt-poor sharecroppers. His daddy had no education and signed his name with an X.
Strib once told me: “I borrowed a suit from a first cousin in Detroit who was tall and about my size. He sent it in the mail, a nice blue suede suit. So I wore that suit to my graduation, but I promised myself right then and there, when I went off to college and made some money, I was never going to have to wear somebody else’s clothes. I was going to have my own suits — and they were going to be nice.”
Strib kept his promise. He was a beauty, Strib was, a vital chapter in Mississippi basketball history.
Mabry is the founder of Tommie Mabry Company and Best Selling Author of A Dark Journey To a Light Future and If Tommie Can Do It, We Can Do It. Born and raised in a tough, impoverished neighborhood in Jackson, Mississippi, Mabry was seemingly destined to sink into a life of crime, drugs and violence. However, he was able to turn his life around and now has become an author and motivational speaker focused on uplifting kids and the educators who teach them.
Mabry mentors at-risk kids to keep them on the path to success and has now come out with a motivational album for teachers called The Educator’s Album.
Many Mississippi legislators, regardless of political party, have never been enamored with the state’s ballot initiative process. After all, the initiative process is a mechanism to allow citizens to usurp one of the Legislature’s most important powers: the power to make laws.
No group, including the Mississippi Legislature, wants to have its power usurped.
When the state Supreme Court in a May ruling made invalid the initiative process for the second time in the state’s history, key legislators pledged to fix the language the high court found unconstitutional and reinstate the initiative. Speaker Philip Gunn even asked Gov. Tate Reeves to call a special session so that legislators could immediately fix the offending language.
Reeves did not, and now most legislators say they prefer to wait until the 2022 regular session to fix the initiative process. It also appears it might be the regular session before the Legislature can try to legalize medical marijuana, which was approved by voters in a November 2020 citizen-sponsored initiative but also was thrown out by the Supreme Court on the same grounds the entire initiative process was ruled invalid.
A key question going into that 2022 session, though: Will two-thirds of the members of each chamber of the Legislature, as required, be willing to pass language to fix a process that usurps their power?
Much of the primary work in fixing the process will fall to the Legislature’s two Constitution Committee chairs: Sen. Chris Johnson, R-Hattiesburg, in the Senate, and Rep. Fred Shanks, R-Brandon, in the House. Both say their goal is to fix the process during the 2022 regular session beginning in January.
“We were ready to go on the House side, but there has not been much talk of it lately,” Shanks said recently. “But we will take care of it during the regular session.”
Johnson shared similar thoughts.
“I think we need to put time into working on the ballot initiative process before we take it up,” Johnson said.
But the two chairs must convince two-thirds of their legislative colleagues to agree to restore the initiative before it can be put on the ballot for votes to approve and to re-incorporate into the state Constitution.
In 1992, the Legislature reluctantly voted to reinstate an initiative process that had been struck down by the Mississippi Supreme Court in the 1920s. Legislators were being pressured by various groups and people, including two young and popular statewide elected officials — Attorney General Mike Moore and Secretary of State Dick Molpus — to revive the process where citizens can bypass the Legislature and place issues on the ballot.
But in reviving the initiative, legislators attached strings and placed conditions on the process that they believed would make it extremely difficult — perhaps impossible — to gather the required signatures.
Thanks in part to two term limit initiatives making the ballot in the 1990s, the Legislature proposed and voters approved a change to the initiative requiring those garnering the signatures to place a proposal on the ballot to be Mississippi residents. That change made the initiative process even more difficult. As a side note, both of the term limits proposals were defeated in part because of concerted campaigns put together by legislative leaders.
After the term limits initiatives in the 1990s, no proposal garnered enough signatures to make the ballot until 2011 when three did: personhood, voter identification and property rights.
Then in 2015, with Republicans controlling both chambers of the Legislature and the governor’s office, the next step was taken in muddying up and making the initiative process difficult. When an initiative designed to change the Constitution to place more of an emphasis on public education made the ballot, the Republican leadership for the first time in the state’s history opted to place an alternative to the initiative on the ballot, confusing voters and most likely helping lead to the defeat of the proposal.
Again in 2020, legislators tried the strategy of adding an alternative proposal to the ballot to try to defeat the citizen-sponsored medical marijuana initiative. But this time, the alternative strategy did not work. Citizens overwhelmingly approved the medical marijuana citizen-sponsored initiative.
At this point, the Supreme Court did, just as it did in the 1920s, rule in response to a lawsuit that the initiative process was invalid. This time the court ruled the process invalid because it required signatures to be gathered equally from five congressional districts and the state now has four.
For the second time, thanks to the Supreme Court, legislators do not have to worry about their powers being usurped.
The question now, though, is will lawmakers agree to legislation that will restore the power to the people and give up a slice of their power, or will they choose to again not have an initiative process in Mississippi.
Bryan Loftin, 16, has a mitochondrial disease that causes intense seizures. (Photo courtesy: Christine Loftin)
Christine Loftin didn’t know what else to do.
Loftin, a Southaven resident whose 16-year-old son Bryan has a mitochondrial disease that causes intense seizures, was a passionate advocate for a ballot initiative passed in 2020 that created a medical marijuana program.
The medicine, Loftin says, is the only thing that could really help her son. Bryan has tried over a dozen pharmaceutical drugs to treat his seizures over the years, but none have worked. Loftin has been studying the use of medical marijuana to treat seizures, hoping her son would one day have access to it.
“It’s never been an option for our family to just up and relocate (to another state), so we just had to wait,” Loftin said.
Last November, Loftin was elated when more than 759,000 Mississippians voted in favor of a medical marijuana program. She thought Bryan would finally get the medicine he needed.
But that celebratory feeling is now a distant memory.
Loftin is among thousands of Mississippians who say their will is being ignored. They feel ignored by the Mississippi Supreme Court, which overturned the marijuana program on a constitutional technicality in May.
And in recent weeks, they’ve felt ignored by a governor who is preventing a legislative alternative and is not meaningfully engaging with the public about the issue — including the patients who need the relief offered by medical marijuana.
This summer, after the Supreme Court struck down the voters’ medical marijuana program, leaders in both chambers of the state Legislature reached an agreement on a bill that would create an alternative medical marijuana program. They informed Reeves on Sept. 24 they had the votes to pass it in a special legislative session, which only the governor can call.
Though Reeves had said for months that he would call a special session if lawmakers struck a deal, he has delayed calling lawmakers to Jackson. Instead of calling the special session, Reeves gave lawmakers a last-minute laundry list of things he didn’t like in the bill. Lawmakers said they conceded on many of Reeves’ concerns, but called others “unreasonable.”
The way Loftin and many Mississippi voters see it: Reeves is now the sole obstacle standing in the way of the legislation being passed.
Loftin, who has closely followed the progress of a legislative alternative to Initiative 65, says she has left more than a dozen messages for Reeves inquiring about the special session, but never heard back. So when she heard that the governor would be having lunch a mile from her home in Southaven on Wednesday, she knew it was the best chance she had to get him to listen.
So Christine loaded up her son Bryan, who is in a wheelchair, and drove to the 10th Inning Bar and Grill for Reeves’ political meet-and-greet and waited for a chance to speak with the governor.
Loftin told Mississippi Today that Reeves avoided them until she pushed Bryan in his wheelchair up to him. The long-awaited encounter was videoed and posted to social media.
Bryan can be seen tugging on Reeves’ coattails. When the governor turned toward the boy, Bryan handed him a photo of himself with a black eye he got after one of his seizures. Reeves reluctantly accepted the photo.
“We need his medicine and we need it soon,” Christine Loftin said to Reeves.
“Yes, ma’am, I’m working really hard on that,” Reeves replied.
When Loftin said she knew lawmakers had reached a deal and asked what the hold-up was, or any other question on the issue, Reeves gave the same answer.
“We’re working on it,” he said over and over again.
After a while, Christine knew the conversation wasn’t going anywhere, so she and Bryan left.
“For the first time in over a dozen years, I had hope that there was going to be something that we could do to give Bryan a better quality of life,” Loftin told Mississippi Today in an interview this week. “I can’t put into words what it’s like to have that ripped out from under you.”
“I really don’t do politics very much, one side or the other, but from where we’re standing, this is all about politics,” Loftin told Mississippi Today. “This has nothing to do with patient care. This has nothing to do with the interest of the people who need the medication. It has nothing to do with anything except for politics. And that’s infuriating.”
Ryan Burns, a Madison County attorney and former assistant district attorney, told a House judiciary committee any person convicted of a felony in Mississippi has the right to petition the court for restoration of gun rights.
But the same option does not exist for Mississippians who lose another constitutional right: the right to vote.
Dennis Hopkins, a 46-year-old Potts Camp resident who lost his right to vote as a teenager when he was convicted of grand larceny, says he does not care whether he gets his right to own a gun restored, but wants to be able to vote.
“If I want to go hunting, I can use a bow and arrow,” Hopkins told the committee Thursday.
“Voting to me is everything,” Hopkins said. “I tell my kids how important the vote is… it shames me to tell them I can’t vote and here is why.”
Grand larceny is one of 23 crimes that disenfranchises Mississippians unless their right to vote is restored through legislative action, through judicial expungement in some instances, or through a gubernatorial pardon. The crimes where people lose their right to vote include the serious crimes of murder and rape, but also several lesser crimes such as felony shoplifting and timber theft.
The House Judiciary B Committee, led by Republican Rep. Nick Bain of Corinth, held a hearing on Thursday about the lifetime felony voting ban and what, if anything, lawmakers could do to reform the law.
Bain on Thursday said he always thought it was unfair a person faces a lifetime ban on voting for a felony bad check writing conviction, but could vote while in prison if convicted of child pornography or of being a major drug dealer.
“I make a commitment to do our best to make it more consistent and fairer. I think it’s past time to do that,” Bain said on Thursday.
The Republican chairman said he hopes to try to pass legislation in the 2022 session, which begins in January, to address the litany of issues surrounding Mississippi’s lifetime voting ban for people convicted of certain felonies. Bain, though, would not offer specifics Thursday on any bill other than to say, “We are committed to do what we can.”
In the 1890s, the Mississippi Supreme Court wrote the disfranchisement of people of specific felonies was placed in the Constitution “to obstruct the exercise of the franchise by the negro race” by targeting “the offenses to which its weaker members were prone.” The crimes selected by lawmakers to go into the provision were thought by the white political leaders at the time as more likely to be committed by African Americans.
That provision is currently being challenged on constitutional grounds in the federal courts with two cases pending before the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. Attorneys have argued that the provision’s intent is the same as the poll tax, the literacy test and other Jim Crow-era provisions that sought to prevent African Americans from voting.
The 1890 Mississippi Constitution says people convicted of certain crimes lose their right to vote unless restored by a two-thirds vote of both chambers of the Mississippi Legislature. In Mississippi, rights also have been restored through gubernatorial pardons and through expungements of criminal records granted through the judiciary.
But lawmakers typically pass few, if any, suffrage bills granting restoring the right to vote, and current Gov. Tate Reeves and his predecessor, Phil Bryant, have not granted pardons.
In the hearing on Thursday, Gayle Carpenter-Sanders, executive director of the Mississippi Volunteer Lawyers Project, told the Judiciary B Committee it is difficult for a person to navigate the cumbersome state expungement process that is available to some — not all — people convicted of felonies.
In addition, Bain said there are counties where circuit clerks do not recognize expungements and gubernatorial pardons as restoring voting rights.
Bain has said he is not engaged right now in a debate about whether people convicted of felonies should lose their right to vote, but has said that the Legislature “should not be in the business” of restoring suffrage. He has advocated that the process could be done through the judiciary much like for gun rights.
But changing the Constitution to restore voting rights and taking it out of the hands of the Legislature could prove difficult. It takes a two-thirds vote of both chambers of the Legislature, and then the approval of a majority of Mississippi voters to amend the Constitution.
There were discussions during the Thursday hearing of whether a whole group of people — such as all people convicted of certain crimes — could have their rights restored via a two-thirds vote instead of restoring the rights one by one with individual bills. And there were questions about whether the rights could be restored just for those already convicted or also for those who would be convicted in the future.
The Legislature normally only restores voting rights to a few each session — typically less than five per year. In the 2021 session, the Senate killed 19 of the suffrage bills passed by the House. Just two people had their voting rights restored via the Legislature in 2021.
Paloma Wu, deputy director of impact legislation at the Mississippi Center for Justice, told the committee that the felony disenfranchisement language was placed in the Constitution in the 1890s, like other provisions, to keep African Americans from voting.
Only a few states impose a lifetime ban on voting for those convicted of felonies.
Roy Harness, a Hinds County resident who was convicted of forgery and lost his voting rights, told the committee how he turned his life around. The military veteran now has a master’s degree and works as a counselor.
“I am not here today to beg,” Harness said. “But as an American, as a veteran, as a man I am saying I would like to be able to vote.”
Hundreds of thousands of Mississippians are now eligible to get a COVID-19 booster shot if they want one and can choose which one to get, the Mississippi State Department of Health announced on Thursday.
The department aligned its guidance on COVID-19 vaccine booster shots with the new policies approved last week by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration.
County health departments will begin offering booster shots of the Moderna vaccine on Nov. 1. Pfizer boosters have already been available since late September. Johnson & Johnson boosters will not be available at county health departments, but are available through many of MSDH’s vaccine partners and pharmacies across the state.
Anyone who meets the eligibility criteria for a booster can request one of a different type than the one used for their primary vaccine regimen. For example, studies have shown that people who receive a mRNA booster after receiving the one-dose J&J vaccine see a much higher increase in their antibody levels than those who received a J&J booster.
Though people can mix and match their booster if they so choose, the qualifiers and time frame for getting them are different depending on which booster you choose.
“If you think that you fall into one of those categories, we encourage you to get a booster… We encourage you to discuss it with your physician if you’re not sure that you meet one of those criteria,” said State Epidemiologist Dr. Paul Byers.
Anyone age 18 years and older who received the J&J vaccine is eligible for a booster two months after their one-dose regimen.
Those who have received their second dose of a Pfizer or Moderna vaccine at least six months ago, and fall into one of the categories below, are eligible for a booster dose.
Adults aged 65 years and older
Long-term care facility residents
Adults aged 18 and older with certain underlying medical conditions. These include:
Chronic kidney disease
Chronic lung diseases (COPD, asthma, etc.)
Dementia or other neurological conditions
Diabetes (type 1 or 2)
Down syndrome
Heart conditions (such as heart failure, coronary artery disease, or cardiomyopathies)
Hypertension
Liver disease
Overweight, obesity or severe obesity (body mass index (BMI) over 25 kg/m2)
Pregnancy
Sickle cell disease or thalassemia
Smoking (current or former)
Stroke
Substance abuse disorders
Other medical conditions determined by a medical provider
Adults aged 18 and older that work in high risk settings that increase their risk of exposure. This includes:
First responders (healthcare workers, firefighters, police, congregate care staff)
Education staff (teachers, support staff, daycare workers)
