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This is part two in a five-part series about Philip Gunn’s influence in changing the Mississippi state flag. Read part one here, and read more about the series here.

A police officer murdered George Floyd on the streets of Minneapolis. A team of police officers killed Breonna Taylor in her apartment in Kentucky. White men killed Ahmaud Arbery while he was jogging in Georgia. Millions of Americans had taken to the streets to protest police brutality in a national reckoning on racism.

Speaker of the House Philip Gunn, who had been the most prominent Republican to publicly call for removing the Confederate battle emblem from the state flag but struggled to get buy-in from his GOP legislative colleagues, was watching intently.

“George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, all the other incidents happened, and we weren’t even supposed to be in session to begin with,” Gunn said. “But there we were, and there the nation was. There clearly was a window of opportunity to discuss the flag again.”

On June 6, 2020, several young Black organizers gathered at least 3,000 Mississippians in downtown Jackson for a Black Lives Matter rally. Historians suggested that the rally was the largest civil rights demonstration in Mississippi since the 1960s. One of the organizers’ main demands to government leaders: Change the state flag.

“Mississippi is a state that I love,” Jarrius Adams, one of the organizers of the BLM rally, told Mississippi Today at the time. “But with the current state flag, Mississippi struggles to love me back … Elected officials who choose to stay silent on this issue are cowards. (They) have a responsibility to ensure anything that represents our state represents us equitably.”

In the crowd that day was state Rep. Chris Bell, a Democrat who represents the city of Jackson. Moved by the rally and the moment, Bell got to work when he returned to the Capitol two days later.

One of dozens of Black lawmakers who had unsuccessfully filed bills to change the state flag in previous sessions, Bell met with eight other House members — including four newly-elected white Republicans — in a closed-door meeting on June 8. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss how, if at all, they could carry out the demand of those activists.

The 10 attendees of that meeting were Democratic Reps. Chris Bell, Jarvis Dortch, Robert Johnson, Tracey Rosebud, Jeffery Harness and Shanda Yates; and Republican Reps. Missy McGee, Kent McCarty, Jansen Owen and Sam Creekmore. The meeting served as one of the first earnest bipartisan efforts to change the flag since 2001.

“We all knew that in order for us to have any shot at changing the flag, it had to have the approval of the speaker,” Bell said. “We knew how critical Speaker Gunn was to this movement.”

So three representatives of the group — Bell, Johnson and Yates — scheduled a meeting with Gunn in his office.

“(Yates) looked at me and said, ‘We want to change the flag,’” Gunn recalled. “I chuckled a little bit and said, ‘Well I do, too. It’s no secret where I stand.’ Then she said, ‘I think we need to bring it to a vote.’”

“Well, how many votes do you have?” Gunn asked. Yates said that she thought she had four Republican votes along with the House’s 39 Black Democrats and five white Democrats.

The fact that the lawmakers even had the ability to meet that day was unusual. In any other year, the Legislature would’ve adjourned its session in April. But because COVID-19 was ripping through the state, lawmakers delayed the session to resume during the early summer. They’d returned to Jackson on June 8, and they had a little less than a month to pass the state’s budget and allocate more than $1 billion in federal coronavirus relief.

Because of the delayed session, the Legislature’s deadlines to introduce general bills had all passed. That meant by a two-thirds vote of both the House and the Senate would have to agree to suspend the legislative rules to even consider a flag bill.

In other words, a flag bill that would normally require just 62 votes to pass the House actually required 81 votes to be considered during the unusual June reconvening.

The group of House Democrats sitting in Gunn’s office on June 8 had counted just 48 votes to change the flag — 33 votes shy of the necessary margin.

“They were well short of the votes not only to suspend the rules, but even just to change the flag (with the simple majority),” Gunn said. “I told them they were welcome to keep counting votes, and I pledged that I would ask around and gauge the temperature among the Republicans. 

“To be honest, I didn’t believe on that day that they — we, anyone — could get anywhere close to the votes we needed,” Gunn said.

The next day, on June 9, Mississippi Today first reported details of that meeting with Gunn. The headline read: “Bipartisan group of lawmakers, with Speaker Gunn’s blessing, pushes to change Mississippi state flag.” Mississippi Today’s political team carefully vetted the story before publication and cited information from multiple unnamed sources with direct knowledge of the meeting.

Thousands of Mississipians, spurred by the explosive news, flooded the phones and email inboxes of legislators. The article published just as the House was going into the morning session on June 9. When Gunn stepped off the floor 90 minutes later, he had received 582 emails from Mississippians about the flag.

Gunn, meanwhile, privately fumed about the publication of the article. He felt it inaccurately portrayed his position, and he felt betrayed by the attendees of that meeting who talked to a reporter. Allies of Gunn’s publicly suggested that the article likely killed any chances of legislative action on the flag.

“That article publishing made my job of getting Republicans a whole lot harder,” Gunn told Mississippi Today earlier this year. “The rest of the Republicans who really didn’t want to deal with the issue became really suspicious. They thought I was having secret meetings and counting secret votes. That wasn’t the case. It just created an uphill battle (getting the Republican votes).”

Nevertheless, Gunn — who later acknowledged the Mississippi Today article and the reaction to it “certainly helped get the ball rolling” — still made good on the pledge he’d made to the small group of lawmakers during the initial meeting.

“The next day (June 10), I brought in three trusted Republican members,” Gunn said. “I brought up the possibility of changing the flag. There wasn’t pushback, per se, but there was caution. They said they didn’t think the caucus could get there, especially with the number of votes needed to suspend the rules. Still, I told them to ask around (the Republican caucus). They did, and there was no overwhelmingly positive support.”

The Democrats who had met with Gunn that week — a couple of whom had leaked details of that first meeting — could only trust that the speaker was holding up his end of the bargain.

“We all wanted the flag to change, but we knew we didn’t have much sway over the Republicans,” Bell said. “You just didn’t have a lot of Democrats running around bothering Republicans because in that meeting, Gunn told us, ‘I don’t have the votes, but I can poll the caucus.’ Knowing where he had been on the flag, that gave us faith in him to go to his caucus and try. Honestly, (Gunn’s position on the flag) was the only hope I had to lean on at that point.”

Outside the Capitol that week, pressure began mounting. Several organizations publicly called for lawmakers to change the flag. Lobbyists began pulling lawmakers aside on behalf of their corporate clients to take the temperature of a possible change. A political consulting group in Jackson released polling that showed attitudes of voters were shifting toward changing the flag.

But sensing little support or enthusiasm among his caucus, no major movement in the House occurred. Gunn began feeling dispirited — that same feeling he’d felt the previous three sessions since he’d publicly called for changing the flag.

On June 11, two days after the Mississippi Today article came out, Gunn hosted a Republican House Caucus meeting on the second floor of the Capitol to discuss state budget priorities. Near the end of the meeting, a Republican House member raised his hand and addressed the elephant in the room: He asked Gunn if the speaker was working to change the flag.

Gunn, still angry about the article and doubtful that he could come up with the votes, gave an unplanned but heartfelt five-minute speech about his position on the flag.

The speech — now a thing of Mississippi political lore — is remembered differently by different Republicans who were in the room. Asked to recount the speech, Gunn smiled and said simply: “It was all about the legacy that we were leaving for our children and grandchildren and the history that was coming.”

Gunn didn’t know it at the time, but that spur-of-the-moment speech laid the groundwork for several critical House votes that would flip over the next couple weeks.

“There were things the speaker understood and we understood that had to happen,” Bell said. “That started with him needing to convince a lot of Republicans to do this thing they didn’t want to do. I give him credit because that week, it all started falling into place.”

Part three of the Mississippi Today’s series will publish on June 30, part four on July 1, and part five on July 2.

The post As activists demanded state flag change in 2020, Philip Gunn began counting GOP votes appeared first on Mississippi Today.

More than 20 years ago, Mississippi State’s Rusty Thoms won the hearts of Omaha and fans of the College World Series. Today, his Omaha story continues to unfold. Rusty joined Mississippi Today’s Rick Cleveland for a conversation about the College World Series and Mississippi State’s newest chapter in Omaha ahead of Mississippi State’s second game.

The post Rusty Thoms joins Rick Cleveland to discuss Mississippi State’s national title bid appeared first on Mississippi Today.

After a tough 8-2 loss last night, Mississippi State is back in the hunt tonight at 6 p.m. for a do-or-die game versus Vanderbilt.

The post Marshall Ramsey: Hunting Dogs appeared first on Mississippi Today.

OMAHA — Mississippi State faithful filled TD Ameritrade Park like a maroon-clad army Monday night for Game One of the College World Series championship round. They came ready to make noise — and they made plenty, especially after Kamren James blasted a first inning home run well over the left centerfield fence.

If there were 24,402 people here, as announced, fully three-quarters of them were State fans. It was the most non-neutral neutral site crowd these eyes have seen or these ears have heard. They were standing and cheering, even before James slugged his homer when the count went to three balls, one strike. They went bonkers afterward.

Then, two things happened: 

One, State starter Christian MacLeod couldn’t throw a strike and never got out of the bottom of the first inning. Vandy put up seven runs, silencing the crowd.

Two, Vanderbilt’s Jack Leiter, soon to be a top five pick in the MLB Draft, settled down and pitched like the several million dollars he’s about to earn. He kept the State partisans out of it — to the point that the loudest and certainly the most piercing — noise was the infamous Vandy Whistler, who whistled the night away during the Commodores’ 8-2 victory.

So, the Bulldogs find themselves down one game in the best-of-three series. State has played its baseball all season long when backed up against the proverbial wall. That’s where the ‘Dogs are now — backs squarely against the wall — and they are playing the defending national champions who have a 49-16 record this season.

“We came this far for a reason,” Bulldogs star Tanner Allen said. “We played eight great innings after the first. We kept playing. We’re gonna bring the same mentality and same attitude to the park tomorrow.”

State coaches clearly were hoping MacLeod could return to the form he often showed before the calendar turned to June and the games became far more meaningful. Over his last five appearances, the tall left-hander has allowed 19 earned runs and 10 walks in 16.2 innings. His problem has been all about command. He falls behind, issues free passes and then when he throws a strike, it’s right over the middle of the plate and somebody makes him pay.

MacLeod walked two of the first three Vandy batters and then hit the next two.

“It’s really frustrating,” Chris Lemonis said postgame. “You can’t give it to them. You have to make them earn it. It’s frustrating to come in here and not play like you have all year long and command the strike zone and pitch aggressively.”

Asked specifically about MacLeod’s recent problems, Lemonis said, “I just think he’s trying to do too much in the moment. And it’s gotten away from him. …He’s been great all year for us, pitched in big stadiums, pitched in big moments. The last couple weeks have been frustrating, more frustrating for him than anyone else.”

Allen was more protective of MacLeod.

“Obviously C-Mac didn’t have his great stuff tonight,” Allen said. “That’s part of the game. As a teammate, watching him the way he worked in the offseason and the fall and in spring training, you can’t do nothing but just slap him on the butt and pick him up and encourage him, because he’ll get the ball again. The sun’s going to come up again for him.

“I know he’s probably catching a lot of flak on social media right now,” Allen went on, “but 99.9% of those people have never played in a national championship game and never pitched in front of even maybe 500 people. … And you know what, he’s a good friend of mine. So as a good friend, I really do feel bad for him. I do. But I know what kind of competitor he is and he’ll pick himself up and he’ll be fine ready to go his next start.”

Vanderbilt had scored a total of 16 runs in its four previous CWS game. The Commodores had scored a total of 10 in their last three. They scored seven in one inning against State.

Then, State’s bullpen limited the Commodores to one run over the next seven innings. When State pitchers threw strikes — “pounded the zone,” was the way Lemonis put it — they kept Vandy bats silent. Indeed, the only run Vandy scored was in the seventh inning and was scored by a player who reached first on a leadoff walk. Again, the Commodores are good enough. You can’t help them.

If the Bulldogs are that charitable Tuesday night, this magical State run comes to an end.

The post Vandy takes advantage of State’s charity, takes 1-0 lead in national title series appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Mississippi lawmakers pondering a medical marijuana program heard on Monday from colleagues from two ends of the spectrum: Utah, which strictly regulates medical marijuana, and Oklahoma, whose program is so open it resembles recreational marijuana use.

“This begins to look a lot like de facto recreational use,” Mississippi Senate Public Health Chairman Hob Bryan, D-Amory, told Oklahoma state Rep. Scott Fetgatter, who spoke with Bryan’s committee via Zoom. Fetgatter told lawmakers his state has issued about 400,000 medical marijuana use cards and issued about 10,000 business licenses for dispensaries, cultivators, processors and testing labs. Oklahoma has about 2,000 dispensaries, allows smoking of medical marijuana and allows patients to grow a small number of plants in their homes.

“That is a fair statement,” Fetgatter said. “We’d be better off at this point if we had an adult use (recreational) program along with medical marijuana … Ten percent of our population currently has a medical marijuana card … and two to three people are using each one of those cards … I had no idea there were so many ill people in Oklahoma … A large amount of the population in Oklahoma is using medical marijuana.”

By contrast, Utah has only about 23,000 people with medical marijuana use cards — about 1% of its population — 42 dispensaries that operate more like pharmacies and a “cap” of only eight growers licensed. The state does not allow smoking of medical marijuana or home growing and it charges a hefty fee — $100,000 for a dispensary license, which limits who can enter the market.

Utah state Sen. Evan Vickers, also appearing via Zoom, said there had been some issues with growers, particularly those in large “vertically integrated” companies that grow, process and dispense, not wanting to sell to some dispensaries and other “disruptions” in supplying medical marijuana to patients.

Mississippi lawmakers are trying to reach consensus on a medical marijuana program after the state Supreme Court shot down one overwhelmingly passed by voters last year with ballot Initiative 65. The state Supreme Court ruled last month that the medical marijuana initiative and the entire ballot initiative process is invalid. Legislative leaders and Gov. Tate Reeves have discussed the possibility of a special session to consider both the reinstatement of the medical marijuana program and entire initiative process where citizens can gather signatures to place issues on the ballot for voters to decide.

READ MORE: Medical marijuana protesters call on Mississippi politicians to ‘stop the steal’

Many medical marijuana advocates and Initiative 65 supporters say they don’t want the state to overregulate a program to the point patients can’t get cannabis, or where only big marijuana corporations could participate.

“I think they need to find a happy medium between Utah and Oklahoma type programs and do what’s in the best interest for patients in Mississippi,” said Angie Calhoun, chairwoman of the Mississippi Medical Marijuana Association and mother of a son who suffered debilitating seizures, inability to eat and other problems that were untreatable with pharmaceuticals but helped by medical marijuana. “We don’t want them to overregulate, and we don’t want to see $100,000 license fees like in Utah.”

Both Vickers and Fetgatter offered Mississippi lawmakers some advice from their hard-learned experiences in Utah and Oklahoma.

“If it’s medicine, then treat it like medicine,” Vickers said. “We require cannabis pharmacies, where they have some expertise, not cannabis dispensaries where someone’s main expertise is that they’ve gotten high before… The vertically integrated companies are more efficient, where they own all three: the cultivation, the processing and the pharmacy. You just don’t want them to own the lab.”

Fetgatter recommended any state creating a program have a “stand alone” agency overseeing medical marijuana.

Fetgatter also said: “We have an issue with the criminal element moving into our state, legally growing, but then trafficking the marijuana outside our state … Make sure you protect your agricultural and rural land from foreign investors. They will trash your rural areas with large grow operations if you let them.”

Reeves, who as governor has sole authority to call a special session, said he would do so only if Senate and House leaders are on the same page with a medical marijuana program and other issues.

Sen. Kevin Blackwell, R-Southaven, who has led the push to pass a medical marijuana program in the Legislature, on Monday said he believes such a consensus could be reached soon.

“I told the governor a couple of weeks ago we should have something by mid-July, an agreement between the House and Senate,” Blackwell said. “By August I believe we could have a special session.”

Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, who presides over the Senate, sat in on the morning part of the day-long hearing on Monday. He wouldn’t speculate on a special session.

“You’ll have to check with the governor,” Hosemann said. “The governor is who calls special sessions.”

The Senate Public Health Committee at its Monday hearing also heard from:

• Karmen Hanson, with the National Conference of State Legislatures. She showed lawmakers the patchwork of laws, regulations, taxes and fees across the 36 states plus Washington, D.C. and three territories that have regulated comprehensive medical marijuana programs. She said most states require a doctor have a “bona fide medical relationship” with a patient before approving medical marijuana use. She said that typically states provide “the floor, not the ceiling,” with regulations and allow local governments to develop their own regulations, and many allow opt-in or opt-out provisions for localities.

• Dr. Jennifer Bryan, chair of the Mississippi State Medical Association Board and Dr. Scott Hambleton, an addiction specialist and director of the Mississippi Physicians Health Program. Bryan reiterated the MSMA’s opposition to Initiative 65 and both doctors warned lawmakers that research on the efficacy of medical marijuana is very limited, it has severe detrimental effects on users and it is not the panacea that advocates make it out to be. Bryan said: “We are not Utah and we are not Oklahoma. We’ve already got some sick folks around here that we’re trying to get taken care of … Marijuana is not a medicine. It is a product that should be researched.”

• Amy Smoot, a patient advocate from DeSoto County. Smoot, a former emergency medical technician, spoke on behalf of three families with young children with terrible illnesses that traditional pharmaceuticals couldn’t treat and caused severe side effects. “Today I’m requesting that you legalize their medication,” Smoot said. Of one young patient named Miles, she told lawmakers, “I’m begging you today, please help Miles. Senators, you all are Miles’ last chance. Please do not let him down.”

• Mark Cash, owner of Green Guys CBD dispensaries in Saltillo and Starkville who was hoping to transition into medical marijuana before Initiative 65 was overturned by the court. Cash said he’s seen people benefitting from use of CBD, and believes medical marijuana would be even more effective for many patients.

The post How regulated should Mississippi medical marijuana be? appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Rick Cleveland has been in Omaha covering the Bulldogs’ College World Series run. The legendary sportswriter was joined by Mississippi Today Editor-in-Chief Adam Ganucheau to preview game one and to chronicle the atmosphere in Omaha.

The post Rick Cleveland previews game one of the State-Vandy national title series appeared first on Mississippi Today.

This is part one in a five-part series about Philip Gunn’s influence in changing the Mississippi state flag. Read more about the series here.

The day Speaker of the House Philip Gunn became the first prominent Republican elected official to publicly call for changing the state flag, the backlash he received was so distressing that he asked the Clinton Police Department to watch his house closely overnight.

“I called and said, ‘Hey, I don’t know what’s going to happen. Would you just keep an eye on my neighborhood?’ I have no idea if they did, but I was concerned, to say the least,” Gunn said, pausing to collect his thoughts. “We had gotten some — just some very aggressive, hateful responses in emails and text messages that day.”

It was June 22, 2015, and Gunn had attended a fundraiser earlier in the day for state Rep. Joey Hood in Ackerman. After the event, a reporter at a northeast Mississippi television station grabbed Gunn for a quick interview.

Less than a week before in South Carolina, a young white man walked into a Black church in Charleston and brutally murdered nine worshippers. Because the gunman had publicly documented his obsession with the Confederate battle emblem, the murders inspired debate across the country about the government-sanctioned use of the Confederate symbol.

The TV reporter asked Gunn about the Mississippi state flag, which was the last in the nation containing the Confederate battle emblem. While the camera rolled, Gunn advocated for a new flag.

As soon as Gunn left the fundraiser, he called Nathan Wells, his then-chief of staff and longtime top political adviser. The two had been privately talking for years about their shared disdain of the state flag and how they could work to change it.

“He said, ‘Nathan, uh, I think we need to release a statement,’” Wells recounted to Mississippi Today in an interview earlier this year. “I didn’t know he was going to take this step that rocked the Mississippi political scene for a minute, but knowing how he felt about it, it didn’t surprise me.”

Later that day, Gunn’s office released an official statement that did not mince words. It landed him in headlines and TV news broadcasts across the state and the nation.

“We must always remember our past, but that does not mean we must let it define us,” Gunn said in the June 22, 2015, statement. “As a Christian, I believe our state’s flag has become a point of offense that needs to be removed. We need to begin having conversations about changing Mississippi’s flag.”

A former deacon of his Baptist church in Clinton and trustee of one of the nation’s top Southern Baptist seminaries, Gunn frequently cites his faith as he takes public positions on political and social issues.

In interviews with Mississippi Today, Gunn opened up about how difficult it became for him to square his perception of the state-sanctioned Confederate battle emblem with his view of Christianity.

“My conviction was borne out of my religion, out of my understanding of scripture,” Gunn said. “I believe the number one charge of anyone who professes to be a Christian is to love God first and love your neighbor second. We are also charged to be witnesses for the gospel to share our faith and to encourage others to follow God. And so as I began to think about that and the flag, it just seemed to me that the continued use of the Confederate emblem was an obstacle we had to overcome.”

Gunn continued: “It would be very difficult for me to go into an African American neighborhood, say, with a Confederate battle emblem on my T-shirt and say, ‘Let me tell you about how I love you and Jesus loves you.’ To me, that would immediately raise suspicion because of how that image has been used to represent the hatred that some had in their hearts.”

While describing his feelings about the Confederate battle emblem, Gunn specifically mentioned the Charleston church shooting and the 2016 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, where white nationalists from around the country came together around the symbol.

Even before that, Gunn said, he felt the image was offensive, leading him to vote in the 2001 referendum to change the state flag. Gunn was among just 36% of Mississippi voters who voted to change the flag that year.

“That image had become co-opted to represent things that I don’t think Mississippians stand for, for something I don’t think represents my Christian faith,” he said. “You know, there are other scriptures in the Bible, like when Paul says, ‘If I eat meat and it offends my brother, then I don’t eat meat.’ I don’t, for the sake of the gospel, do certain things that drive away people or prevent me having the opportunity to share the gospel or lead people effectively. So all that was, first and foremost, the nature of my conviction about changing the flag.”

Gunn’s statement in June 2015 sent a shockwave through the state’s political apparatus. While U.S. Sens. Thad Cochran and Roger Wicker quickly echoed Gunn’s sentiments about the flag, no other prominent Republicans in Mississippi were moved enough by his words to join him on the limb.

Statewide officials and top legislators privately suggested the speaker must have had intentions of leaving politics or had another job lined up. There were serious talks of a mutiny within the House GOP caucus, and several flag-supporting House Republicans from rural districts floated the notion of running against Gunn for speaker to anyone who would listen. Signs popped up in white yards of voters across the state: “Keep the flag, change the Speaker.”

“I respected him for it,” said Rep. Robert Johnson, the Democrat from Natchez who serves as the House Democratic caucus leader. “No matter the impetus, it took courage to do it in light of the people and party he represented. I witnessed some of the vitriol and backlash he got. I knew what the sentiment was in some circles, but I just didn’t know people would turn on him the way they did. Here’s a man who you couldn’t question his conservatism. And just because he took that stance on the flag, he was thrown to the wolves.”

Gunn didn’t even receive meaningful political support from his own caucus. Just six Republican lawmakers in the House reached out to him and privately offered their support that week, Gunn said. Only two of them backed his statement publicly.

“I got a call from a top Republican political adviser — a good friend of mine — who said ‘Philip Gunn is done,’” Wells said. “Was there a political risk? Sure. We talked about that at the time. Ultimately we said that if we lead a caucus that will vote you out as speaker because you want to change the flag from this hateful image, do you really want to be speaker of that caucus anyway? It was a pretty easy question to answer.”

Gunn, too, downplayed any perception of political fallout.

“I try not to operate worrying about the next election or worry about things like that,” Gunn said. “I would like to think that I operate more based upon conviction, what I think is right and not based on any possible consequences. I think most political experts would tell you to make a statement like that was probably not very politically smart.”

It’s difficult to overstate how alone Gunn remained on the issue. His statement spurred no movement within the Mississippi Republican Party, which had a complete grasp of the state’s power structure that had the capability to change the flag.

Neither of the two most powerful officials needed to make the change had the personal desire to take on the issue. Then-Gov. Phil Bryant, a dues-paying member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, displayed a state flag license plate on the front of his state-issued SUV. Then-Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves, whose principal focus at the time was building statewide support for his planned 2019 run for governor, made no bones about his support of the flag, wearing the image on a ballcap to football games and on hunting excursions.

Republicans, who enjoy a legislative supermajority, long feared going against their constituencies on the flag. Gunn’s statement in 2015 came a couple months before the Republican primary in a statewide and legislative election cycle — timing that spooked even the members of his party who may have privately agreed with his position on the flag.

As late as 2019, Republicans who even hinted at a new flag were targeted the next election cycle. Any public statements from most Republican lawmakers not named Philip Gunn included something about the pro-flag vote in the 2001 referendum or how “voters, not lawmakers, should make this decision.”

In the legislative sessions following his 2015 statement, Gunn knew he didn’t have anywhere close to the votes necessary in his House to make the change. And even if he did expend the capital to whip the House votes for such a politically contentious issue, he still had to contend with a Reeves-led Senate and a governor who would likely veto.

He focused, instead, on building relationships with a broad coalition of House members.

“We talked about the flag every session,” Johnson said. “He’d always say, ‘You know where I’m at on this, you know I want to change the flag, but we just don’t have the support in the Republican caucus. None of my people want it out of committee.’ He thought it would further divide or create tension in his caucus. He saw it as a futile effort.

“He was trying to maintain unity within his caucus, and I didn’t always agree with that,” Johnson continued. “I thought the way to get it passed was to keep hammering it, at least force the debate. He thought it would end up creating more anger and discord. For better or worse, he stuck to that.”

In the years after the statement, Gunn felt he had no choice but to wait. Meanwhile, he continued to have conversations with both Democrats and Republicans about the issue. When the Southern Legislative Conference met on the Mississippi Gulf Coast in 2017, Gunn hosted several lawmakers of both major parties in a closed-door session with the William Winter Institute to discuss the state flag, among other things. Catching wind of that session, about 20 protesters waving old state flags gathered outside the conference center on its opening night.

The speaker would sometimes become visibly frustrated when pressed on why he hadn’t pushed legislation to change the flag following his 2015 statement.

“I think ultimately, those of us who wanted to change the flag knew that something outside our control had to happen for the energy to be created to have a real conversation,” Gunn said. “We of course weren’t rooting for another Charleston or anything like that, but something bigger than a statement I put out needed to happen (for real talks of a change among Republicans to occur).”

To Gunn’s dismay, it would take five years from the time he first called for the change for that “something bigger than a statement” to happen. But when it did, he was ready to move and didn’t hesitate.

Part two of the Mississippi Today’s series will publish on June 29, part three will publish June 30, part four on July 1, and part five on July 2.

The post Why Philip Gunn became the first prominent Republican to call for changing the state flag appeared first on Mississippi Today.

As Mississippi’s vaccination effort continues to limp forward, state health officials are warning of the massive threat the Delta variant of COVID-19 poses to the unvaccinated, and of a potential surge of infections set off by a strain that’s much more infectious and potentially deadlier than the original strain of the virus.

“Delta variant increasing rapidly in Mississippi,” State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs tweeted last week. “Let’s pay attention to Missouri. I predict it will be our dominant strain in 1-3 weeks.”

Missouri is certainly a cautionary tale for how the Delta variant could impact Mississippi’s recovery efforts. The variant now accounts for around 29% of total cases in Missouri, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It also accounts for one in every five COVID-19 cases in the United States.

A wave of new infections has left Missouri with the highest infection rate in the country and is stressing the limits of the state’s hospital system. In Springfield alone, there has been a 225% increase in hospital admissions since June 1, according to the Springfield-Greene County Health Department.

With 650 confirmed cases, the Alpha variant of COVID-19, which originated in the United Kingdom, still represents nearly 86% of all variant infections in Mississippi. There are currently 29 confirmed Delta infections in Mississippi, but this number nearly tripled in the 10-day period between June 14-24. Hinds County is the current hotbed for the Delta variant, where 18 of the 29 confirmed cases have been identified.

The vaccines are nearly as effective against the Delta variant as the original strain, greatly minimizing the chance of infection and nearly eliminating the risks of developing a serious illness.

Dobbs has repeatedly stressed that Mississippians have the choice of getting vaccinated or contracting COVID-19, and that in every scenario a vaccinated person is going to have a better outcome than if they had declined the shot.

The data collected on infections and deaths over the last few months has made this argument irrefutable. The Associated Press reported that nearly all COVID deaths in the U.S. are among the unvaccinated. Of the more than 18,000 COVID-19 deaths that occurred in May, only around 150, or 0.8% were from fully vaccinated people. 

Despite the wide availability of vaccines and the risks posed by variants, Mississippi continues to rank last in the nation in the share of its population that has been vaccinated. 

Only 32% of Mississippians have been fully vaccinated despite significant gains made in recent months in vaccinating the most vulnerable and making vaccine access more equitable. People are simply declining to get their shots, and this is keeping Mississippi in last place.

MAP: Where Mississippians can get the COVID-19 vaccine

“We’ve been through the worst pandemic in over a century. We’ve lost over 600,000 Americans. It’s now the third leading cause of death in this country,” Dobbs said during a press conference last Wednesday. “We now have an exit door. Too many of us are choosing not to use that door. When we don’t all use it together, and in a sufficient number … it keeps us all vulnerable.”

We’re already seeing the danger vaccine resistance poses to the most vulnerable populations, with even some working in healthcare settings refusing to get vaccinated. 

“We’ve seen outbreaks where symptomatic staff members have brought (COVID-19) into nursing homes,” Dobbs said. “This is something that just can’t be OK.”

The significant protections already known to come from COVID-19 vaccines received another credibility boost on Monday, as a new report found that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines initiate a persistent reaction in the immune system that may protect the body against the virus for years. 

"It's a good sign for how durable our immunity is from this vaccine," Dr. Ali Ellebedy, an immunologist at Washington University, who led the study, told The New York Times. 

The study did not examine the immune response prompted by the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, and researchers said they expected it to be less durable than the protections provided by mRNA vaccines. Still, the results of the study suggest that those who received one of the two mRNA vaccines may not need booster shots later in the year, as many had expected, so long as significant mutations in the virus and variants do not occur. 

Last week, the CDC said that there is no data that currently supports recommending booster shots. To recommend them, the center would require “evidence of declining protection against illness, such as declines in vaccine effectiveness" or detection of a "variant of concern substantially impacting vaccine protection.”

People who recovered from COVID-19 before being vaccinated may not need boosters even if the virus does make a significant transformation. But whether or not boosters will be needed for more vulnerable populations with suppressed immune systems is yet to be seen, and the landscape will certainly continue to change as the virus continues to evolve.

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New life has been breathed into a lawsuit attempting to overturn Mississippi’s lifetime ban on voting for people convicted of certain felonies.

The full panel of the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has agreed to hear the lawsuit seeking to strike down the Jim Crow-era provision that framers of the 1890 Mississippi Constitution said was designed to try to prevent African Americans from voting.

Mississippi denies a higher percentage of its residents the right to vote because of felony convictions than any state in the country. In Mississippi, 235,150 people — or 10.6% of the state’s voting age population — have lost their right to vote, according to The Sentencing Project. Under the same restrictions, 130,500 Black Mississippians — or 16% of that voting age population — cannot vote. Since 2016, Mississippi has moved from second to first highest percentage in the nation.

The lawsuit, which challenges the constitutionality of the disenfranchisement provisions and was filed by the Mississippi Center for Justice, appeared dead in the water after a three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in February rejected efforts to continue the lawsuit. But last week, the full panel of the Appeals Court agreed to hear the case. Oral arguments most likely will begin the week of Sept. 20.

“This is a big step forward in this case, which we filed in 2017 to remove the remnants of this racist 1890 provision from Mississippi’s Constitution,” Center for Justice attorney Rob McDuff, who filed the lawsuit, said in a statement. “We are now in front of the full complement of 17 active Court of Appeals judges who will take a fresh look at whether the unconstitutional motivation behind this law requires that it be struck down.” 

In the 1890s, the Mississippi Supreme Court said the disfranchisement of felons 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.” McDuff said the provision’s intent was the same as the poll tax, the literacy test and other Jim Crow-era provisions that sought to prevent African Americans from voting.

Those crimes placed in the Constitution where conviction would cost a person the right to vote were bribery, theft, arson, obtaining money or goods under false pretense, perjury, forgery, embezzlement, bigamy and burglary. Those were crimes that the 1890 framers believed African Americans were more likely to commit.

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 and still be able to vote — even while incarcerated.

In 1968, the crimes of murder and rape were added as disenfranchising crimes. But even today, a person could be convicted of writing a bad check and lose the right to vote, but be a major drug kingpin locked up in prison and still vote. The lawsuit does not seek to overturn the voting ban for those convicted of murder or rape.

Under the Mississippi Constitution, a person who loses his voting rights because of a felony conviction cannot have them restored without a two-thirds vote of both chambers of the Mississippi Legislature or by a gubernatorial pardon. The Legislature has been reluctant to restore those rights.

In the 2021 session, the House passed bills to restore voting rights to 21 people convicted of felonies, but the Senate rejected all but two of those bills.

READ MORE: Mississippi Senate killed 19 House bills to restore voting rights

“We are committed to challenging racial discrimination in voting on all fronts, including this remaining vestige of the infamous 1890 constitutional plan to steal the vote from Black people,” said Vangela M. Wade, president and chief executive officer of Mississippi Center for Justice. “At a time when most states have repealed their disfranchisement laws, it is time to remove from Mississippi’s Constitution this backward provision that was enacted with such a vicious purpose.”

Mississippi is in the minority of states — less than 10 — where voting rights are not automatically restored for people convicted of felonies either after they complete their sentence or at some point after completing parole or probation. 

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Roy Harness and Kamal Karriem. According to a statement from the Center for Justice, “Harness is a military veteran who was convicted of forgery in 1986 during a period of drug addiction. He served his sentence and later kicked the habit and went on to earn a degree in social work from Jackson State at the age of 62. Karriem is a former city council member in Columbus who was convicted of embezzlement in 2005. He also served his sentence and later became a pastor and one of the owners and operators of his family’s restaurant.”

Other attorneys working on the case for the Center for Justice include former Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Fred Banks; civil rights lawyers David Lipman and Armand Derfner and former U.S. Solicitor General Don Verrilli. Verrilli is expected to argue the case before the 5^th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Editor’s note: Vangela M. Wade is a member of Mississippi Today’s board of directors.

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