Starting Thursday, people holding many professional licenses — including public school teachers — in good standing in other states can move to the Magnolia State and take a job or hang out a shingle.
House Bill 1263 would require most of Mississippi’s occupational licensing boards, agencies and commissions to issue licenses to people who hold a current license in good standing from another state and have been licensed at least a year. There are some exceptions, such as physicians and attorneys, but it covers dozens of other professions, such as accountants, cosmetologists, dentists, nurses, pharmacists, psychologists and veterinarians.
Gov. Tate Reeves at a press conference this week thanked the bill’s author, state Rep. Becky Currie of Brookhaven, and Sen. Kevin Blackwell of Southaven for the bill’s passage. Reeves said the measure is “a loss for governmental bureaucracy and red tape,” that will help Mississippi attract residents and jobs.
The measure is one of hundreds of new Mississippi laws and spending bills that take effect on Thursday, including a teacher pay raise, House Bill 852, of about $1,000 per year for Mississippi’s more than 31,000 kindergarten through 12th grade teachers and teacher assistants. The more than 100 appropriations bills that fund state agencies also will go into effect Thursday.
Most laws passed by the Mississippi Legislature take effect each year on July 1, the start of the state’s fiscal year, although some start “from and after passage,” which means immediately after the governor signs them. Others start at later specified dates. For instance, a pay raise of up to 3% for the about 26,000 state employees approved during the 2021 session will not go into effect until Jan. 1, 2022.
A look at some of the laws that take effect Thursday:
Senate Bill 2795: Centers on criminal justice reform. The new law expands parole eligibility and would allow as many as 3,000 of the state’s roughly 17,000 people now in prison to become eligible for parole within three to five years. Those convicted of violations deemed violent crimes committed without a weapon, such as simple robbery or burglary, would be eligible for parole after serving 20 years or 50% of their sentence, whichever is less. They currently have to serve 50%. And some convicted of possession of drugs or of selling drugs and those convicted of some other nonviolent crimes would be eligible after serving 10 years or 25%, whichever is less.
House Bill 1135: This bill concerns the home delivery of alcohol. The law allows home delivery of beer, wine and liquor from liquor stores and other retailers within 30 miles of the stores. Delivery would not be allowed to any “dry” areas where alcohol sales are prohibited and would be allowed only from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Saturday, not on Sundays nor on Christmas day. Purchasers would have to be 21 or older, as would delivery drivers.
H0use Bill 196: The Dignity for Incarcerated Women Act provides women in prison with minor children more opportunity to see the children and provides additional rights for pregnant women, such as allowing a newborn to remain with the mother for 72 hours unless there are medical concerns and prohibiting invasive searches of pregnant women. The new law also would provide additional rights for all women, such as access to menstrual hygiene products.
Senate Bill 2569: This bill makes it a misdemeanor to tamper with urine samples used for testing. A third conviction could result in a felony conviction.
House Bill 277: Allows tribal identification cards to be used as identification cards for various activities, such as proving age to purchase liquor or cigarettes or to purchase lottery tickets. The new law also allows the card to be used to purchase hunting and fishing licenses and for other activities. A tribal identification card including a photo already can be used to vote.
Senate Bill 2253: Allows a concealed carry permit to be combined with a driver’s license or state-sponsored identification card.
Senate Bill 2606: The Mississippi Native Spirits Law allows liquor and wine produced in the state more leeway in its sales, such as allowing sales where it is produced, and allowing direct sales by bypassing the state’s liquor and wine warehouse.
House Bill 1139: This reverses a law passed in the 2000s during a budget crunch where businesses had to submit to the state early a certain percentage of sales tax collected in June.
Senate Bill 2621: This bill creates a task force to study domestic laws, including those surrounding divorce.
Senate Bill 2536: This law mandates that people identified as male at birth cannot participates in female sports activities.
On this week’s edition of Mississippi Stories, Mississippi Today Editor-At-Large Marshall Ramsey interviews popular watercolorist Wyatt Waters.
Known for his watercolors of Southern culture, Wyatt Waters is a watercolor master who works solely on location – preferring the challenges that both plein air and watercolor present. Waters’ works have been featured in Art & Antiques, American Artist, Plein Air, and Watercolor. His artwork can be found in both private and corporate collections. A recipient of the Mississippi Governor’s Award for artistic excellence, Wyatt has had numerous solo exhibitions at museums, such as the Mississippi Museum of Art, The Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, the Meridian Museum of Art and the Jackson Municipal Gallery.
He and chef Robert St. John have collaborated on four books – A Southern Palate,Southern Palate, An Italian Palate, and most recently, A Mississippi Palate. He received the MS Institute of Arts & Letters Award for An Oxford Sketchbook and the MS Library Association Special Award for Art for his collaboration with Robert St. John, on A Southern Palate.
Additionally, Waters and St. John co-hosted Mississippi Public Broadcasting’s popular Palate to Palette series for five seasons, which chronicled their travels and culinary and artistic experiences across Mississippi and Italy.
Trading international travel for the travel trailer life, Wyatt and his wife, Kristi, are documenting their travels with Wyatt’s watercolors of the Southeast for a new book, scheduled to be released in the Fall of 2022.
All of Wyatt’s work is available through the Wyatt Waters Gallery in Clinton, Mississippi.
Greenville school officials last week directed the school board attorney to draft information about the April bus driver strike to submit to the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office, according to attorney Dorian Turner.
“The board discussed and reviewed information regarding individual bus drivers and the alleged strike,” Turner said in a statement. “They directed the board attorney to draft for their approval documentation to submit to the appropriate authorities.”
Between 13 to 20 bus drivers for the Greenville Public School District skipped work in April to protest reduced pay and what they called poor work conditions. Following the strike, which is explicitly illegal in Mississippi, the school board reversed a previous decision to reduce the number of work days for the drivers for the next school year by five days.
Several bus drivers who previously spoke to Mississippi Today said they had not been paid by the district for hours worked. One driver said she was not paid for the duration of her quarantine after being exposed to COVID-19 while at work.
In May, Turner, the board attorney, advised board members that what occurred was indeed a strike. Board officials, however, delayed taking any action for weeks.
The strike law passed in 1985 clearly states that school board members themselves are responsible for reporting the names of those who went on strike to the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office. For each day that those names are not reported by the board to the state, the individual board members and school administrators can be fined between $100 and $250.
The school board held a special called meeting Tuesday. The majority of the meeting was held behind closed doors in executive session, but Turner said no action was taken concerning the strike.
Turner will present the information to the board for its approval at its next meeting on July 27. Everitt Chinn, a spokesperson for the district, said the district will not be streaming that meeting or any future meetings online as it has in the past.
Emails between board members and Superintendent Debra Dace reveal some of the internal conversations between Turner, board members and the superintendent in the aftermath of the strike. Dace and board president Jan Vaugh discussed receiving calls from Mississippi Today, and both agreed they would not be commenting on the matter.
” … I guess this is one of the disadvantages of team-audio conferencing because I had no idea (the Mississippi Today reporter) was listening,” Vaughn said in reference to the streamed board meetings.
Mississippi State pitcher Preston Johnson reacts after striking out Vanderbilt’s Carter Young during the fifth inning in Game 2 of the NCAA College World Series baseball finals. (AP Photo/Rebecca S. Gratz)
OMAHA — Mississippi State for decades stacked on decades has boasted one of the elite, most beloved college baseball programs in the country. The Diamond Dogs have been to 12 College World Series, won multiple SEC, NCAA Regional and Super Regional championships. They’ve produced dozens of Major League stars, scores of All Americans.
What they have not done is win a National Championship. That could change Wednesday night, June 30, 2021.
Rick Cleveland
An estimated 20,000 Bulldog fans will cheer them against defending national champion Vanderbilt tonight at TD Ameritrade Park, which really has become Dudy Noble North this week.
The Bulldogs, with their backs to the wall, fired back for a 13-2 trouncing of the Commodores Tuesday night to force a winner-take-all third game in this CWS Championship series. The announced attendance was 24,122. Surely, 20,000 of them were State faithful.
They made a difference.
Honestly, neither Vandy’s 8-2 victory in Game One or State’s bounce-back victory in Game Two have been works of baseball art. Walks and hit batters by State pitchers contributed mightily to Vandy’s first game victory. Walks, wild pitches and errors on the part of Vandy greatly aided State Tuesday night.
Do not expect anything of the sort Wednesday night. State will go with Will Bednar on the mound. Vandy will pitch Kumar Rocker. Both are first-round Major League draft picks, soon-to-be millionaires. Yes, both are going on shorter than normal rest. But both are big, strong, rugged guys who can’t wait for this moment.
Were he here for this, good ol’ Emory Bellard, the long departed State football coach, would put it this way: “Podnuh, it’s a hoss and a hoss.”
It is.
State has one distinct advantage: These really are like home games times two. Vandy has its Whistler. State has a maroon-clad army of fans, who waited out a two-hour weather delay Tuesday night and then cheered from start to finish as if their lives, not just a national championship, depended on it.
Strikeouts were cheered like touchdowns at an SEC football game. We’ll never know how much all that noise factored into the three Vandy errors, the four wild pitches or the 10 walked batters by Vandy pitching. My educated guess: plenty.
They’ve come from all nook and cranny of Mississippi, thousands making 13-hour drives and more.
“You had to come,” said former Bulldog baseball star Rusty Thoms, who has made the trip twice during this CWS to cheer on his alma mater. “It’s expensive as the devil and it’s not easy because it’s a long, long way. But you had to come because this might be the year. Some day it’s gonna happen, and this might be the year, and you had to be here if it happens.”
Thrown into the middle of all that pandemonium was 17-year-old Vanderbilt starting pitcher Christian Little, probably the next Commodore pitching star, possessor of a 96 mph fastball and a nasty slider. He allowed an unearned run in the first but ran into huge trouble in the third inning. When Tanner Allen reached first base because his grounder stuck in the webbing of shortstop Carter Young’s glove, the State crowd thundered approval. And the State fans got louder with each of the 12 balls Little threw to the next three State batters, all of whom walked.
That was it for Little. Four more Vandy pitchers followed him, none with great success. Tanner Allen scored four runs and had two hits. Scotty Dubrule rapped two hits and knocked in four runs. Luke Hancock also provided two hits and two RBI. Lane Forsythe, the nine-hole hitter, broke out of a slump with three hits and two RBI.
Meanwhile, State’s Houston “Hootie” Harding, who pitches as if he has a deadline to meet, gave the Bulldogs four quality innings of one-run baseball, and big Preston Johnson followed him with five excellent innings.
Johnson said he got chills down his spine just being asked about pitching in front of that crowd that was cheering his every strike. “Our fans are the best in the country,” Johnson said. “And that’s just a hundred percent fact.”
Those pitching performances were just what the doctor — and Chris Lemonis — ordered for State, which has a well-rested bullpen ready for Wednesday night’s finale.
And that might be the other State advantage. Behind Bednar, the Bulldogs have master closer Landon Sims, rested and ready to go after not pitching in the first two games of the championship series. Said Lemonis, “After the game I grabbed Landon, I said, ‘Man, it was sure nice not having to pitch you tonight,’ because I feel like in every win for the last month he has been out there. So for him to have the night off and to still get the victory was huge.”
Vanderbilt is still Vanderbilt. Kumar Rocker is still Kumar Rocker. Said Lemonis of Rocker: “He’s probably one of the best to ever play college baseball.”
Still, all things considered, it could not set up a whole lot better for the Bulldogs.
Mississippi Today is creating a COVID-19 Vaccine Guide, where readers can find everything about vaccines, including the how and where of getting them in Mississippi. We’ll answer the most frequently asked questions about the vaccines. You’ll also find information about where vaccination sites are located, transportation options and a layout of the progress Mississippi has made in the vaccine rollout.
Here’s a sneak peek of what the guide will offer: View maps showing how Mississippi’s vaccination progress compares to other states across the United States. For more COVID-19 vaccine data and our full coverage, stay tuned for our 2021 COVID-19 Vaccine Guide, which will be live here.
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View all of our data showing COVID-19 vaccination progress here.
Cases of the Delta Variant of COVID-19 are increasing. More virulent, it is attacking the unvaccinated and causing younger people to get ill (as opposed to the original version that didn’t affect younger people as severely.) The good news? Those who are vaccinated have a strong level of protection from severe illness.
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.”
“The flag is going to change today, it’s going to change a year from now, it’s going to change 20 years from now, but it’s going to change. My children and my grandchildren one day are going to want to know what Philip Gunn did the day he had a chance to do something about it. I want them to be proud of what I did, of where I was and what their Pop did the day he had a chance.
So for me, I’ve got to vote to change the flag. If it beats me in the next election, it beats me. But having the reputation and the respect of my family is more important to me than winning an election. One day, this flag is going to be viewed in a very negative light. And if I am not viewed as having supported its change, then my children and my grandchildren are going to be embarrassed by me. I feel that way. That’s just how I feel.
I want each of you to think about that, go home this weekend and think about that. The driving force for me is the legacy that I leave my children and my grandchildren. There is no plan right now to take this thing up. If we have the votes to take it up, we will take it up. But as we sit here today, we don’t have the votes. There’s no plan to take it up without the votes, but I want each of you to go home this weekend and think about where you want to be on this — where history will show you were on this.”
Philip Gunn’s speech to the House Republican Caucus on June 11, 2020, recounted by Gunn to Mississippi Today
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.
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.
