On this episode of Mississippi Stories, Mississippi Today Editor-at-Large Marshall Ramsey sits down with former Miss Mississippi and artist Glenda Grubbs. Born and raised in Richton, Glenda got her undergraduate and master’s degrees in music from the University of Southern Mississippi.
After winning Miss Mississippi in 1972, Glenda married Gary Grubbs and moved to Los Angeles where they lived for 25 years. Gary became a prolific character actor, starring in numerous television and movie roles (including a brief cameo in this video as he operates the camera). Glenda taught elementary music education until one day, with the encouragement of Gary, she picked up the paint brush and palate.
Glenda and Gary moved back to Hattiesburg, where her artwork is gaining an audience and he continues to act and write. This is a conversation for anyone who has dreams and wonders the path to take to achieve them. Glenda also tells several entertaining stories from her time as Miss Mississippi and from Gary’s career.
The devil will be in the details as legislators attempt to revive the state’s ballot initiative process that was killed by the Mississippi Supreme Court in May — and lawmakers appear far from a consensus on how, exactly, to get there.
At the heart of the issue is whether the ballot initiative process should be used to try to amend or change the Mississippi Constitution, general law, or both. When a proposal is added to the Constitution, it is much more difficult to change.
“I hope we spend some time researching that and find something that works for everyone. We need to make sure we get this right,” said Sen. Chris Johnson, R-Hattiesburg, who as chair of the Constitution Committee most likely will play a key role in any effort to revive the ballot initiative process.
Most legislators agree that they need to pass a resolution to place on the ballot a proposal to re-establish the state’s ballot initiative process. But there are sharp differences in how that resolution should be crafted.
For instance, House Speaker Philip Gunn believes that the ballot initiative process should be changed so that it can be used to alter general law and not the Constitution.
Rep. Robert Johnson, D-Natchez, argues that the Legislature should re-create the initiative process as it was with the only exception being fixing the language that resulted in the Supreme Court striking down the process.
The Supreme Court struck down both medical marijuana, an initiative that was approved by voters in November, and the entire ballot initiative process. In a 6-3 ruling in May, the court said the constitutional mandate of gathering signatures equally among five congressional districts to place an initiative on the ballot was invalid since the state has had only four districts since the 2000 Census. When the Legislature proposed the initiative process and voters approved it in 1992, the state had five districts.
“Some people are talking about making it more difficult,” Rep. Robert Johnson said. “It is funny that is happening after people are beginning to take partisanship out of the equation and try to use the process for pocketbook issues and for issues that genuinely affect their lives.”
Recent initiative efforts that were halted by the Supreme Court ruling dealt with early voting and expanding Medicaid — both proposals that are opposed by much of the state’s governing Republican majority. And, of course, medical marijuana was approved overwhelmingly by voters in November after years where the issue was ignored by the Legislature.
Soon after the Supreme Court ruling, Gunn voiced support for the governor calling a special session “to fix” the initiative process so that the people can continue to use it. But in fixing the process, Gunn advocates that the initiative be changed so that it can be used to pass general laws, not amend the Constitution.
“That is the way most states do it,” Gunn said.
Gunn and others point out that once an issue is placed in the Constitution it is difficult to amend or to change. To change the Constitution requires approval by a two-thirds majority of both chambers of the Legislature and approval by voters during a statewide election. The other way to change the Constitution before the court ruling was through the initiative process.
“We need to do some research and see what other states are doing and make sure Mississippians have equal access to the ballot initiative process,” said Rep. Zakiya Summers, D-Jackson.
Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, who presides over the Senate, said committee chairs in the upper chamber are doing that research.
In total, 25 states, not counting Mississippi, have an initiative process, according to research done by the National Conference of State Legislatures. In those 25 states, 23 allow changes to general law through the ballot initiative while 15 have processes to change both general law and their constitutions. Illinois and Florida, like Mississippi before the Supreme Court ruling, allow changes to the constitution, but not general law through ballot initiatives.
Some worry that it would be too easy for the Legislature to change the general law that was created through the ballot initiative. It takes a simple majority vote of both chambers and signature of the governor to pass a general law.
An option would be to place a higher threshold — at least for a period of years — on the number of votes needed in the Legislature to change a general law created through the initiative process.
Plus, Rep. Randy Boyd, R-Mantachie, and others argued that there would be “political consequences” for legislators and the governor for making wholesale changes to a law enacted through the initiative process.
Even many of the sponsors of the medical marijuana initiative conceded after the Supreme Court ruling that changes need to be made to what was approved by voters. If medical marijuana was in the Constitution, it would be nearly impossible to make those changes, Sen. Chris Johnson pointed out. He said there needs to be an initiative process that is “pliable” for a few years.
Sen. Hob Bryan, D-Amory, proposed a process where after a sponsor filed an initiative, there would be a period to allow people or groups to offer input on possible changes for the sponsor to consider. The sponsors would have a period of time to consider those recommendations and re-file if they agreed with any of the recommendations.
“People might say why don’t you do X or why are you doing Y,” Bryan said. “Nobody sees everything or thinks of everything. It would be an opportunity to make it better.”
Besides the debate on whether to change general law, the Constitution or both through the initiative process, another issue that might come up is the issue of number of signatures needed to place a proposal on the ballot. In Mississippi, the requirement has been a number equivalent to 12% of the popular vote of the last governor’s election, divided equally among five congressional districts.
When the Legislature approved the process, it was believed that it would be difficult to garner that 12%. But as technology has evolved and an industry has developed specializing in gathering signatures, some believe it is much easier now to obtain the 12% than it was in 1992.
Since the initiative process started in Mississippi, seven proposals have reached the ballot and only three have been approved: medical marijuana, a proposal to limit the taking of private property by the government for the use of another private entity, and a proposal to require that people display a government-issued photo identification to vote.
Gov. Tate Reeves has said he most likely would call a special session if a legislative agreement is reached on legalizing medical marijuana and fixing the initiative process. Reaching that agreement on the details of any proposal is proving troublesome.
Jackson native Janet Marie Smith, a Mississippi State-educated architect, designed Camden Yards in Baltimore, renovated Fenway Park in Boston, and most recently has renovated Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. Her hardhat is in the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, and she may be, too, some day.
State Sens. Sampson Jackson, D-Preston, and Tammy Witherspoon, D-Magnolia, have announced their resignations midway through their current terms.
Witherspoon was recently elected mayor of Magnolia and began serving in that office on July 1. She has served six years in the Legislature as senator for District 38, which includes Adams, Pike, Walthall and Wilkinson counties. She was chairwoman of the Enrolled Bills Committee and vice chairwoman of the Housing Committee.
Jackson, who represented District 32 including Kemper, Lauderdale, Noxubee and Winston counties, has served in the Legislature for 30 years. He was chairman of the Forestry Committee. He told local news outlets in his home district that he felt it was simply time for him to retire.
Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann thanked Jackson and Witherspoon for their service and said both senators “had a collegial and congenial nature in the chamber, and oftentimes worked across the aisle on issues aimed at making Mississippi a great place to live and work.”
“After nearly three decades of service, Sen. Jackson has a wealth of experience and knowledge about the legislative process and policy which served his district very well,” Hosemann said in a statement on Tuesday. “Sen. Witherspoon was equally as dedicated to finding solutions and opportunities for her constituents.”
Gov. Tate Reeves will set special elections to fill the final two years of the four-year terms.
The Mississippi Department of Employment Security has secured a $2.5 million federal grant to improve the state’s employment and workforce data.
The U.S. Department of Labor’s employment and training administration heads the grant program, which helps states grow databases to examine whether education programs lead to jobs, if jobseekers are selecting training-related positions, and the impact of training on workers’ wages.
“The grant will allow us to improve the quality and breadth of data in Mississippi’s mature state longitudinal data system,” Mississippi employment office spokeswoman Dianne Bell said in a statement.
Bell also said the funds will allow the state to better evaluate its job training programs by adding information from unemployment insurance wage records.
The grant comes as the state plans to double down on addressing labor shortfalls with a new workforce development office. Ryan Miller, a former program director at the University of Mississippi, began as the office’s first executive director in the spring.
When Miller’s appointment was announced in March, Gov. Tate Reeves said the new office will strategize how to move more Mississippians into higher paying jobs and train more workers to meet the demands of modern labor needs.
The improved data through the grant program is aimed at aiding state leaders, employers and educators in identifying the pathways and programs that lead skilled workers to higher paying, in-demand positions. The data can also help workers make informed decisions about their own education and job interests, according to the department of labor.
Mississippi is one of five states to receive a total of $11.6 million in federal funds to analyze their respective programs and services that help jobseekers find and keep higher paying positions.
This is round eight of the program’s grant distribution. Mississippi also received $2.7 million through the same program in 2017.
Doris Carpenter worries about her young grandson. It’s been 15 months since he’s seen his father — her son — who is serving a 10-year sentence at the Bolivar County Correctional Facility in Cleveland. That likely won’t change any time soon because of a new policy put in place by the Mississippi Department of Corrections.
The visitation policy, issued by MDOC Commissioner Burl Cain in May 2021, lays out guidelines restricting age and time frames that people can visit their loved ones inside of prison. According to the new policy, incarcerated people can only have two adult visitors and no children per session, and they can only come during specific hours once a month.
“It’s unfortunate that a 7-year-old child cannot see their father and cries all the time… In essence, they’re keeping their children from their loved ones,” Carpenter said.
When Mississippi reported its first case of COVID-19 in March 2020, MDOC suspended all visitation at their facilities, “effective immediately” and “until further notice.” The department reported 109 deaths in 2020 — of those, 22 were determined through autopsy to be caused by COVID-19, though dozens more are still pending autopsy results.
Carpenter said she and her husband are fully vaccinated, and their son received the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine in April in the Bolivar County Regional Correctional Facility.
She wasn’t able to see her son until June 19, Carpenter said, her first time seeing him since the pandemic began in 2020. She drove over four hours to visit with her son inside the prison for less than one hour.
She arrived at the Bolivar County Correctional Facility with her husband about an hour before visitation started at 9 a.m., but prison officials only allowed people to begin filing into the prison 10 minutes before the visitation window opened, cutting into visitation time, Carpenter said. She only got 45 minutes with him and is unsure when prison officials will schedule visits again at the Bolivar County Correctional Facility, she said.
“It’s almost like MDOC is doing everything in their power to prevent the visits than rather allow the visits,” Carpenter said, “even though the inmates have had the vaccine.”
Carpenter worries most about her 7-year-old grandson, the child of her incarcerated son, who is now not allowed to visit his father at all inside the Bolivar County Regional Correctional Facility, per MDOC’s visitation policy, which does not allow any visitors under the age of 18.
Carpenter’s son has been incarcerated since 2016, when his son was just a toddler. Carpenter would bring her grandson to visit his father inside the prison two times a month for a total of six hours. Now, under the new MDOC visitation policy, children are not allowed to visit their incarcerated family members and loved ones, a reality that deeply worries Carpenter.
“At 7 years old, they don’t really understand everything,” Carpenter said. “Even if I wear my mask, can I still not see my daddy? I can only talk to my daddy, but I won’t ever be able to see him again? Those are the kinds of questions I get from a 7-year-old used to seeing their daddy from the time they were two all the way up until 15 months (ago).”
Miles away from the Bolivar County Correctional Facility stands the South Mississippi Correctional Institution (SMCI) near Leakesville, where Sara Jane Scott’s husband is incarcerated. Scott visited her husband for the first time in late May and mid June of this year.
Scott’s husband, who is serving a life sentence, described seeing his wife during visitation as “an amazing feeling.”
Scott, who founded the prison reform advocacy organization The Parchman Project, said she’s heard different visitation guidelines being upheld at different prisons across the state. For instance, while visitation windows at SMCI are three hours, she said they are only one hour at East Mississippi Correctional Facility, a private prison, not operated by MDOC, near Meridian.
She also said prison officials did not screen visitors for COVID-19 symptoms when she visited her husband in SMCI two times.
“They’re not asking COVID questions, so if you’re not asking questions, why are you using that as an excuse (to limit visitation)?” Scott said.
Another man serving a life sentence at Parchman said his mother and girlfriend visited him inside prison on June 13 for the first time in 16 months, a feeling he described as “being able to breathe fresh air again… like hitting reset.”
“It’s a great thing to have somebody come check on you,” Scott’s husband, incarcerated at SMCI, said. “It makes you feel like, OK I’m still here.”
Editor’s note: Doris Carpenter is using a pseudonym over fear that prison officials will transfer her son to another facility. Mississippi Today independently verified her identity, as well as her son’s.
“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” — Pete Townshend in The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again”
Mississippi’s settlement of a lawsuit with state Medicaid contractor Centene was based on the same blueprint as other cases: private lawyers were hired by the attorney general to pursue allegations of wrongdoing against mega companies.
Republican Attorney General Lynn Fitch sent out a news release last month touting the $55 million settlement of the lawsuit that accused Centene of overcharging the state for pharmacy benefits it was contracted to provide to the Medicaid program.
The big difference is that Fitch’s predecessor — Democrat Jim Hood — often called news conferences to announce such settlements where reporters routinely quizzed the state’s only elected Democrat about the use of private attorney for such lawsuits.
Hood was often savaged for the use of outside counsel by legislators, former Gov. Haley Barbour and by others. Legislation was filed to try to prevent the hiring of private attorneys.
But when Fitch and state Auditor Shad White announced they had settled with Centene, the same people who used to complain about the use of private attorneys by Hood and his predecessor — Democrat Mike Moore — uttered not a single negative word.
There was no criticism even though the case against Centene had elements similar to Moore’s lawsuit against the tobacco companies from the 1990s — still the best known and perhaps most successful use of outside counsel. In that lawsuit, Mississippi received what is known as a “lead dog” commitment. If another state later received a better settlement, then Mississippi, as the lead dog, would get the same settlement.
In the Centene case, Ohio filed and settled the first lawsuit and received “lead dog” status.
And like with the tobacco lawsuits and scores of lawsuits since then, the private attorneys were paid only if they prevailed — a percentage of the settlement, or about $2.5 million in the Centene case.
In recent days, Fitch has announced she has filed another lawsuit against insulin manufacturers. The lawsuit alleges the companies are artificially inflating the price of the life-saving drug.
“As the mother of a diabetic, I know the emotional, physical and financial toll the unconscionable price of insulin has on families,” Fitch said in a statement. “I filed this lawsuit on behalf of every Mississippian who relies on this medication to survive. These companies are exploiting the vulnerable. I’m fighting back because you should never have to decide between paying the ever-increasing price of insulin or compromising your care.”
The insulin lawsuit is being pursued for Fitch by the attorneys who worked on the Centene case: Ridgeland-based Liston & Deas. And if they win, they will receive a percentage of the settlement — 5% of any settlement above $25 million — a larger percentage for smaller settlements. The attorneys pay all the expenses of the lawsuits, and they receive nothing if they lose.
Hood used to argue that the outside counsel was needed to pursue cases where the state did not have the expertise, manpower or finances to be successful against large corporations with deep pockets. In the Centene case, for example, work on the concept that led to the lawsuit began years ago.
The fact that Fitch is pursuing much the same course as Hood and Moore should not be a surprise.
During the campaign, a Fitch spokesperson said, “The default should be in-house counsel, of course, because it is usually the best, most efficient, and most cost-effective way. But, just like any law firm, if there’s a case that requires specialized knowledge and the people’s interests are better served with some outside expertise working alongside AG attorneys, Lynn Fitch won’t foreclose the option.”
Also during the campaign, Jennifer Riley Collins, the Democratic nominee for attorney general, complained that many of the lawyers and others who had supported Hood financially were contributing to the Fitch campaign. The message some saw in that was that in Republican-controlled Mississippi, Riley Collins did not have much of a chance of winning, so they contributed to the Republican who essentially would play by the same rules as previous Democratic attorneys general.
During Hood’s tenure, $2.8 billion was awarded to the state in lawsuits assisted by outside counsel. The private attorneys received $121.1 million in fees and expenses, or 4.3% of the total awarded to the state, according to information compiled by Hood’s office before his tenure ended. Those numbers do not include the annual payments to the state from the tobacco lawsuit.
In the early 1990s, cigar-chomping Rep. Charlie Capps, D-Cleveland, the powerful Appropriations chair, warned Moore he had better not spend state funds on the dubious and unwinnable lawsuit against the cigarette makers.
Moore did not. But the state still is spending the money — about $100 million annually — Moore garnered in settlements from the litigation.
It took 129 years of playing college baseball and 12 trips to the College World Series, but Mississippi State’s Bulldogs are national champions. Tyler Cleveland interviews his pops, Rick Cleveland, on State’s incredible run to a national title and what it means to the most passionate fan base in America.
This is part five in a five-part series about Philip Gunn’s influence in changing the Mississippi state flag. Read the full series here.
State Rep. Manly Barton walked into Speaker of the House Philip Gunn’s office on June 25, 2020, for what he knew would be a difficult conversation.
With the clock ticking on the 2020 legislative session, Gunn was sprinting to whip the necessary votes to suspend the rules to change the state flag, the last in the nation featuring the Confederate battle emblem. Barton, the 72-year-old Jackson County Republican who was in his eighth year in office, was among the final holdouts.
Because lawmakers were in session in June following COVID-19 delays, general bill deadlines had long passed. Gunn needed about 40 Republican votes to join the 44 Democrats to suspend the rules to even get to the bill that would change the flag. Once House leaders cleared the heftier rules suspension threshold, they knew the simple majority vote to change the flag would sail through.
On Monday of that final week, Gunn had counted just 14 of the 40 necessary Republican votes. But in just three days, as pressure outside the Capitol had reached a fever pitch, Gunn and his allies had whipped about 35 Republican votes.
“Talk about all the things that had to come together, all the House members who ended up voting with us… Manly Barton is the one that inspires me the most,” Gunn told Mississippi Today.
Like most rural district Republicans, Barton had assured his district’s constituents for years that he would not vote to change the flag. Barton’s stance ran so deep that his main campaign placard featured a photo of him while serving in Vietnam. Draped in the background of the photo was the old Mississippi state flag.
Gunn, for years the most prominent state Republican who had publicly called for a new flag, was closer than he’d ever been to having the votes to get there. He needed Barton, and he believed he would flip.
“He stood behind that leather chair,” Gunn recalled, pointing across his office. “I said, ‘Manly, I need your vote.’ He said, ‘Mr. Speaker, I just can’t do it. I just can’t do it.’
“I said to him, ‘All I need is for you to vote to suspend the rules, you don’t have to vote to change the flag when the separate bill comes up.’ He moaned and groaned and said, ‘I just can’t do it.’ That went on for about 10 minutes, and I talked to him about the legacy he’d be leaving, about how his children and grandchildren would remember this moment.”
Barton left the office without giving Gunn a hard commitment.
Later that night, Gunn was at dinner with a group of House Republicans when Barton approached his table, tapped him on the shoulder and asked to speak with him privately. For about 45 minutes, Barton explained to Gunn how he felt about the flag, and he expressed fear that he couldn’t get reelected in his majority-white rural district if he voted to change the flag.
“He wanted to do the right thing. He’d struggled with it all day, so he called his wife,” Gunn recalled. “She asked him, ‘Are you going to be able to look at yourself in the mirror the day after this vote and be proud of what you’ve done?’ He looked at me and said, ‘I know the answer to that. You know, I gotta do the right thing. Not only will I vote to suspend the rules, I’m going to vote to change the flag.’”
There are several similar stories from the final hours before the vote. To this day, Gunn won’t take credit for Barton or any of the other flips of House holdouts. He insists that their families or maybe even God moved them, and that statements from business, religious and sports leaders gave them enough political cover to get there.
“I just gave them the opportunity,” Gunn said. “I brought them in here one by one. I said, ‘Where are you? Don’t you want to be on the right side of history here? People will forever look back on this moment.’ And, you know, before too long, the votes started coming together.”
But several House members told Mississippi Today they fully credit Gunn for his consistent message about the legacy they would all be leaving and getting the key holdouts on board —.an effort that began in an unplanned June 11 Republican caucus speech.
“The practical reality is that the flag doesn’t change without (Gunn’s) leadership,” said Rep. Robert Johnson, the House Democratic leader. “When we first came to him in early June with the desire to try, he went to work. If he doesn’t take that initiative and start telling his caucus how important it was, this doesn’t happen. That leadership didn’t come from Tate Reeves or Delbert Hosemann, it came from Philip Gunn.”
When Gunn left that dinner on Thursday, June 25, he and his leadership team felt they had received enough verbal commitments to meet the 81-vote threshold needed to suspend the rules and take up the flag bill.
But three main questions remained: What, exactly, would the bill look like? How many House members did they really have on board? Did the Senate have enough votes to suspend its rules if the House did its part?
House and Senate leaders negotiated the contents of the bill itself for at least four days, all the way up to the morning of June 28, when the House voted to suspend the rules. Gunn, along with his trusted confidants Rep. Jason White and Rep. Trey Lamar, had talked at least a dozen times that final week with Hosemann and Senate chairmen Sen. Briggs Hopson and Sen. Josh Harkins about the details of the bill.
Hosemann, who had just a couple days before still not supported lawmakers making the change themselves, had agreed to legislative change as long as the new flag had the words “In God We Trust” on it. Gunn, too, insisted that phrase make the final bill. Many lawmakers expressed to reporters that week they felt that the slogan would provide some political cover for them to vote for the change.
“Who would vote against God on the ballot?” a Senate Republican chairman quipped to a Mississippi Today reporter on the day of the final vote.
After a couple days of back-and-forth, House and Senate leaders decided the bill would feature three main elements: It would create a commission to select a new flag design (including the words “In God We Trust”), it would require that the commission report back to legislators and it would eliminate the Confederate battle emblem from consideration.
The House and Senate leaders were careful not to put the contents of the bill on paper because they didn’t want the details to leak to the press and give the public or even some on-the-fence lawmakers time to poke holes in the plan.
The next question to answer was how many House members were on board. On the evening of Friday, June 26, Gunn and his leadership team thought they had 84 votes — more than enough to suspend the rules and later pass a veto-proof flag bill. But before Gunn called the vote, he had to be sure.
“I took my caucus, and I divided it into five groups,” Gunn said. He assigned a handful of members to Rep. Jason White, another group to his chief of staff Trey Dellinger, another group to his policy director TJ Taylor, and another group to his former chief of staff Nathan Wells. Gunn took the final group himself.
“I told them to call every member and ask for three things,” Gunn said. “First, you will vote to suspend the rules. Second, you will vote against any floor amendments offered. Third, you will vote to change the flag. I needed them to answer all three in the affirmative. So we spent a couple hours making those calls, and the number was dead on. We had 84 votes.”
Late that week, as Gunn focused on the House, he also had to keep an eye on the Senate. If he garnered enough House votes to suspend the rules and change the flag, he wanted to be sure the Senate would follow suit. Otherwise, the effort would have been for naught.
“You can’t overlook the effort given by a number of young lobbyists who were working mostly on senators,” Gunn said. “There was a group of 10 or 12 lobbyists — all of them of the younger generation that frankly was always more supportive of the change. They weren’t paid by anybody. They just decided to give up their time to work the issue because they thought it was the right thing to do.”
Meanwhile, White and Lamar were in constant communication with Hopson and Harkins, the Senate leaders. The young lobbyists and the Senate leaders communicated to Gunn on the night of Friday, June 26, that the Senate would make their number.
On the morning of Saturday, June 27, the Capitol was buzzing. Mississippi Today reported the night before that the House had their votes and would suspend the rules to consider the flag bill on Saturday.
Many lawmakers brought their families to the building for the historic day. Everyday Mississippians lined up outside the House gallery in hopes of being in the chamber when the vote was cast. Reporters from around the South and the nation were present to document the moment.
Gunn gaveled in the House that morning, but neither the rules suspension nor the flag bill were on the calendar. Leaders on both sides of the building remained eerily quiet all morning. The suspense spurred questions about whether something had happened overnight.
Behind the scenes, though, leaders were still hammering out the details of the bill itself, legislative attorneys were ensuring the language was air-tight, and the Senate was still counting its votes. Gunn was adamant that the House would not take up the resolution until he got a verbal commitment from Senate leaders that they had their number.
Gunn received that confirmation of the Senate votes around noon, and he quickly called a House Republican caucus meeting on the second floor. He informed his members that both chambers had the votes, and they would soon go back upstairs to take the procedural vote.
Several Republicans who opposed the flag change loudly voiced their opinions in that meeting, but there was no changing minds at that point.
Gunn, White and Lamar left the caucus meeting, walked into the speaker’s office and closed the door. They had decided a couple days before that White, as House pro tem and someone who worked hard to whip the votes, would handle the bill on the floor. White had been rehearsing his speech since Friday night.
“I remember working on all that and, uh, it was very emotional. I think all of us understood the weight of the moment,” Gunn said of the final few seconds before they walked onto the House floor for the rules suspension vote. “I recall as we were in the office just working on our speeches, how choked up we all got just contemplating that moment.”
Gunn had Rep. Lee Yancey, a Republican from Rankin County, come into his office to pray for the small group before they walked to the House floor for the vote.
On the floor, White delivered what some consider one of the best speeches given on the floor of the Mississippi House of Representatives. Many of his colleagues and visitors in the gallery openly wept.
Then came the moment so many people had been waiting so long for. The final vote on the House rules suspension was actually one vote better than Gunn counted the night before: 85 yeas, 35 nays.
House members applauded for several minutes. Cheers echoed through the halls of the Capitol. Visitors hugged and wiped tears from their faces.
A couple hours later, the Senate followed suit, voting to suspend its rules to consider the bill. The biggest procedural hurdles had been overcome, and everyone knew the flag would be changed the very next day.
As the House votes on the rules suspension were tallied, Gunn held back tears from the speaker’s podium.
“It’s hard to describe,” Gunn said when asked about his feelings during that moment. “This had been a long journey. Five years to the month of being out front and advocating for this, such a long time that nobody had really bought in. You just feel like it’s all been worth it because we’ve now turned a corner in the history of our state. The magnitude of that moment, I don’t think any of us even realized it at the time.”
The next day, on June 28, the House passed the bill that actually changed the flag — the historic event but just a formality after Saturday’s rules suspension. Nine House Republicans who had voted against suspending the rules on Saturday actually voted to change the flag on Sunday — a change of heart certainly prompted by the overwhelmingly positive press the state had received the day before. The Senate passed its flag bill a few minutes later on June 28.
“Just to think that flag will be flying long after we’re all gone, both from the Legislature and this life, it was just a momentous occasion,” Gunn said in the interview earlier this year. “Everybody involved in the process can take pride in the fact that they played a role in that history and put forward an image that’s positive.”
For five years, Gunn was on a limb in his party. He remained patient, even while taking criticism from several political factions, and he watched carefully for the right moment to move.
When that moment came in June 2020, as thousands of Mississippians and millions of Americans protested racial inequality, Gunn challenged his fellow Republicans to think about their neighbors, the future of the state and their own individual legacies. He coordinated critical meetings and asked religious, university and sports leaders to get involved at key inflection points. He strategically pieced together the legislative coalition necessary to make the change based on the relationships he’d built over the past several months and years.
After the final vote on June 28, Gunn called a press conference outside the House chamber and invited several lawmakers — Republicans and Democrats alike — to give speeches. Several lawmakers got choked up as they talked about the significance of the vote and the moment.
But when it came time for Gunn to speak, he gave credit for the change to everyone but himself.
