President Donald Trump speaks from the Oval Office of the White House as he gives a prime-time address about border security Tuesday, Jan. 8, 2018, in Washington. (Carlos Barria/Pool Photo via AP)

President Trump’s re-election campaign has sent a cease-and-desist letter to a group pushing to legalize medical marijuana in Mississippi, saying its mailers falsely claim Trump supports a ballot initiative in the Magnolia State.

“The President’s campaign has learned that your organization, Mississippians for Compassionate Care, has been circulating misleading communications using the President’s name, image, or likeness in support of Mississippi Initiative Measure No. 65 and your group’s efforts to legalize medical marijuana in your state,” Trump campaign Director Michael J. Glassner wrote to Jamie Grantham, spokeswoman for Mississippians for Compassionate Care. “President Trump has never expressed support for Initiative 65, and his campaign demands that you immediately cease and desist all activities using the President’s name, image or likeness …”

One major issue being debated in Mississippi is putting medical marijuana in the state Constitution, and the wording of the initiative that would not allow the state Legislature to set regulations or tax its sale.

The campaign said it learned that mailers supporting the medical marijuana Initiative 65 had envelopes that “deceptively — and in bold, capital letters —urge voters to ‘JOIN PRESIDENT TRUMP’ in supporting legalization of medical marijuana in Mississippi …”

READ MORE: Mississippi medical marijuana rhetoric intensifies as November vote nears.

But Grantham responded, “President Trump has clearly stated on multiple occasions that he supports medical marijuana. That is all that we’ve shared — the truth.” She provided links to videos and reports of Trump stating he supports medical marijuana and letting states decide the issue.

“We’ve never said he supports Initiative 65 and that would be absurd to do so as I think he is pretty tied up with his own presidential election,” Grantham said.

The Trump campaign said using the president’s name is “unfair to Mississippi voters who may be led to vote Yes … on the false belief that President Trump supports the measure.”

“Therefore, let us be clear about this:” Glassner wrote, in bold. “President Trump has never stated his support for passage of Initiative 65 or the legalization of medical marijuana in Mississippi.”

In a press release sent out by Mississippi Horizon, a group that opposes Initiative 65, Jim Perry, a member of the State Health Board, which also opposes the initiative, claimed “there is a pattern of deceptive statements from the pro-65 campaign.” He claimed the Initiative 65 campaign is “taking the playbook from Big Tobacco.”

Grantham said: “Politicians and bureaucrats who are behind Mississippi Horizon are spreading propaganda every chance they get and they are against people in Mississippi having access to this plant that God made that is safe and effective at treating pain, nausea, tremors, seizures and other debilitating conditions.”

Mississippi voters on Nov. 3 will decide whether to change the state’s constitution to legalize medical marijuana. Voters will have three choices:

• Approve Initiative 65, for which more than 228,000 Mississippians signed a petition, which opponents say is too permissive and written to help the marijuana industry, not patients.
• Approve Initiative 65A, put forth by the Legislature, which would allow lawmakers to regulate a medical marijuana program, but which opponents say is a rope-a-dope by lawmakers to thwart medical marijuana usage and dilute the vote for Initiative 65.
• Vote against both. But voters who do this can still vote for one of the two initiatives, should one pass.

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We are the stories we tell

An essay by W. Ralph Eubanks | Oct. 20, 2020

If there is one thing my students in Southern Studies grow weary of hearing me say, it is this: Memory is not a passive repository of facts, but an active process of creating meaning about the past. Here in Mississippi, the interplay between the past and the present is always with us should we choose to engage with the varieties of ways in which we envision our history. This state has two magnificent museums to help us do just that, so we’re lucky. Still, active engagement with the past is what can help Mississippi move forward.

American cultural memory exists within segregated realms and goes hand in hand with the construction of our individual identities. Black and white Americans frame their personal histories differently, rather than seeing a common historical narrative rooted in our origin in Mississippi and the American South. So, when I am asked why I teach and write about Southern identity and memory, I say it is to foster a better understanding of this shared past and to help us all develop a more nuanced idea of the recent past. As a writer, I am constantly in search of memory that is not seen or has been silenced.

But Mississippi’s past is a painful place to visit. Since my time back in the Magnolia State, I’ve come to realize that the Holocaust feels more real to most of my students than the Jim Crow era. They can quickly tell me the historical significance of Auschwitz, yet know little of Mississippi’s legacy of lynching or even the murder of Emmett Till. If we truly want Mississippi to advance, we have to embrace all of its stories, even the ones that make us uncomfortable. As a professor I teach those stories, often beginning with Mississippi’s own Richard Wright.

Reading Richard Wright’s experience of hunger, poverty, and racism in Black Boy often feels otherworldly. This is a book that stares into the deep abyss of life under segregation, one that explores the ethics of living under Jim Crow, probing the question of “how do you remain an ethical person in an unethical society?” Dante’s Inferno takes the reader through nine circles of Hell and so does Richard Wright, with Mississippi standing in for the flaming fires of Gehenna. Yet to my students, because the book’s narrative shape mimics a novel, they can’t imagine that a world like the one Wright describes ever existed.

The rage and insecurity of the narrator in Eudora Welty’s short story “Where is the Voice Coming From?” shocked my students, leading one to remark that they could not conceive of anyone harboring so much hatred. Welty wrote the story the same night that she learned of the murder of Medgar Evers. When she heard the news, it occurred to her that she knew what was going on in the mind of the man who pulled the trigger. Welty’s story is so effective at putting readers inside the mind and heart of a murderer that it evoked both psychic and emotional discomfort during our class discussion.

Some might think that it is a good thing that the torrid reality of the Southern past under Jim Crow elicits disbelief to those who never lived under the system. But it concerns me that until some of these students read Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream, and Eudora Welty’s “Where is the Voice Coming From?” they are learning for the first time how racism manifests itself in tangible acts of bigotry. They also have little awareness of how racism haunts us and sometimes is invisible in our society, whether it is a building named for James K. Vardaman or a Confederate statue proclaimed as a symbol of heritage. And while they may be unaware of the invisible nature of racism, they have all largely embraced the simple triumphant narrative of the Civil Rights movement rather than the more complex layered narrative that is historical reality. We all do a disservice to the past if we don’t think about the risks people took for us to co-exist in integrated spaces. It is my job to remind them that before there was even a glimmer of a dream, we all lived in a nightmare.

But it is also my job to remind them of the ways in which Americans have not achieved elements of that dream. Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped stands as a towering reminder of how much farther we have to come. Like Black Boy, Men We Reaped is not a book to be engaged with casually. When Ward relates the unconnected deaths of five young men in four years, you quickly realize the story she tells demands attention. “By all official records,” Ward writes, “here at the confluence of history, of racism, of poverty, and economic power, this is what our lives are worth: nothing.”

In Mississippi we can no longer write off Black lives as being worth nothing. We cannot continue to underfund our public schools, which are 47.6 percent black. And we must stop avoiding our history, shrouding it in mythology, or sanitizing it. Last year, the writer Randall Kenan spoke at the University of Mississippi about his work as a writer and the role of the writer in society. Kenan said “for a community to change they have to understand the devastation they are wreaking on certain people.” We in Mississippi often don’t realize the ways we are destroying ourselves through benign neglect of education, health care, and our social safety net. One way we can begin to understand each other is through the stories we tell about this state. And my hope is that by understanding each other, we might also develop sounder and humane public policy.

Stories shape the way we look at and perceive the world and help us to gain a shared perspective. That is especially true in Mississippi. Yet here and throughout the South we also use narratives to obscure the truth. Now that we have changed our state flag, Mississippi needs to begin a dialogue on how we memorialize the past, whether it is Confederate monuments or large bodies of water named for rabid segregationists.

When students finish my course on Southern identity and memory, they begin to think of Mississippi and of their own personal identities in a new way. “We all construct our identities from a toolkit of options,” I tell them, echoing philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah. I’m always hopeful when the class ends, since I see how they are beginning to construct their own toolkit of Southern identity. But I also realize these are only a dozen or so students in a large university. And in this state—and across the country—only about a third of the population ever gets a college education. My hope for Mississippi is that the active engagement of our young people with our history, even as painful as it is, will begin earlier and become part of our state history curriculum. For it is through our stories and the memories we may neglect to see or hear that we can begin to find a clearer path in which to forge our future.

Editor’s Note: We are sharing our platform with Mississippians to write essays about race. This essay is the second in the series. Read the first essay by Kiese Laymon. Click here to read our extended editor’s note about this decision.

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Hugh Freeze and Liberty University host Southern Miss on Saturday. (Taylor Irby/The News & Advance via AP, File)

Nearly 14 months ago Hugh Freeze made his coaching debut at Liberty University, watching the game from a hospital bed in the Liberty press box.

He was experiencing excruciating back pain that all but paralyzed him. Making matters all the worse, the Liberty Flames were pretty much doused 24-0 by Syracuse. That’s right: Liberty scored as many points as you and me.

Now then, fast-forward to his past Saturday. Freeze’s Flames traveled to Syracuse to play the Atlantic Coast Conference Orange in a return match. Freeze’s back has long since healed. Final score: Liberty 38, Syracuse 21. It was not that close. Liberty, missing its starting tailback and two starting wide receivers, rolled up 520 yards, 338 of that on the ground, in controlling the clock and the game. The victory moved upstart Liberty to a perfect 5-0 record. It was Liberty’s first-ever victory over an Atlantic Coast Conference team.

Rick Cleveland

And all that just reinforces what we have known here in Mississippi for a while: Whatever else you may think of Freeze from his mercurial five seasons as Ole Miss head coach, the man can ever more coach football. He’s a ball coach. His players play hard and his plays work. No lesser an authority than Nick Saban largely credits Freeze for transforming the Southeastern Conference from a power-oriented league to a spread-the-field, fast-break offensive style. “If you cant beat ’em, join ’em,” is the way Saban put it.

Whether Freeze has been the head coach at Lambuth, Arkansas State, Ole Miss and now Liberty, many, many teams can’t beat him. Nevertheless, this turn-around at Liberty has been impressive.

Freeze recovered from the bad back and an 0-2 start last September to guide Liberty to an 8-5 record and a bowl victory last year. The Flames are 13-3 since last season’s 0-2 start.

Next on Liberty’s schedule: a home game with Southern Miss this Saturday, and there are more angles at work here than in an octagon.

You see, Freeze graduated from Southern Miss. So did his wife Jill. Hattiesburg is where they met.

That’s just part of it. When Jay Hopson resigned at Southern Miss after the first game of the 2020 season, immediate speculation on his immediate successor centered on Freeze. Never mind that Freeze reportedly makes four times as much at Liberty as Hopson made at Southern Miss. Many, including Paul Finebaum, called Freeze a perfect fit at USM. Finebaum went so far as to say, “My gut feeling is that he would take the job… .”

Freeze, as you might expect, publicly pooh-poohs any suggestion that he would leave Liberty to come back to Mississippi and to his alma mater.

“I have an awesome job here at Liberty,” he said by phone Monday afternoon. “I am so thankful to have the opportunity to coach here. My sole focus professionally right now is to help Liberty have the best football team we can possibly have. Besides that, I make it a habit not to talk about other people’s coaching jobs.”

My educated guess is that Freeze, at the least, is mightily intrigued by the idea of returning to Mississippi and to his alma mater.

But the Southern Miss job currently belongs to 30-year-old Texan Scotty Walden, the youngest Division I coach in the nation. Walden’s Golden Eagles are 1-3 in this craziest of seasons, having won for the first time Oct. 3, 41-31, at North Texas. Since then, USM has had consecutive games postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. All in all, Walden, who coaches as if he just downed a case and a half of Red Bull, has done an admirable job in holding things together amid the coaching change, COVID and the turmoil of an 0-3 start.

Freeze said Monday he has had little time to watch tape on Southern Miss but that his first impression was how athletic the Eagles are, especially at wide receiver and in the defensive secondary.

“Those wide receivers, man, those guys are big-time,” Freeze said. “They are a challenge. And Jack Abraham, the quarterback, I had him in a bunch of camps at Ole Miss. He’s accurate, he’s competitive and he’s a leader. I have all the respect in the world for him.”

Freeze also respects the Southern Miss football program, dating back to his days as an undergraduate, when he tried out unsuccessfully for Hill Denson’s baseball team. “I just wasn’t good enough,” he said.

Freeze instead concentrated on his studies and his position as the president of the Baptist Student Union. Yes, he said, he did attend football games when Curley Hallman was the head coach and Brett Favre was the quarterback and Southern Miss defeated the likes of Alabama, Auburn and Florida State, all on the road.

“I remember that big sign over the practice field that said, ‘Southern Miss football: Anyone, Anywhere, Anytime,’” he said. “And they meant it, they weren’t scared of anybody.”

Freeze said he got to know Favre back then and they have become friends.

“I expect to get a text from Brett this week because he loves to needle you,” Freeze said.

Otherwise, Freeze said he doesn’t expect any special feelings Saturday other than the one he always feels on a football Saturday.

“I want to win,” he said. “I want to beat Southern Miss. That’s my mindset. Heck, I love to beat my brother or my cousins at anything we play. I have lots of dear friends down there, but this week, I just want to win. That’s it. I want to win.”

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Eric J. Shelton/Mississippi Today, Report For America

Gov. Tate Reeves speaks to media about his shelter-in-place order for Lauderdale County during a press conference at the State of Mississippi Woolfolk Building in Jackson, Miss., Tuesday, March 31, 2020.

With COVID-19 cases rising again in Mississippi, Gov. Tate Reeves on Monday reinstated a mask mandate and stricter limits on gatherings for nine counties.

The counties under the new order are: Chickasaw, Claiborne, DeSoto, Forrest, Itawamba, Jackson, Lamar, Lee and Neshoba. Other counties will be added if they reach a threshold of more than 200 recent cases, or 500 cases per 100,000 residents over a two-week period, depending on the population size of the county.

Social gatherings in these counties will be limited to 10 people indoors and 50 outdoors, although Reeves said this will not prevent high school football games, covered in separate orders.

Reeves’ new executive order also again requires hospitals statewide to reserve 10% capacity for COVID-19 patients. If 10% capacity is not available, a hospital will have to delay elective procedures. Reeves said this worked during the summer peak to relieve pressure on hospitals.

Reeves on Sept. 30th lifted a statewide mask mandate — making Mississippi the first state to rescind such a mandate — that he had issued on Aug. 4, and he relaxed restrictions on social gatherings. Since then cases have risen.

Reeves said Mississippi’s rolling average of cases — which peaked at about 1,250 this summer — had dropped to about 500 but has now “ticked back up” to more than 600 cases. On Monday, Mississippi’s seven-day average was 766 cases, and last week saw huge one-day spikes, including more than 1,300 cases reported Thursday.

“Here in Mississippi we have seen this movie before,” Reeves said. “We know what happens if it’s allowed to get out of control. Today I will be signing an executive order, consistent with the strategy that allowed us to turn things around the last time we saw an increase in transmission.”

During the span of the statewide mask mandate, Mississippi cases plummeted, dropping by 54%.

Reeves had been hesitant to issue a statewide mask order in the summer, instead taking a county-by-county approach until state hospitals were becoming overloaded.

But Reeves said he still prefers limited COVID-19 orders to “the heavy hand of government,” and said a mask mandate “is not a silver bullet.” He has said he believes people pay more attention to limited, regional mask orders based on case spikes.

“Many of you may ask, why don’t you throw a statewide mask mandate on, and we’ll be fine,” Reeves said. “Look at the data in Arkansas and look at the data in Alabama, where they never took down their statewide mandates, and their curves look a lot worse than ours.

“… Just writing something down on a sheet of paper doesn’t slow the spread of the virus. Let’s work together, put politics aside, wear masks, stay in small groups and stay socially distant.”

Monday was the first COVID-19 livestreamed public briefing Reeves has held since he rescinded the mask mandate Sept. 30. He said, “I tried to give everyone a break from the Tate Reeves show.” He also reaffirmed that he has tested negative for the coronavirus himself since potentially being exposed to a White House outbreak during a visit there in late September.

Reeves said he believes Mississippi elections will be safe, despite Mississippi being the only state not to allow some form of early voting for all voters.

“Mississippi over the last seven or eight months has had multiple elections run in a safe, responsible way,” Reeves said. “I have every confidence going into the general election that that is going to be the case. The vast majority of voters are going to be wearing masks, and I would recommend them doing so … We just had four (legislative special elections) throughout Mississippi, and I have not been made aware of one case of transmission from them.”

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Eric J. Shelton, Mississippi Today/ Report for America

About 235,000 Mississippians can’t vote because of felony convictions – the highest percentage in the nation.

Mississippi now denies a higher percentage of its residents the right to vote because of felony convictions than any state in the country, according to a recent study.

In Mississippi, 235,150 people, or 10.6% of the state’s voting age population, have lost their right to vote, according to a recent study by The Sentencing Project, a national nonprofit that advocates for voting and criminal justice issues. Since 2016, Mississippi has moved from second to first highest percentage in the nation.

Mississippi also has the third highest percentage of disenfranchised Black residents of any state in the nation: 130,500 Black Mississippians, or 16% of that voting age population, cannot vote. Mississippi is third to Wyoming (36.22%) and Tennessee (21.65%).

Both Mississippi percentages are well above national averages: total felony disenfranchisement is 2.3% nationally, and the national average for disenfranchised African Americans is 6.3%.

The Mississippi Constitution, written by white lawmakers in 1890, contains a list of crimes for which a person convicted of a felony loses voting rights. The original list of crimes deemed to be disenfranchising has been updated by official opinions from the attorney general’s office through the years to coincide with modern criminal law.

Disenfranchising crimes include: arson, armed robbery, bigamy, bribery, embezzlement, extortion, felony bad check, felony shoplifting, forgery, larceny, murder, obtaining money or goods under false pretense, perjury, rape, receiving stolen property, robbery, theft, timber larceny, unlawful taking of a motor vehicle, statutory rape, carjacking and larceny under lease or rental agreement.

There are other crimes, such as crimes connected with the sale of drugs, where a person convicted of a felony does not lose the right to vote and actually is eligible to vote while incarcerated.

Felony disenfranchisement language was added to the state Constitution in the 1890s as one of several attempts to prevent Black Mississippians from voting. With African Americans still being disproportionately convicted of crimes, that continues to be the effect of the disenfranchisement language.

A 2018 analysis by Mississippi Today found that 61% of the Mississippians who have lost their rights to vote are African American, despite the fact that African Americans represent 36% of the state’s total voting-age population.

Most states restore voting rights for people convicted of felonies at some point after they finish their sentence or complete their parole and probation. But in Mississippi, people convicted of many crimes — some of the crimes violent, and some not — never have their rights restored unless done so by a two-thirds vote of both chambers of the Legislature or by a gubernatorial pardon.

READ MORE: Not all ex-felons are barred from voting in Mississippi, but no one is telling them that.

Legislation to automatically restore voting rights to felons at some point after serving their sentence is introduced most years in the Legislature and in past years has passed one chamber, but died in the other. There are federal lawsuits pending claiming that permanent disenfranchisement violates the U.S. Constitution.

In the 2020 session, the Legislature restored the right to vote to six felons. In 2019, legislators restored suffrage to 16 – the most since 2004 when voting rights were restored to 34. Between 2000 and 2020, the Legislature averaged restoring voting rights to 7.3 felons per year.

In a 2016 study, The Sentencing Project estimated that Florida was first in the nation for total felony disenfranchisement at 10.4%, and Mississippi was second at 9.6%.

Florida voters approved a citizen-sponsored initiative in 2018 to restore voting rights to most after their sentences were completed. Still, 7.7% of Floridians convicted of felonies have not had their rights restored in large part because they have not paid off fines and fees mandated by the Florida Legislature.

But no such major reform has passed in Mississippi.

“Mississippi is one of those states with indefinite disenfranchisement, essentially lifetime disenfranchisement,” said University of Minnesota professor Christopher Uggen, the lead researcher on the Sentencing Project report. “Many of the other states have pared back those restrictions… In Mississippi, it is for life.

“That means if you had a felony conviction in 1972 you are still locked out of that process without some extraordinary effort,” Uggen continued. “And frankly the number of restorations in Mississippi, the people who go through the formal process, is tiny. Clearly, in my view, this is a vestige of the long civil rights process where we had very restrictive laws in the 19th century, and some of them exist today.”

The Sentencing Project held a recent conference call to release the report that detailed how the number of disenfranchised felons had dropped from more than 6.1 million in 2016 to about 5.2 million in 2020 as states like Florida and others have reformed their laws. In many states, governors have issued executive orders restoring rights to thousands of felons.

Shahur Abdullah, who served 41 years in prison in Nebraska and founded JustUs 15 Vote, had his rights restored when the state of Nebraska changed its law from a permanent ban to a ban for two years after being released from prison. He said voting was particularly important to him because his father, a Mississippi native, was not able to vote in his home state after fighting for the United States in the Korean Conflict. Abdullah’s father later moved his family from Philadelphia, Mississippi, to Nebraska.

“Given my own personal history, and this country’s history of systemic racism and white supremacy, I felt the full weight of my ancestors behind me when I voted for the first time,” Abdullah said. “We ought to remember that this country was founded on the principle of no taxation without representation. I was immediately required to pay taxes upon my release from incarceration, but my vote wasn’t accepted. This should never be the case.”

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A new charter school will be opening its doors in Canton in the 2022-2023 school year.

The Mississippi Charter School Authorizer Board last week approved SR1’s application to open the SR1 College Preparatory and STEM Academy. The school will serve kindergarten and first grade in its opening year, then expand each year after to serve kindergarten through fifth grade. The school would serve 450 students once expansion is complete.

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Tamu Green, founder of SR1 (Scientific Research)

SR1 (Scientific Research) was founded by Tamu Green in 2005 and collaborates with public and private partners to decrease disparities in Mississippi, specifically among minorities. The group applied to open a school in 2017, 2018 and 2019 and was denied, but has since worked with the board to address deficiencies.

The board also denied an application by Voices for Education to open a school in the North Bolivar Consolidated School District.

The board followed the recommendations of School Works, an educational consulting group out of Massachusetts hired to evaluate the applications.

Charters are public schools that do not charge tuition, and are held to the same academic and accountability standards as traditional public schools. By law, charter schools have the capacity for more flexibility for teachers and administrators when it comes to student instruction. Unlike traditional public schools, charters do not have school boards or operate under a local school district, although they are funded by school districts based on their enrollment.

Charter schools can apply directly to the authorizer board if they’re planning to open in a D or F district. If an operator wants to open in an A, B, or C district, they need to get approval from the local school board.

Each year the authorizer board goes through a months-long process to screen potential operators and grant them the authority to open a school in Mississippi. This year the timeline for the 2020 application cycle has been slightly pushed back because of the pandemic.

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