Three marches Saturday in Mississippi will join a national call for lawmakers to address gun violence and pass gun control measures.
Demonstrations are scheduled in Jackson at the Mississippi State Capitol, Oxford City Hall and Fairpark in downtown Tupelo, each from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. They will happen alongside marches in Washington D.C. and across the country for March For Our Lives.
March For Our Lives formed in 2018 as a student-led organization after the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. where 17students and staff died.
That year, students from the school and around the country went to Washington to demonstrate and call for gun control measures.
The Saturday marches were scheduled in response to the May 24 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas where 17 students and teachers died, according to March For Our Lives.
Since the group’s 2018 demonstration, there have been countless other gun violence incidents and a lack of gun control to prevent shootings, according to the organization.
So far this year, there have been 251 mass shootings in the United States, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which counts gun violence and crime incidents daily and verifies them. Five of this year’s mass shootings occurred in Mississippi.
A mass shooting is defined as four or more people shot or killed during a single incident at the same time and location, not including the shooter.
In 2022, there have been 450school shootings in the county, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Fivehavehappened in Mississippi this year.
People who would like to participate are asked to register on the pages for Jackson, Oxford and Tupelo. Information about other marches can be found here.
The Cleveland boys discuss the Ole Miss-Southern Miss Super Regional in Hattiesburg this coming weekend. Ole Miss is fresh off a three-game dash through the Coral Gables Regional, winning impressively. Southern Miss had a fight to finish to win the Hattiesburg Regional over LSU. Who has the edge? People with tickets, that’s who. It might be the toughest ticket in Mississippi sports history.
Jackson County Sheriff Mike Ezell announced Thursday he has been endorsed by all five other Republican challengers ahead of his June 28 runoff against incumbent U.S. Rep. Steven Palazzo.
Ezell, who was one of six Republicans to challenge Palazzo in Tuesday’s primary election, was flanked in a Thursday press conference by four fellow candidates, including third-runner in Tuesday’s primary businessman Clay Wagner and distant fourth-runner state Sen. Brice Wiggins.
“My campaign slogan was we deserve better than what we have, and we’ve got the man right here who will be better,” Wagner said at the Ezell press conference. “He’s got my full endorsement.”
Wiggins noted he and Ezell have been longtime friends and worked together when Wiggins was an assistant district attorney.
“He is an honorable, stand-up law enforcement guy,” Wiggins said. “He knows how to get the job done. He knows how to take on the things we’ve seen in D.C. … 63% of the voters in South Mississippi (in the Tuesday primary) chose somebody other than the incumbent. That’s a mandate for change.”
Palazzo, who has held the 4th District U.S. House seat in South Mississippi since 2011, received about 32% of Tuesday’s primary vote in unofficial results — a poor showing for a longtime GOP incumbent in a district considered safely Republican. Ezell received 25% and Wagner 22%.
The Republican primary race for the 4th District has not centered on major policy differences to date, but more on Palazzo. He has been under a congressional ethics investigation for a year and a half over allegations of misspending campaign and congressional money and misuse of his office. Over years, Palazzo has also faced criticism for not holding town halls or attending many public events in his district, garnering a nickname of “No-show Palazzo” among detractors.
While endorsing Ezell on Thursday, challenger Carl Boyanton said: “I ran with one thing in mind: to get Palazzo out of office.”
Palazzo, who left the district headed back to Washington on Tuesday before primary votes were counted, did not immediately respond to a request for comments to his campaign spokesman on Thursday.
In a press release after Tuesday’s vote pushing him into a runoff, Palazzo said: “It’s an honor to serve south Mississippi, and it’s something I do not take for granted. I’m grateful for our supporters and volunteers who worked hard in this election and who will work hard to help us over the next three weeks. We now turn our attention to the run-off, and we will not be out-worked. We will continue talking to voters about what we’ve been able to accomplish and our plans for promoting policies to restore economic growth, secure our borders, and keep Americans safe.”
Ezell, in a new runoff ad, continued to hit Palazzo on the ethics allegations and complaints of being inaccessible in his home district.
“You have a clear choice,” Ezell said. “Steven Palazzo has been under the cloud of an ethics investigation … Mike Ezell has served with honesty and integrity as a law enforcement officer for 40 years fighting crime, cleaning up corruption and saving taxpayers millions. On June 28, the choice is clear. Mike Ezell is the conservative Republican who will show up to represent our values every day.”
The winner of the June 28 Republican primary for the 4th Congressional District will face Democratic former longtime Hattiesburg Mayor Johnny DuPree, who handily won Tuesday’s Democratic primary, in the Nov. 8 general election.
Reuben Anderson, Mississippi’s first African American Supreme Court justice of the modern era, had the responsibility of introducing former President Bill Clinton at the recent memorial ceremony for his longtime friends, Gov. and First Lady William and Elise Winter.
Before making that introduction, Anderson said he wanted to recognize “my congressman.” He described 2nd District U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson as “the most unusual politician you will ever meet. He is not interested in getting rich. He is not interested in a higher office, and he shuns publicity.”
Reasonable people can differ on whether Anderson was being overly generous of “a fella I have known for over 50 years,” but what is not debatable is that Thompson will not be able to shun publicity this week.
Thompson, the Bolton native who has held the 2nd Congressional District post since 1993, will be at the center of attention as the special committee he chairs holds prime-time hearings beginning Thursday on the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by those trying to prevent the certification of the 2020 presidential election. A big part of the committee’s work centers around the role of former President Donald Trump and his allies in the attack.
Thursday’s hearing begins at 7 p.m. It and a separate hearing next week will be carried live by most major networks and cable news channels — with the notable exception of Fox News.
“I want, as an African American, to be able to say to the world that I helped stabilize our government when insurrectionists tried to take over,” Thompson recently told CNN of the hearings.
Thompson — the dean of the Mississippi congressional delegation and indeed someone who has worked to avoid the limelight — has built his long political career on protecting democracy.
As a young adult in the 1960s, he worked to register African Americans to vote and to ensure votes were counted. Now leading the Jan. 6 Commission, he is effectively doing similar work: ensuring that legally cast votes are counted and that the nation’s representative democracy is protected from any future efforts to overturn the results of an election.
During a 2018 Mississippi Today interview, Thompson recalled in the 1960s as a Tougaloo College political science student working in the Mississippi Delta trying to register people to vote on behalf of civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer’s congressional bid.
“I was talking to my mother, and she was saying you know we don’t vote here in Bolton,” Thompson recalled. “It was a shock to me that I was up in Sunflower County helping register Black people to vote, and even in my hometown they didn’t enjoy the same luxury.”
Thompson’s auto mechanic father, who died in 1964 — the same year of passage of the federal Voting Rights Act designed to ensure racial minorities were not denied the right to vote — never got to vote. His mother, a schoolteacher, did, and most likely her first vote cast was for her son when he ran and was elected to the board of aldermen in his hometown of Bolton in 1969.
While Thompson won that election, it took a ruling of the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals to ensure victory for him and for two other African Americans elected that year in Bolton.
Thursday’s Jan. 6 Commission hearings could be viewed as a continuation of Bennie Thompson’s life’s work in terms of trying to ensure fair elections.
“I’m a passionate believer that in a democracy you have to follow the rule of law,” Thompson recently told NPR. “It has nothing to do with individuals. It has nothing to do with wealth. It has nothing to do with status in the community. It’s the law. The law is colorblind.”
You know about Ole Miss and Southern Miss baseball teams winning NCAA Regionals and facing off this weekend in a Super Regional at Hattiesburg. You know about Mississippi State winning the national championship of college baseball last season. You know about the tradition of success at Delta State.
Rick Cleveland
College baseball: It gets no better than what we have here in Mississippi. And it goes a lot deeper than those aforementioned. Last week, Pearl River Community College, 30 miles south of Hattiesburg in Poplarville, won the national championship of junior college baseball.
At Enid, Okla., the Wildcats, coached by Jackson native Michael Avalon, lost to Madison (Wisc.) College 11-4 in the first game of a best-of-three championship series and then came back and smoked Madison 19-1 and 7-2 the next two games. Madison entered the championship series having lost only eight of 56 games the entire season. Pearl River beat them twice in two days by a total of 23 runs.
There’s so much to tell you about those Pearl River Wildcats, including the fact that 12 players off the team have either signed or committed to play for Division I teams in college baseball. That’s not even counting centerfielder Tate Parker of Gulfport, who should be named national junior college player of the year any day now and hasn’t committed to any four-year college yet. He may just go pro.
All those guys will follow a path so many Wildcats have taken over the past few seasons under Avalon. Slugging outfielder Reece Ewing and closer Landon Harper, former Wildcats, are two of the keys to Southern Miss’ success this season. Pitcher Cole Tolbert, who earned the most outstanding pitcher award of the national championship series (16 strikeouts in nine innings), has signed to play at Ole Miss.
The Wildcats lose a slew of players off the championship team, but Avalon believes he has “some really outstanding players waiting in the wings” to make another run next season.
“Pearl River will win as long as he’s there,” says Harper, the Southern Miss closer from Meridian. “Coach Avalon is a winner. No matter where I go or what I do, I am going to remember that man the rest of my life. He makes you not only a better player but a better person.”
The acronym “S.O.A.P.” is all over the PRCC locker room.
Avalon, who grew up in south Jackson and pitched for Forest Hill, operates the Pearl River program, basing every aspect of his coaching on a four word mantra: “Success = Organization, Attitude, Pride.” The acronym is S.O.A.P. You’ll find it anywhere you look in the Pearl River locker room, dugout and clubhouse.
Michael Avalon didn’t come up with the slogan. No, he took it from his dad, the late Billy Avalon, who was a much-beloved English literature teacher and coach in the Jackson area for decades.
Billy Avalon, a gruff-voiced ex-Marine who loved his family, words and sports (probably in that order), was the best coach Michael Avalon ever had, Michael says. And if you talk to students who had Billy as their English or literature teacher at St. Joseph or Madison Central, most will tell you he was the best teacher they ever had.
Billy Avalon used the S.O.A.P. mantra as a teacher, coach and parent. “I remember him asking me that of success, organization, attitude and pride, which was the most difficult to sustain,” Michael Avalon said. “I said success, and he said, ‘No, it’s pride, pride in everything you do, doing everything the best you can do. That’s the hardest.
“And that’s what we stress in this baseball program. I don’t want them to just be the best players they can be. I want them to be the best students, the best citizens, the best sons, the best teammates they can be.”
Says Harper, the USM closer: “S.O.A.P. was part of everything we did there. I mean, it’s stuff like, if you see a piece of trash on the side of the road, don’t pass it by. Pick it up.”
His players describe Michael Avalon as “intense” as a coach. He apparently got that from his father, too.
Michael (left) and his father Billy Avalon.
“This will tell you how intense my dad was,” Michael Avalon says. “Once, when he was coaching his girls basketball team, he broke a finger calling a timeout.”
He did what?
“Really, he broke his own finger calling a timeout,” Avalon says, chuckling. “When he made the ’T’ sign with his hands, he slammed his fingers on one hand into the other hand too hard. I’m telling you, he was intense.
“At the same time, he was a man who would do anything he could to help anybody he encountered. Not just his students or his players, but somebody he just met on the side of the road.”
Billy Avalon, friends say, was intensely proud of Michael’s coaching success. He made every game he could make. He was there for all the state and region championships his son’s teams won at Pearl River. He was in Enid, Okla., in 2019 when the Wildcats were eliminated from the national championship tournament.
Last July, Billy and Michael were having one of their typically brief daily phone conversations when Billy said, “You know what you gotta do next season?”
“What?” Michael said.
Said Billy, “You gotta go back to Enid and win the whole damned thing.”
A couple days later, Billy Avalon, 72, was killed in an automobile accident.
This season, as Pearl River won 45 games and ranked at or near the top of national polls, Michael missed his father terribly — at least partly because he knew how much Billy would have enjoyed the success.
Billy missed the Region 23 championship. He missed his son’s team ascending to No. 1 in the national polls. He missed them winning three straight games at Enid to reach the three-game national championship series. He missed the ultimate victory.
Or did he?
Pearl River was leading the championship game 7-2 going into the ninth inning. On the P.A. system, the recording of Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days” blared. Besides Proust, Dickens, Tolstoy and Joyce, Billy Avalon loved Springsteen. “Glory Days” was his favorite song.
Says Michael Avalon, “When Glory Days came on, I knew dad was there, knew he was watching. You couldn’t even make that up.”
Former President Donald Trump, headlining his “American Freedom Tour,” is scheduled to be in Southaven on June 18.
This visit comes ahead of Mississippi’s June 28 GOP primary runoffs, with two incumbent Republican congressmen struggling to keep their seats. With Trump remaining popular with Mississippi Republicans, his endorsement in either race could be a deciding factor for incumbents or challengers.
Incumbent Rep. Michael Guest trailed Republican challenger Michael Cassidy in unofficial results from Tuesday 46.6% to 47.8%, forcing a runoff with no candidate breaking 50%. Cassidy, a former Navy pilot, tried to run to the right of Guest, including criticizing Guest for voting with Democrats to create a commission to investigate the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by those trying to overturn Trump’s loss to President Joe Biden.
Incumbent Rep. Steven Palazzo is headed to a runoff with Jackson County Sheriff Mike Ezell. Palazzo led Ezell 31.6% to 25.2% in unofficial results, with the two topping a crowded field of Republican challengers to Palazzo. Palazzo drew numerous challengers in part because he has faced an ethics investigation over allegations he misspent campaign and congressional money and misused his office.
Trump’s only endorsement in Tuesday’s Mississippi midterm primaries was for incumbent 1st District Rep. Trent Kelly, who handily won his primary with 90% of the vote.
Trump carried Mississippi with 58% of the vote in 2020, and to date, candidates he has endorsed and campaigned for here — including Gov. Tate Reeves and Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith twice — have won. On Tuesday, all 16 candidates he endorsed for midterm primaries held by seven states won, although most were, like Kelly, strongly favored to win.
Trump’s American Freedom Tour event is billed as being for Memphis on the group’s website, but is set to be held at the Landers Center in Southaven on June 18 from 8:15 a.m. to 5 p.m.
The event includes some free access with pre-registration required, but also includes special paid access and seating ranging from $1,295 for the “chamber” level to $3,995 for the presidential level.
The daylong event schedule includes roundtable discussions, meet-and-greet and photo ops and speeches. Speakers include Trump, his son Donald Trump Jr., former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, conservative commentators and authors Candace Owens and Dinesh D’Souza.
Two of Mississippi’s four incumbent U.S. House members on Tuesday were forced into June 28 runoffs with challengers.
Neither Michael Guest, representing the 3rd Congressional District based in central Mississippi, nor Steven Palazzo, representing south Mississippi’s 4th Congressional District, could garner a majority in the Republican Party needed to avoid the runoff.
While it was expected that Palazzo would face a tough re-election campaign in a six-candidate primary field, Guest’s troubles were more surprising.
Based on late but incomplete results, it appeared Guest will finish second in the three-candidate field. Michael Cassidy, a former Navy pilot who now lives in Meridian, was leading with 47.8% of the vote compared to 46.6% for Guest.
Guest, a former district attorney representing Rankin and Madison counties in suburban Jackson, is seeking his third two-year term.
The upstart Cassidy ran an aggressive campaign, loaning himself more than $200,000 to challenge Guest. He especially focused his campaign on the fact that Guest was the only member of Mississippi’s Republican congressional delegation to vote in favor of creating a special congressional commission to investigate the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. That attack was carried out by those trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, in which Democrat Joe Biden defeated Republican incumbent Donald Trump.
Cassidy’s campaign has been aided by Matt Braynard, a former Trump campaign data specialist, who has been a leading voice in trying to perpetuate the myth that Trump won the election.
Cassidy held his own in Guest’s home turf in the Jackson metro area and dominated the vote count in the Meridian area and in many rural counties on the eastern side of the district.
In south Mississippi, Palazzo was leading Jackson County Sheriff Mike Ezell 31.6% to 25.2% in late — but also incomplete — results.
Palazzo, a former state House member who first was elected to the U.S. House in 2010, was believed to be vulnerable because of an ethics investigation over accusations he spent campaign funds on personal expenses. Palazzo has repaid some funds to his campaign and it appears that Palazzo will survive the investigation, though it is far from a given that he will succeed in his reelection effort.
Palazzo was the top vote-getter in most of the counties in the district, but not by wide enough margins to avoid the runoff.
Mississippi’s other two incumbents — Democrat Bennie Thompson of the 2nd District and Republican Trent Kelly of the 1st District — won by comfortable margins.
Thompson, the chair of the Jan. 6 Commission, won with 96% of the vote, while Kelly, a former district attorney in northeast Mississippi, garnered 90% of the vote.
All winners of this summer’s party primaries will face opposition in the November general election. The 2nd District, which includes much of the Jackson area and nearly all of the western side of the state along the Mississippi River, is viewed as a safe Democratic district while the other three are viewed as safe for Republicans.
It appears the Republican primary in the 2nd District will head to a runoff between Brian Flowers and Ronald Elder.
Diane Black was an easy winner of a two-candidate field in the 1st District Democratic primary, while Democrat Shuwaski Young ran unopposed in the 3rd. Johnny DuPree, a former Hattiesburg mayor and former candidate for governor and secretary of state, handily won a two-candidate race in the Democratic primary in the 4th District.
Primary runoff elections will be held June 28. The general election, pitting primary winners against one another, will be held on Nov. 8.
When Mississippi asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, it argued that a long tradition of state restrictions on abortion in the U.S. “defeats any claim of a deeply rooted right” to an abortion.
Yet for all but 21 of its 156 years as a state prior to Roe, Mississippi law technically permitted abortion for any reason until about 16 weeks of pregnancy.
Mississippi Today could find no published scholarship on the history of abortion law in Mississippi specifically, and national histories on the topic generally make little reference to the state.
This story is based on interviews with historians of abortion law and politics, stories published in Mississippi newspapers in the 19th and 20th centuries, books and articles about abortion law in the U.S., vital records held in the state archives, and a review of Mississippi laws.
Decades after almost every state had banned the procedure at any stage of pregnancy, Mississippi’s law continued to follow the practice in place at the country’s founding: Abortion was a crime only if the fetus was “quick,” or had been felt to move, typically around four months of pregnancy. Mississippi did not update that law until 1952, though people were still prosecuted for abortions prior to that, usually in cases where the woman had died.
The role of abortion in the U.S. decades ago sits at the center of arguments about its future. In his leaked draft opinion, Justice Samuel Alito sided with the state’s reading of history when he wrote: “An unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973.”
But if the Court’s final ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is similar to Alito’s draft, Mississippi’s legal restrictions on abortion today will become tighter than they have been at almost any point in its history. The state’s trigger law will ban abortion in all cases except those involving rape and a threat to the mother’s life. A separate law passed in 2019 banning abortions after six weeks contains no exception for rape.
The evolution of state law after Roe in 1973 mirrors the national rise of the pro-life movement as a powerful force in Republican politics. A movement that was once predominantly Catholic and Northern became largely evangelical and Southern.
A movement that was once on the defensive in Southern state legislatures, including Mississippi’s, began winning one victory after another across the South and Midwest.
Mississippi, for decades an outlier in permitting many abortions, became in 2021 the state that asked the Supreme Court to overturn Roe.
“If there’s a person in Mississippi who thinks that by virtue of these laws going into force after Dobbs, that we’re returning Mississippi to the good old days … they’re wrong,” said Aaron Tang, a professor of law at the University of California, Davis who has researched the history of state abortion laws. “The substantial history of Mississippi throughout its existence as a state has been basically what Jackson Women’s Health Organization is willing to do: a procedure up to 16 weeks.”
At the time of the founding of the United States, abortion was legal in every state until the “quickening,” following the English common law tradition. Because there was no medical way to prove a pregnancy until the fetus had moved, a woman could claim she needed to “restore” or unblock her menstrual cycle, and no one else could insist she was actually pregnant.
“The popular ethic regarding abortion and common law were grounded in the female experience of their own bodies,” the historian Leslie J. Reagan wrote in her book “When Abortion Was A Crime.”
Mississippi passed its first law on abortion in 1839: “The wilful killing of an unborn quick child, by any injury to the mother of such child, which would be murder if it resulted in the death of the mother, shall be deemed manslaughter in the first degree.”
The law was part of an early wave of such legislation across the country from roughly 1820 to 1840. The historian James C. Mohr wrote that such laws were usually passed as a part of larger revisions to the state criminal codes; abortion itself was not a public issue.
Mid-19th century newspapers treated abortion as a practice that did not involve Mississippians – or, at least, white Mississippians. After the Civil War, as white Mississippians resisted Reconstruction and Black political empowerment, state newspapers sometimes presented abortion as a symbol of Northern immorality.
In 1867, the body of an infant was found near the river Under the Hill in Natchez, partially buried in the sand, wrapped in an apron and tied to two bricks.
“We sincerely hope that the abortion and child murdering mania which rages in the New England States and in New York to such a fearful extent has not reached us,” the Natchez Democrat opined.
Racism was also part of discussions of abortion in Mississippi, as it was around the country.
“Notwithstanding the North makes pretensions to all the purity of the land, and essays to look down upon the South in her barbaric practices, yet infanticide the most inexcusable and disgusting, as well as most horrible of all crimes, is of common occurrence there, while with us it is almost unknown, and when known is confined almost exclusively to the Negroes,” wrote a columnist for the Vicksburg Post in 1870.
By 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, Mississippi was one of only three states with a law against abortion that nonetheless explicitly permitted it prior to quickening. (The others were Arkansas and Minnesota.) Six states had no laws on abortion.
In the draft opinion leaked in early May, Alito claims that the remaining 28 states prohibited abortion at all stages, and thus that the Fourteenth Amendment – in which the court has located a right to privacy – cannot be understood to protect a right to an abortion.
Other historians disagree with that claim. A brief filed in Dobbs by the American Historical Association reported that pre-quickening abortions were legal in 11 states and less heavily punished in seven more by 1868. Tang claims that the true number of states that departed from the common law tradition to prohibit abortion at all stages of pregnancy by the time of the Fourteenth Amendment was actually 16.
And before the 20th century, there was no way to prove a pregnancy before the quickening, so abortion laws pertaining to a “pregnant woman” in practice were not always substantially different from laws that applied only to post-quickening abortions.
A Mississippi Supreme Court decision in 1898 rejected the idea that fetuses were people, citing the common law.
A Pontotoc woman named Emma Prude was indicted for ending her own pregnancy under a state law prohibiting giving medicine to a woman pregnant with a “quick child” to end the pregnancy. The Court not only determined that the statute didn’t apply to a woman who ended her own pregnancy, but also wrote that “An infant in the mother’s womb … is not considered a person who can be killed within the description of murder,” even if the pregnancy was quick.
However unusual Mississippi’s law was by 1868, it was much more of an outlier 50 years later.
In the late 19th century, states continued to pass stricter abortion laws, largely at the urging of doctors and the American Medical Association. The movement was led by Dr. Horatio Storer, a Boston doctor who believed fetal life began at conception, and that abortion was murder at any stage of a pregnancy.
Historians say the physician-led anti-abortion movement painted midwives, many of whom were Black women, as “abortionists” in an effort to position themselves as better trained and morally upright – and win over more patients. Storer was also concerned that white Protestant women were using abortion to limit the size of their families, while he believed recent immigrants, many of whom were Catholic, regarded abortion as immoral.
“Of the nine States that had not yet criminalized abortion at all stages (as of 1868), all but one did so by 1910,” Alito wrote. That state was Mississippi.
In 1909, state lawmakers considered a proposal to ban abortion at all stages of pregnancy, which had been backed by the Mississippi Medical Association. An abortion that ended a pregnancy would be manslaughter.
“An infant in the mother’s womb, whether viable or not, is hereby declared a human being,” the legislation said.
Yet the proposal didn’t become law, for reasons Mississippi Today couldn’t locate.
Mississippi legislators considered another total abortion ban in 1918 but would not actually pass one until 1952.
The lack of a ban didn’t mean that abortion was universally regarded as normal or morally acceptable. But it did mean, as one dismayed headline in the Jackson Daily News in 1911 put it, “Abortion Not a Crime.”
The article explained that a group of physicians had investigated an alleged abortion and contacted local law enforcement. But they found that there could be no prosecution because there was no law against an abortion before “practically four months pregnancy.”
People facing criminal charges for performing an abortion that resulted in a woman’s death could try to use this point in their defense.
Dr. F. E. Lee, for example, never denied that the abortion he performed in 1916 had led to the death of a young woman named Mary Miller. Instead, he claimed the procedure hadn’t been a crime.
At his trial in Corinth in 1920, Lee’s lawyer said that because Miller’s pregnancy was not “quick,” he had violated no law by performing her abortion and should not be held responsible for her death.
The prosecutor rejected that argument, but not that reading of the law. He acknowledged that the “original undertaking was not condemned by the law,” but said the doctor was still liable for Miller’s death.
Lee was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 20 years in the state penitentiary. But if Miller’s procedure had gone as intended, law enforcement would have had no grounds to get involved – making Mississippi an anomaly in the U.S. at the time.
Late in the evening on July 25, 1945, a former policeman named B.J. Jennings heard a car speed over the bridge above his houseboat on the Pearl River, not far from downtown Jackson. He saw someone toss something out of the car and into the water.
Later, he found a purse and pair of shoes in the river and called the police.
His call helped law enforcement piece together an explanation for what had happened to 18-year-old Betty Massey, a waitress at Abe’s Cafe who had been missing for days. Her body was found a few days later, floating in Rhodes Creek near Terry. Police arrested Dr. B.F. Johnson and said Massey had died in his clinic following an illegal abortion.
Massey’s death became a media event. Her portrait ran on the front page of the Clarion-Ledger, where stories suggested she was a tragic symbol of the dangers facing young women during the social tumult of World War II. The newspaper reported that the father of her baby, a soldier, had written her “a nasty letter … in which he relieved himself of any responsibility.”
Massey, a white woman, was a “small-town girl working in Jackson,” and a member of “a prominent Delta family.” One story described “perhaps the most tragic point” in her death: Her boarding house at 313 State Street had been located just two doors down from the state office charged with helping unmarried pregnant women.
Their case workers could have helped her “overcome some of her fears, dreads, and anxieties and face the reality of her situation so that the desire to destroy herself and others is allayed,” a representative said.
Some news stories about the doctor charged in Massey’s death mentioned that he had previously been convicted of manslaughter in the death of a Black woman named Etta Perkins following an abortion. Her life and case got little attention on its own.
He had appealed the conviction and was out on bond when he performed Massey’s abortion, the papers reported.
For Massey’s death, prosecutors chose a harsher charge — “depraved heart murder.” Johnson ultimately pled guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to 16 years in prison.
By the time Perkins and Massey died, abortion in the United States – though illegal at all stages of pregnancy in most of the country – was becoming safer. Abortion was the official cause of death of about 2,700 women in 1930, accounting for a fifth of all pregnancy-related deaths that year, according to the reproductive rights nonprofit the Guttmacher Institute. In the 1940s, the development of antibiotics reduced deaths by making it easier to treat infections after abortion. In 1950, about 300 women died following an abortion.
It’s not clear how many people died following abortions in Mississippi in the 19th and 20th centuries. Vital records held at the state archives did not list abortion as a cause of death until the 1920s, and in some years after that, all pregnancy-related deaths were tallied together.
Mississippi Today reviewed records from 1927 through 1940 that showed abortion was listed as the cause of death for roughly 30 to 50 women each year. More Black women than white women died: In 1930, for example, abortion was the cause of death for 15 white women and 26 Black women.
In 1952, the Mississippi Medical Association asked the Legislature to pass a stricter abortion law. Lawmakers obliged, prohibiting the procedure at all stages of pregnancy.
The new law said someone who provided an abortion could be charged with manslaughter and sentenced to one to 10 years in prison. If the woman died, the crime was murder. The only exception was to save the life of the mother, and the law required two doctors to make that determination in writing.
Pro-life advocates often point out that women were rarely prosecuted for their own abortions prior to Roe. Historians largely agree, but that fact doesn’t account for the public shame and pressure to cooperate with law enforcement women could endure during trials of doctors and partners, Mary Ziegler, a law professor and expert on abortion history, has written.
Mississippi’s 1952 abortion ban didn’t explicitly prohibit such prosecutions. Mississippi Today found that at least one woman was arrested and charged with her own attempted abortion after she refused to cooperate with the investigation of two men involved.
In September 1962, Jackson police got a tip: An abortion was set to take place in a few days at a Travel Inn Motel on Highway 51, just outside of the city. Officers waited outside Room 152. They would later say they could smell a chemical odor, like a powerful disinfectant, wafting out of the room, and heard the clanking of metal instruments or furniture being moved.
When they opened the door, they found a woman named Mary Ann Aiken hiding in the bathroom, covered in a sheet and holding her skirt in her hand. She was arrested for participating in her own abortion and taken to a hospital for a medical examination.
Aiken, whose name was often spelled Mary Ann Eakin or Mary Ann Eakin Johnson, refused to cooperate with the authorities.
During the trial of Leo Hall, one of the men charged with the illegal abortion, Aiken denied she had attempted to get an abortion, frustrating then-District Attorney Bill Waller, who said he had a signed statement from her declaring otherwise and that she could also be charged with perjury. Aiken also said she was a prostitute and had had sex with Hall, who reportedly had ties to the Dixie Mafia, perhaps helping to explain why she would not want to testify against him.
The trial for Aiken herself was delayed because she had to give birth – the abortion had not been successful. She pled guilty to the crime of attempted abortion.
The state could also expend significant time and resources investigating suspected abortion providers.
In May 1968, a Baton Rouge woman met a doctor in a Jackson motel room. After he agreed to perform an abortion and she handed him $200 in cash, Mississippi Highway Patrol agents who had set up the sting burst into the room and arrested him.
He was eventually acquitted by jurors who were unconvinced that the woman had ever been pregnant.
By the mid-1960s, discussion of abortion nationally was intensifying. Feminists called for abortion to be legal and free. Professional organizations of doctors, attorneys and psychiatrists began arguing for more liberal abortion laws.
The 1967 Mississippi Boys’ State convention – attended primarily by well-off white high school boys who hoped to become state leaders – passed legislation making abortion legal when the pregnancy could affect the mother’s mental or physical health and when the fetus would be born with a serious deformity. Though it wasn’t actual legislation, some observers saw it as an indicator of where public opinion was heading.
“In a few years these same boys will be of voting age, and in the not too distant future some of them will hold real offices in state government,” noted an opinion columnist in the Hattiesburg American.
In 1966, Mississippi became one of the first states to add a new exception to its abortion ban, allowing women to get an abortion if they said they had been raped. Unlike Mississippi’s 2007 trigger ban, the law did not require them to report the rape to law enforcement.
Some of opponents’ points echoed pro-life claims today: that only God could make a decision to end a pregnancy, and that a woman who got an abortion could feel guilty later in life.
Supporters’ main arguments were based on racist fears around sex between Black men and white women. The Daily Herald of Biloxi reported that the measure passed the House after a speech by Rep. George Payne Cossar of Tallahatchie, who told his colleagues that pregnancy could result from “rape between the races.”
“Are you going to force this poor woman to carry this burden?” he said. “This bill is designed to prevent disgrace in a family.”
As of early 1971, abortion was legal in five states – New York, Alaska, California, Hawaii and Washington.
That year, a Hattiesburg lawmaker thought Mississippi should join the list. Rep. Robert Lennon introduced a bill that would make abortions legal up to 24 weeks of pregnancy.
“Abortion must be considered a medical procedure and a private one between a licensed physician and his patient,” he told the Clarion-Ledger. “It should not be a part of our criminal statutes.”
The bill provoked a furious outcry. Catholic leaders in the state urged their 90,000 parishioners to lobby against it. One opponent in the Legislature called it “a possibly well-intended attempt to legalize the murder of innocent babies.”
The bill didn’t make it out of committee, and Lennon didn’t run for reelection.
Two years later, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe provoked a more muted response in Mississippi. Religious leaders were split: Catholics and some in other denominations told local newspapers they saw the ruling as a sign of moral degradation.
Rev. J.C. Harris, pastor of a United Methodist Church in Biloxi, called the ruling “wonderful.”
“I believe a woman and her doctor should do what she thinks fit.”
Man-on-the street interviews captured a range of views among ordinary Mississippians, too. Some echoed Harris’s perspective.
One Delta valedictorian used her high school graduation speech to warn that Roe would lead to “garbage cans full of aborted fetuses.”
Some states actively resisted the high court’s ruling: Rhode Island didn’t have an abortion clinic until 1975. But Mississippi and most other Deep South states did not, said historian Daniel K. Williams, who has researched the pro-life movement.
“In Mississippi at the time, the pro-life movement didn’t really have a very strong presence because in the early 1970s the pro-life movement was very Catholic and very Northern, and Mississippi had a pretty low Catholic population, considerably lower than neighboring Louisiana’s,” said Williams, a professor of history at the University of West Georgia. “So, as a result, it was somewhat unclear in the early 1970s which direction Mississippi would go on abortion.”
An editorial in the Greenwood Commonwealth published the week after the ruling sounded relieved to declare that the Court had “essentially resolved” the legal question over abortion.
“The Supreme Court has very broadly liberalized abortion law and in so doing brought years of controversy and litigation to an end,” the editorial concluded.
Nearly 50 years later, the state of Mississippi would claim before the Court that Roe was “egregiously wrong” and based on a flawed reading of U.S. history.
Left unexplained was Mississippi’s own unusual place in that story.
A resolution to the dispute between the state’s largest insurer and hospital is off to a slow start.
Insurance Commissioner Mike Chaney said mediation between Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Mississippi and the University of Mississippi Medical Center has begun but is moving at a “snail’s pace” so far.
“Some preliminary groundwork has been set,” he said. “… I expect by Monday of next week, it’ll ramp up to full steam.”
While Chaney does not have authority to force the two parties to agree, he made a pointed statement: “I do have the authority to make them mediate. If either party tries to forestall or hinder mediation, they run the risk of damaging the University (of Mississippi) Medical Center possibly beyond repair. And they run the risk of damaging the health insurance side.”
Marc Rolph, Executive Director of Communications and Marketing at UMMC, told Mississippi Today that actual mediation will begin next week.
Blue Cross officials said they could not comment on mediation because it was confidential.
Frank Dungan poses for a portrait near Barnett Reservoir in Ridgeland, Miss., Tuesday, May 10, 2022. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
Meanwhile, patients are still in the lurch. Frank Dungan of Madison is on the transplant list for a liver at UMMC. But because the hospital is out of network with his insurer, he has been marked “inactive” on the list.
Despite the insurance company directing him to go out of state and enroll in another transplant program. Dungan said he asked for his doctor to refer him to one of those transplant programs out of state, but the program never responded.
Dungan wants to stay at UMMC, where he has years-long relationships with his doctors. He wanted to know what it would cost him to stay there and get the procedure – but he was having no luck getting any numbers from either UMMC or Blue Cross.
After Chaney sent the letter, UMMC provided a cost estimate for the surgery to Dungan and Chaney, and representatives for Blue Cross provided an amount to Chaney. Both asked Dungan to keep the numbers confidential, he said, but he would have had to pay a significant amount to make up the difference in what the insurance company was willing to pay and what UMMC would charge.
There were further conversations between the two, Dungan said, but he never received anything in writing. He’s also been unable to get any cost estimates of what the immunosuppressants post-surgery would cost.
Two weeks after the communication from Blue Cross and UMMC, he’s dealing with additional medical problems.
Dungan’s knees locked up and began swelling. He couldn’t walk, which led him to the emergency room and later received injections of steroids. Now, he’s trying to figure out whether he’ll need surgery before he’s able to get a transplant.
He also discovered he again has an esophageal condition caused directly by his liver disease. The condition requires a procedure.
He’s frustrated that he’s having to see a provider outside of UMMC for his issues.
“It makes it more difficult, it makes it more complex for me to schedule and keep up with my health care appointments,” he said. “I’m sure they’re doing the best they can to communicate, but it’s two different systems.”
Chaney’s office is continuing to hear from Mississippians with questions about the dispute – including those who receive care that can only be found at UMMC – and what it means for their medical care.
Chaney said he is trying to work with individuals on a case-by-case basis, particularly those who use Children’s of Mississippi or who are on the organ transplant list.
While pandemic child tax credits meaningfully reduced financial stress for Mississippi families, federal child care supports have been less effective than in other states because of poor administration, a new report finds.
Researchers at The Center for the Study of Social Policy surveyed and interviewed Mississippi parents and child care providers to understand the impact of federal stimulus efforts, namely the increased child tax credit and stabilization grants to child care centers. The authors found that while the child tax credit payments meaningfully eased financial burdens for families, grants for child care centers experienced a delayed rollout and providers have struggled from a lack of clear spending guidelines.
The state received $319 million in federal funds for stabilization grants, which were meant to steady an industry that had experienced significant COVID-19 disruptions. Data from the 2021 Mississippi Child Care Market Rate Survey showed that 72% of providers closed at some point due to COVID-19, 80% had reduced enrollment, and 78% lost revenue.
Despite this, the Department of Human Services (DHS), the agency that administers the stabilization grants and has recently been embroiled in scandal, did not seek input from stakeholders when creating the process and has changed the rules of the program multiple times, according to providers and advocates interviewed in the report.
“When we talked to stakeholders who have worked on child care for decades in Mississippi, most really pointed to issues around the limited capacity of the state agency to administer the funding,” Elisa Minoff, one of the report authors, told Mississippi Today.
Minoff said that other states they looked at brought stakeholders into the conversation sooner to decide how to spend the stimulus funds, and created clearer guidelines and schedules for spending the money and what types of reporting were expected. She also said that for states with limited capacity like Mississippi, the federal government should be providing more support to ensure these programs run smoothly.
Democratic state lawmakers held a hearing with DHS last month after advocates complained that the agency was not adequately answering questions from providers.
Carol Burnett, director of the Low Income Child Care Initiative, spoke at the hearing addressing the issues with the short grant period of six months and the need for more technical assistance. DHS Director Bob Anderson responded to the concerns voiced at the hearing by saying that the agency cannot “take providers by the hand.”
“I felt like (Anderson’s comment) was dismissive of the genuine desire on the part of providers to be compliant, and a desire to know for sure if what they planned to do with the money was acceptable,” Burnett said. “Given the recent fiasco at DHS, you would think that they would be equally as eager to make sure that this grant program goes well.”
Despite issues with the child care stabilization grants, the report found that the expansion of the child tax credit was an effective method of decreasing financial insecurity and pointed to other research that it could cut child poverty in Mississippi in half if made permanent. The expansion of the tax credit meant that 351,000 children in Mississippi who were previously ineligible could receive benefits last year.
Approximately 86% of Mississippi children benefited from the credit in 2021, with the average monthly payment amounting to $439 per family, according to U.S. Department of Treasury data.
Parents reported spending their credit on basic necessities, with the top five uses of the expanded payments being food and groceries, clothing, internet and utility bills, rent or mortgage, and child care. The majority of parents surveyed — 61% — said the credit reduced daily financial anxiety and 25% said it reduced the financial anxiety of their children.
One parent interviewed for the report explained the usefulness of the credit, saying, “What people fail to realize is, I have a bachelor’s degree. I have a stable job. I wish I could just open up to some people like, ‘I need help.’ It might not be forever, but if I had two or three years of [government programs] to let me get higher, what’s wrong with that if our government has it. Our government spends a lot of money on a lot of stuff…That’s something that just gets on my nerves— [people say] ‘Get up and get a job.’ I got one.”
The credit was automatically available to anyone who had filed a tax return with dependents last year, but people who didn’t file taxes were still able to sign up. The authors pointed out that the ease of accessing the funds was part of what made the credit so successful, especially when compared to other government assistance.
“The saying goes, ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ and that’s really true,” Minoff said. “But parents have really been doing it on their own for so long without enough support from society. With the federal investments that we saw last year, it was an indication of what could happen if we move towards providing families those holistic supports they need.”
