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U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson is asking the Justice Department to investigate the 2018 jail death of Robert Loggins in Grenada.

“No question it’s equal to the George Floyd situation,” he said, alluding to the 2020 death of Floyd after a Minneapolis police officer kneeled on his neck for more than nine minutes.

Asked if the Justice Department had begun to investigate, Acting U.S. Attorney Clay Joyner of Oxford responded, “We cannot comment on any investigation.”

Calls for an investigation came after the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting published a video of Loggins’ death inside the jail on Nov. 29, 2018. The video shows Loggins slowly rolling when officers get on top of him inside the Grenada County Jail, with one officer appearing to kneel on his neck and sit on his head.

Three and a half minutes later, they got off him. The 26-year-old never moved again. More than six minutes passed before anyone checked his conditions — only to discover he had no pulse and wasn’t breathing.

Despite that discovery, another four and a half minutes passed before anyone conducted any CPR.

Authorities ruled the death an accident, blaming the methamphetamine he took, but renowned forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden concluded the death was a homicide, saying the methamphetamine was not a fatal amount. “They killed him by piling on top of him,” he said. “He absolutely died from some kind of asphyxia.”

A Mississippi Bureau of Investigation concluded no foul play was involved in Loggins’ death. Officers have yet to respond to the litigation, but they denied in interviews with MBI that they had done anything wrong.

Loggins’ wife, Rika Jones, the administrator for his estate, has filed a lawsuit in federal court against those involved, accusing them of causing her husband’s wrongful death.

“The wrongdoing that culminated in Robert Loggins’ untimely death is difficult to watch but plain to see,” said the family’s attorney, Jacob Jordan of the Tannehill, Carmean & McKenzie law firm in Oxford. “The family appreciates the increasing number of calls for justice and reform in his wake.”

Thompson requested the Justice Department investigation after reading MCIR’s story and viewing the video.

“It is unacceptable that Mr. Loggins’ last moments were met with unnecessary suffering and pain at the hands of Grenada County law enforcement officials,” he wrote Attorney General Merrick Garland. “As a representative of this community, I request a complete and thorough investigation of the causes and circumstances surrounding the untimely death of Mr. Loggins.”

The Grenada City Council and Mississippi’s Legislative Black Caucus have also called for an independent investigation by the Justice Department.

Back in 1995, the department, along with the International Chiefs of Police, warned law enforcement officials that keeping people restrained in the prone position increased the risk of death from asphyxia. “As soon as the suspect is handcuffed, get him off his stomach,” the report urged.

If the person must be kept in the prone position, that person “should be closely and continuously monitored,” the report said.

Applying weight to someone’s back adds to that risk, the report said. The more weight, the more risk. Drugs and alcohol also add to the risk.

In his book, Evaluating Police Uses of Force, co-author Seth Stoughton warns twice, “DO NOT PUT YOUR KNEE ON THE SUSPECT’S NECK OR SPINE.”

He said it’s even more well established to not do this while someone is handcuffed, but that is what has continued to happen in policing across the U.S.

The city of Minneapolis paid $3 million to settle litigation involving the 2010 death of 28-year-old David Smith, who suffered from mental illness and died after officers used a Taser on him and held him face down on the floor. One officer kept a knee on Smith’s back even after he stopped speaking.

As a part of that settlement, the city agreed to include additional training to avoid positional asphyxiation, but that training failed to prevent continued use of these techniques by officers.

In 2020, four Minneapolis officers kneeled on the handcuffed George Floyd, including then-officer Derek Chauvin, who kneeled on Floyd’s neck more than nine minutes. The city of

Minneapolis has already agreed to pay $27 million to settle a civil lawsuit from Floyd’s family.

A jury convicted Chauvin of second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter, and he faces sentencing later this year.

On Friday, a federal grand jury charged Chauvin and the three other former officers with depriving Floyd of his civil rights.

A second indictment accuses Chauvin of depriving a teenager of his civil rights in 2017 by kneeling on his neck and upper back after he was handcuffed and in the prone position for nearly 17 minutes. Chauvin also reportedly held the minor by the throat, struck him with a flashlight and ignored complaints from the teen that he couldn’t breathe.

The Justice Department is now investigating whether Minneapolis police have engaged in the continued practice of excessive force.

In Mississippi, four police officers in Southaven pinned Troy Goode down, handcuffed him and called for an ambulance. His wife, Kelli, described multiple officers “on top of him with their knees in his back.” He died after being kept hogtied in the prone position for 90 minutes.

Authorities blamed LSD toxicity for his 2015 death, but an independent autopsy by a pathologist hired by the family concluded that he died from “positional asphyxia.”

Authorities tried to have the case dismissed, but the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that “hog-tying a drug-affected person in a state of drug-induced psychosis and placing him face down in a prone position for an extended period constitutes excessive force.”

The trial is set for July 12 in Oxford before U.S. District Judge Michael P. Mills.

Chris Vignes, spokesman for the Mississippi Department of Public Safety, said the Mississippi Law Enforcement Officers’ Training Academy “does teach on the dangers of positional asphyxia.”

The academy doesn’t teach “any form of neck restraint, including chokeholds, as a force option; however, we do expose students to neck restraints for familiarization,” he said. “This exposure gives them insight into how to defeat a chokehold position.”

In 2016, Dallas police officers handcuffed Tony Timpa. One of the officers put his knee on Timpa’s upper back for 14 minutes while he lay prone, and he stopped breathing, according to court records.

The medical examiner blamed cocaine use and “the physiological stress associated with physical restraint,” concluding that due to “his prone position and physical restraint by an officer, an element of mechanical or positional asphyxia cannot be ruled out,” according to court records.

In 2017, Jonathan Salcido, who was experiencing a psychotic episode, died after officers from the Whittier Police Department in California piled on top of him while he was handcuffed and in the prone position. His mother had called police to get her son to a hospital. The city paid $1.9 million to the family.

Last month, Mario Gonzalez, who appeared to be under the influence, died after police officers in Alameda, California, pinned him to the ground for more than five minutes.

The bodycam video shows one officer keeping his knee in Gonzalez’s back.

Over the past decade, there have been 157 asphyxiation deaths in police custody, according to fatalencounters.org.

Stoughton, who trains officers, said far too many are failing to do “what decades of training tells them they should be doing—taking secured subjects out of the prone position at the earliest opportunity.”

Changing that behavior requires “a clear policy that directs officers to take handcuffed subjects out of the prone position as quickly as possible, even if the subject is still not fully compliant,” he said. “Officers must be actively trained on that policy—rather than just signing an acknowledgment form that they received it—so that they actually understand it.”

Prosecutors who review in-custody deaths should educate themselves about positional asphyxia, and if officers “acted with gross negligence or recklessness that might meet the threshold for criminal prosecution under governing law,” he said, they “should be prosecuted.”

Baden said most, if not all, of the deaths in police custody attributed to “excited delirium” are “really deaths due to restraint asphyxia in my experience.” A 2020 review of these delirium cases raised questions about this cause of death, concluding that these cases were fatal mostly in aggressive forms of police restraint.

Jerry Mitchell is an investigative reporter for the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization that is exposing wrongdoing, educating and empowering Mississippians, and raising up the next generation of investigative reporters. Sign up for MCIR’s newsletters here.

The post Rep. Thompson says Mississippi jail death ‘equal to the George Floyd situation’ appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The COVID-19 vaccination rate in Mississippi is continuing its steep decline.

Last week, 46,440 Mississippians received COVID-19 vaccines, a drop of over 16% from the week prior. The state’s weekly vaccination rate has dropped 65% from its peak in late February. Mississippi continues to rank last in the nation for the share of its population that is partially or fully vaccinated.

Allison Cox, executive director of the Jackson Housing Authority, said she’s surprised more people are not getting vaccinated in Mississippi. Her organization even had difficulties in early March to fill the 240 vaccination slots per day they had through a partnership with Walmart. Still, Cox is proud that they were able to get around 2,000 Mississippians vaccinated over a six-week period. 

“Our northeast partners, like up in Maine, when they talk to us, they just can’t believe that it’s so accessible to us and that people aren’t taking advantage of it,” Cox said.

The Mississippi State Department of Health reported on Monday that 974,542 people in Mississippi — about 33% of the state’s population — have received at least their first dose of COVID-19 vaccine. Nearly 839,000 people have been fully inoculated since the state began distributing vaccines in December.

Thousands of vaccination appointments are currently available on the MSDH vaccine scheduler. All Mississippians ages 16 and up are currently eligible to receive a COVID-19 vaccine.

MAP: Where Mississippians can get the COVID-19 vaccine

Follow our full vaccine coverage, including data on the vaccination progress in Mississippi.

The post Mississippi COVID-19 vaccination rate tumbles 65% since peak appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Gov. Tate Reeves said Mississippi in early June will opt out of a federal pandemic program that has been providing an extra $300 a month in unemployment benefits to Mississippians since last year.

Reeves’ announcement came just hours after fellow Republican, House Speaker Philip Gunn, called on Reeves to either start enforcing job-search requirements for unemployment benefits or end the federal stipend. Gunn said small businesses are reporting they cannot hire people because of the extra benefits, and that the state is not enforcing the rule that people search for work while receiving them.

“The purpose of unemployment benefits is to temporarily assist Mississippians who are unemployed through no fault of their own,” Reeves posted on social media on Monday. “After many conversations over the last several weeks with Mississippi small business owners and their employees, it has become clear that the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance and other like programs passed by the Congress may have been necessary in May of last year but are no longer so in May of this year. Therefore, I have informed the Department of Employment Security to direct the Biden Administration that Mississippi will be opting out of the additional federal unemployment benefits as early as federal law allows – June 12, 2021.”

Gunn said he’s heard reports that unemployment claimants are not following requirements that they earnestly search for jobs, and that “MDES is not effectively enforcing that requirement.”

Gunn in his letter Monday said he received a report from one small-business owner that over a short time, 18 people had applied for job interviews, but only three showed up. He said the owner believed they were trying to game the system with MDES and “he reported these individuals to MDES to no avail.”

“I and other House members are continually being contacted by increasingly desperate small businesspeople who inform us their businesses are at risk,” Gunn wrote to Reeves, and copied the letter to all House members. “They report that they cannot get employees to return to work because they can earn more from combined federal and state unemployment benefits than their normal wages.”

Gunn noted that the governors of Montana and South Carolina last week announced they were ending their states’ participation in the $300 a week federal COVID-19 benefits. Politicos and pundits nationwide have surmised increased pandemic unemployment benefits and stimulus payments have incentivized many people to not return to work.

Reeves on Monday said, “I have also directed MDES to prioritize pre-pandemic enforcement of all eligibility requirements for any individual to receive unemployment benefits under state law. Mississippi is open for business!”

Last August, Reeves announced the state would participate in a federal COVID-19 unemployment stipend created by an order of the Trump administration that would provide unemployed Mississippians an extra $300 a week. In Mississippi, state benefits are a maximum $235 a week, with the average payment at less than $200, compared to the national average of $308 a week.

House Ways and Means Chairman Trey Lamar, R-Senatobia, said he has heard from numerous employers in his district that they can’t find workers because of increased pandemic benefits.

“Not just one or two (employers),” Lamar said, “but a substantial number of businesses just here in my little hometown of Senatobia — restaurants, other businesses. The place where I used to get coffee in the mornings can’t open in the mornings because they don’t have enough workers … I think it’s past the point for this. People can safely go back to work.”

But Mississippi has suffered from low wages, lack of jobs, high unemployment and low workforce participation long before the pandemic.

House Democratic Leader Rep. Robert Johnson of Natchez said, “let’s raise the minimum wage first,” before ending the pandemic unemployment stipend.

READ MORE: Reeves says unemployed Mississippians will receive $300 per week through Trump stipend

Johnson said “people have been working in poverty” because of the state’s $7.25 an hour minimum wage and should not be blamed for taking advantage of an opportunity to earn more thanks to the $300 per week federal benefits stipend. Plus, he said, cutting the benefits off without taking other steps could harm people who are legitimately unemployed.

He said many states have increased their minimum wage to as much as $15 per hour. If it was increased to $9 or $10 an hour in Mississippi, Johnson said it would help low wage workers and boost the economy.

Rep. Chris Bell, D-Jackson, said, “It’s very unfortunate to hear about ending the unemployment benefits for Mississippians who are currently out of work.”

“I don’t know of a single person who would rather receive these benefits than find meaningful employment,” Bell said. “The extension of unemployment benefits should not expire.”

Mississippi’s unemployment for March was 6.3%, higher than the national average of 6% and up from 6.1% in February. Overall, Mississippi’s number of jobs remains down by 3% from last year.

Mississippi for March ranked last, at 56.1%, in workforce participation — a trend that predates the pandemic — and it ranks last in median household income at $45,081, also a trend predating COVID-19.

Mississippi’s state economist recently reported that the state is forecast to see a major economic rebound in 2021, including job growth of 1.8%, the highest annual increase since 1998. He noted that much of that growth would be due to federal COVID-19 stimulus spending.

The post Reeves to end $300 unemployment stipend after Gunn calls for crack down appeared first on Mississippi Today.

New Census means it is time to draw new maps.

The post Marshall Ramsey: Map Drawing Time appeared first on Mississippi Today.

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said last week that Mississippi could provide his Democratic Party another seat in future elections.

Ezra Klein, in his New York Times podcast, asked Schumer how Democrats could add senators like Sen. Joe Manchin, a moderate Democrat from conservative-leaning West Virginia. In response, Schumer rattled off several states that were winnable for Democrats.

“Mississippi, 38% of the vote is African-American, if we could get that vote up a little bit and then Jackson becomes a little more moderate because the people are moving in from tech and other jobs, I wouldn’t cross that off the map,” Schumer said.

TRANSCRIPT: Read Klein’s entire interview with Schumer here.

Schumer was Senate minority leader in 2020, when Democrat Mike Espy faced Republican incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith.

During the race that culminated in a 10-point Hyde-Smith victory, Espy publicly chastised national groups including the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee — which, as majority or minority chair, Schumer wields great influence over — for its lack of investment into his campaign. That lack of investment was such that Rep. Bennie Thompson, the Democratic congressman from Mississippi, leaned on Schumer to take a closer look at Espy’s race.

“They don’t think a Black man in Mississippi can win,” Espy said in 2020 of the lack of early support from national Democratic organizations.

By the end of the 2020 race, the DSCC and the Democratic National Committee had given hundreds of thousands of dollars to the campaign and diverted some other financial, field, polling and organizational support.

Still, Espy and other critics said the national organizations’ priorities need to change to include political infrastructure building in off years, not just in years when candidates are on the ballot.

“They’ve been doing it so long because they’ve been doing it so long,” Espy said in 2020 of the national organizations. “There is less polling here because there is less polling. You’re ignored here until you prove your own viability, but it’s hard to prove your viability if you’re ignored … In Mississippi we have a legacy of disinvestment. If the national party, the DSCC, had been putting in $5 million, or $10 million in off years, we’d have a competitive party now — the best data, an army of door knockers. But the Mike Espy campaign (had to build that infrastructure) since 2018 because we had no choice.”

READ MORE: Espy finally landed support from national Democrats in 2020 Senate race. Was it too late?

The post Schumer says Democrats can add a Senate seat in Mississippi appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Moderating comment sections on news websites is a dreadful task. Newsrooms across America have struggled to figure it out, and we’re officially admitting we’re among them.

Central to our mission is inspiring civic engagement. We think critically about how we can foster healthy dialogue between people who have different ideas, beliefs and perspectives about the state we love. We believe that conversation — raw, earnest talking and listening to better understand each other — is vital to Mississippi’s future. But not at the expense of others.

Unfortunately, we just don’t have the staff resources to consistently ensure informed, productive, respectful dialogue in the comments section of our website.

Beginning today, comments will be disabled on all articles on Mississippi Today’s website. We encourage you to continue to engage with us and each other on our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram pages — all of which will very much remain active. You’ll also notice a new website feature below each of our articles: a link to our new “Letter to the Editor” page. Those comments will go straight to my inbox, and I vow to respond to them accordingly and share them with the appropriate Mississippi Today staffers.

Please let us know if you see hateful dialogue regarding any of our journalism. And as always, we welcome feedback or criticism of our work and decisions. Reach out to me any time at adam@mississippitoday.org.

Keep talking with and listening to each other. And please, be kind to each other.

The post Why we’re disabling comments on Mississippi Today’s website appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Senate Corrections Chair Juan Barnett, D-Heidelberg, talks with Mississippi Today’s Geoff Pender and Bobby Harrison about the state’s high incarceration rates and efforts to give more people being held in prison an opportunity for parole. Barnett explains why he works so hard on efforts to ease sentencing guidelines even after his father was murdered.

Listen here:

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In 2001, House Speaker Tim Ford of Baldwyn supported the plan of fellow Democrats to place much of suburban Jackson in a congressional district with northeast Mississippi.

Explaining the congressional redistricting effort featuring the Tupelo to Jackson district, Ford off-handedly dubbed it “the tornado plan” because of the way it looked on the map. Ford’s intent was not to sabotage the plan, and most likely opposition to the plan would have been intense regardless of what it was called, but the “tornado” moniker stuck and not in a good way.

Indeed, the moniker helped galvanize opposition.

The political landscape of the state was much different in 2001, though in hindsight the writing already was on the wall portending the rise of the Republican Party and fall of the Democratic Party.

As a result of the 2000 Census, Mississippi’s number of U.S. House seats was reduced from five to four — not because the state lost population but because it did not grow as much as other states. Legislators faced the difficult task of redrawing the districts, knowing they would be forced to pit two incumbent U.S. House members against each other.

Legislators could not complete the task after the 2000 Census. And legislators also failed to draw congressional districts based on the population shifts found by the 2010 Census. In both 2000 and 2010, the federal judiciary ended up drawing the districts.

Now, 10 years later, legislators again face the task of redrawing House districts. The preliminary census data was released last month. Both Senate Pro Tem Dean Kirby, R-Pearl, and Rep. Jim Beckett, R-Bruce, who are heading up their chambers’ redistricting efforts, have said they intend for the Legislature, not the courts, to redraw the congressional districts — early in the 2022 session.

They will not have much time. The qualifying deadline for candidates to run for the U.S. House is March 1.

Like in 2000 and 2010, Mississippi will have four U.S. House members. The state is not losing a U.S. House seat even though it was one of only three states to lose population, according to early census data.

In 2000, Mississippi’s five U.S. House members were Democrats Gene Taylor of the 5th District on the Gulf Coast; Ronnie Shows of the 4th District, which stretched from Jackson into southwest Mississippi; Bennie Thompson of the 2nd District, who was the state’s sole African American member representing most of the Delta; and Republicans Roger Wicker of the 1st District in north Mississippi; and Chip Pickering of the 3rd District, which included parts of the Jackson suburbs and much of east Mississippi.

The consensus was that Pickering and Shows would be thrown into the same district — in part because they had less experience than some of the other members and in part for the sake of the compactness of the districts.

Democrats, who controlled both the state House and Senate in the form of Speaker Ford and Lt. Gov. Amy Tuck, reasoned that it made sense to move the Republicans in high voter turnout Jackson suburbs in Madison and Rankin counties from Pickering to Wicker.

Democrats reasoned that the tornado plan would result in the re-election of Thompson and Taylor for their side and put the incumbents Shows and Pickering in a toss-up district. On the other hand, people from northeast Mississippi feared the tornado plan could make Wicker, a Tupelo resident, vulnerable to a Republican from the Jackson suburbs.

At any rate, Tuck, though a Democrat, would not go for the tornado plan.

The result was a November special session where the two redistricting chairs, Rep. Tommy Reynolds and Sen. Hob Bryan, essentially did nothing other than call meetings where they rejected each other’s offers on behalf of their leadership and then regaled those in attendance with their vast knowledge of literature, ranging from Shakespeare to Tennessee Williams to Faulkner to the Bible.

After seven days, the House leadership opted to end the special session. The Senate stayed in session, knowing that if one chamber refused to go home the other would be forced to return.

But then Gov. Ronnie Musgrove, Mississippi’s last Democratic governor, stepped in to conclude the session based on a constitutional clause that said the governor could end the session if the two chambers could not agree.

With the Legislature not able to complete its task, the courts, both on the state and federal levels, got involved in a complex process that involved multiple high profile attorneys. The end result was a plan that looked nothing like a tornado where Pickering easily defeated Shows.

In 2003, Tuck, facing anger from Democrats, ran and won re-election as a Republican. In 2010, Taylor lost to Republican Steven Palazzo, leaving the Democrats with one U.S. House member: Thompson.

The upcoming effort to redistrict the House is not expected to result in such dramatic changes.

The post Task of redrawing U.S. House districts not as daunting as in 2000 appeared first on Mississippi Today.

A political time bomb is ticking in Greenville, and the explosion could transform the state’s public education environment for decades to come.

Last Monday and Tuesday, between 13-20 bus drivers for the Greenville Public School District — some of the lowest paid employees in one of the most under-resourced school districts in one of the most under-resourced regions of America — skipped work to protest reduced pay and what they called poor work conditions.

As far as anyone knows, this was the first organized work stoppage in Mississippi public schools since 9,429 teachers walked out in a 1985 strike, after which lawmakers passed the demanded pay increases but also enacted one of the nation’s most stringent strike laws.

Lawmakers that year made it explicitly illegal for school employees to strike in Mississippi. They drafted the law as broadly as possible to include pretty much any excuse that teachers — including bus drivers, in this case — could use.

The consequences for the Greenville bus drivers, clearly written out in state law, are grave: They could be fired and would never be able to work in any public school district in the state again. Several of the drivers have indicated to Mississippi Today in recent days they did not know the extent of the state law before they went on strike, and school officials said on Thursday that several of the drivers tried to retroactively claim they were sick for the two days of the strike.

Dorian Turner, the attorney for the Board of Trustees of the Greenville Public School District, said in a Greenville Public School District board meeting on Thursday afternoon that she had been gathering facts about what, exactly, happened last week. And despite the bus drivers’ claims about not knowing state law, she said that what occurred last week was, indeed, a strike.

“It looked to me that what we had was a situation where the bus drivers had gone on strike, and that was activity that was illegal,” Turner told the Greenville school board on Thursday. “If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, you’ve probably got a duck on your hands. They may or may not have known that doing that was an illegal activity, but that was the effect of all those employees deciding not to come to work.”

The meeting then quickly devolved into confusion, with board members talking over each other and lobbing accusations. Some members questioned whether what the bus drivers did even constituted a strike by legal definition, and the board president blamed the director of transportation for allowing the work stoppage.

The board members appeared oblivious to the state laws at hand, including ones that could affect them personally. The strike law passed in 1985 clearly states that school board members themselves are responsible for reporting the names of those who striked to the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office. For each day that those names are not reported by the board to the state, the individual board members and school administrators can be fined between $100 and $250. Turner did not disclose that provision to the board during the Thursday meeting, though Greenville Superintendent Debra Dace at one point said during the meeting that she had a list of the drivers who went on strike.

“Before we send these names to the AG’s office, we want to be sure,” Jan Vaughn, the president of the board, said during the meeting. “There’s a misdemeanor, a large fine, maybe even jail time. So I want to be clear about this before we take any action.”

The board ended the Thursday meeting by taking no action. The next board meeting is scheduled for May 27. If the names were not reported to the state until that day, every school board member in the Greenville Public School District could face fines of $8,000 each, according to the strike law.

Turner told Mississippi Today in an email she was not authorized to speak to reporters without permission from the board or the superintendent. Vaughn, the board president, has not returned multiple requests for comment since last week. A spokesperson for the district and superintendent did not respond to questions from Mississippi Today by Friday morning.

There is little legal precedent in the state that dictates what may happen next. The Greenville board obviously must make decisions about if, how and when to report the names of the bus drivers to the Attorney General’s Office. If that happens, it’s unclear how Attorney General Lynn Fitch may handle the case.

State Auditor Shad White, who earlier this year issued a demand for a return in taxpayer money to a University of Mississippi professor who participated in a nationwide walk-out, told Mississippi Today he is unsure if his office will investigate.

“The state law is clear: public employees in Mississippi cannot strike,” White said in a statement. “My role, if there was a strike, is to ensure that striking employees were not paid while on strike. My assumption here is that the drivers were not paid while they were not driving, though we haven’t looked into it.”

For years, attorneys and advocates both in Mississippi and outside the state have been clamoring to challenge the constitutionality of the state’s strike law. But without legal standing to make such a challenge, they’ve had nothing to do but wait. The Greenville bus drivers may have, perhaps inadvertently, kicked that door wide open.

Many have argued the merits of the strike law being struck down in Mississippi. The state’s public school teachers are the lowest paid, on average, in the nation. While teacher pay is often the most discussed issue at hand, behind the frustration of many school teachers is a long history of broken political promises and little meaningful action to support the very teachers that politicians often boast as critical to the future of the state.

Certainly not making matters easier is the fact that public education advocacy groups, whose thousands of members often suggest going on strike, have been handcuffed by the strike law themselves and are now left to sit on the sidelines while the Greenville situation unfolds. 

The law passed in 1985 explicitly prohibits “teacher organizations” from doing anything to “promote, encourage or participate in any strike against a public school district, the State of Mississippi or any agency thereof.” During the 1985 strike, board members of the Mississippi Association of Educators, the local affiliate of the National Education Association that is still active in advocacy work today, were fined and received two-day jail sentences for the organization’s role in the strike (although the board members did not actually have to serve the jail time after cooperating with court orders).

What happens in the days to come is unknown. But eager onlookers — both the ones who are speaking up and the ones who legally cannot — realize this moment could prove pivotal to the state’s educational future.

Meanwhile, the Greenville bus drivers, who all along just wanted to be paid fairly and treated better by school district leaders, are caught in a grim reality. Their bosses, the same ones who ignored their pleas for better pay and treatment during the pandemic and pushed them to organize a work stoppage, appear poised to report their names to the state’s top prosecutor.

Fair or not — constitutional or not — the law is working exactly how lawmakers in 1985 intended.

READ MORE: Background of Mississippi’s strict law that forbids educators from striking.

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