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INDIANOLA —About 30 parents, educators, students and community members gathered at Minnie Cox Park here for the Parents for Safe Schools Rally to protest schools reopening due to the rising number of coronavirus cases and deaths around Mississippi. Many schools across the state are expected to reopen in August despite the rising number of reported cases.

According to State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs, 2,413 cases have been reported in children between the ages of 11 and 17. As of Thursday, Sunflower County has a total of 721 cases and Bolivar County has 673. Around the state, total confirmed cases have reached 48,053, with 1,436 confirmed deaths. A follow-up rally, led by Mississippi Teachers Unite, is scheduled for Monday in Cleveland.

Here are images from the Parents for Safe Schools Rally:

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Stan Hindman, a consensus All American for Ole Miss in 1965, died on July 15 in California.

This was Nov. 3, 1963, a Saturday. Ole Miss was playing a rare afternoon football game against LSU in Baton Rouge. CBS was broadcasting. I was 11 years old, watching on a black and white TV in Hattiesburg.

As was always those case in those days, the Ole Miss-LSU game had SEC and national championship implications. Ole Miss was undefeated. LSU had lost once. Ole Miss sped to an early lead and LSU was fighting to get back in the game. And then it happened.

Ole Miss punted and LSU speedster Joe Labruzzo, who had run the 100-yard dash in 9.6 seconds for the LSU track team, gathered in the kick at his own 14 and took off. He broke into the clear and seemed headed for an 86-yard touchdown that might have turned the game around. Then, a huge Ole Miss player appeared on the screen, racing to try and catch Labruzzo from behind. This huge, speeding Rebel was a sophomore from Newton, named Stan Hindman. Labruzzo weighed 175 pounds. Hindman weighed 232. As Labruzzo crossed the 5-yard-line, Hindman reached out his right arm, snagged Labruzzo from behind, and took him down at the one-yard-line. Ole Miss then held the Tigers on a goal line stand and went on to win the game 37-3. Nearly 57 years later, Hindman’s rundown of Labruzzo remains one of the most incredible athletic feats I have witnessed.

“Not many linemen anywhere could have done that,” Ole Miss coaching legend John Vaught said in the next day’s newspaper. Vaught called Hindman the “greatest lineman he had ever coached at this stage of his career.”

When told the player who had run the great Labruzzo down from behind was a sophomore guard, LSU coach Charlie McClendon responded: “A guard, you say. I can’t believe it.”

Rick Cleveland

So why bring up this play from 57 years ago? Because Stan Hindman, a Mississippi Sports Hall of Famer, died July 15 in Oakland, Cal., where he was a renowned architect and sculptor. Hindman, three times an All-SEC player and once a consensus All-American, was 76.

Stan Hindman, a college football god, was the quintessential Renaissance man. A pre-med major who made straight As, he was as interested in art as he was football, says Mike Dennis, his roommate for four years at Ole Miss.

“Stan wasn’t like the rest of us; he studied all the time,” said Dennis, a running back who became a dentist. “Stan loved school. He loved to learn.”

Stan Hindman, whose younger brother Steve was also an Ole Miss star, did not originally attend Ole Miss. No, he accepted an appointment at West Point to play football for Army. Federal judge Rhesa Barksdale was in the same plebe class as Hindman at West Point. Says Barksdale, “He was only at West Point for two months and he was already the best football player Army had. He was unbelievable.”

Ole Miss athletics

Stan Hindman was a big, fast guy.

And he was out of place. The Army way did not suit Hindman, who had been recruited by all the southern football powers including Ole Miss and LSU. In October, he called Vaught to see if Ole Miss still had a scholarship for him. Vaught, of course, said he did, and then Vaught had someone go fetch Dennis, who was an Ole Miss freshman and a friend of Hindman’s from when they had competed against one another in high school track meets. Vaught did not often talk to freshmen back then, and Dennis wondered what he had done wrong to be summoned by the legendary head coach.

“Mike, I have some really good news,” Vaught told him. “Stan Hindman is joining us at Ole Miss. And, Mike, you are going to be his roommate.”

Dennis reminded Vaught he was rooming with another freshman, who, as Dennis, had attended Murrah High School. Vaught responded, “Mike, as I told you, I want you to room with Stan Hindman.”

And that was that. Hindman and Dennis, both future pro football players, roomed together all four years at Ole Miss. Says Dennis, who now lives in Oxford, “I can honestly say we never had a harsh word, not one.”

“Stan was a quiet guy, and one of the smartest guys I ever knew,” Dennis says. “He could have been a great doctor, or a dentist like his dad, or an engineer or anything else.”

Stan Hindman was drafted in the first round by the San Francisco 49ers, and, says Dennis, could have been All-Pro offensive lineman from the start. But the 49ers needed more help on defense and so he began his pro career as a defensive end. When a serious knee injury caused him to lose a step, he slid over to defensive tackle. He wore jersey number 80, the same jersey another Mississippian, Jerry Rice, would wear years later.

Hindman started and played seven NFL seasons, becoming increasingly interested in architecture all the while. By the end of his football career he was living in Haight Ashbury studying architecture at Cal-Berkley. He later studied at UCLA. “I loved going to school,” he told a writer in 2007.

“I love the gathering of the information, creating the seed of what the building is going to look like,” Hindman told Dave Newhouse of the East Bay Times. “Then getting the sense of what it can be from an architectural standpoint and achieving it.”

Newhouse asked Hindman which pursuit defined him: architecture or football?

“The greatest sense of inner-satisfaction is derived from the architecture,” Hindman answered. “It’s something I’ve been doing for the longer time. But part of me is being an athlete. I owe football a lot.”

The post 57 years ago, the late Stan Hindman, a Renaissance man, made a play for the ages appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The flag redesign commission has already met without Governor Tate Reeves’ appointed members — who are unnamed at this point. When asked about it at Wednesday’s press conference, the Governor said he was busy with COVID-19, would do so when he was darn well ready and questioned the Legislature’s authority to name people to the commission.

The post Marshall Ramsey: The Gub’ner’s Choices appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The post Marshall Ramsey: Charles Evers appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Charles Evers passed away this week. He was 97. (AP Photo/Rogelio Solis)

Civil rights activist and politician Charles Evers, brother of slain NAACP leader Medgar Evers, died Wednesday morning in Brandon, his family said. He was 97.

“The world lost a fearless Civil Rights leader this morning,” a statement from his family said. “… The life mission of Charles Evers was to advance the work of his beloved brother, who was assassinated on June 12, 1963. After his killing, Charles Evers rushed to Jackson to take his brother’s place as field secretary for the Mississippi NAACP and in 1969 he became Mississippi’s first black mayor since Reconstruction in a biracial town (Fayette) … Our family is heartbroken and proud of his legacy.”

Charles Evers ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1971 and for U.S. Senate in 1978, as an Independent candidate.

He was born in Decatur, was a World War II Army veteran and along with his brother, became active in the Civil Rights Movement in the early 1950s. He served two decades as Fayette mayor.

Evers in recent years was a Republican, although he supported President Barack Obama. He endorsed President Donald Trump and was part of a welcoming committee for Trump when the president attended the opening of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum.

Gov. Tate Reeves in a social media post on Wednesday said Evers “was a true friend to me and so many Mississippians.”

“His memory will always be cherished and honored,” Reeves said.

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The commission lawmakers charged with putting a new Mississippi flag design before voters held its first meeting Wednesday, minus three members Gov. Tate Reeves failed to appoint by last week’s deadline per a new law he signed.

Six members of what is supposed to be a nine-member commission unanimously moved up their deadline to have a new flag design from Sept. 14 to Sept. 2 to allow more time to put it on a Nov. 3 ballot.

Geoff Pender

House Speaker Philip Gunn opens the first meeting of commission to redesign Mississippi’s state flag.

The commission agreed to over the next few weeks review hundreds of designs the public has submitted — and likely to choose a final design from one of those. They agreed to meet next week with a vexillologist, or expert on flags. They also unanimously chose former state Supreme Court Justice Reuben Anderson as chairman of the commission.

Officials at the meeting had little comment on Reeves’ failure to make his three appointments to the commission, other than the commission has enough members for a quorum and will move forward regardless.

Reeves, who opposed the Legislature removing the state’s 1894 flag with its divisive Confederate battle emblem but signed the bill into law, has given little explanation for his delay in appointments other than he has been too busy.

On Wednesday, after the commission had met, Reeves said: “I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but we are dealing with serious hospital capacity issues (from COVID-19) and people are dying every day … We will make our appointments when we make those appointments.”

Although he had signed the flag commission legislation into law without raising such issues, on Wednesday he questioned whether lawmakers have the “constitutional authority to call a meeting of an executive branch entity” or to make appointments to such a commission.

House Speaker Philip Gunn and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann made their appointments to the commission last week.

Gunn, who led the legislative push to remove the 1894 state flag and authored the bill, thanked commission members and stressed the historic “weight” of their work as he opened Wednesday’s meeting.

“We are making history,” Gunn said. “Whatever banner we decide will represent this state, probably forever.

“When that thing goes up, you can say, ‘Hey, I did that,’ and your grandchildren will know you did it,” Gunn said. “… The children of Israel have a banner they unite behind … even pirates have a banner, skull and crossbones that says we rape and pillage, but they unite behind it … We need a design the entire state can be proud of that does in fact represent all our people.”

Gunn marveled that the Legislature voting to remove the flag with a Confederate emblem after decades of debate was “nothing short of a miracle” and said, “I want to be on the right side of history.”

Anderson, serving as the first African American justice of the state high court from 1985-1991, said he didn’t seek the role as chairman, but, “Now that I think about it, I’m probably uniquely qualified.”

“I went to law school at Ole Miss in 1965, and I think that every person on campus back then was carrying that flag,” Anderson said. “The marching band back then marched in Confederate uniforms. So I was not welcomed there.

“Every courtroom I walked into all those years, that flag told me I was not welcomed,” Anderson said. “I and thousands of Mississippians have been stiff-armed by that flag … We are the right group to take care of it.”

Four of the commission members attended Wednesday’s meeting at the Two Museums in person, with two there via video conference. The Mississippi Department of Archives and History is providing clerical help and support for the commission.

The commission reviewed its charter set forth by the Legislature: select a new flag design —which must include the words “In God We Trust” and cannot have a Confederate battle emblem — present it to the Legislature, governor and secretary of state so it can go before voters on Nov. 3 for an up or down vote. If voters reject the proposal, the commission will go back to work on a new design for the ballot in 2021.

Archives and History Director Katie Blount told the commission on Wednesday that the secretary of state’s office and county circuit clerks had expressed concerns that the Sept. 14 deadline for choosing a new design would be cutting it close on getting the flag on the ballot. Commissioners moved up that deadline to Sept. 2. They set meetings for July 28, Aug. 19 and Sept. 2, and said they might schedule others.

The Department of Archives last week put out a call for the public to submit designs, and has received about 600 so far. The commission considered letting archives staff winnow these down to a short list for them to view.

But commissioner Mack Varner, a Vicksburg attorney, said he wanted to look at all the submitted designs, to which others agreed. They plan to have have a short list of 25 designs selected by Aug. 19.

The commission is not required to pick a public-submitted design and could come up with its own, but commissioners appeared unanimous in wanting to choose from public proposals.

“I think the public’s engagement is very important in this,” said Commissioner Sherri Carr Bevis of Gulfport, a marketing and communications executive.

Anderson told his colleagues that as a longtime jurist he believes “the phrase In God We Trust is a challenge, constitutionally.”

“But if there ever was a time that Mississippi and the country needed In God We Trust, it is now,” Anderson said. “I look forward to supporting that phrase.”

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