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This article was reported and published by The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom investigating gun violence in America. Click here to subscribe to its newsletters.

When Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves announced he was sending his state’s National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., at President Donald Trump’s request, he framed the move as a matter of public safety. “Crime is out of control there, and it’s clear something must be done to combat it,” Reeves declared.

But several parts of Reeves’s state are worse off than Washington. At least 17 Mississippi counties endured more gun homicides per capita than the nation’s capital in 2024. That includes Hinds County, home to the state capital of Jackson, where the rate was nearly twice that of Washington’s last year.

Reeves isn’t alone. Five other Republican governors — in Louisiana, Tennessee, South Carolina, Ohio, and West Virginia — also dispatched guard units to Washington in August, echoing Trump’s rhetoric about a city in crisis.

But a Trace analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data shows that most of those states suffer from some of the nation’s highest gun homicide rates, with some areas worse than the capital Republicans portray as especially dangerous.

“Why is there not more outrage in those states about their higher violence rates?” said Shani Buggs, a violence prevention researcher at the University of California, Davis. “Spending state resources to outsource people to other cities doesn’t make sense. If this is supposed to be a strategy for reducing violence, why aren’t they employing it within their own states?”

The Trace reached out to the six governors that have deployed guard units to Washington and asked if they were planning to send troops to violent crime hotspots in their own states. One responded. 

“Ohio has traditionally helped the District of Columbia, Ohio mayors, and other states when they request assistance from the Ohio National Guard or the Ohio State Highway Patrol,” said Daniel Tierney, a spokesperson for Governor Mike DeWine. Tierney noted that the state had deployed the guard to Cleveland and Columbus at the behest of Democratic mayors to help quell protests over the 2020 police murder of George Floyd.

The Data

The nation’s capital has long been a political scapegoat for Republicans, who point to its homicide rate as evidence of Democratic mismanagement. Last year, Washington’s gun homicide rate stood at 18.7 per 100,000. If it were a state, it would have the nation’s highest rate. But Mississippi’s homicide rate was nearly as high — 16.9 per 100,000 — and Tennessee, South Carolina, and Louisiana each ranked in the top 10 states for gun homicides. Ohio and West Virginia fall closer to the national average.

Washington is almost entirely urban, lacking the suburban and rural areas that help pull down most statewide averages. The district’s land area — about 68 square miles — is smaller than most counties but more comparable in scale, making counties a more fitting benchmark than entire states. County-level data also provides consistency, as it is a standard unit in federal public health reporting, unlike city-level data, which can be uneven. 

Our analysis of counties found areas within several Republican-controlled states that face higher levels of gun violence than Washington. Four of the six states that have deployed guard units to Washington have at least one county that’s deadlier. Mississippi has the most counties with gun homicide rates exceeding Washington’s, at 17.

“From a rational perspective, there’s very little to support these states outsourcing people to communities that are not asking for this,” Buggs said. “Meanwhile, there have been cuts to violence prevention strategies, health care, Medicaid, affordable housing, social services, and youth job programs. Those are the things communities are asking for — not this type of intervention.”

Annual gun homicide rates fell by double-digits last year in the three cities Trump has focused most of his attention on: Washington, Chicago, and Baltimore. Meanwhile, at least 31 of 82 Mississippi counties saw their rates increase. In Louisiana, 19 parishes endured increases, and as did 36 Tennessee counties. 

In New York, where Trump has also threatened to send the guard, 66 Mississippi counties, 50 Louisiana parishes, 38 South Carolina counties, and 20 Tennessee counties had more gun homicides per capita last year than the Bronx, the New York City borough with the highest rate. Ohio had eight deadlier counties, while West Virginia had one.

A double standard?

The governors sent troops to Washington, but at home they’ve taken a more subtle approach, coordinating with federal and local law enforcement partners — something the Trump administration reportedly has not done with leaders in any of the states to which he’s mentioned deploying troops.

Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry, the only one of the six governors to have served in the National Guard (or in the military at all), has used the guard for security within his state. He deployed the guard to assist police in the aftermath of the New Year’s truck attack and shooting on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, and again a few weeks later for the Super Bowl. 

Four Louisiana parishes — as counties are called there — have gun homicide rates higher than Washington’s, including Orleans Parish and East Baton Rogue Parish, home to the state’s largest city and state capital, respectively, The Trace found. Caddo Parrish, where Shreveport is located, also had a higher rate, as did Rapides, a solidly Republican county that includes Alexandria.

In Baton Rouge, Sateria Tate-Alexander, who runs the nonprofit anti-violence group AGILE, said Landry’s deployment to Washington is a waste of resources that could be used to help reduce violence in her community. AGILE’s violence intervention programs are at risk of shutting down after the city’s new mayor, a Republican, canceled a federally funded grant. “It actually is devastating because we see it all the time, the wasted resources or the displacement of resources,” she said. “It makes me angry.”

She said the Louisiana cities suffering from high rates of violence need more state support for community programs. “Violence is a complex issue, so we have to have an equally complex solution to actually be effective,” she said. “What we’re seeing is the opposite.”

In Memphis, where violence is worse than in Washington, community groups say they’ve also been left in the lurch — even as Tennessee Governor Bill Lee sends guard troops to the nation’s capital. “It makes me feel like they’re ignoring the violence — that they’re not concerned about what’s going on here in the city of Memphis,” said Brian Tillman, a violence interrupter with the 901 B.L.O.C. Squad, a violence prevention team that was recently furloughed after its budget was slashed. 

“If you have resources to allocate to D.C., why wouldn’t you have resources to allocate to the city of Memphis,” he said. “If you’re not addressing the root causes, then you’re not part of the solution, which makes you part of the problem.”

Chip Brownlee is a reporter at The Trace covering federal policy related to violence prevention and firearms. He is also the author of The Trajectory newsletter, which spotlights the people, policies, and programs grappling with America’s gun violence crisis. Before joining The Trace as an investigative fellow in June 2020, Chip Brownlee worked as a reporter and the editor-in-chief of his collegiate newspaper, The Auburn Plainsman. He also covered the state legislature, governor, courts, and elections for the Alabama Political Reporter. As an undergraduate, Chip studied political science and journalism at Auburn University. He also earned an M.A. with a concentration in politics from the Columbia Journalism School.

Jennifer Mascia is a senior news writer and founding staffer at The Trace. She previously covered gun violence at The New York Times. In her dozen years on this beat, she’s covered community gun violence, the intersection of domestic violence and guns, and the growing role of firearms in public life.

Editor’s note: Mississippi Today Ideas is publishing guest essays from people impacted by Hurricane Katrina during the week of the 20th anniversary of the storm that hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast on Aug. 29, 2005.

As I flew home from a three-week economic development trip to Japan on  Aug. 24^th, 2005, I became aware that a tropical storm was in the Atlantic headed toward Florida. That day it was named Hurricane Katrina by the National Hurricane Center.

It hit southeastern Florida as a Category 1 hurricane on the 25^th and then traveled into the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico that evening.  

After Hurricane Camille hit Mississippi’s Gulf Coast in 1969, the state had conducted annual drills and practice sessions in preparation for the next major hurricane. Based on those preparations and practices, the Mississippi Emergency  Management Agency (MEMA), the Mississippi National Guard and the Mississippi Highway Patrol joined with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)  and the Mississippi Department of Transportation (MDOT) along with county and  city responders and private companies in preparing for a serious hurricane.

As Katrina approached, we established a unified command structure that tied the various governmental structures together, which strengthened our operations. This was especially important since the state had more than 3,000 National Guard forces on the ground in Iraq. Private companies such as public utilities, airports, ports and shipyards tied into the command structure.  

By Aug. 27^th Katrina had begun to change course, turning north  and gaining strength. Dr. Max Mayfield, head of the National Hurricane Center, called me that evening and told me the hurricane would probably come ashore in  Mississippi and would be worse than Camille.

I asked him to get the government and the news media to start saying that because our evacuation efforts were too  small. He agreed and once the media started saying this hurricane would be worse  than Camille, our evacuation became much larger. Our citizens knew how terrible Camille had been.

The eye of the storm came ashore early the morning of Monday, Aug. 29^th,  where Mississippi and Louisiana come together at the mouth of the Pearl River, with  the strongest part of the storm, the right front quadrant, covering the entire  Mississippi Coast and more. The wind speed, which had been a Category 5 storm  until Sunday, was knocked back to a high Category 3 when the eye passed over the  mouth of the Mississippi River and the Chandeleur Islands.

While the winds were down to 125 mph, the storm surge was enormous. The storm surge in Hancock County was 30 feet plus the waves on top. At Waveland that equaled 37 feet!

Afterward at Waveland there were no habitable structures remaining. Seventy miles to the east at Pascagoula the storm surge equaled more than 20 feet on Beach Boulevard.

As it went forward, Katrina threw off 11 tornadoes in southeast Mississippi, including population centers like Laurel and Meridian. Thirty more tornadoes were spread across other Southeastern states.

No airplanes were allowed to fly in the hurricane’s path, but my office made an agreement with USDOT to allow the governor’s office to fly the state plane to Gulfport-Biloxi airport, provided the Mississippi National Guard cleared  one runway by Tuesday morning.

After I landed, we had a quick leadership meeting; then I saw my wife Marsha, who had gone down Sunday to Camp Shelby to thank the large elements of the Mississippi National Guard and Highway Patrol who had sheltered there.

She traveled to Gulfport when the convoy was able to clear one lane of U.S. Highway 49 on Monday. It was a seven-hour trek to cover what was normally less than a two-hour drive. 

After the meeting, the Guard bought up three helicopters for damage assessment. I asked Marsha to go, but she said she had done it earlier that morning and didn’t want to see it again. My team took up two of the choppers, and I let the  news media take the third. 

The devastation was shocking. There was utter obliteration. As far as the eye could see, it looked like the hand of God had swept away the whole Gulf Coast.

We flew first over Gulfport and then went all the way to the Pearl River. Gulfport had 10 to 15 feet of water flow through it, and much was washed away. As we went farther west, most everything seemed to be covered with several feet of debris and residential neighborhoods were flattened.

A new verb was created: “slabbed,” as in my house was “slabbed,” meaning there was nothing left but the slab. Many thousands of houses and other buildings were “slabbed” in never-before-seen destruction.

And it wasn’t just residential destruction that littered the Coast. Major  industrial sites were badly damaged. As I flew over Pascagoula in the helicopter, I saw that Huntington-Ingalls Shipyard was covered in debris, and Chevron’s largest refinery in the United States was also covered with debris.

It was estimated that Katrina reduced US energy output by 20%, including offshore.

Remarkably, all the damage and debris were not on the beach. Many tons of debris were piled up on the railroad right of way; more were miles past the right of way. In very few places could you even see the grass as it all was inundated under trees, cans, waste from buildings, etc. It was scary.

When we landed at Gulfport at the end of the ride, Bert Case, a leading Jackson television reporter, asked me, “Governor, after seeing what you saw on the helicopter ride, what is your worst fear?” I told Bert my biggest concern was how many bodies will we find under all that debris.

By God’s grace, the number of fatalities we had was 238 – too many for me, but fewer than expected. And one-third of those were not in the coastal counties. We had a small fraction of the number of fatalities compared to Louisiana, which numbered 1,600 to 1,800, despite the fact that Mississippi bore the brunt of the storm.

While the death toll turned out to be far fewer than feared, the devastation to property and the terrain was beyond anyone’s expectation. And it was not only a coastal calamity. The hurricane force winds extended to north of Columbus in north Mississippi. As I mentioned earlier, a third of fatalities from Katrina were not on the Coast but north of there.

As we united to rescue survivors and to stay conscious of security and looting  (we had very little looting), we laid out our priorities. On Wednesday – two days after the storm – I  shared those priorities with senior staff of the governor’s office.

I laid out the literal goals of our work: return heavy employment to the Coast as very few people would return unless there were lots of good jobs; rebuild or replace the tens of  thousands of homes, apartments or condos because people would not return unless there was ample, good quality housing; and a quick opening of high quality schools for their children’s education.These priorities were pursued from the first week after the storm.

A main method of achieving these goals was the work of the Barksdale Commission for Recovery, Rebuilding and Renewal, chaired by Jim Barksdale of  Jackson. The 50-member commission was made up of leaders from around the southern half of the state and as far north as Greenwood. The makeup reflected the fact that Katrina was not just a coastal calamity.

The commission was very active, and a highlight of their work was a  “Charrette,” a French word for “cart,” which in this version had morphed into a meeting of a hundred or more professional architects, engineers and other gifted designers who proposed and assessed multiple ways to rebuild and reestablish the Coast area in smart, more livable fashion.

To achieve our goals, we had to clear the debris from all the areas it covered. We removed 47 million cubic yards of debris at a cost of $717 million. More than  57,000 homes, condos or apartments were rebuilt or replaced in the first five years.

From the Charrette, ideas were born like the Mississippi Cottage, an improvement over the “FEMA trailer” which was the federal standard but was greatly inferior to the Mississippi Cottage. We were able to provide more than 3,000 families with far superior Mississippi Cottages.

Just before the Charrette began, the Legislature had finished a special session  focused on Katrina and gaming.

Gaming was legal in Mississippi in counties that touch the Gulf of Mexico or the Mississippi River, if citizens chose to have it by referendum. Two coastal counties (Harrison and Hancock) had voted to have casinos in the early ’90s when the state legislation was passed.

Gaming on the Gulf Coast had become a major industry, employing more than 30,000 citizens directly or indirectly. Before Katrina it generated 6% to 9% of state general fund revenue.

Because of the requirements of the 1990s’ legislation that legalized casinos on the Coast, the casino gaming floor had to float on the Gulf of Mexico. During Katrina every casino gaming floor but one broke away and floated on shore, some by hundreds of feet. The Beau Rivage gaming floors uniquely floated by being strapped down so they could not float away.

A major issue in the special session was whether to allow the casino floors to be built resting on land. Many casino companies insisted they would not rebuild if the casino floor had to float.

Quite a number of legislators, including House Speaker Billy McCoy, opposed gaming as did most of their constituents.

Even though Coast leaders and their constituents believed the Coast would be decades rebuilding without the casinos, attracting tourists and creating jobs and revenue, allowing the on-shore change was not a sure thing.

The Senate leadership, all Republicans, did not want to go first in passing the onshore casino law. So, I had to ask Speaker McCoy to allow it to come to the House floor and pass. He realized he should put the Coast and the state’s interests first. He did so, and the bill passed 61-53, with McCoy voting “no.”

I will always admire Speaker McCoy, often my nemesis, for his integrity in putting the state first.

Many legislators stepped up strongly, not only during the special session, but  through the Katrina ordeal: such as Bobby Moak, Tommy Robertson and Billy Hewes.

The Legislature could hardly have been better during Katrina. Legislators did not try to take charge. They realized the process and structure we followed was working.

A lot of state legislatures didn’t have that discipline; but led by Lt. Gov. Amy Tuck and Speaker McCoy, ours did.

State employees, from first responders, National Guard, Highway Patrol to social workers, secretaries and others were magnificent in adjusting to the remade environment.

My staff was sensational. After Aug.29^th everything changed. But they adjusted overnight! They made tough decisions, while taking over new responsibilities. People like Charlie Williams, Paul Hurst, Jim Perry, Marie Sanderson and many others not only led but oversaw senior staff.

The local officials and their employees were strong and smart from the beginning, making the united command structure work extremely well.

Attached to the unified command structure were federal partners.The Bush Administration got criticized early after the storm, but the federal government did a whole lot more right than wrong. President Bush not only visited many times to check on progress, but he and his administration also favored the states and citizens on every discussion. He bent over backwards to help us, and so did the Congress.

Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran, as chair of the Appropriation Committee of the Senate, was the biggest star for us, but fellow Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott got many crucial decisions  made in our favor. Our members of Congress, both Democrat as well as Republicans, worked tirelessly for us.

And we had support from right and left in Congress, such as Democratic Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank. Similarly, 46 of our sister states sent people or resources to help.

The American people proved again that they are the most generous in the world, and not just with money. Yes, the federal government supplied Mississippi and our companies and citizens with $25.5 billion. Tens of millions  more came from companies, industries, private citizens and charities.

People gave something more valuable than money, something irreplaceable: their time. More than 960,000 people volunteered to help with the recovery; 600,000 in the first year and 360,000 in the next four years. These are the numbers of people who registered  to help, work, rebuild, all of whom registered with churches, charities and organizations.

Finally, the greatest hero of Katrina, the people of Mississippi who got knocked down flat, got back up, hitched up their britches and went to work. They went to work helping themselves and helping their neighbors. Our people did more in Katrina to improve our state’s image than anything that has happened in my lifetime.

I close by saluting my wife Marsha, who spent 70 out of the first 90 days after the storm on the Coast, helping people who didn’t know how to get help. Marsha was the face that showed the state cared and was doing all it could. 

Haley Barbour served as Mississippi governor from 2004 to 2012. From 1993 to 1997, he served as chairman of the Republican National Committee, In 2015, he wrote “America’s Great Storm: Leading Through Hurricane Katrina.” A native of Yazoo City, Barbour still resides in his hometown with his wife, Marsha. They have two sons and seven grandchildren.

Editor’s note: Marsha and Haley Barbour donated to Mississippi Today in 2016. Donors do not in any way influence our newsroom’s editorial decisions. For more on that policy or to view a list of our donors, click here.

Mississippi State and Southern Miss, two teams desperate for even a little football success, will open their respective seasons Saturday at The Rock in Hattiesburg. State won two games last season. USM won one. Neither won a conference game.

The good news: Somebody has to win this one.

Oddsmakers believe State is the likely victor, installing the Bulldogs as 13.5-point favorites. That seems about right. In this era of NIL and the wide-open transfer portal, the college game has become all about the dollars. From all reports, State likely spends at least 10-fold what USM spends on its football payroll, a word I hate to use in college football but it is what it is.

Nevertheless, this is an intriguing way to start the football season. We’ve got two in-state rivals who used to play every season but now get together much less frequently. We’ve got two teams with totally revamped rosters. Even the most diehard of Bulldog and Golden Eagle fans will need a program to know who is who.

Only one NCAA Division I team brought in more transfers than Southern Miss, and that was Marshall, which had to do so, mostly because Charles Huff, the new USM coach, brought so many of his Thundering Herd players with him from Marshall. Perhaps, this season, they should be called the Thundering Eagles. At last count, USM’s roster includes a whopping 63 transfers in all, 21 from Marshall.

Four of the USM transfers came from Mississippi State, including running back Jeffery Pittman and linebacker Avery Sledge, who were Bulldogs the last time these two teams played. In fact, Pittman ran 10 times for 98 yards and a huge touchdown against USM on Nov. 18, 2023, in Starkville. The final score was 41-20, but USM had closed the gap to 26-20 in the fourth quarter when Pittman took off on a 59-yard dash to the end zone to pretty much seal the deal.

At last count, Jeff Lebby and State lead the SEC in portal transfers this year with 37, including several highly rated defensive linemen and linebackers expected to plug the many holes in last season’s porous defense. We shall see.

State leads the series with USM 18-12-1, having won the last six meetings. Older fans will remember a time when the Golden Eagles were every bit as dominant if not more, winning seven straight between 1977 and 1983 and 10 of 12 between ’77 and ’88. 

None of those games – before or after – was more meaningful than the 1981 game played at Mississippi Veterans Memorial Stadium before a equally divided crowd of more than 64,000. State was ranked No. 15 in the country. USM was ranked No. 20 and about to zoom higher. There was serious talent on display on both sides of the field. There was some violent hitting. Orley Hood, the Mark Twain of Mississippi journalism, later referred to it as the “limp off game” because so many players on both teams had to be helped off the field.

Emory Bellard’s Bulldogs included the late, great linebacker Johnie Cooks, who would be the second pick of the 1982 draft and who would knock you into next week. Glen Collins, another first round pick, anchored the defensive line that also included Tyrone Keys on one end and the great Billy Jackson on the other. Kent Hull, one of the great centers in football history, blocked for Michael Haddix, still another first rounder. Two-time All-SEC wide receiver Mardye McDole was another remarkable talent, the first receiver in MSU history to account for 1,000 yards receiving in a single season. And there were more. Said Reggie Collier, the truly great Southern Miss quarterback, “I have never been hit so hard in my life as I was in that game. I thought they were going to kill me.”

The Southern Miss offense featured Collier – who was Lamar Jackson before Lamar Jackson existed – and future NFL stars Sammy Winder and Louis Lipps. Defensively, nose tackle Jearld Baylis dominated the line of scrimmage on a line that also included future NFL star Richard Byrd and under-sized sack specialists Rhett Whitley and George Tillman on the ends.

Southern Miss, in a defensive struggle, prevailed by a final score of 7-6. That Southern Miss team tied Bear Bryant’s sixth-ranked Alabama Crimson Tide 13-13 earlier in the season. They ransacked Bobby Bowden and Florida State 58-14 the week after the State game. They would rise to No. 8 in the nation at one point.

It’s difficult to imagine Saturday’s State-USM matchup will equal that one for brutality or significance, but it is interesting nonetheless. And, as previously noted, somebody who really needs a victory is going to win.

For decades, this haunted piece of history — the weapon allegedly used to kill Emmett Till — lay in a wooden drawer, gathering dust.

That changed in 2004 when FBI agent Dale Killinger began reinvestigating Till’s lynching.

The longtime owner of the weapon, who asked not to be named for fear of harassment or retribution, said the FBI kept the gun “for a year almost to the day.”

On Thursday, the .45-caliber pistol that J.W. Milam is believed to have used to pistol-whip and shoot the Black Chicago teen became part of the Emmett Till Exhibit at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. 

In World War II, Milam served as a lieutenant in the Army Air Force and brought back the Ithaca Model M1911-A1 .45-caliber pistol.

Milam and his half-brother, Roy Bryant, abducted Till from his great uncle’s home in the wee hours of Aug. 28, 1955. The white men heard that Till had reportedly wolf-whistled at Bryant’s wife Carolyn.

They took Till to a barn, where Bryant, Milam and others brutally beat him. Witnesses heard Till’s screams.

Till was beaten so badly there was talk of dropping him off at a hospital, but Milam killed him with a single bullet.

An all-white jury acquitted the half-brothers of Till’s murder. They later admitted to Look magazine they had indeed killed Till, who had just celebrated his 14th birthday.

During the FBI’s investigation of the Till murder, authorities exhumed his body. X-rays revealed extensive skull fractures and metallic fragments in the skull. There were also fractures to the left femur and the left and right wrist bones. The Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office in Illinois concluded that Till died of a gunshot wound to the head.

During the autopsy, doctors found four lead fragments that experts determined were consistent with lead shot pellets. The FBI learned that the size of those pellets matched the size of the lead shot manufactured for the Army Air Force.

The longtime owner said his father was a gun collector and a friend of one of the lawyers who defended the half-brothers. He said his father got the gun from one of those lawyers around 1959 or 1960.

Years after his father died, he said his mother announced that she wanted the gun out of the house. She gave it to his sister, and from that moment on, the siblings became the gun’s owners.

The longtime gun owner said the family knew they had something of historical value, but “none of our children cared about or wanted the gun.”

In recent years, they had offers from private collectors to sell the gun, but “we didn’t want to go that route,” he said.

Instead, they decided to make the gun available to the foundation for the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, which in turn has added the weapon to the Civil Rights Museum.

The gun makes a lighted appearance during a 6-minute film about the case, narrated by Oprah Winfrey.

It’s the second such weapon in the department’s possession. The first is the .30-06 rifle used in 1963 to kill Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers, which can also be seen at the museum.

The FBI’s borrowing of the gun proved fortuitous. During the year the FBI had the weapon, the longtime owner said his sister suffered a break-in during which guns were stolen.

The thief never got a shot at the .45 that changed the course of history.

From that moment forward, the gun spent its days in a safety deposit box in a bank in Greenwood, the longtime owner recalled. “It could have been lost, but the truth is, it was never hidden.”

U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith on Thursday launched her reelection campaign for a second full term by highlighting her advocacy for Mississippi farmers, fighting to overturn abortion rights and having a strong relationship with President Donald Trump. 

The state’s junior U.S. senator was greeted by about 150 supporters at the Mississippi Agriculture and Forestry Museum in Jackson. They cheered when she promoted the passage of the “one big beautiful bill,” President Donald Trump-backed legislation that expanded some tax cuts and spending and slashed social safety net programs. 

“The past eight months, we have delivered for the American people,” Hyde-Smith said. 

The senator was flanked by U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, who spoke in support of her. The pair visited Mississippi State University earlier in the day to announce new policy addressing the state’s veterinarian shortage. 

Rollins said Hyde-Smith fights daily on Capitol Hill for farmers and the agriculture industry by ensuring federal agency leaders understand how federal regulations impact Mississippi farmers. 

“She is a warrior’s warrior,” Rollins said of the senator. “She will never rest until she serves this state and this country to the very best of her ability.” 

Hyde-Smith also praised the Trump administration’s stance on tax policy, heralded its efforts to increase oil drilling, and promoted her own efforts to fight for conservative social policies in Congress. 

A key message she delivered on Thursday is her close relationship with Trump, who has already endorsed her reelection bid. 

“I can send a text to President Trump, and he responds,” she said. 

But at the event, Hyde-Smith touted some policies that likely don’t align with Trump’s agenda, most notably her disagreements with U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 

“Bobby Kennedy is going to do some really good things,” she said. “I think that he’s going to do some things that are beneficial. But when he crossed over into the line of production agriculture, we had a little dustup. I’ll be honest with you, we had a pretty big dustup over it. I told him in the beginning that when you come after the American farmer and the products that we have depended on for 50-something years, and you think you’re going to take them off the market, I’m going to be the first one through your door.” 

While the senator was not specific about the disagreement with Kennedy, she seemed to be referring to a back-and-forth she had with Kennedy in an Appropriations Committee meeting about the Cabinet secretary’s fight against certain pesticides. 

According to the New York Times, Hyde-Smith told Kennedy not to interfere with the livelihood of American farmers by suggesting certain pesticides are unsafe. 

Hyde-Smith also stated that the state’s agriculture sector needs to be bolstered by migrant farmworkers, as the country would “starve to death” without them. However, she emphasized that the workers should enter the country legally. 

The senator also joked about riding in a truck with a member of the audience and “spotlighting” deer along a trail, something that is illegal in Mississippi.  

“We didn’t spotlight that night, did we? Oh, we didn’t shoot anything. That’s it,” Hyde-Smith said. 

Spotlighting is an illegal hunting technique where a hunter shines a high-powered light at a deer, causing the animal to freeze and making it easier to kill. If someone is caught shining a light at the deer at night, it can result in a hefty fine and the loss of hunting privileges. It is also illegal to intentionally shine lights at deer without shooting them.

Hyde-Smith said the audience member had a large flashlight with a “spinner” on it.  

“I said, ‘I probably need to get out of this truck right now,’” Hyde-Smith said. 

Even though the U.S. Senate race won’t occur until 2026, it appears Hyde-Smith’s Thursday event is a signal that she’s taking a likely competitive reelection campaign seriously.

Scott Colom, a district attorney in north Mississippi, is widely rumored to be considering a run for the Democratic nomination. U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York has said he’s looking for ways to break the GOP’s grip on Mississippi in 2026. 

Ty Pinkins, a 2023 unsuccessful candidate for Mississippi Secretary of State and a 2024 unsuccessful Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, is running as an independent. 

Before she faces Colom and Pinkins, though, Hyde-Smith will have to capture the GOP nomination. 

Hyde-Smith has attracted two Republican primary challengers, neither of whom has held elected office before. One of the challengers entered the race at a press conference hours before Hyde-Smith announced her reelection bid.

Andrew Scott Smith, who has a pork rinds business, calls himself the “Pigskin Politician.” The 29-year-old Florence resident announced his bid for the U.S. Senate on Thursday behind a podium set up between the William F. Winter Archives and History Building and the Two Mississippi Museums in Jackson.

Smith said he was challenging Hyde-Smith because she has become disconnected from her constituents.

Smith, who considers himself a monopoly-busting conservative in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt, said he hopes to address consolidation in the American economy through index funds. He also wants to focus on the “fiscal future” of the country by phasing out social security and federalizing the national debt.

Smith took a swipe at Hyde-Smith’s other Republican challenger: Sarah Adlakha “or however you pronounce her last name,” as Smith said in his speech.

Adlakha had already entered the race before Thursday. A physician, Adlakha says on her campaign website that she is running “to protect the values that raised her—faith, family, freedom, and hard work — by securing the border, stopping reckless spending, improving healthcare, and putting Mississippi first.”

Hyde-Smith, a Brookhaven resident, previously served in the Mississippi Senate before being elected to the statewide post of commissioner of agriculture and commerce. In 2018, former Gov. Phil Bryant appointed her to the U.S. Senate to replace Thad Cochran, who opted to retire. She has since been elected to the U.S. Senate twice. 

In 2018 and 2020, Hyde-Smith defeated Democrat Mike Espy, an attorney, a former congressman and former U.S. secretary of agriculture in the Clinton administration. 

Mississippi Today reporter Michael Goldberg contributed to this report.

A high-ranking lawmaker is asking Mississippi to use $5 million of opioid settlement money to explore the medical potential of ibogaine, a drug with mixed evidence of its ability to safely treat addiction. 

At a meeting Thursday of the House and Senate committees that deal with public health, Republican Rep. Sam Creekmore of New Albany invited testimony from speakers who support the use of the chemical for treating post traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injury and opioid addiction. Creekmore, who chairs the House Public Health and Human Services Committee, said Mississippi could prevent suicides and drug overdoses by investing in clinical trials that study the drug.

“We cannot keep using the same conventional methods for these ailments and expect different results,” he said. 

Some studies suggest ibogaine, a molecule found in a shrub native to West Africa, can help treat substance use disorder. But analyses of these research papers have pointed out that most of the evidence comes from studies with few people and no comparison group. 

A review conducted by researchers across North American universities in March found that most examinations into psychedelics, including ibogaine, and their ability to treat opioid addiction were “found to have high risk of bias” because of their study designs. It said there were possible ibogaine deaths in two of the studies. 

While many mental health conditions do not have clear treatments, the FDA has approved medications that effectively treat opioid use disorder. Addiction researchers across the country call two of them, buprenorphine and methadone, the “gold standard” for treating opioid addiction.

Ibogaine has been linked to dangerous heart problems, particularly cardiac arrhythmias. Brian Shoichet, the University of California San Francisco Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry chair and a psychedelic researcher, told Mississippi Today in an email that while making access to ibogaine easier may help a lot of people with mental illness, it could also lead to more deaths.

“There are alternatives to ibogaine, often having the same mechanism of action but without the arrhythmias, that will be safer and perhaps just as efficacious,” he said. 

It’s uncommon for any state to fund clinical trials. Studies for many treatments for mental illness are funded by private investors or branches of the National Institutes of Health. But over the past few years, some states have proposed using public dollars to fund experiments on the drug. Last spring, Texas set aside $50 million and Arizona allocated $5 million for ibogaine clinical trials.

Five speakers, including three Mississippi military veterans, shared personal stories about traveling outside the U.S. to receive ibogaine treatments for mental disorders. All praised the drug’s impact on their lives and encouraged lawmakers to fund ibogaine clinical trials.

“My migraines vanished, my chronic depression was dramatically alleviated,” Myles Grantham, a Mississippian who served in the Army, told the committee. “For the first time in years, I felt a shift.” 

Bryan Hubbard, chief executive officer of the nonprofit Americans for Ibogaine and a speaker at the hearing, has traveled to states across the country encouraging lawmakers to invest in Ibogaine research. He told Mississippi Today the drug’s dangerous side effects can be mitigated under proper medical administration, and some Mississippians with mental health disorders could join the experiments as participants if the state provides money for the trials.

Hubbard said ibogaine drug development is expected to cost $300 million to $350 million, and he hopes trials could lead to a Food and Drug Administration approval of ibogaine as a medication within six years. He criticized existing addiction medications like buprenorphine and methadone, saying the crisis has persisted even with these treatments available. 

“We are here to introduce an additional therapeutic option through a fractional amount of money that is used on what we have just for a potential breakthrough,” Hubbard said. 

Dr. Benjamin Howell, a faculty member of the Yale Program in Addiction Medicine, said in May that while buprenorphine and methadone aren’t perfect, they’ve been proven over decades to treat opioid addiction well. 

He said one of the biggest reasons tens of thousands of Americans continue to die of overdoses is because they can’t get these treatments. 

“I’m open minded that there might be future treatments that could be developed that are superior,” he said. “And yet, we also don’t have systems that are allowing everyone to get access to the medications that we know work.”

Most of the money Mississippi has received from the opioid lawsuits – cases that accused pharmaceutical companies of marketing and distributing prescription painkillers in a way that led to hundreds of thousands of overdose deaths – is controlled by state lawmakers. 

Unlike most states, the Legislature and Attorney General Lynn Fitch have set aside some funds to be spent on purposes other than addressing addiction and have yet to spend any of the state government’s share on curtailing the public crisis.

Creekmore told Mississippi Today he would like the Legislature to use millions of dollars from the general purposes settlement pot to financially support pharmaceutical companies that could run ibogaine clinical trials. 

“We could pave a road with it,” he said. “But I think it needs to go toward opioid abatement.”

Nine out of 10 drug clinical trials fail to receive FDA approval, but Creekmore said he believes the risk of not funding ibogaine research outweighs the risk of Mississippi’s settlement money not leading to a new medication.

He pointed to some of the public speakers’ stories of ibogaine treatment as evidence that the experiments are worth pursuing.

“It’s obviously working or they wouldn’t be doing it,” he said.

Ibogaine is a Schedule 1 drug on the U.S. list of controlled substances, meaning the federal government believes the compound is dangerous and has no medical use. The scheduling system has been criticized by many public health researchers who say it can prevent research into potential medications. 

Mississippi Department of Mental Health Medical Director Dr. Thomas Recore gave the health committees an overview of the potential of psychedelic drugs, including ibogaine, to treat mental health conditions. He told lawmakers that as they think about whether to invest in ibogaine trials, they should consider whether it has enough potential to merit further study rather than whether it’s a cure-all for all mental afflictions. 

“The answer for me is a clear yes,” he said. 

Creekmore has been writing opinion pieces promoting ibogaine’s potential therapeutic uses throughout the summer. He frequently cites a 2024 Stanford University study in which researchers reported that among 30 veterans with mild traumatic brain injuries, many had decreased PTSD, depression and anxiety treatments a month after receiving ibogaine treatment. 

The scientists did not report any adverse cardiac effects in the study, which they said could be because the veterans received magnesium simultaneously. 

Creekmore and Recore were two attendees of dozens for a conference Hubbard organized last spring called the Aspen Ibogaine Meeting. Its website says the group hosted lawmakers from as many as 17 different states. 

Robert Gulock, the meeting’s coordinator and a private medical consultant, told Mississippi Today in May that Creekmore and the other legislators paid for their flights and lodging themselves. Creekmore and Hubbard said they do not have financial ties to the development of ibogaine as a medication.

Howell, the Yale physician, said he believes the public health priority for preventing more overdose deaths should be connecting people who need it with tools already proven to be effective, rather than a compound that could take years to move through the FDA approval process and may not lead to any new medication. 

“The history of medicine is littered with things that didn’t work out,” he said.

A three-judge panel of the Mississippi Supreme Court has ruled that court records in a politically charged business dispute will remain confidential, even though courts are supposed to be open to the public. 

The panel, comprised of Justice Josiah Coleman, Justice James Maxwell and Justice Robert Chamberlin, denied a request from Mississippi Today and the Sun Herald that sought to force Chancery Judge Neil Harris to unseal court records in a Jackson County Chancery Court case or conduct a hearing on unsealing the court records. 

The Supreme Court panel did not address whether Harris erred by sealing court records and it has not forced the judge to comply with the court’s prior landmark decisions detailing how judges are allowed to seal court records in  extraordinary circumstances. 

The case in question has drawn a great deal of public interest. The lawsuit seeks to dissolve a company called Securix Mississippi LLC that used traffic cameras to ticket uninsured motorists in numerous cities in the state.

The uninsured motorist venture has since been disbanded and is the subject of two federal lawsuits, neither of which are under seal. In one federal case, an attorney said the chancery court file was sealed to protect the political reputations of the people involved. 

READ MORE: Private business ticketed uninsured Mississippi vehicle owners. Then the program blew up.

Quinton Dickerson and Josh Gregory, two of the leaders of QJR, are the owners of Frontier Strategies. Frontier is a consulting firm that has advised numerous elected officials, including four sitting Supreme Court justices. The three justices who considered the media’s motion for relief were not clients of Frontier. 

The two news outlets on Thursday filed a motion asking the Supreme Court for a rehearing. 

Courts are open to public

In their motion for a rehearing, the media companies are asking that the Supreme Court send the case back to chancery court, where Harris should be required to give notice and hold a hearing to discuss unsealing the remaining court files.

Courts and court files are supposed to be open and accessible to the public. The Supreme Court has, since 1990, followed a ruling that lays out a procedure judges are supposed to follow before closing any part of a court file. The judge is supposed to give 24 hours notice, then hold a hearing that gives the public, including the media, an opportunity to object.

At the hearing, the judge must consider alternatives to closure and state any reasons for sealing records. 

Instead, Harris closed the court record without explanation the same day the case was filed in September 2024. In June, Harris denied a motion from Mississippi Today to unseal the file.

The case, he wrote in his order, is between two private companies. “There are no public entities included as parties,” he wrote, “and there are no public funds at issue. Other than curiosity regarding issues between private parties, there is no public interest involved.”

But that is at least partially incorrect. The case involves Securix Mississippi working with city police departments to ticket uninsured motorists. The Mississippi Department of Public Safety had signed off on the program and was supposed to be receiving a share of the revenue.

Mississippi Today and the Sun Herald then filed for relief with the state Supreme Court, arguing that Harris improperly closed the court file without notice and did not conduct a hearing to consider alternatives. 

After the media outlets’ appeal to the Supreme Court, Harris ordered some of the records in the case to be unsealed.

But he left an unknown number of exhibits under seal, saying they contain “financial information” and are being held in a folder in the Chancery Clerk’s Office.

File improperly sealed, media argues

The three-judge Supreme Court panel determined the media appeal was no longer relevant because Harris had partially unsealed the court file. 

In the news outlets’ appeal for rehearing, they argue that if the Supreme Court does not grant the motion, the state’s highest court would virtually give the press and public no recourse to push back on judges when they question whether court records were improperly sealed. 

“The original … sealing of the entire file violated several rights of the public and press … which if not overruled will be capable of repetition yet, evading review,” the motion reads. 

The media companies also argue that Harris’ order partially unsealing the chancery court case was not part of the record on appeal and should not have been considered by the Supreme Court. His order to partially unseal the case came 10 days after Mississippi Today and the Sun Herald filed their appeal to the Supreme Court.

READ MORE: Judge holds secret hearing in business fight over uninsured motorist enforcement

Charlie Mitchell, a lawyer and former newspaper editor who has taught media law at the University of Mississippi for years, called Judge Harris’ initial order keeping the case sealed “illogical.” He said the judge’s second order partially unsealing the case appears “much closer” to meeting the court’s standard for keeping records sealed, but the judge could still be more specific and transparent in his orders. 

Instead of simply labeling the sealed records as “financial information,” Mitchell said the Supreme Court could promote transparency in the judiciary by ordering Harris to conduct a hearing — something he should have done from the outset — or redact portions of the exhibits.  

“Closing a record or court matter as the preference of the parties is never — repeat never — appropriate,” Mitchell said. “It sounds harsh, but if parties don’t want the public to know about their disputes, they should resolve their differences, as most do, without filing anything in a state or federal court.” 

A gun used during the killing of Emmett Till is now on display at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. It’s a grim artifact from the 1955 lynching of a Black teenager at the hands of angry white men – a crime that galvanized the Civil Rights Movement.

“One of the reasons why this civil rights museum was created is to tell the unvarnished truth about what happened in terms of the Civil Rights Movement here in Mississippi,” Michael Morris, director of the Two Mississippi Museums, said during a news conference Thursday. “That’s our mission, and I think the acquisition of this artifact is a part of our mission.”

The Foundation for Mississippi History acquired the .45-caliber pistol and holster for the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. The items came from “a Mississippi family that is not connected to the case,” the department said in a press release Thursday, the 70th anniversary of Till’s lynching.

The gun was once owned by J.W. Milam, one of the two white men charged with murder in Till’s death and acquitted by an all-white jury weeks after the killing. The weapon was later owned by someone else.

Acquisition of the gun happened under the condition that those who most recently had the weapon would remain anonymous, said Morris, who oversees the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum and the adjoining Museum of Mississippi History. Morris did not disclose other terms.

“We thought we had a moral obligation to go out and try to acquire it,” Morris said. “Once we got acquisition of it, the question became: Should we put it on display? And we didn’t think that this was the kind of artifact that we wanted to just put away in a drawer somewhere.”

The gun and holster were added to an exhibit that tells the story of Till’s lynching.

Nan Prince, the department’s director of collections, said the gun is “a very hard thing to see.”

“This weapon has affected me moreso than any other artifact that I’ve encountered in my 30-year museum career,” Prince said. “The emotions that are centered around it are hard, and a hard thing to see and a hard thing to convey.”

In August 1955, 14-year-old Till traveled from Chicago to the Mississippi Delta to visit his cousins. Till and other young Black people went to buy snacks one day at Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market in the tiny community of Money. Till’s cousin Simeon Wright later said he heard Till whistle at the white storekeeper, Carolyn Bryant, as they left.

Days later, a group that included Carolyn’s husband Roy Bryant and his half-brother Milam kidnapped Till from the home of Till’s great uncle, Moses Wright. They took Till to a barn, where they beat, tortured and shot him. Milam is believed to have used the .45 to pistol-whip and fatally shoot Till.

The group dumped Till in the Tallahatchie River, using barbed wire to attach a 75-pound cotton gin fan to him. Till’s body was discovered three days later, decomposed beyond recognition except for his father’s ring on one of his fingers.

Till’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley, insisted on an open-casket funeral in Chicago so people could see what had been done to her son, and Jet magazine published a photo of his brutalized body.

An all-white jury in Mississippi acquitted Milam and Bryant of Till’s murder in September 1955. Months later, Milam and Bryant admitted their involvement to Look magazine.

In World War II, Milam served as a lieutenant in the Army Air Force and brought back the Ithaca Model M1911-A1 .45-caliber pistol, which has the serial number 2102279.

Morris said the department notified Till’s relatives about the Department of Archives and History’s acquisition of the gun. The department’s press release said Wheeler Parker, a cousin who was in the home when Till was kidnapped, thanked the department for acquiring and displaying the artifacts.

“I think it’s good because it brings closure,” Parker said. “I hope you guys can find the ring and cotton gin.”

Filmmaker Keith Beauchamp discovered the existence of the .45 pistol while working on his 2005 documentary, “The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till.” He shared the email with FBI agent Dale Killinger, who investigated the Till case. 

The owner of the weapon had kept it in a safety deposit box in a Greenwood bank, according to Wright Thompson’s book, “The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi.”

During the FBI’s 2005 investigation into the case, the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office in Illinois did an autopsy that found Till’s cause of death was a gunshot wound to the head.

This announcement about the department’s acquisition of the gun comes a week after the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board released more than 6,500 pages of documents on Till’s case.

It’s the second murder weapon in possession of the Department of Archives and History. The first is the .30-06 rifle used in 1963 to kill Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers, which can be seen at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum.

Mississippi Today’s Jerry Mitchell contributed to this report.

Editor’s note: Mississippi Today Ideas is publishing guest essays from people impacted by Hurricane Katrina during the week of the 20th anniversary of the storm that hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast on Aug. 29, 2005.

I don’t have any really good Katrina stories to tell.

Thinking about Katrina, even 20 years later, still freaks me right the hell out.

Many people will be remembering the storm on Aug. 29. I promise you, I will be doing my best not to think about it. Katrina in one way or another consumed years of my adult life, personally and professionally.

Honestly, I wish I had not volunteered a few months back to write this column. But I did my job after Katrina, and I’ll do it now.

I was a reporter/editor for the Sun Herald in 2005, basically Capitol bureau chief covering the Legislature and state government, splitting time between Jackson, the Coast and Hattiesburg. I had recently moved from the Coast to Hattiesburg — for reasons I’ll get to later — and I spent much time burning up U.S. 49 going to and fro.

One of the clearest early recollections I still have of Katrina is being at the Sun Herald the day before, getting ready to head back to Hattiesburg with a couple of newspaper staffers who planned to ride it out at my house (Hattiesburg, as we and the National Guard soon discovered, wasn’t far enough away). Someone was going through the newsroom saying, “Hey, y’all, look at this.”

They had a copy of “The Bulletin,” as it’s now known. They said something like, “I think the National Weather Service is telling us to kiss our butts goodbye.”

The NWS bulletin, in all caps, said in part: “URGENT … DEVASTATING DAMAGE EXPECTED … MOST OF THE AREA WILL BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS PERHAPS LONGER … PERSONS PETS AND LIVESTOCK EXPOSED TO THE WINDS WILL FACE CERTAIN DEATH IF STRUCK … POWER OUTAGES WILL LAST FOR WEEKS … WATER SHORTAGES WILL MAKE HUMAN SUFFERING INCREDIBLE BY MODERN STANDARDS … DO NOT VENTURE OUTSIDE!”

Well, most of us had covered hurricanes before. Some longer-time staffers had been through many. And while we knew Katrina was going to be bad, we thought that NWS communique was downright weird, perhaps a bit too alarmist.

But it was prophetic.

Even 70 miles inland, Katrina was terrifying. But my memories of the actual storm have grown fuzzy. I do remember heading out well before dawn the next morning, trying to make it to Jackson in time for a helicopter sortie of state officials and media Gov. Haley Barbour had arranged to view the damage on the Coast. It took me forever to maneuver around trees across the highway or wait as crews cut paths. Early on, the radio news loop kept saying New Orleans had been spared major destruction.

But as the sun came up and I got closer to Jackson, new reports started coming in that Louisiana and New Orleans were hit hard, levees had been breached and New Orleans was seeing massive flooding.

My heart sank. At the time, I was as worried about the fate of New Orleans — particularly Ochsner Medical Center — as I was Mississippi.

My first wife, Jennifer, had at the time recently been placed on the heart transplant list at Ochsner. We were living in Hattiesburg to be near family who were helping and still be close enough to Ochsner to rush there when a donor heart became available.

The helicopter flight over the Coast that morning was surreal and horrifying. It looked like, as Gov. Barbour said that day, an atomic bomb had gone off, or the hand of God had wiped large swaths of the Coast away.

Communications after Katrina were crap. Cellphone service was worse than spotty, and I hadn’t been able to reach anyone or have a photographer on the flight with me. I shot photos with a point-and-shoot while white knuckled and leaning out the door of a Huey.

And not having talked with anyone at the Sun Herald, as we flew over the destruction, my mind raced: How many of my colleagues and friends died in this storm? How will the Coast ever recover from this? Did Ochsner hospital survive?

Back on the ground at an Air Guard base in Gulfport, I managed to borrow a satellite phone and talk with my boss at the Sun Herald. Most, but not all, employees had been accounted for, but they were still unable to get in touch with some in Bay St. Louis and Hancock County. It would be a few days before we learned that, miraculously, no newspaper employees had died in the storm, although at least one had family members who perished.

The first few months after the storm are kind of a blur to me now, other than we were very busy. I spent much of my time following Gov. Barbour from Jackson to the Coast to Washington, and at times following President George W. Bush and U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran and others as they tried to figure out a recovery plan and funding.

There were special legislative sessions. Big political fights. I had to spend about a month in D.C. watching Congress dicker over Katrina relief spending.

Ochsner wasn’t destroyed by Katrina, but it went into triage mode, and a lot of staff left. Its transplant unit technically kept running, but … not like normal. We had been assured pre-Katrina that the wait for a donor heart should be six months, tops.

One can’t just jump from one hospital’s transplant list to another. It doesn’t work that way. And you have to be within about two hours of a hospital. At the time, they weren’t doing heart transplants in Mississippi.

It took well over a year for Jennifer to get a heart, and she got sicker and sicker in the meantime, amidst Katrina’s aftermath.

She passed away, from an infection, about a month shy of a year after Katrina.

The official death count for Katrina was 1,833, including 238 in Mississippi. It caused $108 billion in damage, destroyed 104,000 housing units in Mississippi including 51,000 houses.

But those numbers don’t cover collateral damage, or all the anguish that storm caused. Those National Weather Service folks were right. The human suffering was incredible by modern standards.

I really intended to have a different focus with this column — perhaps tell a few journalism war stories, talk about the years-long recovery efforts, heck, maybe even try to write something more uplifting about Mississippians’ famous resiliency, how people “hitched up their britches” and got to work on recovery.

I remember a woman on the Coast at a town hall meeting some time well after the storm opined that she was sick and damned tired of being so resilient.

But as I sat to write this, I couldn’t really dredge up any good Katrina stories.

And I damned sure can’t think of anything good to say about that storm, other than all storms end, the sun eventually comes out and life goes on.

I’m afraid I just told a bad Katrina story, and I told it poorly. It’s one I haven’t told very often and I don’t intend to any more if I can help it. But I guess it’s my main Katrina story.

I try to forget that storm as much as possible, when not required to think about it for work. I’m ready for this “anniversary” to be over, and I hope my memories of it fade even more.

Katrina sucked.

GULFPORT — Rocking on his front porch overlooking the Mississippi Sound, former Gulfport Mayor Billy Hewes questions how anyone wouldn’t want to live there.

“People are always going to gravitate to the water,” he said. “And we have a beautiful waterfront.”

But it was far from certain that people would return after 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, which killed 238 people in Mississippi and left only concrete slabs in many areas. With beachfront rebuilding crawling along a decade later, Gulfport began offering property tax breaks to those who built near the water. Hewes said the goal was for people to “build back better, quicker, help kick-start the economy.”

Where to encourage building is a thorny decision for local governments in areas exposed to floods or wildfires. Despite risks including rising sea levels, places need residents and taxpayers. Like other Gulf Coast cities after Katrina, Gulfport required residents to build at higher elevations and enforced a stronger building code. But most residents near the water are in at least a moderate-risk flood zone. Nationwide, many more homes are being built in flood zones than are being removed.

“The local government was not necessarily thinking we need people to build in this flood-prone place,” Miyuki Hino, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who researches flooding, said of such decisions. “They were thinking we have this land that’s underutilized and we can increase our property tax revenue.”

Storm left a ‘postapocalyptic’ wasteland

Allen Baker lived through 1969’s Hurricane Camille in neighboring Long Beach and thought he knew what to expect after Katrina. But the 2005 storm was far worse. His historic beachfront home was blown to bits by what witnesses said was a tornado spun off by the hurricane.

“Coming back, there was no home,” Baker said.

All along the coast, neighborhoods between the beach and a railroad track just to the north were shredded by a battering storm tide and winds. Recovery was slow for years.

“It was kind of spooky down here,” Baker said. “I mean, it looked like one of your postapocalyptic movies.”

Baker and his wife waited. They didn’t move into a new home until 2016, after Gulfport began waiving city property taxes for seven years when owners invested certain amounts in building south of the railroad tracks. Property owners still had to pay county and school taxes.

Sixty properties received Gulfport’s tax break before the city stopped approving new applicants in 2021, tax records show. The savings weren’t huge, typically $500 to $1,000 a year, depending on property value. But Baker and others said it was a sign to stop hesitating and start building.

“In simple terms, it was a green light,” Baker said.

Steel rods and thick foundations

Not every area has recovered equally. In a lower-lying area on the west side of Gulfport, where rotting chicken and giant paper bales washed up from the port, many lots are still vacant. But one block inland on the east side, attractive new houses mix with structures that survived.

Hewes also benefited from the tax break, building a new home on a beachfront site owned by his family since 1904 — the second-most valuable house built under the program, according to tax records. Hewes said he and his wife used their tax savings to build stronger.

“We put a lot more money into actually hardening this home to a much higher standard,” Hewes said.

Baker’s current house also exceeds Gulfport’s building code, with steel rods inside walls that tie into a 3-foot-thick concrete foundation and fasten down the roof. That qualified the home for an insurance industry standard called “fortified,” which provides savings on expensive wind insurance. But only 1,500 homes in Mississippi have fortified status, according to the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety. That compares with 9,000 in Louisiana and 50,000 in nation-leading Alabama.

Baker, who became a civil engineer after flying airliners, argues beachfront areas need an extra-strict building code.

“Everything about this house is built to be punished,” he said. “If you seriously want to live in this environment, you have to plan for that.”

Some progress, but not enough?

Katherine Egland, a Gulfport resident who chairs the NAACP’s national Environmental and Climate Justice Committee, fears the community may not be prepared for the next big storm.

“I’m not saying we didn’t make some progress,” Egland said. “What I’m saying is we didn’t make nearly the amount of progress that we should have made.”

She still rejects how Mississippi prioritized business recovery and says some development farther inland has worsened rainwater flooding in historically Black neighborhoods. Areas targeted by the tax break are whiter and more affluent than the city overall.

“You’re giving incentives to residents south of the tracks, but at the same time, you are imperiling residents that live north of the tracks,” Egland said.

Most of the first block facing the beach in Gulfport is rated as having a 1% yearly chance of flooding, although what’s called the 100-year flood zone sometimes stretches farther back. The Federal Emergency Management Agency considers almost all of the rest of the area south of the railroad track to have between a 1% and a 0.2% risk of flooding annually. Flood insurance generally isn’t required in that moderate risk area.

Hino said it’s “absolutely true” that elevating a building reduces risk but said risk grows over time with rising sea levels, which could require someone to elevate a house multiple times over decades. And while a 1% yearly risk of flooding sounds low, those odds add up over time.

“Over the course of your 30-year mortgage, you have a 40% chance of flooding,” Hino said.

It’s not unusual that houses were built in a flood zone in Gulfport. From 2001 to 2019, more than 840,000 homes were built in flood plains nationwide, according to a 2024 University of Miami study. That’s in part because the federally subsidized National Flood Insurance Program will repeatedly pay to rebuild, no matter how high the risk

“The incentive for local governments is to build, and in some ways the incentive for people is to stay where they are,” Hino said.

The buyout that didn’t happen

There was a plan to get more people out of Mississippi flood zones. Federal officials considered buying out 2,000 properties at highest risk of being damaged by hurricane storm tides. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers projected that a $408 million buyout, in 2008 dollars, would lower potential yearly storm damage by $22 million to $33 million. But Congress never appropriated the money.

Hino said buyouts can create parkland that serves both as an environmental buffer and an amenity. But Hewes said he thinks Gulfport’s choices “may have done more for our recovery than any sort of federal buyout.” He said it took years for Gulfport to productively reuse land from a pre-Katrina buyout along a flood-prone bayou.

“Do you create an area that is blighted, that is abandoned, that is neglected after the fact?” Hewes asked.

Even without the tax break, construction is continuing in beachfront areas. But it may not be clear how successful recovery has been until those new buildings are tested by the next major hurricane.

“Some people have built out of concrete,” Baker said. “Some people have built out of better materials. Some people have not. And those people are going to be in for a shock.”