Jump! Existing law makes Mississippi one of the most difficult places in the nation to vote early. Read more here.

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Eric J. Shelton/Mississippi Today, Report For America

A sign notifying voters where they can cast their votes sits outside of Chastain Middle School during Mississippi’s Primary Election Day, Tuesday, August 6, 2019.

A second lawsuit has been filed challenging Mississippi’s restrictive absentee voting requirements in advance of the Nov. 3 general election.

Most states allow people to vote early in person and by mail, but to do so in Mississippi, voters must provide an excuse, such as being away from home on election. The existing law makes Mississippi one of the most difficult places in the nation to vote early.

On Thursday, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Southern Poverty Law Center and private attorneys have filed a lawsuit in the federal court for the Southern District of Mississippi on behalf of state residents and organizations claiming the state’s absentee voting rules are unconstitutional because they could jeopardize the health of citizens trying to vote during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The suit was filed against Secretary of State Michael Watson and Attorney General Lynn Fitch.

“Mississippi has some of the most restrictive burdens on absentee voting in the nation that run afoul of the Constitution and have a particularly stark impact on Black voters,” Jennifer Nwachukwa, counsel at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said in a news release. “As a historic number of people are expected to cast their ballot this fall amid the ongoing pandemic, election officials have failed to take action that will ensure that all voters across Mississippi will have their voice heard. With weeks to go before the November election, we are turning to the court to defend the right to vote for people across Mississippi.”

Even though the state has the nation’s second highest number of coronavirus cases per capita, Mississippi is one of the six states that “do not allow legitimate fear of illness from COVID-19 as an excuse to request an absentee ballot,” according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit said Mississippi laws and regulations do not comply with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Preventions guidelines developed to help ensure voter safety.

The lawsuit says Watson, the state’s chief elections officer, did not rule that changes made by the Legislature earlier this year would allow people concerned with the coronavirus to vote early either in person or by mail. Watson has said he is waiting on an official opinion from Attorney General Fitch’s office on just how the new legislation would impact early voting during the pandemic.

The state requirement of having both an application for an absentee ballot and the ballot notarized also places voters at more risk because they have to leave their homes twice to seek out an official to notarize the documents, the lawsuit maintains.

The issues addressed in the lawsuit are similar to those filed in a state court case earlier this month by the Mississippi Center for Justice, the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Mississippi on behalf of a group of Mississippians concerned about voter safety.

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Yvonne Moore, left, and Christy Carmichael collect specimen for COVID-19 testing outside of the Aaron E Henry Community Health Services Center in Clarksdale, Miss., Wednesday, March 29, 2020.

Mississippi this week took over the nation’s highest infection rate after hovering in the top several states for weeks.

Almost all of Mississippi’s daily COVID-19 metrics have improved over recent weeks — but so have other hot-spot states that drove summer surges.

On Tuesday, Mississippi averaged 29 daily new cases per 100,000 people over the last seven days, or about 6,000 weekly cases total. Though both the daily case average and total weekly cases have fallen in recent weeks — daily case counts have dropped by almost half since they peaked almost exactly one month ago — they still top the U.S. per capita. By Thursday, North Dakota overtook Mississippi based on a recent influx of new cases.

Further, Mississippi now sees the nation’s fourth-highest infection rate per capita since the pandemic began, according to national data collected by the COVID Tracking Project. Mississippi has now surpassed states that had early, large surges but have since flattened out, such as New Jersey and New York which held top spots until recently.

Mississippi is now only behind Louisiana, Florida and Arizona for cumulative cases per 100,000 people.

Hospitalizations in particular have seen major improvements over the past weeks, seeing the first steep decline since the pandemic began and hitting their lowest point this week since early July.

Dr. Alan Jones, who oversees University of Mississippi Medical Center’s COVID-19 response, says the lull is welcome, but it’s not enough yet and warns Mississippians and policy makers alike to maintain the progress made.

“What the medical community is holding its breath about is, we are seeing a reprieve, but we have schools re-opening, colleges going back, we have football games starting to take place, we have more travel, people going back to work, Labor Day is coming up,” said Jones, assistant vice chancellor for clinical affairs. “We are all kind of holding our breath. A good two to six weeks after (re-openings), we believe we’ll see those numbers go back up in the wrong direction.”

He says the simple the measures that went into place over the past month — masking and reinforced social distancing — are now showing up in lagging indicators, like hospitalizations. But now, more than ever, is the time to stay vigilant, he said.

“If we can have policy makers continue to be resolved in seeing it through to the end — and not say, ‘Well, its been better for two weeks, so we’re going to lift the mask mandate, or we’re going to allow (larger) gatherings.’,” Jones said, hospitalization improvements might prolong. He added he hopes for hospitals’ sake that policy makers continue to be “extra cautious” and “extend those things that are in place where the Band-Aid’s already been ripped off, until we truly are seeing sustainable or lower transmission and we do believe that the pandemic is under control enough where you can begin to relax.”

He added: “And then when you do relax things, don’t go from closed down to wide open in  matter of days — gradually lead back into things such that you have effective behavior that will be maintained.”

Like hospitalizations, deaths also reflect case trends from previous weeks. Though they’ve declined since peaking late July, Mississippi still has the most new deaths per capita and the eighth-most deaths overall in the U.S.

Despite improvements, hospitalizations are still tight across the state. Last week 15 hospitals had zero ICU space available — meaning, of Mississippi’s hospitals that have ICU beds, 30% were full. Before the pandemic, ICUs across the state averaged about 66% capacity. Three-fourths of all hospitals were above that average as of last week, according to Mississippi Today’s analysis of the state health department’s new hospital capacity tracker, and 84% of all ICU beds were full.

As of last Monday, the 15 hospitals included some of the state’s biggest regional hospitals: Delta Regional in Greenville, Baptist’s locations in both Southaven and Jackson, Forrest General, and UMMC in Jackson, which tends to stay full.

As of Thursday, those regional hospitals were still full or close to it, and across the state 82% of ICU beds were full. Those offering the highest levels of COVID care (16 self-designated hospitals, as Levels 1 and 2) were 88% full.

As for running at sustained full-capacity, Jones says the current reprieve has helped reduce complex COVID care demands and allowed for some future planning. But he doesn’t expect it to linger as he sees schools, colleges and sports resume and new cases slowly start to tick back up.

“It’s human nature when you’re not in the eye of the storm, to lose sight of the fact that there is a storm. Numbers going down, fewer people we know have it, there are decreased hospitalizations — we become lackadaisical about things that resulted in that present reality,” Jones said. “You have people that just don’t even care anymore, I think that’s also just human nature.”

But he adds that complacency with individual behavior will drive the hospital back into critical levels that late July brought, and there’s only so much health care systems can do when people don’t follow guidelines, mandates or learn to “co-exist with the virus,” he says.

“It would be as if you had a MASH (mobile army surgical hospital) unit in a war where all of the soldiers just threw their guns down, didn’t fight back and just got shot. You’re just going to get overwhelmed and your interpretation is going to be, ‘You guys didn’t do what you were supposed to do or needed to do to help us.’ How can you expect us to be able to take up all that slack?” he said. “There’s not enough resources. It requires everybody to do their part. If you look at countries that have managed to control this — every human in various roles has managed to do their part, for the most part.”

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Aallyah Wright, Mississippi Today

Pamela Gary, director of Central Mississippi Inc., thanked all entities for being involved in the process.

SCHLATER — On a cloudy Thursday morning, Tom Clemon stood on a dirt road on the outskirts of this tiny Delta community and cried. After more than a year of traveling and hauling water from a water tank to his trailer home, he says his prayers have been answered.

With assistance from state and local government and community agencies, this community of six families celebrated a groundbreaking ceremony to install a new water well system in the area.

“There’s too many areas in Mississippi like where we are today that are forgotten places and that’s just a fact. Too many people in state government forget that areas like Schlater in our small rural communities exist,” Mississippi Public Service Commissioner for the Northern District Brandon Presley said at the groundbreaking.

“This is a success story, but the problem is how many other people are falling through the cracks?”  

Schlater residents have been living without clean, running water since July 2019 as a result of broken water well pumps. The Clemon family traveled nearly 13 miles several times a week to find water to haul back to their trailer homes. This served as the basis for cooking, cleaning, and bathing, among other needs.

Aallyah Wright, Mississippi Today

Minerva Clemon, Schlater resident, spoke out about living without access to running water in July 2019. Here she stands in the area where a new water well will built in the coming months.

After wasting countless dollars of her own on attempts to repair the water well pump and purchase bottled water, Minerva Clemon reached out to Anjuan Brown, the Leflore County supervisor who represents her area, she told Mississippi Today in November 2019. 

After Mississippi Today’s initial report, Presley, the public service commissioner, called to ask about how his office could help. He conducted follow-up discussions with federal and local water agencies and local lawmakers to see what could be done to assist the families and established a two-phase plan.

In May, the Mississippi Department of Human Services announced the receipt of a $63,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to build a new well. Following this, issues of heirs property, or property passed down without a will, halted the construction phase. Minerva Clemon had to get a court to partition the land, or divide it, among all property owners since a will did not exist.

Now with clearance, Pamela Gary, director of local community agency Central Mississippi Inc., said construction for the new well system will start within the next two weeks. It’ll take two to three months to complete, she added.  

Sen. David Jordan, a longtime Democrat from Greenwood, recalled a childhood memory where he, too, drank and used water from a water well pump.

“The only thing different in my childhood and this, we had a pump and the residue of sulfur was so thick we had to wait to settle at the bottom to drink off of it. I don’t know how we live through that,” Jordan said. “But I’m glad we came to the rescue (for Schlater residents).” 

Remaining patient, hopeful, and vigilant for over a year, residents here will finally be able to access running water in their homes. Throughout the ceremony, Minerva and Tom Clemon smiled through their masks.

“Thank God. Thank God, it’s been a long time coming,” said Minerva Clemon, standing next to her brother. 

Tom responded to his sister, “It’s done this time. (He’s) sending the Angels to see about us. Angels I ain’t never met before.”

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The 1970 Forest Bearcats: ‘We weren’t thinking about making history…we were thinking about making touchdowns’

By Rick Cleveland | Aug. 27, 2020

FOREST – Fifty years ago this month, the young people of this Scott County town had no idea what to expect. They just knew life – and school – would be different because the two high schools in town were combining into one.

Previously all-white Forest High School was merging with previously all-black E.T. Hawkins High School. There would be no black school, no white school – just one school. This was happening all over Mississippi. And, as happened in many communities across the Magnolia State, the football team showed the way.

Before we proceed, you should know this: Football was – and still is half a century later – huge in Forest. The Forest High Bearcats were a Little Dixie Conference power. The E.T. Hawkins Black Bearcats had a proud history as well.

Football practice started a month before classes began. In Forest, the first black and white students to mingle were the football players. You should know the 1970 season would have been a season of change even without integration. Gary Risher, a 28-year-old Forest native, was taking over for his former boss, Ken Bramlett, who had moved on to a college job after leading the 1969 Bearcats to a 10-0-1 record and the Little Dixie championship.

But graduation losses had decimated that team. Eighteen seniors had been lost, including several who would go on to play college ball. Risher, a former Bearcat himself, wasn’t starting from scratch, but he was definitely rebuilding and time was short. Risher hired another former Bearcat, Billy Ray Dill for one of his two assistant coaches.  Those two led Forest through spring workouts, not knowing if integration would occur the next school year or be delayed until 1971-72. Risher kept the other assistant’s job open.

Once the decision was made to fully integrate for the 1970-71 school year, Risher made one of the best coaching moves he would ever make. For his line coach, he hired James “Bo” Clark, another Forest native, who had been the head coach at Hawkins. Amazingly, it seems now, Risher and Clark had grown up in the same town, been high school coaches in that same small town and had never met.

The same was true for the players. Said Lee Dukes, a senior wide receiver/defensive back who had never had a black teammate or classmate: “We lived in the same town, we walked the same streets, but we didn’t know one another.”

In 2016, Clark talked about the day he was hired by Risher. “I was working T-ball games, my summer job,” he said. “I looked up from what I was doing and saw a man get out of a pickup truck. He walked toward me and asked if I was Coach Clark. I replied I was, and then he introduced himself as the new Forest High football coach. He asked me to be his line coach and stressed the point he would not tell me how to coach the linemen. That would be my responsibility; he just wanted results. We shook hands on it, and he said, ‘Let’s go to work.’ Believe me, we did.”

It was brutally hot that August and the team practiced twice a day. It is said that misery loves company and perhaps that helped the black and white players come together. They shared the same misery. Said Willie Bowie, a wide receiver and kick returner who came over from Hawkins, “I am not going to lie. Those two-a-days were tough, really tough.”

Eighty-five players showed up for the first practice. By the time the season started, that number was down to 40. The oddest part: Bo Clark, the black assistant coach in charge of the linemen, had no black linemen. All his players were white.

Forty-six years later, Clark remembered his first meeting with his players. “Gentlemen, I am going to be your line coach, and I am going to respect you as a player, and in due time I think you will learn to respect me as a coach. But one thing I know for sure, I am going to be your daddy away from home.”

Clark saw bewildered looks on all the white faces, so he repeated himself: “Gentlemen, I am going to be your daddy away from home. And when I blow this whistle, I better be the last man to hit the sled!”

As it happened, Clark did become much like a second daddy. “He was always there for you,” said Bubby Johnston, a lineman and kicker on the team. “You could talk to him, and he would always shoot straight with you. He was a great motivator.”

Risher, the young first-time head coach, was demanding, but he also tried to make football fun for the players. For instance, each week he would install a new trick play to be used in that week’s game.

Said Johnston, “We players ate that up. Some of those plays even worked.”

All three Forest coaches consistently delivered the same message, that the color of one’s skin made no difference, that they were all in it together with one goal: Win. And, boy, did the first integrated team in Forest history do that…

Said Bowie, then a junior and the fastest man on the team: “As teammates, we just treated one another with respect. We took care of business. We weren’t thinking about making history. We were thinking about making touchdowns.”

They made plenty of those, and they didn’t give up many. Only one opponent scored more than one touchdown. The Bearcats allowed fewer than six points per game, while scoring nearly 27 per game themselves.

The Bearcats opened with a 27-7 victory over Neshoba Central and followed that with a 47-6 trouncing of Raleigh.

Said Johnston, “You could feel the whole community coming together behind the team.”

Indeed, as Little Dixie Conference play approached, the community and the newly integrated school rallied around the Bearcats. This was back before Mississippi had any state playoffs and before high football teams were divided into classifications. Most of the state’s bigger high schools played in the Big Eight Conference. The Little Dixie was the next level. Competition was fierce with football towns such as Mendenhall, Magee, Brandon, Pearl, Clinton, Morton and Monticello among those in the mix.

Many of those conference games were defensive struggles decided in the fourth quarter. Brandon went down 6-0 on a late fourth quarter touchdown. Clinton fell 10-6 in a driving rainstorm. Joe Buddy Madden (white) and Lee Evans (black) combined to bat away a late pass and preserve a hard-fought 12-6 victory over Pearl.

Those Bearcats of 1970 prided themselves on playing physical, hard-hitting defense. Risher, the head coach, often left the last words of pre-game and halftime talks to Bo Clark. Those words were always these: “All right, let’s go hit somebody!”

Jackson homebuilder and accomplished golfer David Lingle quarterbacked the Forest Hill team that fell 25-0 to Forest. Forest Hill, a good team, ran the wishbone, which meant Lingle was a marked man since he ran the option on nearly every play.

“I felt like a rag doll out there, they beat me up so bad,” Lingle said, chuckling.

Fifty years later, he can laugh. Not then. Forest junior defensive end Jackie Calhoun, who would later play at Mississippi State, hit Lingle so many times he must have made himself sore.

Said Lingle, “If I handed off, I got hit. If I kept the ball, I got hit. If I pitched it, I got hit. Man, they hit hard. I remember walking off the field and their head coach coming up to me and saying, ‘Good game.’ I said, ‘It might have been a good game for you, but it wasn’t for me. I feel like I might die.’”

The Bearcats kept winning, even when Dukes, a star receiver and defensive back, went down with a leg injury. That just gave Bowie more chances to catch the ball and dazzle in the open field.

Risher called one of those trick plays in the Newton game. Quarterback Mike Massey passed to Bowie, who deflected the ball to fast-charging Ken Gordon, who raced to the Newton 7 to set up a touchdown in a 28-12 Forest victory. Most coaches would call that play a “hook and lateral.” Risher called in: “Sweet Georgia Brown.” His players loved it.

The Bearcats took a 9-0 record into the regular season finale against arch-rival Morton with the Golden Chicken trophy and the North Little Dixie Division title on the line. Despite the terrific running of Forest’s all-conference halfback Billy Thompson, Morton led 7-3 into the fourth quarter. Fittingly, the Bearcat defense delivered the winning points. Bobby Latham broke through the line to block a punt and Madden picked it up and ran it in for the winning points.

On the sidelines, Risher saw Lee Evans, a black defensive back, celebrating the go-ahead touchdown, dancing with Forest Mayor Fred Gaddis. Said Risher, “Ol’ Lee Evans was having a good time, dancing all around. I jacked him up and told him to get out there and he better make the next tackle. Well, he did better than that. He made several tackles in a row to clinch the victory.”

Forest, 10-0 and champion of the north, would play Monticello, winners of the South Little Dixie and coached by the legendary Parker Dykes, for the overall league championship. Risher, looking for an edge, switched from the Bearcats’ normal Power-I formation to a Winged-T to for the championship game.

That Friday was one Risher will never forget. Robin Risher, his infant son, became ill that morning and was rushed to a Jackson hospital where he was pronounced in critical condition.

“I got to the hospital and everyone was shaking their heads like there was no hope,” Risher said. “I was told to prepare for the worst.”

The Risher family was quarantined as a precautionary measure. Risher remained at the hospital while the Bearcats took on Monticello. “I had all the confidence in the world in Bo Clark and Billy Ray Dill,” Risher said. “There was no panic from anyone.”

There need not have been, although the score was tied at 10 going into the fourth quarter. That’s when Bearcats, as had been their habit all season, took over. Thompson, who rushed for 115 yards, scored two fourth quarter touchdowns to clinch a 22-10 victory.

Meanwhile, Robin Risher was diagnosed with meningitis. He would remain hospitalized for 10 days and would fully recover.

Fifty years later, the surviving 1970 Forest Bearcats are well into their 60s. At least seven have died, including Billy Thompson, the hard-charging 1,000-yard rusher and the team’s leading scorer with 67 points. Gone, too, is the much-beloved Bo Clark, who would serve on the Forest Board of Aldermen for the last 37 years of his life. Clark died last June. He was 88.

Risher, the head coach, is battling cancer. Dill retired after a career with the Chevron Oil Refinery in Pascagoula, where he last coached as offensive coordinator of an undefeated 1976 State Champion Pascagoula High team.

Surviving players and coaches will be celebrated at halftime of a Sept. 18 Forest-Florence game at L.O. Atkins Field, where 50 years ago the town’s first integrated football team, under a brand-new coaching staff, overcame so many obstacles to achieved perfection. In so doing, the 1970 Forest Bearcats helped bring two races, two schools and one proud town together.

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We asked our readers to choose their favorite of the five flag designs the Mississippi Flag Commission selected Aug. 18 from a narrowed pool of thousands of original entries.

After flying the top five designs over the Capitol Tuesday, the commission narrowed the choices to two.

We wanted to show you how your reader poll results measure up against the commission’s selections.

Of the 2,647 readers who participated in our poll, 39% selected Flag 2, which was not one of the two designs selected by the commission.

Flag 4, which includes a magnolia blossom on a blue background with red and gold stripes, received 25% of the votes from our readers. It was one of the two selected by the commission.

Flag 1, also one of the two selected, received 16.8% of our readers’ votes. The design includes a red-white-and-blue striped shield, which pulls inspiration from the state’s territorial seal of 1798.

Neither Flag 3, with 10.6% of our readers’ votes, nor Flag 5, with 8.7%, made it to the final round of designs.

On Sept. 2, the flag commission will pick one of the two designs, which will appear on the Nov. 3 ballot for voters to accept or reject a new Mississippi state flag.

Read our full Mississippi state flag coverage.

View the complete results from our reader poll:

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