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Rogelio V. Solis / Associated Press

Democratic Party Chairman Bobby Moak (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)

Willie Simmons, a Mississippi transportation commissioner and one of the top Democratic elected officials in the state, blasted Democratic Party Chairman Bobby Moak in an email to the party’s 80-member executive committee last week and endorsed the man running to unseat Moak as party chairman.

Simmons laid out a long list of grievances to committee members, including that Moak and state party officials “did nothing to assist” during his 2019 campaign for central district transportation commissioner, and that the party has done little to support Black candidates running for office.

“The facts appear to suggest that we do not want real inclusion in the party, and discrimination practices are alive and well in the Mississippi Democratic Party,” Simmons wrote on July 18. “We are suffering from having the knees of members of our own party on our necks and we cannot breathe.”

Simmons continued: “If we are going to win elections going forward we have to overhaul the Party and revise our mission… Today, the Mississippi Democratic Party must have effective leadership that has a commitment to inclusion.”

The email began a back-and-forth exchange between Simmons and Moak, all copying the 80 members of the executive committee. The exchange, ahead of a contentious internal election to decide the next party leader, included direct and indirect character criticisms and a photo of Moak meeting with Simmons’ Democratic primary opponent at a Jackson restaurant.

Moak was elected party chairman in 2016 and is again running for the top leadership position this year. Tyree Irving, a former Mississippi Court of Appeals judge who is Black, is running against Moak. The 80 members of the party’s executive committee will elect the party’s chairman later this week. In his email last week, Simmons directly endorsed Irving in the chair race.

Willie Simmons-Bobby Moak Emails (Text)

Simmons also wrote in his initial email that party leadership “silenced” former party staffer Jacquie Amos, who was “made ineffective in assisting me and other Black candidates on the ticket.” Amos, a Black woman who was one of the party’s three paid staffers in 2019, resigned in December after working seven years for the party.

The day after Simmons sent the initial email, Moak fired off a 1,300-word reply and responded directly to many of Simmons’ points. Moak wrote that party officials remained in close contact with Simmons’ campaign in 2019.

“First of all, I understand and am sympathetic to the impulse to embellish, exaggerate and distort certain facts while campaigning,” Moak wrote in a July 19 email to Simmons, copying all 80 members of the party’s executive committee. “It’s something I’ve seen often in my dealings over the years with Republicans. In this setting… we must strive to keep an honest dialog and avoid the tendencies to mislead members of our own party. There is a known record here, we’ve saved the receipts and our records do not support a number of the claims you are making.”

Moak also refuted the notion that he “silenced” Amos, the former party staffer.

“Secondly, any insinuation that any member of our staff was silenced is false,” Moak wrote. “MDP provided tremendous flexibility to Ms. Amos when she made her departure known, and accommodated employment while she tried to join numerous campaigns. This accommodation is a far cry from silencing — it’s laying a path forward for a planned staff departure.”

Earlier this year, Mississippi Today chronicled how dysfunction within the state Democratic Party led to the historic 2019 losses, how the state party leaders established and pushed no clear identity, and how the party’s leadership has failed to support and devote resources to Black candidates and constituents.

In his lengthy email, Moak laid out his platform for the chair election, pointing to 22 specific items the party has accomplished during his four years as chairman.

Simmons replied to Moak, writing: “Please know that I never received a call from you during or after the 2019 election.” Simmons also attached a May 2019 photo of Moak meeting at a Jackson restaurant with Marcus Wallace, who ran against Simmons in the August 2019 Democratic primary.

“Today, I am like the late Fannie Lou Hamer, I am sick and tired of being sick and tired,” Simmons wrote. “We must all work overtime to ensure that Vice President Biden is elected as our next President of these United States. In doing so, we must fix our Mississippi Democratic Party.”

The post ‘We cannot breathe’: Top Democrat blasts party chairman Bobby Moak ahead of leadership election appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Eric J. Shelton/Mississippi Today

Lawmakers during the legislative session at the Capitol in Jackson on Thursday, May 28, 2020.

As a Republican House chairman waited outside Speaker Philip Gunn’s office one day in late June, another prominent member walked up and they began an intense, face-to-face conversation literally inches apart with no masks.

Several other Republicans — all without masks — joined the group a few seconds later. A masked reporter waiting near the door said to the members: “You guys aren’t too concerned about the coronavirus.”

One of the members in the face-to-face conversation looked at the other and proclaimed, “Yeah, get away from me.” The other let out a fake cough. Everybody laughed, including the reporter.

The scene is not so funny now that those two legislators are among the at least 30 lawmakers and at least 11 legislative staffers who have tested positive for COVID-19 the past two weeks. Gunn and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, who presides over the Senate, are among those who tested positive.

The intent in sharing the anecdote is not to embarrass. There were, no doubt, countless other similar instances in the Mississippi Capitol not witnessed by a reporter as the Legislature was in session during a chaotic June.

But the episode does highlight the cavalier attitude many members of the Legislature took about the coronavirus — particularly the longer the session went.

The Legislature recessed the session in March because of safety concerns about the COVID-19 pandemic. When lawmakers returned in May, Gunn and Hosemann implemented strict precautions, including limiting the number of members in the chambers at any one time. Temperature checks were administered as people entered the Capitol.

“When we came back from the recess, the speaker had developed a good plan,” said House Democratic Leader Robert Johnson of Natchez. “But the longer we were in session, the less we adhered to the rules.”

Johnson said he hopes when legislators return to the Capitol in coming days that those original precautions will be re-imposed and one additional restriction will be initiated: a mask mandate.

“We should all understand by now how important wearing a mask is,” Johnson said. “It is a little burdensome, but it is not that much of an inconvenience.”

Some legislators who have gotten sick with the coronavirus wore masks all the time. For instance, Rep. Bo Brown, D-Jackson, who has confirmed he has tested positive, seldom was seen without a mask in the halls of the Capitol. But many who got sick never wore masks.

To be clear, not all Democrats were wearing masks, but most were. And not all Republicans were eschewing the wearing of masks, but many were.

Health experts have reiterated the wearing of a mask protects not so much the mask wearer but those who come in contact with the person wearing the mask. So if everyone wears a mask, everyone will have an added layer of protection.

State Health Officer Thomas Dobbs cited a Centers for Disease Control study where two stylists in a hair salon tested positive for COVID-19, but none of their 130 clients caught the virus presumably because the stylists were wearing masks.

“Pretty strong endorsement of the power of masks,” Dobbs said. “The more data that is available” points to “what a simple, easy, effective intervention it is.”

Both Hosemann and Gunn set good examples wearing masks in public early on. But as the session progressed and intense debate developed over changing the state flag, disbursing $1 billion in federal funds for COVID-19 relief and funding state agencies in the midst of economic uncertainty, many of those safeguards were discarded.

Perhaps the Legislature is a microcosm of the state. Dobbs said the state is having record number of coronavirus cases now because Mississippians have let down their collective guard in terms of battling the pandemic.

“It’s insanely difficult to control a pandemic when people A) think it’s not real, B) find every reason to undermine the reality of it to justify not following the rules,” Dobbs said in a recorded meeting on July 10.

Just as the pandemic is preventing the full reopening of the state, the Legislature’s coronavirus outbreak is delaying lawmakers’ return to the Capitol to address the important issues of funding the Department of Marine Resources and taking up Gov. Tate Reeves’ veto of the kindergarten through 12th grade education budget.

Reeves, who espouses the virtues of wearing a mask even though there are high profile instances of him not doing so, says those entities can survive in the short term without legislative action.

“We believe we are in a situation in which both of those entities can function,” Reeves said. “Is it perfect? No… But we are a position in which we will bring them back at an appropriate time if and when it is safe to do so. I think public health must trump everything else in regards to legislative action.”

Without question, for part of the 2020 legislative session, public health concerns were placed on the backburner.

The post Legislators pay price for disregarding COVID-19 precautions at Capitol appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Well-known in the blues scene in the U.S. and abroad, these Mississippi bluesmen have a lot more in common than just guitars.

Growing up playing music in the Church of God in Christ isn’t the only thing Clinton, Mississippi-bred bluesmen Eddie Cotton Jr. and Jarekus Singleton have in common, but it might be the most significant.

“When other churches were conservative, not letting people bring in drums, not letting people bring in guitars, at the COGIC church the lid has always been off,” says Cotton, whose father was a preacher at Christ Chapel Church of God in Clinton.

The weekly free-form church services were a training camp for both musicians — Singleton’s grandfather led the True Gospel Church of God in Christ in Jackson — challenging them to keep up with all manner of instrumentation and tempos while honing their improvisational chops.

“Anybody could get up and start to singing,” he says. “If people wanted to shout, they shouted. And being a musician, you had to put music behind what they were doing. If you couldn’t catch them, you were accused of not being able to play.”

After church services, though, Cotton turned his attention to the blues in the historic Sarah Dickey neighborhood where he grew up. That was the music he heard on 90.1 FM while riding around in his uncle’s car, from old schoolers like Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King and Albert King to “southern soul” blues artists Tyrone Davis, Elmore James and Little Milton, who recorded for Jackson’s Malaco Records.

“Blues was played all the time around the neighborhoods, and the music fascinated me,” says Cotton. “It had a certain feel to it that I just loved even as a youngster.”

Cotton understood how the music of his church related to the music on the block. Even though the songs played in the Church of God in Christ were gospel, he says, they still used blues-based chord progressions and scales, which gave him a feel for the blues. At Jackson State University, he expanded his knowledge base and began experimenting with other kinds of music, but blues was always his foundation, and he sought out likeminded artists.

“King Edward was the first that I ever saw, that I could put my hand on, that was playing the blues like I’d never seen it before,” he recalls. “That encouraged me more than anything, because it was like I found a new home.”

Cotton struck up a friendship with Edward and began sitting in with him on guitar at live performances. “Hearing blues on a radio is one thing,” he says, “but to see somebody play it live is another. I’ve heard guitar players all my life, but they didn’t play with the mastery of lead that I saw King Edward play with. And he was doing it for a living.”

Despite being born half a generation apart, the lives of 50-year-old Cotton and 35-year-old Singleton intertwined through church, music and familial bonds.

As leaders of neighboring churches of the same faith, Eddie Cotton Sr. and Jimmy Lee Shearry, Singleton’s grandfather, preached and led revivals together. That’s how Honey Emmett Shearry, Jimmy’s brother, came to teach Cotton how to play guitar. Later, as Cotton’s popularity grew, he paid that mentorship forward by teaching Singleton’s uncle, Tony Shearry, who then opened his world to the blues.

“We all looked up to Eddie coming up,” says Singleton, who remembers seeing Cotton perform at the Alamo in Jackson while in high school. His uncle Tony would bring him to hear music at the old 930 Blue Café on North Congress Street, too, even though he was underage. “I couldn’t get in, but I’d sit outside and listen to the bands.”

Cotton and Singleton share an independent streak, and not just in their commitment to the blues. Both artists put in the work to have it their way, building their audiences and running their own businesses while continually investing back into it and becoming savvy marketers.

Although they’ve both recorded for prominent record labels, they currently maintain control over their own recording and performing careers, while others choose to work within the traditional network of booking agents, managers and publicists. Their method is becoming more common in the age of streaming, where consumers listen to music through platforms like Spotify and Apple Music instead of owning physical CDs distributed by a label.

“I wanted to do it a certain way,” Cotton explains. “I wanted to make a certain amount [of money].

And you’ve got these people, the movers and the shakers so they think, and if you don’t do it they way, they try to make it hard on you. So, I always was, ‘If you can’t get in the niche, you have to create your own.’”

As Cotton and Singleton have established themselves as popular blues musicians on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean through touring clubs and the European and U.S. festival circuit, their friendship and mutual respect endures.

“I go to his house every now and then,” Singleton says. “He’ll just grab a guitar, he’ll tell me to pick one up. He’s a phenomenal musician. He plays organ, drums — and he might can play more instruments than that.”

The artists were scheduled to perform together at the city of Clinton’s 31^st July 4^th Family Fireworks Extravaganza until the continued spread of COVID-19 led the city to cancel the event. Instead, Singleton has been working on his fourth album at Brudog Studios in Pelahatchie.

“The pandemic is holding us up for sure, as far as playing live,” Singleton says. But considering more recent events, he has heavier things on his mind these days.

“This racial issue we really have to address, and it’s getting out of hand. I’m just thinking about how we have to speak to this racism and this police brutality, and this unwarranted behavior toward blacks and other minorities,” he says.

The killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery at the hands of policemen or private citizens acting in that capacity this spring have made those issues a global conversation once again.

“A policeman should be a friend of the people,” says Cotton. “He should be someone who I can trust to uphold the law. If you check history, that kind of authority is always being abused. What I think is going on now is with social media, you can’t get away with stuff you used to get away with.”

As statues and symbols honoring the Confederacy began to come down around the United States, Mississippi legislators voted to remove the state flag, which flew for 126 years with the Confederate battle emblem in the upper left corner. Gov. Tate Reeves signed the legislation to retire the flag on June 30.

“[The flag] shouldn’t even be an issue,” Cotton says. “I hear people talk about their heritage. I can understand that, but on my side, being an African American, it didn’t work for me. I don’t need to be reminded that this is what it’s about — white supremacy. That part I don’t agree with. That’s what it means.”

The post How Clinton’s Eddie Cotton Jr. and Jarekus Singleton found the blues appeared first on Mississippi Today.