OurTupelo

Rick Cleveland

Jake Mangum answers reporters’ questions in a somber Mississippi State locker room after Bulldogs were eliminated from the College World Series last June.

Today is Memorial Day. It’s sunny. Warm. Guys should be playing baseball. We should be watching baseball.

Jake Mangum needs to be playing baseball.

For Mangum, who turned 24 on March 8, time is of the essence. Twenty-four is a ripe age to be entering your first season of professional baseball. He’s on the clock, and he knows it.

“I just want to go play baseball,” Mangum said Thursday morning, before taking some swings in the batting cages at Jackson Prep. “Actually, I don’t just want to be playing, I need to be playing.”

Rick Cleveland

The 2020 baseball season is on hold. Mangum’s career is on hold. If you know Jake Mangum, you know how hellish that is for him. He absolutely loves the sport and plays it as hard as it can be played. He’s on the field before anyone else and his uniform is dirty before anyone’s. He plays fast. He can’t stand to be idle.

He began this spring at the New York Mets’ Major League camp as an invited non-Major League roster player. He got his first hit against Major League pitching on Feb. 22. He had hoped to begin this season with the Mets’ Port St. Lucie ballclub in high Class A League baseball.

And now he knows there might not be any minor league season at all. And so he spends his days working out, taking swings, lifting weights, making himself stronger.

“When they call and say it’s time to play, I am going to be ready,” he says.

He looks ready. Actually, he looks noticeably bigger – broader in the shoulders and upper body. He has put on 15 pounds of mostly muscle and now weighs 195 pounds. That’s more than his dad, John Mangum, weighed when he played nine years of cornerback for the Chicago Bears.

Jake Mangum says he is hitting the ball harder and farther. At Mississippi State, he became the Southeastern Conference’s all-time hits leader with 383, but only five of those were home runs. And while he’s never going to be a home run slugger, some of his line drives could become gappers and some of those singles could become doubles and triples.

He has tinkered with his swing, working with both his father and with Mets hitting instructor Trey Hannam. His swing, he says, is now more level instead of swinging down at the ball. The early results have been promising, Mangum says.

Brooklyn Cyclones

Mangum, hitting for the Brooklyn Cyclones, last summer.

After State’s 2019 season ended June 20 in the College World Series, Mangum spent the rest of the summer playing for the Mets’ rookie league team, the Brooklyn Cyclones, in the New York-Penn League. He hit .247 with 45 hits and 17 stolen bases in 53 games.

“I had a good summer. I felt like it was a good start,” he says.

But he felt like he made much more progress last fall when he went to the Mets’ Dominican Republic baseball academy and produced nine hits in 12 at bats during limited game action. “Big strides there,” he said. “I really hit it well.”

All that – and the added muscle – had him more than eager to begin his first full year of pro baseball, which is currently in a holding pattern.

Major League owners and players are squabbling, of course, over how this season will unfold and how the reduced revenue will be divided. There are safety concerns, of course. And there are indications we could learn much more this week. A scheduled meeting between the two sides Tuesday hopefully will resolve some issues.

Nothing in minor league baseball will be decided until Major League baseball comes up with a plan. There could be a reduced season. There could be no minor league season.

Mangum waits and says he can see both sides of the issue.

He just wants to play.

Meanwhile, he has begun a new podcast “The Jake Mangum Show” on Apple Podcasts.

“This seemed a good as time as any to pick up a new craft,” Mangum says.

Yes, he said, a career in broadcasting is something he has considered, post-baseball, which he hopes is in the distant future.

Said Mangum, “I’m going to play until they rip the jersey off my back.”

The post Jake Mangum is a fast-forward baseballer with his career currently on pause appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Color your way through Mississippi with me! Click below to download a coloring sheet of Friendship Cemetery in Columbus. 

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Eric J. Shelton/Mississippi Today

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

As state leaders continue to relax statewide safety measures and businesses reopen, Mississippi reported its highest ever weekly count of COVID-19 cases.

The state health department recorded 1,956 new cases this week, the most total cases for a week in Mississippi. Daily new cases have remained steady all week, whereas prior weeks have shown more day-to-day variability in new cases numbers. The past week is the first to have only one day reporting less than 200 cases: Monday’s 136 cases.

The startling weekly statistics come days after Gov. Tate Reeves announced additional safety restrictions would be relaxed. Reeves has kept a “safer at home” recommendation in place, which suggest that Mississippians stay socially distanced and avoid public places. But his previous orders that closed many businesses across the state have largely been retracted. As of Monday, the only businesses that remain closed because of executive order are indoor entertainment venues such as theaters and museums.

Sundays and Mondays traditionally show lower case counts due to weekend reporting lags from labs. But even with the lags, this week’s numbers have remained high, averaging 279 daily cases, the highest rolling average for any week since the pandemic began. At last count, the health department estimated 69 percent of all cases had recovered, meaning about 3,500 are considered actively contagious.

More than a month ago, officials said the state was likely in a new case plateau, though they warned there was no way to know for sure. Both Gov. Tate Reeves and State Health Officer Thomas Dobbs said that the state has successfully “flattened the curve,” meaning prevented cases from spiking as to not overburden the health care system.

Though hospitalizations have risen over the week, they have remained mostly stable. However, number of new cases are distinct from hospitalizations, and those trends could reverse if cases don’t flatten and continue to spread, especially to those most vulnerable.

Testing has increased over the week, averaging 5,300 daily diagnostic tests over the last four days, potentially accounting for increased cases. Mississippi is now reporting COVID-19 diagnostic tests separately from its reported antibody tests, which look for past infections. Antibody tests account for growing proportion of all COVID tests in the state — now at 6 percent, up from 3 percent mid-week. Since a handful of states have separated out the two tests, their total testing numbers have declined, recovering from the artificial boost of the antibody test inclusion.

Thursday, the Sun Herald reported that the state health department has been aggregating antibody tests and diagnostic tests since antibody testing came online last month, confounding public health experts who question both the reasoning and effect of the unusual methodology decision. At least seven other states and even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have since admitted the same.

“It does indicate infection, it’s just past infection, so it does give us historical perspective about the total number of cases, so there’s value in it,” Dobbs said Thursday in a press briefing. “We could separate them out. That’s not a big deal. I don’t think it’s an inflation of numbers. It’s just a different mechanism of identifying an infection.”

Dobbs has been emphatic in the past that antibody testing could be useful for understanding how widespread the disease is, but that there are unknowns about its medical value and should be distinct from diagnostic testing.

The two tests measure different snapshots of COVID infection. Viral tests — performed by a DNA nose swab — diagnose a current infection. But serology tests, a blood draw, show the presence of antibodies that the immune system develops to fight off infections, suggesting a former infection.

Antibody tests caught on quickly in the month since they have been available, though experts have warned against reading too much into the tests as it’s not clear what former infections mean for immunity other than helping to identify a true prevalence of the disease.  The Food and Drug Administration, which regulates the tests, has warned against reading too much into the tests and recently increased previously lacking standards for the tests.

Quest Diagnostics has performed 975,000 antibody tests nationally as of Monday and offers the test direct-to-consumers, bypassing state health systems. As of Sunday, Mississippi reported 9,057 antibody tests.

The problem with lumping in the two different counts is two-fold. First, it could inflate testing numbers, like is the case in Georgia, if the cases identified through antibody tests are not added to the tally of confirmed cases. Mississippi says they are including antibody-identified cases in the total case count, so the artificial boost in tests should be countered by adding in the cases found.

Dobbs has said antibody tests have shown a 2 percent positive rate, though the health department has not updated the antibody case-identification rate since Thursday. If the 2 percent figure is still accurate, 181 cases in the state have been identified this way over the month, accounting for just 1 percent of the more than 13,000 confirmed cases in the state and 2 percent of the new cases over the past month.

However, adding in those cases begets its own challenge — those 181 reflect previous infections, and don’t help identifying active cases. Because diagnostic and antibody tests measure different things, they are not helpful in the same way to the public or to scientists. At worst, it can be misleading, and at best, it identifies overall disease prevalence but does not aid case-tracing for current infection or help stop active spread by isolating cases.

Despite the inclusion of antibody tests, diagnostic testing alone has ramped up over the week after slowing in previous weeks. The state’s lab reported its most ever single-day tests this week, averaging 730 daily tests. Mississippi has had a consistently high rate of tests compared to other states, ranking 18th in the U.S. — accounting for diagnostic tests only — as of Friday, according to Mississippi Today’s analysis of the COVID Tracking Project’s national data.

The state announced universal testing for long-term care facilities in mid-May, which partially accounts for both the testing increase and the case increase. However, long-term care cases have only slightly edged up over the week — by 204 cases, or 14 percent — less than they increased the week prior at 25 percent.

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Mississippi Supreme Court

African Americans make up 38 percent of the state’s population, but only 11 percent of the membership of the Mississippi Supreme Court. This November’s election could change that.

Latrice Westbrooks of Lexington, one of two African Americans on the 10-member Court of Appeals, is challenging long-time Mississippi jurist Kenny Griffis in the November general election for a spot on the Supreme Court representing the Central District of Mississippi.

While Griffis has more judicial experience, Westbrooks is a formidable candidate – an experienced attorney who has won a district-wide race for the state’s second highest court. In short, both candidates can tout qualifications. But what makes this race unique is that it provides the best opportunity in the state’s history for there to be two black justices on the Supreme Court at the same time.

Bobby Harrison

Since 1985, Democratic and Republican governors have made efforts to ensure there would be at least one black Mississippian on the Supreme Court – all representing the same Central District post. Supreme Court justices are elected from three districts – three each from the Northern, Southern and Central districts. In 1985, Democrat Gov. Bill Allain appointed Hinds County Circuit Court Judge Reuben Anderson to a vacant spot, making him the first African American on the Supreme Court as created by Mississippi’s 1890 Constitution.

Anderson later won election to the post before resigning to go into private law practice. At that point, Democratic Gov. Ray Mabus appointed another black jurist to the seat, Fred Banks, who was elected to the post twice before resigning and being replaced by James Graves, who was appointed by Democratic Gov. Ronnie Musgrove.

Graves also won election to the seat, but then was appointed to the 5^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals by President Barack Obama. At that point in 2011, Republican Gov. Haley Barbour appointed Leslie King, who remains the only black member of the court.

During the 35-year time period that four African Americans have held the same seat from the Central District, white Mississippians have held the other two Central District seats.

In late 2018, Chief Justice Bill Waller Jr. resigned from his Central District seat and eventually ran for governor where he reached a runoff before losing to Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves.

To replace Waller, Gov. Phil Bryant appointed Griffis, who was chief judge of the Court of Appeals, where he served with Westbrooks.

State of Mississippi Judiciary

Latrice Westbrooks is challenging long-time Mississippi jurist Kenny Griffis.

The Central District, according to the 2010 Census, has an African American voting-age population of 51 percent. Public service commissioners and transportation commissioners also are elected from the same districts as Supreme Court justices.

Both Democrats and Republicans have prevailed in recent Central District elections. In 2019, Democrat Willie Simmons, also an African American, won the Central District Transportation Commission seat. But in the same year Republican Brent Bailey was elected to the Public Service Commission from the Central District, defeating De’Keither Stamps, an African American member of the Jackson City Council.

The Westbrooks-Griffis Supreme Court election is expected to be more competitive than most judicial contests. Both candidates are lining up support. While candidates for judicial seats do not declare a party affiliation, much of the Republican establishment and much of the business community are lining up for Griffis, who was first elected to the Court of Appeals in the early 2000s as a candidate supporting changes to the civil justice system to provide more protection from lawsuit for businesses.

“As a legislator I know how important it is to have justices on our Supreme Court who properly interpret and apply the law without trying to legislate from the bench,” said state Sen. Jennifer Branning, R-Philadelphia. “That’s why I’m supporting Justice Griffis. He’s a constitutional conservative who deserves our support based on his record, character and work ethic.”

Of course, many Democratic groups are lining up behind Westbrooks – as is Vicksburg Mayor George Flaggs, who is an independent.

“I have known her for a long time,” Flaggs said. “She always has been passionate and an advocate for helping those who are less fortunate.”

But Flaggs said the fact Westbrooks is African American is not the reason he is supporting her.

“I would love to see another African American, particularly a female, on the Supreme Court,” said Flaggs. “I think that would make great history for Mississippi. But at the same time she has the qualifications to be on the Supreme Court and, besides that she is a great person.”

Oh, by the way, in addition to one African American currently serving on the Supreme Court, there also is one woman – Dawn Beam of Sumrall in the Southern District. Like with black justices, there have been only four women justices in the state’s history  – two – Beam and Ann Hannaford Lamar – serving together for a brief period in 2016.

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Late morning edges into afternoon in the Community Room at the Arts Center of Mississippi in Jackson, and the stories tumble out — of the front line in Mississippi’s civil rights struggle, of a sharecroppers’ daughter determined to get an education, of the degrading checkpoints in occupied Gaza a Palestinian family’s young son never forgot.

Founders and staff of the International Museum of Muslim Cultures gather for a workshop with Blue Magnolia Films, the pioneering Mississippi-based documentary film company that spotlights bright spots in the state and forges community connection through storytelling. 

Aiming to take the museum from a local/regional presence to a national profile, they see founders’ succinct photo documentaries as a key piece in that goal. “We have a just story to tell, and people can connect with it from a human perspective. We just need to tell it in a better way,” says museum founder Emad Al-Turk.

Blue Magnolia Films’ way zeroes in on the “why” thread, helping individuals craft and tell their unique stories in an engaging way, with a purpose and universal resonance.

Blue Magnolia Films was founded by Mississippi native and documentary filmmaker Chandler Griffin and his wife, Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Alison Fast, in 2013. Their project for Mississippi’s bicentennial in 2017 —  short documentary films highlighting cool projects and creatives, many in small towns around the state — introduced not only the film’s author/subjects, but also, for many here, a powerful and positive method of storytelling. 

Blue Magnolia Films has done about 160 workshops in 24 countries, including across the Middle East and Africa, helping people apply storytelling to goals in health, development, democracy building and human rights. “This is very much our specialty,” Griffin says. “I’m a fifth-generation Mississippian, so where else would we be doing this? We’ve really been around the planet and very much are taking everything we’ve learned and applying it now to Mississippi.” Work with Volunteer Mississippi highlighted stories of service; workshops with Selma, Alabama, showcased stories of revitalization to mark Alabama’s bicentennial and Selma’s 200th anniversary.

The Community Foundation for Mississippi, now in its 25th anniversary year, is working with Blue Magnolia Films on a suite of photo documentaries to get at the heart of why people do the work they do, to change the communities they live in. Jane Alexander, foundation executive director and long a fan of Blue Magnolia Films’ work in the state, was sold on the accessible, cost-effective, “extraordinarily personal” workshops. Resulting stories connect with people in a way that numbers and annual reports can’t.

Alexander wanted Blue Magnolia Films’ iPhone photo/personal narrative approach for stories of individuals less directly involved with the Community Foundation, but whose admirable work touched tandem chords. “Their level of commitment to community is a story that’s worth lifting up.” Rich, layered narratives share stories of risk takers and leaders who put some part of their lives on the line for something important, such as Jackson Public Schools Chief of Staff Michael Cormack. He left the Barksdale Reading Institute and uprooted his family to take up that mantle; he highlights the possibilities ahead in his photo story, “Excellence for All.”

Alexander hopes to re-ignite a community spirit that was a matter of course in her parents’ generation, that is perhaps less so in current times. “What we’ve lost is this feeling that we have a shared responsibility to build our own places and make those places good to live in.”

Photo documentaries by architect Buddy Faulkner, restaurateur and Extra Table founder Robert St. John and Cormack will soon be joined by another three — by Mississippi Alliance of Nonprofits and Philanthropy leader Sammy Moon, by Winter Institute Youth Engagement Coordinator Von Gordon, by JPS Partners in Education Director Thea Faulkner, and by Alexander. That’s it for this year, but Alexander’s plan extends to future workshops — annually, the hope is — to highlight constituents’ stories.

“It really leads to a very deep dive into your own life and your own thoughts and philosophy,” Alexander says, likening “dig deeper” talks with Fast to “just like those late-night college conversations we used to get into at 2 o’clock in the morning on a Saturday night after too many beers at CS’s. … like when you have the luxury to really think about the ‘why’ of your life, and not just the ‘what’ of your life.”

As Fast says, “The more personal your story is, the more personable, the more vulnerable, the more honest, open, sincere, the more universal it becomes.”

With this process, “There’s a format, but there’s not a formula. It is about taking a journey, and each person will take a journey, using photography and narrative — oral history,” Fast says. “Each person has different touchstones.”  Values-based and place-based stories emerge through the intense and organic workshop, over days of mentorship, reflection and deep conversation, over thousands of photographs, over script revisions and recordings to get at the heart of each individual’s backstory, involvement, hopes and purpose. 

“We help people to connect their own stories to where they live, and then to those they serve. … It really is not only telling our stories, but putting our stories in service of our community, and the values that we want to grow,” Fast says.

In the finished documentary, stories unfold in the author’s voice, over dozens of photographs (often by that person), and take viewers along, connecting — human to human — in a meaningful way. Stories emerge from the inside, out, that’s especially important in Mississippi, where stories are often underrepresented or misrepresented, Fast says.

At a time when Muslims are under attack worldwide and false narratives abound, “Our work is even more important, to actually correct the stereotypical depictions of Muslims and Islam,” the International Museum of Muslim Culture’s Al-Turk says. “Our faith guides us to do this in a respectful way … to present the facts about our faith to the American public, and if people know what Islam is about, what the message of peace and coexistence and love and care that Islam promotes us to do, then the narrative will change over time.” 

Photo stories by museum founding families Okolo and Sababu Rashid and Emad Al-Turk (with another by his wife, Karen, expected later) will be used as the museum’s exhibition “Muslims with Christians & Jews: Covenants & Coexistence” begins touring nationally, sharing commonalities among the faith traditions and building bridges of understanding.

“We always say, ‘Tell the kind of stories you want more of,’” Fast says. People can get stuck in a narrative, or with a naysaying approach about what’s not working. 

“There always is a story of what is working, and if we want more of that story, we need to tell that story, make it visible. And, the best people to tell that story — the ones who can authenticate it, the ones who can voice it — are the ones who are living it.”

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