OurTupelo

Allison Palmer is looking to get her life back on track. She lives in a women’s shelter and is hoping to find a job to support herself and her husband, who is staying in a men’s shelter.

“I just want to be able to stand on my own two feet,” she said.

Palmer, 55, was one of dozens of jobseekers attending Clocked In, a free workforce expo that aimed to connect employers, jobseekers and community organizations to help people find work, training and other resources.

Deep South Today, Mississippi Today and the Foundation for the Mid South hosted the event, which took place Tuesday at the Jackson Medical Mall. It was made possible by a grant from the Foundation for the Mid South’s Moving Mississippians Forward Through Employment Initiative.

Another jobseeker, Maailyah Davis, 19, attended with her mother and sister. All three were looking for work. She said she’d been looking for a job for a month, and had an interview coming up. She also said she has had trouble finding job openings. Davis, who has a son, said she’s seeking a part-time job.

“I want to spend time with him but still have a job to make money for him,” she said.

Davis is planning to return to school in the fall and work while being a student.

Palmer said her main challenge is her lack of transportation. She hasn’t been in the job market for eight years, but said she is optimistic.

“I’ve talked to a couple people, and they have some opportunities that I think would be good for me,” she said.

Employers and organizations from a variety of fields had tables at the event where they were offering opportunities and resources. 

Edd Blake is the coordinator of business outreach for MCA Powered by NeXT, which provides free training programs for people who want to enter the tech industry.

Blake said events like Clocked In are important for breaking down barriers. 

“It’s all about access,” he said.

Lindsay Stevens, the regional manager at SURGE Staffing, echoed the same point. She said that people in central Mississippi often lack resources.

“I see them come into our offices every day, and they’re looking for jobs, but they don’t know how to apply for jobs or other resources that they may need to gain good employment,” she said.

Donte Jones, director of reentry at MAGCOR, a nonprofit organization that provides support services and job training for people who are currently and formerly incarcerated. He said he wanted to raise awareness about his organization.

“Sometimes they’re a little shy about coming out and trying to find out information because they’ve been told certain things or stigmas or barriers are out there,” Jones said of people who had been incarcerated.

“But there’s a lot of programs and services out there to make sure that they get out and stay out and do well and become tax-paying, law-abiding citizens.”

The expo also featured live conversations with community leaders and Mississippi Today employees about challenges facing Mississippi’s job market and economy.

WASHINGTON — The NAACP is calling on Black athletes and fans to boycott the athletic programs of public universities in states that are taking steps that the nation’s oldest civil rights group says are restricting Black voting rights.

Launched on Tuesday, the “Out of Bounds” campaign urges prospective Black athletes, their families, alumni and fans to “withhold athletic and financial support” from major public universities in states that “have moved to limit, weaken or erase Black voting representation.”

If Black athletes participate in the boycott, it could deplete rosters for powerhouse football and basketball programs across the Southeastern Conference and Atlantic Coast Conference.

The NAACP is among groups responding to a wave of gerrymandering in the aftermath of a U.S.Supreme Court ruling that winnowed a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The boycott comes as civil rights activists have mobilized across the South to protest redistricting plans by Republican state legislatures that eliminate majority-Black congressional districts after the high court’s ruling. Activists have looked for pressure points to dissuade GOP-led states from redistricting maps, including calls for mass protests and economic boycotts.

“Across the South, Black athletes have helped build some of the most profitable college athletic programs in America,” said NAACP President Derrick Johnson, who lives in Mississippi.

Johnson noted that the programs “generate hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue, national television value, alumni donations, merchandising sales, ticket sales, and brand equity — much of it powered by Black football and basketball talent.”

The NAACP’s campaign calls out Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and South Carolina as states to boycott, arguing that the athletic programs of those states’ flagship universities are especially reliant on Black athletic talent and should protect Black political interests.

“Black athletes should not be asked to generate wealth, prestige, and power for state institutions while those same states strip political power from Black communities,” Johnson said.

The timing of the initiative comes at a moment in the college athletic calendar that might make it difficult for it to have any immediate impact. The transfer portals for the high-profile Division I sports of football and basketball are all closed until 2027.

There may be an opportunity to influence prominent high school recruits who are still weighing their college prospects for the fall of 2027 and beyond. While many schools have received nonbinding verbal agreements from football and basketball players, those agreements won’t become official until late fall at the earliest.

The signing window for basketball opens in mid-November — about a week after the midterm elections — and the 72-hour early signing period for football arrives in the first week of December.

There is a chance that recruits could attempt to put pressure on flagship institutions in the targeted states by threatening to sign somewhere else. The reality, however, is that the pockets of those schools run deep, and asking a teenager to factor politics into a decision that could produce a life-altering financial windfall before they are even old enough to vote could prove tenuous.

Black lawmakers themselves are also putting pressure on athletic leagues to take action against Republican-led states that may redistrict longtime Black members of Congress.

The Congressional Black Caucus on Monday sent a letter to the commissioners of the SEC and ACC athletic conferences, as well as NCAA President Charlie Baker, that its members will oppose the SCORE Act, a bill to standardize athletes’ contracting rights across the country, unless conference leaders oppose GOP-led redistricting efforts in states that include major conference members.

“The Congressional Black Caucus believes institutions that profit from Black talent and Black communities have a responsibility to stand with those communities when their fundamental rights are under attack,” the CBC said in a Monday statement. “Silence in the face of injustice is not neutrality — it is complicity.”

One estimate shows Democrats could lose as many as 24 seats in the Mississippi Legislature from GOP-led gerrymandering, the state party chairman said Tuesday.

At a news conference in Jackson, Rep. Cheikh Taylor, Democratic Party chairman, said he has reviewed maps Republicans might adopt in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais ruling, which gutted part of the Voting Rights Act.

Taylor said he fears Democrats could lose as many as 17 seats in the House and 7 seats in the Senate. He also cited a report published last fall in anticipation of the Callais decision by voting rights organizations Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter. The report said nearly half of the state’s Black-majority districts, 29, could be eliminated if Republicans adopt an aggressive redistricting strategy encouraged by some in the majority party.

The impact of the Supreme Court decision is almost certain to trickle down to the state and local level, as the decision significantly narrows how courts can require states to account for race in redistricting. And in Mississippi and across the Deep South, race and party affiliation are intertwined.

The majority-white, Republican-dominated Mississippi Legislature has already formed special committees in both chambers to consider redistricting ahead of the 2027 legislative session.

Taylor’s remarks came a day after the U.S. Supreme Court reversed a lower federal court’s ruling that determined Mississippi lawmakers unlawfully diluted Black voting strength when it redrew the state’s legislative districts in 2022. 

Republicans already hold near supermajorities in both chambers of the Legislature, but several state officials have urged the Legislature to draw maps to cement even stronger majorities. Many Republicans in Mississippi have also said the state should redraw its congressional maps to oust U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, the lone Democrat and lone Black member of the state’s delegation.

Republican Gov. Tate Reeves called off a special session he initially ordered to redraw state Supreme Court districts in light of the Callais decision. But in a radio interview, Reeves said it was only a matter of time before Republicans moved to target Thompson.

“The tenure of Congressman Bennie Thompson reigning terror on the 2nd Congressional District is over,” Reeves said. “It’s not a question of if. It’s a question of when.”

On Tuesday, Taylor condemned Reeves’ remarks as “dog whistles,” and said Republicans were poised to target Black representation across Mississippi’s political system. He also said moves by Mississippi Republicans to redraw maps would likely be met with litigation.

“When people say race no longer matters, while simultaneously redrawing districts, weakening protections and targeting Black voting power, we must call it what it is: hypocrisy, moral decay and political cowardice disguised as constitutional principle,” Taylor said. “The same forces framing America as suddenly colorblind are the same forces that continue manipulating systems to dilute Black voices and Black communities working together to make sure that their issues are heard.”

Taylor also vowed Democrats would mobilize to counter Republicans’ “power grab.” On Wednesday, voting rights advocates are set to host a rally at the Jackson Convention Center in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent rulings and subsequent calls to redraw Mississippi’s electoral maps. Attendees scheduled to appear include Thompson, NAACP President Derrick Johnson, Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate Scott Colom and the daughter of the late Medgar Evers, Reena Evers-Everette.

“We will continue organizing, we will continue educating, mobilizing and building leadership in every corner of Mississippi, from the Delta to the Coast, from Jackson to the smallest rural community. Every church house and every college campus,” Taylor said. “Our fight is not over, and in many ways it’s just the beginning.”

A federal judge has again delayed the trial of the Madison man accused of setting fire to Mississippi’s largest synagogue, this time to Aug. 3. 

U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate granted a second request from Stephen Spencer Pittman’s federal public defender for more time to review evidence in the case. Wingate signed the order Monday, and it appeared in the federal court’s electronic records Tuesday.

Pittman, who usually goes by his middle name, is facing three federal charges: arson, damage to religious property and using fire to commit a felony for allegedly burning the Beth Israel Congregation synagogue in northeast Jackson in January.

If convicted of all charges, he could face up to 60 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. 

Pittman has pleaded not guilty to all counts. He is accused of breaking into the house of worship and dousing a lobby in gasoline before setting it on fire. The blaze charred parts of the building and left smoke damage throughout.

Pittman remains in jail as he awaits trial, despite the efforts of his attorney, Michael Scott. Scott had previously successfully requested to move Pittman’s trial from April 6 to June 1. Federal prosecutors have not opposed Scott’s motions. 

State and federal prosecutors indicted Pittman within days of his arrest by law enforcement at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. Pittman was being treated for burns just a few hours after the synagogue fire. 

In addition to the federal charges, Pittman is facing a separate first-degree arson charge in state court that is enhanced under a Mississippi law punishing “offenses committed for discriminatory reasons.” 

In the weeks before the synagogue was attacked, Pittman began making antisemitic statements on social media and allegedly behaving in such a way that the “family pets were afraid” of him and his mother was considering “locking their bedroom doors at night,” an FBI agent testified at the February hearing. 

Beth Israel Congregation leaders recently revealed plans for rehabilitating the one-story brick building, with work that included sending away the Tree of Life for cleaning and restoration. The brass plaque commemorates milestones such as congregants’ birthdays and anniversaries.

Brenda Travis was 15 when she joined the Civil Rights Movement, deciding she could not “sit still and be silent.” She was subsequently beaten, jailed, expelled and ultimately sent away from Mississippi,

The McComb native, a self-described exile of the Mississippi movement, died Sunday at age 81.

When she was 10, the sheriff broke into her family’s house without knocking or a warrant and arrested her 13-year-old brother.

A vision flashed in her head of the photograph of Emmett Till’s beaten, battered and swollen body, she said in a 2007 interview posted to the Civil Rights Movement Archive website. “I became enraged and knew that one day I had to take a stand.”

That time began in 1961 when she was just 15, and she became the youth leader for Pike County’s NAACP. Local president C.C. Bryant had just welcomed Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader Bob Moses to the area.

“I joined the NAACP and became involved in the movement to get people to vote. “But they were afraid,” she said in a 2013 interview published in the Huffington Post.

SNCC began to teach Black Mississippians how they could vote. First, they had to pay a poll tax and then they had to pass the test given by circuit clerks. The test was supposed to center on the Mississippi Constitution, but Travis recalled that it sometimes became an absurd question like “How many grains are in a bag of rice?”

SNCC soon began a series of protests in McComb. After a sit-in at Woolworth’s in August 1961 resulted in two arrests, SNCC members gathered. Moses had been beaten for helping two Black men try to register to vote, and his head was wrapped in gauze.

“They were asking people to volunteer, because they wanted to keep the momentum going,” Travis recalled. “And it was at that point that I knew that I could not sit still and be silent. So I volunteered to go to jail.”

On Aug. 30, 1961, she and two other SNCC volunteers purchased tickets and sat at the “all-white” lunch counter inside the Greyhound Bus station.

She spent a month in jail. “The Movement trained us very well,” she recalled. “They trained us how to survive, how not to go stir crazy. … Our survival technique was prayer and singing. … We had the jailhouse rocking.”

When she was finally released, she learned that civil rights leader Herbert Lee had been killed for working with SNCC.

She also learned that Berglund High School had expelled her. She stormed to the school and led a walk-out of more than 100 students, who sang “We Shall Overcome” as they marched to city hall and knelt in prayer.

They were beaten and so were SNCC leaders who accompanied them — Moses, Chuck McDew and Bob Zellner — who were arrested for contributing to the delinquency of minors. Behind bars, Moses wrote, “This is Mississippi, the middle of the iceberg. … There is a tremor in the middle of the iceberg — from a stone that the builders rejected.” 

Students continued protesting by refusing to return to school until Travis was allowed to re-enroll. School officials expelled those students, too.

SNCC started its own high school for the students. Moses taught math, Dion Diamond handled science, and McDew informed students about history. 

“Nonviolent High” inspired the creation of “Freedom Schools” during 1964’s Freedom Summer. 

Travis was sent to Oakley Training School, a juvenile detention center near Raymond.

“People say, ‘Time heals all wounds,’ but that’s not true,” she recalled. “The wound may have a scab over it, but deep within, it’s still sore. It’s still painful. When I was placed in reformatory school, nobody knew where I was, not even my attorney.”

She was released after six and a half months when she agreed to leave Mississippi. She finished high school in Connecticut and later attended the Tony Taylor School of Business in California.

“I still carry the blood-stained banner, and one day it will be all right,” she recalled in the 2007 interview.

Six years later, she started the Brenda Travis Historical Education Foundation in McComb and wrote a memoir, “Mississippi’s Exiled Daughter: How My Civil Rights Baptism Under Fire Shaped My Life.”

A half-century after the protest, district officials honored the protesting students and awarded Travis, a longtime civil rights veteran, an honorary degree.

“You know what the beauty of it is?” she told The Associated Press. “They made a scapegoat of me, but the students continued to come.”

Mississippi Today Ideas is a platform for thoughtful Mississippians to share their ideas about our state’s past, present and future. Opinions expressed in guest essays are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of Mississippi Today. You can read more about the section here.     

Across the country, resistance to data centers is rising even as plans are steadily being made to build new ones.

According to the Pew Research Center, a majority of new data centers — 67% — are being built in rural areas. And three-quarters of those are in Midwestern and Southern towns, including more than 20 in Mississippi, according to Baxtel, which does data center research. The Mississippi date centers include smaller data centers and hyperscale centers that are used for cloud computing and AI and generate the most controversy

The negative effects have not gone unnoticed. A planned xAI  data center in Southaven in DeSoto County, for example, is reportedly terrorizing the community with high levels of noise and air pollution, and residents are now regretting its existence.

Other factors that could lead to community resistance of data centers include the depletion of water systems and the increased energy costs to consumers. When you dig a little deeper, you begin to see how data centers are built on exploitation that goes far beyond small-town USA.

Data centers are both products and producers of wars that kill people and destroy the planet on a global scale. The rapid expansion of these data centers requires raw materials, especially fossil fuels — resources often obtained through violence —  and they fuel a technology that is increasingly used to commit war crimes.

Fossil fuels provide almost 60% of the power for data centers, especially for “emergency generators.” AI data centers run almost 24/7, so these “emergency” generators are consistently operating.

Control over fossil fuels, of course, is a driving factor behind the U.S. regime change efforts in Iran, Venezuela and other resource-rich regions. And the extraction of other needed minerals — like silicon, gallium, lithium and cobalt — requires both the destabilization of the sovereign regions in which they are found and inhumane mining practices, including the use of child labor.

Then there is the question of the moral and ethical use of generative AI. The expansion of data centers comes at a time when AI and LLMs (large language models) are increasingly being used by the Pentagon for militarism domestically and internationally.

The Pentagon recently agreed to massive deals with both Palantir and OpenAI. The employment of AI in military operations has already resulted in war crimes. For instance, Anthropic’s Claude was used in the bombing of the girls’ school in Minab, Iran, which killed about 170 students and teachers. Do towns that pride themselves on family values want to be behind a killing machine capable of murdering young girls?

It’s easy to understand why the announcement of these data centers can seem like good news for areas facing dire economic conditions. Existing low-wage jobs are difficult to survive on. But the evidence suggests data centers create very few local jobs in the towns where they’re built. Should this small number of jobs come at the expense of people and the future of our planet?

The state officials brokering these deals with tech companies could instead work on bringing jobs that design, install and maintain renewable energy systems to replace fossil fuel reliance. They could sign contracts with companies that manage and protect the beautiful natural ecosystems, habitats and biodiversity that often surround rural towns.

We need jobs that sustain the heartbeat of the Midwest and the charm and hospitality of the South — not jobs in an industry that terrorizes communities and kills people.

Data centers are not just toxic installations in communities’ backyards. They are a driving force behind wars and instability, and they keep American workers tied to the endless cycle of wars for fossil fuels.

In defense of the planet, our communities, and communities around the world, I hope urban and rural communities alike can unite to stop data center projects  — especially across the Midwest and the South, where there is so much beauty and love to protect.

Rural communities’ future is not AI. We should be investing in what makes us great: the people and the land.

Melissa Garriga is the communications and media analysis manager for CODEPINK. She was born and raised in Mississippi, where she continues to live and work. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.

House Democratic Leader Robert Johnson of Natchez says that as states across the nation become embroiled over racial and partisan gerrymandering of voting districts, he believes now they’ll know “what it’s like to be in Mississippi” with its long struggles with voting rights and drawing district lines. What other states see as unprecedented political battle, Johnson said, “We call Tuesday.”

This article is the first in a series on Mississippians sharing their thoughts on the new gerrymandering push embroiling Mississippi, the South and the nation.

Inside a tin-roofed shed on a grassy stretch along Dentville Road in Hazlehurst, Michael Watts’ grandmother did something she had never done before – she voted.

It was 1987, and Betty Watts had been too fearful to vote for her entire adult life. Polling taxes, literacy tests and intimidation aimed at deterring Black people from voting persisted until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, when Betty Watts was middle-aged, and vestiges of Jim Crow and more subtle voter suppression lingered.

When Betty Watts was in her 60s, a white Democrat named Ray Mabus ran for governor promising that Mississippi would “never be last again.” The prospect of ousting adherents to a movement that took pride in “standing athwart history” propelled Betty Watts to the polls for the first time.

Mabus would go on to become the 60th governor of Mississippi, securing almost 90% of the Black vote, which included the late Betty Watts. The memory of his grandmother voting for the first time still lingers in Michael Watts’ memory. It resurfaced weeks ago when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act and opened the door for states such as Mississippi to eliminate majority Black electoral districts.

Despite having the highest percentage of Black residents of any state in the country, Mississippi has no Black statewide elected officials and only one Black member of Congress, whose seat Republicans now have in their sights as a result of the Supreme Court ruling.

The ruling in the Louisiana v. Callais case places Mississippi and other Southern states at the center of a national partisan and racial political battle over redistricting.

The ruling has also prompted some Mississippians to grapple with questions over race and political representation in a state that’s home to people who lived through a period of widespread voter suppression targeting Black residents, or had family members who did. Such controversies aren’t only a distant relic of history.

As recently as last year, a George W. Bush-appointed federal judge ruled that Mississippi’s Supreme Court districts diluted the Black vote and ordered them redrawn. But now the legal landscape has changed, and some Mississippians worry about the diminishment of hard-won progress in voting rights and fairness.

‘That’s crazy’

President Donald Trump has urged Mississippi officials to redraw the state’s four congressional districts as part of his national push for Republican states to flip Democratic districts to the GOP in this year’s federal midterm elections.

In the Deep South, where partisanship and race are intertwined, this poses the specter of undoing decades of civil rights gains in voting.

Republican Gov. Tate Reeves, a devoted ally of Trump, has called off a special session he initially ordered to redraw state Supreme Court districts in light of the Callais decision, which could signal the state is unlikely to take the step of redrawing congressional maps before the 2026 midterms. But in a radio interview, Reeves vowed the state would redraw lines to oust Rep. Bennie Thompson, the lone Democrat and lone Black member of the state’s congressional delegation.

“The tenure of Congressman Bennie Thompson reigning terror on the 2nd Congressional District is over,” Reeves said. “It’s not a question of if. It’s a question of when.”

In Mississippi, the impact of the Supreme Court decision is almost certain to trickle down to the state and local level, as the decision significantly narrows how courts can require states to account for race in redistricting. The majority-white, Republican-dominated Legislature has already formed special committees in both chambers to consider redistricting, putting some legislative seats held by Black Democrats at risk.

Now, as Watts contemplates the effort to redraw lines and oust Black Democrats from office, he remembers that day nearly four decades ago, watching his grandmother vote for the first time. What stands out is the potential eradication of all the progress made in Mississippi to increase Black representation in elected offices.

“It kind of hurts to see how, in my lifetime, all of that is gone,” Watts said. “My grandmother was in her 60s, voting for the first time when I was 8 years old. And that’s just, that’s crazy.”

Betty Watts had come from Carpenter, Mississippi, and his grandfather, Tom, from Utica. They spent their lives as sharecroppers and met while picking cotton. When the Watts family later moved to Hazlehurst, they washed clothes in an iron pot out back and left them to dry outside. If it rained and the laundry wouldn’t dry, Betty Watts would hang her grandson’s clothes near their wood stove, and Michael Watts would go to school smelling of smoke. The family home had a five-gallon bucket in lieu of a toilet.

These material conditions and the burdens they imposed on daily life made voting a distant concern, Michael Watts said. When elections were discussed in the Watts household, it was often due to the fear they induced.

The specter of poll taxes and literacy tests, even after they were banned, instilled in Betty and Tom Watts a sense that they wouldn’t measure up to the standards imposed on those who exercised their right to vote.

“She didn’t want to do it because she was afraid she was going to fail them,” Watts said of his grandmother.

In 1987, Watts’ mother explained that poll taxes and literacy tests were gone, which helped coax Betty to the polls. But for Michael Watts’ late grandfather, Tom Watts, the fear would be insurmountable.

He never voted.

Michael Watts has a different fear — that the political representation in his home state will begin to look more like it did before Betty Watts summoned the courage to vote for the first time in the shed on Dentville Road.

“We’re going backwards,” Watts said. “That is not what the voters need. Their leaders are getting chosen for them. That’s not how it’s supposed to work.”

‘People are waking up’

Public opinion among Black Mississippians is not monolithic. That’s part of the argument made by Republicans like Reeves, who said federal law before the Callais decision engaged “in the offensive and demeaning assumption that Americans of a particular race, because of their race, think alike and share the same interests and preferences.”

The overwhelming majority of Black people in Mississippi vote for Democrats. But in the wake of the Callais decision, some have complicated feelings about the incumbents who represent their communities, even if they disagree with Republicans’ plans to gerrymander districts.

Bridgette Morgan, 37, is an attorney from Greenville. The predominantly Black Mississippi Delta is one of the poorest parts of the state, and many of its elected officials say the needs of their region are overlooked by the Republican-controlled Legislature.

Other areas have more hospitals and more taxpayer-funded special projects. The lion’s share of economic incentives and private investment have flowed east of Interstate 55, which divides the Delta from the rest of the state.

With that reality in mind, Morgan, who is Black and considers herself an independent, moved to Jackson and got involved with politics. She saw the city as the “playground of civil rights.”

“I was enamored by it,” Morgan said.

But she quickly became disillusioned with the area’s leaders, most of whom were Black Democrats. Morgan ran unsuccessfully for Hinds County Court judge, a defeat she said was brought about by opposition from Jackson’s entrenched political class.

Morgan believes some incumbents in heavily Black districts have failed to deliver for the constituents who elected them, which exacerbates the apathy that leads to lower turnout in these same districts.

“They’re apathetic at this point about this outcry about redistricting,” Morgan said. “People are waking up to some of our own leaders taking advantage, and we’re not getting what we voted for.”

A debate has long raged between white Republicans and Black Democrats about whether Mississippi’s longstanding issues with poor health outcomes and poverty in places such as Jackson and the Delta persist due to disinvestment from the state or mismanagement by local officials.

Unlike Watts, Morgan’s grandparents died when she was young, so the historical memory of race-based voter suppression never loomed as large.

She wants to see increased political competition in majority Black areas of the state, where she believes politicians have grown accustomed to getting re-elected without much effort or improving the lives of their constituents.

But she is quick to affirm that she does not want Black representation intentionally drawn out of existence, whether such an effort is driven by racism or partisanship.

“I am not for intentionally drawing out Black representation,” she said. “If that’s what the whole thing is — to keep any type of person who is Black from office — I have an issue with it. Of course, we want to be represented by people who look like us. But you can look like us and still not have our best interests at heart.”

Partisan gerrymandering is ‘just as bad as any other kind’

Melody Worsham, 64, grew up in Ocean Springs, the daughter of a military father stationed in Vietnam while the family lived in Mississippi.

Worsham, who is white, remembers hearing about Black neighborhoods on “the other side of the tracks,” and stories of difficulty setting up voting precincts in these areas.

When Worsham was in third grade, Black students arrived at her school through busing and desegregation orders, and she befriended a girl who sat behind her in class. On the playground, they once touched each other’s skin, curious whether it would feel different.

“We just wanted to see what we had in common,” Worsham said.

She also remembers “whites only” signs in downtown Ocean Springs persisting on some storefront windows into the late 1970s and early ’80s.

For Worsham, who now works in the mental health field and lives in Biloxi, these visceral memories cannot be divorced from the current calls to redraw electoral maps and potentially eliminate Black representation in service of a partisan agenda.

“It’s disgusting how they’ll go, ‘Oh, see, we’ve been wrong all this time, and we’ve got to correct the egregious sins of our past.’ And it’s like, no — you’re just trying to commit another sin that you have rationalized,” Worsham said.

But Worsham also has reservations about how map drawing was practiced before the Callais ruling.

Protecting minority representation should not uphold the assumption that race always predicts political affiliation.

“We’ve got to stop assuming that all Black people are Democrats,” she said. “I hang out with Black people all the time, and not all of them are Democrats.”

Worsham would like to see maps drawn by population count and geography alone.

“The partisan gerrymandering,” Worsham said, “is just as bad as any other kind.”

A judge has dismissed a lawsuit by former Jackson State University President William Bynum Jr. against the university and the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees, ending a six-year legal battle. 

Bynum, who was JSU president from July 2017 to February 2020, sued the university and IHL in Hinds County Circuit Court alleging that the state’s college board violated his contract after he resigned. Bynum resigned after he was arrested in a prostitution sting.  

Bynum remained on staff at Jackson State as a professor until April 2020. A month after he filed the lawsuit, university leaders fired him. In the lawsuit, IHL and JSU countered that Bynum’s contract never granted him tenure at the university.

Bynum argued in the lawsuit that through a clause in his contract, he could resign or be fired as president but remain employed at the university as a full professor.

Senior Status Judge James D. Bell noted in his decision that the IHL Board of Trustees’ policies stipulate that after completing five years of service, a college president could be granted tenure as a professor at the board’s discretion. 

But Bell ruled, Bynum did not serve five years as JSU president and did not qualify for tenure. 

Nothing in the contract gave Bynum a right to tenure, Bell wrote. “Upon his resignation, he became an at-will employee. The entire premise of his Complaint is based upon a misreading or misunderstanding of the plain words of his contract.” 

Bell also dismissed Bynum’s complaint that he was entitled to punitive damages because IHL’s and JSU’s actions were “‘fraudulent, egregious, in bad faith and in total disregard for’ his actions.” 

Charles Winfield, an attorney who represents Jackson State and IHL, and Bynum’s lawyer, Dennis Sweet III, did not respond to a request for comment.

State Rep. Jeff Hale, a Republican lawmaker from Hernando, was arrested and charged by the Hernando Police Department on Friday night with driving under the influence, reckless driving, speeding and disorderly conduct. 

Online police records show Hale was booked into the DeSoto County detention facility, posted a bond of $1,500 and that he has been released from custody. The online records also say that this is Hale’s first DUI charge.

Hale did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It’s unclear if he has an attorney representing him. The police department also did not respond to a request for comment. 

Hale told the DeSoto Times-Tribune in a statement that he received a phone call from his son and daughter-in-law saying that his granddaughter was unconscious and that they were traveling to the hospital for treatment. 

He further told the news outlet that while he was traveling to meet his family at the hospital, he was “providing instructions through my wife over the phone in an effort to help my granddaughter.” 

He also apologized to the police department and the sheriff’s department for his actions, but said he was not under the influence of alcohol or any other intoxicants. 

Hale has been in the Legislature since 2016, and he currently serves as the chairman of the House Energy Committee.