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Category: BWC

BWC

One Crop At A Time: School Farms Target Food Insecurity, ‘Supermarket Redlining’

When Noxubee County schools closed in March 2020, kindergarten teacher Latoya Chamberlain and other staff helped pass out school lunches at satellite sites across the county. Now, some are wondering if school-based agriculture is a solution for high food insecurity in the majority-Black, rural East Mississippi county. Torsheta Jackson explores how the strategy used elsewhere might work in her home county.

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Woman in black long sleeve top that looks like smooth leather, a bold silver necklace, and silver hair that frames her face. She's sitting against a brown background
BWC

Not Another Child: Mother Turns Grief Into Solutions for Gun Violence, Grieving Families 

Oresa Napper-Williams is the founder of Not Another Child, a nonprofit organization that she founded after her son, Andrell Daron Napper, was killed by gun violence in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 2007. One mission of her work is to ensure that parents who lost children to violence are treated with respect and dignity, and get the resources they need. She both collaborates with NYPD on violence prevention and is frank about problems within policing, including respect for Black community members.

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BWC

‘He Was a Good Son’: COVID-19 Amplified Jackson Violence, Inequities for Black Families 

Found dead on the side of a road in South Jackson, Tramaine Green was one of 128 homicides in Jackson in 2020. In her overview introducing the Hinds County chapter of our “(In)Equity and Resilience: Black Women Women and Systemic Barriers” collaboration with the Jackson Advocate, reporter Aliyah Veal tells one family’s story of navigating COVID-19, gun violence and being ignored by police through the pandemic—and the pandemic-magnified causes of crime and inequities that have long affected their path to success.

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4-County Electric building exterior
BWC

Co-ops Stepping In to Solve Rural Internet Inequity in Noxubee, Nearby Counties

FASTnet, a for-profit subsidiary of the not-for-profit 4-County Electric Power Association, is providing broadband service to rural areas around the Golden Triangle area of Mississippi. COVID-19 magnified the disparities many Black families faced with little or no reliable internet access as they tried to continue their children’s education from home. Federal dollars should now boost the cooperative solution across Mississippi, barring roadblocks.

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Noxubee County mind map
BWC

How and Why: Behind the Scenes of the ‘Black Women, Systemic Barriers, COVID-19’ Project

In this Jackson Advocate-Mississippi Free Press collaboration, the BWC Project team has spent a year planning, reporting, hosting solution circles of Black women and doing deep historic research on, so far, three counties. Our big, hairy goal is to show why COVID-19 initially affected Black women in our state harder than any other group including even Black men.

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An abandoned and broken Central Academy yellow bus parked under a large tree
BWC

White Flight in Noxubee County: Why School Integration Never Happened

Central Academy was one of Mississippi’s dozens of segregation academies that opened in the 1960s in anticipation of a final Supreme Court mandate, while many others were “founded in 1970” soon after the Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education decision finally ended legal public-school segregation. They demanded and often got public funding even as they excluded Black children and openly taught racism to many of today’s prominent white Mississippians and decision-makers.

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