University of Mississippi football players marched in Oxford and others in Tallahatchie County on the 65th anniversary of Emmett Till’s murder: “We have to be able to show love even when hate is brought to us. We have to be able to create change where this is no change.”
Black students and faculty at the University of Mississippi explain how administrators, donors and alumni can step boldly into an anti-racist future with transparency, publicly stated solutions and without depending on UM community members of color to do the heavy lifting. They love the university and want to see it reach its, and thus the state’s, full diverse, equitable and inclusive potential.
Mississippi’s public schools “would be miles ahead of where we are now” in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic “had schools not been dreadfully underfunded,” The Parents’ Campaign Executive Director Nancy Loome says, days after the Legislature overrode the governor’s funding veto.
Even as Gov. Tate Reeves pushes K-12 schools to resume traditional in-class instruction, Mississippi is experiencing a surge in COVID-19 cases among school age children.
Mississippi State University’s campus honors two prominent Confederate leaders, Stephen D. Lee and James Z. George, who helped keep Black Mississippians from voting and students of all races studying revisionist, false history about the Confederacy for generations. Is it time to confront those symbols?
Despite death threats, Tiffon Moore is pushing to move the Confederate statue in front of the Neshoba County Courthouse. Her cousin Malek and her mother Tiffany, all descended from slaves, are helping.
LGBTQ Fund of Mississippi founder Sammy Moon considered moving away with his partner amid a raft of anti-LGBTQ legislation, but decided to stay and use his experience in philanthropy to make it a better place. The fund envisions a Mississippi in which “all LGBTQ Mississippians will live safely, openly and without alienation”—the opposite of Moon’s own experiences growing up.
IHL voted June 18 to move the University of Mississippi’s beleaguered rebel statue, after years of efforts by students and others with much less reverence for the Confederacy than Charles Scott and the women who erected the statue to celebrate the “lost cause” of white supremacy.
“I wanted to be able to sell to somebody like me when I was younger. I live in the middle of a 1,000 acres of cattle, and I was having to go to Walmart myself and buy the crappy meat,” Jaclyn Rogers of Honestly Beef says. “I wanted to be able to sell to the local people, not just the restaurants or the people who had the money to buy a whole cow.”
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