James Lap Baker was a stickler for proper grammar. It got under his skin when anyone or anything misused the English language. Take the Liberty Mutual Insurance commercial, for example. Linda Baker, his younger sister, remembers him bringing up his problems with the commercial whenever they’d speak on the phone.
“Every time I talked to him, it was always, ‘Linda, have you seen that commercial about Liberty Mutual?’ And in my mind, I’m saying, ‘Yes. The last time you talked to me, we talked about this.’ It just irked him that the commercial would say ‘Liberdy,’” Baker told the Mississippi Free Press.
It bothered Lap so much that he was tempted to write the company a letter about it, telling them that they needed to stop airing the commercial with the mispronunciation of the word. Linda said her older brother often wrote letters to express his views and opinions on things.
“Everytime I see that commercial, I think of James,” she added. “He would always call my attention or alert me to other things like that.”
Linda was the baby of her four siblings, with her and Lap being five years apart. She remembers a story her mother told her: When she was born, Lap was so jealous that he wasn’t the baby anymore that he tried to pull her through the bars on her crib. Despite this, the two grew up to be closer, raised in a household of 15 including a few aunts, uncles and a grandmother in Picayune, Mississippi.
“(James) was someone that was old-school; that’s how I would describe him,” she said of her brother. “He didn’t care too much about technology. He would say, ‘Don’t text me Linda. I like in-person calls.’ I would still text him and send him inspirational messages each day, which he would share with others.”
Lap was intelligent, often absorbing and retaining information and never really needing to study too much in high school or college. He was a people person and very perceptive of people, generally able to discern whether someone was sincere in their words and demeanor, Baker said. He wasn’t big on birthdays or holidays, though she still tried to make them special by sending cards and gift cards.
“ I would describe (James) as Burger King: have it his way, no other way,” his baby sister said. “When he speaks, everyone listens. He was admired by so many people. He was a person that spoke whatever was on his mind, and he did not put a politeness on his words. He just spoke it as it was.”
They come from a family that tends to live long, with their father passing away in his early 90s and their mother dying at 97 in 2019. So, when James Lap Baker passed away on Jan. 30, 2026, it came as a shock to the entire family, Linda said.
“I feel that a chain in our family has been broken. … I can tell you now that it’s a void. It is like a void that is indescribable. No words can express how I feel or are adequate enough to express my emotions because he is a brother that I truly love,” Baker explained.
‘Lap Don’t Play’
Renae Baker was scrolling through Facebook when she ran across a comment from Carl Thomas, a former student of her brother, James Lap Baker. For 24 years, James Lap Baker was an adjunct professor teaching urban studies at his alma mater, Jackson State University. She read the comment, harkening back to a moment in time where Baker questioned Thomas and a fellow student named Todd, who were both in the Sonic Boom of the South marching band, about why they hadn’t played a particular song.
“Why y’all ain’t played my homeboy daughter’s music yet?” Renae Baker said, read the comment thread.
“Who?” Carl questioned.
“Brandy,” Lap responded.
“Who is Brandy? We know her?” they questioned Lap Baker.
“Brandy Norwood. Her daddy played in the Boom. Y’all acting stupid, but y’all gone she become famous,” Baker warned his students.
In spring 1994, a few months later, Norwood’s song “I Wanna Be Down” played on the radio, peaking at no. 6 on Billboard Hot 100 and spending four weeks at no. 1 on the Hot R&B Singles chart.
“And just like that, Lap was right. He wasn’t just talking music. He was teaching us to pay attention, to recognize greatness early, to understand that the Boom family reaches far beyond the practice field,” Renae Baker said, pausing to apologize as her voice broke with tears.
The Pearl River County native was born James Aubrey Vincent “Lap” Baker on July 5, 1948, in Picayune, Mississippi. He received the nickname “Lap” from his cousin, Clinton, who took the name Floyd Dunlap, a drunk patron of their Uncle Leonard Bender Sr. ‘s barbershop. The nickname was meant to tease James, who didn’t like it at first, but he eventually adopted the moniker as his own.
“My brother (Charles) would call him Floyd Dunlap Pickle Juice Jr. The pickle juice came from the fact that my brother loved to eat pickles, but after a while of being mocked and teased, he adopted the name Lap as a part of his name,” Linda explained. “So practically everyone knows him as Lap Baker.”
Ironically, Floyd Dunlap, despite his drunkenness, was also known to be a man of high intellect, like James. Lap was incredibly talented, playing multiple sports such as football, baseball and basketball at George Washington Carver High School.
“ He was a jokester in the family. He would mimic our dad, and he would be joking at the family reunion,” Renae Baker told the Mississippi Free Press. “I remember him singing. His mom did sing in the choir, and (our) dad was a singer. We sung together back in the day. We used to sing ‘Endless Love’ together.”
Renae and James were half-siblings, sharing the same father, so they weren’t raised together. He was older than her and grew up in Picayune, while she grew up in Pearl. They became closer once he moved to Jackson and began attending Jackson State, where he majored in urban planning and pledged Omega Psi Phi fraternity.
“I know he was popular. I remember people telling me who doesn’t know Lap Baker because he was outspoken like our dad,” she recalled. “They knew me through him, and they’d say that’s Lap Baker sister, so nobody wanted to talk to me cause Lap didn’t play.”
‘He’s History’
James Lap Baker was widely known for being one of many survivors of the 1970 Gibbs-Green tragedy that took the lives of James Earl Green and Phillip Lafayette Gibbs while injuring 12 others. On May 14, 1970, Jackson police and Mississippi Highway Patrolmen walked onto campus and fired more than 500 rounds of ammunition into Alexander Hall, a women’s dormitory.
Lap Baker was standing across the street near the B.F. Roberts building on Jackson State University’s campus, near Green, when the shooting started. His firsthand account helped to change the narrative that the government put out that Jackson State students and a sniper initiated the shooting.
“It affected him so much that it became a part of his existence to never let anyone forget or erase that tragedy from their memory,” Linda Baker said. “I learned later on that it occurred at the same time as the killings at Kent State, but no one focused on the Black university. Everything was on the killings that had occurred at the white university.”
On May 4, 1970, Ohio National Guard members fired into a crowd of Kent State University demonstrators, killing four students and wounding nine students. The tragedy caused a student-led strike that forced hundreds of colleges and universities across the nation to close. Meanwhile, the tragedy at Jackson State merely forced the cancellation of the Class of 1970’s graduation ceremony.
“He worked to keep that memory alive and never erase it,” Linda said of her brother. “It caused a chain of events that changed the lives of young people. … It was terrible, but it did not stop him from continuing to grow in his knowledge and become the person that he was.”
After graduating from JSU, James Lap Baker received a full ride scholarship to attend San Jose State University, where in 1972 he became the first African American to receive a master’s degree in urban and regional planning. He then became San Jose’s first Black professional city planner before taking a position in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1974.
”I even came across a letter from the director of admissions or someone from San Jose telling him not to worry about whatever expense that he was going to incur, that they were going to waive that because they wanted him to enroll in the program,” Linda Baker recalled.
Three years later, Baker came back home to Mississippi and accepted a position as Director of Planning and Administration for the former Mississippi Health Systems Agency. There, he became the first African American to oversee the writing and development of the health plan for Mississippi until 1986. That year, he established the first Black professional planning firm in the history of the state, becoming president and founder of Comprehensive Planning Consultants.
From June 1996 to June 2013, James served as the director of planning and administration for the Hinds County Department of Public Works. He wrote the “Road and Bridge Maintenance and Construction Plan” and received grants totaling more than $10 million for the Hinds County Board of supervisors and his department.
He created the first surveillance system for illegal dumping and the first rubberized-asphalt project in Mississippi. He also created the Hinds County Waste Tire Program, the Hinds County Solid Waste Enforcement Officer Program and the Hinds County Scrap Metal Program before retiring from the Hinds County Department of Public Works in June 2013.
In 2013, he entered the political realm by running for the Hinds County District 4 supervisor seat, but he lost. He ran again in 2015, but lost in the Democratic primary. Despite his knowledge, his presence at supervisor’s meetings and the admiration people had for him, it still wasn’t enough to get him elected, Linda Baker explained.
“And I always saw that as they knew the force that they would have to reckon with if he were on the inside and not on the outside, as he was,” she said. “He’s history, and that history will continue to be echoed and spoken about for years to come.”
‘An Extraordinary Man’
An artistic man, James Lap Baker formed a music group with classmates and fellow vocalists James Staples and Willie Ray Norwood, father of singers Brandy and Ray J. The group debuted under the name Ray James & James in 1981, recording four songs for PolyGram Records as a tribute to Nat King Cole.
“They sang together, and then Willie Norwood got called into the music ministry in California, and that’s how the group kind of broke up,” Renae Baker said. “(James) just told Willie Norwood, ‘When God calls you, you gotta move. But he sang with many other groups, too.”
In 1987, Lap would go to record his first solo record “Sharing Love” under Lapco Records and Lapco Publishing Company. He would sing in different bands and perform at Suits, a former club in Jackson. He transitioned to singing gospel music as a member of Lynch Street CME Church’s inspirational and male choir.
He wrote poetry mostly about love, the foundation of everything that he did. In going through his things, Linda found a letter that he had written to Nikki Giovanni where he submitted some of his poems and she responded with feedback.
“I have spoken to Dr. Luckett at Jackson State where I want to take not only the collection that he had given to him, but others that I have found in his apartment as I cleaned it out,” Linda Baker said. “I would love to have a book of poetry published in his honor.”
In May 2021, the JSU Class of 1970 were able to don cap and gowns and receive their diplomas in a special graduation ceremony. Renae was the only sibling that could attend the ceremony as it took place amid the COVID-19 pandemic and most of James’ siblings lived out of state.
Linda Baker was wheelchair-bound after a fall two years prior and could not drive to make it, but she watched the stream and was there in spirit. When she looks at pictures of him at the event, she sees joy in her brother’s face mirroring that of a child. It’s a memory that will stay with her forever, she said.
“I have pictures of him, and every time I look at him in the yellowish gold gown and the hat, he just looked like a happy kid,” Linda remembered. “To have come to Jackson State from a single home and you’ve been in school all this time, (once) it’s time for graduation, what you’ve been working for, only to have the actual ceremony taken away, it was a lot.”
Renae Baker hopes people remember her brother as being loud and outspoken, a poet, a smart man, who loved to sing and loved the youth. “ He was an extraordinary, very smart man. Sometimes he thought he was my dad, and I allowed him to be that. He would always tell me to have a plan A, B, and sometimes C, and he would always encourage me,” she said fondly.
Her last conversation with her brother was a few days before his passing. They were discussing the winter storm and his power being out. Though she blamed herself at first, it took her days to get past that feeling and realize that it was just her brother’s time to go.
“When we were in our conversation, I would say, ‘I love you Lap.’ And he would say, “I love you too, Rita,’” Renae Baker said.
James Lap Baker leaves behind eight siblings, five of which are siblings through his father’s second marriage. He had two children: Pamela Renee Floyd, who previously passed away from leukemia, and Alegra Bird. He had three grandchildren and two great grandchildren. James’ legacy will be the eulogy that he lived, one filled with helping people and encouraging people to get an education, especially young Black men, Linda Baker said.
“I think his legacy will be being a mentor to young people, especially young Black men to stand up and be counted, to strive to be the best that you can because so often you are not given that opportunity of education,” she said. “We had to fight for that, so don’t take it for granted.”
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