Letitia Johnson, a candidate for Mississippi Senate District 26, spoke with the Mississippi Free Press on Nov. 13 about her views on the issues affecting voters in the district, which includes parts of Hinds and Madison counties.
She is in a Dec. 2 runoff for a special election to replace former Sen. John Horhn, whom voters elected as mayor of Jackson in June 2025. You can read MFP’s Q&A with her opponent, Kamesha Mumford, here.
Johnson is an attorney and the Managing Partner of Singleton Schreiber’s Southeastern Region, with a focus on work related to civil rights, the environment, wildfires and personal injury. She lives in Jackson and is also the former president of the Jackson Public Schools Board of Trustees.
Reporter Shaunicy Muhammad’s Q&A with Johnson is presented below with light edits for clarity.
Shaunicy Muhammad: Why are you running for office?
Letitia Johnson: I care about this district. I’ve been here for 30 years. I’ve raised my children here, and it’s not the same as it was 30 years ago. For instance, when I graduated from college, there were lots of jobs. It was easy for me to find a job. I worked at Solomon Smith Barney for five years downtown, and downtown was bustling. It’s not the same state. It’s not the same (Jackson). And I think that the power to change those things is in the hands of the people.
You ran on a campaign focused on education, safe neighborhoods, health care and economic security. Why did you choose those as your four priorities?
So, education, of course, is near and dear to my heart. I’ve educated five children. All of them are products of (Jackson Public Schools). I see education as fundamental to democracy and people’s ability to move upwards. I served on the Jackson Public Schools board for five years.
All of those (four priorities) are sort of interconnected, right? Our economy also helps that process. You have to have jobs available once you have children educated and ready for the workforce. And then you want them raised in a safe environment, and in order for them to be whole, they have to have access to health care. So what I’m really saying is that I’m advocating for a healthy community. And these are all the components of a healthy community.
Right now, I feel like our communities are falling below standard. So with my efforts in the Senate and the community being active and fighting back and holding elected officials accountable, I think we can get back to where we were and surpass that.
How did your role on the JPS board prepare you for being a state senator?
So the work on the school board was intense. I was appointed to the board, and then the state decided that it would take over JPS. After a lot of back and forth and collaboration, JPS was spared.
I was reassigned to the new board, and we had to know all the standards. We had to hold the district accountable, and we had to find a superintendent. After we found a superintendent, we had to do a strategic plan and we had to figure out how we were going to raise the district from an F to anything. And we were able to do all of those things. We came from an F to a C.
I was the school board president during COVID. The difficulty of that is that there were so many components and so many things that you had to take into consideration. You had to take students into consideration. You had to take the potential loss of knowledge into consideration. You had to take the scores into consideration, but you also had to take into consideration parents and grandparents. Those were not easy challenges, but we had to do a lot of balancing.
There were difficult choices, but we were able to make them. And so the school board work taught me that collaboratively, if people are focused on the betterment of the unit or the district or the community, and we’re working together, that we can accomplish great things.
You said that you are against efforts to use public funding for private schools. Tell me more about that.
I feel very strongly about what I think education does for the average citizen. I think it’s fundamental to our democracy. But that education system is suffering in all sorts of ways, and mostly it’s because of underfunding. So, to take more funds from the school district would be detrimental. And when I say detrimental, I am saying that I think it would end the public school system as we know it.
JPS would have to write a check for over a million dollars every year to go to charter schools that were doing no better than JPS schools, but they had less regulation, and that doesn’t seem fair. The reason why we have a public education system is for the public good. So I don’t think any of us should be able to opt out of that or get our money back. I don’t have children in JPS anymore because my last child has graduated, but my tax money should go to that public education system for the next generation.
You’ve called the state’s grocery tax a “regressive” tax. Why?
Because it’s a tax on poor people. I mean, it’s burdensome to the people who need those dollars the most. I’m a middle-class person. Take your state income tax from me so that someone living on a restricted income, someone that’s disabled or someone that’s elderly or a family of five—two parents and three children—aren’t having to make ends meet for their basic necessities.
Part of the district includes northwest Jackson and Hinds County. What do you think of JXN Water, and what should happen to Jackson’s water system when the third-party administrator leaves?
My prediction is that once this third-party leaves, Jackson’s water system is going to face more troubles and more issues. Our infrastructure hasn’t completely been replaced, nor has the water system been completely replaced. So, what I feel is going to happen is that all of this has been a Band-Aid, and we’re going to find ourselves back in a hard position.
Would you support a regional board taking over responsibility for the water system?
No. For the last 20 years, resources have been sucked out of the city. I don’t think that any system should continue to suck out of its capital city. There should be more investment. The water system should be completely revamped—I’m talking about new. And more money should be given to take care of the infrastructure in the city.
What can you do in your role as a state senator to stop brain drain?
I think that we need to think creatively about building our economy and making sure that when kids enter the job market, there’s something for them to do.
I also think that we have a problem with letting corporations come into our communities and make demands, and we sort of give in to those demands without ensuring that they’re going to bring the number of jobs (and that) they’re going to make the community investment.
I think that we can do this by contractually holding them accountable. In order for them to get the tax incentives that we give out freely now, they have to complete certain tasks or they have to return the funds. I think just like public officials should be held accountable, corporations should be held accountable.
Which specific corporations have you seen come in and take advantage of tax incentives but not provide an adequate number of jobs?
There are lots of them. I think the data centers are one. All the information that I’ve read about data centers is that they only create between 20 and 100 sustainable jobs. Everything else is temporary. And temporary is not good enough—especially not to combat the brain drain.
How can Jackson stop the flow of businesses leaving the capital city and attract new business?
So I think that one thing that Jackson did—and it’s a combination of the last administration and this administration—was the (National) Folk Festival. I think we need more activities like that to bring people downtown to remind them that we do have a capital city and it is functioning.
But there also has to be a huge investment in infrastructure. And that’s got to come from the state. That’s got to come from, you know, the appropriations from the Senate and from the House. Without that, Jackson is going to suffer, and businesses are going to leave.
So the state has to have some goodwill in order for Jackson to survive.
How have your current position or previous roles prepared you to be a state senator?
So I went to law school with three kids. I had one in law school and had one during the bar. So by the time I got done, I had five kids. I started working at the (Mississippi) Attorney General’s office at DHS. I was assigned to do parental termination. So I traveled the state, terminating parental rights. And that work transferred into doing work where I would do investigations on behalf of the court.
What I’d learned from that is how lots of Mississippians live—the severity of poverty, the severity of lack of education, and) the cycles that happen in rural and poor communities. And these are all things that I feel like we control. These aren’t things that are caused by the people themselves or the circumstances that surround them.
Going back to those healthy communities, these unhealthy communities are caused by the things around them. When I left that, I practiced family law for a while, while my children were really little, so that I could be active in their education. Then I went on to start a bankruptcy practice. I fell in love with bankruptcy because I felt like it was a way to help the average family. My very first clients were a police officer and a teacher. And they had two kids, and they were still struggling, and there was nothing abnormal about their lives.
That helped me to understand that again, this is systemic and not because of bad choices. I think a lot of times we want to blame failures on individuals when it really is a system that’s failing people.
I am the managing partner for the region, and I have fallen in love with environmental law. We have a case down in Gloster, Mississippi. I’m sure you’re familiar with Drax and all of the horrible things they’ve done to that community, and don’t want to be held accountable.
What’s happening all around the country, and particularly in the South, is that corporations are finding poor communities that lack the voice to take advantage of, to pollute, to misuse their resources, because they feel like these people are the least resistant.
Data centers are among them. But I see people all across the south rising up and speaking up for their communities, and I’m hoping that I can encourage this community to do the same.
All of the jobs that I’ve had require intellect. They require hard work, they require all the things. But what I’ve gotten from them is empathy and compassion and an understanding of how systems work and how they don’t always work for regular people.
What perspective do you have on policing or public safety in the district?
A lot of it goes back to these healthy communities, right? So there are two things that we have to do. We have to address the crime issue as it is now and whether that (solution) is, temporarily, policing. But I also think that building healthy communities and supporting communities will also help solve the crime problem.
But that takes everybody being involved. It takes community members to go to the HOA meetings and hold their neighbors accountable. It also takes police officers to have training to know how to deal with community members like their neighbors, you know. Then, with education and health and the availability of jobs, we’ll wind up in a place where people have the opportunity to make the American dream happen for them.
Do you have any last-minute efforts planned to get in front of voters and talk about your priorities ahead of the runoff?
Oh yeah, absolutely. Saturday morning we’re doing a sweet potato drop in Edwards. I’ll be there and come down to the Tougaloo community cleanup. Then I’ll go to the Jackson State game and then there’s some activity at night and, of course, then I’ll start visiting churches on Sunday.
I will also be canvassing daily and making phone calls and reaching out to community members and attending HOA meetings and all of those things. That’s the good part of this process because the more I talk to people, the more I understand what they want and what they need and what they see. So this has been a wonderful experience for me. It’s been a learning experience and I’m grateful for it.
Mississippians will vote in the runoffs for Senate districts 24 and 26 on Tuesday, Dec. 2, 2025. Any eligible registered voter in those districts who registered to vote in person and had their voter registration application postmarked at least 30 days ahead of the election can cast a ballot in the special runoff election.
Polls are open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Contact your local circuit clerk or election commissioners for polling place information. Voters must bring an accepted form of photo ID to the polls; if they do not have an accepted form of photo ID, voters can get a free voter ID from their local circuit clerk before Election Day. For more information, visit sos.ms.gov/yall-vote.