FOCUS: #MSWelfare/TANF Scandal • Jackson Water • Abortion • Race & Racism • Policing • Incarceration • Housing & Evictions
Just over an hour into the speeches at Moss Hill, a shot rang out. It touched off four days of violence in which white vigilantes and local leaders murdered as many as 50 Black residents of Hinds County. Thus began the Clinton Massacre—terrorism that upended Hinds County and Mississippi. Here is the real story of what began on Sept. 4, 1875.
U.S. House Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Black Democrat, was the lone Mississippi member to vote in favor of removing monuments devoted to white supremacists from the halls of the nation’s Capitol today. A 285-120 majority passed the bill, House Resolution 3005, this evening with all 120 nay votes coming from Republican members, including two from Mississippi.
The Poor People’s Campaign’s “Third Reconstruction” resolution highlights what it calls a congressional failure to elevate the poor through social programs, voting-rights expansion and the elimination of systemic racism. It details suggested solutions for each of these problems, including an increase in the long-stagnant federal minimum wage, provisions to expand insurance coverage, a large-scale reduction of student debt and prison reform.
It’s like it happened yesterday. Fifty-five years ago, I was watching the news in my parents’ home in Gary, Ind., when I saw the news that James Meredith had been shot. I couldn’t know then that some day I’d be married to the man gunned down in the middle of a Mississippi road for demanding equality for Black Americans.
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The Mississippi Free Press is a project of the Mississippi Journalism and Education Group, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit journalism organization (EIN 85-1403937).