The Columbia-Marion County Public Library has temporarily removed “Heartstopper” from its book shelves after complaints about LGBTQ+ content. The library’s board of directors temporarily pulled the books from the shelves to review them.
Heather Peerboom’s efforts toward inspiring her young students to enjoy reading earned her the Mississippi Humanities Council’s Humanities Teacher of the Year award at the organization’s 2022 Public Humanities Awards ceremony.
“So many people tell us that we represent the kind of excellence and honesty they didn’t quite think is possible in Mississippi,” Kimberly Griffin writes. “Myth-making and half-truths serve the powerful and encourage the powerless to lobby against themselves or just plain give up. I’m asking you not to give up on Mississippi.”
Mississippi State Auditor Shad White is endorsing proposed legislation to ban educators from teaching “anti-racist” ideas in schools and accused libraries in the state of stocking “racist” books that criticize “whiteness.”
Donna Ladd writes that young adults reading a book that explains the origins of the Klan in Pulaski, Tenn., and how it became a white-terrorist “Invisible Empire” under Nathan Bedford Forrest is unacceptable in white suburbs in Kansas, we learn. They don’t think teenagers can handle the truth about white terrorist and vigilante groups burning schools and killing and beating teachers here in Mississippi and beyond to stop Black advancement.
After completing this year’s application, Andrea Foreman said she wasn’t confident that she would win, but she felt that she’d at least get second or third place. She submitted two books, poetry and an essay for the application compared to the one piece of writing submitted the year prior. “In the back of my head, I was kinda anxious because I really needed the scholarship, and I needed to win,” she expressed.
We are unusual in Mississippi as women journalism leaders and visionaries when it comes to Mississippi’s potential, but it is our home, and we will fight for it. All of you have shown that you will, too.
Mississippi Journalism and Education Group is a a 501(c)(3) nonprofit media organization (EIN 85-1403937) for the state, devoted to going beyond partisanship and publishing solutions journalism for the Magnolia State and all of its people.
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