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BWC Voices

The Love of Mississippi Women Restored Village COVID-19 Broke

Shanina Carmichael reflects on her experiences as a woman, mother and wife during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how the love from her village of Mississippi women continues to guide and uplift her despite the many challenges her family endured. “Losing access to schools, childcare providers and friend groups was more frightening to me than the disease itself,” Carmichael writes.

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BWC

‘He Was a Good Son’: COVID-19 Amplified Jackson Violence, Inequities for Black Families 

Found dead on the side of a road in South Jackson, Tramaine Green was one of 128 homicides in Jackson in 2020. In her overview introducing the Hinds County chapter of our “(In)Equity and Resilience: Black Women Women and Systemic Barriers” collaboration with the Jackson Advocate, reporter Aliyah Veal tells one family’s story of navigating COVID-19, gun violence and being ignored by police through the pandemic—and the pandemic-magnified causes of crime and inequities that have long affected their path to success.

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4-County Electric building exterior
BWC

Co-ops Stepping In to Solve Rural Internet Inequity in Noxubee, Nearby Counties

FASTnet, a for-profit subsidiary of the not-for-profit 4-County Electric Power Association, is providing broadband service to rural areas around the Golden Triangle area of Mississippi. COVID-19 magnified the disparities many Black families faced with little or no reliable internet access as they tried to continue their children’s education from home. Federal dollars should now boost the cooperative solution across Mississippi, barring roadblocks.

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Noxubee County mind map
BWC

How and Why: Behind the Scenes of the ‘Black Women, Systemic Barriers, COVID-19’ Project

In this Jackson Advocate-Mississippi Free Press collaboration, the BWC Project team has spent a year planning, reporting, hosting solution circles of Black women and doing deep historic research on, so far, three counties. Our big, hairy goal is to show why COVID-19 initially affected Black women in our state harder than any other group including even Black men.

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An abandoned and broken Central Academy yellow bus parked under a large tree
BWC

White Flight in Noxubee County: Why School Integration Never Happened

Central Academy was one of Mississippi’s dozens of segregation academies that opened in the 1960s in anticipation of a final Supreme Court mandate, while many others were “founded in 1970” soon after the Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education decision finally ended legal public-school segregation. They demanded and often got public funding even as they excluded Black children and openly taught racism to many of today’s prominent white Mississippians and decision-makers.

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Two Black women wearing TLC tshirts pose in the center of a small room wallpapered in newspaper pages
BWC

Black Noxubee County Women Struggle to Overcome Historic Inequities COVID-19 Exposed

Noxubee County mothers and educators, many of them resilient Black women, are determined to make it work and find solutions that their students and families deserve. But that is a challenge now, just as it was before the pandemic hit, due to long-term disparities and historic and intentional inequities that made the effects of the pandemic especially acute for the Black women of the county and their families.

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BWC

No More Waiting to Exhale: Black Mississippi Women Are Digging Out Causes of Harmful Inequities

Through the partnership of the Mississippi Free Press and the Jackson Advocate, the (In)Equity and Resilience project is gathering and listening to Black women virtually from across Mississippi, creating a safe space for them to voice their stories of vulnerability, fear, injustice, pain and joy. We are also digging out the deep, historic causes of inequities they and their families face.

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