FOCUS: 2022 Elections • Housing & Evictions • #MSWelfare Scandal • Jackson Water • Abortion • Race & Racism • Policing • Incarceration
Performers, inductees and representatives returned to the MSU Riley Center stage for a rousing, revival-like close to the The MAX Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony.
On Tuesday, 124 years after Ida B. Wells-Barnett first visited the White House to campaign for a federal antilynching law, her efforts finally paid off as her great-granddaughter, Michelle Duster, stood next to President Joe Biden while he signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act into law.
Sam Cooke. W. C. Handy. Marty Stuart. Alice Walker. Ida B. Wells. These five superstars in their fields—musical performance and business, writing, journalism, Black activism—are the latest Mississippians inducted into the Mississippi Arts and Entertainment Experience Hall of Fame. They join the ranks of Oprah Winfrey, James Earl Jones, Sela Ward and 25 other Mississippi artists The MAX, as it is commonly known, has honored.
Before the University of Mississippi terminated Dr. Garrett Felber, an anti-racist history professor, his public criticisms of its ties to the private-prison industry drew concern from administrators on campus who had monitored social-media activities, emails this publication obtained show.
“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” said Wells, in whose honor a statue will be unveiled Friday morning July 23, 2021 on Beale Street. The vigilance she speaks of doesn’t assume every act is sinister, but it does implore us—especially journalists—to listen when disenfranchised people speak out, to be relentless in pursuit of truth in any issue, and never dismiss the plight of historically overlooked people.
A century after white Mississippi women gained the right to vote, U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith reminded Black Mississippians of feminism’s painful past last week when she insinuated that the For The People Act, a new federal voting rights bill, could diminish women’s gains.
The work of the Black Panther Party, a 1960s- and 1970s-era Black political group featured in a new movie and a documentary, helps illustrate how cartography—the practice of making and using maps—can illuminate injustice. Cartography is a less documented aspect of the Panthers’ activism, but the group used maps to reimagine the cities where African Americans lived and struggled.
A monument dedicated to the seven known lynching victims in Lafayette County will go up on the lawn of the county courthouse in Oxford. But it will include language stipulating that one of the men lynched was accused of “murdering” a white woman although he was never convicted of the alleged crime.
An interracial group of women and men founded the group that would soon become known as the NAACP in 1909. A coalition of white journalists, lawyers and progressive reformers led the effort. It would take another 11 years until, in 1920, James Weldon Johnson became the first Black person to formally serve as its top official.
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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The Mississippi Free Press is a project of the Mississippi Journalism and Education Group, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit journalism organization (EIN 85-1403937).