Mayor Buzz McGuire presented Jeffery Simmons with what the mayor says is believed to be the first key to the city at inaugural Jeffery Simmons Day on July 1, 2023 at the Noxubee Sportsplex.
“With her years of teaching experience (19 as of now), her brilliance, her curiosity, her wit and her stunning work ethic, I knew Torsheta Jackson was the kind of reporter Mississippi, and America, needs and deserves covering education,” Donna Ladd writes.
When Noxubee County schools closed in March 2020, kindergarten teacher Latoya Chamberlain and other staff helped pass out school lunches at satellite sites across the county. Now, some are wondering if school-based agriculture is a solution for high food insecurity in the majority-Black, rural East Mississippi county. Torsheta Jackson explores how the strategy used elsewhere might work in her home county.
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.
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.
Warning: This piece contains graphic descriptions of race violence. NOXUBEE COUNTY, Miss.—Travonder Dixon-McCloud grew up in Macon, Miss., hearing about a local white mob killing
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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The Mississippi Free Press is a project of the Mississippi Journalism and Education Group, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit journalism organization (EIN 85-1403937).
