George Raymond was a teenager when he came to Mississippi from New Orleans to fight for Black freedom and voting rights. He could have been driving the car instead of James Chaney on Father’s Day, 1964, when the KKK killed three civil rights workers in Neshoba County.
Retired civil-rights lawyer Barbara Phillips filed an ethics complaint against Oxford Mayor Robyn Tannehill, then called an unsanctioned meeting of the Oxford Commission on Police Transparency. The mayor and police chief did not run this meeting as they usually do.
On Election Day last November, many Mississippians waited for hours in line to cast their ballots at some precincts, requiring some to miss work or find babysitters for their children. Now, a north Mississippi lawmaker and a group of activists have a plan to make democracy more accessible and flexible.
Victor Hugo Green’s “The Negro Motorist Green Book” was the guidebook for African American roadtrippers during the Jim Crow era. The guide offered services and places that were friendly to African Americans, while also highlighting the dangers of travel with threats such as whites-only sundown towns. Author and journalist Deborah Douglas has published a new kind of civil-rights guide.
What does it mean to be without water? It is innumerable small humiliations: the splash of a toilet flushed with a bucket, days on end without a shower, no clean clothes. It is weeks without a cooked meal, a sink full of unclean dishes, brushing one’s teeth with water from a bottle, if a bottle can be found. For Tamiko and Otis Smith and many others, it is something far more dangerous.
Karla McCullough is the executive director of the Juanita Sims Doty Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the lives of Black residents in Jackson, with a focus on tackling the dehumanization of Mississippians of color. The Franciscan Sisters gave the foundation small grants between 2018 and 2019. But then in 2020, the religious group called her about their new grant project called “Seeding the Legacy.”
Silbrina Wright, a native of Camden in Madison County, is the first Black executive director in the Greater Jackson Arts Council’s 40-year history. As such, she says it is essential to lead the organization in a closer examination of the intersection of the arts and social justice in Mississippi. First on her agenda: a listening tour.
“I began twirling in my bathroom as I realized the fundamental truth that had evaded me years earlier: I was a swan, St. Andrew’s was my flock, Mississippi was my lake, and this would be only the beginning of my story.”
The bloody murders of three Guatemalans—a brother, sister and her unborn child—in their home in Canton is fueling long-standing anger among the Hispanic population who feel they are victims of frequent robberies and assaults in the community.
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.
125 S. Congress Street #1324
Jackson, MS 39201
info@mississippifreepress.org
tips@mississippifreepress.org
events@mississippifreepress.org
601-362-6121
The Mississippi Free Press is a project of the Mississippi Journalism and Education Group, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit journalism organization (EIN 85-1403937).
